Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form [1 ed.] 9781138024496

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Performing the Void: Liminality and the Ethics of Form in Contemporary Trauma Narratives • Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega
Part I: Ethics and Generic Hybridity
1 Learning from Fakes: Memoir, Confessional Ethics, and the Limits of Genre • Leigh Gilmore
2 “ . . . with a foot in both worlds”: The Liminal Ethics of Jenny Diski’s Postmodern Fables • Maria Grazia Nicolosi
3 Witnessing without Witnesses: Atwood’s Oryx and Crake as Limit-Case of Fictional Testimony • Marie-Luise Kohlke
4 “I do remember terrible dark things, and loss, and noise”: Historical Trauma and Its Narrative Representation in Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture • Rudolf Freiburg
Part II: Ethics and the Aesthetics of Excess
5 Vulnerable Form and Traumatic Vulnerability: Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs • Jean-Michel Ganteau
6 Ethics, Aesthetics, and History in Lawrence Durrell’s Avignon Quintet • Dianne Vipond
7 The Ethics of Breaking up the Family Romance in David Mitchell’s Number9Dream • Gerd Bayer
8 “circling and circling and circling . . . whirligogs”: A Knotty Novel for a Tangled Object Trauma in Will Self’s Umbrella • Georges Letissier
Part III: Ethics and Structural Experimentation
9 Family Archive Fever: Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost • Marc Amfreville
10 “The Roche Limit”: Digression and Return in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn • Ivan Stacy
11 “Separateness and Connectedness”: Generational Trauma and the Ethical Impulse in Anne Karpf’s The War After: Living with the Holocaust • Silvia Pellicer-Ortín
12 Hybridity, Montage, and the Rhetorics and Ethics of Suff ering in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces • Susana Onega
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Contemporary Trauma Narratives This book provides a comprehensive compilation of essays on the relationship between formal experimentation and ethics in a number of generically hybrid or “liminal” narratives dealing with individual and collective traumas, running the spectrum from the testimonial novel and the fictional autobiography to the fake memoir, written by a variety of famous and more neglected contemporary British, Irish, US, Canadian, and German writers, including Margaret Atwood, Sebastian Barry, Jenny Diski, Lawrence Durrell, James Frey, Anne Karpf, Jon McGregor, Daniel Mendelsohn, Anne Michaels, David Mitchell, W. G. Sebald and Will Self. Building on the psychological insights and theorising of the fathers of trauma studies (Janet, Freud, Ferenczi) and of contemporary trauma critics and theorists, the articles examine the narrative strategies, structural experimentations and hybridizations of forms, paying special attention to the way in which the texts fight the unrepresentability of trauma by performing rather than representing it. The ethicality or unethicality involved in this endeavor is assessed from the combined perspectives of the non-foundational, non-cognitive, discursive ethics of alterity inspired by Emmanuel Levinas, and the ethics of vulnerability. This approach makes Contemporary Trauma Narratives an excellent resource for scholars of contemporary literature, trauma studies and literary theory. ‘An original collection, which will make a significant contribution to the study of literature and trauma.’ —Susan Derwin, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Susana Onega is Professor of English at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. She is a member of the Academia Europaea, a former Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, and the Head of a research team currently working on the rhetoric and politics of suffering in contemporary narratives in English. Jean-Michel Ganteau is Professor of British literature at the University of Montpellier 3, France. He is the main editor of the journal Etudes britanniques contemporaines and the co-editor of the ‘Present Perfect’ series (PULM) and he currently works on the ethics of vulnerability in contemporary British fiction.

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Contemporary Trauma Narratives Liminality and the Ethics of Form Edited by Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau

NEW YORK

LONDON

First published 2014 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Taylor & Francis The right of Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Contemporary trauma narratives : liminality and the ethics of form / [edited by] Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau. pages cm. — (Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature ; 27) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Psychic trauma in literature. 2. Liminality in literature. 3. Ethics in literature. I. Ganteau, Jean-Michel. II. Onega, Susana. PN56.P93C66 2014 809'.93353—dc23 2013045919 ISBN13: 978-1-138-02449-6 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-1-315-77453-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global.

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Performing the Void: Liminality and the Ethics of Form in Contemporary Trauma Narratives

ix

1

JEAN-MICHEL GANTEAU AND SUSANA ONEGA

PART I Ethics and Generic Hybridity 1

Learning from Fakes: Memoir, Confessional Ethics, and the Limits of Genre

21

LEIGH GILMORE

2

“ . . . with a foot in both worlds”: The Liminal Ethics of Jenny Diski’s Postmodern Fables

36

MARIA GRAZIA NICOLOSI

3

Witnessing without Witnesses: Atwood’s Oryx and Crake as Limit-Case of Fictional Testimony

53

MARIE-LUISE KOHLKE

4

“I do remember terrible dark things, and loss, and noise”: Historical Trauma and Its Narrative Representation in Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture RUDOLF FREIBURG

70

viii Contents

PART II Ethics and the Aesthetics of Excess 5

Vulnerable Form and Traumatic Vulnerability: Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs

89

JEAN-MICHEL GANTEAU

6

Ethics, Aesthetics, and History in Lawrence Durrell’s Avignon Quintet

104

DIANNE VIPOND

7

The Ethics of Breaking up the Family Romance in David Mitchell’s Number9Dream

120

GERD BAYER

8

“circling and circling and circling . . . whirligogs”: A Knotty Novel for a Tangled Object Trauma in Will Self’s Umbrella

137

GEORGES LETISSIER

PART III Ethics and Structural Experimentation 9

Family Archive Fever: Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost

159

MARC AMFREVILLE

10 “The Roche Limit”: Digression and Return in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn

176

IVAN STACY

11

“Separateness and Connectedness”: Generational Trauma and the Ethical Impulse in Anne Karpf’s The War After: Living with the Holocaust

193

SILVIA PELLICER-ORTÍN

12 Hybridity, Montage, and the Rhetorics and Ethics of Suffering in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces

210

SUSANA ONEGA

Contributors Index

231 239

Acknowledgements

The idea for this book originated in at least three academic events convened by the editors of the present volume: the Trauma and Ethics in Contemporary British Literature seminar hosted by the ESSE 2008 conference in Aarhus, the Trauma and Romance seminar hosted by the 2010 ESSE conference in Turin, and the Ethics of Limit-Case Trauma Narratives seminar hosted by the 2012 ESSE conference in Istanbul. The three events were concerned with ethics, a dimension that seeps into most of the chapters in the present collection, the alliance between trauma and ethics being fairly well documented in contemporary criticism and theory. The seminars themselves were part of the wider ongoing research activities carried out by the editors in the last decade. The co-authorship of the introduction and the co-editing of the book by Jean-Michel Ganteau are part of a project funded by the French Ministry of Education through the laboratory to which he belongs (EMMA-EA 741). The co-authorship of the introduction and the co-editing of the book by Susana Onega is part of a project fi nanced by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) (code FFI2012–32719). Susana Onega is also thankful for the support of the government of Aragón and the European Social Fund (ESF) (code H05). We would like to thank the editors of the journal Etudes britanniques contemporaines for their kind permission to reproduce part of Jean-Michel Ganteau’s article on Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs.

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Introduction Performing the Void: Liminality and the Ethics of Form in Contemporary Trauma Narratives Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega

In an article entitled “Art and Trauma,” published in 1995, Dori Laub and Daniel Podell drew attention to the emergence of a new type of art triggered off by the need to “act as an antidote” (991, italics in the original) to the collective psychic trauma caused by the atrocities of the Second World War and other twentieth-century armed conflicts. As they forcefully argued, “[o]nly a special kind of art, which we shall designate ‘the art of trauma,’ can begin to achieve a representation of that which defies representation in both inner and outer experience” (992). The birth of a new art form in response to the specific demands of an age dominated by the trauma paradigm presupposes not only that art is a privileged vehicle for the expression and transmission of psychic trauma but also that it can provide mechanisms of resilience aimed at ensuring the survival of the traumatised subject.1 As Laub and Podell explain, when the wish for life of the victim elicits no response from the executioner, the latter is denying the existence of a primary empathic bond between human beings that is essential for the individual’s sense of self: The erasure of this primary empathic bond, the refusal of this most basic human recognition is always at the nidus, the source, of massive psychic trauma. The breakdown of trust in a functioning empathic external dyad le[ads] directly to the [victim’s] loss of internal communication with the ‘other’ in himself. Without this internal ‘other’, there can be no representation. [ . . . ] The feelings of absence, of rupture, and of the loss of representation that essentially constitute the traumatic experience all emerge from the real failure of the empathic dyad at the time of traumatisation and the resulting failure to preserve an empathic tie even with oneself. (991) Laub and Podell’s words echo Freud and Breuer’s path-breaking contention in “On the Psychic Mechanisms of Hysterical Phenomena” (1893) that what produces the characteristic state of affective numbing, fright, anxiety, shame,

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or physical pain in traumatised subjects is not the atrocity of the experience itself, but the lack of adequate reaction to it, that is, the repression of affects (5–6, 8). Consequently, the goal of Freud and Breuer’s psychotherapy was to enable the ideas produced by the repressed affects to reach consciousness, so that the patient could give adequate expression to the shocking event, either in deeds or words, since, as they argued: “language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be ‘abreacted’ almost as effectively” (8). In order to facilitate this process of abreaction or purging of the emotional excesses of the traumatic memories stored in the unconscious, Freud and Breuer’s patients were invited to talk about their symptoms while under hypnosis.2 But soon Freud abandoned hypnosis and started asking patients to talk freely about whatever ideas or memories occurred to them through the “free association” of ideas.3 This clinical practice facilitated the establishment of an ongoing dialogue between analysand and analyst which involved a process of transference, or displacement onto the analysts of the patients’ feelings and ideas derived from previous figures in their lives. Although this phenomenon could affect the patients’ objectivity and interfere with the process of remembering, Freud came to see it as an essential part of the therapeutic process. As an affectively charged dialogue between analysand and analyst, Freud’s psychoanalytic method may be said to possess the capacity to restore the patient’s affective bonds with the internal and the external Other. According to Laub and Podell, the traumatised subjects’ spontaneous engagement in artistic expression has a similar restorative purpose: “survivors of a trauma or children of survivors often become involved in an ongoing dialogue with the trauma, which leads them to engage consciously or unconsciously, in artistic expression” (993). The repression of affects that lies at the heart of trauma is manifested in the impossibility of knowing and communicating the traumatic event or experience in cause-and-effect, rational terms. This incapacity to know and to put this knowledge into words is the result of the dissociation of cognitive knowledge (usually produced by the left hemisphere of the brain) and sensorial knowledge (produced by the right hemisphere of the brain) that takes place as a defence mechanism when the subject is forced to cope in the short run with the shock produced by an overwhelming event or situation (Bloom 2010, 200, 202; Onega 2012). As Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart have pointed out, Pierre Janet, the contemporary of Freud who worked with Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière, already distinguished “narrative memory” from “automatic synthesis or habit memory.” While the latter is “a capacity humans have in common with animals,” narrative memory is “a uniquely human capacity [ . . . ] consist[ing] of mental constructs, which people use to make sense out of experience” (160). As they further explain: Janet thought that the ease with which current experience is integrated into existing mental structures depends on the subjective assessment of

Introduction

3

what is happening [ . . . ]. Under extreme conditions, existing meaning schemes may be entirely unable to accommodate frightening experiences, which causes the memory of these experiences to be stored differently and not be available for retrieval under ordinary conditions: it becomes dissociated from conscious awareness and voluntary control [ . . . ]. When that occurs, fragments of these unintegrated experiences may later manifest recollections or behavioural reenactments. (160) Unable to narrativise the traumatic experience in logical terms, the subject gives expression to his or her trauma by means of sensorial images instead of words. Unlike words, sensorial images are emotionally charged and symbolic, so that when they emerge from the unconscious during the process of acting out, they are experienced by the subject as overwhelming and incomprehensible. According to Freud, the compulsive repetition of the traumatic experience that takes place during this phase, often triggered off or accelerated by psychoanalysis, though not healing in itself, constitutes a necessary cathartic stage in the difficult process of abreaction prior to the integration of these traumatic memories in the conscious mind and their transformation into logically arranged and meaningful narrative memories (Freud 2001a, 267–8; 2001b, 154–5). Laub and Podell’s contention is that the art of trauma has a similarly integrative and restorative function. As they argue, the art of trauma is essentially dialogic, containing as it does “a latent but powerful address that requires the viewer or reader to become engaged in a dialogue of his own with the trauma” (993). This dialogism of the art of trauma suggests an affi nity not only with the analysand–analyst relationship required by Freud and Breuer’s talking cure, but also with the I–you relationship of narrator–narratee in autobiographical and testimonial writings. According to Laub and Podell, the establishment of this dialogue is aimed at the creation of sensorial and affective meanings capable of reconnecting the bonds with the internal and external Other and of revealing pain in indirect ways: “In essence, it is only through its indirect and dialogic nature that the art of trauma can come close to representing the emptiness at the core of trauma while still offering the survivor the possibility of repossession and restoration” (993). This capacity of art to create and transmit unspeakable knowledge indirectly is set into question, however, by the ethical demand to represent the traumatic experience faithfully. As Shoshana Felman has noted, the poet Paul Celan, after his release from the Moldavian camp where he had been interned by the Nazis, refused to reprint his much acclaimed work “Todesfuge” (German for “Death Fugue”), “regarded by many as the canonical poem about the Holocaust in any language,”4 and he changed his highly musical poetic style for “a less explicit, less melodious, more disrupted and disruptively elliptical verse” (qtd. in Laub and Podell 994). Celan’s rejection of the aesthetic elements that conferred beauty on his poem points to his bafflement at its reception by the critics, who profusely praised its poetic

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Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega

richness, musicality, and structure while failing to take into consideration its atrocious subject matter. As María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro has pointed out: Something that particularly hurt Celan in the 1950s and 1960s, and surely influenced his evolution as a poet, was the fact that Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum about the barbarism of writing poetry after Auschwitz was thought to be a veiled reference to “Deathfugue,” and there were even German critics who accused Celan of eliciting aesthetic pleasure from the Holocaust, presumably feeling their interpretation backed by the authority of Adorno’s views. (273) Celan’s move to a more elliptical and bare sort of poetry was the result, then, of a conscious struggle to represent and transmit his atrocious Holocaust experience ethically, avoiding the danger that aesthetic pleasure might work to diminish the pain of the victims or condone the guilt of the perpetrators. At the same time, the poet’s turn towards a more inchoate and elliptical style signals indirection as a key element in the achievement of this ethical aim. Paradoxical though it may seem, indirection is essential for the overcoming of traumatic self-fragmentation and alienation, since, as Laub and Podell, explain, “By pointing to what is ‘between the lines’ and beneath the main surfaces of the event, Celan’s poems, Kiefer’s paintings, Lanzmann’s fi lm, and other examples of the art of trauma may serve to re-establish narrative and connection, thus defying the overpowering forces of fragmentation inherent in trauma” (996). What is more, as Marc Amfreville has forcefully argued, indirection is intrinsically ethical as it produces contradictory feelings of empathy and alienation that preclude the readers’ unlawful identification with the victims of trauma (23). It is through indirection, then, that the art of trauma attempts to re-establish the severed empathic dialogue with the internal and external Other without which there can be no representation. The importance of restoring this double dialogue might explain the proliferation of autobiographical and testimonial writings in the late twentieth century. In The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (2001), Leigh Gilmore draws attention to the upsurge of hybrid narrative forms combining “scholarship and life writing and memoir proper” that took place in the Western world “in the skittish period around the turn of the millennium” (1). As she explains, this boom of hybrid autobiographical and testimonial narratives has displaced “the historical description of autobiography as a Western mode of self-production, a discourse that is both a corollary to the Enlightenment and its legacy, and which features a rational and representative ‘I’ at its center” (2). Though she admits that “the tradition was never as coherent as it seemed to appear” (2), Gilmore considers that this unprecedented generic transformation of the autobiography is an effect of “trauma’s centrality to contemporary self-representation” (3). Roger Luckhurst endorses this view when he describes the decade of the

Introduction

5

1990s as dominated by a “memoir boom” prompted by the sheer difficulty of narrativising the collective traumas of our post–World War II age (117). A striking phenomenon related to this process of generic hybridisation is the ever-growing collaboration of contemporary trauma narratives with the romance. As we argued in an earlier work (Onega and Ganteau 2012, 1–14), contemporary trauma narratives seem to evince a formal affi nity with the romance as a mode whenever realism fails to evoke extreme situations. If, following Barbara Fuchs, we envisage this mode as a strategy, among other things, it is easy to see why trauma narratives feel so compelled to adopt the malleability, iterability, and ubiquity of the romance. Its urge to transcend groupings based on criteria such as period, form, and theme allows this mode to permeate texts of all sorts and generic labels, endowing them with the power of saying/complementing what other types of narratives, including history, cannot say. What is more, in its darkest forms, the romance also provides unparalleled mechanisms for the expression of the melancholic and elegiac drives of mourning. The new perspectives on and possibilities of narrativising trauma opened up by this mode’s fluidity and excessiveness are in keeping with the ethical demands of Levinasian excendance (Levinas 1982, 73), 5 that is, the self’s powerful need for/of evasion—literally, the self’s need to “climb out of” being (93)—provoked by the contemplation of its shortcomings and the realisation that there is no way out of being from within being. As John Caruana explains, this need to exit being is “the very manifestation of our being, presenting itself as inordinate and excessive, and therefore, as impossible to address adequately” (16). In his later works, Levinas characterised the Other not only in terms of alterity but also of excessiveness. Thus, in Totality and Infi nity, he presents the Other as the persecutor of the self and foregrounds its traumatic intensity and vehemence in the relentless accusation of the self as guilty (1969, 244–7). Levinasian ethics involves the rejection of the temptations and peril of being for oneself and the move not towards the annihilation of the self but towards the reach beyond the self towards the being-for-the-Other/the infi nite (1981, 161). This ethical move, compared by Levinas to a sacred experience and, we may add, to the creative madness of the Romantic poet/prophet or shaman, can only be achieved if the self is no longer in possession of itself and becomes instead possessed by affective forces outside its control. In summary, the complex modal and generic destabilisation that has materialised in the upsurge of a plethora of new hybrid forms reinforces Laub and Podell’s contention about the birth of a new art of trauma in the late twentieth century, characterised by dialogism, indirection, and, we may add, the fluidity and excessiveness of the romance as well. Our contention is that these formal characteristics of trauma narratives thematise and perform the wounded self’s vision of the void in a colossal creative effort to assimilate and work through the traumatic event or experience that has provoked this void.

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Autobiography has always been an essentially dialogic genre, as the narrator/character invariably addresses his or her life story to an explicit or implicit reader/witness. Consequently, the fact that this genre should have undergone a process of hybridisation in order to meet the demands of representing the traumas of our contemporary age points to the complexity of these demands. In this sense, the fact that Gilmore should present autobiography as “a corollary to the Enlightenment and its legacy” suggests that the transformation of the genre is informed by the post–World War II distrust in the Enlightenment ideology of rationalism, endless progress, and infi nite perfectibility of mankind, whose excesses abutted in Nazism. Among the “ancestors” of this subgenre is to be found what the French writer Serge Doubrovsky termed “autofiction” back in 1977. Autofiction is a liminal subgenre as in it the referential and the fictional collaborate systematically, and the self is by defi nition envisaged as not only double, but also multiple. If autobiography is a genre closely associated with the Enlightenment in that it places a rational “I” at its centre, yet another staple of the rationalist ethos is the Hegelian concept of history as endless progress through empty time. As Michael Rothberg explains in Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation, Walter Benjamin, in his efforts to counteract this Enlightenment concept of history that had failed to predict or combat the forces of Nazism, argued for a relational interpretation of history in terms of “constellations” (10), that is, “a sort of montage in which diverse elements are brought together through the act of writing [ . . . ] meant to emphasize the importance of representation in the interpretation of history” (10, emphasis in the original). Benjamin’s anti-lineal and self-conscious approach to history constitutes an excellent model for the sort of imaginative refashioning required to cope with the perplexities of understanding and representing the Shoah. According to Rothberg, this involves responding to three fundamental demands: “a demand for documentation, a demand for reflection on the formal limits of representation, and a demand for the risky public circulation of discourses on the events” (7). His main contentions are that the need to respond to these demands has brought about a rethinking of “the categories of realism, modernism, and postmodernism [ . . . ] not only as styles and periods [ . . . but also] as persistent responses to the demands of history” (9),6 and that, by thinking of the historical event in terms of these three categories simultaneously, rather than sequentially, a complex system of understanding is created that forces readers to perceive the relationship between archival documentation, aesthetic form, and public circulation. Like Benjamin’s constellation, Rothberg’s montage of realist, Modernist, and postmodernist elements creates an anti-linear tension that counteracts the progressiveness of Hegelian world history. Just as the hybridisation of autobiographical and testimonial narratives studied by Gilmore produces a new hybrid genre conversant with the plastic subgenre of “autofiction” (Colonna), specifically aimed at the representation of trauma, and just as the atrocity and unutterability of the

Introduction

7

traumatic experience forces authors towards the elegiac and the dark poles of the romance, so Rothberg’s montage of contradictory modes creates a new literary mode that, following Hal Foster, he calls “traumatic realism,” and which, by setting its own discourse into question, effectively blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, history and story-telling, the collective and the individual. The chapters contained in this volume are aimed at analysing this complex phenomenon through the close reading of a representative number of contemporary narratives in English that have recourse to the generic hybridisation of autobiographical and testimonial narratives pointed out by Gilmore, the combination of realistic and romance forms, and/or the modal montage of realist, Modernist, and postmodernist elements theorised by Rothberg, in the attempt to transform traumatic memories into narrative memories and, in the case of collective traumas like the Shoah, to create a relational discursive system aimed at providing an imaginative alternative to the teleological discourse of history. The fi nal target of the volume is to establish whether the formal features of these paradigmatic examples of the dialogic and indirect art of trauma, identified by Laub and Podell, really succeed in offering a faithful and ethical representation of the various traumas portrayed in them and by what means. The question of faithfulness and of its link to ethics is central to our purposes and is at the heart of traumatic realism. It is precisely because of the difficulty to represent trauma through the idiom of traditional realism, on account of the inaccessibility of the causes of trauma and of its absent memory, that new forms have been devised so as to achieve faithfulness perhaps not of representation—a term associated with duplication and a more traditional aesthetics—but of presentation. Tentativeness of presentation seems to be the condition of faithfulness to the symptoms of trauma. The fact that such evocation is generally provided from inside implies a great deal of attentiveness to the vulnerable subject. This subject is not envisaged from a domineering, totalising position, thus favouring an ethical treatment. The narratives addressed in this volume are concerned with traumas of various types, whether individual or collective, whether concerning the Shoah, as indicated above, or evoking other historical episodes of collective duress. Given the variety of the corpus, the chapters are grouped in three parts linking various forms of generic hybridisation and/or narrative strategies with ethics: Part I, “Ethics and Generic Hybridity”; Part II, “Ethics and the Aesthetics of Excess”; and Part III, “Ethics and Structural Experimentation.” Put together, the chapters in the three parts provide a fairly comprehensive view of the complex ways in which the formal specificities of the narratives collaborate in the expression of an ethical and political position. In this sense, the chapters may be said to respond to the challenges set by the shift in critical perspective arising from the “double ‘turn’ to ethics and literature” (Eskin) that took place in the 1980s as a reaction of academia against the cultural radicalism and relativism propounded by

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extreme forms of postmodernist thought. As is well known,7 this ethical turn brought about two antagonic ethical modes: a nostalgic neo-humanist ethics, of a rather normative, deontic type, defended by critics like Walter Jackson Bate, René Wellek, Wayne C. Booth, or Marshall Gregory, that reaffi rmed the traditional function of literature as a transparent transmitter of moral values and took for granted the stability of the characters’ egos as represented in classic realist texts, and a newer type of “discursive ethics,” as Andrew Gibson calls it (1999, 54–55), that defi nes itself as non-deontic (in concurrence with meta-ethics, error theory, and the postulations of J. L. Mackie and G. E. Moore), non-foundational (in line with Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity), non-cognitive (in agreement with the ethics of truths), and above all non-ontological. This new type of ethical approach was expounded by critics and philosophers such as Zygmunt Bauman, Andrew Gibson, Robert Eaglestone, and Drucilla Cornell, among others. To these may be added other related types of ethics that are relevant for the analysis of trauma narratives, such as the ethics of care (concrete and political) and the ethics of vulnerability (against the fictions of an ethics of autonomy and an ethics of productivism). All these types of discursive ethics are interested in experimentalism rather than realism and have come to be identified with the practice of postmodernism to such an extent that some critics have called it “a postmodern ethics” (Bauman). The analysis of literature from the combined perspective of ethics and aesthetics lies at the heart of several new critical approaches emerging in the 1980s and 1990s out of this ethical turn, the most relevant of which are trauma studies, memory studies, the theory of affects, and the theory of resilience. A common defi ning trait of these new critical currents is their strong inter- and transdisciplinary character, combining as they do elements of history, philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and sociology, among others. Our reading of the trauma narratives in this volume partakes of the insights provided by these critical approaches and is fi rmly based on the notion of a discursive ethics reserved for experimental narratives that strive to express “what the text cannot say,” precisely (Gibson 1999, 55). In a number of essays and books published in the past twenty years, Andrew Gibson has developed an innovative and useful theory on the ways in which narrative might indicate, render, or bear witness to “the event,” defi ned, in line with Alain Badiou’s famous characterisation of the term, as “the chance occurrence of something that had no existence beforehand, could not be predicted or foreseen and had no prior name” (Gibson 2007, 3). Unlike accidents or disasters, the event has unpredictable and long-lasting consequences, as it is the occasion of the disruption and “transformation of forms, the transformation of the world” (2007, 3). Thus, for example, “in the case of Galilean physics, Mallarmé’s inauguration of Modernist poetics, the French Revolution or the relatively commonplace event of falling in love, the event arrives to transform a situation that not only was blind to

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it but could not have predicted its coming” (2007, 6). This defi nition can easily be applied to the events that, according to Ronald Granofsky, provide the main subject matter of contemporary trauma literature: “the collective disasters of the contemporary world—the Nazi camps, nuclear weapons, the dehumanization of the Soviet Gulag, the catastrophic environmental pollution, and others” (3). Yet, together with this type of collective and/or cultural traumas, there are also cases of rape, incest, and gender violence which, though individual, also bear on the institutional and the political. And there are also those less spectacular though no less damaging forms of trauma, induced by patriarchy’s formation of identity, related to gender, social class, and racial identity, which have been socially sublimated by means of systematic practices and continued behaviour patterns, so that we do not perceive their deeply traumatising character even though, or precisely because, they are interwoven within the very mechanisms that function to perpetuate our societies. All these types would also qualify as events in Gibson’s and Badiou’s senses of the term, as they can all be the occasion for an unexpected transformation of the world, with long-lasting and imperfectly understood consequences. As Gibson explains, unlike lyric, narrative “is a literary form that is seemingly not open and even inimical to the event [ . . . ] because the representational relation on which narrative is commonly founded implies an originating instance, a reality already known and given which narrative is constrained to duplicate” (2007, 3). This fact has forcefully contributed to the perpetuation of a sceptical tradition, running from Bergson and Heidegger to Levinas and Lyotard, about the capacity of narratives to represent the event ethically, without neutralising or pacifying it (2007, 3). Opposing this view, Gibson argues that “certain modes of narrative or narrative instances [are concerned] with the radical singularity or incalculable hazard of the event, the event as instantaneous surprise” (2007, 3), and that what is needed in order to perceive this capacity of narrative to capture the unpredictable and ungraspable nature of an event is “a careful, precise, discriminating analysis of the modes, conditions and instances of articulation of the narrative event” (2007, 3–4). In Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel, Gibson explored the ethical dimension of the narrative event with reference to Samuel Beckett’s writings. Drawing on Levinas’s Otherwise than Being, he developed an “ethics of the event,” understood as the event of literary language, that is, “the possible [ethical] disruption of the order of what Levinas called the Said, in which language has always proposed, ordered, constructed experience beforehand, by what he called the Saying, the sheer radicality of the event of language itself” (2007, 4). Rejecting the Heideggerian tradition that defined the event as ubiquitous and omnipresent, and in line with Walter Benjamin, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Rancière, Gibson characterised the event as a rare and punctual occurrence “appear[ing] as a rupture or break with an established order (aesthetic, political, psychic etc.),” that brings about a sequence of unpredictable,

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open-ended, and intermittent consequences (2007, 5). From this, Gibson went on to explain the experimentalism of much Modernist literature in terms of the difficulty of thinking or continuing to think the event and its “remainder,” that is, “what the event appears to disrupt” (2007, 6). This new perspective allowed Gibson to see the work of Beckett, and also Proust, as key examples of an “aesthetics of intermittency,” aimed at representing the events that defi ne modernity, not as a series of historical facts arranged in a structure of progression, but by conceiving “the possibility of pure, aleatory, originary historical beginnings, by interruptions of existing series and inaugurations of new ones” (2007, 8). This notion of event as an intermittent and non-lineal structure of “historical striations” (2007, 8)— evocative of Walter Benjamin’s “catastrophe in permanence”—allowed Gibson to explain why, in Beckett’s works, the event appears only “in second-order, muted, veiled, distorted, equivocal or compromised forms” (2007, 10). Beckett’s representation of the event of modernity in these indirect and equivocal terms is ethical, as it conveys the strong suspicion that the project of modernity is extremely problematic. In the light of Gibson’s characterisation of Beckett’s aesthetics of intermittency, the duplicity, indirection, liminality, and anti-progressiveness of trauma narratives pointed out by Laud and Podell, Leigh Gilmore, and Michael Rothberg may be read as evidence of a widespread need among the post–World War II generations of writers to (re)present the event of (individual and collective) trauma and its remainder in similarly elusive and distorted terms. Indeed, the fact that, in these narratives, trauma and its long-lasting and unpredictable consequences can only be evoked indirectly and dialogically, begs for a study of these narratives’ ethical position from the perspective of the “liminal ethics” arising out of the ethical turn that relies on the “irreducible restlessness” (Gibson 1999, 117) exemplified by Gibson’s reading of Beckett’s works. Now, if some measure of critical attention has been paid to narrative ethics and the ethics of trauma literature,8 no full-length study has been devoted so far to the conversation between discursive ethics and the form of liminal trauma narratives. This is all the more striking as the discursive ethics of narratives, bent on expressing what the text cannot say, seems to have a natural affi nity with the workings of trauma that drills a hole in the victim’s psyche, bringing along a “collapse of [ . . . ] understanding,” in Cathy Caruth’s famous words (1995, 7). Of course, trauma narratives, fictional or not, are often seen to be characterised by the inability to voice a trauma, and they tend to limit themselves to indirect evocation, beating about the hole that they must be content to circumscribe, short of describing it. More often than not, trauma narratives must renounce the possibility of describing the unassimilated traumatic memory and build their impossibility into the textual fabric, performing the void instead of anatomising it. What is meant by “perform” here is akin to what Michael G. Levine argues in his study of witnessing as speech act: an “illocutionary speech

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act which must be performed each time, as though for the fi rst time, on the contingency of an act that in each instance tests—and contests—the limits of narration” (4). The trauma narratives addressed in this volume precisely test the limits of representation by testifying to a traumatic content and through an act of witnessing. In such circumstances, they may be said to present or perform (poiesis)—as opposed to represent (mimesis)—some radical Otherness, as when the subject is no longer related to some alienated part of him-/herself, that is, when the internal Other has become some internal foreign body (Press 69). Paradoxically, this provides the condition for a ceaseless soliciting of the Levinasian ethical relation, predicated as a non-violent encounter with the Other, or a continuous departure from the self, the refusal—or impossibility—of totality, the better to privilege openness to the Other, be it internal or external. Through the reality of the separation from some inassimilable memory, trauma provides the conditions for some ceaseless movement towards Otherness, and liminal trauma narratives build up the textual modalities of such openness. This is tantamount to suggesting that the narratives addressed in this volume are characterised by an open, hole-ridden, vulnerable form that may be said to be the expression or symptom of some ethical sensibility to the Other of trauma and to the traumatised Other. Further, one could claim that trauma narratives are ethical precisely because they are relational apparatuses allowing the principle and concerns of the ethics of form and the ethics of affects to meet. As suggested above, there is a sense of the limit in the way in which trauma narratives reach towards the pole of anti-mimesis (predicated on the impossibility to represent directly the void of trauma) without completely relinquishing the claims of mimesis (Rothberg 140), since, as we argued elsewhere, “these ever-growing contemporary trends never completely jettison the mimetic even while they tap the incommensurable powers of the inassimilable” (Onega and Ganteau 2012, 7). Such a contradiction or tension warrants the asymptotic nature of what cannot be represented—the radical alterity of trauma—which is at the heart of the poetics of liminality and liminal ethics as defi ned, for instance, by Drucilla Cornell. The working hypothesis on which most chapters contained in this volume develop is that the trauma narratives selected for analysis resort to strategies of excess to react to the openness of the wound, but also to perform an openness to the wound, that is, to the intergenerational wanderings of the ghost, to the internal foreign body of traumatic states, to the Other’s wound. In these texts, what obtains is the power to be affected, which is also a defi nition of Levinasian sensibility or vulnerability. What is more, such vulnerability generates responsibility for the Other at the individual and communal or social levels, which directs our attention to the political edge of the ethics of trauma, as foregrounded in the chapters devoted to Anne Karpf, Jenny Diski, Anne Michaels, or Jon McGregor, for instance. The collaboration among the violence of trauma, the opening

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powers of ethics, and their liminal presentation may well belong to the cultural, epistemological, and critical Zeitgeist which promotes a critique of totality. It also brings about, in Jacques Rancière’s terms, a dissensus that reconfigures norms and rejects the totalising powers of harmonisation. It may also be argued that what characterises the discursive ethics at work in the following chapters is a difference from what were considered to be the dominant moral languages till the advent of the ethical turn in the 1980s, that is, the idiom of Kantian and utilitarian models in which motives and the power of reason are granted priority over a consequentialist model that gives pride of place to the ethical role of emotions (Held 58–60). The idiom privileged in contemporary trauma narratives may be said to emanate from a second perspective or, better said, to be spoken “in a different voice,” to refer to Carol Gilligan’s highly influential study. Such an ethical perspective, grounded in feminist theorising, ceases to envisage the individual as autonomous and independent—in other terms as heroically invulnerable—and thus . . . total. On the contrary, what the trauma narratives that we are concerned with here seem to promote is a model of humanity—individual and collective—defi ned through openness to risk and suffering, thus interdependence (Gilligan 47). One step further, the spectacle of the Other’s pain and vulnerability is a reminder of some form of community of suffering that defi nes a common denominator of humanity and solicits responsibility for the others that depend on us (Held 10). In other terms, trauma narratives privilege an ethics that defi nes humanity as inherently relational, which takes us back full circle to the original conception of an ethics of alterity based on the non-violent relation to the Other. Envisaging ethics through the prism of contemporary trauma narratives makes us adhere to a Levinasian inquiétude and restlessness (Levinas 1982, 47) in our sensibility to the Other, while moving beyond to an attentiveness to the wound of the Other, or to the Other as wound. Attention would thus become the ethical mainspring of the narrative dynamics, from author to reader, through narrator and character. At the heart of the trauma narratives addressed in this volume, whether they are concerned with overtly or more discreetly experimental forms, there is a sense of intensification performed through non-mimetic, defamiliarising devices or through some more empathic soliciting that may verge on the melodramatic, the elegiac or the melancholic. And it will come as no surprise that the literary in general, and trauma narratives in particular, whether fictional, nonfictional, or both, should appear as especially apt to voice the cognitive and ethical power of affects. The liminal trauma narratives, as envisaged in this volume, educate us ethically by catching our attention and whetting our attentiveness. The following chapters present readers with a great variety of topics and perspectives: while all of them analyse texts dealing with individual or collective traumas and delve into the relationship between aesthetic form and ethicality, some of them focus on the generic limits of fictional and

Introduction

13

testimonial forms (Ganteau, Kohlke, Nicolosi); others are concerned with the fictional representation of trauma by fi rst- or second-generation witnesses (Freiburg, Onega, Pellicer-Ortín) or with the questions of authenticity and (un-)ethicality raised by the fake memoir (Gilmore). Yet others privilege the analysis of the mechanisms at work in the evocation of direct or indirect, secondary trauma (Stacy, Vipond) and/or the representation of various stages of trauma like “acting out” or “working-through” (Freud 2001b) (Amfreville, Bayer, Letissier). The various perspectives provide illuminating complementary insights into the formal and stylistic devices privileged by trauma narratives to secure an ethical distance from overidentification while ensuring an ethical empathic relation to the story and the protagonist (LaCapra 41). From a generic and modal point of view, the chapters demonstrate that the British, Irish, US, and Canadian texts under analysis resort to sundry forms, like the Holocaust fictional memoir, the survivor’s testimony, the fake, Gothic, fantasy, the fairy tale, the fable, the picaresque, and, more astonishingly, the pastoral or kitsch, among others. The combination of these theoretically incompatible forms points to the complexity of the phenomenon, which is forcefully contributing to enlarge the trauma narrative subgenre, even while being symptomatic of the vigour and stabilisation of the trauma paradigm. Yet, as the analyses demonstrate, beyond such diversity all these trauma narratives share a community of interests and concerns: they are fuelled by anti-totalising claims;9 they promote paroxystic affect as a stand in favour of openness; they make a point of staging moments of encounter with the vulnerable Other; they are highly conversant with the ruin of being (through the traumatic figures of the hole, of the double, and of the ghost, for instance) and/or with history as catastrophe; and, in so doing, they call on the authors’, narrators’, readers’, and more often than not the characters’ attentiveness to and accountability for the vulnerable Other. In the end, they help defi ne the human as suffering, dependent, and relational, hence inherently ethical. At work in those texts is the specificity of literature in general and fiction in particular, conveyed in the precarious form of the liminal trauma narrative, to thematise and perform responsibility. In this way commitment is redefi ned in ethical terms. Ultimately, within the general framework of a Levinasian-inspired, discursive ethics, as indicated above, this volume seeks to provide evidence for a shift from an abstract ethics of the Platonic type, concerned with universals, to a more concrete ethics of an Aristotelian inspiration, in which dialogue, the negotiation of forms, attentiveness to singular situations, and relationality are given pride of place.10 Such a move can be seen at work in the hybrid, liminal texts and genres used as instruments for the literary performance of trauma: the hybrid autobiographies in which the dialogue between referentiality and fiction is acutely at work; the liminal historical narratives, in which once again the referential and the poetic are made to collaborate without the ironic stance of historiographic metafiction; the

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meeting of realism and romance (in the case of dystopias, and also of several narratives that reject the constraining idiom of realism so as to figure out excruciating events). Whether considered in terms of genre or mode, the hybrid, liminal forms that harness their representational powers to the evocation of trauma help illustrate and extend the meaning of testimony as “[s]peaking beyond understanding” (Whitehead 7). More specifically, they remind us of Caruth’s remark that, whether addressed in theoretical or literary form, trauma raises questions that “can never be asked in a straightforward way, but must, indeed, also be spoken in a language that is always, somehow, literary” (1996, 5). This volume aims to contribute to the idea that the mode of testimony—whether it is fictional, or not, or both—favours the practice of dialogue and indirection as staples of a discursive ethics lending itself to the evocation of trauma. Working within the general frame of Levinasian ethics of alterity, this volume aims at promoting our alertness to testimony as ethical form, which implies a discursive, dialogic ethics. The narratives under scrutiny here provide literary presentations of trauma that never renounce ethical performativity. In fact, by resorting to liminal, impure, rhetorically excessive forms, they tap the powers of what Derek Attridge has defi ned as “the singularity of literature,” that is, “a transformative difference, a difference, that is to say, that involves the irruption of otherness or alterity into the cultural field” (136, emphasis in the original). This difference Attridge analyses in terms of inventiveness and, he is quick to specify, it cannot be separated from performance, that specificity of the literary: Among all the inventions that can be so characterized, works of art are distinctive in the demand they make for a performance, a performance in which the authored singularity, alterity, and inventiveness of the work as an exploitation of the multiple powers of language are experienced and affi rmed in the present, in a creative, responsible reading. But performance in this sense [ . . . ] is a matter both of performing and of being performed by the work: hence the eventness of the reading—and thus of the work—is crucial. (136, emphasis in the original) In line with the preceding evocation, it could be said that the trauma narratives in this volume all seek to perform the alterity of trauma. Through their attentiveness to the singularity of the traumatic event, they get the readers to open themselves to the violence of experience, to train their attentiveness and responsiveness, and to favour risk-taking over noninvolvement. In this respect, the liminal, vulnerable form of trauma narratives iconically performs an ethics of alterity that is also an ethics of vulnerability. Turning its back on the Kantian, utilitarian, and liberal views of individual autonomy, the contemporary text expresses and performs the contemporary subject’s inherent frailty as dependence on the Other and

Introduction

15

on circumstances (Maillard). Vulnerable trauma narratives articulate and perform this new vision of contemporary subjectivity as intrinsically vulnerable, which might very well explain why they have elicited such popular and critical interest over the last few decades. NOTES 1. Concurring with Theodor Adorno, George Steiner, and Giorgio Agamben, Roger Luckhurst has signalled “Auschwitz as the determining catastrophe that inaugurates the trauma paradigm, for after 1945 all culture must address this question” (Luckhurst 5). Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman reach the same conclusion about the advent of the trauma paradigm, focussing on the suspicion against shell-shocked soldiers during the First World War and assessing the evolution towards the general acceptance of the reality of trauma in the last decades of the twentieth century (Fassin and Rechtman). 2. It was Breuer’s patient, Anna O, who coined the phrase “talking cure” for her treatment (Freud 1995, 8–9). 3. The method was progressively refi ned between 1892 and 1895 (Jones, Trilling and Marcus 214). 4. The poem was written between 1944 and 1945 and fi rst published in 1947 in an anthology, translated into Romanian, with its original title, “Deathtango” (“Tangoul Mortii”). See Martínez-Alfaro on the reasons for and implications of the change of title. 5. See Gibson (1999, 36–42); Ganteau. 6. “In the representation of a historical event [ . . . ] a text’s ‘realist’ component seeks strategies for referring to and documenting the world; its ‘modernist’ side questions its ability to document history transparently; and its ‘postmodern’ moment responds to the economic and political conditions of its emergence and public circulation” (Rothberg 9). 7. See Ganteau and Onega (1–9); Onega (2008, 57–64; 2009, 195–203). 8. See for instance, Gibson (2007) or Onega and Ganteau (2007). 9. This does not imply that the traumatised subjects are not striving to recapture their lost psychic totality, which is precisely what they attempt to do to various degrees, whether they actively go into therapy or are simply aware of loss and dispersal. What we mean here by “anti-totalising” narratives is to be understood in the Levinasian acceptation of the term as texts that do not make didactic claims and are not produced from a position of authority but rather choose to report on the traumatic experience from inside—one of the privileges of fiction. The anti-totalising precautions of traumatic realism express the loss of subjective integrity and the subject’s groping towards lost totality. 10. For more information on the shift from Platonic towards a more Aristotelian dimension in Levinasian ethics, see Morgan (54).

WORKS CITED Amfreville, Marc. Écrits en souff rance: Figures du trauma dans la littérature nordaméricaine. Paris: Michel Houdiard Éditeur, 2009. Print. Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

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Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London and New York: Verso, 2013. Print. Bate, Walter Jackson. “The Crisis in English Studies.” Harvard Magazine 85.12 (1982): 46-53. Print. Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodern Ethics. London: Blackwell. 1993. Print. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Refl ections. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt. Preface by Leon Wieseltier. 1955, 1968. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Print. Bloom, Sandra L. “Bridging the Black Hole of Trauma: The Evolutionary Significance of the Arts.” Psychotherapy and Politics International 8.3 (2010): 198212. Print. Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Print. Caruana, John. Beyond Tragedy and the Sacred: Emmanuel Levinas on Evasion and Moral Responsibility. Unpublished PhD thesis. York U. Toronto, Ontario. July 2000. Accessed on 28/08/2013 at: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/ obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/NQ59122.pdf. Web. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Print. . Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print. Colonna, Vincent. Autofiction et autres mythomanies littéraires. Paris: Tristram, 2004. Print. Cornell, Drucilla. The Philosophy of the Limit. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Print. Doubrovsky, Serge. Fils. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. Print. Eaglestone, Robert. Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. 1997. Print. Eskin, Michael. “The Double ‘Turn’ to Ethics and Literature?” Poetics Today 25.4 (Winter 2004): 557–72. Print. Fassin, Didier, and Richard Rechtman. The Empire of Trauma: An Enquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2009. Print. Felman, Shoshana. “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching.” Testimony. Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Eds Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. 1–56. Print. Foster, Hall. The Return of the Real: The Avant Garde and the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1996. Print. Freud, Sigmund. Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995. Print. . “Constructions in Analysis.” 1937. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XXIII (1934–38). Eds and trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson. London: Vintage, 2001a. 257–69. Print. . “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis).” 1914. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XII (1911–15). Eds and trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson. London: Vintage, 2001b. 145–56. Print. Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. “On the Psychic Mechanisms of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication.” 1893. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. II (1893–95). Eds and trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson. London: Vintage, 2001. 3–17. Print. Fuchs, Barbara. Romance. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

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Ganteau, Jean-Michel. “The Logic of Affect: Romance as Ethics.” Anglia. Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie. Special Issue on Literature and Ethics 129.1–2 (August 2011): 79–92. Print. Ganteau, Jean-Michel, and Susana Onega. Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature Series. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Print. Gibson, Andrew. Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996. . Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Print. . “‘Thankless Earth but Not Entirely’: Event and Remainder in Contemporary Fiction.” On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English. Eds Bárbara Arizti and Silvia Martínez-Falquina. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 3–19. Print. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. 1982. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1993. Print. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 2001. Print. Granofsky, Ronald. The Trauma Novel: Contemporary Symbolic Depiction of Collective Disaster. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Print. Gregory, Marshall, “Ethical Criticism: What It Is and Why It Matters.” Style 32.2 (Summer 1998): 194-220. Print. Held, Virginia. The Ethics of Care. Personal, Political and Global. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print. Jones, Ernest, Lionel Trilling, and Steven Marcus. The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud. Pelican Freud Library. 1961. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, and New York: Penguin, 1964. Print. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Print. Laub, Dori, and Daniel Podell. “Art and Trauma,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 76.5 (October 1995): 991–1005. Print. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infi nity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969. Print. . Humanisme de l’autre homme. Saint-Clément-de-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 1972. Print. . Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. Print. . De l’Evasion. 1935. Saint-Clément-de-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 1982. Print. Levine, Michael G. The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2006. Print. Luckhurst, Roger, The Trauma Question. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Mackie, J. L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. 1977. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. Print. Maillard, Nathalie. La vulnérabilité. Une nouvelle catégorie morale? Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2011. Print. Martínez-Alfaro, María Jesús. “Fugal Repetition and the Re-enactments of Trauma: Holocaust Representation in Paul Celan’s ‘Deathfugue’ and Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl.” Trauma in Contemporary Literature: Narrative and Representation. Eds Marita Nadal and Mónica Calvo. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. 269–91. Print. Moore, G. E. Principia Ethica. 1903. Mineola, New York: Dover Philosophical Classics, 2004. Print. . Ethics: The Nature of Moral Philosophy. 1966. Ed. William H. Shaw. Oxford: Clarendon P, 2005. Print.

18 Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega Morgan, Michael L. The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas. Cambridge: CUP, 2011. Print. Newton, Adam Zachary. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. Print. Onega, Susana. “The Ethics of Fiction: Writing, Reading and Representation in Contemporary Narrative in English: A Research Project.” Literatures in English. Priorities of Research. Eds Wolfgang Zach and Michael Kenneally. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2008. 57–68. Print. . “Ethics, Trauma and the Contemporary British Novel.” Literature and Value. Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating and Constructing Norms and Values. Giessen Contributions to the Study of Culture, vol. 2. Eds Sibylle Baumbach, Herbert Grabes, and Ansgar Nünning. Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2009. 195–203. Print. . “Affective Knowledge, Self-Awareness and the Function of Myth in the Representation and Transmission of Trauma. The Case of Eva Figes’ Konek Landing.” Journal of Literary Theory 6.1 (2012): 83–102. Print. Onega, Susana, and Jean-Michel Ganteau. The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960s. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. Print. . “Introduction: Traumatic Realism and Romance in Contemporary British Narrative”. Eds Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega. Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature Series. Routledge: London and New York. 2012. 1–14. Print. Press, Jacques. La Perle et le grain de sable. Traumatisme et fonctionnement mental. Lausanne: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1999. Print. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. New York and London: Continuum, 2006. Print. Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Print. van der Kolk, Bessel A., and Onno van der Hart. “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins UP, 1995. 158–82. Print. Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. Print. Wellek, René, “Destroying Literary Studies.” New Criterion 2.4 (December 1983): 1-8. Print.

Part I

Ethics and Generic Hybridity

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Learning from Fakes Memoir, Confessional Ethics, and the Limits of Genre1 Leigh Gilmore

In 2006, A Million Little Pieces (2003) brought memoir to the forefront of debates about authenticity and life-writing when the Smoking Gun exposed how author James Frey had invented facts and misrepresented events. Frey’s memoir, one of a handful of contemporaneous falsified or embellished memoirs, took on a larger-than-life quality: not only had it been selected by Oprah Winfrey for her Book Club and reached a huge audience; it exemplified the popularity of memoirs based on personal experiences of hardship. 2 Frey’s fraudulence seemed to make all self-representation of trauma newly vulnerable to charges of hoaxing. In this chapter, I will argue that fake memoirs tell us less about the line dividing fiction from nonfiction, and its putative correspondence to facts and truth, and more about the limits of our current response to representations of life, especially when they involve trauma, the complex affective demands trauma imposes, and the insufficiency of genre to underwrite an adequate ethic of engagement with truth-telling in memoir. Although it is difficult to quantify the pervasiveness of fakery in contemporary life-writing, embellished, invented, or falsified memoirs represent a fraction of texts published. Their influence has less to do with actual numbers than with the claims staked through them about widespread mischief and even the depravity of the form itself. The representative subset of fakes most frequently cited includes four fake Holocaust memoirs, one by an actual survivor, Herman Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived (February 2009, cancelled by Penguin Group USA), Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years (1997), Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments (US edition, 1996), and Helen Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed the Paper (Australia 1994); fake South Central LA gang memoir, Margaret Seltzer’s Love and Consequences (2008); and Frey’s ubiquitous A Million Little Pieces. The texts cited most frequently as examples of fakery take trauma as the central story and induce readers to identify with a narrator who suffers and survives. Frey invites the reader to gaze voyeuristically at James’s self-infl icted damage, to root for his application of tough self-love, in short, to identify with the redemption of the addict and criminal he used to be. Similarly, Margaret Seltzer invents an

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autobiographical persona of mixed race ancestry through which to engage readers in the plight of gangs. After her sister saw a photo of Seltzer in a story about Love and Consequences, she called Riverhead Books and alerted them to the fraud. Following her exposure, Seltzer explained why she chose memoir as the vehicle for eliciting identification: For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to [ . . . ]. I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk [ . . . ]. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it. (Rich A1) Fragments, Binyamin Wilkomirski’s fi rst-person account of surviving Auschwitz as a child, offers the suffering child’s “I” as a means of empathic identification for readers. Wilkomirski, like Frey, won accolades, mounted a successful book tour, and generally presented himself as the persona of his fake memoir for three years before being exposed as an impostor. In all cases, trauma memoirs were the site of fakery and the fakery capitalised on readers’ trust that books marketed purposefully as memoirs by publishers were written by people in whom they could believe. Earlier fakes suggest that fakery is a product of its time and part of larger discursive formations of power. They emerge in specific and contingent historical moments, within particular discourses, and our susceptibility to them is partly attributable to the politics of particular time periods. As Gillian Whitlock notes: “A literary hoax is a defi nitive event: it brings to light social, political, and ethical investments of narrators, readers, and publishers of life narrative” (165). Whitlock identifies Norma Khouri’s Forbidden Love (2003) as precisely such a text. It portrayed honour killing in Jordan and was marketed to a Western audience primed to consume stories of Arab backwardness following 9/11 (Whitlock). Similarly, The Education of Little Tree was exposed as a fraudulent chronicle of a Native American boyhood written by notorious racist Asa Carter and released twenty-five years later by the University of New Mexico Press as a “classic.”3 Published in 1976, The Education of Little Tree extolled the virtues of simple living in accordance with the land and certainly worked to counter the version of Native American genocide put forward by the American Indian Movement. In the face of increased awareness about US history as well as a resurgent Native American political movement, readers were drawn to a fake Romantic tale to sustain an image rendered unavailable by political action.4 Fake memoirs create a placebo effect. Just as an inert agent one believes to possess certain properties can induce actual effects, a fake memoir can take readers to the same places as the real thing. Yet fakery also dilutes the capacity of memoir to produce its characteristic effects, not only because it cuts the referential tether of real life to its representation, but because it

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de-authorises memoir as a dominant discourse in which to represent truth and identity. That is, fakes degrade the discourse of self-representation as a mode in which one can say “I” with legitimacy and derive the corresponding social authority of the form. Frey’s exaggerated drug rehab memoir generated an overcorrection. To safeguard against future fakes, memoir would be henceforth held to the same standards as its nonfiction neighbour journalism and managed by similar protocols, including fact checking.5 Certainly, due diligence is reasonable. But fakery exists whenever it is possible to tell the truth. Further, fakery thrives when the agreed upon approach to autobiography is to cede credulity as soon as the author and protagonist share the same name.6 Drawing a bright line between fiction and nonfiction and placing memoir fi rmly on the side of nonfiction fails to address the ongoing appeal of certain kinds of stories and the identificatory desire they elicit. Instead of taking fiction and nonfiction as representing the two best categories through which to understand fake memoirs, I propose we take instead the literary and the testimonial as twin properties of memoir broadly. Instead of saying that fakes threaten memoir because they are unlike it, that they are fiction rather than nonfiction, that they are lies and not facts, we would say, instead, that fakery teaches us about vulnerabilities at the heart of memoir. In this reading, fakes threaten memoir’s testimonial qualities not only when they deceive, but when we respond by attacking memoir’s literary qualities as the root of deception. This is because the two are intertwined and draw power from their co-presence. Moreover, they generate complex and mingled reading practices. In staring at the self in memoir, we often consume it as another version of ourselves. We are induced to identify as we would with many “I’s” no matter the genre in which they emerge. In reading life-writing, readers often interpret identification as empathy and even ethical witnessing. In learning to read fakes more sceptically, we engage with our own credulity. This is hardly bad news because it also offers the opportunity to engage with the literary capacities of the form, what Derek Attridge calls the singularity of literature and Derrida cites as the core of testimony. To assert that fakes should be understood in relation to the co-presence of the literary and the testimonial in memoir (rather than as fictional texts misrepresented as nonfiction) is to say that they teach us less about what is external to life-writing (all of fiction) and more about life-writing itself. In what follows, I examine the current response to fakery and its consequences. Instead of reading specific fakes or offering a history of hoaxes, I place fakery in conversation with the ethical turn in life-writing studies. In so doing, I explore what fakes teach us about memoir and the critical discourse about it; namely, that in analysing fakery, we do not find the alien threat but the hybrid heart of self-representation. I take a series of memoirs, fake and not, as limit-cases that ultimately prompt a rereading of ethics and life-writing.

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All life-writing harbours a fundamental tension between transparency and opacity, between what can be openly stated and documented about a life and what cannot, between a requirement to confess and an invitation to tell a good story. Although fakes force these tensions to the surface, they exist in life-writing broadly. Fakes are not simply testimony’s opposite, the lie in the place of the truth; instead, they are the vehicle of identificatory desire. Fakes call attention to three topics within life-writing that theorists and critics consider crucial to the form: the figural and representational aspects of language, the norms and ethics of consuming life story, and the role of readers’ responses in the production of truth and legitimacy. Problems arise in each of these areas that are equally relevant to fakes and lifewriting as a whole. In some ways, the simplest claim here is also potentially the most troubling: that it is not only truth that determines the difference between memoir and a fake, but the dispositions of taste and power around truth, who may speak it, and in what form.

TYING GENRE TO ETHICS According to author Bill Roorbach, rules of genre distinguish fiction from memoir. Readers can count on writers to know which genre’s rules they are playing by. In other words, the touchstone of autobiographical truth is writerly expertise and fidelity. For Roorbach, who has written fiction, memoir, and Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth, “[b]etween fiction and memoir, no genes are shared” (6). He describes a “good faith” bargain between reader and writer on the issue of genre, but also tasks the reader with an “understanding of the differing rules and traditions and emphases of the subgenres under the wide and inclusive and elegant rubric of creative nonfiction” (6). Readers in this system should no more call foul when they fi nd they have read fiction as memoir than they should impose standards of journalistic accuracy on memoir, which neither memory nor the conventions of telling a good story can support. Roorbach’s bright line between memoir and fiction is traced in the transactional spaces between the writer and the work, the reader and the work, and the reader and the writer, all of which are contained in an Eliotian universe of tradition. In Roorbach’s flexible and sensible contextualisation, fakery would be best regulated by smart readers crying foul only when authors practice the studied deception of a hoax, and not when they, say, fi ll in for faulty memory with dialogue that is true to the speaking styles of those whose conversations are rendered. Michael Chabon’s comment on reading James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces is apt. In an interview, Chabon describes reading Frey’s book as fiction because he had placed it in a stack of books he was judging for a prize in fiction. When he learned it was a fake memoir, he was unperturbed because he had read it as fiction from the start. No harm, no foul, Chabon concluded. In Roorbach’s analysis, “the spell of the real

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is different from the spell of fiction” (6). Yet, Chabon’s unwitting reading (albeit by a smart reader) suggests a stranger transaction is taking place, one regulated by a regime of names (fiction, memoir) and their capacities to cast the spell Roorbach describes independently of the text and the author’s intention. Within the ecosystem of life-writing, a hoax can take a reader to the same places a true story can as an effect of textuality. Early in the scholarship on autobiography, Paul de Man approached autobiography as an especially thorny example of how language appears to offer a mode of transparent representation it cannot achieve. The performative aspect of life-writing—the capacity of utterance in an autobiographical speech act to materialise the “I” narrated—intertwines with the constative aspect of autobiography—its capacity to describe past aspects of one’s life. Both are part of a textual system—language, broadly, but self-representational speech acts more narrowly—in which telling the truth necessarily emerges within a tropological system of substitutions involving the “I.”7 For de Man, the fundamental tension between the transparency autobiography seems to offer and the impossibility of making good on this offer is inescapable. These operations imply not only futility, but fatality to de Man. He argues that Rousseau confronts “the lethal quality of all writing” (296) when he writes autobiographically: Rousseau represents his life by omitting huge swaths of it. Rousseau does not include, for example, stories that cast him in too favourable a light, thereby marring transparency by omission, or he embellishes with inflated claims—“I have never said less, but I have sometimes said more”—and errs on the side of excess. While neither of these statements amounts to painting Rousseau’s Confessions as fakery, they represent for de Man precisely the aspects of language that all autobiographers confront and through which self-representation emerges. De Man’s critique points to the problem of the integrity (297) of the autobiographical venture broadly. Fakes do not make autobiography fall apart; instead, autobiography harbours its own undoing because its performative rhetoric (in some sense, what the author wishes, intends, essays within life-writing) and its cognitive rhetoric (the author’s material: the rhetoric of tropes) “fail to converge” (300). The linguistic predicament requires us to acknowledge that the seeds of memoir and fakes alike are equally contained within this moment of failed convergence. The ethics of memoir entail relations of obligation between writers and people at varying degrees of proximity to them: friends, family members, and many others, all of whom have differing abilities to consent to their portrayal or to challenge it. It also includes the relation of writers and readers. Like Roorbach, scholars Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson raise the issue of ethics in the transaction between reader and writer. In their Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Smith and Watson cast the ethical issue in terms of material consequences: “real consequences upon the writer’s or other people’s lives may ensue from publishing a narrative and from reading it” (178). These are not only the harms that

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follow from a fake in which someone portrays herself or others falsely. These concerns are intrinsic to any autobiographical narrative and refer to revelations that violate standards or preferences around privacy, decorum, tact, and a host of other variable social mores. Smith and Watson are concerned with disclosures of “compromising details of personal life” (178), which for them are governed by ethics as norms, even as they astutely raise a countervailing question: “What purposes or motives might the narrating ‘I’ have in violating these norms?” (178). Where do manners, social norms, and ethics diverge, especially in the representation of trauma? How ought autobiographers to be bound by norms and still engage with the literary and testimonial promise of witnessing? What would Augustine, Rousseau, and even Proust make of such a potential interdiction, not to say Kathryn Harrison, whose memoir about adult incest and its branching harms and conflicts, The Kiss, provoked divergent reactions (see Eakin 2001; Gilmore 2003; Marshall)? What Smith and Watson target is that the criteria used to judge fakes are the same that attach to any autobiography, not only those that transgress the borders of truth and deception. Writing specifically within the ethical parameters described by Smith and Watson, Paul John Eakin, too, observes how issues of privacy are raised by narrating lives lived in relation to others (Eakin 1999; Gilmore 1994). Few lived situations prove sufficiently isolating to let autobiographers off this hook. In writing about one’s life, one inevitably writes of others, discloses aspects of their lives they themselves have not chosen to make public, and places one’s family, relationships, and communities on view as a necessary part of self-representation. For Eakin, the crux is whether the legal protections already in place through libel laws and privacy protections are sufficient or whether some additional nuances—properly understood as ethical—also obtain. Like Smith and Watson, Eakin weights decorum highly, even tasking autobiographers with guarding their own privacy in addition to the privacy of others. This suggests that living in relation to others carries the obligation not to violate social norms around transgression and disclosure, or, at least, to behave responsibly, to weigh the cost to others, including readers, and to exercise restraint in deference to others. Yet such concerns themselves implicate norms about where, precisely, such lines should be drawn. That is, the ethical harbours within the commonsensical—that is, being sensitive about placing information about others in the public sphere—regulatory impulses that would hold life-writers responsible for not violating conventions on self-disclosure. Drawing together the ethical and linguistic predicaments associated not only with fakery, but with life-writing generally, Eakin and de Man represent different ways of addressing concerns they see as inescapable. For Eakin, these concerns are related to a central ethical dilemma: autobiographical narration requires autobiographers to reconstruct and represent interactions with others, to put words in their mouths. This is precisely de Man’s concern about autobiography, which he addresses by reading

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prosopopoeia as the central trope of life-writing.8 For de Man, the problem with autobiography lies in giving voice to the self in history and thereby compelling it to appear in the text as if it were materialising by other than textual means. Eakin fi nds the attribution of conversation by the autobiographer to vex readers and writers of autobiography alike. He cites Janet Malcolm’s transposition of her notes from an interview with Jeffrey Moussaiff Masson into quotations attributed to Masson, and the ensuing claim Masson successfully brought against her. The attribution of voice to another is a “special power” (180) in Eakin, while for de Man, the prior problem is the attribution of voice and presence through prosopopoeia to the self. It is a problem not only when such representation goes wrong, as in the Malcolm–Masson case, but when it is exercised with extreme fidelity to the form. For Eakin, the ethical crux confi nes the text to the status of a medium through which one can represent life transgressively, coercively, or with tempered restraint. Although “there is no getting around the fact that ventriloquism, making the other talk, is by definition a central rhetorical phenomenon” (181), and goes to the heart of the ethical problem in lifewriting, its regulation lies outside the text. Sometimes it seems that propriety and ethics are interchangeable terms. That it is unethical to represent what is conventionally private, off stage. Much of what disturbs Eakin’s construction of the ethical entails the body: excrement, genitals, sex acts, violence. Anthropologist Mary Douglas reminds us that “dirt is matter out of place” (44), and the “dirty linen” or “TMI” of life-writing leads many to invoke privacy as a way of staunching the flow of disclosure. The absence of a morbid shocker like O. J. Simpson’s If I Did It, in which he hypothetically describes how he might have murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, is no great loss, but the problem remains that political speech that is both testimonial and transgressive of norms around taste, propriety, race, sexuality, and gender is often policed via the same conventions that constrain TMI in life-writing. Whether or not readers, critics, and scholars fi nd a memoir transgressive of ethical boundaries is not a reliable index of whether it is fake. The critical response toward transgression applies to all life-writing, including fakes. If ethics in life-writing has neither emerged from encounters with fakes, hoaxes, and deceptions nor been used yet to diagnose or predict fakes, is it the right term for the problem?

CONFESSIONAL ETHICS As recent work on “giving an account of oneself” shows, ethics are not primarily about good manners (Butler). Nor can the full scope of ethics be confined to how memoirists broach normative propriety and privacy. The rhetorical and the ethical are triangulated with the political, and point to the dynamism of reception in a public sphere that may be moulded into

28 Leigh Gilmore witnessing publics. Eakin contextualises the representation of trauma in memoir as an ethical issue. He is concerned about how disclosing trauma violates privacy, including the privacy of unwilling participants in the memoir and those potentially exposed without recourse to defence. Sidonie Smith, however, sees the extremities that Eakin casts in ethical terms as primarily about representation, both in terms of how the story is told (representation) and the status it confers on the one who testifies (political representation).9 In her analysis of “comfort women” narratives by Korean women interned as sex slaves by the Japanese army in World War II, Smith examines how exposure can be wielded as political rhetoric. Smith finds autobiography to be a dynamic tool for displacing the truths it is supposed to provide evidence of. Indeed, in Smith’s canny reading, autobiography can dislodge and transform normative expectations about testimonial evidence in surprisingly political ways. In Smith, the ethics of life-writing are dynamic, unprescribed, and mobile because ethics are political ideas that impose normativity, regulate dissent, permit violence and harm, veil perpetrators, and entrap victims in testimonial protocols that silence them. Smith is concerned less with how to prevent autobiographical narrative from disturbing public sensibilities than with how such sensibilities can be shifted through autobiographical narrative used as political speech. The tensions within autobiography, including its capacities to decentre the personal and, in the narratives of the Korean women, to dislodge the “grammar” of victimisation, arise through a rhetorical view of autobiography’s confessional ethics. Autobiographical narration has the capacity to change the game. Those who narrate their experiences may fail to comply with norms, or may resist them, and may introduce as evidence experiences that confound the very truths they had previously been compelled to sustain. Autobiographical acts are disruptive. They disturb norms about national character and make claims of violation, even as their “impropriety” conflicts with the proprieties lodged in the name of ethics. Ethics and norms are necessarily related in the production, circulation, and evaluation of life-writing. What standards of accountability best enable the circulation of testimonial speech in the face of self-censorship, shame, and the barred constitution of witnessing publics? When the ethical response strengthens norms around propriety that stand in for political judgements about the value and permissibility of nonnormative life-writing, its application is at odds with the potential of life-writing as a testimonial vehicle. This is significant in a discussion of fakes because it may be precisely the version of ethics that would privilege, if unintentionally and as a consequence of good intentions, normative life narrative. Such life-writing may be invigorated in response to riding herd on fakery, with the net effect of imposing constraints on all life-writing. It might be that the fake that delivers what a readership wants and expects is less likely to trigger scepticism than the nonnormative life narrative that challenges it. Given the value of ethical considerations in life-writing and the challenges posed by testimonial acts, on one hand, and the varied impulses of those who produce them, on the other, what insights might strengthen our

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ethical frameworks? In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler traces Adorno’s critique of how social norms and conventions rise to a level of universality and present as a collective ethos a set of principles and thought that prevent dissent. Without the possibility of challenging this ethos, social norms and the silencing they entail amount to ethical violence. Whereas for Eakin, the relevant relation is between a self and others to whom she is bound by norms of discretion, Butler asserts that “the ‘I’ has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation—or set of relations—to a set of norms” (8). These norms govern any account an “I” offers, and, while this means that “the ‘I’ is always to some extent dispossessed by the social conditions of its emergence” (8), the dispossession is productive. As in Sidonie Smith’s analysis of the testimonial surprise effects of the “comfort women,” Butler poses the negotiation, even the contention, between the subject and norms as ethical deliberation and moral inquiry. Because subjects emerge in specific and contingent historical moments, within particular discourses, and before a variety of audiences (more or less disposed to hearing nonnormative life narrative, for example), Butler argues that the conditions for giving a full and transparent account of oneself do not exist. This is not because people are duplicitous or lying is unavoidable, but, rather, because the conditions for offering such an account do not simply exist, transparency should not be the standard. We should pause before this statement to consider the obvious: has such a standard ever been met in lifewriting? While testimonial and documentary accounts have often sought to provide evidence of harm that is verifiable and actionable, they have not managed to “tell all.” Nor is it the case that a longer work or serial autobiography will meet the standard of transparency, as works as diverse as The Education of Henry Adams (Adams 2000) and Jamaica Kincaid’s œuvre attest.10 If we have a standard of judgement (i.e. transparency) that is at odds with the account one can offer of oneself, what follows? This mismatch represents an ethical problem that cuts at least two ways for Butler: it harms those who offer and those who receive accounts, which is all of us. It obscures where the opacities exist in self-representation when elucidating these would be of inestimable use. It cannot be ethical to hold persons to an impossible standard of fullness and transparency in accounts of the self. With the standard of transparency in place, blame, censure, and gullibility abound. Following Roorbach, we might ask whether Butler’s argument only applies when there is good faith on all sides. Or does the site of negotiation between the “I” and the conditions of its emergence name the precise location where both fakes and other accounts of the self emerge? Does the demand that such accounts be transparent—along with the claim that fakes and memoir, like fiction and memoir, are non-identical—permit fakery to take hold? Following Butler, it is clear that judgement informs the ethical scene, gives it structure and legibility through the imposition and maintenance of norms, and even describes the arena the autobiographical subject enters as she negotiates social norms (including those governing literary compacts of good faith). Butler’s cautionary remarks about holding up an unmeetable standard

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as the measure of ethical behaviour illuminate the impossible claims staked in the name of autobiography around transparency. We should also note that if autobiography were to meet such standards, it might still fail to convey something stranger and more compelling about the opacities of consciousness and experience, which describes the form’s renewable promise. Philippe Lejeune’s pact is one model that governs truth-telling as a social relation in life-writing, and Paul Eakin’s ethics another. Both focus on the obligations entailed by autobiography as speech act and thus tend to dissolve the textual in favour of a social contract model. Another model that describes the relation of life narratives to social order is the claim by some narrative theorists and cognitive psychologists that humans are hard-wired to tell stories and that this evolutionary habit toward story-telling expresses itself in autobiography. Following this logic, one should also say that humans have evolved to lie and to malinger, as well as to entertain, to earnestly represent, and to cry out for justice and for blood. Yes, all of this. But the value of the normative life story, while held out as a marker of a healthy self, and even as a therapeutic aspiration for persons to order violent and incoherent experience, is assumed rather than at stake in these studies. It is not exactly that this is wrong as much as that it is at odds with what people in a variety of ways and in diverse social circumstances frequently seize the rhetoric of self representation for. These challenges to normative life narrative arise within life-writing as surely as fakes do and are often policed by the same standards. What norms of judgement are operating, what practices have become habitual such that a fake and a genuine account alike can be challenged as running afoul of the same rules? My argument is that fakery brings to the fore in a mode of crisis the judgements that always circulate around uses of the autobiographical “I”; that the normativity in these judgements contains and reproduces hierarchies of value around gender, race, and sexuality because these are the very discourses through which norms are established and maintained; and that fakery does not defile the truthfulness of autobiography so much as challenge the unspoken values on which it rests, namely, a hostility to otherness at the normative core of life-writing, masking now as at other times (if in different ways) as an admirable desire to engage with transparent and knowable others.

“TRANSMISSIBLE GIFTS” Fakery causes epistemological unease. How do we know what we know about life-writing, truth-telling, and other people’s lives (or our own)? On what grounds do declarations of such knowing rest, and how are the limits of such knowledge best understood so that they do not become barriers to self-representation? Is there a more porous notion of truth-telling and identity that is more ethical than the rule-governed normativities that enshrine gendered notions of privacy and protect raced and sexual violence within

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social norms of power? Fakery represents a stress test for memoir’s legitimacy. According to sales and numbers of new memoirs published, recent fakes have failed to turn readers and publishers away from life narratives. By other measures, however, including the disparagement of the genre as narcissistic and exploitative, memoir has absorbed some of the stigma directed toward individual fakers. How, then, are we to sort the proximities and simultaneities that make fakery so perplexing? In Touching Feeling, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers a path through this conundrum when she evokes the sensual attractions of “cognitive frustration” (24). Sedgwick captures the visceral attraction of an idea shaped and articulated by another as it arises imperfectly in oneself. As it hovers at the edge of cognition, it represents “the promising closeness of transmissible gifts” (24). This phrase captures the co-presence in autobiography of life story and hoax. Hoaxes hide within the folds of the plausible; they capitalise on hope. They rely on the currency of the genre and therefore can be seen as doing it harm, but also, rather more diagnostically, they reveal what autobiography can be thought to offer, what lives are valued and with what limitations on their claims to authority or truth, and what stories are desired in the mode of life-writing. What can a “we” constituted as a market be said to want from autobiography now? What if fakery is a predicament within the project of life-writing, rather than primarily an instance of bad faith within an autobiographer? Then fakery represents a perversion that reveals the path of life narrative by swerving from it. Autobiography is a genre in which one may tell the truth, but it cannot guarantee truth; its path is toward cultural authority more than truth. Life-writing studies have worked over the border issues raised by memoir’s situation at the intersection of life and writing. At this intersection, memoir represents a discourse overwritten by numerous and nonidentical boundaries.11 These boundaries have been theorised in terms of reference and mimesis, but also in terms of genre in order to specify what constitutes the specificity of an autobiographical act, including the ways in which it touches fiction and history but is meaningfully understood as not identical to them (Bruss, Benstock). Memoirists themselves have long described the temptations of story-telling. Scholars of life-writing have theorised the constitutive co-presence of fiction and nonfiction, as well as the normal constraints on an eyewitness getting any story wholly accurate. Fakery flickers at the edge of these issues, but has not yet been construed as capable of illuminating them. Instead, fakes have drawn primarily regulatory impulses. But must it be so?

LEARNING FROM FAKES Fakes expose how a readership can be constituted as a collective in order to respond to deception. The revelation of fakery becomes an occasion for reaffirming certain rules and norms, toughening tolerances at the edge

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where autobiography shears off into fiction, and specifying the conditions under which the nonfictional enterprise exceeds autobiographical license and breaks faith with a collective’s sense of fair play. This way of approaching fakery makes us mindful of the legalistic edge of the terrain, that is, of fraud, where deception begets profit. In a way, readers are vulnerable to deception and autobiographical fakery because of the conventions of autobiographical form. Autobiographical discourse exists in relation to norms and rules around truth-telling as they are established across time and within communities. Although these are not uniform, and derive from a range of self-representational practices, such norms and rules constitute a social reality in which autobiographical “I’s” and the “you’s” to whom they are addressed take up self-narration. Fakes threaten our capacities to engage with these possibilities because they tempt us to draw bright lines between the falseness of the fake and the truthfulness of other memoirs. We err by crafting defi nitional and ethical armour from the fraudulent when we sacrifice our productive uncertainties in the face of self-representation for the hardened certainties of those who will not get fooled again. What we want/get from autobiography is the same thing we want/get from fakes . . . almost. Fakes and memoirs belong to, arise, circulate, and are consumed within (and in turn influence) the same cultural processes. What enables us to consume and take pleasure in personal stories is consistent across ones that turn out to be fake and ones that remain (or are proved to be) true. Indeed, without fakes, the pleasure in true stories would differ. Publics celebrate the truth-tellers and shame the fakers. Thus fakes are not the opposite of the true story. The effort to make such a pairing is part of the ideological formation we must pry apart here. Instead of threatening ideological certainties, fakes strengthen them. I have used Butler to question whether the transparency desired from memoir, or required in its name, ought to represent the horizon of our ethical desire for what can be accomplished in and through the discourses of self-representation. If we can be fooled by hoaxes, what forms of judgement serve us best in remaining open to the potential for producing and testifying to truth in autobiography and transforming identity through writing, while reserving and even sharpening our faculties for articulating the harms of fakes? Are the legalistic terms of contract (between writer and reader, between writer and those represented in an autobiographical text, etc.) or even Lejeune’s autobiographical pact complicit in eliding the place of the unconscious in self and self-representation that forms a necessary topos of the autobiographical, wherever and whenever it becomes a text? And if legalisms fail to produce appropriate forms of and language for judgement, what can take their place? Drawing on Butler, we can see that the always-active opacities of life-writing do not simply disable ethical inquiry and action, or moot the importance of truth in autobiography and the searching activity of judgement in the public sphere. Instead, they necessarily inhabit any autobiographical text, any place where the “I” is to come, and any utterance of truth, especially where the stakes appear in the

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mode and moment of the political. More broadly, they defi ne the cultural politics in which personal stories circulate, as the examples of Forbidden Love and The Education of Little Tree illustrate. Rather than blame fakery for ruining memoir, we should acknowledge that a certain amount of suspicion about claims of truth-telling is not a bad thing, especially if such suspicion tempers readerly enthusiasm for optimistic and normative tales of overcoming and redemption. After all, fakes are less memoir’s alien double than a reminder that self-representation, doubt, and authority are bound together. I propose, then, a new scepticism, but not of the kind that would overshoot literature, land in journalism, and bring back fact checking as probative cure. Instead, the transmissible gifts of the hoax might take the shape of critical reading rather than identification, in which one does not take the other for one’s self, but holds open an interval of regard, even poise in the face of the affective demand of life story. NOTES 1. I am grateful for several years of thinking together on hoaxes with Gillian Whitlock, Sidonie Smith, and Julia Watson. Thanks to Finn Pounds for a conversation about how fakes do and do not threaten the entire enterprise of memoir. Deep appreciation to Beth Marshall for her acute reading of the fi nal draft. 2. See Gilmore (2010) for discussion of Oprah and the Frey scandal. 3. See Gates (1991) for a discussion of the controversy. 4. For discussion of issues central to the construction of the social legitimacy of AIM and Wounded Knee, see Meister and Burnett. 5. Among many such articles, see as representative Thompson. 6. In 1975 Philippe Lejeune described this agreement as the autobiographical pact. Although he has revised his view, it is consistently repeated and invoked in autobiography criticism as a standard. 7. Scholars of autobiography have churned over these dilemmas and agreed: life-writing is not as simple as it appears. See Smith and Watson for deft summaries. 8. See Michael Riffaterre for an analysis of de Man’s use of this trope; for its significance to autobiography, see my Autobiographics (Gilmore 1994). 9. Spivak’s elucidation of these two meanings of representation in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is helpful here (Gilmore and Marshall). 10. Adams did not mention his wife’s suicide and his grief. Kincaid stretches autobiographical narration over many texts without dissolving the knot of transparency and opacity (Gilmore 2001). 11. In an earlier work, I described these intersections in terms of categorical limits (e.g. between fiction and nonfiction, but also between one person’s autobiography and another’s biography, etc.) that are relevant in different ways for specific texts (Gilmore 2001).

WORKS CITED Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. 1918. NY: Houghton Miffl in, 2000. Print. Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004. Print.

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Benstock, Shari. “Authorizing the Autobiographical.” The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writing. Ed. Shari Berstock. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988. 10–33. Print. Bruss, Elizabeth. Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Status of a Literary Genre. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. Print. Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Print. Carter, Forrest. The Education of Little Tree. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2001. Print. Defonseca, Misha. A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Gloucester, MA: Mt. Ivy, 1997. Print. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as Defacement.” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (1979): 919–30. Print. Demidenko, Helen. The Hand That Signed the Paper. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin. 1994. Print. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1996. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000. Print. Eakin, Paul John. Making Selves: How Our Lives Become Stories. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999. Print. . “Breaking Rules: The Consequences of Self-Narration.” Biography 24.1 (Winter 2001): 113–27. Print. Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: Random House, 2003. Print. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. “‘Authenticity’ or the Lesson of Little Tree.” Review of The Education of Little Tree, by Forrest Carter. New York Times Book Review 24 November 1991: 26–30. Print. Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1994. Print. . The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2001. Print. . “Jurisdictions: I, Rigoberta Menchú, The Kiss, and Scandalous Self-Representation in the Age of Memoir and Trauma.” Signs 28.2 (2003): 695–719. Print. . “American Neoconfessional: Memoirs, Self-Help, and Redemption on Oprah’s Couch.” Biography 33.4 (Fall 2010): 657–79. Print. Gilmore, Leigh, and Elizabeth Marshall. “Girls in Crisis: Rescue and Transnational Feminist Autobiographical Resistance.” Feminist Studies 36.3 (Fall 2010): 667-690. Print. Harrison, Kathryn. The Kiss. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998. Print. Jones, Margaret B. Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print. Khouri, Norma. Forbidden Love. New York: Random House, 2003. Print. Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Print. Marshall, Elizabeth. “The Daughter’s Disenchantment: Incest as Pedagogy in Fairy Tales and Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss.” College English 66.4 (March 2004): 395–418. Print. Meister, Mark, and Ann Burnett. “Rhetorical Exclusion in the Trial of Leonard Peltier. American Indian Quarterly 28.3–4 (Summer–Autumn 2004): 719–42. Print. Rich, Motoko. “Gang Memoir, Turning Page, Is Pure Fiction.” New York Times 4 March 2008: A1. Print. Riffaterre, Michael. “Prosopopeia.” The Lessons of Paul de Man. Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 107–23. Print.

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Roorbach, Bill. Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print. Rosenblat, Herman. Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived. New York: Berkley Books, 2009. Print. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Print. Smith, Sidonie. “Narrating the Right to Sexual Well-Being and the Global Management of Misery: Maria Rosa Henson’s Comfort Woman and Charlene Smith’s Proud of Me.” Literature and Medicine 24.2 (Fall 2005): 153–80. Print. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. Print. Smoking Gun. “A Million Little Lies: Exposing James Frey’s Fiction Addiction.” The Smoking Gun Website. 4 January 2006. Accessed on 29/03/2013 at: http:// www.thesmokinggun.com/ documents/celebrity/million-little-lies. Web. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1988, 271–313. Print. Thompson, Bob. “True or False: Book Publishers Can Avoid the Agony of Deceit.” Washington Post 5 March 2008: C01. Print. Whitlock, Gillian. “Tainted Testimony: The Khouri Affair.” Who’s Who?: Hoaxes, Imposture and Identity Crises in Australian Literature. Eds Maggie Nolan and Carrie Dawson. Australian Literary Studies 21.4 (2004): 165–77. Print. Wilkomirski, Binjamin. Fragments. New York: Schocken, 1996. Print.

2

“ . . . with a foot in both worlds” The Liminal Ethics of Jenny Diski’s Postmodern Fables Maria Grazia Nicolosi

Although acknowledged by a few critics to be “one of the most complex, captivating and, at times, disquieting writers” (Caporale-Bizzini 108) of contemporary British literature, Jenny Diski’s general critical standing and readership are far from established. The reason may be that the issues the writer most often addresses in her fictional and nonfictional work are forbidding ones: in Diski’s writing a dismal array of traumatic events are indeed paraded in their naked extremity. Episodes of childhood sexual abuse, material and affective deprivation, identity dispossession through immigration (epitomised by her forbears’ self-willed repudiation of their Jewish family name), household violence between her parents, their— and her own—reiterated suicide attempts, her mother’s—and her own— repeated spells of mental disorder are all woven into the narrative fabric of her “autographic” texts (Abbott 597–615) and her “autobiographical” novels. In no sense is this painful material cathected behind “screen memories” or sublimated through a retrospective redemptive tale. As Diski herself has confessed, “I don’t feel compelled to tell comfortable stories” (in Sage 193). Arguably, Diski’s writing conforms to the structural and stylistic landmarks of contemporary trauma narratives (Gilmore 2001a; Vickroy; Whitehead; Luckhurst). In keeping with the literary practices associated with “trauma fiction”—wherein haunting repetitions elusively point to traumatic affect neither named as such nor properly worked through (Vickroy 117–39)—Diski circles elliptically the same shadowy, disturbing events, obsessively piecing together, text after text, the traumatically broken remains of too vivid but strangely disconnected memories of her distressed past. All the while, however, she has denied these events the status of full “experience.” One may recall Cathy Caruth’s emphasis on indirection as a distinguishing feature of psychic trauma, “suffered in the psyche precisely [ . . . ] because it is not directly available to experience” (1996, 61). In this respect, one of the abiding questions trauma narratives raise concerns the aesthetic form by which such “paradoxical structure of indirectness” (60) can be brought into discourse. A number of psychoanalytically oriented feminist theorists (Dinnerstein; Ruddick; Chodorow; Hirsch; Kristeva 1982) have described the maternal

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role as potentially traumatogenic. Dorothy Dinnerstein underlines how the mother–daughter primary bond is rife with metaphysical terror: while being “the prototype of the tie to life,” at the same time, “[t]he pain in it, and the fear of being cut off from it, are prototypes of the pain of life and the fear of death” (34). Likewise, Sara Ruddick points to the ambivalence and deep-seated Angst at the core of the mother–daughter interrelation (348). In Diski’s writing the life–death dilemma is constantly worked out in connection with the archetypal mother–daughter knot: as might be expected, the intimations of mortality proceeding from such a formidable maternal figure loom large in the background of her trauma narratives. Caporale-Bizzini suggests that Diski’s work is “openly (and apparently) challenging Kristeva’s notions of the maternal chora and maternal abjection” (113). This insight shall be kept in mind in the attempt to elucidate how the maternal motif crucially grounds Diski’s “liminal ethics” of form both in her fi rst volume-length “fictional” memoir, Skating to Antarctica (1997), and in her “autobiographical” novel, Like Mother (1988). Julia Kristeva depicts the mother–child’s earliest rift as a horror-fi lled experience which configures the ego in terms of a ruptured and always brittle self-identity (1982, 5–15, 56–63). From this apprehension of one’s own primal Otherness, one can see why the trauma of recognition and misrecognition underlying most discussions of the mother–daughter knot must be declared unspeakable and remain unspoken. To some extent, the Kristevan “abject other” mirrors the condition Emmanuel Levinas calls “ipseity”: “The other is in me and in the midst of my very identification. The ipseity has become at odds with itself with its return to itself” (Levinas 1981, 125). By uncovering such ethical inflections at the silent core of Kristeva’s notion of abjection, one might discern interesting reasons why the drama of sameness versus Otherness shapes Diski’s postmodern “fables” concerned with the mother–daughter traumatic tie.1 In her memoir, the writer plods through the tensions and contradictions to which the theories cited allude in order to take her distance from both the silencing constraints of mother-phobic discourse (Kloepfer 1–45) and also from the falsely utopian but effectively just as paralysing celebrations of the maternal myth (Hirsch 1–39). The trauma-laden Freudian script of the “family romance” is also traversed deconstructively, if not subverted, in her novel Like Mother, where Diski has envisaged its literally selfless narrator, a brainless baby whom her mother has refused to abort, as the carrier of irreducible Otherness within and without. Because of their ostensible refusal to mourn maternal loss and their puzzling rejection of commonly acknowledged moral values, the reader is constantly prevented from construing Diski’s “fables” as the literary counterpart of her traumatic “symptomatology” according to the available cultural scripts. I would contend that the writer’s ethically perilous literary practice should be interpreted as her excavation of a deeper core at the centre of her autographic space wherein Freudian/Lacanian discourse as well as deconstructive

38 Maria Grazia Nicolosi and feminist trauma theories intersect with a wider-ranging notion of shock that calls for a careful rethinking of the current understanding of trauma. As psychoanalyst Ann Kaplan suggests, psychoanalysis would like to attend to traumatic event(s) in a specifically aetiological sense: “The structure of trauma is precisely that of repeated rupture of safety and comfort by terror from some past incomprehensible event” (34). Yet, from a different perspective, one has good reasons to wonder whether such “past incomprehensible event”—no matter how devastating—is to be regarded as the ultimate source of “terror.” This is the question that Diski’s postmodern “fables” appear to invite: knowledgeable as the writer is of mainstream approaches to individual and collective traumas, she has insistently exhibited dissatisfaction with their at times crudely generalising vocabulary. In this connection, it is significant that Diski’s stubborn resistance to the conclusive knowledge of her mother’s death or continuing life after they broke off for good, following a brief and wholly damaging reunion, should be reflected, as Gunnthórunn Gunnmundsdóttir has specified, in a parallel resistance to any facile psychoanalytical reading of her life-long depression within the framework of the standard Freudian family romance (93). I would argue that the writer’s “impatience” with the psychoanalytical paradigm has to do with her sense that traumatic “terror” is rooted in what the early Levinas termed “il y a” and located in the primeval ontological horror of being: Does Being contain no other vice than its limitation and nothingness? Is there some sort of underlying evil in its very positivity? Is not anxiety over Being—horror of Being—just as primal as anxiety over death? Is not the fear of Being just as originary as the fear for Being? [ . . . ] Being is essentially alien and strikes against us. [ . . . ] There is a pain in Being. (1978, 4–5, 9) Inspired by Shakespeare’s tragedies, 2 Levinas’s conception of the “horror of being” resonates with the language of traumatic experience. The points of similarity are especially remarkable in relation to the Shakespearean fool, whom he regards as “the one who feels and bespeaks with lucidity the insubstantiality of the world and the absurdity of its situations” (1987, 59) in the face of inscrutable destructive forces impossible to confront with ordinary cognitive means. Consistently with my focus, Janina Nordius singles out the exploration of “the ontological boundaries of humanity” (442) as Diski’s main concern in her early fiction, which Billy Gray extends to the writer’s nonfictional work in his reading of Skating to Antarctica: “The Arctic is used as a setting for a philosophical debate concerning what is, or is not, human, personified in the battle between flesh and ice” (129). Indeed, Diski’s characters, as well as her “autographic” persona in her memoirs and essays, are racked precisely by this apprehension of being as il y a: in this sense, traumata may be regarded as the index of the truly unlocatable and unspeakable site of

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this essential ontological terror. Frances Laughton, the protagonist of Like Mother, undergoes just this experience: “Frances discovered her own presence and the terror that accompanies existence. [ . . . ] How could there be horror where there was nothing?” (Diski 1989, 119). Likewise, in Skating to Antarctica, “Jenny Diski” confesses to suffering the same anguish: It was as if the wind, having got my measure, was denying my existence and simply rattling through me. [ . . . ] I begin to feel that the world has deserted me, that things have fallen apart. [ . . . ] the bleakness immediately chimed with something mournful inside me. [ . . . ] It truly scared me. [. . .] Suddenly, I am bereft, lost, and a terror wells up. (172, 174) Contrary to the customary view of Levinas’s attitude to art and literature as being outright dismissive, a few critics have persuasively argued that he rather mounts a critique of the post-Kantian, subjectivist Romantic trust in artistic mastery as capable of transcending aesthetically the agonising contradictions of reality.3 Since these proceed from the essentially traumatic condition of horror and inchoate anguish of the il y a, too overbearing and too elusive to be represented, “[t]he artist moves in a universe that precedes [ . . . ] the world of creation [ . . . ]. An image marks a hold over us rather than our initiative, a fundamental passivity. Possessed, inspired, an artist, we say, harkens to a muse” (Levinas 1998, 7, 3). This passive endurance of a world not of the artist’s own devising suggestively chimes in with the traumatic predicament described by Cathy Caruth: “To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or an event” (1995, 4–5). Yet, it is precisely from the shadowy strangeness of the il y a that artistic creation is called out of silence and thus, paradoxically, the il y a turns out to be the enabling condition of art. As Levinas puts it: “the artist knows and expresses the very obscurity of the real [ . . . ]. Art does not know a particular type of reality; it contrasts with knowledge. It is the very event of obscuring, a descent of the night, an invasion of shadow” (1998, 3).4 Interestingly, Caruth has suggested a similar “obscure” exchange between trauma theory and literature: “it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience precisely meet” (1996, 3). This constellation might well explain Diski’s otherwise incomprehensible attachment to her past traumas, in the face of her outspoken investment in survival, and why, in the novel Like Mother, the creative energy released when Frances discovers her inner “dark” world—as opposed to her diurnal self—is characterised much in the terms of Maurice Blanchot’s “other night”: the bad girl deep inside her lit a dark candle, until a strange illumination glowed [ . . . ]. At night she discharged the fury [ . . . ]. (Diski 1989, 54, 55)

40 Maria Grazia Nicolosi A dark moment. [ . . . ] Mother had those moments too. That’s when she wrote her stories. (26) Just as the overwhelming horror of the anonymous il y a sabotages the epistemological and ontological foundations of representational art, in Levinas’s sense, so Diski’s trauma narratives exceed what is deemed speakable within ordinary literary and philosophical discourse. However, rather than dragging literary representation down to paralysing stasis, and therefore to utter silence, the symptomatic mimesis of traumatic experiences would appear to interrupt the workings of everyday communication in ways that have suggested to Caruth a rethinking of “reference in nonrepresentational terms (or more accurately in terms of an interruption of a representational mode)” (1996, 115n). Along these lines, one can recognise an ethical dimension to Diski’s Beckettian poetics of form, 5 which fi nds in the aesthetic failure occasioned by trauma the ally to her ethical agenda, producing in the process what Andrew Gibson has called a postmodern “discursive ethics” whereby “discourse supervenes upon and destabilises representation” (1999, 55). As Gilmore has pointed out, “[c]onventions about truth-telling [  .  .  .  ] can be inimical to the ways in which some writers bring trauma stories into language. The portals are too narrow, and the demands too restrictive” (2001a, 128). This problematisation of what is to be understood by “truth” is consciously Diski’s own, who provocatively begins her memoir with an epigraph from Beckett’s Malone Dies: “I wonder if I am not talking yet again about myself. Shall I be incapable, to the end, of lying on any other subject?” (Diski 1997, n.p). It has been underlined by many theorists that the sense of dislocation inherent in traumatic experience thwarts direct access to memory (Middleton and Woods 81–116). The psychic route from traumatic occurrence to its assimilation to experience is predicated upon a paradoxical kind of forgetting that affects language and narrative: as the traumatic event withdraws from conscious language, it remains encrypted everywhere in between its folds. Although being thrust to the immemorial interstices of language, where we will peer in vain to retrieve it, the forgotten event will haunt narratives of the past “[b]y virtue of a temporality beyond reminiscence, in diachrony, beyond essence” (Levinas 1981, 30). Aware of this enigmatic mechanism, the writer has pointedly declared, “[f]or me, the fragmented narrative rings truer” (in Sage 194), because memory, while not to be regarded as bluntly mendacious, is nonetheless, as her fictional alter ego puts it in Skating to Antarctica, “excitingly corrupt in its inclina[tion] to make a proper story of the past” (154). Through a suggestive conjunction of trauma theory with a postmodern ethics, Diski has often described the effects of traumatic damage as “forgetting” in a Levinasian sense: “The I loses its sovereign self-coincidence, its identification [  .  .  .  ] and is not the already glorious consciousness

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of this exile” (Levinas 1998, 97). In Like Mother, Frances’s “negative” yearning would seem to instantiate just such ethical “forgetfulness”: “[  .  .  .  ] she was after the lessening of herself. Every refusal, every act was a stripping away” (137). For Levinas it is “self-forgetting”—what he provocatively terms “atheism”—that turns the encounter with the Other, despite oneself, into a transcendent event: “The idea of infi nity, which requires separation, requires it unto atheism, so profoundly that the idea of infi nity could be forgotten. The forgetting of transcendence is not produced as an accident in a separated being; the possibility of this forgetting is necessary for separation” (1991, 181). The limit experience of trauma brings Diski’s longing for oblivion, which features in all her writings and comes to dominate the two “fables” analysed in this chapter, close to Levinas’s idea of ethics as grounded in the self’s originary forgetfulness precisely because it allows “self-coincidence” to be withdrawn. As Burrows specifies, “the inward fl ight of trauma [ . . . ] becomes a fl ight into the self which is also, paradoxically, a withdrawal from the self” (41). In this respect, what has often been regarded as the writer’s fl ight from a confrontation with still unclaimed traumatic pain (Gray 133) may in fact indicate her attempt to escape the “private and public cage of being” (Diski 1989, 29). As a consequence of the exposure to the irreducible alterity of trauma, “being and time fall into ruins so as to disengage subjectivity from its essence” (Levinas 1981, 9). This “ruin of being” shows “how trauma ruptures the boundaries of the autonomous autobiographical ‘I’” (Gilmore 2001b, 72). As Gilmore further suggests, despite the “struggle to organize, even contain, trauma within narrative” (72), it also ruptures any clear lines of demarcations between genres, for Diski’s postmodern fables combine incompatible narrative conventions, notably by blurring the lines between autobiographical and biographical material, on the one hand, fictional invention and literary intertextual revisions, on the other. That such a liminal form is ethically motivated need be emphasised, for Diski deliberately forfeits any assured position of alleged artistic mastery over her own writing. Taking his cue from Lyotard, Gibson reminds us that a “liminal ethics” “does not bring the unpresentable back ‘inside’ established systems of representation. It leaves the unpresentable ‘outside,’ and contents itself with gesturing towards it, or registering its power as a force that deforms or distorts established forms” (1999, 70). By hovering between worlds, Diski’s “fables” make room for the complex transvaluation process just described, which enables the potentially disintegrating pull of the “catastrophic” discourse of trauma to release “that exceptional event—that sovereign forgetfulness, which frees language from its servitude towards the structures in which the said prevails” (Levinas 1996, 153, emphasis in original). Diski herself has offered the most effective troping of her own “liminal ethics”:

42

Maria Grazia Nicolosi There would be a moment when she hovered, with a foot in both worlds, when something would be lost and something gained, and a change would occur that made a difference. (1989, 62, emphasis added)

The same threshold experience is clearly alluded to in Skating to Antarctica: “to skate is magical. [ . . . ] the ice you are on strengthens the sensation of your own body and its capacity both for control and for letting appropriate things happen” (16, emphasis added). Revising his earlier “ethics of the event” towards a new emphasis on événementialité, Gibson has recently developed a more risk-taking and hesitant notion of “intermittency” (2007, 7), which would seem to extend the promise of that “sovereign forgetfulness” of the “said”—formerly reserved to the limited “interstices” of literary language—to narratives concerned with the unspeakable language of the traumatised self. With Gibson’s later emphasis in mind, I move on to the next stage of my analysis by suggesting that Diski’s literary practice engages the question of how to craft an “intermittent” aesthetic form through which trauma’s unheard narrative might happen in writing without losing its irreducible alterity.

STAGING THE ETHICAL ENCOUNTER WITH THE (M)OTHER IN SKATING TO ANTARCTICA AND LIKE MOTHER In rupturing self-identity, trauma produces “a break in the mind’s experience of time” (Caruth 1996, 61). Central to this experience is “a gap that carries the force of the event and does so precisely at the expense of simple knowledge and memory” (Caruth 1995, 7). The liminal temporality of trauma closely resembles Levinas’s “meanwhile,” the temporal articulation of the il y a in the manner of “the eternal duration of the interval [. . .] never fi nished, still enduring [ . . . ] instant stripped of the essential characteristic of the present, its evanescence” (1998, 11, 9). From this Levinasian perspective, one could revise the prevailing understanding of “belatedness” as a temporary protective suspension of consciousness and time (Caruth 1995, 8), and argue instead for the notion that the irreducible alterity of traumatic temporality asserts a fundamental ethical exposure to the Other through “the intricate relation between trauma and survival” (Caruth 1996, 60). As Levinas puts it: “The temporal continuity of consciousness is overwhelmed whenever it is a ‘consciousness’ of the other [ . . . ]. In the meanwhile the event expected turns into the past without being lived through, without being equaled, in any present” (1998, 68, emphasis in original). Just this sort of “interruption” presides over the peculiar temporality of Like Mother and Skating to Antarctica. In both texts the characteristics of Levinas’s “meanwhile” are grafted onto the structure of traumatic “belatedness.” “Jenny Diski” puts it succinctly: “If I wept on the beach at St. Andrew’s Bay, they were tears belonging to another time. The past can

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still make me shiver, but no bones are broken” (1997, 175). And the novel Like Mother articulates it explicitly: “It was what it did to time that she had been after. [ . . . ] She had found [ . . . ] so precisely what she wanted: another place, another time, a kind of extended nothingness where she existed and didn’t” (116, 119). In Skating to Antarctica, the “meanwhile” of traumatic temporality complicates its narrative movement—tellingly termed “a three-part syncopation” (79)—by interlacing the tale of the outlandish trip Diski made to the frozen whiteness of the Antarctic with the narrative of the search her teenager daughter undertook of her lost grandmother’s whereabouts, a search “interrupted” in its turn by fragmentary recollections of moments dating back to Diski’s “fi xed landscape of my early childhood” (10). The juxtaposition of these narrative threads with reiterated sections suggestively entitled “At Sea” (39–83, 121–84, 217–33)—poignantly associated with the time of writing—interrupts the temporal course by hovering, literally and symbolically, at the threshold of an “other” time. Even the open-ended dedication of the book to Diski’s daughter (“For Chloe without whom”) seems designed to alert the reader to the everlasting interruption inherent in the writer’s “quest.” In the fi rst chapter, entitled “Schrödinger’s Mother,” Diski takes this temporal structure to paradoxical extremes through a “thought experiment” which practices quantum physics by replacing her mother for Schrödinger’s cat (23). The translation into quantum theory of such exceedingly hurtful either/or truth articulates Diski’s resistance to fi nd out whether her mother was still alive or already dead much like Levinas’s “eternal duration of the interval.” By calling her mother’s paradoxically “suspended” death, until the end of the book, “a superposition of states, an inextricable mixture of the decayed and notdecayed possibilities” (23, emphasis in original), Diski seems to have explicitly connected it with the traumatic alterity of “the meanwhile.” Described as “a book in part about my mother” (95, emphasis added), despite the writer’s vehement disclaimer of any affective attachment (30), a strangely privileged space is devoted to the traumatic rupture of the mother–daughter knot. If the frozen whiteness of the Antarctic landscape, like any archetypal “deserted landscape[,] embodies the loss of the mother” (Kaplan 35), then Diski’s “irrational desire to be at the bottom of the world in a land of ice and snow” (120) replicates, in its own way, the search for the lost grandmother her own daughter is engaged in. Antarctica is gradually construed as a complex symbolic map of traumatic affect, in which the figural transformation of ice into a trope of maternal loss constantly returns as a sort of leitmotif, even through the only explicitly referenced biblical quotation: “The Book of Job contain[s] the lines: Out of whose womb came the ice? / And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it?” (139, emphasis in original). Significantly, the same trope flashes in the novel Like Mother, fi rstly related to motherly abandonment but increasingly seen as a signifier of

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Maria Grazia Nicolosi

melancholic loss in general. The story’s co-protagonist, Stuart, allegorises his frustration for his unrequited love for Frances by referring to an old film’s skating scene: [A] man [ . . . ] sees a young girl skating on a frozen lake, all alone. He falls in love with her, but she was dead, just a ghost that haunted the place. But he can’t stop loving her anyway, even though he knows she doesn’t exist. (120) Now “the meanwhile” is not only concerned with “the limited problem of art” but it crucially refers to “the time of dying [which] cannot give itself the other shore. [ . . . ] In dying [ . . . ] one is in the interval, forever an interval” (Levinas 1998, 11). In this sense, it is the trauma of living (on), as Levinas defi nes it,6 that most accurately describes Diski’s melancholic terror. She clearly states that the most appalling thought, rather than her mother’s death, had been that she might have been living on after her ostensible “disappearance” from her life (1997, 242–43). It could be argued that Diski’s avowed nihilistic courting of oblivion, emptiness, and nothingness in fact bears “an ethical dimension outside its mimetic project” (Gibson 1999, 54). In this sense, the ethical significance of her wish to “write white and shades of white” (Diski 1997, 127, emphasis added) can be illuminated by the lengthy excerpt from Melville’s Moby Dick, where Ahab, gazing straight into the “visible absence of colour” (Diski 1997, 189), is overwhelmed by the “thought of annihilation” (189), for “the whiteness of the whale” portends the metaphysical abyss of “atheism” (189–90). Diski comments: “perhaps there is as much attraction as revulsion at such an absolute absence” (189). From this perspective, Diski’s attitude to her own trauma-related bouts of depression appears to be motivated by her truth-seeking impulse to lift the veil off “the palsied universe [that] lies before us a leper” (190) and see it for what it really is: My attraction to blankness, to oblivion, was just as Melville described it, a sense that at source absence was everything. Colour was light and made the world livable in, but from time to time it was necessary to get to the blank reality. [ . . . ] Not to stay, but to be in it for a while. (190–91) Diski’s reading of Melville identifies the harsh “truth” no one can dwell long in with death: “allurements [of hues] cover nothing but the charnelhouse” (190), or at least with its temporary image—depression—since death is not for us to choose, although the fascination of its impossible possibility is there to be felt: “one need only give oneself a constituted duration to remove from death the power to interrupt. Death is then sublated. To situate it in time is precisely to go beyond it, to already fi nd oneself on the other side of the abyss” (Levinas 1998, 11). In the essay “Other and the

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Other,” Levinas unequivocally identifies the “absolute other” with death (1987, 77–79): when we confront “death qua nothingness” (1998, 11), its ineffable alterity can only be met with silence. If Diski’s “hopeful voyage into whiteness” (1997, 126, emphasis added) signifies this experience, then the writer’s seemingly escapist journey in fact enacts the ultimate confrontation with her mother’s no longer suspended “death sentence.” “Writing white” may stand for the wish to execute and mourn her mother at once, by encrypting her burial place at the silent centre of her writing wherein the unspeakable mystery of “the death of the other, the death for the survivor” can be interrupted (Levinas 1998, 11). The protagonist of Diski’s “autobiographical” novel Like Mother, Frances Laughton, endures a harrowing childhood at the hands of severely dysfunctional parents, desultorily grows up in post-war Britain, takes up and relinquishes a ballet career, marries a man she does not love, gives birth to a child without a brain, writes a book of stories, and at the end lets herself die of cancer. The whole story is so thoroughly contrived in accordance with the irreducible alterity of its embedded trauma narrative that the narrating locus of trauma comes to be viewed as the trope for writing tout court. “Like Melville’s notion of whiteness [that] makes clear and [  .  .  .  ] obscures” (Diski 1997, 220), in Like Mother “obscurity provide[s] it [art] with its very element and a completion sui generis, foreign to dialectics and the life of ideas” (Levinas 1998, 3). Its remarkable narrator, Nony, “short for Nonentity” (Diski 1989, 9)—and the narrative form that bears her/is borne by her—might be described, in Levinas’s words, “as a totally independent ontological event” (1998, 3), whose peculiar kind of “interruption” instantiates “the difference of transcendence” of “the otherwise than being” (1981, 3). Surely the reader is deterred from construing a transcendental ontology in the place of Nony’s “existential purity” (Diski 1989, 99). Neither self-originating nor, strictly speaking, an act of creation, Nony’s story-telling must thus be referred to the “inhuman and monstrous” (Levinas 1998, 11) of aesthetic form which, in the “interstices” of the story told, retains the immemorial trace of the “saying” (Levinas 1981, 5–9): “If the baby has no higher brain function [ . . . ] how can you be telling me this story? [ . . . ] You wouldn’t have any language. You couldn’t think. You’d be living in a silent, hermetically sealed universe” (Diski 1989, 17). Nony’s alterity might well indicate Diski’s (necessarily failed) attempt to return to the future anterior of a language before the lapsed, that is, post-traumatic, human predicament. But, if Nony is envisioned as perhaps prior to, or other than (symbolic) language and the cogito, one may well wonder how the readers are expected to correlate her “story” to the signs they are reading, when asked “[t]o listen to a story without words?—[ . . . ] a story told in imagined words” (18). By way of a possible answer, it might be worth considering the puzzling inset short story “Isn’t It Romantic?” (180–81), where the narrative thread is kept tied by what Heidegger would call “the sounding of the word” (129)—“dum de

46

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dum de dum dum dum” (180, emphasis in original). Any meaning this story might be expected to deliver is nullified by a barrage of self-cancelling phrases (180), so that what really matters, in the end, is that such a “forgotten” language passed on precognitively and intersubjectively— the singing itself—has been effectively conceived outside ordinary human speech and any possible narrative regimes. In this sense, Diski’s writing turns us back to the root of the unthinkable “fi rst,” before ontology, before (human) language, before knowledge, before meaning, before presence, before the mother–daughter traumatic duality as constituted in and through language. Should we interpret these intimations of a possibility to transcend what counts for meaningful discourse within a Levinasian frame, this ethical possibility would be warranted by the ascription of such a radical discursive dispossession to the very subject who says “I”—who thus lets the “saying” “speak” through her, against any putative affirmation of the logos. By turning Frances’s story and Nony’s discourse, that is, the text’s narrated and narrating movements, into each other (just as happens with the narrated and narrating movements of Diski’s own inner journey vis-à-vis her daughter’s search in Skating to Antarctica), the said and the saying, while maintaining their incommensurability, which defeats any logocentric hierarchisation, prove to be mutually implicated. Indeed, hypostatised categories tend to founder in the face of Nony’s mode of being “beyond essence” (Levinas 1981, 45). As we have seen, essential notions of “selfhood” are fiercely debunked in the novel and standard readings of the mother–daughter traumatic duality (Caporale-Bizzini 116) are never warranted. In this respect, we only need to turn to the interpretation the text itself meta-narratively provides for its title as emblematic of the relationship of Frances and Nony: “I bounced back at her what she knew about herself. The image of her emptiness. I provided the most convincing version of herself. [ . . . ] I showed her she was substance without substance” (Diski 1989, 98). Diski’s stabs at the existentialist metaphysics of being, at the violent and oppressive enforcement of scientist totality, by mocking its jargon intradiegetically: “To the world out there I’m just one of Nature’s jokes—the apotheosis of developmental evolution with the brain of a salamander. But maybe there’s more to me than meets the crude and fearful gaze of those who rate their cerebral hemispheres so highly” (18). We might well superimpose a Freudian interpretation on the act of symbolic defiance inscribed in Diski’s fable. However, the language the writer struggles to reinvent for herself represents a far more radical departure than a mere mimicking of pre-Oedipal semiotic language, for the novel as a whole is shaped according to a principle of radical non-logocentrism. This “other” language is effectively epitomised by Frances’s dancing qua dancing, that is, as a nonrepresentational art form:

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Her solo negated the infusion of narrative and drama [ . . . ]. It denied the story of life and death that the audience had colluded with, and presented the entire piece anew as an abstraction of form and structure [ . . . ], stripping the audience of the story it wanted to be told. (161) This utterly new “event of language” (Gibson 1999, 151) effects the exchange of speech for silence by starting, out of nowhere, a dialogue between Nony and her “imagined listener” (18), a likewise “disembodied ego” (138) “beyond essence”: —Do you want to tell me something? —No. —Well, we’ll wait then. But I’m here to listen. —Do you want to tell me something? —Yes. —Yes? (7–8) The open address of the novel’s fi rst dialogue, modelled after a Levinasian notion of vulnerable self-exposure to the Other (1981, 120),7 informs not only the parts where Nony and Listener interact, but also— less obviously—the third-person chapters where the life of Nony’s mother is recounted. By teasing out the unquestioned ethical significance of the self–Other co-implication, Diski projects Frances Laughton’s and Nony’s antithetical experiences of daughterhood onto a shared representational space whose structural and thematic symmetries, repetitions, mirrorings, and overlappings with regard to their respective beings, experience of life and death, (narrative) knowledge and (narrative) identity crucially bear on Diski’s rethinking of the mother–daughter problematic. To Listener’s nonplussed response to the aporia of the story’s impossible originating consciousness, Nony opposes Levinas’s ethical claim that the self is called into existence by the fact of attending to the other’s demand: —You couldn’t have told me that without a brain. —I didn’t. —I heard it, though, and everything else you’ve said. —That’s because you’re here to listen. (17) Like the novel itself, with which its narrator enigmatically coincides, Nony is without an already given language and hence without any preestablished connections to the world. These have to be built in the very act which founds the narrative’s intersubjective space: “I have to have someone who can listen to the language I don’t have. I need you to imagine the world I have no commerce with” (19). Such a bold act of acknowledgement of the Other’s language and world that cannot be grasped cognitively

48 Maria Grazia Nicolosi aligns Diski’s aesthetic practice with trauma theory’s ethical mandate, as the building of a shared narrative knowledge is invoked in both cases from a radically intersubjective standpoint.8

CONCLUSION My contention throughout has been that Diski’s attempts to protect the ultimate alterity of trauma from becoming fully redeemable might depend on the ethical possibilities embedded in its discursive and temporal structures. In being missed at the level of lived experience in the writer’s real past, her traumatic wound may act as entry point into “hearing” and so into articulating her (m)other’s lost language. I have identified in her liminal form the aesthetic means of this paradoxical protection.9 By representing trauma in such a way that certain past events be kept unacknowledged and unassimilated into the self’s conscious life, Diski manages to carve out the empty space where the silent maternal language can become writing.10 This previously silent Other could be articulated neither in a language that betrayed the alterity of trauma into a normalised discursive logic nor in a language that does not exist yet (which would amount to absolute incommunicable relapse into the unconscious). Its writing must rather be handed over through some sort of “unwriting” akin to Blanchot’s désœuvrement (Critchley 37–48). In Like Mother, the overlapping of the process of writing as pregnancy and the “fi nished” book as child take this unwriting to its extreme conclusion. When Frances fi nalises her publishing contract, she signs herself out of (narrative) life: I can sign it now, she thought. The date of publication was projected for nine months ahead. She had been waiting, she realized. [ . . . ] She didn’t feel empty any more. [ . . . ] She would let the cancer grow and bloom inside her like a flower, filling the space that Nony had evacuated. (203–4) Once again, Frances’s unaccountable refusal resonates with Levinas’s suspicion of being: “The void that hollows out is immediately filled with the mute and anonymous rustling of the there is [il y a]” (1981, 3, emphasis in original). The very last dialogue between Nony and Listener unexpectedly throws the reader off balance, as the “anhydranencephalic” daughter takes over to tell her own story. Frances’s passivity in letting herself die, so that the daughter can survive in writing and tell her own story, gestures towards Levinas’s emphasis on “signification as the signification of an order given to subjectivity before any statement [which] is the pure one-for-the-other. Poor ethical subjectivity deprived of freedom! Unless this would be the trauma of a fission of the self” (1998, 173).

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Diski’s own silence around her mother’s death and the manner in which the writer fi nally falls silent mirror Nony’s story around the mother’s death, which depends on Frances’s silence for it to exist at all. Significantly, the narrative of Diski’s mother’s last days is not handled directly in her own writing, but handed over to her daughter, whose fragmentary notes, penned in a conspicuously different style—“The intro had the pleasing distance of a play. Pinter, perhaps” (1997, 244)—contain the long deferred closure. The event of the daughter’s own story can happen because the mother–daughter deadly circle has been interrupted by the granddaughter breaking free from their traumatic dyad, which thus reaches out onto the future of an other— the third generation’s—daughterly self. In her study of depression and melancholia, Kristeva dismisses Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical novel, The Lover, because the writer obstinately dwells within the trauma of maternal loss. To Kristeva’s mind, Duras’s is a paradigmatic case of “the malady of grief” that haunts so many contemporary writers (1989, 219–60), whose writing “no longer opens onto music in literature,” but rather succumbs to “illogicality and silence” (258). As if in reply to Kristeva, Diski has written depression in “white,” in the process allowing maternal silence to speak from within the very “selffission” of trauma: “the silence and absence of the place where depression puts you [ . . . ] is coloured white and filled with a singing silence” (1997, 236–7, emphasis added). From the position of vulnerable self-exposure that trauma forces upon its sufferers, Diski has summoned the strength to challenge the totalising language of Western onto-epistemology and to attend, in its own terms—à la Beckett—to the fading of the artist’s egological mastery. From this position of voluntary deficiency, Diski’s fables realise the same ethics of form which Levinas saw the advent of in the poetry of Shmuel Yoseph Agnon: “Poetry signifies poetically the resurrection that sustains it: not in the fable it sings, but in its very singing” (Levinas 1997, 12).

NOTES 1. I employ the term in the sense specified by Levinas in his early essay on aesthetics. “Reality and Its Shadow” (1948), where, synonymously with “allegory,” “fable” designates a complex ethical relation between art and reality relevant to Diski’s writing: “It is an ambiguous commerce with reality in which reality does not refer to itself but to its reflection, its shadow. An allegory thus represents what in the object itself doubles it up. An image [ . . . ] is an allegory of being” (Levinas 1998, 6). 2. Levinas’s meditation on death entertains a life-long conversation with Shakespeare, particularly with regard to the theme of suicide as treated in Hamlet (1978, 61–62), Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet (1987, 50–51), and again in Macbeth (1991, 231). 3. My reading of Diski’s texts is greatly indebted to Simon Critchley’s analysis of the il y a—to my view, the strongest argument of his excellent study (35–97).

50 Maria Grazia Nicolosi 4. As Critchley compellingly argues, Levinas’s il y a must be viewed on a par with Maurice Blanchot’s concept of the “other night” (48–70), when the ghosts and monsters we were familiar with in our childhood are unleashed and return in adult life as the agony of insomniac creativity (51). It is precisely to this nocturnal world that little “Jenny” would seem to refer (Diski 1997, 89, 90, 91). 5. More than her stylistic and narrative minimalism, or the explicit allusions to and distinct echoes of Beckettian motifs, what surely connects Diski’s writing to Beckett’s is her adherence to a very Beckettian practice of “intermittency,” in Gibson’s use of the term, which disturbs any interpretive assurance deceptively invited by her seemingly traditional narrative form. Such intermittency, driven by traumatic affect, injects the logical and rhetorical contradictions of her “autographic” self-dispersal into her fictional fabrications, and vice versa. 6. “Being is evil not because it is fi nite, but because it is without limits. Anxiety, according to Heidegger, is the experience of nothingness. Is it not, on the contrary—if by death one means nothingness—the fact that it is impossible to die?” (Levinas 1987, 51). 7. Robert Eaglestone’s persuasive elucidation (164–65) has drawn my attention to this risk-taking aspect of the ethical encounter according to Levinas. 8. See “But if I didn’t have any real faith in the story, I liked it and participated in it” (Diski 1997, 207, emphasis added). 9. In the part entitled “On Being Holed-Up” of Diski’s nonfiction volume On Trying to Keep Still, alongside the exemplary autobiographical writings by Augustine, Montaigne, and Rousseau, the writer cites an impressive list of mystical and philosophical texts struggling—via theologia negativa—with the threshold experience of the sacred, (2006, 78). 10. This argument is a familiar one with that brand of feminist literary criticism arguing that the literary daughter’s writing replaces the absent mother at the empty centre of the daughter’s self (Juhasz 157–83).

WORKS CITED Abbott, Porter H. “Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories.” New Literary History. A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 19.3 (Spring 1988): 597–615. Print. Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln and London: Nebraska UP, 1995. Print. Burrows, Victoria. Whiteness and Trauma: The Mother–Daughter Knot in the Fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print. Caporale-Bizzini, Silvia. “Breaking the Boundaries between Life and Fiction: The Mother–Daughter Tale(s) in Jenny Diski’s Like Mother.” Narrating Motherhood(s), Breaking the Silence: Other Mothers, Other Voices. Ed. Silvia Caporale-Bizzini. Bern and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006. 108–21. Print. Caruth, Cathy, “Introduction.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 3–12. Print. . Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print. Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1978. Print.

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Critchley, Simon. “Very Little . . . Almost Nothing”: Death, Philosophy, Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Print. Dinnerstein, Dorothy. The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. Print. Diski, Jenny. Like Mother. 1988. London: Vintage, 1989. Print. . Skating to Antarctica: A Journey to the End of the World. London: Granta Books, 1997. Print. . On Trying to Keep Still. London: Little, Brown, 2006. Print. Eaglestone, Robert. Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997. Print. Gibson, Andrew. Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Print. . “‘Thankless Earth, but Not Entirely’: Event and Remainder in Contemporary Fiction.” “On the Turn”: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English. Eds Bárbara Arizti and Silvia Martínez-Falquina. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 3–19. Print. Gilmore, Leigh. “Limit-Cases: Trauma, Self-Representation, and the Jurisdiction of Identity.” Biography. An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 24.1 (Winter 2001a): 128–39. Print. . The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 2001b. Print. Gray, Billy. “‘This Dream of Arctic Rest’: Memory, Metaphor and Mental Illness in Jenny Diski’s Skating to Antarctica.” Northern Studies 1 (2009): 125– 40. Accessed on 16/05/2012 at: http://pure.ltu.se/portal/fi les/3312880/ColdMatters.pdf. Web. Gunnmundsdóttir, Gunnthórunn. Borderlines: Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003. Print. Heidegger, Martin. On the Way to Language. 1957. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper One, 1982. Print. Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1989. Print. Juhasz, Suzanne. “Towards Recognition: Writing and the Daughter–Mother Relationship.” American Imago. Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture 57.2 (Summer 2000): 157–83. Print. Kaplan, Ann E. “Performing Traumatic Dialogue: On the Border of Fiction and Autobiography.” Women and Performance. A Journal of Feminist Theory 10.1–2 (1999): 33–58. Print. Kloepfer, Deborah Kelly. The Unspeakable Mother: Forbidden Discourse in Jean Rhys and H.D. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1989. Print. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror—An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Print. . Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. Print. Levinas, Emmanuel. Existence and Existents. 1947. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1978. Print. . Otherwise than Being: or, Beyond Essence. 1974. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. Print. . Time and the Other. 1947. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1987. Print. . Totality and Infi nity: An Essay on Exteriority. 1961. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. Print. . “The Servant and Her Master.” The Levinas Reader. Ed. Seán Hand. Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996. Print.

52 Maria Grazia Nicolosi . “Poetry and Resurrection: Notes on Agnon.” 1975. Proper Names. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. 7–16. Print. . Collected Philosophical Papers. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998. Print. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2008. Print. Middleton, Peter, and Tim Woods. Literatures of Memory: History, Time and Space in Post-War Writing. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2000. Print. Nordius, Janina. “Molds of Telling: Metafictional Sliding in Jenny Diski’s Like Mother.” English Studies. A Journal of English Letters and Philology 72.5 (October 1991): 442–53. Accessed on 22/02/2012 at: http://www.tandfonline. com/ doi/abs/ 10.1080/ 00138389108598766.pdf/. Web. Patterson, Christina. “Diski, Jenny.” The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English. Ed. Lorna Sage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 193–94. Print. Ruddick, Sara. “Maternal Thinking.” Feminist Studies 6 (1980): 342–67. Print. Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2002. Print. Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. Print.

3

Witnessing without Witnesses Atwood’s Oryx and Crake as Limit-Case of Fictional Testimony Marie-Luise Kohlke

Envisaging the near total extinction of humanity, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), like its follow-up The Year of the Flood (2009), explores the limit-case of witness-bearing in a world potentially devoid of witnesses. Via a complex amalgam of trauma narrative, fictional testimony, speculative fiction, and dystopian fiction, incorporating an unexpected comic strain, Atwood dramatises what might best be termed witnessing without witnesses, when no Others are left to bear witness to or receive one’s own testimony. In the aftermath of a global plague caused by a genetically engineered supervirus, the lone survivor-protagonists spend most of the novels inchoately reliving their lives and suffering before and during the apocalypse in a desperate attempt to reconstitute themselves as viable subjects in the post-catastrophic present. Hence the texts quite literally enact the belatedness of trauma, what Cathy Caruth calls the “temporal delay that carries the individual beyond the shock of the fi rst moment,” with the horrors of the cataclysm only pieced together from disjointed memory fragments over the course of the novels, as characters undergo “a repeated suffering of the event” which “is also a continual leaving of,” or perhaps more precisely, a continual attempt to leave “its site” (10). In effect, the narrative re-enactment of trauma endeavours to negotiate a shift from a position of overwhelmed sufferer “stuck in past time” (Atwood 2003, 338)—at best the object of another’s witness-bearing—to a subject capable of bearing witness to the self and/or Others for the future. Atwood’s novels function as virtual sites of the (future) past’s reliving in the present, both as trauma and testimony, for the would-be witness protagonists as well as the extradiegetic witnessing readers. Indeed, the genre of dystopian fiction proves peculiarly well suited for this purpose since, structurally, its characteristic estrangement effect replicates the uncanny and bifurcated temporality of trauma. As noted by Katherine V. Snyder, this genre of writing facilitates “a kind of double consciousness,” demanding of us as readers that “we see the imagined future in our actual present and also recognise the difference between now and the future-as-imagined,” simultaneously identifying and dis-identifying with the world of the text (470; see also 472–3). Dystopia’s time-slip readers thus

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inhabit incompatible temporal realities, akin to trauma victims seeking to narratively bridge the gap between their discontinuous existences pre- and post-trauma. Crucially, however, Oryx and Crake pre-emptively forecloses any post-traumatic future in which the lacuna of trauma, described by the protagonist Jimmy/Snowman as “blank spaces in his stub of a brain, where memory used to be” (Atwood 2003, 4), might become fi lled in with retrospective meaning. Hence the repetition of analepsis evacuates the second potential meaning of the term so relevant to working-through, namely, a restorative function that promises at least a qualified eventual transformation or transcendence of the traumatic (non)experience. For most of the novel, there is no longer any human future to try and move on to from the past, which haunts the protagonist via intrusive flashbacks, helpless longings, nightmares, and oppressive feelings of guilt. As the apparent sole survivor of the catastrophe orchestrated by his best friend, the scientific genius Glenn/Crake, the protagonist perceives himself as an ever-diminishing spectral trace of the now consumed yet all-consuming past, unable to re-engender his lost humanity or achieve a secure subject position. Like the elusive Abominable Snowman after whom Jimmy renames himself post-apocalypse, he is rendered monstrously obsolete by the genetically engineered Crakers, created by Crake to supersede humanity and left to Snowman’s guardianship. Having experienced the end of the world as he knew it and the deaths of those closest to him—of Crake and Oryx, one-time Asian sex-worker and lover to both men, and prior to the catastrophe, the violent death of his mother—Atwood’s protagonist suffers from reminiscences of loss and self-loss, but also from perpetrator trauma. Unwittingly Jimmy was inoculated by Crake against the virus and abetted its dissemination, running the promotional campaign for the contaminated BlyssPluss drug and assisting Oryx’s mass-marketing of the product in the pleeblands beyond the high-security biotech corporation compounds of the social elites. While BlyssPluss afforded protection against venereal diseases, combined with aphrodisiac and anti-ageing properties, the drug was simultaneously designed to secretly sterilise its users (albeit reversibly), so as to counter overpopulation and the concomitant spiralling demand for resources—a violation of human rights in which Jimmy knowingly conspired in spite of his ethical reservations. Much later, it is revealed that, provoked by Crake, Jimmy also killed his friend when the latter murdered Oryx, constituting the protagonist as slayer and betrayer several times over. As Snyder points out, these elliptical traumatic memories are only fi lled in with the protagonist’s return to the destroyed Paradice dome, the research laboratory that acted as “‘ground zero’ for the pandemic” (475). Not only does this journey include an encounter with Oryx’s and Crake’s remains, but it also reenacts Jimmy’s symbolic Fall into evil when he followed Crake’s summons to join him at the facility. On his return from the ruined Paradice to the Craker community, Snowman further recalls his cold-blooded killing of

Witnessing without Witnesses 55 two infected humans in response to their pleas for help during the Crakers’ exodus, which he now retraces alone. The protagonist’s complicity in the extinction of his fellow human beings accentuates Snowman’s survivor guilt, explaining his choice of the self-monstrifying “Abominable.” Aptly regarded by him as “his own secret hair shirt” (Atwood 2003, 8), the fi rst part of his alias functions as both symptom and indirect testimony of his culpability. Yet the crux of Atwood’s novel, I want to propose, lies in a different dilemma—not the dubiousness of the survivor’s ethical right under such compromised circumstances to assume the role of witness to Others’ suffering and/or his own in the fi rst place, but rather the very (im)possibility of witness-bearing in the absence of an Other. It is exactly this limit-case of human testimony that the dystopian genre allows Atwood to dramatise for, analogous to the psychoanalytically inspired talking cure involved in working-through trauma, the process of witness-bearing is inherently dialogic, requiring at least a nominal addressee and respondent to be able to take place. The Other whose suffering is being witnessed or who, alternatively, acts as listener (and secondary witness) to the bearer of the traumatic tale becomes, as it were, a co-producer of the text of trauma and testimony. Without an Other to facilitate address, to feel for, or from whom to elicit empathy for endured suffering, thereby enabling this performative co-production, the potential primary or auxiliary witness becomes ipso facto incapable of witness-bearing.

IMPOSSIBLE WITNESS-BEARING Dori Laub’s discussion of the “collapse of witnessing” during the Holocaust (80), though not directly comparable—the Holocaust, after all, aimed to exterminate particular racial and social groups rather than the entire human species—nonetheless throws light on Snowman’s dilemma. Laub explains how the calculated extermination of primary witnesses to the Nazi atrocities, combined with the perpetrators’ attempted eradication of self-conscious humanity from their victims and the repeated failure of potential external witnesses (non-victims, bystanders, and/or perpetrators) to adopt a witnessing role, produced a situation wholly antipathetic to the production of testimony. No uncompromised position sufficiently separate from the events was left to bear witness from in “a world in which the very imagination of the Other was no longer possible” (81, emphasis in the original). As Laub proceeds to argue: There was no longer an other to which one could say “Thou” in the hope of being heard, or being recognized as a subject, of being answered. The historical reality of the Holocaust became, thus, a reality which extinguished philosophically the very possibility of address,

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Similarly, for most of Oryx and Crake, “the very imagination of the Other,” capable of recognising, hearing, and responding, remains out of reach. The third section of Chapter 1, aptly titled “Voice,” opens with Snowman’s melodramatic recitation of “all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea!” from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (343, Part IV, ll. 232–33), as he feels a comparable desperate “need to hear a human voice—a fully human voice, like his own” (Atwood 2003, 10). Later, ruminating on his involvement in Crake’s conspiracy, Snowman cries aloud: “What could I have done? Just someone, anyone, listen to me please!” (45). The absence of the necessary community of suffering and/or witnessing—even a responsive community of just a single human Other—pre-empts the very possibility of witnessing on Snowman’s part. The same quandary faces Atwood’s female protagonists, Toby and Ren, in The Year of the Flood. For the greater part of the novel, each woman remains in total isolation: the sex worker Ren has been sealed into a brothel’s quarantine apartment, to which she does not know the door code (Atwood 2010, 5), while Toby shuts herself up in the AnooYoo health spa, her former place of work, having refused to respond to victims’ cries for aid and watched them die from the rooftop (423). When Ren eventually appears “miraculous[ly]” at her door, Toby realises that, without an Other, she was merely “a ghost” inhabiting “a haunted house” (431). Similarly, Snowman experiences himself, like his mythical namesake (Atwood 2003, 7–8), always on the point of vanishing (224), occupying a liminal abject state, retaining traces of humanity but unable to fully regain it. Witnessing becomes constitutive of rather than consequential on humanity. In a crucial difference to Atwood’s earlier dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), the protagonist is not depicted recording his painful reminiscences. Although Jimmy had begun to write an explanatory account while observing the mass dying from inside the Paradice complex, this record “for the edification of a world that no longer existed” was left unfinished (347), and Snowman, upon revisiting the site, tears the draft to pieces.1 Hence he does not envisage a future reader either, who might function as a substitute prospective Other, akin to the (in potentia) witnessing role afforded the academic community which discusses the significance and authenticity of Offred’s found recordings at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale. As Snowman expressly reflects, “he’ll have no future reader, because the Crakers can’t read. Any reader he can possibly imagine is in the past” (41). 2 Hence the literal extra-diegetic reader of the novel’s apocalyptic future is spectralised also, relegated to the status of virtual spectator rather than viable witness, since only able to attest to the repeated failure of the witnessing process. Without witnesses, Snowman becomes his own eidolon. Admittedly he has the company of the gentle, peaceable Crakers who take an interest in his well-being, but having been hermetically sealed from the pre-apocalyptic

Witnessing without Witnesses 57 world in the Paradice dome, these post-humans literally cannot imagine, let alone share, Snowman’s trauma. Snowman recognises as much when he imagines intruding like an uninvited guest or a spectre “from the land of the dead” into the Crakers’ singing circle to be met with “blank faces turned towards him,” their “puzzled goodwill” and offers of help: “Forget it, he would say. There’s no way they can help him, not really” (2003, 106, emphasis in original). Having no knowledge of good and evil or any notions of wilfully enacted violence and inflicted suffering, Craker society lacks both the private and collective conceptual and institutional resources which Alan Feldman describes as essential social preconditions for witness-bearing, such as “law, medicine, and readership markets,” “media” (for example, film and literature, including dystopian fiction), and “human rights practice” (164). Trauma’s ineffability and resistance to representation in Oryx and Crake, then, derive not so much from the incommensurability of the experience at the time of occurrence or an insufficiency of everyday language to do justice to limit-events beyond common experience, but rather more from the absence of a conceivable present or future Other, rendering the struggle for meaning-making and the production of testimony utterly futile. There is no common experience anymore, nor any experiencing commonality to address. Hence Jimmy never even attempts to acquaint the Crakers with knowledge of human evil, suffering, and trauma. As it turns out, ironically the Other must be sufficiently like oneself to actualise testimony. As a fictional testimony, Oryx and Crake is thus founded on an ethical impasse: the text that would bear prospective witness to the imminent horrific consequences for humanity of unchecked capitalist consumption, scientific experimentation, and ecological devastation appears to disqualify itself from doing so. Laub’s description of “the journey” of survivor testimony as “eerie” (76) proves uncannily appropriate to Atwood’s text: her reprieved protagonist’s aborted testimony possesses a ghostly quality, since initially addressed only to the dead, his pre-apocalyptic former self, or imaginary self-projected voices. It takes over half of the novel for Snowman to even contemplate the possibility of other human survivors, “will[ing] them into being” (Atwood 2003, 222), and a potential Other only emerges two-thirds through the text, when he finds a wind-up radio and scans the frequencies of faraway countries hoping they might have escaped the worst of the plague; “pray[ing]” that someone will talk to him, he first hears “a human voice” speaking in a foreign, incomprehensible language (273), then another speaking in English. Having forgotten how to work the transmitter, however, Snowman is unable to respond. Testimony again becomes impossible.

BEARING SELF-WITNESS AND WITNESSING OTHERS Oryx and Crake negotiates this dilemma by rendering literal what Caruth metaphorically describes as “departures” taken from oneself (11). Atwood’s

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protagonist constructs a solipsistic internal Other (splitting himself into Jimmy and Snowman), ironically reproducing the traumatic self-fissure earlier occasioned by the pandemic. This arguably also explains Atwood’s strategic decision to opt for third-person narration, incorporating indirect internal monologue, rather than the fi rst-person perspective she initially experimented with for the novel (Howells 2006, 171). 3 In addition, he projects seemingly external (but equally solipsistic) Others. Though disembodied, the latter can nonetheless be heard and addressed, or at least appear to speak to and address Snowman, simulating reciprocity, thereby maintaining what Coral Ann Howells calls his “narrative compulsion” (2006, 162). The voices include fragments of his mother’s house-keeping instructions (Atwood 2003, 232), his father’s extortions to manliness (162), Crake’s ironic aphorisms, coinages and fridge magnet captions, Oryx’s admonitions and endearments, former lovers’ accusations, snatches of Romantic poetry (10) and children’s poems (96), platitudes from his high school Life Skills class (42), maxims from writers of self-help books (45, 195), survival manuals (151), motivational television lectures (237), encyclopaedia entries (109), advertising slogans, lines from Westerns (373–4), porn movies (151), and encounters with prostitutes. The multigendered and ideologically inflected voices he replays in his mind suggest a manifold Otherness,4 which functions as archive and stand-in for the lost witnessing human community. To adapt Laub’s terminology, in order to be able to have a “you” to turn to, so that he can still (or again) say “thou” to himself, Snowman resorts to self-Othering, engaging in what might be termed a talking-tooneself cure or talking-to-oneself-as-Other cure. Yet the novel also offers an unexpected alternative. The already cited “Voice” section recounts how sometimes Snowman “laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion,” or else “he grunts and squeals like a pigoon, or howls like a wolvog,” imitating genetically engineered creatures, actions which make him temporarily “feel better” (10). (Fittingly, the pigoons, genetically engineered to produce transplant organs, incorporate actual human DNA.) Although akin to Craker society, the animal world lacks the social preconditions for testimony, this scene nonetheless imagines the non-human Other as an antiphonal pole of possible appeal and response. In The Year of the Flood, Adam One, the leader of God’s Gardeners, a millenarian Christian environmentalist group to whom Toby and Ren belonged, stresses that “[o]ur role in respect to the Creatures is to bear witness” (Atwood 2010, 300), and the Gardeners’ child members chant “Animals R Us!” (48). Hence in a sense, by bearing witness to animal Others, Jimmy/Snowman (re)affirms his own humanity. As much is also suggested by his “earliest complete memory,” aged five or six, of attending a bonfire of farm animals, destroyed because infected with an unknown man-made virus, at which the boy’s naïve anthropomorphism renders him acutely sensitive to the imagined pain he projects onto the bodies (Atwood 2003, 16), a sacramental apperception of what Marina Warner, albeit in a different context, terms “enfleshed fragility” (32). First he

Witnessing without Witnesses 59 worries about the “poisonous” disinfectant he has to wade through “getting into the eyes” of the happy duck faces printed on his rubber boots, reluctant to believe the ducks impervious to suffering, even though he knows “they weren’t real” (Atwood 2003, 16). Thereafter, he grows “anxious” that the fire consuming the corpses might occasion the animals’ pain, in spite of their being dead (17). When his father tries to reassure him by likening the beasts to “steaks and sausages” only with the skins still on, the boy crucially focuses on the animals’ heads, which render his parent’s analogy suspect, even sacrilegious: their faces make them appear to be “looking at him reproachfully out of their burning eyes,” causing him to think that “[i]n some way all of this—the bonfire, the charred smell, but most of all the lit-up, suffering animals—was his fault, because he had done nothing to rescue them” (18). Here the faces of the non-human Others, albeit no longer living, impose a Levinasian obligation on the self, based on a phenomenological recognition of their equal vulnerability to suffering rather than their negation in terms of consumability and expendability. It is no coincidence that, simultaneously fascinated by the abhorrent spectacle, Jimmy experiences the bonfi re of Otherness as “luminous” (18), or that his memory of the scene is intertwined with another—of his fi rst grown-up haircut, at the end of which the barber describes Jimmy as “a tiger” (17). Taken together, the imagery seems intended to evoke William Blake’s “Tyger, burning bright” from “The Tyger” (1794) in Songs of Innocence and of Experience (24, l.1). 5 “The Tyger” imbues the beast with an incarnate divinity, akin to the purported human soul, focussing attention on the precious, incomparable, and transcendent livingness—and a pantheistic vision of inviolable interrelatedness—of all creatures jointly inhabiting the world in their singular Otherness.6 Similarly, when Snowman fi nds a bright green caterpillar descending towards his sleeping place, it strikes him like a revelation: “he feels a sudden, inexplicable surge of tenderness and joy. Unique, he thinks. There will never be another caterpillar just like this one” (41).7 As Emmanuel Levinas asserts, “[t]he very value of love is the impossibility of reducing the other to myself, of coinciding into sameness” (qtd. in Kearney 58). In both Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, such Blakean ethics of wonder, fellowship, and love counter and critique the extreme scientific and economic objectification/commodification of other life forms, human beings, and the planetary ecosystem, which underpins pre-apocalyptic society, advocating instead an ethics of care for Otherness in all its manifestations.

TESTIMONY, TRAUMA CONSUMPTION, AND ABREACTION These narrative ethics repeatedly clash with the novels’ problematisation of trauma’s potential appropriation as commodity and voyeuristic spectacle. The Year of the Flood, for example, features the Painball Arena, a

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punishment facility in which teams of condemned criminals compete to kill one another in “an enclosed forest” (Atwood 2010, 118)—a parodic inversion of Paradice—with the gladiator-style combat streamed online for public consumption. Similarly, in Oryx and Crake, Jimmy recalls spending much of his teenage years playing (fictional) videogames such as Kwiktime Osama, Barbarian Stomp, Blood and Roses, and Extinctathon, which turn brutality, atrocity, and decimation into pleasurable entertainment, and avidly viewing Internet coverage of public executions, suicides, and violent porn, including paedophilia—a pastime during which he fi rst encounters what he believes to have been Oryx’s face. Once he becomes her lover, Jimmy obsessively tries to extort her testimony of this supposed childhood trauma. He regards Oryx as “a casketful [sic] of secrets,” anticipating that “[a]ny moment now she would open herself up, reveal to him the essential thing, the hidden thing at the core of life, or of her life, or of his life— the thing he was longing to know” (Atwood 2003, 314, emphasis added). Arguably, his longing for a kind of hyper-authentic narrative performance of trauma constitutes an attempted forcible and objectifying appropriation (rather than invited reciprocity), privileging his desire/demand over an Other’s appeal for response, what Roger Luckhurst, albeit in a different context, terms “the allure of traumatic identification” (28). In effect, Jimmy refuses to respect the specificity and singularity of the Other’s trauma and instead seeks to assume the victim’s place for his own gratification, disabling the co-production of witnessing even before the catastrophe. Yet Atwood makes Oryx an agent of deliberate withholding, refusing to re-enact her own suffering and deliverance for Jimmy’s consumption or that of her novel’s readers. What little Oryx does disclose may be no more than fictions produced to pander to Jimmy’s voyeuristic desires, in which the reader becomes inadvertently implicated. The narrative thus resists being claimed for any monolithic teleological reading of trauma as the inescapable foundation of postmodern identity, demythologising our culture’s confessional and testimonial drives even as the novel reaffi rms these. Atwood calls into question both trauma theory’s tenets and trauma’s circulation and consumption as cultural capital, both inside and outside fiction, critiquing what Feldman terms the “redressive and curative trajectory” that would “archive the experiences of terror and abuse as episodes scheduled for overcoming through redemptive survival, recovery, and restorative justice,” enabling “witnessing at a remove” within judicial or therapeutic—or, in this case, dystopian fiction’s—“controlled conditions” (165). Conveniently sequestered from everyday normal life, trauma is relegated to another space and time, analogous to the pleeblands safely segregated from the compounds. Such distanced witnessing inevitably “situates the past as an object of spectatorship” (165) regardless of the degree of empathy that trauma and testimony may evoke, so that, as Feldman remarks, viewers/ readers risk becoming quasi-trauma tourists in virtual “museums of suffering,” safe in the knowledge of an imminent “return to a homeostasis of self

Witnessing without Witnesses 61 and society” after a temporary “irruption of the abnormal” (185)—a reassurance only accentuated by the speculative genre that deals with events that have not happened (yet). Moreover such cordons sanitaires wrongly presuppose a normality unmarked by trauma, whereas Atwood’s novels depict pre-apocalyptic social and private life, even in the compounds, as equally marred by manifold punctual, structural, and insidious traumas, such as family breakdown, abandonment, social exclusion, sexual abuse and trafficking (including paedophilia and rape), individual and state-sanctioned murder, ecological devastation, animal cruelty, and eco-terrorism. Trauma, her novels ironically suggest, can no longer be contained; seeping into every aspect of human existence, it has become a normalised constituent of the very self-destructive fabric of consumerist postmodernity. Just as problematically, the fantasy of redemptive overcoming implicitly claims trauma as an exclusively human prerogative. Atwood thus subverts her own texts’ ambiguous invitations to buy into prevalent trauma culture. Hope Jennings pertinently describes her as “an apocalyptic writer who retains a comic, or sceptical, distance from the nightmares she presents” (11). Even while encouraging ethical reflection on the reader’s part, Atwood’s novels stage the danger of an ethical disconnection or disengagement with trauma. This risk is complicated by the precarious balance required of testimonies and trauma narratives more generally: though intended to disconcert and harrow, if too unremittingly dark and pessimistic, such narratives risk alienating readers and putting them off reading further, short-circuiting the very response to an Other’s suffering they aim to evoke. Consequently, Atwood resorts to a strong comic rather than nihilistic vein in her later speculative fictions, complementing her novels’ double-consciousness and double time frames with dualities of register and tone. Repeatedly, horrors in extremis are juxtaposed with humour, varying from the light-hearted and laconic to the bitingly satiric and bawdily carnivalesque.8 A prime example is the seasonal mating ritual of the Crakers who live as new Adams and Eves in unselfconscious nudity, vegetarianism, and pacifism. When a Craker female comes into heat once every few years, her genitals turn blue like a baboon’s, evoking a similar response in the males, who non-competitively sing to her and offer her both flower tokens and their blue erections to choose from; once she has selected four participants, the group retires for a private gang-bang. Since the Crakers misread human females’ scents as blue, encounters between the species inevitably lead to comic confusion. Towards the end of Oryx and Crake, for example, the Crakers report one such confrontation to Snowman, just returned from the Paradice dome, describing how they offered the woman “flowers and signalled to her with [their] penises, but she did not respond with joy,” how her male companions “looked angry” (Atwood 2003, 364), and how the three humans fled at their approach. Their listener’s reaction too is hilariously understated: “Snowman can imagine. The sight of these preternaturally calm, well-muscled men advancing en masse, singing their

62 Marie-Luise Kohlke unusual music, green eyes glowing, blue penises waving in unison, both hands outstretched like extras in a zombie fi lm, would have been alarming” (365). The passage reads like a sardonic reflection on the hyper-sexualisation, permissiveness, and stress on instant gratification (not to say, multiple orgasms) in today’s hedonistic Western consumer society and “Viagra culture” (Hartley), which, left to run riot, precipitate various acts of sexual violence, exploitation, and trauma in the dystopian future predicted. On the other hand, such pithy ironies jar with the ethical imperative not to deflect from, mitigate, or profane the full horrors of suffering or else appropriate these as special effects for entertainment and diversion. Analogously, Anthony Griffiths takes issue with what he takes to be Atwood’s imprecise and parodic (mis)representation of ground-breaking genetic science for purposes of sensationalism. When Atwood dramatises the “very real threat” of “[a]ccidentally released invasive species,” for example, she does so not in terms of actual “natural species introduced from exotic sources” but “dangerous hybrids” like the humorously named pigoons, wolvogs, and liobams, a strategy Griffiths regards as “another instance where the imaginary problems expressed in Oryx and Crake distract our attention from the real ones that assail us” (n.p.). In this sense, the comic strain can also operate as a form of seductive escapism akin to that provided by horror fiction, focussing on the gruesome to shock and thrill rather than precipitating reflexive social critique and self-critique. Comedy thus serves a dual purpose: it provides readers (and characters also) with an abreaction of excess affect, and with a temporary break from (or containment of) overwhelming trauma, both of which enable them to continue with the story. This safety valve function is reinforced by Atwood’s introduction of further alternative genres into what J. Brooks Bouson calls the “complex, and game-like, multi-layered narrative” of Oryx and Crake, which becomes a hybridisation of “contemporary popular fictional forms” (2004, 141), or, to borrow one of the novel’s own scientific tropes, an instance of protean “genre splicing” (Howells 2004, 93).9 In addition to the text’s evident classification as trauma narrative, fictional testimony, speculative fiction, and dystopian fiction, Atwood herself has described it as “an adventure romance” or quest narrative, as well as a “Menippean satire, the literary form that deals in intellectual obsession” (Atwood 2004, 517), or as one critic termed it, “a Gulliver’s Travels for the twenty-fi rst century” (Howells 2004, 92). Meanwhile Danette DiMarco suggests the novel is best read as a disaster narrative and monster story, reprising the mythical North American Wendigo in the “less and less human” looking protagonist (2011, 138), who becomes a “manifestation of the monstrous choices humans have made” (142). Further genres influencing the novel’s content and form include horror fiction and ghost story; the Bildungsroman and revenge tragedy (Barzilai 88–89); and “the castaway-survivor narrative,” “the detective and actionthriller” centred on the discovery of “Crake’s bioterrorist plot,” and “the

Witnessing without Witnesses 63 romance story” of “the Jimmy-Crake-Oryx love triangle” (Bouson 2004, 141). In their introduction to this volume, the editors draw specific attention to trauma narratives’ frequent compulsion to “adopt the malleability, iterability and ubiquity of the romance,” so as to better “permeate texts of all types and generic labels” (7). Hence Atwood’s use of romance in particular, but also her resort to other popular genres, seems aimed at broadening the appeal of trauma literature and reaching the largest possible audience, albeit for didactic as much as commercial purposes.

THE (RE)TURN TO ETHICS The proliferating narrative forms of Oryx and Crake afford short-term diversions from trauma through apparent detours and digressions, which actually all target the same end-point—the end of witnessing itself. This deliberate misdirection leads Bouson to liken Atwood to her “tricksterjokester” villain Crake (2004, 141).10 Like the virus hidden within the BlyssPluss pill, Atwood’s trauma narrative is insidiously delivered via the Trojan horse of genre splicing that reinforces the comic incongruence between linguistic registers encompassing epic tragedy, teenage slang, porn, scientific terminology, computer games jargon, romantic idiom, greeting card platitudes, and spam email and advertising lingo. Yet the generic fusion/confusion also draws attention to the text’s ethical dimension by foregrounding the difficulty of fi nding an appropriate language for witness-bearing and trauma’s representation. The inability to conclusively categorise the novel generically replicates trauma’s essential evasion of determinative classification and highlights the way that any narrative mode at best achieves an incomplete approximation of the literal (non)experience. Unsurprisingly, the close of Oryx and Crake thus returns its protagonist and readers to the novel’s opening impasse. Following the Crakers’ report of their encounter with armed human survivors, Snowman tracks the latter to the beach, where in Robinson Crusoesque fashion he discovers human footprints in the sand. Like Defoe’s protagonist, Snowman is faced with the possibility of a violent confrontation, which could be read equally as self-defence—and defence of the non-violent Crakers whose survival might be threatened by a resurgence of humanity—or cold-blooded murder, reprising the protagonist’s role as slayer/betrayer. Formally, the text figures the ethical choice by staging a crucial repetition with minor variations of the novel’s opening paragraph at the start of the closing chapter (DiMarco 2005, 192), suggesting both a destructive re-enactment of the traumatic past and the emergence of a post-traumatic future as distinct feasibilities. Atwood deliberately leaves the novel open-ended, with Snowman facing the choice between recovering the possibility of a witnessing community of human Others (and thereby perhaps achieving a viable post-traumatic subjectivity beyond the

64 Marie-Luise Kohlke self-split Jimmy/Snowman) and eradicating that possibility once and for all by completing Crake’s project of humanity’s extermination—leaving a world potentially without witnesses, in which human suffering has been rendered irrelevant. The intimated final negation (of witnessing, self, and Other) is aptly figured by a return to the novel’s opening and recurrent image of the “blank face” of the broken wristwatch Snowman continues to wear that always shows “zero time” (Atwood 2003, 3), or in this case “[z]ero hour” (374). This “talisman” (3) functions as an apocalyptic sign, perhaps intended to recall the stopped watch in the West Wing gallery of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, while also evoking an omnipresent ground zero that Snowman is (still) unable to leave, since in his case the site of trauma has, quite literally, become the whole world. Yet “[z]ero hour” also suggests the fi nal countdown to the end of witnessing, while the watch’s “blank face” stands in for the obliterated face of the Other and the potential witness’s denial of its appeal for recognition of co-present and commensurate livingness—and suffering—in its absolute Otherness. In Levinas’s terms: the face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone, as if to do so were to become an accomplice in his death. Thus the face says to me: you shall not kill. In relation to the face I am exposed as a usurper of the place of the other. (qtd. in Kearney 60) The reader’s fi nal view of Snowman is that of lurker (serpent?) in the bushes of the new Eden, avoiding direct confrontation with the Other’s face, here transmuted to mankind’s original sin, implicitly hardening himself to commit the murder he contemplates. The scene positions him as a potential Saint Peter about to deny humanity itself (here assuming the role of the sacrificed Christ) for the third and fi nal time. Indeed, the scenario has been previously rehearsed in two pre-apocalypse instances of his refusal to bear witness. The fi rst occurs in Jimmy’s on-screen encounter with the violated child sex-slave, presumed to be Oryx, gazing out mutely but penetratingly at the teenage voyeur and making him feel “culpable” (Atwood 2003, 91). Later reflections on this incidence— “Retribution was at hand, but for what? What had he done? Nothing. He’d only looked” (215)—underline his ethical failing, as the very self-defence of doing nothing implicates him in the dehumanising crimes against her. The second instance involves the recording of his mother’s execution for crimes of terrorist treason, which Jimmy is made to watch by the CorpSeCorps security officials: “looking right at him” with “wounded” eyes (recalling the burning farm animals), his mother’s fi nal words are “Remember Killer. I love you. Don’t let me down” (258, emphasis in original). Significantly, her words stage a direct address, highlighting the antiphonal reciprocity of appeal and response, of “I” and “you” and the way that ethical obligation and the constitution of each subject is predicated on the Other. Jimmy

Witnessing without Witnesses 65 initially simulates dismissive nonchalance, denying her as Peter denied Christ—“Nope. Sorry. Nothing” (258)—but the monitor he is connected to registers his shocked recognition. Subsequently forced to identify Killer as his pet rakunk (a genetic splice of raccoon and skunk), which his mother took with her when abandoning her family, Jimmy feels he has conspired with the perpetrators and committed “[a]nother betrayal,” but quickly proceeds to imagine that the recording may have been only “a fake” or a “digital” simulation (259). Conveniently, this once again liberates him from the obligation to bear witness, since to do so would then mean bearing false witness to something that never happened. Ironically, of course, “Killer” also evokes Jimmy’s actual and potential renewed status as killer of mankind, emphasised by the replaying of his mother’s last words—“Don’t let me down” (374, emphasis in original)—as he must choose once more between assuming the witness or perpetrator role. (Significantly, he never contemplates a bystander role, that is, simply doing nothing.) Meanwhile, being placed in the position of having to imagine what Jimmy/Snowman will do thereafter, Atwood’s readers too are forced to choose. Indeed, when the protagonist asks, “What do you want me to do?” (374, emphasis added), his query seems at least partly addressed to the extra-diegetic witnesses, compelled to reflect on their wilful ignorance of potentially disastrous social, scientific, and environmental changes, or complacent acceptance of the same as inevitable. Readers become analogous to God’s Gardeners in The Year of the Flood who, as Jennings points out, prove incapable of “preserving” human life, instead “passively standing by as witnesses to its annihilation” (14) or, more accurately, as failed witnesses or non-witnesses like Jimmy.

BEYOND HUMAN WITNESSSING If, as earlier proposed, witnessing becomes constitutive of rather than consequential on humanity, Atwood’s narrative strategies suggest that our notions of witnessing, and of trauma as a category of entitlement, need to be broadened and extended to incorporate recognition of an equivalent capacity to suffer in—and an ethical obligation to recognise harm done to—numerous other kinds of being in the world. As Adam One sermonises in The Year of the Flood, “why do we think that everything on Earth belongs to us, while in reality we belong to Everything?” (Atwood 2010, 63). To believe ourselves “set above all other Life” (64) as masters of the universe, instrumentalising other beings rather than regarding them as companion species, leads to an ethical and existential dead end, and eventually the expendability of humanity itself. Atwood herself has identified one of speculative fiction’s primary functions as “[e]xplor[ing] the nature and limits of what it means to be human in graphic ways, by pushing the envelope as far as it will go” (2004, 515). However, Grayson Cooke pertinently

66 Marie-Luise Kohlke points out that “[t]he ‘human,’” as such never fully materialises, remaining an unfulfi lled “promise, something always yet to appear” in her novel (116): “The end of one understanding of the human is the beginning of another” (123). Oryx and Crake, like The Year of the Flood, thus returns to an older sense of apocalypse as personal revelation or illumination (see Warner 12),11 with its vision of the end disclosing a possible regeneration and transformation of humanity and a new form of biopolitical life that collapses the asymmetrical human–nature binary, instead replacing it with a model of symbiosis between self and Other. Herein lies the paradoxically utopian promise of Atwood’s dystopian vision,12 the possibility of a dethroned, newly sacramental humankind, given over to the care of Others, committed to what DiMarco calls the potential “creation of a yet-to-be imagined inviolate world” (2005, 170). According to Atwood’s Levinasian and Blakean narrative ethics, postmodernity’s self-conscious traumatic subjectivity would be better replaced by Other-conscious traumatic intersubjectivity, not simply inter-human but inter-all-life. As Snowman realises as he prepares to confront the survivors, “he has nothing to trade with them, nor they with him. Nothing except themselves” (Atwood 2003, 373, emphasis added). Significantly, when the same scene is played out at the close of The Year of the Flood, Toby and her companions opt—temporarily at least—for non-violence, even towards the surviving Painballers who brutally raped both Ren and Amanda and murdered their friend Oates. Though earlier Toby poisons their gravely wounded and abandoned leader, the psychopath Blanco, she nonetheless silently speaks the Gardener’s ritualistic “words of apology and release” over him, “the same as she would for a beetle” (Atwood 2010, 458). On one hand, this darkly comic formulation strips her personal nemesis and one-time rapist of humanity, reducing him to the insignificance of a lowly insect, next to nothing; indeed, when she tries to justify her action to herself as “mercy” the next morning, she is forced to admit having been motivated as much by revenge: “‘May his spirit go in peace,’ she says out loud. Such as it is, the fuck-pig” (459). On the other hand, while registering the difficulty of transcending egocentric and exclusive notions of the human, Toby’s resort to the Gardeners’ terminology evokes their celebration of even the basest of life forms and all beings’ singularity and interdependency. Hence the animal references applied to Blanco paradoxically cast him as a fellow creature whose presence confers both address and obligation—thus in turn guaranteeing Toby’s own humanity. Fittingly, The Year of the Flood ends on “All Souls” Day (515), with the survivors preparing to share food with their prisoners in sacramental communion, implicitly endorsing an ethics of sustaining mutual life rather than an ethics of wilful self-centred destruction. Momentarily, the world is transfigured into a shared living space instead of humanity’s laboratory of power over Others. While Oryx and Crake concludes with Snowman still

Witnessing without Witnesses 67 awaiting a return to humanity, The Year of the Flood adopts a more hopeful ending, since the survivors have already begun reconstituting humanity as a community of suffering and witnessing Others. Yet the protagonists continue to be faced with the same ambiguous choices as Snowman of whether or not—and under what (if any) circumstances it may be justified—to abrogate the living and suffering being of Others: human, nonhuman, and post-human, as well as that of the Earth itself. NOTES 1. “Snowman had done quite a lot of writing in early manuscript versions” of the novel, Howells notes (2006, 171), but Atwood dispensed with these, likely to foreground the impasse of address in the absence of witnesses. Similarly, in The Year of the Flood, Ren does no more than write her name with an eyebrow pencil on the wall (Atwood 2010, 7), while Toby feels she ought to believe that she was spared “to bear witness, to transmit a message” (114) but cannot, and when she begins to keep a ledger, she merely notes down the Feast or Saint’s Day, the weather, and inconsequential housekeeping activities, but nothing concerning past trauma (see 195–6). 2. Significantly, early drafts had Jimmy dedicate his narrative to Oryx and included “Snowman’s Address to the Absent Reader,” but Atwood chose to excise these from the published novel (Howells 2006, 162, 171). 3. Similarly, in The Year of the Flood, Toby is restricted to narrating in the third person. When she hears sounds of faint singing and catches a glimpse of the Crakers’ exodus from afar, Toby dismisses the possibility of Others as “a hallucination” and “siren mirage,” since “[l]oneliness creates company” (Atwood 2010, 197). In contrast, Ren’s stubborn insistence on imagining her friend Amanda as a still living Other enables her to narrate in the fi rst person. 4. Snyder oversimplifies these voices when she describes Jimmy’s “aural hallucination” as distinctly feminine, “utterly generalised” as “an everywoman” and “utterly specific” as Oryx adopting a variety of roles (478). 5. Atwood’s other counterpart to Blake’s tiger is the “liobam,” a “lion-sheep splice [ . . . ] commissioned by the Lion Isaiahists in order to force the advent of the Peaceable Kingdom” (2010, 112), and the Gardeners’ hymns that intersperse The Year of the Flood at regular intervals are deliberately modelled on Blake’s poetry. 6. Young Jimmy also proves deeply reluctant to eat pigoons, because he thinks of them “as creatures much like himself” (Atwood 2003, 24), implicitly viewing “[h]is own materiality as equal and not superior to them” (DiMarco 2005, 188). The Year of the Flood develops life’s indiscriminate reduction to consumable to its logical end-point via implicating mass food production in possible cannibalism (Atwood 2010, 40). 7. The scene also recalls the Ancient Mariner’s response to the glorious vitality of the watersnakes; it is only when the Mariner experiences an instinctive surge of love, unwittingly blessing the snakes and hence himself also, that the dead Albatross falls from his neck (Coleridge 344, Part IV, l. 273, 284–91). 8. For a detailed account of how different modes of humour operate in Oryx and Crake, see Dvorak, especially 117–8 and 126–7. 9. For a summary of The Year of the Flood’s comparable genre splicing, see Bouson (2011, 11).

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10. Significantly, Jimmy too is constructed as a trickster/jokester figure, both in his performance as satiric mimic and comedian for his high-school classmates and in his later manipulative relationships with women. 11. Curiously, Warner misses this crucial aspect of Atwood’s novel, which she instead regards as “taking up apocalypse [ . . . ] as political allegory” (17). 12. Levinas appropriately remarks that the “concern for the other remains utopian in the sense that it is always ‘out of place’ (u-topos) in this world, always other than the ‘ways of the world’” (qtd. in Kearney 68, emphasis in original).

WORKS CITED Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. 1985. London: Virago Press, 1995. Print. . Oryx and Crake. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Print. . “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake ‘In Context.’” Science Fiction and Literary Studies: The Next Millennium. PMLA 119.3 (May 2004): 513–7. Print. . The Year of the Flood. 2009. London: Virago P, 2010. Print. Barzilai, Shuli. “‘Tell My Story’: Remembrance and Revenge in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” Critique 50.1 (Fall 2008): 87–110. Print. Blake, William. “The Tyger.” 1794. Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman with commentary by Harold Bloom. New York and London: Doubleday, 1988. 24–25. Print. Bouson, J. Brooks. “‘It’s Game over Forever’: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39 (2004): 139–56. Print. . “‘We’re Using up the Earth, It’s Almost Gone’: A Return to the PostApocalyptic Future in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 46.1 (2011): 9–26. Print. Caruth, Cathy. “Introduction.” “Part I: Trauma and Experience.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 3–12. Print. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” 1798, rev. 1817. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 1962. 4th Edition, Vol. 2. Eds M. H. Abrams, E. Talbot Donaldson, Hallett Smith, Robert M. Adams, Samuel Holt Monk, Lawrence Lipking, George H. Ford, and David Daiches. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1979. 337–53. Print. Cooke, Grayson. “Technics and the Human at Zero-Hour: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Studies in Canadian Literature 31.2 (2006): 105–25. Print. DiMarco, Danette. “Paradice Lost, Paradise Regained: homo faber and the Makings of a New Beginning in Oryx and Crake.” Papers on Language and Literature 41.2 (Spring 2005): 170–95. Print. . “Going Wendigo: The Emergence of the Iconic Monster in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Antonia Bird’s Ravenous.” College Literature 38.4 (Fall 2011): 134–55. Print. Dvorak, Marta. “Margaret Atwood’s Humour.” The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Ed. Coral Ann Howells. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2006. 114–29. Print. Feldman, Allen. “Memory Theatres, Virtual Witnessing, and the Trauma-Aesthetic.” Biography 27.1 (Winter 2004): 163–202. Print.

Witnessing without Witnesses 69 Griffiths, Anthony. “Genetics According to Oryx and Crake.” Canadian Literature 181 (Summer 2004): 192–5. Accessed on 22/08/2013 at: http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk.www.ezp.biumontpellier.fr/seachFulltext.do?id=R03 466855&div Level=0&area=abell&forward=critref_ft. Web. Hartley, Heather. “The ‘Pinking’ of Viagra Culture: Drug Industry Efforts to Create and Repackage Sex Drugs for Women.” Sexualities 9.3 (July 2006): 363–78. Print. Howells, Coral Ann. “Bad News.” Review of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Canadian Literature 183 (Winter 2004): 92–3. Print. . “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake.” The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Ed. Coral Ann Howells. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2006. 161–75. Print. Jennings, Hope. “The Comic Apocalypse of The Year of the Flood.” Margaret Atwood Studies 3.2 (2010): 11–18. Print. Kearney, Richard [in discussion with Emmanuel Levinas]. “Emmanuel Levinas.” Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Herbert Marcuse, Stanislas Breton, Jacques Derrida: The Phenomenological Heritage. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. 47–70. Print. Laub, Dori. “An Event without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival.” Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Eds Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. 75–92. Print. Luckhurst, Roger. “Traumaculture.” New Formations 50 (2003): 28–47. Print. Snyder, Katherine V. “‘Time to Go’: The Post-Apocalyptic and the Post-Traumatic in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Studies in the Novel 43.4 (Winter 2011): 470–89. Print. Warner, Marina. “Angels & Engines: The Culture of Apocalypse.” Raritan 25.2 (Fall 2005): 12–41. Print.

4

“I do remember terrible dark things, and loss, and noise” Historical Trauma and Its Narrative Representation in Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture 1

Rudolf Freiburg BARRY’S ART AS DIAGNOSIS AND THERAPY OF IRISH HISTORICAL TRAUMAS The historical background against which Sebastian Barry’s dramas and novels have to be read consists of a multitude of traumatic events that contributed to shaping the fate of Ireland.2 The nation never forgot the exigencies of mass starvation (Fitzpatrick 213–74), disease, and emigration caused by the Great Famine in the years between 1845 and 1852 (Maurer 219–27). From 1880 on, the Boer Wars took a terrible toll, and the first decades of the twentieth century witnessed numerous insurrections in Ireland, among which the repression of the Dublin Lockout (1913) and the Easter Rising (1916) play a significant role in Barry’s literature. The history of these events has often been narrated by chroniclers and historians alike, but—if one is willing to believe Barry—all these accounts have been one-sided. To remedy this deficiency, contemporary Irish drama has meanwhile embarked on a kind of “national self-examination” (Meche 464), eager to detect concealed wounds and to heal them, if possible. Together with distinguished dramatists such as Frank McGuinness, Tom Murphy, and Marina Carr (Meche 464), Barry belongs to an ambitious group of politically interested writers who are willing to delve deeply into both the enigmas and mysteries of Irish history. It is an almost Pyrrhonian scepticism worthy of Montaigne which drives him to question the grands récits of official Irish historiography and to seek alternatives for the allegedly normative perspectives that traditional historiographers choose. As a novelist, Barry (2006, 640–48) knows quite well how easily biographical facts can be turned into lies and myths, and as a sceptical “subjective” historian, he tries to study how national history is transformed into anecdotes, legends, and myths which are incorrectly taken for truth. As a writer stemming from a Catholic family, which was intensely involved in the processes of Irish history and which even produced family members similar to Eneas McNulty, who finds himself “on the wrong side of history” (Seree-Chaussinand 54), Barry has developed the ethical notion that a person is not completely responsible for what he or she does. As a “pure fish of circumstance,” which is “enmeshed in the nets of history” (Kurdi 42), the

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individual protagonist of Barry’s novels and dramas is a paradoxical figure: a victim and a perpetrator simultaneously. In Barry’s work, individual and collective traumas deeply influence ethical systems, but they do not destroy them. Barry is no stickler for historical facts, nor does he negotiate history by concentrating on glorious Irish “heroes” such as Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera, or Charles Stuart Parnell; instead he focusses on the lives of misfits, underdogs, and outsiders,3 clearly revealing the reasons that made them behave “incorrectly” and showing the distress that their decision engendered. The tragic conflicts of his predominantly naïve protagonists are not triggered off by fits of greed, pride, sexual desire, or overestimation of their capabilities (Mahony 2006a, 83–98); they are caused rather by an outmoded loyalty based on a strange mélange of Christian ethics and traditional family values, once true and honest in their core, but rendered odious and ugly by the political changes that have occurred and changed Irish life forever. In truth, Barry’s protagonists are riding on the horns of dilemma, suffering from unbearable conflicts of loyalties. In his attempts to rewrite history, Barry has occasionally been accused of an inappropriate revisionism that seeks “to discredit the contemporary IRA” and to “blacken de Valera” with texts which “would have been more powerful had they been less driven by their anti-Republican thesis, less concerned to refute a one-sided version of history by offering an equally one-sided and sometimes factually misleading rebuttal” (Cullingford 131, 139, 144). But, as many critics have shown (e.g. Foster 187), this position can hardly be defended convincingly, since, as I hope to demonstrate, Barry is particularly interested in ethical, moral, and humane questions; his intention is not to blame or satirise individual persons or political groups.

THE ETHICS OF FORM: BARRY’S USE OF LITERARY GENRES In order to diagnose and perhaps “heal” the wounds of Irish history, Barry employs a wide range of genres comprising the picaresque novel, the pastoral, biography and autobiography, florilegia, and letter-writing. By not damning the “poor fish of circumstances,” Barry’s dramas exude a certain metaphysical charm of redemption and healing intensified by “gravid lyricism” and an “elegiac” tone (Forster 99). To mitigate the horrors of the events he describes, Barry capitalises on his long experience as a dramatist, but also as a poet,4 when he hides atrocities behind a veil of lyricism and impressionism. Endeavouring to invalidate Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum, that “it is no longer possible to write poetry after Auschwitz” (30, my translation), Barry’s poetic style compensates for the lost harmony of a world stricken by grief and pain, and he thus assumes the role of a healer. Although most of his characters could easily compete with biblical Job in terms of suffering, they never complain, preserving an astonishing degree of benevolence: “Barry’s innocents, in their damaged or thwarted conditions, convey an astounding lack of bitterness” (Mahony 2006a, 84).

72 Rudolf Freiburg It is probably this deep tenor of humanism based on Christian values, typical of Barry’s dramatic works, that is responsible for the international success of his plays. At the same time, like many Modernist novelists such as James Joyce, Alfred Döblin, or Robert Musil, Barry is deeply interested in the processes of deranged minds. He has often been compared with Virginia Woolf (Gleitman 209–10), who delivered the unforgettable portrait of her addle-headed protagonist, Septimus Warren Smith, traumatised by the nightmarish visions caused by shell-shock. Barry knows that traumatic experiences breed mental distress,5 which may range from the schizophrenia of the colonised subject, over the paranoia of the perpetrator, who has committed many crimes and—feeling guilty—thinks that he is pursued by his former victims, to the loss of speech and memory, subjecting the erstwhile man of power, represented by Thomas Dunne,6 the tragic figure of Barry’s The Steward of Christendom (1995), to the humiliations of an ever-increasing dementia. For the poet, dramatist, and novelist, the deranged human mind, haunted by strange sights, bizarre visions, and idiosyncratic memories is a great opportunity to employ his own imagination, since this third faculty of the mind—next to rationality and memory—displays a genuinely esemplastic function by fusing heterogeneous elements together. When the imagination of a traumatised mind infiltrates memory and transforms its myriads of personal or historical entries, the art of trauma is likely to emerge. Authentic history is transformed into idiosyncratic versions of events that may not be correct, but that have their merits because they can assuage the pains caused by post-traumatic stress disorder. In this way, the life stories of Barry’s protagonists turn out to be clear examples of limit-case trauma narratives, as Leigh Gilmore defines them. Barry describes the tragedy of the typical “Castle Catholic,” who endeavours to remain loyal to an empire which he associates with the glory of the Victorian Age, although he is simultaneously looked upon as a traitor and a back-stabber by his Irish compatriots. The unbearable tensions caused by this dilemma produce violence, discrimination, and outright ostracism, and they lead to a loss of property, a loss of love, and a loss of life. The physical and psychological traumas Barry’s protagonists suffer from are so terrible that any form of coherent linear narrative seems to be inappropriate for the task of representing such an intense form of pain. In Barry, the “productivity of the limit” (Gilmore 14–15) becomes evident in the choice of his genres. In his dramas he uses visions and dreams in order to represent the unimaginable atrocities of the Irish Civil War. All his novels, too, are clear examples of trauma narratives.

THE SECRET SCRIPTURE: TRAUMATIC MEMORY AND POSTMODERN NOTIONS OF HISTORY Whereas the essential features of Barry’s writing have long since been analysed in his dramatic works, his prose narratives have not to date been

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rewarded with the critical attention they deserve. The novels, however, form a central component of Barry’s literary cosmos; just as Virginia Woolf, who was extremely interested in all matters concerning literary theory and aesthetics, tried to combine the various stylistic features of drama, poetry, and the novel, even inventing the generic term of “playpoem” for her experimental, Ur-postmodern novel The Waves (1931), Barry also enriches his narrations with elements imported from both drama and poetry. And just like Woolf, he creates an atmosphere of impressionistic vagueness and ontological undecidability when representing the actions, ideology, and historical background to the characters, which, in the case of The Secret Scripture, conceals—to a certain degree—the heinous crimes committed during the de Valera era. Arguably, in Barry’s novels in general impressionism clearly represents what Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega describe in the introduction to this book as the “asymptotic nature of what cannot be represented—the radical alterity of trauma—which is at the heart of the poetics of liminality and liminal ethics” (17). Another aspect that Barry’s pseudo-autobiographical works share with Woolf’s is the choice of members of his own family, whose lives he frequently takes as an inspiration for his novels. This shows that Barry consciously acknowledges the dark sides of his pedigree and he expects the Irish nation to do the same for its own history: “Because if we exclude a part of ourselves, even a disreputable or reprehensible part, we by extension exclude and erase a part of the family, and by further extension a part of the nation” (Anonymous 6). Because of the idiosyncratic use of autobiography, Barry’s novels clearly represent limit-case trauma narratives. As Gilmore puts it succinctly: Yet conventions about truth telling, salutary as they are, can be inimical to the ways in which some writers bring trauma stories into language. The portals are too narrow and the demands too restrictive. [  .  .  .  ] [T]he autobiographical project may swerve from the form of autobiography even as it embraces the project of self-representation. (3) Most of Barry’s novels widen the portals of autobiography by introducing techniques of metamorphosis and transformation, by blurring the lines between the authentic representation of individual and historic truth and the idiosyncratic appropriation of a past that can only be remembered if it is embellished by acts of euphemistic fantasy and imagination. Something new is created, since “knowledge in the testimony” is “not simply a factual given that is reproduced and replicated by the testifier, but a genuine advent, an event in its own right” (Laub 1992, 62). In the story Roseanne tells in The Secret Scripture, language is both an obstacle and a healing force. All Barry’s literary works pay tribute to the fact that the aftermath of traumatic experiences never ends and that it is the omnipresence of historical catastrophes that regulates life, as the writer himself suggests: “The

74 Rudolf Freiburg civil war was a time of exceptional savagery, and our history books at school didn’t dwell on this less admirable period. But the wounds of that time still informed everything about modern Ireland” (Anonymous 8). In Barry’s The Secret Scripture (2008), the reader meets Roseanne McNulty, alias Roseanne Clear. It is a sure sign of Barry’s literary world that it is inhabited by people who are related to each other; the protagonist of The Steward of Christendom is the father of the main protagonist in Annie Dunne (2002), whose portrait is thus completed and slightly altered in the novel, but also the father of Lilly in Barry’s latest novel, On Canaan’s Side (2011). In The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998), the protagonist has a brief but intense love affair with Roseanne McNulty. The permanent reintegration of figures the reader has already studied in former plays and novels expresses the selective perspective of each and every narrative and historical report; simultaneously it turns the gallery of individual life stories into a kind of family saga, in which Irish history is reflected. Ambiguity, multiperspectivity, the asymptotic nature of truth, vagueness, and a certain doubt if what is told really represents reality are essential features of limit-case trauma narratives, and Barry’s novel is no exception. In the narrative present, Roseanne represents “felt history” (Garratt 2011a, 10); she is a one-hundred-year-old woman who resides in the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital. Her fragmented life cannot be told in a traditional coherent, linear, unambiguous way. Thus, the novel displays a significant generic hybridity: those parts marked as “Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself” (1) are followed by passages entitled “Dr. Greene’s Commonplace Book” (31). This hybridity is further complicated by the fact that, as Barry himself has explained in an interview, the figure of Roseanne is based on his own great-uncle’s fi rst wife, a beautiful woman who had lived in Sligo “before she was put into a lunatic asylum by the family” (Jeffreys n.p.). Though written in the fi rst person, the author refers to it in the third, as “Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself” (3), thus pointing to her acute state of dissociation. The testimony of the traumatised old lady, a kind of unreliable autobiography, in which the limits between fact and fiction are permanently blurred, is contrasted with the analytical, scientific view of the professional psychiatrist who has done some research on Roseanne’s life. The narrator includes letters and so-called “official” documents written by persons who knew Roseanne well, thus enhancing the complexity of the search for truth. Whereas the testimony reveals the typical aspects of an individual and idiosyncratic appropriation of the past—the confounding of events, the addition of narrative elements, the mythopoetic transformation of historical incidents—the psychiatrist’s report sticks to the facts and often corrects Roseanne’s version of the past. The peculiar nature of Barry’s narrative, however, leaves no doubt that Roseanne’s testimony offers a specific insight into the traumatic nature of the events a factographic report could never achieve.

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Roseanne is another example of Barry’s “errant Irish lady,” a female Job, born to suffer and willing to bear everything with benevolence and optimism. As a personification of Ireland, Roseanne’s story assumes an allegorical character, in this respect reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s “The Story of the Injured Lady,” fi rst published in 1707 (1–12), and it seems as if Swift’s Irish Lady had been forbidden to die, and like a female version of his unforgettable Struldbruggs, had been damned to live forever, suffering from her wounds, getting lonely and alienated from her surroundings, until the reader meets her again in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), as the impoverished old woman who sells milk to Stephen and his friends (13–15), only to be resurrected in the form of Barry’s Roseanne McNulty. Like the errant Jew, the “errant Irish Lady” haunts the history of the nation as an incarnation of the many traumas that Ireland has witnessed throughout the ages. In Roseanne’s biography, personal and political traumas merge with each other. Born into a poor family, Roseanne witnesses the mental decay of her beautiful mother and the increasing poverty of her father, who works as a gravedigger. As a child she obviously sees how her Presbyterian father is punished as an alleged traitor by fanatic Irish freedom fighters, a traumatic experience that she will dissociate from her conscious mind by turning it into a poetic narration. She does not fully understand the humiliation of her father, who eventually loses his job as a gravedigger and must henceforth work as a rat-catcher. Roseanne’s acts of remembrance are marked by flashbacks and iterations; her memory circles around the ever-present tragedy of her life, the killing of her father by Irish freedom fighters, an event so frightful to her that she is not capable of coping with it directly. In her memory the killing is metamorphosed into a suicide, and the euphemistic nature of this transformation reveals the fact that a deeply depressed and traumatic experience is concealed by fantastic stories, surrealistic variations of historical facts, and the confounding of events that should be kept asunder. Her reaction to the murder of her father illustrates Sigmund Freud’s idea of “the repetition-compulsion” which “must be ascribed to the repressed element in the unconscious” (1952, 644, emphasis in original). It shows that, although she is probably the oldest woman in Ireland, Roseanne has not yet overcome the acting-out phase of her childhood trauma and still feels as deeply as the fi rst day the pain caused by the murder of her father and the absurd violence of Irish history: “The grief that does not age, that does not go away with time, like most griefs and human matters. That is the grief that is always there, swinging a little in a derelict house, my father, my father” (Barry 2008, 145, emphasis added). But the calamities do not end here. Roseanne herself is considered to have betrayed two freedom fighters to the police. A priest called Gaunt, one of the darkest figures in Barry’s literary world, plans to marry her to the old and unattractive Joe Brady. Roseanne turns him down, however, and after falling in love with Tom McNulty, whom she marries, she meets John Lavelle, another traumatised victim of Irish history. Gaunt, who accidentally

76 Rudolf Freiburg observes them, interprets their meeting as a severe case of adultery and informs Roseanne’s husband, who immediately leaves his wife. Sentenced to live on her own in a little hut on the beach, Roseanne suffers immensely from the separation and the subsequent annulment of her marriage. Having become pregnant during the brief matrimony with Tom, Roseanne spends the time until her delivery in isolation and despair. Shortly before the birth she seeks help from Tom’s mother, who sends her back out into the storm and the rain. Straying through a gloomy and indifferent Irish landscape reminiscent of both Hardy’s Egdon Heath and Shakespeare’s wilderness in King Lear, Roseanne gives birth to her child all alone, without any help. When she is found by a passer-by, the child is taken away from her and she herself is committed to an asylum, where she is to spend the rest of her life. The story is moreover reflected in Dr. Grene’s “commonplace book” (31), he being the doctor who takes care of Roseanne and does some research into her life. At the end of the novel the reader learns that Grene is the son Roseanne gave birth to in the midst of wind and rain. Though Roseanne and Dr. Grene do not have access to each other’s narratives, they are accessible to the readers. The story is thus presented antiphonally: Roseanne’s own testimony and Grene’s professional and subjective observations interfere with each other, complement each other, and quite often even correct each other.7 Dr. Grene adopts the role of the listener who has to be aware of the particular condition of his patient: He [the listener] needs to know that the trauma survivor who is bearing witness has no prior knowledge, no comprehension and no memory of what happened. [ . . . ] He needs to know that such knowledge dissolves all barriers, breaks all boundaries of time and place, of self and subjectivity. (Laub 1992, 58) Thus, an element of undecidability is established that brings to the fore the subjectivity of Roseanne’s memoir in contrast to the presumed objectivity of the doctor’s scientific discourse. This undecidability works paradoxically to set the reliability of Roseanne’s traumatic memories into question and to reveal the existence of deeply repressed individual and collective secrets affecting Roseanne’s family and nation. Barry’s novel proves Dominick LaCapra’s idea that “writing trauma is a metaphor,” since it can never represent the traumatic experiences directly (186). “Trauma brings about a dissociation of affect and representation: one disorientingly feels what one cannot represent; one numbingly represents what one cannot feel” (42). The testimony can never cope with the limit-case traumas it describes, which will reveal the nature of a “negative sublime,” a dark emblem of existential “otherness” (93–96). Choosing old and traumatised Roseanne as one of the two narrators enables Barry to intensify the aesthetics of vagueness and undecidability. Her story proves what Dori Laub has analysed in Holocaust survivors, precisely that “massive trauma precludes its

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registration; the observing and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out, malfunction” (1992, 57). Further on, the memories of old people, especially if they are—like Roseanne—one hundred years old, tend to be unreliable; the facts of authentic biography are changed by the idiosyncrasy of subjective acts of remembrance. Imagination infiltrates memory, and the raw data of real life assume a poetic character merely because they are remembered. Old age, frequently accompanied by fits of forgetfulness or even dementia, produces a kind of metamorphosis of the life lived in reality, shaping it into something vague, perhaps more beautiful or more painful than it really was. Barry utilises this mythopoetic function of an old person’s memory, which helps him to transform the traumatic experiences Roseanne had to go through into a paradoxically beautiful story of great aesthetic value. The interesting paradox, however, consists in the successful attempt to represent authenticity and truth by lies and fiction. The many stories in Roseanne’s autobiography, which display a kind of surrealistic character (the story of the hammer and the feathers, the story of the burning rat, the story of the attempted rape in the churchyard), are true although they seem to have been invented. At least they represent a version of truth that seems much more convincing than the psychiatrist’s account or the biased report written by Father Gaunt. Barry works with the ethicality of the paradoxical true lie, in this respect reminding the reader of Geoff rey Braithwaite’s dictum in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1985): “I invent my way to the truth” (165). He condenses truth into a poetic emblem, a dark but beautiful epiphany, which—because of its inherent ambiguity—allows the reader to understand pain much more directly; this directness could never be achieved by the distancing stratagems of traditional linear narratives. The limit-case trauma puts literature and language to a test: Something of a consensus has already developed that takes trauma as the unrepresentable to assert that trauma is beyond language in some crucial way, that language fails in the face of trauma, and that trauma mocks language and confronts it with its insufficiency. Yet, at the same time, language about trauma is theorized as an impossibility, language is pressed forward as that which can heal the survivor of trauma. (Gilmore 6) The enormous psychic forces set free by traumatic events transform the protagonist’s long life of one hundred years into a gallery of single unforgettable epiphanic episodes, which reveal both the fragmentary character of life itself and its essential “moments of being” (Woolf 61–160); they also disclose their mythopoetic nature and achieve a kind of “attenuation and transmission [that] has always been the function of myth and fantasy genres like fairytales” (Onega 2012, 89). In a poetic language teeming with metaphors and euphemisms and reminiscent of the symbolic language of

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dreams and the “truth” of Jungian archetypes, Barry manages to represent the ugly reality of violence and catastrophe in a beautiful aesthetic way, as if his literary work was the narrative equivalent of amber in which an impellent insect is trapped. The symbolic, metaphorical truth seems to be wiser than the historical truth. The reader admires the serene, occasionally lyrical and pastoral style, simple and honest in its tenor, in which Roseanne depicts the calamities of her childhood and her life as a young woman abandoned by her husband. The reader has to fi ll in many gaps when Roseanne is not able to remember correctly. Silence is more than just a word in The Secret Scripture, it can be interpreted as a “sanctuary,” “a place of bondage,” a “fated exile, yet also a home, a destination, and a binding oath” (Laub 1992, 58). Silence is both a virtue and an aesthetic programme capable of depicting the infinitesimal nature of great pain (Caruth 2003, 60). But silence is also communicative, even elaborate, wordless speech, which adumbrates the underlying trauma. Silence is the last phase of communication, after a traumatised victim has lost his or her trust in even the expressiveness of metaphor and myth (Onega 87–90). This is Roseanne’s description of her father’s traumatic humiliation when Gaunt tells him that he is losing his job as a gravedigger and has to accept one of the lowest occupations imaginable, that of a rat-catcher: Now I could write a little book on the nature of human silences, their uses and occasions, but the silence that my father offered to this speech was very dreadful. It was a silence like a hole with a sucking wind in it. He blushed further, which brought his face to crimson, like the victim of an attack. (Barry 2008, 101) Only gestures, blushes, groans, and sighs are able to express the great distress that Barry’s amiable naïf feels. Roseanne interprets her father’s silence as a sign of the deep shock that Father Gaunt’s words have caused, but the reader knows that the rhetoric of his silence also includes a great portion of shame, since he is not only a victim, but also a perpetrator of violence, who betrayed the freedom fighters. Like so many of Barry’s protagonists, he is Janus-faced, a walking paradox, forced to act ruthlessly and unethically against his compatriots by the harsh circumstances of Irish history, only to become a victim himself in the end. Barry criticises the perpetrator, but he feels sympathy for the victim simultaneously; he revitalises the timehonoured tradition of eloquent silence, reminding the reader of the myth of Philomela raped by Tereus, who cuts out her tongue and condemns her to be silent forever. Philomela’s metamorphosis into a nightingale and the transformation of pain into the sad but beautiful lament of the nightingale symbolises how pain can be converted into beautiful art. Roseanne regards the progress of her life story as a pilgrimage reminiscent of the many pious scenes one may observe in a place like Lourdes or Knock. The poetic memory prevents the recurrence of post-traumatic stress

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disorder; it tries to heal the injuries of a soul so humiliated that it feels completely lost. Like Woolf, Barry works along the lines of aesthetic vagueness, because he tries to fi nd a poetic tone in which he can depict the nature of human suffering; his poetic impressionism, which breaks up historical events into small seemingly autonomous epiphanies, transforming a killing into a suicide, can be considered a paradoxical attempt to anesthetise and thus assimilate the ugly, detestable, unbearable knowledge. The picture that is reconstructed can and should not be precise, since any form of precision would render the story unbearable. In one of the many conversations she has with Grene, Roseanne says: “I do remember terrible dark things, and loss, and noise, but it is like one of those terrible dark pictures that hang in churches, God knows why, because you cannot see a thing in them.” “Mrs. McNulty, that is a beautiful description of traumatic memory.” (168) Although Roseanne is possessed by this very image (Caruth 1995, 4), its traumatic character makes it impossible for her to see its contents precisely, the lines are blurred, the margins unclear, the picture is the result of “an elusive memory that feels as if it no longer resembles any reality” (Laub 62). Henceforth, trauma combined with old age causes the interference of entries in the memory producing layers of stories and histories that assume a lyrical nature since they remain obscure. Roseanne contemplates “the possibility that everything I remember may not be—may not be real” (324, emphasis in original). Barry deconstructs any notion of autobiography as a linear form of writing. The stories appear alien and familiar at the same time. Suffering from a kind of amnesia certainly typical of her age, and possibly used to figure out hyperbolically the effect of trauma on memory, Roseanne does not lament the deficiencies of her memory but accepts them with great equanimity. In her view, memory is comparable to a palimpsest; it resembles a kind of psychological archaeology since by every act of digging into the ground one risks destroying the treasures which one would like to lay bare or conserve for posterity. The title of the book probably not only refers to the fact that Roseanne keeps her diary hidden from Grene and all others, but that the “secret scripture” functions as a palimpsestic alternative history of Ireland that becomes readable once the official forms of public biographies, autobiographies, and histories have been removed. The “secret scripture” displays the repressed and dissociated contents of a kind of memoro-politics (Hacking), which “concerns pathological forgetting, the kind that has produced psychoanalysis’s clinical vocabulary of dissociation, repression, and amnesia” (Gilmore 25). The combination of the diary and the commonplace book symbolises Barry’s subversive endeavour to fi nd alternatives for the grands récits that characterise official Irish history: “Memory, however, remains a remnant from which a

80 Rudolf Freiburg counterdiscourse may emerge. It is at least partially unassimilable to power even as power attempts to conscript it to its own ends via official discourse” (Gilmore 34). Barry shares some basic views of postmodernity, especially the notion of the multilayered complexity of history. The postmodern concept of history as a “narration” that works with principles of “emplotment” and causes “tropics of discourse” that render any authenticity questionable, has long since been studied (White). Life stories as well as the stories of nations, and especially the story of Ireland, are neither holistic and linear nor reliable in their nature. Moreover, they reflect the fragmentary character of old texts with gaps and fissures, erased letters, blurred lines, missing pages, where an act of emendation, quite often ideological in its intention, fi lls in the meaning that got lost. The secret scripture, composed by a voice from the margin, challenges the authority of official Irish history, bringing to the fore the informal history in general and the informal Sligo history in particular (Barry 2008, 95). The historical reports are disclosed to be just versions of ever-changing stories. Roseanne is neither historian nor philosopher, but her life experience has made her come to this conclusion that “history” is nothing “but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses” (95). In this respect, Barry’s The Secret Scripture is reminiscent of the postmodern genre of historiographic metafiction. In its view, histories are comparable to psychological projections, products of despair, sublimations of traumatic experiences into a sphere of poetic rearrangements which use the explanations and justification of the persons concerned as metonymical and metaphorical devices, changing, altering, distorting, and interpreting the facts all the time, often without being conscious of this procedure. After having done much research concerning Roseanne’s life story, Grene, just like Roseanne before him, develops a similar opinion of history as an “unreliable” and “treacherous” concept full of “misapprehension” and “untruth” (466–7). Barry’s decision to designate Grene’s report as a “Commonplace Book” signifies the fragmentary nature of history, both personal and national. As one of the most important genres in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, quite often associated with the recondite learning of the denigrated virtuoso scholars, the commonplace book was both a collection and a conglomeration of quotations, aphorisms, maxims, apophthegms, anecdotes, memories, fables, life stories, and literary ephemera. Since the commonplace book by nature lacks any coherence, it—to a certain degree—could be looked upon as an anti-genre, for the readers are not allowed to develop any expectations, and they must be prepared to accept everything the author presents. One important author of commonplace books was Sir Thomas Browne, who is frequently mentioned in The Secret Scripture and from whose Christian Morals (1716) Barry selected the motto for his book: “The greatest imperfection is in our inward sight, that is, to be ghosts unto our own eyes” (9). Barry’s anthropology does not divide the gallery of human

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beings into black and white, but he studies the many shades of grey, the paradoxes inherent in man’s nature, caused by the distorted “inward sight” Browne speaks of. There is still another parallel to Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1643), the book Roseanne inherited from her father and still possesses, in which the “gravely reflective and rambling author” analyses his own self (Bush 1990a, 349), showing an interest in each and everything and a predilection for paradoxes and oxymora. Like Barry, Browne was not content with official versions of things, but he subjected facts to severe criticism, being almost congenial to Sir Francis Bacon and his doctrine of the idols in this respect (Krohn 93–107). Like Bacon, Browne refutes “the Goliah and Giant of Authority” (Bush 1990b, 287) in his famous Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), but the “modern reader cares less for Browne’s critical intentions than for his uncritical lapses, the variety and oddity of his matter, the piquant contrast between most of the topics and the polysyllabic arguments woven about them” (Bush 1990b, 288). The choice of diary and commonplace book and the reference to Sir Thomas Browne again show Barry’s predilection for the disruption of holistic lifelines, and his endeavour to redefi ne life along the lines of coincidence and contingency. When switching to realistic techniques of writing, Barry can be unrelenting in his descriptions of calamities such as deaths, executions, or accidents (1998, 63–66); however, his aesthetics of impressionism and vagueness modify reality in such a way that it becomes tolerable, even beautiful. Roseanne still remembers that her father had a “famous story” concerning the accident of a friend, whose motorcycle crashed against a wall. The friend was not injured, and Roseanne’s father swore that he believed to have seen the wings of an angel who rescued the tragic biker (Barry 2008, 23–25). Stories such as this turn out to be imaginary survival techniques, forms of escapism into a fictional world of fantasy and surrealism, when reality becomes too pressing and dangerous. Roseanne, when old, has a fi ne explanation for these mental procedures: “I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made of imaginary bricks and mortar against the horrors and cruel, dark tricks of time that assail us, and be the author therefore of themselves” (14). The psychiatrist Dr. Grene emphasises the many parallels between Roseanne’s traumas and those of the Irish nation. Roseanne’s fate is a synecdoche for Ireland, an allegorical, emblematic story of individual suffering in which the contours of national history clearly emerge: “It is a wonder the country ever recovered from these early miseries and traumas, and de Valera is to be greatly pitied that he was met with these necessary horrors” (365). The best specimen of the transubstantiation of cruel facts into beautiful stories is the episode that Roseanne still cherishes as a valuable childhood memory. Even the fi rst pages of the novel display her strong love for her father, the admiration she felt for him and the safety she experienced in his presence. This picture of her father was obviously completely shattered by the events in de Valera’s Ireland, where former members of the RIC could

82 Rudolf Freiburg be executed if they seemed to prevent the new state’s liberal development. The poetic imagination at work in the transubstantiation of fact into fiction can be studied by comparing these two narrative versions of the same event. In her testimony Roseanne speaks of a “fit of educating enthusiasm” of her father (37), who wants to teach her the laws of gravitation and show her that “all things fall at the same rate” (39); she briefly wonders why “a grown man would take his child to the top of an old tower with a bag of hammers and feathers” (39), but then she remembers the beauty of the fi ne experiment: Although there was not a breath of wind, the feathers immediately drifted away, dispersing like a little explosion, even rising greyly against the grey clouds, almost impossible to see. The feathers drifted, drifted away. [ . . . ] I am standing there, eternally, straining to see, a crick in the back of my neck, peering and straining, if for no other reason than for love of him. The feathers are drifting away, drifting, swirling away. My father is calling and calling. My heart is beating back to him. The hammers are falling still. (43–44) Probably, only the hammer, the feathers, and the father’s calling are authentic. Everything else seems to have been made up by the bizarre hermeneutics of a traumatised mind still suffering from the unbearable pain of the events which are merely adumbrated here. The psychological metamorphosis of a painful scene into a vague and impressionistic confabulation with which one may survive and live becomes completely clear when Roseanne’s testimony is set against the backdrop of the events as reported by authentic historical documents. Obviously, as Grene reports, Roseanne’s father was abducted by some victims of the former RIC: His mouth was stuffed with white feathers no doubt to characterise his former work [ . . . ]. Then alas he was beaten with hammers, and an effort was made to push him out the little window at the top of the tower. Roseanne herself was below looking up. [ . . . ] The hammers had not really killed him either, and as he roared, the feathers burst from his mouth. In a desperate rage they pulled him back in, and one of the men flung the bloody hammers out the window. And the feathers flew up and the hammers fell down, striking Roseanne as she stood gazing up a blow to the head knocking her out cold. (291–2)

CONCLUSION Barry’s narratives contribute to the diagnosis and perhaps therapy of Ireland’s specific traumas caused by the shock of political and historical catastrophes. His novels, which assume both the universality and complexity of

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a family saga, present the lives of hybrid personalities, who can be interpreted as perpetrators and victims simultaneously. Roseanne’s life story turns out to be a sound example of what Gilmore calls limit-case trauma narratives. Renouncing any form of linearity, limit-case narratives try to achieve the impossible: to represent the unrepresentable. Since Roseanne’s life appears to be a rich gallery of dark epiphanies caused by numerous traumas, traditional autobiography is of no use here. The limit-case representation of trauma results in a modification and transformation of traditional genres. Roseanne’s testimony, which gets permanently compared with and corrected by Dr. Grene’s factographic commonplace book, blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. Because of her high age and the after-effects of severe psychic injuries, Roseanne’s memory remodels her past into a series of sad but beautiful mythopoetic epiphanies that reveal their charming idiosyncratic truth, thus reanimating the tradition of the paradox of the true lie. By conveying a voice—but also the enigmatic rhetoric of silence—to his marginalised naïfs, Barry presents an alternative to the grands récits of official Irish history. He clearly chooses genres which reveal a healing effect and offer redemption instead of blame. According to Barry, remembrance, perception, and understanding are more important than vituperation, accusation, and polarisation. So far he has shown a predilection for the picaresque novel, the pastoral, the letter, and biographies, renouncing the probably more spectacular effects that pasquille, invective, and satire would offer. NOTES 1. For the support I received in preparing this article, I would like to thank Nina Abassi, Barbara Cunningham, Josef Guggenberger, Evelin Werner, and Rosemary Zahn. 2. For the general relationship between literature and trauma, see Onega and Ganteau. For the close affi nity between Irish history and trauma, see Garratt (2011a) and Cummings (291–302). 3. See also Llewellyn-Jones (45–53): “Focusing on misfits, characters with ambiguous identities, Barry’s plays are concerned with the spiritual journeying of individual human beings rather than overtly ideological issues” (46). 4. See Christina Hunt Mahony’s comment in her “Introduction”: “A poet fi rst, he found a distinctive voice thereafter in both prose fiction and for the stage. His poeticism reigns supreme and his signature language has found its place in the history of literature in Ireland” (2006b, 7). 5. Barry’s characters are typical of the contemporary Irish novel: “Through extended flashbacks and narrative repetition, they are continually haunted and shaped by previous events and moments of intense violence. The past, then, remains ongoing in the individual’s consciousness, replaying previous actions and experiences” (Garratt 2011a, 3). 6. See Jude R. Meche’s characterisation of Thomas Dunne: “He is one of those middle-class metropolitan functionaries that Benedict Anderson terms a ‘mental miscegenation,’ assimilated by the colonizer but belonging completely with neither the colonizer nor the native population” (467). For

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WORKS CITED Adorno, Theodor W. “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft.” Gesammelte Schriften 10.1. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997. 11–30. Print. Anonymous. “A Conversation with Sebastian Barry.” The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty. 1998. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999. 5–9. Print. Barnes, Julian. Flaubert’s Parrot. 1984. London: Jonathan Cape, 1985. Print. Barry, Sebastian. The Steward of Christendom. 1995. Plays I. Intro. Fintan O’Toole. Birkenhead: Methuen, 1997. 235–301. Print. . The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty. New York and Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998. Print. . Annie Dunne. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. Print. . On Canaan’s Side. London: Faber and Faber. 2002. Print. . “Lies and More Lies.” Princeton University Library Chronicle 68.1 (2006): 640–48. Print. . The Secret Scripture. Detroit: Thorndike P, 2008. Print. Browne, Sir Thomas. “Christian Morals.” 1716. The Voyce of the World: Selected Writings of Sir Thomas Browne. Ed. Geoff rey Keynes. London: The Folio Society, 2007. 215–67. Print. . “Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Selections).” 1646. The Voyce of the World: Selected Writings of Sir Thomas Browne. Ed. Geoff rey Keynes. London: The Folio Society, 2007. 269–510. Print. . “Religio Medici”. 1643. The Voyce of the World: Selected Writings of Sir Thomas Browne. Ed. Geoff rey Keynes. London: The Folio Society, 2007. 1–91. Print. Bush, Douglas. “Religion and Religious Thought.” The Oxford History of English Literature Vol. VII: The Early Seventeenth Century 1600–1660: Jonson, Donne, and Milton. Ed. Douglas Bush. 1962. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1990a. 310–67. Print. . “Science and Scientific Thought.” The Oxford History of English Literature Vol. VII: The Early Seventeenth Century 1600–1660: Jonson, Donne, and Milton. Ed. Douglas Bush. 1962. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1990b. 272–309. Print. Caruth, Cathy. “Trauma and Experience: Introduction.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 3–11. Print. . “Parting Words: Trauma, Silence, and Survival.” Acts of Narrative. Eds Carol Jacobs and Henry Sussman. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. 47–61. Print. Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler. “Colonial Policing: The Steward of Christendom and The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty.” Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry. Eds Christina Hunt Mahony. Dublin: Carysfort P, 2006. 121–44. Print. Cummings, Scott T. “The End of History: The Millennial Urge in the Plays of Sebastian Barry.” A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage. Eds Stephen Watt, Eileen Morgan, and Shakir Mustafa. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2000. 291–302. Print.

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Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Print. Fitzpatrick, David, “Ireland since 1870.” The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland. Ed. R. F. Foster. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. 213–74. Print. Foster, Roy. “‘Something of Us Will Remain’: Sebastian Barry and Irish History.” Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry. Ed. Christina Hunt Mahony. Dublin: Carysfort P, 2006. 183–97. Print. Forster, John Wilson. “‘All the Long Traditions’: Loyalty and Service in Barry and Ishiguro.” Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry. Ed. Christina Hunt Mahony. Dublin: Carysfort P, 2006. 99–119. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” The Major Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. Robert M. Hutchins. Chicago, London and Toronto: U of Chicago P, 1952. 639–63. Print. Garratt, Robert F. “Introduction.” Trauma and History in the Irish Novel: The Return of the Dead. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011a. 1–18. Print. . Trauma and History in the Irish Novel: The Return of the Dead. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011b. Print. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 2001. Print. Gleitman, Claire. “‘In the Dark Margins of Things’: Whistling Psyche and the Illness of Empire.” Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry. Ed. Christina Hunt Mahony. Dublin: Carysfort P, 2006. 209–27. Print. Hacking, Ian. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995. Print. Jeff reys, Stuart. “Interview: Sebastian Barry Reveals the Secrets of His Costa Prize Win.” Guardian 29 January 2009. Accessed on 12/01/2013 at: http:// www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/28/sebastian-barry-costa-prize-winner1. Web. Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. Ed. Jeri Johnson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Print. Krohn, Wolfgang. Francis Bacon. Munich: Beck, 1987. Print. Kurdi, Maria. “‘Really All Danger’: An Interview with Sebastian Barry.” New Hibernia Review 8.1 (2004): 41–53. Print. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Print. Laub, Dori. “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening.” Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Eds Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. 57–74. Print. . “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 61–75. Print. Llewellyn-Jones, Margaret. “Sebastian Barry.” British and Irish Dramatists since World War II: Third Series. Ed. John Bull. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2001. 45–53. Print. Mahony, Christina Hunt. “Children of the Light amid the ‘Risky Dancers’: Barry’s Naïfs and the Poetry of Humanism.” Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry. Ed. Christina Hunt Mahony. Dublin: Carysfort P, 2006a. 83–98. Print. . “Introduction.” Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry. Ed. Christina Hunt Mahony. Dublin: Carysfort P, 2006b. 1–7. Print. Maurer, Michael. Kleine Geschichte Irlands. 1998. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2009. Print. Meche, Jude R. “Seeking ‘The Mercy of Fathers’: Sebastian Barry’s The Steward of Christendom and the Tragedy of Irish Patriarchy.” Modern Drama 67.3 (2004): 464–79. Print.

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Onega, Susana. “Affective Knowledge, Self-Awareness and the Function of Myth in the Representation and Transmission of Trauma. The Case of Eva Figes’ Konek Landing.” Journal of Literary Theory 6.1 (2012): 83–102. Print. Onega, Susana, and Jean-Michel Ganteau, Eds Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. Print. Seree-Chaussinand, Christelle. “Irish Man, No Man, Everyman: Subversive Redemption in Sebastian Barry’s The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty.” SubVersions: Trans-National Readings of Modern Irish Literature. Ed Ciaran Ross. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010. 53–64. Print. Swift, Jonathan. “The Story of the Injured Lady. In a Letter to Her Friend with His Answer.” Irish Tracts 1720–1723 and Sermons. Eds Herbert Davis and Louis Landa. Oxford: Blackwell, 1963. 1–12. Print. White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. 1978. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Print. Woolf, Virginia. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being. 1976. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1985. 61–160. Print. . The Waves. 1931. Ed. Kate Flint. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992. Print.

Part II

Ethics and the Aesthetics of Excess

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5

Vulnerable Form and Traumatic Vulnerability Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs Jean-Michel Ganteau

As Jeanette Winterson brilliantly states in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, some stories are wound stories (220–2). This she confi rms, when taking stock of her own evolution as an artist, as she pithily confesses: “All my life I have worked from the wound” (223). Now, even if McGregor’s œuvre is not as fully fledged as Winterson’s (he has published three novels and a collection of short stories to this day), I would argue that, similarly, he has never ceased working from the wound, which appears dazzlingly in his third novel, Even the Dogs (2010). In his fi rst two books, McGregor evinces a taste for the banal and the ordinary. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002) presents the reader with highly fragmented chapters written in the fi rst person under the shape of list-like one-sentence paragraphs, giving access to the protagonist’s consciousness as she discovers her unexpected pregnancy and mulls over her family secrets and traumas. Her private thoughts alternate with descriptive passages that evoke the life of a group of anonymous neighbours in what looks like a suburban street in an unknown city, somewhere in Britain. Predictably, violence lurks beneath the small coin of the neighbours’ conversation, as the narrative rehearses a traumatic event that affected the community of witnesses and neighbours living in the same street and still sends ripples of anxiety lapping the shore of the present. So Many Ways to Begin (2006), McGregor’s second novel, may also be considered a wound story or a trauma story as it is a record of child abuse, and as it documents the scars that the violence experienced in childhood has left on the adult protagonist’s psyche. It is organised as a series of highly individualised chapters, each being an item in the inventory of a painful past that remains very much present while still being partially inassimilable. Both novels clearly choose to evoke the scars showing through the surface of apparently banal lives and take the readers to the uncharted yet often explored territories of ordinary trauma. Even the Dogs breaks new ground by taking a plunge into the underworld of dossers and drug addicts, in yet another unnamed suburb somewhere in the north of England.1 In so doing, the narrative seems to edge towards that time-honoured British subgenre, the Condition-of-England novel or, in more contemporary terms, the State-of-England novel. The

90 Jean-Michel Ganteau label has been revived fairly recently by Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012), in the wake of his earlier Money: A Suicide Note (1984), which provided a radioscopy of 1980s London. Now, if Money may rank as the emblematic State-of-England novel of the 1980s (with David Lodge’s Nice Work [1988] as an explicit revisiting of the Victorian Condition-ofEngland template), What a Carve Up! (1994) by Jonathan Coe might well qualify as the emblematic State-of-England novel of the 1990s, a vein that Coe exploited well into the 2000s, with The Rotters’ Club (2001) and The Closed Circle (2004). 2 These emblematic texts provide a diagnosis of the cultural and political state of the nation either, as Coe does, through a sample of characters representing a fairly large part of the population, or, as in the case of Amis, by adopting the perspective of an individual belonging in a singular milieu. Now, if Even the Dogs belongs to the State-of-England subgenre, it is certainly in this vein, as it focusses on a specific community: the underworld of waifs that are plunged into a state of physical, psychological, and economic vulnerability. The novel evokes this microcosm in its relation to the rest of the nation, which necessarily allows for evocations of the role of the social services, of what happens to some of those who fought for their country in the Falklands, Bosnia, or Afghanistan when they come back home. In other words, Even the Dogs addresses the meeting of individual and collective traumas. As this description suggests, Coe’s novel qualifies as trauma fiction, or rather confi rms that State-of-England and trauma fiction overlap fairly naturally, as is amply demonstrated by both Coe’s and Amis’s works. It zooms in on various protagonists’ case histories: histories of abuse at the hands of parents or wardens, and treason performed by the state through its involvement in various confl icts. Also addressed is the state’s responsibility in what is at times suggested to be social neglect. This is done by resorting to most of the ingredients of trauma fiction, particularly traumatic realism (Foster; Rothberg; Whitehead 84), in a narrative that verges on experimentation in many ways—we may remember here that Whitehead points at the affi nity and collaboration between trauma narrative and experimentation (87). Even the Dogs is a typical trauma narrative, as it is intent on building its content into its form, puncturing it and riddling it with holes, privileging a poetics of the fragment very much dependent on parataxis, making it an example of frail form. Through its experimental dimension, the text qualifies as liminal in more ways than one. Like McGregor’s previous novels, it is written in what at times may be defi ned as poetic prose, less on account of lexical choices and tropic pyrotechnics than thanks to the use of opaque rhythmical devices, a strong anaphoric disposition, and a preference for short, condensed paragraphs that aim at capturing the intensity of a moment and of a voice—or rather voices. Those are staples of fragmented writing, which may at times become interrupted writing, as is the case throughout the second chapter, in which all paragraphs end in aposiopesis, that figure

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of syntactical break and silence used when emotion becomes too heavy to spell out, when it is impossible to give voice to painful desperation or remorse. I should also specify that the fragmentation is expanded through clear paratactic preference that translates as juxtaposition of short clauses or sentences generally evocative of feverish accumulation, surface description, and the breakdown of causality. The narrative, as often with trauma fiction, is also dominated by the haunting recurrence of conversational snatches (interviews conducted by the police, the judge, or care workers) that figure the characters’ failure to eschew responsibility for what they consider a lapse of solidarity. They left Robert, a friend of theirs and a severely alcoholic fellow outcast, unattended over the Christmas period, when he died on his own. One of the most poignant aspects of the novel, the failure of solidarity, is captured as the main ingredient of trauma and relentlessly recurs as structural rhyme to underscore the inassimilable nature of the offense and perform the presence of the past. Yet, on top of such formal opaqueness, I should make clear that two other salient formal choices are given pride of place in the narrative. The fi rst one is concerned with voice, as the story is narrated in the fi rst person plural, in a choral mode. This implies that the identity of the choral narrator remains quite literally unspecified, which adds to the spectral dimension of the narrative, as if the chorus of classical tragedy were transformed into an army of invisible witnesses to the precariousness of urban life. In this respect, one should note that the classical inspiration is substantiated by the fact that the short novel falls into five acts, with the traditional phases of exposition and complication, leading on to climax and falling action, culminating in a haunting roll call of deaths at the very end of Chapter 4. Secondly, the narrative experiments with time as it is written in the present throughout, getting the readers to plunge into the immediacy of the event and making them unable not to witness the havoc wreaked on vulnerable populations by inadequate social policies. The limits of time are also stretched and investigated through simultaneity, anachronism, and contradiction that envisage and perform temporality as traumatic symptom. As may be surmised from the above, my purpose will be to address the novel as an exhausted limit-case trauma narrative, and I shall do so by referring successively to spectrality, traumatic time, and vulnerability.

SPECTRAL VOICES AND CHORAL WITNESSING There is something unusual about the narrator of Even the Dogs, or perhaps I should say “narrators.” The choral “we” that is used consistently, in association with the present tense, is perceived as problematical from the very beginning. Granted, it is a chorus of voices that chronicle(s) the discovery of Robert’s corpse, right in the middle of winter, on a freezing evening. But who those voices belong to is a moot point. The reader realises quickly

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enough that they are those of witnesses, who can see from a distance, can get close to the protagonists (the policemen, ambulance men, and doctor), but do not seem to hear them, most of the time. As the observer(s) cannot but interpret the gestures of the actors on the crime scene, the focalisation on external features and movements, together with the present tense, produce a woolly impression of both proximity to the action and distance from it, as if the protagonists were and were not there at the same time. This contributes to the impression of some sort of “movement between,” or “[t]his peculiar neither-nor but also both-and-at-the-same-time” (Royle 2011, 8) that feeds on contradiction and prefers performing a “play of forces” (Royle 2011, 5, emphasis in original) to running in a straight line that Nicholas Royle calls “veering” (2011). And indeed, they are there and not there, since they brush shoulders with the protagonists while remaining on the margins, never interfering with them, and without the protagonists noticing them. A few pages are necessary to confi rm the original uncanny presence of the chorus, disincarnated voices managing to squeeze into the ambulance without anybody noticing their presence: “In the street, the men slide Robert’s body into a van with darkened windows, and we all climb in beside him. There isn’t enough room, but it seems like the right place to be” (15). Indeed, the previous sentence sums up most of the narrative’s ingredients: it makes it clear that there is something decidedly wrong with the narrator(s) who is/are not all there, fairly literally; it also gives a good airing to the theme of responsibility (responsibility for the Other, including the departed). One step further, it allows the reader to realise that those voices, whose texture is woven into the narrative fabric, both literalise and dramatise the collective narrator’s invisibility. For in fact, even if the reader is left in doubt as to the plural narrator’s identity, it becomes obvious as the story unfolds that the speakers are the departed, that is, those who knew the protagonist and the newly deceased, without one group sharing the other’s ontological sphere. Once again, the impression is that of a state in between, that is, in between that of the dead and of the living, a condition of invisibility and of intermittent presence from which those who know, those who belong, and those who feel accountable can bear witness. My hypothesis is that, despite the fact that the epigraph to the novel is extracted from Dante’s Inferno (“Cut off from hope we live on in desire”), those spectral voices, in their in-between world dominated by endless waiting, dwell in some sort of limbo, neither in this world nor in that one, and in both at the same time. As with Nicholas Royle’s liminal trauma narrative, Quilt (2010), which may be considered a long vigil taking place in the limbo-like drawing room of the deceased parents’ home transformed into a ghostly ray pool or aquarium, the reader of Even the Dogs has to bear with the endlessly stretched temporality of waiting. As in Will Self’s own limitcase trauma narrative, How the Dead Live (2001), we are presented with another limbo-like double cartography in which two worlds are seen to impinge on each other, one being unaware of the weighing presence of the

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other. In many respects, such a situation is reminiscent of that described by Jacques Derrida at the beginning of Spectres de Marx, when he comments on what he calls “the visor effect,” that is, the fact that the characters in Hamlet see the ghost seeing them without being able to see his eyes in turn (26). With a difference here, as the “real life” characters in Even the Dogs never see the invisible ghosts who are only visible and audible to the readers, thus magnifying a dramatic irony tinged with a sense of the uncanny. Throughout, the readers see the voices witnessing or bearing witness, which is a way of drawing the readers into an ethical position and making them share in the responsibility to see what happens in contemporary Western cities, in which neighbours and strangers are left in a state of utter neglect. The other function of the spectral voices is to make invisibility audible and . . . visible, precisely. The choral, spectral narrative device achieves an ethical and a political purpose by drawing attention to vulnerability and the ordinary daily trauma of the vulnerable. Said differently, Even the Dogs could be considered a liminal narrative dramatising collective trauma. Even if the ghost, in situations of transgenerational trauma analysed by Abraham and Torok most notably (426–33), is situated inside a traumatised subject, according to the principles of cryptology, 3 here the ghosts seem to have escaped from some limbo-like sphere (unless limbo has uncannily percolated into the diegetic universe). By resorting to this type of narrative and ontological scandal, they figure out the presence of the past and the persistence of the departed in the present. The voices here are monsters that exhibit themselves so as to take the characters, the readers, and themselves to task. Their omnipresence mimics the effects of the repetition-compulsion, and their permanent yet intermittent presence flaunts and visualises the inassimilable nature of a traumatic past: they are always latently there, but they do not systematically assume pride of place or refer to themselves. In Derrida’s terms, the spectre watches us and sees us not seeing it, which creates a spectral asymmetry and achronicity.4 For Derrida, the untimely emergence of the ghost points at something essentially wrong with time.

PRESENT TENSE AND TEMPORAL DISARRAY There are rather few examples of contemporary narratives written in the present tense, from the fi rst page to the last, Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2006), Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007), and Nicholas Royle’s Quilt being notable examples. In these novels, the theme of loss is foregrounded, and the use of the present tense helps figure out that something is defi nitely wrong with time, which seems to be at a standstill or to have difficulty in passing. The fact that those narratives may be said to belong to the general category of trauma fiction and even adopt the workings of traumatic realism is certainly not fortuitous. In the three novels mentioned above and in

94 Jean-Michel Ganteau Even the Dogs, what obtains is a fitful sense of immediacy, as if the readers were automatically invited to collaborate in the witnessing. Like the ghost, the present tense is an ethical device which aims at discreet though consistent defamiliarisation: the reader may very well fail to notice that the narrative is not written in the past, unlike the bulk of narrative production, while at the same time being uncannily aware that there is something not altogether normal with the narrative—yet another instance of narrative veering. This produces an impression of subdued destabilisation not unlike constant ripples of anxiety that may be said to mimic that which emerges in the aftermath of traumatic breaches. What the present tense makes the readers intuit too is the sense that there is something wrong with time or, as may be expected, that time is out of joint. Obviously, present-tense narration does not only evoke presenttime narration, but rather stretched-time or atemporal narration espousing the contourless features of a world from which time has absented itself. In other terms, the world of Even the Dogs is shown to be submitted to an excess of overflowing time, as if the present could not be contained in the instant, as if the present were always, monstrously, on the brink of falling into the past to leave room for the event of the future, and as if this could never take place. My reading hypothesis here is that the novel explores what can be seen as the extremity of the compulsion to repeat and, in Derrida’s terms, what consigns the protagonists and the readers to anachrony. In other words, the perpetual, spectral presence of the past prevents time from flowing, which Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière tell us happens in instances of severe trauma (28). The ceaseless presence of the past makes for a greater density of the present that countermands its flowing. Paradoxically, this is shown in moments of untimely acceleration, as exemplified in the following lines when a cinematic analogy is resorted to as if to shoot the passing of time and, paradoxically, its obliteration: The steam from the bath curls out into the hallway, easing the wallpaper away from the wall. Peppered spores or mould thicken and spread towards the ceiling. Rainwater seeps through the worn pointing on the front of the building and pushes through the plaster, the damp spreading outwards like an old bruise. (11) In this quasi-lyrical, poetic evocation of the spreading mould, chronology is pushed to extremity and cancelled out by the counter-pragmatic use of the present tense. And it is further undermined by the resort to violent shifts from one temporal régime to another. Indeed, after this visionary acceleration, the reader is gratified with an abrupt return to the singulative mode: “Later, when the water has cooled again, she stands up awkwardly, the water streaming from her changed body and splashing into the bath” (11). The incongruous juxtaposition of the iterative and the singulative, of the accelerated and of the normal, builds up a sense of simultaneity

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and impossible mixture that suspends chronological logic and warps the reader’s apprehension of time. Such simultaneity has been analysed as the staple of Freudian Nachträglichkeit by Jean Laplanche (171), when a second occurrence makes the fi rst one traumatic, the fi rst acting forward on the second, while the second modifies the nature and perception of the fi rst in a crumbling and reversibility of chronology and temporality. The time of Even the Dogs is compounded of impossibility and contradiction, as characteristic of traumatic time (Green 161; André 17). Such devices may have a realistic effect in making the readers share in the protagonists’ and choral narrator’s hallucinations, thus evoking the gist of drug-inspired states. Yet, I would tend to say that they fulfi l another purpose by mimicking the symptoms of the stopping of time characteristic of traumatic states and that they figure out the temps éclaté or exploded and pluridirectional time that French psychoanalyst André Green sees as characteristic of traumatic states (69, 77). To expand on this point, I should say that one of the most recurrent words in the narrative is “wait/ing.” It is submitted to a great deal of anaphoric insistence throughout, as applied to the action of the protagonists, who keep waiting for the next “score” or injection, in the endlessly present vicious cycle of scoring, or for the next appointment with the social services. It is also predominantly applied, self-reflexively so, to the chorus of narrators who relentlessly comment on their self-imposed sentry or witness duty. They wait in the fi rst chapter while the policemen and forensic doctor act on the death scene, they wait in the second part while driving with the corpse in the ambulance, they wait at the morgue throughout Chapter 3, they wait throughout the autopsy and its aftermath in Chapter 4, and they keep waiting while the coroner is delivering his conclusions on the case in the fi nal chapter, confi rming that Robert died somewhere around Christmas out of his own neglect and, probably, of alcoholic withdrawal syndrome possibly provoked by a head injury that he got during the war. Such waiting fulfi ls two mimetic and ethical functions: it is used to evoke the hopeless temporality of drug addiction, a life that boils down to waiting for the next “hit,” and it also evokes and performs the temporality of the vigil or wake (reverberating neatly with an allusion to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying on page 173). This is made clear in the fi nal chapter when the chorus indulges in wishfulfi lment and calls up visions of a decent wake, complete with candles, flowers, and sandwiches, and of a proper burial service. The wake then becomes an event that gathers not only friends and attendants, but also witnesses who are accountable for the past and bear testimony to a lack of solidarity among the underworld of drug addicts for which the latter are not even responsible, the guilty perpetrators of abandonment being also the victims of abandonment themselves. The wake is less used to evoke religious or social ritual than the lack thereof, or at least its patent failure. It is an ethical and political device meant to dramatise invisibility and

96 Jean-Michel Ganteau vulnerability, a way to fl aunt the symptoms of collective trauma usually swept under the carpet of social and national oblivion or denial. Strikingly, by staging a limbo-like state of eternal waiting, which stretches temporality to breaking point, the novel may remind readers both of the cadences and content of Coleridge’s famous “Limbo” poem: Tis a strange place, this Limbo!—not a Place, Yet name it so;—where Time and weary Space Fettered from flight, with night-mare sense of fleeing, Strive for their last crepuscular half-being;— Lank Space, and scytheless Time with branny hands Barren and soundless as the measuring sands, Not mark’d by flit of Shades,—unmeaning they As moonlight on the dial of the day! (214)

This poem, which may be considered as one of the novel’s phantom texts, in Nicholas Royle’s acceptation of the term (1993, 277–88), fl aunts some sort of immanent crisis, with “scytheless,” open time, and “lank,” indiscriminate space, dominated by contradiction (“Tis a strange place [ . . . ]—not a Place”), absence (“Not mark’d”), and unknowing (“unmeaning they”), all of them elements and symptoms that seem to provide a compendium of the basic markers of traumatic states and trauma fiction.5 More specifically, the literally timeless nature of limbo as colonising the narrative is a way of abolishing all possibility of a limited event, as if the ghosts drifting through the narrative could come from either the past or the future (Royle 2003, 282), stretching temporality to an impossible, self-annulling point. One step further, as if taking its lead from Coleridge’s phantom text, the narrative seems to move even beyond the paroxystic state of untimely return or repetition characteristic of traumatic states and often resorted to in trauma narratives. In the infinite, blocked present of the eternal vigil that the novel stages, the plural, choral narrator does evoke the past, but it seems that, overall, this evocation does not partake so much of anamnesis or even reminiscence as of some ceaseless and untimely return of events, as if the narrator and protagonists were assailed by the inassimilable past. Seen in this light, Even the Dogs provides the reader with a dramatic vision of Nachträglichkeit, that is, of the other of time that takes at least two occurrences to erupt and that opens up time (André 58), as suggested in the following detached, yet pathetic, comment, the paragraph hesitating on the cusp of disintegration and typographical and syntactic disarray: Things we don’t want to remember but we do. Can’t block none of it out no more. Not now we’re here like this. (99)

What the fragmentary syntax and composition of Even the Dogs perform are the symptoms of endless acting out, as if the whole narrative were but

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an instance of Nachträglichkeit in the making, a limitless event whose temporal frontiers are stretched to the breaking point. In the indomitable sway of the present lies the pathic violence of a present that will not pass.

ETHICS OF VULNERABILITY AND POETIC COMMITMENT Ultimately, and in the wake of the preceding developments on spectral voice and amorphous temporality, I would like to suggest that Even the Dogs is a liminal narrative in so far as it provides an instance of vulnerable form. By this I mean that it not only provides the image of, but also performs the vulnerability that it thematises. In using the phrase “vulnerable form,” what I have in mind are the poetic choices of a novel that does not respect the conventions of traditional narrative, as demonstrated in the earlier section, and which does so by resorting to (formal) excess so as to welcome contradiction, to promote the failure of understanding, and to privilege openness, as indicated in the brief analysis of Coleridge’s poem above. Such formal characteristics are particularly suited to the evocation of trauma—for instance, the novel dovetails in more ways than just one with Michael Rothberg’s description of traumatic realism, by flinging together mimetic and anti-mimetic devices, and by exceeding mimesis even while being unable to free itself from it (140). In so doing, Even the Dogs flaunts its non-canonical, opaque—often poetic—form, which is a way of taking aesthetic risks. This in itself is an ethical gesture, in that the form of the text enters into some sort of harmony with the nature of the contents that it chooses to represent, that is, exposed, vulnerable communities. This is encapsulated in the following sentences, in which bruising appears as a general human feature: “But all of Robert’s bruises don’t count for much. Everyone’s got them, after all. All of us. Bruises and the rest of it: cuts and grazes and sprains and breaks, abscesses and open infected sores” (134). The persistence of the wound is what identifies the protagonists, and the nature of the bruise may also be metaphorical. On top of the wounds that accumulate in the protagonists’ respective case histories is the loss of Robert, who used to be at the hub of the community of the bereft. As suggested above, this constitutes one of the main individual and communal traumas of the novel, as all characters, especially Laura, the dead man’s daughter, keep mulling over their treason and failure of solidarity (she bought food for her father, then met one of her friends, decided that she would share a fi nal hit with him before starting a rehabilitation programme, and then simply forgot about her father, who was left to die unattended). Her attitude is emblematic of that of the community of drug addicts that dwell in the pages of the novel, and the expression of remorse fuels the obsessively repetitive structure dominated by a sense of loss and missed opportunities. The recent past, that of the events that took place around that fateful Christmas, cannot be assimilated and

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repeats itself in the present, in the characters’ visions, the expression of their remorse and wishful thinking that build up into some rehearsal of their responsibilities. The choice of a community of drug addicts is an efficient way to foreground the notion of vulnerability which, the specialists and theorists of care tell us, is defi ned by the sense that there is no such thing as independence, and that what characterises humanity is interdependence (Gilligan 74, 173; Goodin 203; Held 10). Among all the dossers and outcasts who inhabit the crepuscular world of the novel, Robert, the deceased protagonist, is the picture of vulnerability as he used to be a recluse in a fl at which he had not left in years and was wholly dependent on his friends to feed himself and his dog Penny. Addiction and complete passivity are thus used to signal extreme dependence and even violent, extreme dependence, offering a picture of paroxystic vulnerability. And indeed, the notion of care and many instances of care-related activities are given pride of place in the narrative. This is often done through satire, as when the thoughtlessness and bureaucratic inclinations of care workers are derided. However, some of the novel’s epiphanic moments are related to caring activities, as when a chiropodist is remembered enthusiastically for dealing with a vagrant’s feet, in a scene reminiscent of one of the New Testament’s best-known passages and characters, when Mary Magdalene washes Christ’s feet (72). Under the chiropodist’s or the hairdresser’s fingers, the silenced and the invisible are given back their visibility and social existence, through gestures of healing that allow for the very few glimpses into the possibility of hope, in a generally forlorn urban context of precariousness and ordinary tragedy. At such moments, the text seems to show the way towards the possible working-through of collective trauma, through the help of statesubsidised individual talents for alterity. However, the novel generally concentrates on less positive aspects of state mismanagement, when situating individual trajectories and fates within the wider context of periods of historical duress. This is suggested in the last two chapters, when the forensic surgeons discover a head injury on Robert’s corpse, with a piece of shrapnel inserted in his skull, which may date back to his stint as a soldier in the Falklands war. Now, head injuries are known to provoke seizure in the case of alcohol withdrawal syndromes, and Robert ran short of alcohol and may have decided to stop drinking over the Christmas period to emulate his daughter (who had decided to stop taking drugs to go into rehabilitation): this clearly spreads the responsibility for his death beyond the individual and family circles into the national orbit. This is also the case in one of the novel’s most remarkable purple patches, when Ant, one of the secondary characters, who went on a mission to Afghanistan, tells about his own personal experience of physical and psychological trauma as his convoy (and part of his body) were blown up by a hand-made bomb. The six pages evoking the scene through his perspective are striking in the extreme, in that, through

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a densely poetic evocation of the opium-yielding poppy fields—complete with an ironic allusion to Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (115)6 —the farming of the crops and the extraction, shipping, and retailing of drugs, the individual is efficiently and clearly connected to the global (114–20). The passage ends up in pure stream of consciousness, a limit-case instance of absence of punctuation and breathless mistreatment of syntax, in which Danny, one of the most vulnerable protagonists, is shown dying after an injection on the floor of a telephone booth, at the other end of the production line: He leans his face against the cold dark glass and looks out at the city at the lights at the passing cars the passing trains the orange bellied clouds and the black star-pierced sky a flock of pigeons silhouetted against the neon walls of the shopping centre in the valley and he drops the needle to the floor and presses his hands to the cold glass and slides to the floor and curls up on the floor all this shall pass and he waits for all this to pass. (120) I would say that those sentences, found at the very end of Chapter 3, make a point of dramatising the inescapable reality of interdependence and vulnerability at all levels of the chain, even while highlighting the various degrees of responsibility. Such a device is a way of reminding the readers that there are “special responsibilities” to the vulnerable Other, as underlined by Ernest Goodin: “the principle of protecting the vulnerable gives rise not only to standard responsibilities (to our families, friends, clients, etc.) but also to strictly analogous responsibilities towards vulnerable compatriots, foreigners, future generations, animals, and natural environments” (186). In the light of such passages, in which the narrator’s anger becomes strident, it seems as though one of the narrative’s main functions and effects were to raise consciousness, as early as the title, referring to Mathew 15.27: “And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table,” implying that the protagonists of McGregor’s novel do not even get to eat crumbs and are forsaken, stray souls. Seen in this way, Even the Dogs becomes a model of ethical and political commitment, in that it promotes the values of attentiveness and responsibility that correspond to the fi rst two acceptations of care as defi ned by, among others, Joan Tronto, that is, “caring about” and “taking care of” (127). One other essential aspect of the novel’s commitment is to make the readers wonder about the criteria that defi ne vulnerability. Indeed, by choosing to make visible the invisible population of dossers and drug addicts, a group that is usually considered as made up as much of victims as of perpetrators (of theft, various offences, and possibly criminal acts), the novel implicitly raises the issue of the “variable norms of recognition” of vulnerability (Butler 43). Even the Dogs thereby raises the problem of the double stigmatisation of this afflicted part of the population and reminds the readers that

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some citizens are doubly vulnerable, precisely because the recognition and defi nition of their vulnerability is problematical.

CONCLUSION Trauma and the vulnerability induced by trauma are at the heart of McGregor’s third, angry novel, a text that refuses denial and silence, exposes inaudibility and invisibility, and converts them into visibility. In so doing, Even the Dogs commits itself to the obscene, as it takes centre stage what usually lies hidden in the wings of society. This it does by granting readers a vision of individual and collective trauma through the haunted, distorted idiom of traumatic realism. Even the Dogs, while thematising the symptoms of individual and collective trauma, imitates them by fragmenting its prose and relying on devices that make the readers feel the contradiction and unknowability at work in the narrative. By this means, the text comments on and provides an image of the inassimilable nature of trauma, focussing on a trauma-saturated community, emblematised by its state of utter vulnerability. Even the Dogs may thus be considered an ethical and also a political machine that dramatises some of the most salient tenets of the theory and practice of care so as to grant them visibility and give them currency in the political arena. This project is situated within the more general movement towards the politicisation of care that has been described by various critics (Molinier, Laugier and Paperman 27) and takes up the plea for a move beyond an ethic to a politics of care found in the work of pioneer scholars like Tronto (178). In this respect, Even the Dogs qualifies as committed limit-case trauma narrative as it insists on keeping track of those invisible, vulnerable populations that are left and meant to “stay [ . . . ] outside the remit” (194). For McGregor, the paradigm shift described by Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, for whom traumatised subjects have moved from the status of suspects to that of victims in the second half of the twentieth century, cannot be taken for granted. In other words, it seems as if in McGregor’s eyes such a paradigm shift had not been taken into account to a satisfying degree, as if invisible vulnerability were still rife and still stigmatised. His political involvement points towards considering drug addicts and dossers as trauma victims, with the development of appropriate care policies as the only way to achieve ethical efficiency and lead them beyond trauma. Openness to the Other’s trauma and to the cultural and political trauma of society’s Others appears high on the novel’s agenda. Interestingly, such ethical opening is not predicated on an abstract ethical model of the Platonic or Kantian type, but more specifically on an Aristotelian vision of ethics as endless, concrete negotiation, permanent alertness, and attentiveness to the Other, which make responsibility for the Other and concrete taking care of the Other overlap. Fiction (in print or on-screen) has the power to train the

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readers’ or viewers’ attention to the Other’s vulnerability, and I would say that this is precisely what Even the Dogs does, in its dogged faithfulness to the annulment and monstration of invisibility, and by stretching the poetic and structural characteristic of the prose narrative of fiction to its limits. In Even the Dogs, frail form performs the (individual and) collective vulnerability of trauma and activates the political edge of ethics, thus bearing witness to the health of and need for committed art. It chooses a model of humanity that is miles away from the myth of the independent superhero, to stage protagonists essentially characterised by their dependence or, at the very most, “mutual autonomy” (Held 53). It thereby promotes a vision of individuals as interdependent and of humanity as radically relational (Nussbaum 352; Held 36), which is obviously in keeping with the general drive of the ethics of alterity. On top of that, it seems to reactivate the idea that vulnerability is the expression of human excellence and beauty, being conversant with the classical model of arètè as opposed to mètis (Nussbaum 20). By rejecting the image of the invincible warrior (mètis) and promoting that of the vulnerable plant (arètè), the novel privileges a mode of being together that is grounded in interdependence, hence attention and vulnerability to the Other. The fact that this should be done through the liminal form of a highly poetic prose may be seen as a formal tribute to the excellence and beauty of frailty as defi ning the human.

NOTES 1. A shorter version of this chapter was published in Etudes britanniques contemporaines 45 (December 2013). 2. It might be suggested, too, with Michael L. Ross, that Ian McEwan’s Saturday is emblematic of the British, post-9/11, Condition-of-England novel. 3. This intuition is confi rmed by Jacques Press, when he speaks of an “internal foreign body” (69). 4. “Cette chose nous regarde cependant et nous voit ne pas la voir même quand elle est là. Une dissymétrie spectrale interrompt ici toute spécularité. Elle désynchronise, elle nous rappelle à l’anachronie” (Derrida 26). 5. I am referring here to Cathy Caruth’s famous contentions about trauma being predicated on a crisis of truth (1995, 6) and unknowing (1996, 3), but also on paradox and contradiction (1995, 151–5). 6. Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” may be considered yet another punctual phantom text, tying in the novel’s anger and revolt with that of the fi rst wave of Romantics who took into consideration the vulnerability of populations, and spoke against the utilitarian imperative, empire, tyranny, and oppression (Wordsworth 313).

WORKS CITED Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. L’Écorce et le noyau. 1987. Paris: Flammarion, 2011. Print.

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Amis, Martin. Money: A Suicide Note. 1984. London: Vintage 2005. Print. . Lionel Asbo: State of England. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012. Print. André, Jacques. Les Désordres du temps. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010. Print. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. 2004. London and New York: Verso, 2006. Print. Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Print. . Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print. Coe, Jonathan. What a Carve Up! 1994. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995. Print. . The Rotters’ Club. 2001. London: Vintage, 2003. Print. . The Closed Circle. 2004. London: Penguin, 2005. Print. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Limbo.” Selected Poems. London: Penguin Classics, 2000, 214. Print. Davoine, Françoise, and Jean-Max Gaudillière. History beyond Trauma. New York: Other P, 2004. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Spectres de Marx. Paris: Galilée, 1993. Print. Enright, Anne. The Gathering. 2007. London: Vintage, 2008. Print. Fassin, Didier, and Richard Rechtman. L’Empire du traumatisme. Enquête sur la condition de victime. 2007. Paris: Flammarion, 2011. Print. Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. 1930. London: Vintage, 1991. Print. Foster, Hall. The Return of the Real: The Avant Garde and the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1996. Print. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. 1982. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1993. Print. Goodin, Robert E. Protecting the Vulnerable. A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1985. Print. Green, André. Le Temp éclaté. Paris: Minuit, 2000. Print. Held, Virginia. The Ethics of Care. Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print. Laplanche, Jean. Problématiques IV. L’après-coup. Paris: PUF, 2006. Print. Lodge, David. Nice Work. 1988. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989. Print. McEwan, Ian. Saturday. 2005. London: Vintage, 2006. Print. McGregor, Jon. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. 2002. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Print. . So Many Ways to Begin. 2006. London: Bloomsbury, 2007. Print. . Even the Dogs. 2010. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Print. Molinier, Pascale, Sandra Laugier, and Patricia Paperman. Qu’est-ce que le care? Souci des autres, sensibilité, responsabilité. Paris: Payot, 2009. Print. Nussbaum, Martha. The Fragility of Goodness. Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. 1986. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print. Press, Jacques. La Perle et le grain de sable. Traumatisme et fonctionnement mental. Lausanne: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1999. Print. Ross, Michael L. “On a Darkling Planet: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and the Condition of England.” Twentieth-Century Literature 54.1 (Spring 2008): 75–96. Print. Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism. The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Print. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Print. . Quilt. Brighton: Myriad Editions, 2010. Print. . Veering: A Theory of Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011. Print. Self, Will. How the Dead Live. London: Penguin, 2001. Print.

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Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Print. Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. Print. Winterson, Jeanette. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? 2011. London: Vintage, 2012. Print. Wordsworth, William. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” The Poems of William Wordsworth. Ed. Nowell C. Smith. Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2009, 313. Print.

6

Ethics, Aesthetics, and History in Lawrence Durrell’s Avignon Quintet

1

Dianne Vipond Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)

THE AVIGNON QUINTET AS A NOVEL OF WORLD WAR II While Lawrence Durrell’s fi nal novel sequence, the five-volume Avignon Quintet (1985), is currently best known for its stylistic metafictional innovations, it may yet prove to be one of the most significant works of fiction to depict the Second World War. If John Fowles’s The Magus (1965) is cited as a noteworthy postmodern novel “about the German occupation of the Greek islands” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Literature (and rightly so), anyone familiar with the Quintet will recognise the important contribution that it makes to World War II literature as well (Piette 432). But perhaps there is a connection between these two subgenres (metafiction and war literature) that, although not immediately apparent, warrants further investigation, a reciprocity that Durrell may well have recognised and clearly utilised. Set primarily in Europe during the Second World War, the Quintet exemplifies what Linda Hutcheon describes as “historiographic metafiction” that underscores the complexity of the relationship between history and narrative, and in so doing draws attention to the intrinsic interdependence of three major dimensions of the text: ethics, aesthetics, and politics. Although many would argue with Wittgenstein’s equation of ethics and aesthetics expressed in the epigraph to this chapter, Durrell’s Avignon Quintet demonstrates precisely how literary form (aesthetics) is capable of reflecting literary content (ethical and political themes). By focussing on two key political aspects of the war, the German occupation of France and the Holocaust, Durrell recreates the historical context from which central ethical considerations emerge. He treats these largely through a unique approach to characterisation in the Quintet—a method integral to his experimentation with the boundaries of metafiction—and through the style he calls metarealism, as he tests both the limits of language and the limits of fiction in his prototypically liminal text. A novelist whose work often predates the theoretical paradigms that promote a fuller understanding of it, as is readily apparent with his critiques of colonialism in The Black Book (1938) and The Alexandria Quartet (1962), both published

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long before the advent of postcolonial theory, in the Quintet (1985) he writes about subjects that with the help of recent advances in trauma studies are only now becoming more accessible. Writing about war, and its concomitant, death, clearly poses challenges for any writer. War is an extreme, a limit-case socio-political phenomenon that rarely fails to indicate how precariously the individual is positioned between humanity and inhumanity. Death, largely because it lies beyond the limits of human experience, remains the ultimate mystery and a natural subject for fiction. Through his efforts to explore war and death in the Quintet, Durrell extends the boundaries of fiction as he questions them. The Quintet is a war novel of epic proportions that portrays one of the darkest epochs in human history. Written over the course of a decade, it opens with Monsieur (1974), which sets the stage for the rest of the sequence by establishing its style and structure and introducing many of the characters, settings, and themes. The middle three volumes trace the progress of the war with Livia (1978) heralding its approach; the central novel, Constance (1979), focussing on the German occupation of France, particularly Avignon; Sebastian (1983) marking its end; and Quinx (1985) portraying its aftermath. During this time, several fictions were published about the Holocaust that Durrell would have been aware of, among them William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1979), “The Shawl” by Cynthia Ozick (1980), D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), and Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally (1982). Although it would be inaccurate to say that the Quintet is primarily about the Holocaust, it is a palpable shadow presence throughout. The last four books contain specific references to it and episodes related to it. A somewhat veiled allusion occurs in Monsieur. From 1309 to 1378, Avignon replaced Rome as the home of the Catholic Church and became the site of the trials held during the Inquisition that destroyed the Order of the Knights Templar. Durrell subtly conflates three groups who frequented Avignon—the Templars, the Gnostics, and the gypsies— into one group of dissenters who represent alternative ways of viewing the world and living in it (Durrell 1985, 240–4). His fictional Avignon becomes a Nazi stronghold in the South of France in the 1940s. Ironically, two apparently dissimilar social institutions, the church and the military, prove to be not quite so different as might be expected—each abuses its power in an obsessive effort to destroy a group it perceives as a threat: the Templars and the Jews. The Quintet is not only about historical events, but also about how the artist renders and makes visible the significance of such events and in so doing adds to humankind’s fund of knowledge about itself. Durrell’s scrimlike approach to incidents that are almost beyond comprehension is an aesthetic device that recalls Freud’s concept of the screen memory and may operate to some degree in a similar manner. Both occur in the context of traumatic events related either to personal or communal history. As Cathy Caruth points out in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, the experience of

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trauma often leaves a void in the memory as a result of the psyche’s inability to process the precipitating event; this has a significant impact on the construction of history and “forces us to rethink our notions of experience and communication” (4, 6). Durrell has had an ongoing interest in memory, evident on the fi rst page of his best-known work, The Alexandria Quartet, as Darley writes: “I have come here to heal myself [ . . . as] I return link by link along the iron chains of memory” (1962, 17). The Quintet begins: “How well I remembered, how well he remembered! The Bruce that I was, and the Bruce I become as I jot down these words a few every day [ . . . ] lost in thought [ . . . l]ike the swirls and eddies of memory itself—thoughts eddying about the word ‘suicide’” (1985, 5). In these two Künstlerromane, memory proves to be not only the wellspring of narrative art, but also the vehicle through which his story (Darley’s and Bruce/Blanford’s) and history (Egypt in the 1940s and World War II) are communicated. In both cases, too, the memories are precipitated by what may be surmised to be traumatic events by the need for healing mentioned in Justine and the suicide referred to in Monsieur. The Quartet and Quintet may be said to demonstrate Freud’s hypothesis that the past does not reside in memory, but in the act of remembering itself (Whitehead 91). Each narrator and reader re-creates it anew as it is written, read, remembered, reconstructed, and reflected upon. Caruth’s studies of individuals who have experienced trauma reveal that they often utilise different modes of communication to express themselves, suggesting that artists writing about trauma would likewise need to explore new ways to relate what is by its very nature unsayable. According to Susana Onega, many British writers of historiographic metafiction in the 1980s were attempting “to recover [ . . . ] the mythical, esoteric, gnostic and cabalistic elements which once formed an inextricable unity with reason and logic, and which have been progressively repressed and muffled since the Middle Ages by the mainstream of rationalism.” She explains: “these writers hope to fi nd alternative patterns of meaning capable of [making sense of] the human condition. Incapable of reconciling self and world by rational means, they try to transcend the limits of self in symbolic archetypal terms” (100). Such postmodern visionaries were writing in response to what they perceived as the inability of the values of the Enlightenment, such as reason, to fulfil their original promise to bring about a better world, nowhere more incontrovertibly demonstrated than in a war novel such as The Avignon Quintet, which seeks to express experiences that are all but ineffable often because they are related to traumatic events. Durrell refers to the Nazi regime as a second Inquisition and begins Constance with the torture of Quatrefages (1985, 571). Such details imply not only the inability of Enlightenment values to prevail in an era marked by madness and irrationality, but the depths to which humankind is capable of sinking to fulfi l its material desires, in this case, the recovery of the reputedly buried treasure of the Templars. Durrell identifies the abdication of individual responsibility as a key reason for the prevalence of evil over

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good that seems to characterise most military endeavours. For example, in describing the movement of the German army, the Nazi general Von Esslin ruminates: “They were all diminished as individuals, shorn of their personal responsibility by the power of its motion” (614); from the English side, Sam confesses to Aubrey: “The lack of individual responsibility is so wonderful—it enables the whole race to act from its functional roots, in complete obedience” (643). The resultant inhumanity appears to be directly related to a mob mentality that absolves the individual of any personal responsibility in exchange for his or her freedom; in effect, one is no longer fully human when one has pledged one’s loyalty to an entity that will assume responsibility for one’s actions. The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, forged in the crucible of the Holocaust, is helpful in understanding the ethical dimensions of the Quintet. Within what he calls a fi rst philosophy, an almost preconsciously insistent awareness that comes before all other perceptions, he develops a meta-ethics, ethical principles that take precedence over all others. For Levinas, the ethical is implicated in any and all interpersonal action; it is the foundation for the relationship between the self and the Other. A key tenet of his fi rst philosophy is that the self and the Other are bound by an unconditional responsibility to and for each other that derives from face-to-face contact that reaffi rms their individuality and recognises their shared humanity. This relationship is preverbal and based in affect. At the most fundamental level, what both parties are communicating is: “Do not kill me” (199). Levinas’s philosophy elucidates several significant incidents in the Quintet. Von Esslin, the German general, like his father before him, has a sexual liaison with the family’s Polish maid. When he goes to her room at night, there is no face-to-face interaction: “She lay with her face to the wall. [ . . . H]e felt [ . . . ] in the spider-like grip of her thin thighs and arms a kind of helplessness. [ . . . H]e overwhelmed her as his army would soon overwhelm her country and people, raping it, wading in its blood” (Durrell 1985, 607–8). Durrell describes an act of violence in which the victim(s) are dehumanised, which Levinas’s meta-ethics would suggest is part of what makes possible such brutality. When Von Esslin, a Catholic, learns the maid has stabbed herself through the heart because she does not want to become a slave, he fi nds a German-speaking priest to hear his confession. Durrell heaps irony upon irony when he has the General seek forgiveness, not for any guilt he might have felt about her death—that is, for being part of the regime responsible for her suicide—but because he feels shame about having a relationship with her. In the confessional, not an environment that allows face-to-face contact, he is outraged by what he believes is the priest’s Yiddish accent: “It was as if the gods were making a jest of him! [ . . . ] The accents of a Viennese psychoanalyst, forsooth!” (772–3). The general considers the odds of the priest being apprehended by the Gestapo. Durrell employs irony again with a subtext that reveals unconscious guilt below the level of conscious perception. Later, the depraved SS officer, Fischer, reports

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seeing the priest in a camp where his death sentence has been temporarily commuted because the mechanism for disposing of bodies is currently overwhelmed, yet another awful irony. Did Von Esslin have any part in his deportation? The circumstances under which they met allowed for no face-to-face contact, mitigating any possible connection based on affect. Another example of Durrell’s use of a subtext to communicate disturbing content is in the description of the conversation between Von Esslin and his mother: “And then of course there were other matters upon which they could not smear self-justificatory conversation like a salve; matters too dark, too floating in ambiguities, to form a substance upon which they might base talk not hedged with reservations” (603). Through these carefully layered and distanced scenes, Durrell tries to communicate the moral and ethical violations that led to human degradation so often during the war. While it is unclear whether Durrell was familiar with Levinas’s philosophy, he did know Arthur Rimbaud’s work and wrote a poem with the title “Je est un Autre,” language taken from Rimbaud’s Lettre du voyant (1871), which was considered an explanation of his poetics. Although the statement would seem to refer to an alter ego, in the same letter Rimbaud wrote: “[The Poet] is responsible for humanity,” an assertion not unrelated to Levinas’s meta-ethics (379). While numerous scenes directly depict events of the war, for example, the point-blank-range execution of Nancy Quiminal at the end of Constance, those associated with the Holocaust are consistently related using methods of indirection, for example, through letters, remembered conversations, reports of the camps; they are always at one remove from the main narrative action. These stories are told—not shown. They resemble translations rather than portrayals of lived experience. Perhaps this is Durrell’s way of recognising the fundamental “unpresentability” of the Holocaust, to use Lyotard’s word, by creating buffers to communicate fragments of it (82). Paradoxically, the effect of such veiled, indirect methods of narrative presentation increases the impact of these episodes. By employing a variety of distancing techniques and leaving an appropriate number of gaps or silences, Durrell requires his readers to draw upon their prior knowledge of the Holocaust and deeply engage their imaginations to animate the scenes. In this way, he encourages them to enter a liminal space within the narrative that requires a psychological and emotional participation that narrows the boundaries between history and fiction by enhancing personal response. One of the most emotionally charged scenes in the novel and an illustration of Durrell’s indirect method of handling Holocaust subject matter recounts the story of Dr Schwarz, a psychoanalyst and Constance’s professional mentor, and his wife, Lily. They meet in medical school and marry, but separate shortly after. When the Nazis arrive in Vienna, Schwarz manages to escape but leaves Lily behind. After he learns she has been taken to Buchenwald, overcome by his “own cowardice and callousness,” he experiences a major nervous collapse (853). At the end of the war, Lily is liberated.

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While Schwartz does not actually meet with her in person, he describes her from photographs: “This bald and toothless old spider, worn to the skeleton with hunger—this was all that was left of Lily, the lovely Lily!” (1155). He reports their phone conversation: “It was like talking to a very old and halfmad baboon” (1156). He has lived with the guilt of what he thinks of as his betrayal of her since fleeing Vienna, but when she returns, he perceives her as “a living, breathing reproach to the man who had been responsible for her distress, her imprisonment!” (1156). Unable to entertain the thought of a face-to-face encounter, Schwarz gives himself a lethal injection after recording the reasons for his suicide on his Dictaphone. Like Constance, who learns about the reasons for Schwarz’s suicide from the recorded message, the reader’s knowledge of Lily is filtered through Schwarz’s perception of her based on a photograph taken after she was released from Buchenwald and his description of her voice on the phone, both interpretations of sense data that put the reader in the position of being twice removed from Lily, as a survivor of the camps. Schwarz’s relationship with her is also mediated by mechanical devices, the camera and the telephone. His decision to end his life rather than literally face her is a self-condemnation on two counts. He has abandoned her twice—in Vienna and in Geneva—and even if he is not as direct a cause of her condition as the German fascist regime, he is still culpable for refusing to take responsibility for her. Incapable of responding to Lily in a face-to-face encounter, he takes his own life. Self and Other are mortally connected; if he denies her, he denies himself. Schwarz’s language indicates how alienated he has become from her; for him she has become a “spider” and a “baboon” (1155, 1156). His dehumanising language aligns him with the general, who describes the grip of the Polish maid’s thin limbs as “spider-like” (607); Schwarz’s attitude to Lily is insignificantly better than that of a Nazi, and his subsequent self-condemnation suggests that he is only too aware of it. Descriptions of Lily intimate that she resembles what was known as a Muselmann in the camps, what Giorgio Agamben sees as a “limit” figure hovering between life and death (63). The Muselmann is someone who is a mere remnant of a human being and for this very reason a true witness to the Holocaust, someone whose body has been inscribed by the unsayable (120). Lily’s physical being expresses what cannot be said verbally and lingers in the reader’s memory. Her body is a memorial to the trauma she has experienced, her desecration a testimonial to the depravity of those who perpetrated it and a judgement on those who stood by and allowed it to happen. The word “trauma” is derived from the Greek meaning “wound”; the Quintet is filled with physically or mentally wounded characters. Durrell employs the motifs of suicide, madness, and blindness on both personal and political levels throughout the novel to depict the death drift of the war and demonstrate its traumatic effects. Livia, Schwarz, Sutcliffe, and Von Esslin’s Polish maid, among others, commit suicide, and Sylvie, Imhof, Quatrefages, and Mnemidis are incarcerated for insanity. Political parallels

110 Dianne Vipond include Blanford’s comment in Livia: “the whole of Europe was bent upon [suicide]” (489) and Constance’s rhetorical question: “What good is a poor psychiatrist when the whole world has gone out of its mind?” (727). The blindness motif is most often associated with Nazi characters to indicate their lack of clear-sightedness, their inability to detect the fatal flaw at the centre of the ideology of the regime to which they have pledged their allegiance—its lack of humanity. There are several significant examples. The eyes of the Waffen-SS officer Fischer are described as “empty”: “They might as well have been the empty sockets of a Roman statue, so little did they convey of sensibility or intelligence” (680). Livia blinds herself in the wake of Hilary’s execution by guillotine brought about by her Nazi lover’s jealousy (1294), and Von Esslin is blinded in a gun accident deliberately orchestrated by his Polish slave, Krov (881–2). Durrell’s style in the Quintet is linked to the character of Livia, an avid supporter of the Nazi party and everything it represents. This is his coded way of suggesting that it is capable of rendering not only the surreal atmosphere of the dream, but also the noirish unutterability of the night terror that eludes comprehension and articulation and is often associated with the trauma of war experiences, a style appropriate to the liminal space that lies between history and fiction.

METAFICTION, METAREALISM, AND THE UNCANNY The Avignon Quintet is Durrell’s most ambitious novel, a highly self-conscious Künstlerroman that represents his exploration of the limits of language and fiction as he probes the perimeters of the postmodern novel by exploiting the properties of metafiction, developing a style he calls metarealism and experimenting with character in an effort to confront events that continue to resist human comprehension—some of the darkest hours of World War II. The Quintet is a quest novel (derived from the medieval romance) whose plot revolves around the pursuit of the legendary treasure of the Knights Templar that metamorphoses into the spiritual journey engaged in by members of the gnostic group associated with Akkad. Durrell transforms this quest into a search for a metaphorical philosopher’s stone buried within the depths of the literary palimpsest that is The Avignon Quintet, which ultimately becomes the reader’s search for meaning in the text—meanings that can never be found but only constructed using the materials provided in Durrell’s fictional universe. As he points out in his autobiographical essay, “From the Elephant’s Back,” “the ‘real’ reader has always known that he or she must read between the lines. That is where the truth hides itself” (64). It would be difficult to fi nd a more metafictional text than Durrell’s Quintet, where the reader is often caught off balance by narrators who morph into each other from one page to the next, as is especially true at the end of Monsieur when the reader learns that the novel he or she thinks

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has been narrated by Bruce Drexel was, in fact, written by a writer named Aubrey Blanford, whose alter ego is Robin Sutcliffe, who, in turn, refers to Bruce as Oakshot and Blanford as Bloshford, all of which is summarised in the “begats” of the “Envoi” that concludes Monsieur (1985, 294). The Quintet begins with the narrator Bruce watching himself in the mirror and expatiating upon a number of writerly concerns brought about by contemplating a novel penned by a character in Monsieur about other characters in the novel. He thinks about how to blend the real with the imagined and wonders how real people compare with paper characters (5–7). Thus, the reader is immediately alerted to the novel as a self-conscious Künstlerroman that not only utilises metafictional technique from the outset, but makes it an object of inquiry. More than half of Monsieur is devoted to a chapter titled “Sutcliffe, the Venetian Documents,” literally referring to the archive of the main narrator’s alter ego, Sutcliffe, thereby highlighting the importance of the writer’s papers, the imagination, and the raw materials (documents) of history. The other novels contain numerous poems, conversations about art, and excerpts reminiscent of material from a writer’s notebook that reinforce the self-consciousness of the text. And throughout the Quintet, Sutcliffe and Blanford engage in many dialogues about writing, the writer and the books they are writing, all of which comprise the novel the reader is reading. In true metafictional fashion, Durrell is constantly destabilising the putative reality of the text, one of the primary features of metafiction, according to Patricia Waugh: “Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (2, emphasis in original). The double is a ubiquitous figure throughout the Quintet both as complementary persona and traditional Doppelgänger, a metafictional move in its own right as well as a device that supports and contributes to Durrell’s characterisation. Sutcliffe is the most notorious double, related to both Blanford and Toby. As Blanford’s alter ego, he alternately represents both body and spirit, depending on the context. He was a psychologist before he began writing fiction; another detail reveals that he took a degree in philosophy and psychology (1985, 335). Toby is a historian, an Oxford don specialising in the history of the Templars, and Blanford’s early ambition was to write “a definitive book on some aspect of medieval history” (328). The interests of these three characters reflect Durrell’s main preoccupations in the Quintet: history, psychology, philosophy, and the art of writing. He also relies upon both intratextuality and intertextuality to enhance the metafictionality of his novel. Intratextuality occurs when such characters as Pursewarden and Melissa, and a perfume, Jamais de la Vie, from The Alexandria Quartet make appearances in the Quintet. Intertextuality is present throughout the text and includes references to Ulysses, Proust, The Arabian Nights, and Hegel’s Aesthetics. Durrell’s incorporation of the “Last Will and Testament of Peter the Great” into the appendix

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of Constance provides another example. In addition, contradiction and paradox abound, properties often associated with metafiction and used to manipulate the reader’s ability to distinguish between fiction and reality. Early in the second volume of the Quintet, Livia, Sutcliffe remarks: “[Livia] deserved to be commemorated in a style which we might call metarealism” (307). Although he never explains exactly what he means by this, other than it is prose “with more body,” Durrell’s style in the Quintet fills in this gap for the reader. Metarealism suggests a variety of concepts linked to the content of the novel by the prefi x “meta” and the root “real”: metafiction, metamorphosis, metaphysics, metanarrative, metapsychology, metempsychosis, surrealism, magic realism, and realism. Each of these terms has something specific to contribute to the singularity of the novel and to add to its significance as a postmodern text. The prefi x itself, “meta,” simultaneously intimates a state beyond and a consciousness of the root term, in this case, the real, but it could equally apply to fiction, given the self-consciousness of the Quintet. While there are clearly many levels at which the narrative of the Quintet operates, two are of particular relevance: the plot that focusses upon central realities of the human condition—love, death, and war, and the novel about the art of fiction (metafiction). Metarealism is a term that efficiently alludes to both levels, seamlessly uniting form with content. Metarealism also suggests a possible new direction for the novel as a genre—as a hybrid that shares traits of both the epistemological novel of Modernism and the ontological novel of postmodernism (McHale 11). This would not be a return to nineteenth-century realism but instead a metarealistic narrative whose form would reflect its content, a narrative of ideas that would grapple with and interrogate the challenging issues of the day, including an exploration of the often mysterious and sometimes ineffable facets of the human condition. In Quinx, the fi nal volume of the Quintet, Sutcliffe tells Blanford that he hopes the novel he is about to begin writing (the very same that the reader is about to fi nish reading) “works as a metaphor for the human condition” (1302). It is the responsibility of the reader to interpret the metaphors employed by the writer who is using them to communicate these complex areas of human experience. Blanford writes: “I have made a discovery but I can’t tell you what it is because the language in which to express it has not been invented. I know a place but there is no road to it [ . . . w]hat’s to be done? Why, we must push on with reality, living in the margins of hope” (1344). Metarealism would seem to be the style, the language, and hence the road with which to express the discovery that readers must locate and decipher for themselves. Freud’s 1919 essay “The ‘Uncanny’” is particularly useful in elucidating Durrell’s aesthetic strategies in the Quintet and thereby clarifying what metarealism entails. According to Freud, the uncanny is an aesthetic effect that produces a strangely familiar emotional response related to fear, especially the fear of death (929–30). From a psychoanalytical point of view, he perceives it as the return of something that has been repressed but should

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have remained hidden (950). Both of these descriptions seem to echo traumatic effects: a fear brought about by an extreme experience (perhaps associated with death in some way) that has been repressed but returns unbidden. The novel is replete with returns, as many of its chapter titles attest: “Prince Hassad Returns,” “The Return Journey,” “The Return,” and Monsieur begins with Bruce’s return to Avignon on the occasion of Piers’s suicide. The aesthetic and the traumatic intersect at the level of affect, which begins to explain why art so often becomes the medium through which extremities of experience are expressed and why the uncanny is a particularly effective device for communicating difficult and disturbing subjects involving trauma. Those who have lived through trauma often feel a double crisis, the fi rst a result of a close encounter with death they did not expect to survive, the second, a product of actually surviving (Caruth 1996, 7). Barely alive, Lily Schwarz returns from Buchenwald precipitating her husband’s crisis of survival and extreme response—suicide. He has managed to repress the guilt he felt in abandoning her, but upon her return he can no longer do so, with deadly results. The story of Lily and Schwarz intimates the complex, persistent, and far-reaching effects of trauma. In their close reading of Freud’s essay, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle identify thirteen manifestations of the uncanny—repetition, odd coincidences, animism, anthropomorphism, automatism, uncertainty about sexual identity, fear of being buried alive, silence, telepathy, death, the death drive, ghosts, and language—all of which are present in the Quintet, many within the fi rst chapter (Durrell 1985, 36–40). Repetition is of primary importance in Durrell’s method of characterisation and in his mise en abyme narrative technique. The second volume of the Quintet, Livia, is subtitled Buried Alive. It refers to a specific manifestation of the uncanny, registers Piers and Livia’s fear of such a fate, and reflects the Inquisition’s punishment of Templar Knights thought to be homosexual. It is also reminiscent of the repressed or buried memory associated with trauma. The novel is riddled with death from beginning to end: natural death, multiple suicides, ritual murders, countless deaths from war, and the horrors of the Holocaust. One of the most dramatic manifestations of the uncanny takes place when Blanford dines at Quartila’s with the ghost of Constance, the Duchess of Tu, an indication that it can operate as a medium between the natural and the supernatural, the material and the spiritual, the fictional and the real, as well as signal Durrell’s interest in border crossing. The uncanny informs Durrell’s use of language, adding a “thickness” of texture, a density to his prose, that Sutcliffe calls “body” (308). Although it operates linguistically, it communicates through feeling, reaching the audience at an intuitive level beyond language and evoking an affective response. Durrell’s use of the uncanny contributes much to his metarealistic style, one distinguished by paradox and ambiguity, the feeling of the strange within the familiar, and an ability to communicate subtleties of affect.

114 Dianne Vipond Durrell’s ultra-metafictional treatment of character in the Quintet functions in a variety of ways, but most importantly it is the primary vehicle for communicating the ethical dimension of his narrative. The word “ethics” is derived from the Greek word for “character,” which originally referred to a distinctive mark, engraved or impressed. Over time, the literal defi nition of character included symbols such as letters of the alphabet and came to be associated with writing, printing, and representation. Figurative meanings include distinctive features and moral and mental qualities. And, of course, character is a central literary element, one of the building blocks of fiction. In a novel as self-conscious as Durrell’s Quintet, it is hardly surprising to fi nd how closely intertwined these two words are or how much they resonate with Durrell’s central thematic concerns. As mentioned, Durrell employs the uncanny device of repetition in a variety of ways, not least of which is his use of the concept of the double. This is readily apparent in the multiple narrators of the Quintet, but unlike the characters in The Alexandria Quartet, whose distinct points of view represent relativity and multiple truths, many of the Quintet characters are more blended than discrete. They are narrative devices manipulated to reflect particular values. Durrell sees himself as something of a puppeteer who employs his characters to communicate ideas (McDonald 160). He “would prefer people not to ask ‘Are they real’ but ask if they are true” (Pomerantsev n.p.). Throughout the Quintet, different characters share the same names—Constance and Constanza, Lily, Lily, and Lily; exhibit similar relationships—Sylvie and Piers, Sylvaine and Bruno; play the same roles—Lord Banquo and Lord Galen, Trash and Thrush; or function as alter egos—Blanford and Sutcliffe. Blanford explains his approach to characterisation in his new novel to Constance: “The old stable outlines of the dear old linear novel have been sidestepped in favour of soft focus palimpsest which enables the actors to turn into each other, to melt into each other’s lifespace if they wish. Everything and everyone comes closer and closer together, moving towards the one” (1265). And Durrell tells Igor Pomerantsev, “the big battle is between the notion of the ego and the notion of the non-ego” (Pomerantsev n.p.), more an Eastern than Western attitude. These two statements, one a passage from Quinx, the other made during an interview, sum up what he is trying to achieve through his handling of character in the Quintet: recognition of the self within the Other, of permeable boundaries between self and non-self. Sutcliffe writes: “The same people are also others without realising it” (978). In The Mediterranean Shore, Durrell comments on the Quintet: “All the characters are aspects of one character, Constance, and if they could be realized in ‘the reality prime’ of Blanford’s fi nal statement in Quinx, they would be fused into an ideal concept” (Hogarth 110). And when Constance’s conversation with the Egyptian alienist turns to Hitler and the war, he declares: “Everyone is a Jew!” (1071). Apart from the similar content of these assertions coming from different sources, what is noteworthy here is the repetition of the root

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word “real”: realising, realised, reality—suggesting perception, actualisation, and just how fitting a term “metarealism” is to describe the Quintet. The alter egos Blanford and Sutcliffe reflect the self–Other relationship but do so in an anti-ego manner, with cooperation and support. They often have conversations about how they will handle character in the book they are writing together titled Tu Quoque, Latin for “You, too” or “You, also,” yet another allusion to the self–Other relationship as an inclusive and positive one. As Freud developed the concept of the unconscious, he came to believe “[t]he ‘other’ was in ourselves; indeed, it was ourselves” ( 917, emphasis in original). But Durrell does not collapse the self into the Other in any simple synthesis of totality or universality; instead he creates a metaphor that recognises and preserves difference while acknowledging mutual dependence, the male and female of the human couple, represented by Constance and Blanford, symbolising “the mystical marriage of four dimensions with five skandas,” that is, of Western physics with Eastern metaphysics and “the king and queen of the affect, of the spiritual world” (Durrell 1985, 1364, emphasis added). The pivotal ethical issue of the novel is the relationship between self and Other, one based on recognition of mutual dependence and a shared humanity anchored in affect. The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas explains both the provenance of and necessity for this relationship (Levinas 203). On a level beyond the narrative itself, Durrell provides the reader with another encounter with the Other of the text as a whole. For Derek Attridge, “reading is an attempt to respond to the otherness of the other.” He describes it as a process that “involves working against the mind’s tendency to assimilate the other to the same” and perceives it as “a relation or relating rather than an object,” as an “act-event” (25). According to Attridge, such an encounter requires the reader to detect the rules of the text, that is, to figure out how it works formally as a way of experiencing its strangeness, which is what allows it to offer the reader something new, something “singular” (21). Such a description is certainly applicable to the Quintet, a work of fiction that produces its effects largely with metafictional devices, metarealistic style, and characterisation based on a philosophy of ethics and an Eastern worldview. It is through the reader’s relationship with the Other of a narrative text, always composed of affective as well as cognitive elements, that the potential to imagine a more humane world is made possible. With the realisation that meaning is constructed, the reader recognises that, because social phenomena are constructions as well, they can be re-constructed to achieve greater empathy, equality, and justice. As political and philosophical a thinker as Hannah Arendt believed that literary narrative was a medium particularly suited to “making sense of history and of our cultural and political identity. [She] valued storytelling [ . . . ] for its attentiveness to the singular nature of human experience” (Swift 1). And she described the ability of narrative to promote political understanding: “Comprehension means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been” (Arendt 1985, I, x).

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CONCLUSION: BORDER CROSSINGS There is a remarkable congruency between the methods Durrell employs in the Quintet—metafiction, metarealism, and characterisation—and what Michael Rothberg calls “traumatic realism,” which, as the editors of this volume explain in their introduction, “blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, history and story-telling, the collective and the individual” (11). The fact that the Quintet is a quintessentially postmodern text leads to an ironic counterintuitive tentative hypothesis: that the more fictional or metafictional the text, the better equipped it may be to communicate the more difficult and complex realities of human experience. If this is indeed the case, or at least partially true, it may be accounted for to some extent by another of Arendt’s observations in Men in Dark Times: “story-telling reveals meaning without committing the error of defi ning it” (105). The gaps, silences, and open endings of many postmodern metafictional texts are predicated on an active reading process that requires substantial critical engagement with the “reality” of the text. In an essay focussing on the Quintet, Durrell discloses: “I began to dream of a sort of novel-as-apparatus (un roman-appareil) which one could use as an historic or poetic ‘conscience’ [  .  .  .  ] I wanted to build something like a cave-cooperative” (1983, 62, emphasis in original). This suggests the power of art to act as a social conscience by depicting historical events, raising political questions, and indicating ethical choices. In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon links an aspect of the uncanny—the spectral—with the historical, the political, and the ethical. For Gordon, haunting is a social phenomenon, “an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known” (xvi–xvii). It demands attention and that something be done. There are many such hauntings in the Quintet; the most compelling are those related to the Holocaust and other atrocities that occurred during the war, for example, Lily returning from Buchenwald, not much more than a skeleton; the hopelessness embodied in the young Jewish couple who shoot themselves in the Princes Hotel; the murder of Nancy Quiminal, in an attempt to recast a heroine as a scapegoat; and the suicide of the Polish maid, who refuses to become a slave. The ghosts of each of these characters haunt both reader and writer, insisting that they be remembered. For Jacques Rancière, “political art [ . . . produces] a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification” (63). Durrell exploits the aesthetic potential of the uncanny in the Quintet to similar ends. Mystery is what motivates narrative discourse and is one of the ways an author maintains audience interest. Since the fi rst myths attempted to account for unknown or disquieting phenomena, story-tellers have been creating narratives in an effort to make sense of human life, the most

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ambitious among them tackling the most difficult questions of all: the meaning of life and death. Brian McHale posits a feature common to the ontological landscapes of all cultures, “the ultimate ontological boundary between life and death” (38), that which separates the living from the dead, a frontier Durrell dares to approach in the fi nal scene of the Quintet. As the cast of characters assembles to enter the mine-riddled caves in the hope of seeing the Templar treasure, Durrell writes: “The lovers gave a shiver of premonition and Blanford thought that if he ever wrote the scene he would say: ‘It was at this precise moment that reality prime rushed to the aid of fiction and the totally unpredictable began to take place!’” (1367). What follows is white space, forcing readers to fall back upon the resources of their own imaginations to complete the narrative. The seemingly infi nite plasticity of the novel’s “ending” is an immediate product of the metaphorical richness of a text that yields a variety of interpretations. One possible reading is to see it as a carefully orchestrated scene in which the death of Piers with which the novel begins is about to be framed with the deaths of the other characters in a massive explosion. On the other hand, the symbolic resonance of the cave, a traditional site of trauma, that is, birth, death, and rebirth, cannot be ignored. And recalling that the gypsies are in attendance for what they know as “an awakening,” it would seem that the entry into the cave (for Plato, a site of perception) will mark an epiphany, an uncanny moment of ethical insight suggested by Durrell’s term “cave-cooperative” (1983, 62, emphasis in original). Mined with explosives to protect the treasure, the cave is a dangerous place that heightens sensibility, enabling the characters to realise that the treasure is not a material one, but instead an ethical principle that asserts the urgent necessity of recognising that their fates are intrinsically bound together. They must accept their inherent responsibility for each other and cooperate if the future is to be any different from the past—their very survival depends on it. NOTES 1. This chapter has evolved from the conjunction of an earlier article, “Reading the Ethics of Lawrence Durrell’s Avignon Quintet,” and an essay in progress that explores the uncanny in Durrell’s Quintet.

WORKS CITED Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 1999. Print. Arendt, Hannah. Men in Dark Times. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1983. Print. . The Origins of Totalitarianism. 3 Vols. 1951. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1985. Print. Attridge, Derek. “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other.” PMLA 114.1 (1999): 20–31. Print.

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Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. 4th Edition. Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2009. Print. Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Print. . Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print. Durrell, Lawrence. The Alexandria Quartet. London: Faber, 1962. Print. . The Avignon Quintet. 1985. London: Faber, 2004. Print. . The Black Book. 1938. London: Faber, 1973. Print. . “From the Elephant’s Back.” Fiction Magazine 2.3 (1983): 59–64. Print. Fowles, John. The Magus. Rev. ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny.’” 1919. Trans. Alix Strachey. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. 929–52. Print. Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Print. Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols, 1845 and 1842. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon P., 1975. Print. Hogarth, Paul. The Mediterranean Shore: Travels in Lawrence Durrell Country. London: Pavilion, 1998. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988. Print. Keneally, Thomas. Schindler’s List. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. Print. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infi nity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969. Print. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Theory and History of Literature Series. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Print. McDonald, Robert. “Jumping about Like Quanta.” Lawrence Durrell: Conversations. Ed. Earl. G. Ingersoll. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1998. 149–62. Print. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 2001. Print. Onega, Susana. “British Historiographic Metafiction.” Metafiction. Ed. Mark Currie. London: Longman, 1995. 92–103. Print. Ozick, Cynthia. “The Shawl.” The New Yorker 26 May 1980: 33–34. Print. Piette, Adam. “World War II: Contested Europe.” The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature. Eds Laura Marcus and Peter Nichols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 417–35. Print. Pomerantsev, Igor. “Lawrence George Durrell in Conversation with Igor Pomerantsev.” Confl uences 26 Lawrence Durrell: Borderlands & Borderlines. Ed. Corinne Alexandre-Garner. Nanterre, France: Presses Universitaires de Paris 10, 2005. Accessed on 20/02/2013 at: http://www.zeitzug.com/ index. php?option=com_content&view=article&id=19. Web. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2009. Print. Rimbaud, Arthur. Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, a Bilingual Edition. Trans. Wallace Fowlie. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Print. Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Print. Styron, William. Sophie’s Choice. New York: Random House, 1979. Print. Swift, Simon. Hannah Arendt. London: Routledge, 2009. Print. Thomas, D.M. The White Hotel. New York: Viking, 1981. Print. Vipond, Dianne. “Reading the Ethics of Lawrence Durrell’s Avignon Quintet.” Durrell and the City: Collected Essays on Place. Ed. Donald P. Kaczvinsky.

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Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson UP and Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. 117– 30. Print. Waugh, Patricia. Metafi ction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Methuen, 1982. Print. Whitehead, Anne. Memory. The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2009. Print. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961. Print.

7

The Ethics of Breaking up the Family Romance in David Mitchell’s Number9Dream Gerd Bayer

Postmodern fiction frequently indulges in the ludic disruption of conventional or traditional narrative and social norms. In the context of trauma fiction, this willingness to break free from stabilising factors runs counter to the need of trauma victims to re-establish ordering devices that will help keep the trauma at bay. David Mitchell’s novel Number9Dream (2001) offers a different kind of response in that it envisions a dreamlike alternative to reconstituting normality. By concentrating on a very small cast of characters that are marked by their family’s traumatic past, Mitchell develops ethical and formal alternatives to the unspoken desire, implicit in Freud and Breuer’s talking cure, that trauma victims can somehow, through narrative, find a way to verbalise their repressed experience of a past trauma and thus move beyond the debilitating state of blocked yet highly intense emotional turmoil. For Mitchell, trauma work rather consists of a move beyond the traumatic narrative and as such, rather paradoxically, constitutes a narrative abandonment of the traumatic memories. The novel in effect first pursues the family narrative in a nostalgic mode and subsequently puts it in play by questioning the efficacy of the family romance, a concept that Freud developed to describe various forms of childhood attachment to actual and surrogate parental figures. While such narratives often follow the established forms of novels and romances in providing the kind of closure that sees long-lost children reunited with their famous or powerful parents, Mitchell’s tale refuses such linear—if not to say, regressive—logic. Like most of his other novels, Number9Dream breaks with the realist tradition of the novel and instead employs narrative features such as dreams, achronicity, cross-mediality, and interior monologue. By drawing on such liminal forms and indeed creating a novel that is heavily invested in breaking up the narrative logic of both its generic history and, by reversing the family romance, its thematic field, Mitchell’s work marks a highly original contribution to the recent wave of limit-case trauma narratives.

FAMILY TRAUMAS The family constellation in Number9Dream is certainly rather unusual. Initially, the family consists of Eiji and his twin sister, Anju, and both their

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parents. That, however, is as far as the conventional part of this particular family romance goes. When Eiji’s parents met, his father was already married. His mother’s status as a “second wife” in a city far from home did not endear her to her neighbours, especially when she became pregnant and soon after a young mother. While the apparently wealthy father quickly disappeared behind a law fi rm that provided fi nancial support to his abandoned family, the mother never recovered from this affair. As Eiji fi nds out in a letter his mother writes to him shortly before his twentieth birthday, soon after the moment at which the novel’s narrative sets in, she at one point, when depression and alcohol dominated her mood, even tried to kill her son. Eiji, obviously, survived and in fact remained miraculously unhurt, but the incident made his mother realise that she had to fi nd a different solution. As she tells Eiji in her letter, sent at the urging of her therapist from a rehabilitation clinic: “I was mentally unfit to raise you and Anju” (74), and she accordingly left her twins with her own mother. While dysfunctional families might not be all that uncommon, what makes Mitchell’s novel a fascinating piece of fictional trauma work is the fact that it sets out to demystify some of the conventional ways of approaching traumatic pasts through narrative means of healing. It instead envisions alternative forms of social bonding that replace those traditionally assigned to the family, and in doing so Mitchell questions the logic and implicit conservatism of Freud’s family romance. In the end, Eiji’s fi rst-person account suggests that he increasingly realises that his way towards fi nding peace relies on moving beyond the traditional formats of the family, which are instead presented as potentially traumatising and even lethal. Eiji’s life has clearly been put under the sign of death. In addition to his mother’s attempt on his life, he also had to overcome the sudden death of his sister, who drowned during a swimming accident under circumstances that suggest she may have given in to a trauma-induced death wish. With all these highly painful and even traumatic events in the early stages of his life, it is little wonder that the novel should present Eiji as a character whose relationship to his remaining family members appears as highly strained. Mitchell’s novel indeed lends itself to a reading as a family romance in that it addresses the deeper strain in a son’s relationship to his parents and his attempts at fi nding strategies that help with the healing process of the wound inflicted on him by his family life. The novel does not specify whether Eiji did in fact remember the violent scene when his mother wanted to throw him out of the window. Since he was old enough to speak at the time, his mother’s outbreak being triggered by Eiji uttering the word “Daddy” (73), he might have been of an age that allowed him to remember the incident itself. Or rather, one can assume that the memory remains with him on the suppressed level of trauma. It is only appropriate that in his oftentimes rather weird day-dreams, Eiji should frequently envision death by falling (e.g. 80, 89) or drowning (e.g. 20), so a latent trace of the mother’s action appears to have stayed with Eiji. His frequently voiced concern over his sister’s daredevil tree-climbing stunts

122 Gerd Bayer may also relate back to this early traumatic experience. His fear of her falling to her death both refers back to his childhood experience and, at least for the readers, anticipates her subsequent deadly accident during another risky exploit. On a rather different level, it is also remarkable that characters in other novels by Mitchell should come to similar deaths: for instance, the critic Felix Finch in Cloud Atlas is thrown over the balcony by writer Dermot Hoggins (148–52), while Louisa Rey, in the same novel, crashes through the railings of a bridge and (almost) drowns in her car (144 and 407). In Black Swan Green, the protagonist takes a “step back” at the edge of a cliff, tumbling through “[e]mpty air” (299); and in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Orito steps back at the very last minute from jumping down the high walls of the mountain monastery where she is kept prisoner (307). All these scenes might well qualify as the kind of return with a difference that trauma theory has described as a typical feature of a traumatised psyche (Caruth 1996). Yet short of suggesting that Mitchell himself is using his writing as some sort of working-through of a related biographical experience, it is certainly an uncanny coincidence that such recurring moments should appear not just within Number9Dream, but also across the author’s existing œuvre.1 While dreams of falling or drowning may simply be an indication of a psyche tormented by lack of control, in Number9Dream they form a contrasting pattern to Eiji’s growing sense of empowerment and thus create a counter-narrative to psychoanalytic traditions of approaching trauma. In the case of Eiji’s family situation, the traumatising past experiences also include at least one moment for which he clearly blames himself, thus adding further to his mental load. The death of his twin sister, Anju, occurred on a day when he was away playing football, despite the fact that the night before she pleaded with him: “Don’t go to Kagoshima tomorrow” (64). Her request was made even more ominous by her claim that she had seen “the pearly snake this morning,” a mythological figure that both siblings have been told “only ever appears to warn of a coming death” (64). To make matters even worse, Eiji on his way to the football camp the next morning stopped at the local shrine of the thunder god, asking for the god’s support in turning him into a great player, offering the god free choice of a return favour: “anything that I can give you, you can have. Take it. You don’t have to ask me, just take it” (70). Eiji quickly comes to believe that the almost Faustian pact with a divine force has claimed his sister’s life. It is easy to see, then, that Eiji thinks he is guilty of his sister’s death. The scene furthermore lays the foundation for Eiji’s increasing distrust of all paternal characters and his growing realisation that the traditional figures of authority are not necessarily acting with his well-being in mind. The dual trauma of his own barely avoided infanticide and the loss of a twin sibling have put a strain on Eiji’s ability to envision a happy family scenario. Both Eiji and Anju are marked for life by their unloving parents and are hence prone to recurring bouts of self-doubt as they somehow seek

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within themselves for reasons why their parents did not provide them with the emotional safety they needed. Given that the starting point for developing a Freudian family romance is thus somewhat reversed, with the conventional memories of perfectly loving parents in this case replaced by the scar tissue of childhood trauma and neglect by the parents, it is nevertheless revealing that Eiji, throughout the novel, appears to search for exactly the kind of idealised parents that, under happier circumstances, children develop during the formative years of their childhood. Yet family is not the only or even the major force in creating a person’s sense of identity and self, or so it seems. In Mitchell’s novel, the destruction of Eiji’s family plays out against the background of a quickly changing social development in the aftermath of a more generally traumatic event, Japan’s involvement in World War II. By emphasising the circumstantial evidence, the text suggests that what is passed on to later generations is not necessarily limited to the traumatic phantoms described by Abraham and Torok (1994), but also includes positive aspects such as a happy and peaceful family environment. The type of family romance that plays out in Number9Dream, one that seems to follow the general logic as described by Freud but which cannot draw on personal memories of a happy childhood, 2 thereby works as a complementary narrative to the dominant mode of trauma and its emphasis on negative memories. What Mitchell communicates through his traumatised character is that, even in a situation where multiple wounds continually pain the soul, positive memories somehow manage to provide the nurturing ground for the kind of desires that encourage people to search for positive experiences and social contacts. The failure of the original core family in Number9Dream goes back to the mother’s supposedly insufficient social standing, making of her at best an accessory to her wealthy lover’s private life and not a genuine alternative to the woman he had previously married but showed no interest in leaving. The force keeping families together, the text implies, is at heart fi nancial, turning the institution of the family into yet another instance of the dominant capitalist ideology. As Margot Gayle Backus describes for other literary examples (see also Douglas), the nexus between traumatic childhood experiences and capitalist forms of labour exploitation operates on the level of mirroring. Seen this way, inhuman modes of production, what Mitchell has Eiji envision as the dominant existence of Tokyoites as drones, echo traumatic experiences. When Backus argues that “the nuclear family has come to replicate the factory as a site of production” (1994, 442), she describes the logic of the family as presented in Mitchell’s novel and at the same time explains why the particular kind of family romance encountered in this narrative does not ultimately strive to re-establish the hierarchical mode of the conventional family. Through its family constellation, then, Mitchell’s novel addresses a society that allows for its families to “covertly devour children” (Backus 1999, 4). Anju’s death is the end-point of a long sequence of bad choices and

124 Gerd Bayer increasingly painful developments that had its starting point in the father’s abandonment of his children for the sake of social reputation; deteriorated following the mother’s realisation of her own sense of being overpowered by her responsibilities towards her twins; and fi nally spiralled out of control by the fantasies through which the children tried to reinvent some sort of family constellation that would allow them to reclaim their lost roles as children. What the novel thus performs is the very failure of the family romance to provide restitutive order and, in doing so, to construe a helpful narrative beyond the repetitive confi nes of traumatic memories. The breaking up of the conventions of the family romance thus attains an ethical dimension, something that Mitchell’s novel approaches through both its form and themes.

DISRUPTING THE FAMILY NARRATIVE A good portion of Eiji’s sense of guilt relates back to his telling Anju about the magic power of the rock in the ocean and to her subsequent death trying to reach that magical space. What ultimately led to her death was this verbal abuse of his sister: his telling her the story and her taking it literally and believing in it. It is this abuse, with all its incestuous overtones, 3 that forms the core of Eiji’s traumatic obsession with reliving the bonding with and separation from his twin sister. While the need to narrate that trauma is occasionally suggested in Mitchell’s narrative, a more explicit means of abreaction is encountered by Eiji through his process of sexual and emotional maturation. The two are patently separated in the novel: Eiji loses his virginity following a sequence of surreal events on his twentieth birthday involving two girls whose almost twinned similarity leaves it a little unclear with whom he fi nally ends up spending the night. His emotional growing up, on the other hand, is directly related to his growing love for Ai, the waitress and musician he encounters as the novel opens. The romantic yet chaste entanglement with Ai that runs parallel to his search for the lost father evidently provides Eiji with some emotional stability and, as a result, “he can fi nally acknowledge the death of his twin and be able to distinguish his romantic and sexual desire for Ai as distinct from his intimacy with Anju” (Simpson 68). Before he declares his love to Ai, however, Eiji describes their relationship as that between siblings, dreaming of a future where he and Ai “have lived this way, as brother and sister, for a long time” (402). The effects of both his sexual and romantic maturity slowly trigger the kind of emotional growth that allows Eiji to shed his various family anxieties: the longing for his father, the anger directed at his mother, and the mourning for his sister. If Number9Dream can indeed be described as “a novel about nostalgia, in the sense that nostalgia is a mode of being that places the subject in continual relation to the past” (Boulter 118), then the cause for that nostalgia is Eiji’s desire to undo the past, both in terms of

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his sister’s death and, even more so, in the previous break-up of his parents’ relationship that left the twins orphaned and living with distant relatives. It is from this mix of biographical family experiences that both Eiji and Anju initially develop the typical features of the family romance. Freud describes the phenomenon as a child’s wish to have famous or influential parents, to have in effect been exchanged at birth and thus be at best a stepchild of the very parents with whom the child has become disillusioned. As Kaplan comments, a child who engages in this family romance “withdraws from the current real parents in preference to the memory in fantasy of the past real parents” (170). The rescue fantasy thus dwells on the idea that a child can restore a parent into the idealised stage (175). Even more appropriately for Mitchell’s novel, Kaplan also points out that the psychological phenomenon of the family romance is often caused by an absent parent (183). Having described the dynamics of the family romance, Freud insists that what appears to be negative attitudes towards parents are in fact thoughts that reinstate the image of the parent in their original form: they are “an expression of the child’s longing for the happy, vanished days when his father seemed to him the noblest and strongest of men and his mother the dearest and loveliest of women” (Freud 241).4 In Number9Dream this sequence is clearly reversed in that Eiji and Anju never knew their father and can hardly be said to have developed any sort of positive image of parents to start with. Their psychic actuation appears to have been based on a fantasy that, at least in Eiji’s case, is later confronted with reality. The particular nature of Eiji’s family romance consists of the fact that he tries to reinstate a kind of parent he had never himself encountered: trustworthy, reliable, kind. What is remarkable about this (fictive) desire is that it re-creates this parental vision not from biographical memory, as described in Freud’s notion, but as a counter-image from the actual traumatic experience of childhood encounters with parents who were anything but ideal. Anju’s desire to materialise the ideal of the core family does not fall behind Eiji’s hopes. Both twins in fact invest quite some energy into making their fantasies come true. The novel makes clear that both siblings are motivated in much of what they do not so much by personal ambition or dreams of fame and glory. Instead, they both hope to put success at football and the powers of a magical rock, respectively, to work for the reunion of their family. When Eiji dreams, rather unrealistically, of coming on the field as a Japanese substitute at a point in the World Cup fi nal against Brazil when his own side is desperately trailing behind only to score nine goals and turn defeat into triumph, he is thinking about the effect this will have on his situation as a son: “Our mother is so proud that she gives up drinking, but better still our father sees me, recognizes me, and drives me to the airport to meet the team jet” (67). Anju, too, is putting all her hopes into the magic rock out in the ocean. Her belief in its magic powers goes back to something Eiji told her about it being a real whale waiting to be released

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from a spell. She is convinced that “once we set foot on it the spell would be broken, and it would be so grateful that it would take us anywhere we wanted to go, even to Mother and Father” (52). Anju has obviously taken Eiji’s story to heart, and she goes on to say: “I used to imagine it happening so hard that I could see it sometimes, like down a telescope. Mother putting on her pearls, and Father washing his car” (52). This image of the picture book family, representative of Anju’s own desires for a core family, can ultimately be traced back to Eiji’s power of imagination, something that may easily be seen as adding to his feelings of guilt once Anju acts on that mythopoeic representation of Eiji’s own wishes and dies trying to make them come true. In the flashback that has him remember the conversation with his sister, Eiji reports himself claiming: “I never said all of that” (52), a verbal gesture that easily reveals his guilty conscience at work. On a more general level, this negative facet of the power of narrative puts a rather sceptical light on the formal substance of the family romance, itself a concept derived by Freud from mythological and literary narratives. Thus, Mitchell’s novel actively disparages conventional narratives, highlighting the ethical consequences that an unquestioning commitment to the established logic of, say, the family romance or religion may bring with it. The most imminent object of Eiji’s guilt, and the target for his violent attempt at assuaging his feelings of abandonment, is found on a different existential level. Indeed, Eiji’s relationship with the thunder god formally frames the second part of the novel, called “Lost Property,” where Eiji tells of the death of his sister. The section begins with him remembering that “[s]awing the head off a thunder god with a rusty hacksaw is not easy” (43); and it ends with young Eiji watching “the severed head of the thunder god” as it falls down a cliff and fi nally “vanishes in a white crown” (93), thus repeating the falling motion that forms part of Eiji’s own repressed personal traumatic memories from childhood. In the absence of any kind of father figure during his young adulthood, Eiji’s turning to the thunder god can be seen as a natural move at a moment when he is in need of parental protection and support. Since his appeal had the unwanted effect, at least in his perception, of killing his sister, Eiji’s belief in the benign nature of parental care is severely eroded. The turning point, when Eiji finally abandons his various attempts at replacing or locating his father, is reached towards the end of the novel, when the desire that drives the family romance is finally abated. The anger that builds up in Eiji when he meets his arrogant and philandering father is given voice through murderous fantasies that echo his earlier beheading of the thunder god, thus linking the two figures even more closely. Listening to his father speak, Eiji thinks: “I want to smash your skull with your golfing trophy” (374). His imaginary attack at the nominal head of the family repeats the revenge he took on the treacherous god who spirited away his twin sister. Both scenes act as moments of liberation that free him from the guilty attachment to a social convention that, in his life, has never benefitted him.

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The incident with the thunder god also evokes his mother, albeit on a rather unconscious level. As Eiji fi nally manages to cut off the wooden head, he slips off the giant statue’s shoulder. In his recollection of this moment, duration is emphasised in an uncanny fashion, one than hints at the traumatic source of this particular memory and simultaneously explains the narrative reappropriation of that memory through limit-case forms of aesthetic representation: “I seem to be falling for the longest time” (92). Earlier in this chapter, Eiji had learned about his mother’s outbreak of infanticidal violence, when she threw him down a fl ight of stairs. In her letter, she describes the moment with a similar temporal clarity, as if she relived the incident in slow motion: You didn’t cry as you fell. I heard you. Imagine a sack of books falling downstairs. You sounded like that. I waited for you to start screaming, and waited, and waited. Suddenly time moved three times as fast, to catch up with itself. (74) Both descriptions of Eiji falling repeat an experience of temporality that falls outside normal time, bringing the traumatic recurrences of the fall into immediate if suppressed contact. As Eiji tells of falling off the thunder god’s shoulder, he relives the extended moment of his earlier fall down the stairs. As the narrative resists the linearity of normal time through expanding the traumatic moment in its instance of the unexpected return, it simultaneously disrupts the conventional chronology of mnemonic writing. This feature of the novel suggests that some memories defy the ordering principle of established narrative patterns and instead require authors to search for hybrid means of giving testimony to the moments of suffering that form the heart of a festering psychological wound. This narrative inability to do justice to the significance of a character’s past trauma speaks to the ethical dilemma caused by such scenarios. Just as Eiji’s fall is almost arrested in his slowed-down retelling of those memories, the narrative itself almost grinds to a halt, implicitly admitting to its own shortcomings. Similar to how time, in the quotation above, tries “to catch up with itself,” Mitchell’s novel always struggles to keep up with the ethical demands posed by its content.

FORMING A PAST AND FUTURE At this point in the novel, when he describes his divine revenge, Eiji has not yet learned about his mother’s outbreak of violence against him when he was a child. Arguably, Eiji is writing the novel retrospectively, and the frequent use of present-tense verb forms also suggests that the narrating I and the experiencing I have access to the same level of insight, further mixing up conventional narrative temporalities. Yet the section “Lost Property” ends with the phrase “Now I must vanish too” (93), implying that the narrating

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voice speaks from the historical past, thus only actively knowing what Eiji knew at the time. Regardless of how one is to decode the various temporalities of the novel’s narrative voice, the recurrence of these moments of death and falling speak to the traumatic nature of their narrative connection. To complete the necessary move beyond these circular recurrences, Mitchell suggests, requires an abandonment of the family romance: the need to break with his nostalgic desires builds up in Eiji as he comes to realise that rather than re-establish the order of parental hierarchies he needs to free himself from the family narrative. Formally, Mitchell situates this desire on the level of dreams, the various visions in which Eiji indulges, both when awake and asleep. By resorting to this strategy, the author appears to take issue with the common trajectories of the family romance. Freud had pointed out explicitly that, for the complex of the family romance, “[a]n interesting contribution [ . . . ] is afforded by the study of dreams” (241), explaining that whenever royal personages appear in dreams, even by adults, they should be read as coded references to the adult’s lasting desire for the original status of his or her parents. Not surprisingly, the ghost of an emperor is also raised in Number9Dream.5 The latent significance of this royal personage offers another layer to Eiji’s reading of the journal kept by his great-uncle Subaru, who died during World War II as a suicide bomber in the service of the Japanese emperor. Locked into a tiny manned torpedo that he was to ride into a chosen target, one of the American military vessels attacking Japan, he tragically failed to carry out his mission. The explosive device was not ignited by impact, and the mini-submarine took its pilot into a wet grave, allowing him, however, to write down his fi nal thoughts for posterity. The story clearly resonates widely with Eiji’s own experience, even if one leaves out the parallelism between the manner of dying that connects Anju with the great-uncle, who both drowned in the ocean. If one takes Freud’s note about the figure of an emperor seriously, then Eiji must have related to this story on the level of paternal obedience. When Subaru willingly accepts his own death in the service of the patriarchal Japanese emperor, Eiji cannot but realise that it also has its benefits not to live under the law of the father, at least not if that law is not benign. The importance—and potential threat—of paternalistic hierarchies is only brought home to him as he learns more about the values held by his forefathers. His paternal family, it transpires, takes great pride in the reputation of its family name and the fact that, proven by ownership of a historical sword, it goes back a long way in Japanese history. Yet his father turned out to be less interested in keeping family traditions alive, as demonstrated by his willingness to abandon his children when they challenged his fi nancial well-being. In other words, while his father had also broken free from the limitations imposed upon him by paternal order, he had only done so in an attempt to increase his own leisurely lifestyle, willingly accepting that his own advantage was bought at the expense of his (extra-marital) family’s

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sense of cohesion and structural integrity. Seen this way, the father’s refusal to follow tradition is shown as an extreme position that, through the experience of his children, is presented as in need of reversal. Eiji is further reminded of the potential harm done by parents to their children’s well-being when Ai wins a prestigious fellowship to study music in Paris, only to be told by her father that he will not allow her to accept it. Ai is told that she is “wrecking the family harmony” (313) and soon after alludes to Freud’s family romance when she tells Eiji that she can now “see the appeal” of why some children “fantasize that their parents are not their real parents” (313). Just a few pages earlier, Eiji was wondering whether he would have been able to obey the parental order of the emperor and meekly go to his death on a military mission: “Could I have calmly stayed in an iron whale cruising towards my death?” (310). The pointlessness of such an endeavour, here implicitly linked to the unnecessary death of his sister on the whale stone by calling the small submarine a whale, only serves to show the oftentimes cruel treatment that parents hand out to their children. Even Eiji’s uncle Subaru seems to have undergone a final change of mind: as he was slowly asphyxiating in his submerged weapon, he wrote a song for his brother, Eiji’s grandfather. Tellingly, his last words are thus addressed neither to the emperor nor to their father, but to Takara, his addressee throughout his diary writing. The fi nal lines—“Learn this song, Takara?” (316)—are introduced with a question mark, potentially indicating how his previous conviction that his suicidal mission was an honourable task is now fading. The song ends with the line: “We shall die, we shall die, we shall die for the emperor, and we shall never look back” (316, emphasis in original). Subaru’s questioning of his past subservience to the patriarchal hierarchies parallels Eiji’s own gradual realisation that to desire the presence of parents is also to submit oneself to their rules and regulations.6 By very cautiously moving beyond that realm, Subaru points the direction for Eiji’s own eventual process of personal maturation. For much of the novel, however, Eiji’s attitude to the past is decidedly different, and his desperate need to look back permanently at his traumatic childhood experiences defi nes his actions.7 While Subaru’s diary in effect offers him a treasured object with which to remember his paternal grandfather, who by his own admission was still looking for “meaning” despite his advanced age (275), it also works as a lesson to free himself of his desire for parental guidance. It is in this spirit also that Eiji comments about how his great-uncle would have responded to the Americanisation of Japanese popular culture, speculating that his reaction might well be “that this Japan is not the Japan he did die for” (310, emphasis in original). In effect, what the post–world war story offers as a teachable moment is that it does not always make sense to die for an ideology and family tradition. The narrative closure promised by the conventional family romance is here turned into an abysmal betrayal that, far from offering a passageway beyond the phase of acting out of the traumatic past, in fact repeats the experience of

130 Gerd Bayer painful wounding. By abandoning the generic (and psychoanalytical) conventions of the novel of development and the family romance, Mitchell’s novel unsettles readerly expectations and at the same time makes visible the ethical implications, not to mention potential culpability, that an unquestioning commitment to these forms creates under specific circumstances. In the end, the engagement with trauma that Number9Dream evokes relies substantially on a readerly attitude that willingly addresses the ethical implications following established narrative patterns. Any commitment to abstract ideas becomes particularly questionable in a discursive context where the very relevance of the social reality from which they emanate is being questioned, or rather, where the medialised forms of representation on which they are built are brought into play. Such a scenario is envisioned in the video-game-dominated Japan evoked in Mitchell’s novel, further adding to the text’s formal hybridity. This facet of Number9Dream in fact substantiates what Geoff rey H. Hartman has argued about the effects of a highly medialised society, where invented realities have become so omnipresent that “a general weakening of the sense of reality” has led to an effect that Hartman terms “derealization” (240). It is noteworthy that Eiji may well be said to be living within a hyper-real environment in that his apartment is located upstairs from a video rental place and that computer games frequently encroach on his sense of reality. Yet his most direct encounter with excessive physical violence, when he witnesses the massive show-down between different yakuza clans, leaves him stunned, deaf, and speechless. As he is subsequently hiding in a suburban home, trying to recover from the experience,8 his senses return only slowly, testifying to the fact that reality, properly experienced, is anything but “derealized” in Hartman’s sense of the term. However, and rather tellingly, this highly physical encounter remains entirely unmentioned by the national media, almost making him believe that he had only imagined it. The secretiveness of yakuza culture thus assigns to reality the kind of elusiveness that Eiji otherwise fi nds in virtual realities. The fi nal outcome of this event can thus yet again be argued to heighten an overall sense of virtuality that sets the narrative on a par with the games Eiji likes playing, thus subverting the realistic Bildungsroman pattern that governs Eiji’s narrative structure. Other scenes in Number9Dream also emphasise that the borders between the virtual and the real are as porous as those between waking and dreaming: at the end of the novel, Eiji takes his revenge on the yakuza by sending information about their criminal actions through a highly sophisticated email virus that automatically passes on data to its recipients’ address books. The effect of Eiji turning himself into a “plague-spreader” (378), though not discussed in the novel (unless one were to read the closing earthquake as an allegorical shake-up of Tokyo’s crime culture), relies on the immateriality of virtual forms of communication. With the anonymous sender untraceable, though with readers in their hundreds taking the

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content seriously, authorship becomes unimportant, even virtual, yet the potential impact of Eiji’s mail is indeed very high. This fi nal (electronic) letter eventually reconnects to the novel’s overall search for paternity and the rather unique family romance in which Eiji fi nds himself looking for a true parent. On more than one level, Eiji had adopted the yakuza clan boss as a surrogate father figure,9 a move that has very negative consequences for the young quester. It is only logical, then, that in fi nally rejecting both his biological father and his latent yakuza serfdom through the mass email he sends, Eiji should not claim the position of authorship that would have identified him as the (paternal) origin of a particular statement. In the case of his father, Eiji’s rejection is only communicated to Ai (and of course the readers), leaving his father ignorant of the true identity of the late-night pizza-delivery boy. And in the case of the yakuza mail, Eiji withdraws into the virtual unreality of anonymous mass email. Both gestures speak to a certain element of reserved non-authority: an unwillingness to claim the powerful position of father that goes with signed or clearly identified fi rst-person speech. Seen this way, the kind of derealisation that Hartman critically addresses may also include positive features in that it allows subjects too closely enmeshed in traumatising pasts to sever the ties to a particular memory through resorting to impersonal and unreal forms of communication. Rather than having to face their trauma and risk being re-traumatised, derealised forms of unrealised contact can offer subjects the kind of agency that chooses not to identify with speech. The refusal to play along with the paternal and authorial claim to authority echoes Eiji’s growing realisation that his own regressive path towards a nostalgically desired family romance was misdirected as it only stood to expose him once again to the original trauma of parental betrayal.

STEPPING OUT OF A CONVENTIONAL TALE On a formal level, this kind of derealisation appears in many contemporary post-postmodern literary texts that deal with questions of trauma. The kind of “traumatic realism” that Michael Rothberg describes in the book by the same title as a structural response to the excessive “demands of extremity” (14) appears in Mitchell’s novel not only in the shape of the video games and the pervasive sense of virtuality mentioned above, but also through the complex interweaving of waking and dreaming stages that allow readers to engage with Eiji’s various forms of traumatised pasts on an epistemological level that leaves the ontological reality of these experiences very much in doubt. As readers, we are frequently not quite sure whether what Eiji narrates are retellings of his dream life or memories from actual past experiences. To confuse matters even further, some of the most clearly stated descriptions of Eiji’s traumatic incidents occur in dreamlike states. A minor character in the novel offers an explanation for this merging

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of realities: as Eiji is travelling through Japan, he meets a mysterious old woman who tells him that “[d]reams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter” (394).10 What this comment on the liminality of strictly defined ontological borders suggests is that alternate states of reality—be they dreams, virtual spheres, or literary works—frequently exist exactly within the reality to which they purportedly offer alternatives. It is through such alternative forms of speech that trauma fi nds a way to be heard, as in the two scenes when Eiji’s friend Suga involuntarily reveals his own personal trauma. The fi rst part plays out in the men’s room at their place of work, where Eiji hears his colleague enter the cubicle next to his and speak to himself, assuming to be in the room by himself: “I don’t wanna remember, I don’t wanna remember. Can’t make me. Won’t make me. Forget it! Forget it! Forget it!” (54, emphasis in original). The words remain unexplained and uncommented by Eiji, who hears Suga add: “It wasn’t my fault. Could have happened to anyone. To anyone. Don’t listen to them” (54–55). Much later in the novel, Suga one night arrives rather drunk on Eiji’s doorstep and blabs what has caused his lasting and traumatic sense of guilt: “Miyake. Saw. Heard. Audiovshl. Car. Brakes. Littlkid. Wham, wham, wham. Flew, littlkid, flew like a baggashopping, ber-latt, bowlingball, bloodontheroad, markerpen.” He adds that he “Ran, Miyake, nverstppt never, run, Suga run, you MUR-DER-RER” (296). When Suga fi nally collapses into sleep, Eiji comments in a separate paragraph that, in its entirety, reads: “I see” (296). Having struggled with his own sense of guilt over the death of his sister, Eiji can easily sympathise with the mental turmoil that pesters Suga. There is no further mention of this incident beyond Suga insisting to Eiji the next morning that he is prone to say strange things when he is drunk: “If I said anything, there wasn’t, y’know, a word of truth in it. Pure bull. Everything I said. Or may have said” (302). Foreclosing any further discussion on the topic, Suga thus reveals that he is incapable of facing up to the reality of his own past. Even when drunk, his coded reference to a film that delights, formally, on manipulating cinematic evidence—with the “run, Suga run” evoking Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump (1994)—plays with the derealised nature of both memory and storytelling. The engagement with actual traumatic pasts is thus related to a level that is removed from proper (diegetic) reality. The same diegetic gesture is worked through Eiji’s forms of remembering, when the narrator falls asleep at the very end of the book and, in the resulting dream, for once unmistakably envisions and faces the painful memory of his sister’s death by water: “I dream a girl, drowning, alone without a word of complaint. I dream her young body, passed between waves and currents, until it dissolves into blue and nothing remains” (417). Tellingly, this narrativisation of his traumatic memory does not qualify as the kind of making-conscious that the talking cure advises as a means to abreact the repressed affects. Like a work of art, Eiji’s dream instead provides the kind of aesthetic experience that allows the suffering

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subject to approach traumatic memories in a manner that is supportive of mental healing. Like Number9Dream in general, this particular scene also demonstrates Mitchell’s extensive formal attempt to combine various narrative forms as a means to envision possible responses to traumatic memories. Aspects such as the virtual game realities, the surviving diary of Eiji’s great-uncle, the son’s not-quite-realised quest for the lost parent, and the dreamlike return of his repressed memories in this scene all show that Mitchell is searching at the limits of form to represent potential strategies for engaging with both the personal and the collective traumas of the long twentieth century. These paths to reconciliation must, however, bypass a number of conventional narratives about family, culture, love, or national identity. In other words, these narrative complexes frequently stand in the way of a subject’s active engagement with past traumas and therefore have to be abandoned. Eiji is woken from this dream by a radio announcement that tells of a major earthquake in Tokyo, and he immediately fears for the safety of his girlfriend, Ai. He imagines the city as “a landscape of rubble under clouds of cement dust” (417), as the kind of wasteland that, along with the already mentioned death by water and the frequent presence of thunder through its eponymous deity, evokes T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Yet even here, one notices a remarkable level of restraint, an unwillingness to address traumatic memories directly. At the same time, Eiji’s immediate response to Ai’s situation of need signifies that he is increasingly able to respond emotionally to his environment, suggesting that the debilitating power of blocked affect is losing its grip. It is equally striking, yet formally fitting, that Mitchell should remain uncannily silent about the most horrifically wasted land in Japan, namely, the cities that were hit by nuclear bombs in August 1945. When Eiji travels across the islands to visit his mother, his various memories and dreams are interrupted by the mention of motorway exits as they are being passed. The name “Hiroshima” is reduced to a mere passing note (390), reminding readers of the insistence, in Lui’s discussion with Elle, in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959), that: “You saw nothing in Hiroshima.”11 In bypassing the significance of Hiroshima for the collective traumas of Japanese twentieth-century history, Mitchell, in his rhetorical engagement with his readers, draws attention to the kinds of individual traumas described in his novel, like losing a family member, that, in their totality, make up collective traumas.12 This move to the collective nature of trauma at the same time provides a prismatic comment on the supposedly essential nature of the family romance. Far from subscribing to the Freudian notion of the wholesomeness of such narratives, Mitchell’s characters experience the desire for lost parents in a context where they cannot relate back to memories of early childhood peace and harmony. The very core of the family romance, the stable reliance and trust in the paternal figures, is absent in these scenarios, suggesting that the narrative logic of the family romance is not a universal plot line to be followed at all

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costs. In the context of abusive or unloving parents, the very desire for a family romance inevitably creates a returning motion to the sites of traumatic memories. In the novel, the protagonist’s sublimated need for paternalistic family values, at a historical moment where these values are ostensibly connected to both personal and cultural experiences of pain and suffering, is presented in a rather negative light. Eiji’s gradual realisation that he does not have to reinstate his absent parents suggests that some traumas are best left untold, and some family romances inconclusive. In breaking up the narrative logic of the family romance, Eiji finally comes to realise that his personal childhood did not provide him with the kind of positive memories that Freud has quietly assumed to be the norm. Mitchell’s novel thus demonstrates that the conventions of the family romance may in some cases prevent a proper narrative engagement with traumatic memories and thereby overinscribe the talking cure with a plot that does not allow patients to abreact their emotional traumas. Form and content both support this reading: in the same way that the novel as a whole resists conventional formal patterns, the psychological dynamics test the limits of trauma logic through a confrontation between, on the one hand, a family romance that promises a deceitful and escapist materialisation of paternal care and, on the other, a bundle of childhood traumas that demand from Eiji to break with that past and with all emotional ties to his family. As he begins to lay out possible pathways for his future narratives that are tied to his current needs and interests, albeit carefully constructed around the fears, hopes, and anxieties of those, like Ai, directly affected by them, Eiji improvises with a response to traumatic memories that moves beyond the talking cure and finds in decisive action and emancipatory maturity a pathway beyond the entrapping circularity of traumatic narratives. As readers of Number9Dream identify with Eiji and his quest for emotional stability, they have to acknowledge that the novel invites them to become conscious of the dangers of overidentification with narratives of family, of guilt, and of the nation. The formal elusiveness of Mitchell’s narrative sketches some possible trajectories within this ethical situation, where an engagement with personal trauma needs to negotiate the traumatic memories within a conventionalised narrative environment that is not always conducive to the needs of the individual. Just like the family romance as a generic and cultural convention fails Eiji in his search for healing, readers are made keenly aware of the dangers of such formal constraints. In breaking up these patterns, the novel considers possible scenarios of ethically responsible narrating beyond the limits of established forms. NOTES 1. Sarah Dillon (5–6) has argued that Mitchell’s work should be read as a continuous work of art or a “house of fiction,” something that the various crossreferences and cameos of characters from different novels easily justifies. This aspect of Mitchell’s novels is also discussed by Schoene (116).

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2. This unusual nexus raises the question of where the origin of Eiji’s family romance narrative lies: according to Freud’s explanation, the longing for “perfect” parents merely forms a return to a childhood attitude, something that in Eiji’s case can be ruled out. Unless one assumes that the Freudian family romance is somehow a Jungian archetype and thus stems from the collective unconscious, the most obvious origin is clearly the author, who created a character without a happy childhood but, inexplicably, with a desire to reconnect to a state he never experienced in the fi rst place. 3. Kaplan (173) notes that the fantasy of the family romance frequently relates to a sublimated desire for a sibling and thus serves as a means of avoiding the illegitimate incestuous desire. Simpson (74n22) points out that Eiji’s masturbatory fantasies over Zizzi, who is later equated with Anju, border on admitting his incestuous desire for his sister. 4. Such cross-generational traumatic flow is the topic of much of Marianne Hirsch’s writing; see Hirsch; Bayer. 5. On the spectre and the phantom in recent philosophical and literary debates, see Davis. 6. Writing about a different Mitchell novel, Carol Watts (161) notes, quite appropriately for the present argument, that there, too, “the storytelling function ostensibly frees voices to speak against the historical grain of violence and disenfranchisement.” 7. Mitchell’s novel could thus be seen as following Blanchot’s tradition in that it discusses “what remains after loss” (Boulter 8). 8. This scene stands as Mitchell’s comments on the major twentieth-century “crises of testimony”; see Felman and Laub. It also echoes Caruth’s comment “that in trauma the greatest confrontation with reality may also occur as an absolute numbing to it” (1995, 6). 9. Eiji only gradually realised that he committed a “stupendous mistake” when he confused the yakuza clan chief, called “father,” with his own father (166). Throughout the novel, Eiji in fact builds relationships with various father figures: “All of these offer dramatically differing versions of, and perspectives on, the father-son relationship and on the tale he thinks he is telling of his quest for his father” (Simpson 55). Boulter sees in the various father figures “Oedipal themes” (123). 10. The “Study of Tales” section of Number9Dream ends with a dual statement that offers a similar form of mutually interdependent points of contact: “Reality is the page. Life is the word” (267). 11. The fi lm has accompanied trauma studies from its very beginning, featuring prominently in Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience. 12. Rothberg has convincingly argued in Multidirectional Memory that particular narratives of trauma have recently begun to move into other cultural and ethnic contexts, allowing for greater dialogue between what hitherto had been very narrowly “owned” by testimonial memories.

WORKS CITED Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Nicholas, T. Rand. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Print. Backus, Margot Gayle. “‘Looking for That Dead Girl’: Incest, Pornography, and the Capitalist Family Romance in Nightwood, The Years, and Tar Baby.” American Imago 51.4 (1994): 421–45. Print.

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. The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999. Print. Bayer, Gerd. “After Postmemory: Holocaust Cinema and the Third Generation.” Shofar 28.4 (2010): 116–32. Print. Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995. Print. Boulter, Jonathan. Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, Memory, and History in the Contemporary Novel. London: Continuum, 2011. Print. Caruth, Cathy. “Introduction.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 3–12. Print. . Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print. Davis, Colin. “État présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms.” French Studies 59.3 (2005): 373–9. Print. Dillon, Sarah, ed. David Mitchell: Critical Essays. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2011. Print. Douglas, Ann. “The Dream of the Wise Child: Freud’s ‘Family Romance’ Revisited in Contemporary Narratives of Horror.” Prospects 9 (1984): 293–348. Print. Eliot, T. S. “The Waste Land.” 1922. The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. 59–80. Print. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “The Family Romance.” 1909. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. IX. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1959. 235–41. Print. Freud, Sigmund, and Joseph Breuer, “On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication.” 1893. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. II (1893–95). Ed. and trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson. London: Vintage, 2001. 3–17. Print. Hartman, Geoff rey H. “Public Memory and Modern Experience.” Yale Journal of Criticism 6.2 (1992): 239–47. Print. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. Print. Kaplan, Linda Joan. “The Concepts of the Family Romance.” Psychoanalytic Review 61.2 (1974): 169–202. Print. Mitchell, David. Number9Dream. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2001. Print. . Cloud Atlas. London: Sceptre, 2004. Print. . Black Swan Green. London: Sceptre, 2006. Print. . The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. London: Sceptre, 2011. Print. Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Print. . Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010. Print. Schoene, Berthold. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009. Print. Simpson, Kathryn. “‘Or Something like That’: Coming of Age in Number9Dream.” David Mitchell: Critical Essays. Ed. Sarah Dillon. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2011. 49–76. Print. Watts, Carol. “On Conversation.” Literature and the Visual Media. Ed. David Seed. Cambridge: Brewer, 2005. 142–62. Print.

8

“circling and circling and circling . . . whirligogs” A Knotty Novel for a Tangled Object Trauma in Will Self’s Umbrella Georges Letissier

Will Self is renowned for his use of “dirty magical realism” (Coe and Self, 2003, 44–46, my translation), that is, the skilful delineation of quotidian details mixed with the fantastic, especially through transmogrification conceived of as inherent in the human condition. His satirical representations of the body, combining the grotesque and the burlesque, partake of a Swiftian vein, which may be found in many of his early fictions and is blatant in his novel Great Apes. However, the naturalist reduction of humans to their organic or physiological functions, such as the species reversal between man and chimpanzee, does not merely work at the allegorical level. It also tells something about the intrinsic deprivation attached to the human condition; the utter disregard for the complex rituals of grooming and touch which places “chimpunity” (1998, vii) at a higher level of civilisation when, by contrast, humans are reduced to some kind of species neuroticism. Thus the weird and the grotesque ultimately serve an ethical purpose. So far, Self has been remembered chiefly for his visceral, radical, and uncompromising fiction writing, picturing weird scenes such as in Cock and Bull, a set of twin stories, where a dull housewife grows a penis whilst the editor of a hearty magazine section fi nds himself with a vagina in the pit behind one of his knees. In his early fictions Self thus evinced a propensity to feature kinky, abnormal scenes while sticking to rather traditional forms of writing, ranging from tall tales to ribald shaggy-dog stories. However, with The Book of Dave and The Butt, the provocative author was to experiment with new forms of writing and, in Umbrella, probably his most ambitious novel to date, he confi rms this tendency by selecting High Modernism as an aesthetic model. His work becomes more ambitious on the matter of form, by shifting from the representation of excess within conventional diegetic frames to the acknowledgement of excess as the incontrovertible condition of fiction writing in a traumatic age. The latter can only accommodate limit-case narratives, that is, narratives constantly exceeding pre-existing frames in their attempt to remain veridical to emotional consciousness. In a sense, this new direction is not fundamentally different from “dirty magical

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realism” as in both cases Self is intent on showing how the commonsensical world interpenetrates with the fantastic world, yet what becomes decisive in Umbrella is the attempt to locate this tension at a more intimate level through the introspective mode. Umbrella falls under the category of fictional, literary trauma narrative as it is not founded on direct testimonies. Even if Self’s previous fictions occasionally drew from the author’s personal traumatic experiences related to drug addiction, illness, and madness, Umbrella approaches the issue of trauma from another angle and a much wider perspective, by fictitiously reconstructing history in a traumatic age, a task already toyed with in The Book of Dave. By mixing the personal and the collective and blending veracious events and imaginary episodes, the novelist singles out liminal situations symptomatic of an age of excess: from the squalor of the First World War trenches in Flanders and the evocation of encephalitis lethargica (EL)—a rare pathology challenging classifications—to the pathetic description of the Learesque rambling of a senescent psychopathologist. But, as this chapter wishes to demonstrate, it is not so much in the depiction of extreme occurrences that Umbrella’s experimentalism resides as in the deeply felt necessity to revive High Modernism—High Modernism at one remove, as it were—so as to articulate a profoundly interiorised personal and collective experience proving relevant to the here and now. The fact that the limit-case paradigm is to be found within the act of writing itself in this unabashedly difficult novel, constantly poised on the brink of the unintelligible, is evidenced by the concept of the “knot,” which will be held as seminal throughout this study: “circling and circling and circling . . . whirligogs” (115, emphasis in original). Given that Self has repeatedly acknowledged Ronald David Laing’s influence in his fiction writing, notably through Zachary Busner’s experiment in running a therapeutic community following the Scottish psychiatrist’s principles,1 and that he reintroduces “Ronnie Laing” (10) in the fi rst pages of his latest novel, the centrality of the concept of the “knot” will be considered with all due care as especially relevant. Precisely in Knots, published in 1970, Laing presents the diverse meanings encapsulated in this visual and polysemic notion: The patterns delineated here have not yet been classified by a Linnaeus of human bondage. They are all, perhaps, strangely, familiar. In these pages I have confined myself to laying out only some of those I actually have seen. Words that come to mind to name are: knots, tangles, fankles, impasses, disjunctions, whirligogs, binds. (epigraph n.p., emphasis in original)2

The knot image appealed to Laing’s phenomenological sensibility and his anti-psychiatric commitment at odds with the rational, classificatory

A Knotty Novel for a Tangled Object Trauma 139 approach endorsed by mainstream psychotherapy. Besides, the reference to knots afforded unprecedented insights into the complexity of human interrelationship and, more particularly, into the interconnectedness of affect and relationality, favouring an energetic conception of the subject. Moreover, knots blur the dichotomous partition lines between the inside and the outside, the psychic and the social, the material and the ephemeral. Interestingly, the concept of knot has been taken up by Roger Luckhurst to account for psychic trauma, which he views as “an exemplary conceptual knot whose successful permeation must be understood by the impressive range of elements that it ties together and which allows it to travel to such diverse places in the network of knowledge” (14). Luckhurst is indebted to Bruno Latour, the French epistemologist who investigated contemporary phenomena such as ozone holes, global warming, and mad cow disease, for example, to argue that these phenomena straddle divisions between the natural and the man-made and tangle up questions of science, law, technology, capitalism, politics, medicine, and risk. Furthermore, Luckhurst propounds the analogy between knot and trauma on the grounds that the latter offers a typical example of a “tangled object” (14) as it is open to contentious debates bearing among other things on its “enigmatic causation and strange effects” and that it “bridge[s] the mental and the physical, the individual and collective” (15). The structural significance of this nodal element to explore trauma is further exemplified by the very words Luckhurst uses to state the purpose of his seminal study, The Trauma Question: “I propose we need to begin by unravelling the complex elements that have been knotted into the notion of trauma” (15). The aim of this chapter is to establish the isotopy (understood both as semantic repetition and common direction of interpretation) between Umbrella, a knotty, entangled fiction, and the subject that undergirds it, that is, trauma as “tangled objects” or “hybrid assemblages” (Latour qtd. in Luckhurst 14), granted that, unlike the critic, the novelist is probably bent on ravelling and twining rather than untying. This tight interlacing between matter and form makes of Umbrella a limit-case narrative for a medical/psychopathological conundrum: EL, which may be construed as emblematic of the powerlessness of science to provide definite answers in an age of trauma. Four strands will be explored successively, without any pretence to unravel the trauma cum fiction knot. Firstly, the textual fabric will come in for attention to argue that cerebration reflects a state of internalised chaos eschewing the usual narratorial landmarks, which brings the novel on the verge of collapse. Secondly, the topic of EL will be construed as the gaping hole whose proliferating absence somehow confuses any cutand-dried distinction between the tangible and the immaterial, the real and the fantastic, the actual and the spectral. Thirdly, Self’s endeavour to call up a historical sense from a highly subjective perspective through the use of the continuous present in a fiction spanning over a century, from the late Victorian age to 2010, will be investigated. And fi nally, it will be shown

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that the twining of intertextual strands and other cultural sources, which may not all have been textual originally, re-establishes the possibility of an empathic bond between reader and text in a—superficially at least—forbidding fiction that is likely to constitute an alienating experience.

TRAUMA AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE NOVEL Umbrella is a cerebral fiction in more senses than one; not only is it concerned with intellectual reflection, but it also endows the brain with corporeal, physical existence. Hence the inner mind versus outer space dichotomy is abolished since places are called up in terms of cerebral interiority following what Self has often described as his passion for psychogeography (Hayes 182–3, 186–7). From the outset, Friern Barnet mental hospital, where Zachary Busner works as a psychiatrist, is depicted as if there were no distinctions between the patients’ brains and the space they occupy: “inside the patients’ bony-stony heads, their cerebral corridors and cortical dormitories” (Self 2012, 4, emphasis in original). This comment stemming from Busner’s own train of thoughts elicits a number of initial remarks. First of all, Umbrella should be read as a High Modernist fiction with a slant. Indeed, the deeply subjective perspective typical of the Modernist aesthetic is given a physical, anatomical turn, granted that the mind is not only the seat of the (un/sub)conscious, but also a spatial entity in a fiction that is shaped as cerebral architecture. For example, the free association of ideas, which is the hallmark of Modernist fiction, is tangibly expressed through a set of imbricated spaces and it is of course no coincidence that Self should refer both to Cantor’s infi nite sets: “maps of maps of maps” (43, emphasis in original), and to Mercator’s projection (160). When Busner looks back on his previous assignments, the mental act of reminiscing is actualised by telescoping different institutions occupying a space of their own in the different chambers of his brain (132). Such telescopic imbrication blurs cerebration and perambulation and makes of Umbrella not just a spatial and temporal journey, which is by and large what all novels are about, but an incursion into the brain, including the pathology of the brain. Indeed, Umbrella shows subjectivity as profoundly rooted in physiology, notably by insisting upon the enslaving power of the machine in the mechanistic age. This is one aspect of the traumatic condition of modern man which Self underscores in this fiction. What the novelist calls the “man–machine matrix” (Testard n.p.) is immediately perceptible thanks to a typically futurist vignette when Busner drives to the hospital in the fi rst few pages. The doctor perceives himself as the Siamese double of his own car as he feels that the piston hammers at his coccyx or that the crankshaft turns his pelvis round. What could seem bathetic at fi rst takes on a more serious dimension later when the chain work of the munitionettes on the

A Knotty Novel for a Tangled Object Trauma 141 assembly line entails the clockwork repetition of gestures and, ultimately, nervous tic disorders and uncontrolled body movements. 3 In Umbrella the omnipresence of this very physical subjectivity engulfs all that is represented: temporal layers, the social, the historical, the personal, the interpersonal, the conscious and the unconscious, the tangible and the fantastic, without any attempt at establishing hierarchies between these different planes of experience or ontological levels. At fi rst glance, the fiction strikes the reader on account of its being (un)shaped as a whole raw chunk, or narrative block, totally devoid of chapter divisions, or cuts between paragraphs, let alone standard punctuation marks. The novel thus offers a typical example of what could be a limit-case narrative, or texte limite (Barthes 91), as it sets “a radical and even utopian challenge to a politically normative realism” (Gibson 92). The multiplicity of the sources it draws from (from warfare in the trenches to the technicalities of ammunition production and the stultifying medical jargon to counteract stark facts) precludes neat classifications and traditional spatio-temporal bearings. Therefore the text sprawls rhizomatically, sprouting narrative shoots in the process and the printed page is subjected to what amounts to dehiscence when meaning is discharged from one single isolated word ushering a logic of its own: “paraldehyde, a liquid sedative [ . . . ] paraldehyde . . . paral- . . . parados! that was the word for it—the side of the trench where they stood” (Self 2012, 6–7, emphasis in original). Almost imperceptibly, from the sole impetus of a word opening itself out on the page, a diegetic leap is linguistically performed from the booby hatch to the battlefield. Significantly, Umbrella is a centrifugal fiction bursting at the seams and constantly threatening to dissolve itself out. This extreme narrative situation, on the brink of implosion, is particularly effective to convey a traumatic condition. Like a number of other contemporary fictions, Umbrella partakes of what Mark Seltzer has defi ned as the “pathological public sphere” (3) which cements contemporary society around a culture of trauma, or “wound culture” (3). However, Self forestalls the risk of trivialising trauma culture by not confi ning his novel to the post-traumatic aftermath of troubled history after two world wars and the ensuing desire to forget. His fiction addresses the bite of the wound as much as the compulsion to repeat which follows in its wake. First, the traumatic condition is all pervasive: for instance, when Busner mentally assimilates Friern Barnet’s dormitories and corridors with the cerebral configuration of the mental patients who haunt them, he does not dissociate himself from this topological analogy as he too happens to be at the very same moment implied in a spatial/mental journey of his own. Caught up in the traffic jam on his way to the hospital, he too is trapped in this loop: “a North Circular of the Soul” (Self 2012, 4, emphasis in original). What the reader soon figures out is that no character escapes unscathed from this communality of trauma. For example, it will be progressively revealed that Mark, Busner’s eldest son, is in community

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care, because of mental problems and, in the novel’s coda, there is the fleeting, albeit unbearable image of the dead body of Busner’s schizophrenic brother, Henry, who killed himself at fi fty-two, after fi fty years spent as a patient in different mental institutions (396). However, any daring experimentalism in fiction writing should have its own limits and natural regulations, dictated by the reader’s capacity of absorption: “At some level or other, novels cannot but adumbrate a common sphere, what criticism calls a ‘world’. A novel that dispensed with all consistencies that make a world—even supposing they are reducible to questions of naming—would no longer be a novel or be readable” (Gibson 103). Even if most of what is represented in Umbrella could be qualified as anomic, the apparent misshapenness is the result of premeditation and hard work and some aesthetic shape is perceptible through the influence of James Joyce’s Ulysses. But whereas the meeting between Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom occurs quite late in Joyce’s Modernist text, that between Zachary Busner—whom readers familiar with Self’s œuvre have known for a long time—and Audrey Death is detailed at some length in the novel’s fi rst pages. She is an inmate at Friern and he is a doctor, but somehow their encounter, couched in medical terms (Self 2012, 8), triggers flash reminiscences in Busner’s mind, fostered by their sudden proximity and embarrassing intimacy. Not only does the present moment fork out into different tracks that are potential narrative matrices, but it also imposes a situation of jarring privacy in the midst of an impersonal medical institution (8–9). The epiphanic instant of the chance encounter between doctor and patient, which is temporarily dilated and spread over thirty pages (8–38), intercut by sundry other passages, is expressed by means of a typical coiling, spiralling structure paradigmatic of Self’s approach throughout Umbrella. There is no fi xed anchoring point, no stable here and now, but a constantly mutating perspective interlacing different time layers, speech registers, and levels of enunciation. The flexible use of italics manifests the text’s polymorphism; polyphonic through the insertion of pop song lyrics, popular ditties, political slogans, snippets of conversation, and the transcription of vernacular, especially Cockney, but also metamorphic when discourse tails off into palilalia, echolalia, verbigeration, or, conversely, when periphrasis congeals into subtly minted neologisms such as “chloreography” (12), “timeitus” (31), or “Am I transcriptase?” (138, emphases in original). From Ulysses Self has obviously kept the stream of consciousness, haphazardly switching in the present instance between essentially three characters: Audrey Death, a former munitionette, who in the early 1970s has been an “enky” for nearly half a century; her brother Stanley, who died in the trenches during World War I; and, of course, Zachary Busner. Far from being artificial, or reducible to a Bergsonian attempt to get at the deep subjectivity of temporality, time disjunctions are the clear expression of trauma in Umbrella. In a novel spanning a whole century and two world wars, to say nothing of an all-permeating sense of impending doom,

A Knotty Novel for a Tangled Object Trauma 143 possibly derived from Catastrophe Theory, time acts like a ticking time bomb, liable at any point to catapult past, present and future: “Stuck in the present’s flesh are the looking glass fragments of a devastating explosion: a time-bomb was primed in the future and planted in the past” (14).

ENCEPHALITIS LETHARGICA: THE PRIMAL KNOT EL—an inflammation of the brain—is the wound, etymologically the trauma, at the core of Umbrella: “the originary meaning of trauma itself (in both English and German), the Greek trauma, or ‘wound’ originally referring to an injury inflicted on a body. In its later usage [ . . . ] the term trauma is understood as a wound infl icted not upon the body but upon the mind” (Caruth 3). First studied by Constantin von Economo, EL is a disease of unknown origins which affects the brain, the seat of consciousness, and may cause death or a state of prolonged catatonia approximating death for those unfortunate enough not to recover from it. Historically, it is linked to the fi rst great tragedy of the twentieth century, World War I, and, for that reason, it is remembered in the collective memory together with the epidemic of the Spanish flu and the butchery of the trenches: “they [the enkies] were simply another feature of the post-war scene—along with limbless ex-servicemen and economic stagnation” (Self 2012, 91). This illness, a tragic pathology in itself, may also emblematise the age of trauma, if only because as the “sleepy sickness”—its more common appellation—, it casts a pall over the universal mytheme expressing the natural cycle of death followed by rebirth, and which is best exemplified in our culture by the tale of Sleeping Beauty. In Umbrella, thanks to the L-DOPA treatment, the enkies do experience resipiscence, that is, a form of “unaccountable resurrection” (214), but the fact that their condition deteriorates drastically shortly after invalidates once and for all the possibility of the fairy-tale script in the age of trauma. Like psychic trauma, EL causes a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and world. Echoing this, Umbrella is built around a rupture, which is a gaping hole in the text’s fabric. Chronologically, the novel stretches from 26 September 1922, when Audrey Death is admitted to Friern Mental Hospital, to the 1980s. Audrey is fi rst admitted on the hazy assumption that she shows symptoms of catatonia, a diagnosis which is then altered in the following years to be replaced by Primary Dementia and Dementia Praecox. Yet the exact nature of her disease is never really understood. Except for the brief episode of a fast but transient recovery thanks to L-DOPA, Audrey remains immured in her catafalque body until she progressively falls into oblivion in the mists of time. In 2010, when Busner returns to a Friern Barnet that has been transformed into modern condos, Audrey only remains in the retired, ageing psychiatrist’s mind as a memory associated to his own sense of personal failure. Audrey’s pockets of silence, after and alongside

144 Georges Letissier long passages dedicated to her own stream of consciousness, puncture the text’s fabric. They impart a coiling structure to the narrative as the latter weaves around the tantalising unsaid of Audrey’s muted presence. The uncommon disease is a “tangled object” in Bruno Latour’s acceptation: “[it] fi rst appear[s] as [a] matter of concern, as [a] new entity that provoke[s] perplexity and thus speech in those who gather around [it], and argue over [it]” (2004, 66). Indeed, as Busner is keen to report, quoting one Dr Marcus, a doctor of the old school who knew better than to hastily countenance any idea of progress: “With the enkies one neurologist’s catalepsy was another psychiatrist’s catatonia—but anyway, it’s progress that’s the real delusion” (Self 2012, 90–91). If EL is a typical case of a concept binding together confl icting diagnoses, it then serves to substantiate an argument which Self, who has read both Thomas Szasz and Ronald David Laing, cannot refrain from repeating in Umbrella: “Then there was no mental illness to speak of, only different ways of looking at the world” (85). Said differently, this might lead to the corollary statement made by the novelist recently that: “sanity was—a bit like the realist novel—a socioculturally determined construct” (Testard n.p.). So EL inverts simultaneously the binary opposition between sanity and insanity, on the one hand, and aesthetic realism and literary experimentalism, on the other, by suggesting the primacy of the second term over the former. Indeed, the undecidability surrounding a rare pathology, which incidentally has remained unsolved to the present day, points up the arbitrary and mendacious nature of succeeding diagnoses and, by the same token, the highly contrived and meretricious conventions of literary realism. Ultimately, this might imply that this lack of fit between a disease and its scientific account, just as this lack of correspondence between reality and its representation, could be remedied by literary experimentation which strives to break pre-existing patterns and recover intellectual freshness by rejecting foundational philosophical concepts such as unity, essence, consistency, or teleology— often held as fundamental to fiction writing—to get as close as possible to the world of erratic events and relations. Indeed Self’s fiction attempts to achieve a form of sensitivity to personal and historical situations which must be understood prior to the interference of encoded forms of cognition or ideological premises. Interestingly, Umbrella is also concerned with exposing different ways of accessing and processing knowledge, such as Bertie’s, Audrey’s elder brother’s, prodigious calculating ability and eidetic memory; Gilbert Cook’s, Audrey’s lover’s, utopianism; and Audrey’s own sensory approach to the world, especially her responsiveness to colours and flowers (Self 2012, 306). This epistemological openness leading to an enlarging of horizons, forbidding the use of one single lens to fi lter the world, would, according to Andrew Gibson, testify to an ethical stance: “The movement from conceptual thought to the prephilosophical [ . . . ] is rather precisely a ‘movement,’ a practice and labour. The necessity for that labour is ethical” (89).

A Knotty Novel for a Tangled Object Trauma 145 In many respects, EL in(de)forms the novel and fulfi ls a catalyst function. In any case, notwithstanding its intrinsic negativity, it constitutes the fiction’s raison d’être. The fi rst obvious explanation, one which may easily pass unnoticed, is that Umbrella is a sequel to other fictions such as The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991) and Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe (2004) in which Self had already dealt with the question of insanity linked to dysfunctional communities. When Busner fi rst enters the fictitious world of Umbrella in 1971 he has just left Concept House in Willesden, which is evoked in Self’s previous short stories, because of his fading enthusiasm for alternative psychotherapy. The late discovery of the existence of such a disease as EL comforts Busner in what had been his non-conformist approach to psychotherapy for at least two reasons, his growing conviction that changing theories on mental diseases are invariably exerted to the detriment of vulnerable patients, and increasing evidence that there is a close tie between poverty and insanity (Self 2012, 91). Not that humour is totally excluded from Self’s last work, but it is defi nitely wry and caustic, as when newsreels of the enkies in their hyperkinetic phase invite comparisons with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or, more sarcastically, Lloyd George. A sense of fun is also found in the characterisation of Gilbert Cook, Audrey’s lover, an apostle of free love and contraceptive methods, whose body after his perfunctory lovemaking is described as: “an inert mechanism of cogs, springs, chains and ratchets” (75, emphasis in original). However, it is the very process of fiction writing itself which EL deeply in(de)forms, so that the proliferating impact of this gaping void determines the text’s structure. The use of the continuous present may be ascribed to the amnesia that is at the heart of the fiction through Audrey’s central presence/absence. As Self remarked, her consciousness is pretty much the canopy of the eponymous umbrella, so that when it is violently pulled back on account of her mentally incapacitating disease, the whole relation to time is both condensed and broken (Kellog n.p.). The effects of this temporal suspension come vividly to the fore when, thanks to L-DOPA, Audrey together with the other enkies, recovers her consciousness for a short spell. As in the biblical episode of the Resurrection of Lazarus (St John 11:1–44), the nearly miraculous recovery thanks to a medicine, which in Umbrella is not treated as providentially as in Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings and its fi lm adaptation, is like a return from the realm of death after a half-century slumber. More to the point, the break in the succession of years initiates a renewed temporal configuration consisting in substituting narrative verticality for horizontal linearity and causality. Said briefly, each present moment contains layered strata of temporality, the novel’s dynamics being triggered by the fact that in Audrey’s case this time palimpsest is inaccessible so that the different streams of consciousness, including Audrey’s own, prior to her illness and shortly during her momentary recovery, coil round this pit of temporal absence. This accounts for the repeated hints at the enkies’ inner cerebral

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crypts: “They [the enkies] are possessed he [Busner] thinks, by ancient subpersonalities, the neural building blocks of the psyche” (Self 2012, 13). In a study on Pat Barker’s Another World, Jean-Michel Ganteau has shown the tight links between the romance paradigm, through the Gothic trope in particular, and the repetitive action of trauma by referring to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s notion of “cryptophoria” (21). This cannot fail to bring to mind Audrey’s abiding habit to hoard (symbolic, transitional?) objects beneath her bed, a habit preserved from childhood and pursued through many long years till the end of her life. The nurses describe the hidden conical heap as “Shrine—or grotto?” (Self 2012, 47, emphasis in original). They may, however, be more aptly construed as objectal correlatives for an amputated future and past, within the limbo of an unceasing absent present. Indeed, with Self it is the High Modernist influence, more than the Gothic one, that is paramount. The transient awakening of the enkies opens the way for a form of excavation reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s reflections on what she designated as the “tunnelling process” (1954, 60). Whilst she was busy writing Mrs Dalloway, Woolf put to the test her intuition of the subterranean existence of caves behind characters connecting together individuals having no consciousness of each other’s existence. Through this technique, Septimus Warren Smith, the traumatised soldier shortly returned from the butchery of World War I, is revealed to share a common sensibility with Clarissa Dalloway, a fashionable lady of high society. Umbrella expands on this idea of the tunnelling process and pathologises it by using the Woolfian metaphor to adumbrate a phenomenological exploration of what the experience of EL might imply for those exposed to it. Once the enkies have rejoined, however shortly, their contemporaries from their benumbed state of oblivion, Busner is able to assemble from their different testimonies a vivid account of their subterranean selves: “the lowering underworld of the postencephalitic, wherein the myriad tics [ . . . ] acted to bore the tunnels and hollow out the burrows required by a multitude of subpersonalities—selflets” (Self 2012, 256).

TROGLODYTE HISTORY Self, like Alan Hollinghurst, though for different reasons, acknowledges the influence of Paul Fussell’s seminal The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) in writing Umbrella (Kellog n.p.). The American literary historian, who is chiefly remembered for his contention that the spirit of Modernism was born in World War I trenches, called up a vivid account of the “Troglodyte World” of the soldiers which resonates throughout Self’s novel (Fussell 36–74). What the English novelist and the American scholar share is the conviction that the very idea of the trenches, which has been gradually assimilated by metaphor and myth, is invested with a traumatic actuality which is still relevant to the (post)modern human condition.

A Knotty Novel for a Tangled Object Trauma 147 In Umbrella one single word often suffices to time-travel or leapfrog from one context to another, as has been shown previously with the slide from “paraldehyde”—a clinical nervous system depressant—to “parados,” “a parapet of earth or sandbags [  .  .  .  ] on top of the friendly side of a trench” (Fussell 41–42). Similarly, the Sisyphean circling of the inmates at the mental hospital coalesces with the weaving and turning along zigzagging trenches once Stanley Death fi nds himself in the thick of the war. Moreover, Friern Barnet patients in their hospital gowns are seen as “Musselmen” (8),4 a direct allusion to Primo Levi’s evocation of concentration camps in If This Is a Man. So the labyrinthine structure of Umbrella is not merely (pscho)geographic and spatial, it is primarily an endorsement of the traumatic condition of (post)modern human beings who need not be institutionalised, like Audrey, or conscripted, like her brother Stanley, to count among the weak and the doomed. As the most direct presence, Busner through his all-permeating stream of consciousness framing the novel on both ends, bears witness to this multilevelled consciousness, including sub-selves, which puts him on a par with the enkies whom he tends: “Along comes Zachary .  .  . the me voice, the voice about me, in me, that’s meier than me .  .  . so real, ab-so-lute-ly, that might not self-consciousness itself be only a withering away of full-blown psychosis?” (Self 2012, 7–8, emphasis in original). On top of blurring the dividing line between sanity and insanity, Busner’s voice contains other levels of selfhood and tends asymptotically towards an ipseity that does not close itself against the threat of mental disorder, as with the Cartesian ego, but instead defi nes itself through a possible filiation with psychosis: “a withering away of full blown psychosis.” Through these successive embeddings: “me-ier than me” and inner burrowings: “the me voice [ . . . ] in me,” Busner’s “me” is artesian, an adjective pointing towards a French region that was crisscrossed by trench lines which, though they have been filled in since, still bring back to their surface vestiges from World War I. These subterranean resurgences may have something to say about Busner’s embroilment in “a continuous present, an awful and unchanging Now” (235, emphasis in original), as will be shown in the fi nal part. Fussell points up the occasionally farcical aspect of trench warfare with, for instance, directional and traffic control signs parodying modern city life and this is a detail that Self recalls when Stanley is on the verge of mental collapse: “stupid fucking signs: Leicester Square, Piccadilly—Fulham Road too” (229, emphasis in original). Umbrella testifies to Self’s maverick sense of the incongruous in yet another way, which might be interpreted with hindsight as a last-ditch effort to countervail the absurdist horrors of war. Adopting a new take on a plot of afterlife and interaction between the quick and the dead which he had already put to the test in his previous fictions (“The North London Book of the Dead” in The Quantity Theory of Insanity and How the Dead Live), the author imagines that once Stanley Death has been wiped off the face of the earth he starts a new, subterranean

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life among a host of unfortunate fellow soldiers from all ranks and nationalities known as the “troglodytes” (315). Their post-mortem existence is a good index of Self’s iconoclastic sense of utopia as all these sacrificed combatants lead an anarchic life underground: “no longer trammelled by rank, king-emperor, Kaiser, or their patrie in any shape” (326). They are no longer answerable to the dictates and conventions of those who have stayed above ground and can give free rein to their own creativity by building up true fraternal relationships transcending cultural barriers. The description of this troglodytic community, or commune, constantly on the move in makeshift subterranean galleries below the shell holes of the new no-man’s land is not immune from tongue-in-cheek comments, though. To convey Stanley’s perfunctory acceptance of Grecian Love, ribald comments are dropped in passing: “This was the way you unfi xed your bayonet in the eternal eventime” (326, emphasis in original). However this parenthetical stasis in the bowels of the earth is not a mere escapist episode. It may be seen as a variation upon what Fussell presents as the prospect of a never-ending war which long after the exhilaration fi rst following conscription turned into an obsession and ushered in once and for all a new approach to what became increasingly seen as the destiny of mankind in a new era: One did not have to be a lunatic or a particularly despondent visionary to conceive quite seriously that the war would literally never end and would become the permanent condition of mankind. The stalemate and the attrition would go on infi nitely, becoming, like the telephone and the internal combustion engine, a part of the accepted atmosphere of the modern experience. (71) This is the momentous turning point which Self captures by drawing a meandering line from the chain work of the munitionettes to the traumatised sensibility of the troglodytes leading an improbable afterlife notwithstanding the weight of aftershock and PTSD. What could have been a utopian escape is in fact a suspension of the course of history at the point when two evenly matched armies respectively cancel their defence and offence to nought (330) in a state of lethal absolute stasis.

NOTHING COMES OF NOTHING Like Joyce’s Ulysses or Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Umbrella is a peripatetic city novel. It consists of walks within walks and maps within maps, which is perfectly in keeping with its embedded structure. Busner’s last journey to what used to be Friern Hospital, on a sunny April day of 2010, affords clear narrative and topographic landmarks. But a number of other displacements are also called up in this fiction of London bearing the stigmata of time.

A Knotty Novel for a Tangled Object Trauma 149 Audrey’s childhood in the East End is partly drawn, as Self himself pointed out (Kellog n.p.), from Jack London’s The People of the Abyss, which is an anthropological exploration of London’s urban deprived areas in 1902. The motifs of descent and circumambulation are seminal to both London’s realistic testimony and Self’s fictitious recreation. Domestic trauma witnessed fi rst-hand by the American novelist is turned into fiction through anecdotes peripheral to the plot in Umbrella, reinforcing the overall rambling, digressive effect conveyed by the contemporary narrative. This indirection fulfils an ethical function by preventing any undue appropriation of the pains and grief of the afflicted by the reader. There is no straightforward display of the spectacle of utter wretchedness, as is the rule in Victorian melodrama, to elicit pity with a view to engaging the better educated on the path of social reforms. Instead, conflicting responses leading to a negotiation between empathy and distance are likely to emerge. Thus, with the Poultneys, the Deaths’ neighbours in Waldemar Avenue, there is no direct exposition of the tragedy from one single, stable point of view. A juxtaposition of several items of information makes up a collage that readers have to work out for themselves: it ranges from neutral, objective data about the family and their reasons for moving in the neighbourhood to how the father was made redundant in the wake of his daughter’s death of diphtheria. Then a polyphonic montage follows, allowing the reader to hear Audrey’s mother’s voice full of good common sense. First her speech is transcribed in standard, grammatical English before being followed by an attempt to render Cockney in order to signal the persistence of the mother’s voice in Audrey’s memory. The fact that the Poultneys’ daughter’s corpse had been hidden away on top of a wardrobe because the parents could not afford a proper burial is reinforced by an exclamation: “the whiff uvit—terrible, it wuz” (Self 2012, 20), bringing the situation home to the reader, both sensually and experientially. It is the persisting echo of voices which provides the constitutive elements of a plot that still needs to be assembled. This technique bears resemblance to Terence Davies’s filming of domestic trauma in both Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes. Seeming indirection is also achieved through the allusion to the street games of the East London children in which Audrey and her two siblings, Albert and Stanley, take part. Street gaming, as opposed to playground games, is not ruled by fi xed principles and does not necessitate fancy toys. It is plastic and fluid and adapts to external stimulus and circumstance. Self, in calling up the Death children’s life in late Victorian London, draws from Norman Douglas’s London Street Games, a book which Peter Ackroyd has hailed as “a vivid memorial to the inventiveness and energy of London children, and an implicit testimony to the streets which harboured and protected their play” (2001, 647). This foray into city life, which could appear as merely incidental to the novel’s main concerns, actually ties in with Laing’s previously mentioned poetic study, Knots. Playfully occupying city space through improvised games involves strategy, power relation, and

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a distribution of parts dictated by personal motives in which the stronger are likely to take the upper hand over the weaker. Nothing comes of nothing and the carefree insouciance that obtains in moments when children momentarily escape the adults’ control crystallises the tension of society at large. Self riffs on both the mimetic and predictive functions of street gaming while covertly passing on metatextual comments on his own fiction’s knottiness when, for example, he evokes: “the game Bedlam” (Self 2012, 52). Of course the game seals Audrey’s destiny, even if at this early stage, the six-year-old girl is only struck by the violence involved and the oddity of the terms referring to its rituals: “dirty boys’ hands grabbing pigtails to straitjacket the girls in the booby-hatch” (52, emphasis in original). Following the novel’s non-lineal structure, this episode of childhood gaming, evincing a form of experience more than one of innocence, is interlaced with scenes from the actual loony bin. The idea of a tight entanglement between sanity and insanity is thus made manifest. The lexis itself underscores the predominance of the motif of coiling which is paradigmatic of the close interconnectedness between past and present, consciousness and oblivion, to say nothing of the intertwining of madness with reason and the suspension thereof: “voices plaiting [ . . . ] then unravelling [ . . . ] to twine once more” (52). “Nothing comes of nothing” (32, 40, 242, 348, 385, 388) recurs as a leitmotif in Umbrella, that is, as an inescapable repetition permeating Busner’s stream of consciousness as he pays his valedictory visit to Friern Barnet in April 2010. The reference to Shakespeare’s King Lear, which is itself a tragedy on the trauma of ageing, is explicit: “I am, Busner thinks, no Falstaff, only a maddened Lear” (348). The intertextual strand is thus twined between Lear and Busner, who has experienced traumas of his own: anti-Semitic taunts at boarding school in the powerless presence of his mentally retarded brother (117), marriage break-ups, an elder son in day care on account of mental problems, and a schizophrenic brother committing suicide after a life spent in psychiatric hospitals (396). King Lear’s plot interweaves nicely with Umbrella’s for another reason. It is the initial shock caused by what the king construes as his favourite child’s, Cordelia’s, ingratitude, which first pushes him to disinherit her: “nothing will come of nothing” (I, i, 90), and subsequently drives him to madness. The tragedy’s denouement corresponds to the protagonist’s awakenings, when in short moments of clear-sightedness, he intermittently realises the extent of his error and unwarranted cruelty. This pattern is similar to the plight that befalls the enkies who awaken shortly before relapsing into their former condition of sleepiness, which in Shakespeare’s play is marked by Lear’s death. The experience of trauma, which is in itself almost impossible to put into words, has been verbalised as a “gaping, vertiginous black hole” (Laub 64). This memory hole, which is at the core of both King Lear and Umbrella, has in fact much to tell about the ambivalence of nothingness.

A Knotty Novel for a Tangled Object Trauma 151 The experience of the enkies bears resemblance to that of the victims of trauma, as this chapter purports to show. In both cases, the question of nothingness is touched upon to open possible lines of reflection: “what it’s like to think of nothing—yes, thinking of nothing [  .  .  .  ] is not the same as thinking nothing” (Self 2012, 235). This nothingness needs not be a nought—nullity—according to the type of equation which Albert, Audrey’s brother, also known as Datas, is keen on, nor the void and darkness preceding creation in the Bible. It may be what falls beyond the pale of consciousness but nevertheless persists as haunting and possessing or, to cite Maurice Blanchot, what “cannot be forgotten because [it has] always fallen outside memory” (28). Precisely, Self, by featuring enkies in his fiction, gestures towards unclaimed experiences in a liminal narrative eschewing any comfortable links with the referential. He also contemplates the possibility of an ethical bond originating from this nothingness: “where nothing comes of nothing. And yet . . . and yet . . . there is something [ . . . ] one or nought, should or ought?” (Self 2012, 348, emphasis in original). Through Busner’s bus travel to Friern Barnet, nearly spanning the whole novel, Self suggests, if only tentatively, the potential creativity of uncreation. As the novel shows, the retired psychiatrist is entrammelled in the (self-)contradictions and impasses that come with old age. He is unable to gather up all the threads of his frayed existence in his condition of senile depression. The novelist insists upon the similarities between Lear and his familiar, recurrent character: his sticking too long to his former position (30); his own children’s suspicion that he might be suffering from incipient dementia; his propensity to “incontinently recall [ . . . ] the lyrical leftovers and junked jingles of seven decades” (30–31). Like King Lear, Busner has left his former abode, but unlike the Shakespearean distracted monarch, he has set up in a shabby rental flat in Fortress Road (99). The possible nod at Bruno Bettelheim signals both the retired psychiatrist’s complete withdrawal from life in the fi rst stage of senescence and the possibility of escaping from this autistic and solipsistic retreat thanks to the talking cure afforded by the ongoing stream of consciousness. Thus the psychiatrist comes to terms with his social isolation and physical degradation by resorting to the occasional, redeeming tongue in cheek, speaking about ageing as “an inversion of foetal ontogeny, in which the phenotype passes through previous fashion stages” (156, emphasis in original), or by calling forth the soothing warmth of past memories (162). In this tabula rasa of senile devastation, Busner comes to realise the insanity of his hubristic ambition to bring the enkies to orderly health, because it was prompted by a scientist’s belief in his power to restore harmony. Dialogically, Busner castigates his own former self to cut down to size the pushy doctor he was once: “Isn’t this the way you’ve always regarded the world, you cold bastard, as a readily apprehensible—no reducible!—object that you could look down upon from your peak perspective?” (377).

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In the last pages of what amounts to a Freudian talking cure, Busner achieves a kind of self-discovery that is also an epistemological reversal and an ethical claim. It is founded on the realisation that chaotic discourse is the fundamental attribute of the enkies and that “orderly health” need not be the one and only feature defi ning the human condition. This last recognition entails a renewed perception of the patients’ Otherness, or of the patient as Other: no longer predicated on the opposition between, on the one hand, the medical profession typing pathologies and, on the other, the suffering ones passively occupying the slots allotted to them: “Henceforth there will be only me and you, never again the fraudulence of either us or them” (358). The possibility of establishing this dialogic bond between two streams of consciousness that have run parallel throughout the novel, that is, Audrey’s and Busner’s, through the experience of reading, is ultimately Umbrella’s commitment.

CONCLUSION Umbrella draws upon Modernism to depict a (post-)Modernity that is bereft and bankrupt, and often on the brink of nihilism. Through stream of consciousness, which is in itself an umbrella term comprising a whole array of techniques, such as direct and indirect interior monologue, to translate random thoughts or sensory perceptions with varying degrees of consciousness, Self engages in an uncompromising critique of the present, filtered by an ageing psychiatrist who has renounced any claim to the domineering position of the scientist. The novelist’s appropriation of stream of consciousness emphasises the arbitrary verbal interplay between words belonging to different realms of experience, colliding in a mind no longer able to hold sway over speech, a mind at times confronted to the entropic deliquescence of language through verbigeration or palilalia. The aporetic dimension of the post-traumatic age that the fiction displays is illustrated by the image of the knot, which Self borrows from R. D. Laing. Through the entanglement of fankles and whirligogs, in sharp contrast with Ackroyd’s neat “ring or circle,”5 the novel erratically suggests transhistorical parallels and correspondences between the “Troglodyte World” of the trenches and the buried subpersonalities of the postencephalitics, so as to conjure up a limit-case situation which is in many respects representative of an age when “every situation or experience is a limit event and [in which] a state of emergency is generalized, with the exception becoming the rule” (LaCapra 2004, 193). Around the gaping void of a traumatic disease, inducing both a state of deleterious oblivion, precluding “the magical entrance to Sleeping Beauty’s castle” (Self 2012, 385, emphasis in original), and nervous ticking, spasming, repetitiveness, and myoclonic jerks symptomatic of the machine age, Self draws up a diagnosis of the postmodern condition through what Dominick LaCapra has termed “empathic unsettlement” (2001, 78). It consists

A Knotty Novel for a Tangled Object Trauma 153 in creating a certain distance in the readers to prevent them from identifying with the victims, in the case of real trauma, or with the characters in fiction writing, by “plac[ing] in jeopardy fetishized and totalizing narratives that deny the trauma that called them into existence” (78). Through Self’s daring, experimental writing the contemporary novel does indeed render the trauma palpable. Whether Self has achieved the narrative tour de force of building up a sense of estrangement in the reading experience, without alienating his prospective readers, will probably require quite some time to decide. The fact is that the novelist was fully conscious of the risk he incurred when he set out to write this experimental trauma narrative.6

NOTES 1. See in particular “Ward 9” in The Quantity Theory of Insanity and the collection’s eponymous story itself, in which Zachary Busner pioneers unorthodox practices to create a psycho-utopia largely inspired by R. D. Laing’s own experiment at Kingsley Hall in the late 1970s. Allusions to these innovative, libertarian experiences are made in Umbrella, in particular on page 128, where the fictitious “Concept House in Willesden” from The Quantity Theory of Insanity is explicitly mentioned. 2. Will Self acknowledges the influence of R. D. Laing’s Knots on Umbrella in the novel itself: “the essence, surely, of all talking therapies, and something that Ronnie nailed perfectly adequately in that silly chapbook of his—what did he call them? The whirligogs and fankles that beset our emotions” (347). 3. This was the name given to women working in ammunition factories during World War I. Audrey Death is employed at the Woolwich arsenal in London. 4. “[A] madness that has already diverted his [Busner’s] career from the mainline before it got started, sending him rolling into the siding that connects to this laager, with its buttoned-up soul-doctors and Musselmen [sic]” (Self 2012, 8, emphasis in original). Even if Self anglicises the German term Muselmann (pl. Muselmänner), the context is sufficiently clear to forestall any ambiguity. For an in-depth study of the Muselmann, see LaCapra (2004, 144–94). 5. In Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, Peter Ackroyd uses Henry Vaughan’s image of “a great Ring of pure endless light” to defi ne the circularity of the English imagination: “The English imagination takes the form of a ring or circle. It is endless because it has no beginning and no end; it moves backwards as well as forwards” (XIX). Through the twining of knots R. D. Laing, from the other side of the Borders, disclaims this essentialist vision of time by replacing it with fankles and whirligogs, which are both Scottish words, to investigate social and domestic trauma. It is interesting to note that Will Self, another Englishman, should adopt this marginal stance to explore the English—and to a large extent London’s—past from the perspective of trauma. 6. See, for example, Self’s interview with Elizabeth Day, tellingly entitled “I Don’t Write for Readers,” in which the author claims that he was aware of the fact that his new fiction was most likely to be off-putting but that he nevertheless planned to go through with this ambitious literary undertaking undeterred.

154 Georges Letissier WORKS CITED Ackroyd, Peter. London, The Biography. 2000. London: Vintage, 2001. Print. . Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. London: Chatto and Windus, 2002. Print. Barthes, Roland. Le plaisir du texte. 1973. Paris: Seuil, 2000. Print. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Empty Fortress, Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self. New York: Free Press Paperback Edition, 1972. Print. Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. 1980. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1986. Print. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print. Coe, Jonathan, and Will Self. Un véritable naturalisme littéraire est-il possible ou même souhaitable? Preface by Bertrand Leclair. Trans. Bernard Hoepff ner, and Catherine Goffaux. Nantes: Éditions Pleins Feux/Villa Gillet, 2003. Print. Day, Elizabeth. “Will Self: ‘I Don’t Write for Readers.’” Observer 5 August 2012. Accessed on 06/08/13 at: http.//www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/05/ will-self-umbrella-booker-interview/. Web. Douglas, Norman. London Street Games. 1931. London: Dodo P, 2008. Print. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. 1975. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print. Ganteau, Jean-Michel. “‘The Past Won’t Fit into Memory without Something Left Over’: Pat Barker’s Another World, in between Narrative Entropy and Vulnerability.” Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature. Eds JeanMichel Ganteau and Susana Onega. New York and London: Routledge, 2013. 17–33. Print. Gibson, Andrew. Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel, From Leavis to Levinas. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Print. Hayes, Hunter M. Understanding Will Self. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2007. Print. Hollinghurst, Alan. The Stranger’s Child. London: Picador, 2011. Print. Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. Harmnodsworth: Penguin, 1979. Print. Kellog, Carolyn. “Video Interview: Will Self on His Challenging New Novel Umbrella.” Los Angeles Times 15 January 2013. Accessed on 06/08/2013 at: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/15/entertainment/la-et-jc-video-interviewwill-self-umbrella-20130115. Web. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Print. . History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004. Print. Laing, Ronald David. Knots. 1970. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Print. Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004. Print. Laub, Dori. “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening.” Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. 57–74. Print. Levi, Primo. If This Is A Man—The Truce. 1958. London: Abacus, 2004. Print. London, Jack. The People of the Abyss. 1903. New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1995. Print. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Sacks, Oliver. Awakenings. 1973. London: Vintage, 1990. Print. Self, Will. Cock and Bull: Twin Novellas. London: Bloomsbury, 1992. Print.

A Knotty Novel for a Tangled Object Trauma 155 . Great Apes. 1997. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998. Print. . The Book of Dave. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. Print. . The Butt: An Exit Strategy. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Print. . Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe. 2004. London: Penguin, 2009a. Print. . How the Dead Live. 2000. London: Penguin, 2009b. Print. . The Quantity Theory of Insanity. 1991. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Print. . Umbrella. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Print. Seltzer, Mark. “Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere.” October 80 (Spring 1997): 3–26. Print. Shakespeare, William. King Lear. The Arden Shakespeare Edition. London: Cengage Learning, 1997. Print. Szasz, Thomas. The Myth of Mental Illness. Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. 1974. New York: Harper Perennial, 2010. Print. Testard, Jacques. “Interview with Will Self.” White Review (August 2012). Accessed on 06/08/2013 at: http://www.thewhitereview.org/interview-withwill-self/. Web. Woolf, Virginia. A Writer’s Diary. 1953. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1954. Print. . Mrs Dalloway. 1925. London: Granada, 1982. Print.

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Part III

Ethics and Structural Experimentations

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9

Family Archive Fever Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost Marc Amfreville

While borrowing its English translation as a title for the present article, and however sensitive to the rich, all-consuming associations linked to the word “fever” undoubtedly present in Derrida’s text, one may wish to turn back to the original French title—Mal d’archive—to retrieve several possible reading directions, all connected to our study of Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost (2006). Mal d’archive, more conspicuously perhaps than “fever,” simultaneously refers to a desire informing the delving for archives and to the harrowing lack of documents and traces.1 It moreover subterraneously seems to indicate that the very act of constituting an archive is painful in itself, which we are willing to believe, if we consider that it took Daniel Mendelsohn several years to write his book, not to mention the inevitably devastating confrontation with the few surviving witnesses of part of his family’s destruction during the Shoah. Finally, in a less expected way, the French genitive form suggests that the archive itself suffers, thus pointing to its necessarily lacunary nature, perhaps even to its link to the structure of trauma, starting etymologically and psychologically from a wound. Several hidden wounds indeed brand the surface and drill the depths of The Lost. Daniel Mendelsohn starts from his childhood puzzlement at the lack of information on the disappearance of his great-uncle, great-aunt, and four daughters, “killed by the Nazis” (7) at an imprecise moment during World War II, in his family’s birthplace, Bolechow (now Bolekhiv), a small town in Galicia that successively belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was invaded by Soviet troops, then by German ones, to end up being part of the Ukraine. Most members of the family had emigrated to the United States or Israel, but Great-Uncle Shmiel, after a year spent in New York, decided to go back to his native land in 1913. While it is common knowledge that Shmiel, his wife, and daughters were murdered, the dates and exact circumstances remain blurred and, as early as 1973, 2 Daniel sets himself the task of unearthing the missing information by interviewing survivors of the genocide, who have known or may have known “the Lost” personally. After his grandfather commits suicide when the young man is twenty, it takes the writer another twenty years to decide that, crossing time and space boundaries, he will travel to Bolechow to complete his

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search. This project will lead him successively to Australia, Israel, Scandinavia, and back to Bolechow for the better part of five years, and the book is mostly the tale of these journeys and quests. This narrative is interspersed with different elements: commentaries on the Book of Genesis, whose successive parts are made to bear upon the different moments of the search; historical documents that shed a specific light on some of the fi ndings; fictional episodes during which the narrator imagines the fate of his family; transcribed interviews of the witnesses; and, fi nally, photographs that are either old ones copied from various old albums or recent ones, taken by Matt (D. M.’s brother) during their travels. As clearly indicated by a title that draws attention to the personal, emotional dimension of the implied disappearance, The Lost thus wavers between historical account, autobiography, fiction, exegesis. In more senses than one, The Lost belongs to the realm of what Laub and Podell, as aptly recalled by Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega in their introduction to this volume, name “the art of trauma”—a designation that circumvents the necessity to draw the line between fact and fiction. At least, in the case of The Lost in particular, it allows the critic to postpone the moment of division long enough to use it as a tool to probe into the very nature of what Paule Lévy has rightly termed an unclassifiable narrative (169), 3 and what one is now tempted to call, in the light of the complex aesthetic and ethical issues it raises, a limit-case trauma narrative. We shall see in a fi rst part how this “search for six of six million” (the subtitle, printed on the cover) connects the writer’s personal story to that of his lost ones and how this link is inscribed in the history of Galician Jews during World War II, and more precisely in what is now rather clumsily known as “The Holocaust by bullets,” thus granting an individual or familial trauma a collective dimension. The alluring diacopic subtitle paves the way for a structuring paradox: the writer’s search will be specifically dedicated to six people, which drowns them in the flood of anonymous annihilation even as it rescues them from it. One cannot help noticing that Mendelsohn already plays with ellipsis, the missing word “Jews” being readily supplied and thus highlighted by the reader him/herself. The awareness of such a literary technique—obviously chosen for its congruence with the two conflicting modes of the manifestation of trauma itself, amnesia and hypermnesia4 —will lead us in the second part to consider the very nature of the text, based as we shall see on the two jointly present meanings of the word “story”: fiction and/or facts, united by the infi nitely challenging Freudian concept of “psychical reality.” We shall fi nally try to think of Mendelsohn’s quest in ethical terms, notably along the lines of proximity and distance. Relying as he did on the direct collection of oral testimonies, which led him to travel to the places where he could fi nd the ageing actors or bystanders of his family tragedy, the author reflects on the role of the direct witness of the Shoah (Jewish, Polish, or Ukrainian), but also on what is now generally known

Family Archive Fever 161 as “postmemory”5 —a term coined by Marianne Hirsch—and on the part played by the interviewer, especially one as personally involved as he was. While, strictly speaking, “postmemory” refers to the fi rst generation after the victims, it has often been suggested, notably by Eva Hoff mann, that the effects of the aftermath of the Shoah have overshadowed the lives of the following generations as well: The deep effects of the catastrophe, the kind that are passed on from psyche to psyche and mind to mind, continue to reverberate unto the third generation. But after the third or in rare cases, the fourth generation, the thread of direct memory will be severed. The experiences of the Holocaust, even if they continue to be part of family narratives, will not be conveyed to further family descendants with the authority of actual witness and vividness of an embodied voice. (185–6) The fact that Daniel Mendelsohn was born in the United States fi fteen years after World War II, while evidently adding a distance factor to the obvious time gap, can only confi rm the persistent haunting described by the word “postmemory”—not only a chronological interval, but also, and above all, a second paradox: the children and grandchildren of victims and survivors “remember” what they cannot logically recall; in other words, they are inhabited by a past that is theirs only by adoption, an act of sympathy in the strongest sense of the word. Before the past is erased, it must be written. Before involuntary identification ceases to take place, it has to be entrusted to writing.

TRAUMA: INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE From the outset, I wish to make clear that the notion of “collective trauma” will be understood here as anchored in its psychoanalytical background. It has become increasingly fashionable to reduce the term to a bland synonym for “shock,” “accident,” or even “pressure.” Aside from sheer misuses of the word, precise intentions may favour a certain dilution of meaning. For instance, in their recent Empire du traumatisme, Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, whose specific interest lies in the social—and ethnographical— condition of the victim, tend to fall into generalities and even to go against the most basic defi nition of trauma when they say: “Past mourning, there is trauma” (16, my translation). Such an assertion evidently fails to understand that, precisely, there is trauma when mourning cannot take place. Similarly, even in unquestionably ambitious essays, scholars have sometimes decided to retain the term—which after all, some might object, is no one’s property—while turning their backs on the theory that gave it pride of place. Dominick LaCapra, for example, in his Writing History, Writing Trauma, makes his position very clear in that respect:

162

Marc Amfreville the very way in which I reconceive certain psychoanalytic concepts is adapted to my understanding of how they may be articulated with both historical analysis and sociocultural, political critique. Thus I tend to avoid orientations primarily devoted to abstract explorations of internal psychological processes or the sometimes casuistic fi ne-tuning of concepts and differentiation of schools or models from one another. (x)

A very different approach will inform the present study. Freud himself opened up the path for a possible convergence of his psychological research and the fields of sociology and anthropology. Throughout his long career, various texts point in that direction, most notably “Totem and Taboo” (1913), “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921), “The Future of an Illusion” (1927), “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1930)— to note but those directly concerned with perspectives extending beyond the realm of the individual. In his most explicit essay in that respect, Moses and Monotheism (his last work, published in 1939), Freud paves the way for interdisciplinary research that will consider the analogy between the subject and the group. “In my opinion,” he writes, “there is an almost complete conformity in that respect between the individual and the group: in the group too an impression of the past is retained in unconscious memory trace” (94). The word “analogy,” used by Freud himself earlier in his demonstration, is crucial. By defi nition, an analogy is not an identity: it even rhetorically sets a limit to the complete fusion of the two concepts thus brought together. Freud does not apply observable sociological and anthropological laws to the individual—in the way Jung does—nor does he intend to explain mass behaviours by individual ones (or by the mere addition of the latter): he cross-fertilises the two templates. Even in the universally acknowledged, properly undeniable, psychologically destroying reality of the Shoah and its haunting effect on several generations, I believe one should pause and decide to use the term “trauma” only with scientific and ethical caution, to fi x rigorous criteria so as to retain its specificity. It has to describe a violent breakthrough in consciousness of such a nature that it remains inassimilable at the time of its occurrence, but also when and only when a phenomenon of latency is observed. As one readily remembers, trauma lies at the root of psychoanalysis;6 it is present from the origin of Freud’s early “Neurotica” at a time when he believed that a real trauma was at the source of all neuroses, to the already-quoted essay on Moses and monotheism. While his conceptions— and consequently those of his followers, contenders, and commentators— have varied several times, it is remarkable that the term Nachträglichkeit (deferred action) appears as early as in the 1895 “Project for a Scientific Psychology” and that it remains present to the very end, 1939, under the form of Latenzzeit in his “Moses.”7 Both terms underscore the intimate relationship between trauma and time and insist on what Cathy Caruth has called “the very inaccessibility” of its occurrence (1996, 18). Whether the

Family Archive Fever 163 victim has totally “repressed” the event (amnesia) or is haunted by flashes, nightmares, or hallucinations (hypermnesia) matters less than the fact that the assailing violence (or the exposing deprivation) has not been fully registered or assimilated into a coherent narrative. We should also be especially careful about the particularity of Nachträglichkeit. As made clear by Freud several times, most notably perhaps in “The Wolf-Man” (written in 1914, originally published in 1918), it takes a second trauma to reveal the fi rst one. In other words, what happens afterwards transforms what occurred earlier, and this consideration bears an impact on the study of all accounts of traumas, be they autobiographical or fictional. Thus, in The Lost, one should constantly bear in mind that if the family history had undeniable traumatic influences on third-generation Daniel Mendelsohn, his position at the end of the arrow of time is not only that of an archaeologist unearthing the past; it is the active principle that drives him to read his personal, familial, and ethnic history backwards, and every trauma along the line is tinged—modified even—by his intimate stance as his great-uncle Doppelgänger, as made clear from the outset by both text and photographs. At the core of the narrative process, although physically present only at the very end of the book, the black hole where the author’s great-uncle and daughter were hidden, found by the Nazis, and taken away to be shot, materialises the pit in which traumatic memory buries itself and symbolises the object of the author’s quest. Its discovery by Daniel Mendelsohn on his last journey to Bolechow—it is chronologically placed at the end of the book—is also the source of the narrative, since it retroactively justifies the whole quest for knowledge and archive. In other words, it is both the target of the search and the justification of the narrative. Its “inky black” powerfully brings together the potentially traumatic reconstructed reality of fear and claustrophobia as Daniel himself goes down into the pit, the repression the whole episode had been made a subject of, and the writing activity that opens the trap and brings the secret back to daylight. Had he not found it, the author would not have thought he had fi nally reached his aim and would probably not have felt the urge to write and publish his testimony. The central kestl (Yiddish for box) thus becomes an apt representation of Nachträglichkeit in the sense that the deferment of its revelation entails a new reading of the Ur-family trauma. The black box metafictionally symbolises memory, its suppression, and its retrieval. It is particularly revealing in that respect to underscore that, at the outset of the book, the writer restitutes his mistake as a child when he heard of the disappearance of his great-uncle Shmiel, his wife, and four daughters killed by the Nazis. Shmiel and Friedka were then said by Daniel’s grandfather to have been hidden in what the young boy thought to be a castle. Strikingly enough, the whole enterprise is thus triggered by the legend of two fugitives hidden in a Polish count’s “castle,” which owes everything to the narrator’s overcorrecting his grandfather, and perhaps to his unconscious

164 Marc Amfreville desire to alleviate tragedy by adding fairy-tale undertones. He had heard kestl, but, being used to the old man’s typical deformation of English sounds, he decided he had heard “castle”: All those years ago, I had listened to my grandfather talk, [ . . . ] and I, listening [ . . . ] had heard what I’d wanted to hear, a story like a fairy tale [  .  .  .  ]. But he hadn’t, after all, been telling me one of his own stories [ . . . ]. He had, after all, known something all along, had heard some story whose details are now vanished [ . . . ]. It had taken me all this [ . . . ] before the fact, the material reality, allowed me to understand the words at last. They’d been hiding in a terribly small and enclosed space, a space that someone, somewhere, must have once described as being like a kind of box, a kestl, and now I was standing in the box, and now I knew it all. (482) It is tempting to interpret this childhood mishearing as the transformation of a reality too harsh to be heard. Uncle Shmiel, Daniel’s grandfather’s oldest brother, was “the handsomest of the seven siblings, the most adored and adulated, the prince of the family” (5). As early as page 5, the reader is made to feel that young Daniel identified with the lost great-uncle. We understand by ourselves, with the help of photographs of part of Daniel’s face juxtaposed with equivalent truncated pictures of Shmiel, that they uncannily resembled each other. Hence the mysterious opening sentence of the book: “Some time ago, when I was six or seven or eight years old, it would occasionally happen that I’d walk into a room and certain people would begin to cry” (3). Confi rmation is deferred but it does come with the striking restitution of phonetic Yiddish: “Oy, er zett oyszeyer eynlikh tzu Shmiel!” (Oh, he looks so much like Shmiel!) (6). Interestingly, not all information about the missing great-uncle has been suppressed. Daniel understands early, through handwritten captions on the back of their photographs, that he, his wife, and four beautiful daughters were killed by the Nazis. Not enough material for us to speak of trauma, but certainly sufficient mystery for the great-nephew to develop a fascination for the vanished man. The young boy becomes haunted with his beloved grandfather’s silent obsession, which the adult narrator calls the great tragedy of his life. As famously described by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok in The Shell and the Kernel, the phantom created by someone’s unresolved trauma can be passed on to the next generation, and this does seem to be the case here. When his grandfather commits suicide, Daniel, aged twenty, gains access to the old man’s wallet and realises that he had kept Shmiel’s 1939 letters on his chest all his life. In one of them Shmiel, alarmed by the Nazi threat and the dire conditions imposed on the Jews, begs his brother Abraham to pull him out of what he calls this Gehenim (hell). The answering letters are of course never found, but what the narrator suggests is that this repeated cry for help was never heard. This guilt—more

Family Archive Fever 165 fantasised than real: what could anybody have done in America to rescue a family of Jews when Germany had just invaded Poland?—must have been unconsciously felt by the young boy, who later clearly implies that his grandfather’s suicide was not solely caused by the mere realisation of the fatal stage of his gnawing cancer. In the form of a phantom, what we encounter here is evidence of a family trauma. The trauma of Abraham’s close relatives’ death at the hand of Aktion commandos bent on the total destruction of Jews comes second. The first one was Mendelsohn’s grandfather’s trauma of helplessness (Hilflosigkeit), the feeling of neglect and desertion felt by the toddler when his mother is absent that re-enacts itself in later moments of utter impotence. Except for the day of the kestl, Daniel’s grandfather never spoke about this intense guilt. He inadvertently passed it on to his grandson through the agency of a misprision.8 The child in his turn unconsciously buried the black hole of the family secret under the castle of his fairy tales, and never stopped looking for it through ceaseless journeys. In other words, the ellipsis that served to hide an unimaginable live burial became the signifier of a lack that the writer had to fill with “stories,” endless and contradicting testimonies that tantalisingly brought him on the verge of an ever-receding truth.

TWO ACCEPTATIONS OF STORY The connection between personal and collective history thus becomes obvious, but from a perspective that refuses to consider personal history as a mere example. The “search for six of six million” is inscribed in the history of the Shoah. More specifically, it brings into light information on the lesser known “Holocaust by bullets,” which in the early stages of the war brought about the destruction of over a million victims, and directly led to the invention and implementation of gas chambers as Aktion commandos could not bear the psychological burden of shooting uncountable victims, most notably, they alleged, women and children. The checking of cross references, the various testimonies, and extant documents allows Daniel Mendelsohn to give us access to atrocities committed at a precise moment in a precise place (Bolechow, 28 and 29 October 1941), evidently less known than the reality of extermination camps. Mendelsohn, reluctantly visiting Auschwitz on his fi rst trip to Eastern Europe, clearly states that it represents the opposite of what he has come for and—one is tempted to add—of what has moved him to write. He seizes the opportunity to reassess that his purpose is “to rescue [his] relatives from generalities, symbols, abbreviations, to restore to them their particularities and distinctiveness” (112). What we witness here is a double movement: the urge to wrench his family from oblivion and the yearning to give “his lost” their particular identity. The informing process is simultaneously that of a synecdoche and its exact reverse. A fraction of the whole, because six million—a figure subliminally

166 Marc Amfreville associated with the Shoah—is a transparent multiple of six, but also a zeroing in on six individual lives and deaths, intimately connected to their biographer by the subtle mechanisms of identification and trauma. This new paradox characterising the very spirit of Mendelsohn’s endeavour, away from what he calls the “dreadful irony of Auschwitz”—which “asserts the scope of the crime at the expense of any sense of individual life” (112)—hinges on the juxtaposition of the different meanings of the word “story.” In the term “story,” as is often the case but particularly in The Lost, two defi nitions collide and merge. It is fi rst used to describe the grandfather’s anecdotes and tales, most notably of his passage to America and early years in his new country. It is therefore almost synonymous with exaggeration, embellishment, and above all with the art of the teller, who, by using a Chinese-box technique and infi nite digressions, knows how to secure his young listener’s enthusiastic attention. It then naturally becomes associated if not to lie at least to unreliable oral tales, and the whole series of trips is launched upon as a way of checking on Abraham’s stories and, more generally, on those that circulate in the family. The openly stated idea is “to prove or disprove the stories [they] had always heard” (128). Fact versus fiction, the opposition would be trite, if one did not pause to think that there is sometimes a basis of truth in every story, and conversely, a possibility of error in the statement of facts, such as, for example, the flawed biographical account of one of Daniel’s lost cousins, Lorka, provided by the Yad Vashem Memorial. Further still, the kestl/castle episode shows that a story, heard and repeated by the grandfather, may carry some historical truth that may not be apprehended by the listener for reasons essentially linked to the potentially traumatic nature of the information it conveys. As repeatedly underscored by the confrontation of testimonies and memories, story-tellers can be wrong, and their listeners can be wrong too. The very desire to establish facts in spite of uncertainty—“a terrific yearning to know” (386)—in spite of the time gap—and the consequent failures of the survivors’ memories, not to mention their understandable sense of intimacy or their wish to protect themselves or their loved ones from the judgement of their interviewer and that of history—can only lead to partiality, and hence to an unavoidable deformation of “the” truth. It is then particularly attention-grabbing to see the narrator’s interest gradually shifting along the pages of his account. While he set out to fi nd out how his relatives had actually died, he became more and more intent on discovering how they had lived. Of course, his main drive is still to establish the facts of Shmiel’s family’s individual fatal destinies (Who was shot and when? Who among them was taken to Belzec and gassed? Who was for some time protected, hidden, and helped? Who was betrayed by whom?), but he ends up being more and more involved in listening to the stories of the witnesses because, be they right or wrong, what they tell about life at a specific moment of history becomes a testimony in itself. In other words, he chooses to overlook

Family Archive Fever 167 the distinction between fact and fiction, and begins to use the word “story” to emphasise the human grain of every testimony: I’d also become interested in stories, in the way that the stories multiplied and gave birth to other stories, and that even if these stories weren’t true, they were interesting because of what they revealed about the people who told them[, which] was also part of the facts, of the historical record. (411) Once this destabilisingly fecund defi nition of truth is established, it then becomes possible for Mendelsohn to proceed to challenging equations. The art of his grandfather as a story-teller is likened to the ancient Greeks’ and to the way mythological stories are told, embedded in one another, with clues skilfully scattered and resolutions constantly postponed. See, for example, how the narrator, speaking of Abraham and his relation to the circumstances of his brother’s death, warns his reader: “the not knowing, in part, was what tormented him” (8, emphasis added). As far as the grandfather is concerned, at the real-life, psychological level, we are then close—although one brotherly step removed—to Cathy Caruth’s Freudian insight: “What returns to haunt the victim, these stories tell us, is not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not been fully known” (1996, 6). We are also confronted with a case of transgenerational haunting, since the “not-knowing” is passed on to his grandson. All this is true, and the reader understandably skips over an essential piece of information: “in part.” Abraham is certainly traumatised by the death of Shmiel, but he is also gnawed by remorse, because he probably did not do enough, in his own judgement, to save his brother—a fact that the reader will learn about only fifty pages later. Leaving the psychological level, we could quote the presence of the song “Mayn Shtetele Belz” (13), recorded as a lullaby sung by his own mother to Abraham and taught to Daniel as a child, belatedly revealed at the end of Part I to have been the song the prisoners were forced to sing on their way to the train to Belzec (74). One last telling instance would be Daniel’s calling one of his lost cousins “Ruchatz” until he has chronologically found out that he had misread the name “Ruchele” on a photograph inscription. These are only a few examples: The Lost is replete with similar instances of deferred information—the founding principle of which lying in the prototypical kestl/castle misprision that pervades the entire book. In addition to its very content, this strategy of “latency” leads us to view the book as a “trauma text.” It is, in other words, a text that mimics the functioning of trauma. Not only does it force its way into the readers’ consciousness with passages that verge on the intolerable, but it buries the primary trauma that, as I have endeavoured to show, lies at the root of its entire structure. Like the sarcophagus in Melville’s Pierre (1852), the black hole is empty. It

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does not contain the remains of the dead: they are lost, and like six million others, disappeared without a grave: But, far as any geologist has yet gone down into the world, it is found to consist of nothing but surface stratified on surface. To its axis, the world being nothing but superinduced superficies. By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid—and nobody is there!—appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of man! (Melville 285) And just as in Pierre, where the lacuna of the “sister omitted from the text” (7) pervades the entire novel, from the mark left by a missing painting on the wall to the emptiness of language itself, the void becomes the allinforming principle of The Lost. As in America’s fi rst fictional account of the plight of a writer, and equally playing on the subtleties of truthful autobiography and literary device—in both cases without any playful intention—Mendelsohn draws our attention to the complex relation between fact and fiction. The distinction between the two becomes almost irrelevant and, as suggested earlier, questions the very nature of his work—a limitcase narrative in its own right, just like Pierre, a novel that, aside from fiction, documents Melville’s acute suffering when Moby Dick proved to be a failure a year earlier. If we consider the structuring information gaps, the memory lapses, the pits dug during the fi rst Aktion, the telling photograph of the Vienna cemetery,9 and even the empty places occupied by the lost and their missing descendants, emptiness hollows out every page of Mendelsohn’s work. Vacancy hence becomes a motif whose repeated occurrences structure the whole text in the way a metaphor infi ltrates a poem. But more importantly, such a poetics creates a vertical dimension which crosses the horizontal timeline of the plot precisely in the way flashes of memory operate in a traumatised mind. Most descriptions of post-traumatic stress disorder, Cathy Caruth reminds us, “agree that there is a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviours stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience” (1995, 4). The introduction of photographs inside the body of the text, into the very grain of the paper—as opposed to their being printed on separate pages, or even merely isolated by conspicuous glossiness—creates the impression of a comparable emergence. In the very fabric of the page, as matt as the written paragraphs, the (sometimes twice) reproduced photographs of the past function as real shocks for the reader: most notable of which perhaps is that of smiling, happy, sensuous Ruchele, some four pages after the story of her shooting has been reconstructed. At the opposite end of the reactions to trauma—the blocking of memory as distinct from its all too present manifestations—we can quote the picture

Family Archive Fever 169 of Meg, one of the Bolechow survivors, as she holds the photograph of her childhood friend, Frydka, one of Shmiel’s daughters, that Daniel has just brought. She would not let Mendelsohn publish this portrait of hers that undoubtedly betrayed all her emotions: a black square therefore covers her face, next to which all one can see, en abyme, is that of teenaged Frydka, with a strikingly melancholic gaze. Re-creating the two possible effects of trauma, hypermnesia in the former, figurative amnesia in the latter, both governed by the structuring principle of belatedness and deconstruction of the logical narrative line, the photographs at once merge into and spring from the text in another example of what we could call the creative, literary dimension of the book. In the interstices left by the blanks between the facts, and prodded perhaps by the documentary and self-reflexive nature of the pictures, some passages are clearly presented as hallucinatory. It is most striking for a reader to realise how he/she tends to forget the clear signposts of the imaginary nature of such scenes. The most striking of those is undoubtedly that of Shmiel’s death at Belzec extermination camp. It is explicitly introduced by the words “I then thought” (240), which imply that Mendelsohn later learnt otherwise. The subsequent narration is proleptically revised by the adverb “then” and henceforth presented as a production of the mind. It is then interspersed with “may be” and grammatical markers of an unreal past: “would have been,” “may well have heard” (237). In no time, however— at least in my experience and that of several consulted readers—perhaps because it is made to correspond with so many often-quoted testimonies, the scene becomes if not real, at least highly verisimilar and hence true. Mendelsohn witnesses Shmiel’s plight on his way to the gas chamber— stopping at the threshold out of respect for the properly unimaginable—“I will not try to imagine it because he is in there alone” (240). What status should we give to this passage? A piece of fiction of course, since we will later fi nd out that Shmiel did not die at Belzec but was hidden in the black hole. But also a truthful account, as what the writer is doing is to reconstruct his own haunting, duly checked and made plausible by the study of historical documents and testimonies. As a result, because this “story” is put forward as such while gradually shedding the evidence of its fictitious nature (note the photographic present tense of “he is in there alone”), the passage proves to be the most devastating in the entire book. In a sense, Shmiel’s introjected imagined anguish, since it is given as such, makes it possible for the reader to “feel,” not the victim’s incoming death— that, the writer would consider ethically inacceptable—but the shattering power of the identified nephew’s peculiar form of inherited trauma. Freud himself had indicated in the study known as “The Wolf-Man”— entitled in fact “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1918)—that he could not “know whether the [trauma inducing] primal scene in [his] present patient’s case was a phantasy or a real experience.” Yet, he hastened to conclude: “I must admit that the answer to this question is not in fact

170 Marc Amfreville of very great importance” (97). In the quasi-simultaneous “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis” (1916–17), he develops the idea of a “psychical reality”: [These mental productions] possess a reality of a sort. It remains a fact that the patient has created these phantasies for himself, and this fact is of scarcely less importance for his neurosis than if he had really experienced what the phantasies contain. The phantasies possess psychical as contrasted with material reality, and we gradually learn to understand that in the world of the neuroses it is psychical reality which is the decisive kind. (368, emphasis in original) The literary scene functions of course in a somewhat different way, but following the path of analogy, we could measure the vital importance of the very concept. “Psychical reality” taken in its most radical inferences implies that all reality, being processed by our psyche, travels the same route as fantasy itself. There is evidently a grain of factual reality to every hallucination, which Freud would later call, in “Construction in Analysis” (1937), “a fragment of historical truth” (267), but representation and hallucination share a common process that cancels the distinction between fact and fiction, at least at the level of perception. Brought to bear upon literary endeavour, and particularly one as ambitious as that of The Lost, our attention is focussed on the production of meaning—the meaningfulness even—in the re-creation of scenes that may or may not have happened but do truthfully belong to the history of the genocide.

PROXIMITY AND DISTANCE On a slightly different plane, is it not telling of the power of such a fertile blurring of fictional and testimonial genres that Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz should have chosen to retrace his experience of Auschwitz not in autobiographical form but in the fictitious guise of a novel? In both The Lost and Fatelessnes—a title inspired, like Mendelsohn’s, by the rhetorical figure of lack and suppression—what is at stake seems to be more than mere empathy: not only the capacity to feel the emotions of another human being or a character in fiction, but the profound resonance between actor and spectator, between character and reader, of their properly incomparable but nevertheless equally haunting pains. We may even go a little further and add that the desire for transmission justifies the recourse to fiction or fictional moments on the part of these two writers. Direct experience or postmemory are ethical warrants that the creator in the profoundest sense is witnessing and thus precludes, as much as possible, lawless jouissance and voyeurism. This ethical consideration directly leads us to Daniel Mendelsohn’s allpervading concern for the right distance from his object and from “his”

Family Archive Fever 171 witnesses. Unlike Claude Lanzman in the fi lm Shoah, he constantly displays sympathy for his interviewees, while managing to retain a perceptible degree of remoteness, dictated both by respect—especially in the case of ageing survivors—and the will to consider the afforded material with enough objectivity to be able to weigh its testimonial value. As regards “the Lost” themselves, the quest is assuredly embarked upon out of a desire to get closer to them—“Reading Shmiel’s letters [ . . . ] was to be my fi rst experience of the proximity of the dead, who yet always manage to remain out of reach” (98). When the journeys themselves start, the very contact with people who had known the lost proves to be extremely trying, and Mendelsohn courageously decides not to suppress the evidence of what may appear as a link too strong to guarantee objective historical research— “It was the sudden and vertiginous sense of proximity to them, at that moment, that made my sister and me start crying” (123). Such examples abound, and it seems especially important to characterise them as related to the question of the validity of testimony. As is clearly stated in the book, “a story is better than no narrative at all” (149). The most telling word in the text in that respect is “approximation,” which I consider in its two acceptations: the desire to come close to the dead by the method employed—meeting the witnesses and recording their versions—implies taking into account an estimate of possible errors, and even a possible swerving from the truth. This raises anew the question of our previous considerations on fact and fiction. Entire passages, based on different accounts, take the form of: “May be what had happened to them was something like that” (234), followed after the description of the scene by “But maybe not” (235). What we touch upon at this stage is the vast and acute question of the witness. As memorably and strikingly worded by Primo Levi and taken up by Giorgio Agamben, the real witness of the Shoah is dead. “Survivors,” Levi asserts, “are not the real witnesses [ . . . ]. Destruction, taken to its term, the accomplished work, nobody has ever told, just like nobody ever came back to tell of his own death” (qtd. in Agamben 41, my translation). It is differently worded here in the particular context of “The Holocaust by bullets,” but it amounts to the same: “If you did not have an amazing story, you did not survive” (315). Drawing from this sheer material impossibility, while adding to it considerations informed by his personal experience as a Shoah victim, psychoanalyst, and interviewer of traumatised survivors, Dori Laub calls this aporia “the collapse of witnessing”: “Not only did the Nazis try to exterminate the physical witnesses of their crime; but the inherently incomprehensible and deceptive psychological structure of the event precluded its own witnessing, even by its very victims” (Felman and Laub 80, emphasis in original). Understanding this collapse in its own right may be the unacknowledged principle that guides Mendelsohn fi rst in his search and later in his writing. Is he not saying that the trauma of the Shoah, as intimately represented for him by his lost ones, calls for a mediation of a kind that goes beyond the

172 Marc Amfreville apparent opposition of proximity and distance? In the same way, his enterprise, in its most profound implications, transcends the distinction between fact and fiction. As he stands simultaneously close to and distant from his interviewees, it becomes possible for him to come to terms with his own haunting. In other words, respect and proximity allow sufferings of different kinds to echo each other. Mendelsohn’s own spectral trauma enables him to listen to the survivors in an almost therapeutic way—both extremely present and absent, bent on spotting revealing details, but with the sort of suspended attention that authorises another type of communication, partaking both of psychoanalysis and spiritualism. An analyst without any acknowledged aim to heal, a medium without any belief that he will manage to actually conjure up the dead, Mendelsohn remains fi rst and foremost a narrator: a writer who seeks to organise the bits and pieces of his story, trying to fi nd coherence where trauma, both individual and collective, had left only loss: “Proximity brings you closer to what happened [ . . . ] but distance is what makes possible the story of what happened” (437).

CONCLUSION Mendelsohn’s consciousness of his craft fi nally leads us readers to try to make sense of a dimension that our primary interest in the art of trauma has left aside. The way in which the different parts of his book are preceded or followed by passages from Genesis cannot be considered as mere strategies of deferment. For example Bereshit (“at the beginning”) is placed at the outset of the text and thus refers to the commencement of the quest and the early stages of the narrator’s life in which he discovers his resemblance to Shmiel. The Cain and Abel episode triggers the revelation of Abraham’s “criminal” neglect of his brother; the Flood precedes the narration of the fi rst Aktion and the subsequent mass murders. The last quoted biblical passage, describing the moment when Lot’s wife is changed into a pillar of salt for having turned back towards her city, powerfully underscores the danger of petrification if one contemplates the past and forgets to live one’s present life. One is thus tempted to view this backward glance as emblematic of the danger inherent in the whole quest. As hopefully made clear by these examples, the bridge thus built between mythological times and the text is much more than an intellectually stimulating exercise. Not only does it anchor Jewish identity to its foundation— one that Ancient Greek scholar Mendelsohn had hitherto self-admittedly neglected—but it opens the range of the writer’s narrative to an evidently philosophical dimension. Can one help noticing that the tree next to which Shmiel and his daughter were shot, discovered at the very end of the narrative, sends us back both to the biblical Tree of Knowledge and to the genealogical tree of the Jäger present on the opening page? In a movement akin to Freud’s creating an analogy between individual psychology and the history of

Family Archive Fever 173 the Hebrews, Mendelsohn challengingly envisions an extension of the dimension of his quest. He thus transcends—without negating them—its individual and collective aspects. To put it differently, in a properly literary approach, he seeks universal pertinence in the nutshell he has chosen as his object. In this sense, too, his narrative becomes what we are invited to consider as “limit-case”: not merely an expected synecdoche, but the passionate search for echoes between individual trauma and the most widely known representations of the human predicament. Chaos, creation, destruction, in telling succession, thus bespeak the founding violence of our origins, the very trauma of existence, that is, its essentially ungraspable, inassimilable nature. The established, irreducibly unique story of six people thus inscribes itself in one of the Western world’s founding myths, once more blurring the distinction between the two acceptations of story, between fact and fiction. To answer our implicit opening question, The Lost is, all things considered, not the product of a family archive fever. As made clear by Derrida, archiving also carries in itself the paradoxical desire to put away, not to look back, when the past has been indexed and stored, manifesting a logic of destruction hidden under the drive towards preservation. The Lost in that respect asserts itself as the paronomastic opposite of Lot’s wife. In its Nachträglichkeit, the glance points towards a future of transmission.

NOTES 1. The French to be “en mal de” means to be in need of.” 2. The author is then thirteen, significantly enough, the year of his Bar-Mitzvah, that is, his religious coming of age. 3. I wish to thank Paule Lévy for introducing me to The Lost and for exchanging views with me on the subject. Her article, “The Lost de Daniel Mendelsohn ou l’expérience dérobée,” was literally groundbreaking in France. I would also like to thank my colleague Thomas Dutoit, who kindly shared the notes he had prepared for his seminar on the book. Yet unpublished, his reflections provided me with a very helpful deconstructionist perspective. 4. On this subject, which Freud defi nes as the negative and positive effects of trauma, see “Moses and Monotheism” (75–76). 5. See, for example, the following defi nition, most pertinent to our analysis of The Lost: “Postmemorial work, I want to suggest—and this is the central argument in this book—strives to reactivate and re-embody more distant political and cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression. In these ways, less directly affected participants can become engaged in the generation of postmemory that can persist even after all participants and even their familial descendants are gone” (Hirsch 33, emphasis in original). Marianne Hirsch clearly envisages longer after-effects of postmemory than Eva Hoffman, and one can be especially attentive to her use of her italicised words: “reactivate” and “re-embody.” 6. For a complete development of this point, see Amfreville, notably Chapter 1 (26–45), which chronologically retraces the concept through Freudian essays.

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7. Admittedly, there is a difference between the two words. “Latency” describes the time necessary for the manifestation of trauma to appear, while the untranslatable Nachträglichkeit points to both postponing and retroactive action. However, they share the peculiarity of insisting on the time factor, essential to the labelling of proper trauma. 8. In that respect, although the word is not actually used in the book, we cannot help noticing that “misprision” means both “a failure to do one’s duty” and “a mistake, a misunderstanding.” 9. The Viennese authorities have decided to leave a vast empty lot where the graves of the Jewish community should have been dug.

WORKS CITED Abraham, Nicholas, and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Print. Agamben, Giorgio. Ce qui reste d’Auschwitz. Paris: Rivages, 1999. Print. Amfreville, Marc. Écrits en souff rance. Figures du trauma dans la littérature américaine. Paris: Michel Houdiard Editeur, 2009. Print. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Print. . Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Print. Fassin, Didier, and Richard Rechtman. L’Empire du traumatisme, enquête sur la condition de victime. Paris: Champs Essais, Flammarion, 2007. Print. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “Civilization and Its Discontents.” 1930. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XXI. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth P, 1964a. 59–145. Print. . “Construction in Analysis.” 1937. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XXIII. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth P, 1964b. 255–69. Print. . “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (“The Wolf-Man”). 1918. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XVII. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth P, 1964c. 7–124. Print. . “The Future of an Illusion.” 1927. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XXI. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth P, 1964d. 3–56. Print. . “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.” 1921. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XVIII. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth P, 1964e. 67–144. Print. . “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis.” 1916–17. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XVI. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth P, 1964f. 243–463. Print. . “Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays.” 1939. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XXIII. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth P, 1964g. 7–137. Print. . “Project for a Scientific Psychology.” 1895. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. I. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth P, 1964h. 283–387. Print.

Family Archive Fever 175 . “Totem and Taboo.” 1913. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XIII. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth P, 1964j. 1–162. Print. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory. Writing and the Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. Print. Hoff man, Eva. After Such Knowledge. Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. Print. Kertesz, Imre. Fatelessness. London: Vintage, 2006. Print. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Print. Lévy, Paule. “The Lost de Daniel Mendelsohn, ou l’expérience dérobée.” L’Expérience I. Eds Françoise Bort, Olivier Brossard, and Wendy Ribeyrol. Paris: Michel Houdiard Editeur, 2012. 168–83. Print. Melville, Herman. Pierre, or the Ambiguities. 1852. New York: Penguin, 1996. Print. Mendelsohn, Daniel. The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007. Print.

10 The “Roche Limit” Digression and Return in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn Ivan Stacy

Literary fiction concerned with the representation of traumatic events has frequently used form to evoke the intrusive return of memory that characterises trauma. Cathy Caruth suggests that the possibility exists for literature to give voice to traumatic experience through the wound (2–3), and Roger Luckhurst identifies such a tendency in a number of texts when he argues that there exists “an implicit aesthetic for the trauma novel,” which draws on traumatic dissociation (87). Both Caruth and Luckhurst thus posit a model in which a central trauma exerts a type of gravitational pull on the rest of the narrative, producing inward-oriented texts in which the return and repetition that characterise traumatic memory are enacted by the formal properties of the text. Trauma is a central concern in the novel-length works of W. G. Sebald. His own Austerlitz employs form in the way outlined above and, as a result, Luckhurst argues that it represents “a culmination of the trauma fiction genre” (111).1 Sebald’s other novel-length works, Vertigo and The Emigrants, also circle around the memory of atrocities committed in the Second World War and over the last few centuries. Yet The Rings of Saturn undertakes a somewhat different project, and the way in which it evokes memory is indicated by its second epigraph, an entry from the Brockhaus Encyclopaedia: The rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet’s equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect (—> Roche limit). (n.p.) The Roche limit is the distance at which centripetal and centrifugal forces are in equilibrium around an object, and its mention indicates that the text contains a tension between the centripetal drive to return to the memory of traumatic events, as identified by Caruth and Luckhurst, and the centrifugal energies produced by magnitudes of suffering. In this article, I argue that the form employed by Sebald in The Rings of Saturn is an attempt to ethically represent the centripetal force of traumatic

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events, while acknowledging the centrifugal dissemination of memory once it enters the cultural spheres of discourse and representation. I fi rst address the ethical imperative behind Sebald’s writing, namely, his subject position as a German writing in the post-war era. Situated as belated witness to some of the traumatic events of the twentieth century, his works are preoccupied with the way in which someone writing from a position of distance may see, bear witness to, and represent these events in an ethical way. In the second section of this article, I examine the form employed in The Rings of Saturn, describing how the text performs an oscillation between magnitude and specificity, a movement predicated on the narrator’s walk through the English county of Suffolk. Orders of magnitude are explored through the narrator’s meditations on bone, ash, sand, and silk, and reach the infi nite in carbon. These materials evoke the view of history as an accumulation of calamity posited by Walter Benjamin in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: in that these substances carry with them the evidence and ongoing effects of atrocity, they encapsulate Benjamin’s notion that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (256). Sebald adds to this perspective a sense of the cyclical nature of history, with tidal surges overwhelming and carrying with them the subjects of the digressions that form The Rings of Saturn. Yet these stories always grow out of the particular and specific: some stem from documentary sources, while others are prompted by the narrator’s encounters with people, places, and artefacts. As such, the form of the text attempts to address the scale of events without losing sight of the individual stories from which those larger histories are woven. In the third and fi nal section of this article, I argue that the ethics of the text rely on the presence of the reader to complete the act of witnessing. J. Hillis Miller has suggested that reading itself involves a paradox between identification and the distance required for reflection. According to Robert Eaglestone, the possibility of identification becomes a more pressing concern in terms of the ethics of literary texts whose subject matter is the Holocaust (and I suggest that this holds true by extension for any text that addresses traumatic events). 2 In this article, I argue that The Rings of Saturn plays on this tension, at once inviting a degree of identification but at the same time employing form in order to encourage the diffi cult, but ethically necessary, task of reading with both empathy and a reflective criticality. In order to achieve this aim, Sebald’s text mixes apparently veracious historical material with a fictionalised account of the narrator’s travels around Suffolk. Leigh Gilmore posits the notion of “limit-case” texts which challenge the boundaries of autobiographical writing (3) and, in this section, I suggest that the generic indeterminacy of The Rings of Saturn can be seen in these terms. However, where Gilmore discusses the ways in which limitcase texts explore issues of self-representation and truth claims with regard to writers’ experiences, Sebald’s testing of the limits of genre acts instead on the readers, calling for an ethically aware form of reading.

178 Ivan Stacy THE BELATED WITNESS The way in which Sebald sees his own subject position is revealed in the foreword to On the Natural History of Destruction, where he describes himself as “one of those who remained almost untouched by the catastrophe unfolding in the German Reich” (vii–vii). Here, Sebald suggests that he (and by implication those of his generation) were not directly involved as perpetrators or victims, and nor were they even in the position of bystanders or fi rst-hand witnesses. The relationship of Sebald’s generation to the “catastrophe” of the Second World War is therefore one of belatedly attempting to come to terms with its implications and ongoing effects. Dori Laub’s theorisation of witnessing and testimony provide tools by which Sebald’s position can be further understood. Laub identifies three levels of witnessing, these being “the level of being a witness to oneself within the experience, the level of being a witness to the testimonies of others, and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself” (75). Having been absent from the events of the Second World War, Sebald is necessarily situated at the second and third of these levels, and it is from the starting point of this distance that The Rings of Saturn operates. Julia Hell argues that post-war German writers have grappled with the questions of seeing and witnessing, and she argues that the question underlying Sebald’s work is: “how can a non-Jewish German author belonging to their particular generation speak about the Nazi past in public?” (15–16).3 Hell goes on to identify Sebald’s concern that any attempt to represent the past risks sliding into a voyeurism that is “a practice of looking that does not keep a proper distance” (31). However, it has been noted that Sebald is not purely a “Holocaust” writer, with J. J. Long arguing that Sebald’s primary concern is with the “meta-problem of modernity,” although he notes that there is an “inescapable” relationship between the nature of the Holocaust and “the technological rationality and bureaucracy characteristic of modernity itself” (2007, 1–3). Given the scales of space and time that The Rings of Saturn encompasses, it provides a greater sense than Sebald’s other texts of the progress of modernity. Thus, the combination of the need to bear witness to instances of barbarity—of atrocities such as the Holocaust—within the larger context of modernity produces a keen awareness in Sebald of his spatial and temporal remove from the events that he feels ethically impelled to represent.4 I have described Sebald as a “belated witness” to the events of the Holocaust and other atrocities, and this term of course evokes traumatic memory, “belatedness” being a translation often employed for Sigmund Freud’s term Nachträglichkeit, a theory which he began to develop in the 1890s. As Ruth Leys notes, Freud saw trauma as arising through the relationship between two events, neither being inherently traumatic. Rather, it is “a deferred act of understanding or interpretation” which creates the presence of trauma (20). That Sebald is familiar with the temporal disruptions caused by trauma

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is evident in an essay on Jean Améry,5 in which he writes that “for the victims of persecution [ . . . ] the chronological thread of time is broken, background and foreground merge, the victim’s logical means of support in his existence are suspended” (2004, 154). Yet Sebald is careful to retain a distance between Améry, the traumatised writer, and the position of the reader, arguing that “the words that Améry set down on paper, and which seem to us full of the comfort of lucidity, to him merely outlined his own incurable malady” (2004, 167, emphasis in original). Thus, when Sebald writes that Améry succeeded in “reconstructing his memory to the point where it could become accessible to him and us” (2004, 155), this suggests that he sees writing not as the performance of traumatic experience, but as its translation. For this reason, I am wary of unreservedly applying the psychoanalytical notion of belatedness directly to Sebald’s writing, and in particular to The Rings of Saturn. While the form of the text is certainly suggestive of Nachträglichkeit, I see the belatedness of Sebald’s subject position in the more mundane sense of the word: he is one who writes after the event, and The Rings of Saturn is a reflection on how we encounter and interpret representations of trauma and atrocity at this remove. As such, I consider it to be an exemplary form of Laub’s third level of witnessing, that is, a text which bears witness to the process of witnessing itself.

OSCILLATION Having outlined Sebald’s subject position, and the ethical questions that this position entails, I now turn to the form of the text. The Rings of Saturn describes the narrator’s walk through Suffolk, and from the encounters that take place on this walk, he digresses into detailed narratives of individual lives. Yet from these individual histories the text is propelled outwards, encompassing the scale of historical events. The Rings of Saturn therefore diverges from Sebald’s other texts, and from the “trauma paradigm” identified by Luckhurst, whereby fragmented form is used to evoke the fractured temporality of traumatic memory (5). Instead, it supplements specific and personal stories with a concern for the broader effects of history, and with the traumatic events that have occurred therein. Notably, and in contrast with the representations of depth and personal memory present in other trauma fictions,6 the text reads at times like a litany of massacres rendered in impersonal and quantitative terms that, generically, possesses echoes of the historical chronicle. The Rings of Saturn thus mixes the personal and the historical and in doing so, it probes at the limits of historical and autobiographical genres as ethical means of representing the past. I return to the ethics of this challenge to genre in the third section of this article, again with reference to Gilmore’s concept of limit-case narratives. The narrator’s tendency to chronicle is evident in his recording that, for example, during the Taiping Rebellion in China, “more than six thousand

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citadels were taken by the rebels and occupied for a while; five provinces were razed to the ground in battle after battle; and more than twenty million died in just fifteen years” (2002b, 140); we are also told of the loss of “seven hundred and thirty-two thousand tons of bombs [ . . . and] almost nine thousand aircraft and fifty thousand men” during the allied bombing of Germany (38). He also writes of the “between seven and twenty million people” who died in the famine in China in the 1870s (150); the half-million victims, yearly, of the Belgian colonisation of the Congo (119); of the six thousand pheasants gunned down every year at the hands of the British upper classes in the decades before the First World War (223); and even of the fourteen million hard-leaf trees that fell victim to the 1987 hurricane in England (265). This accumulation of factual data over the course of The Rings of Saturn suggests the view of history as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” espoused by Benjamin (257). These digressions lead the narrator along chains of signification that tend towards the infinite, with the universality of entropy manifest in fine substances such as dust, ash, and sand. This tendency is encapsulated by the narrator’s comments on carbon, which for him is the most ubiquitous of substances. The narrator’s historical perspective is at its broadest when he describes the destruction of the European forests in order to provide timber for construction and shipbuilding, and he proceeds to state that “our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn” (2002b, 170). The history of civilisation is, therefore, a history of construction and dissolution inextricably bound together. The ubiquity of decay and destruction has significant implications for one, such as Sebald, who occupies the position of the belated witness. As Eric Santner argues, “Sebald’s entire project is to tease out the testimony of dust and ash, to see in such material deposits the very ‘matter’ of historical depositions” (102). This claim is echoed by Long when, using Benjaminian terms, he suggests that the narrator sets out to fi nd “the invisible within the visible” (2010, 82).7 Yet this task weighs heavily on the narrator and, within The Rings of Saturn’s expansive view of history, fi nding the hidden traces of suffering becomes a Sisyphean task. Within a view of the world as an infi nite and circulatory system of matter, the narrator’s erudition seems more a curse than a blessing and the observation that, for Flaubert, “every speck of dust weighed as heavy as the Atlas mountains” (2002b, 8) may equally be applied to the narrator. This burden is an ethical one, because the narrator is well aware that these pervasive substances contain the traces of atrocity, and it is this knowledge that produces the oscillations between digression and return in the text. The relationship between the presence of atrocity and orders of the infinite in The Rings of Saturn echoes the “Carbon” chapter of Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table. Carbon, Levi shows us, is present in everything. Writing as a chemist, Levi tells us that an atom of carbon “could tell innumerable

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other stories, and they would all be true: all literally true [ . . . ] one [atom] could always be found whose story coincides with any capriciously invented story” (232). This suggests that there is no anchor to meaning, and that following signification from any given starting point will inevitably lead to an instance of atrocity. Levi’s own body of work encapsulates shifts in scale between the broad and the specific, from his initial testimony of his experiences in Auschwitz in If This Is a Man (1947) to the highly digressive The Periodic Table (1975), and back to the subject matter of the Holocaust in the more reflective The Drowned and the Saved (1986). In Levi’s writing, there can, therefore, be seen the same oscillation between centripetal and centrifugal movement that I have described in The Rings of Saturn, with outward movements punctuated by retrograde moments. Even within the parable of carbon, which describes the potential for infi nite digression, Levi is compelled to return to the singularity of his experiences at Auschwitz. It is human agency which acts here to arrest the centrifugal energies inherent in language and thus to produce the gravitational centres around which meaning can be made. The entry of an atom of carbon into a nerve cell is: that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one. (232–3) The reassertion of agency in this, the closing passage of The Periodic Table, provides a useful means of reading Sebald. In this moment, the infi nite potentialities of signification are arrested and meaning is reified through the act of inscription. Levi thus indicates that order and associated values are projections of human agency onto an entropic world, and Sebald sees representation in similar terms: he is particularly concerned with the forms that such impositions of order take in representation and discourse and, crucially, with the ways in which these forms are implicated in atrocity while at the same time obscuring the evidence of this implication. Benjamin sees the documents of civilisation as being marked by barbarity, but for Sebald the after-effects of atrocity are even more pervasive, being carried in particles of carbon. Thus, not only can the presence of atrocity be traced in the story of reified artefacts, such as the ornamental train which runs across a river in Suffolk and stands as evidence of colonial brutality in China (2002b, 138–44), but also in a substance as seemingly innocent as sugar, which is revealed to be implicated still in an economy created by the slave trade (194). At its broadest, the knowledge of this pervasion allows the narrator to read the mute landscape of Dunwich Heath as an index of a history of destruction that reaches as far as Borneo and the Amazon, and spans the history of civilisation (149–50).

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At points in the text where the narrator’s gaze encompasses history on this scale, he seems to share the view of history as catastrophe as espoused by Benjamin through the figure of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. However, whereas the angel is “fi xedly contemplating” the totality of the pile of wreckage accumulating in front of him (257), the movement between digression and return in The Rings of Saturn requires the gaze of Sebald’s narrator to shift throughout the narrative. Both Rebecca Walkowitz (155) and Jan Ceuppens (60) note that the narrator’s alternating concern with fi ne, dust-like substances, and with concrete and reified artefacts, produces shifts in perspective that allow him to attribute significance to these encounters in both general and specific terms. For Walkowitz, the destabilisation produced by this movement results in the avoidance of reification of history into myth (155), suggesting that there is ethical intent behind the associative chains that Sebald’s narrator follows. The way that these shifts in focus work is illustrated by the narrator’s encounters with bones throughout the text. When the narrator discusses the significance of the bones underneath the battlefield at Waterloo, they are heaped together and therefore abstracted to an extent (125). Similarly, by repeating Thomas Browne’s question, “who is to know the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried?” (11) the narrator seems to be ascribing to human remains a position closer to that of ash and dust, which occupy an indeterminate position in Sebald’s pantheon of substances and one in which they are part of a longer process of circulation. However, in other cases, bones act more concretely as an index of death, and their solidity seems to lend them relatively weighty significance, as can be seen in the fact that it is the narrator’s search for the writer Thomas Browne’s skull in the Norfolk and Norwich hospital which provides the starting point for the whole narrative. Similarly, the bones in the tomb of Saint Sebolt lie at the heart of a mass of signification, historical and biblical in this case, which is materialised in the iconography of the tomb itself (85–8), and the tombs in Ditchingham churchyard likewise prompt meditations specific to the remains of those buried underneath (259–60). It is this oscillation between scale and specificity that allows Sebald to retain a relational, and hence ethical, view of history as espoused by Benjamin in his notion of “constellations.” It is to the presence of such constellations in The Rings of Saturn that I turn in the third and fi nal section of this article.

THE ETHICS OF READING In calling for the historian to grasp “the constellation which his own era has formed with a defi nite earlier one” (263), Benjamin leaves us to grapple with the abstraction “era” as the basis for this process of brushing history against the grain. However, in using objects, chance encounters, and scraps of narrative as the starting points of his digressions, Sebald’s

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constellations in The Rings of Saturn are not formed by the recognition of the relationships between eras on a grand scale, but through local, specific, and personal connections with previous generations. It is through these constellations that the narrator is able to attempt to enter into an ethical relationship with the past, resisting the inherent complicity with the victors that, Benjamin argues, a historicist perspective entails (256). However, the narrator, reflecting on the view of Europe from the air, remarks that the whole of humanity is “tied into networks of a complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine” (91). These networks are of human creation, Sebald suggests, in that whatever structures and systems of order we impose upon the world thereafter bind us to their material trappings, values, and discourses whether for better or (usually) for worse. In The Rings of Saturn there is, therefore, a profound and fundamental sense of the “always already” quality of our entanglements. This quality is figured by the narrator at one point as a kind of symbiosis in his description of the weavers of Norwich, who spent their lives shackled to their looms and whose situation makes evident the fact that “we are able to maintain ourselves on this earth only by being harnessed to the machines we have invented” (281–3). Notably, the narrator likens weavers to scholars and writers in that they “sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep an eye on the complex patterns they have created.” Creation in any form is an imposition of order on the world, but one that then causes these creators to be “pursued, even into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread” (283). Once order and pattern have been woven (in whatever form) the creators fi nd themselves shackled to it, bodily bound to ongoing, unforeseen, and often calamitous effects. This passage echoes the closing section of Sebald’s earlier text, The Emigrants, in which he evokes the Fates to make an even stronger metaphorical claim for the sinister properties of weaving. The passage is formed by the narrator’s recollection of a photograph taken in the Litzmannstadt ghetto of Lodz by an accountant named Genewin. In it, he describes three weavers shown in the photograph: The young woman in the middle is blonde and has the air of a bride about her. The weaver to her left has inclined her head a little to one side, whilst the woman on the right is looking at me with so steady and relentless a gaze that I cannot meet it for long. I wonder what the three women’s names were—Roza, Luisa and Lea, or Nona, Decuma and Morta, the daughters of night, with spindle, scissors and thread. (237) Critics have found this passage problematic, with Anne Whitehead questioning the ethics of the appropriation of the identities of the three women in the picture, and arguing that passages such as this raise “problems of identification and generalisation” (139). Such concern is unsurprising, given that it is an instance of overidentification, and also appears to ascribe

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to three women who were unequivocally subject to Nazi brutality a kind of mythical agency that they did not in fact possess. This, therefore, seems to be a counter-ethical moment on the narrator’s part. Yet this moment of appropriation draws attention to itself as such: the narrator describes how the inhabitants of the Litzmannstadt ghetto were allowed to look up from their work “purposely and solely for the fraction of a second that it took to take the photograph,” thus making visible the context and process by which the photograph came into existence. Furthermore, in describing how the women seem to be looking at him, as he is “standing on the very same spot where Genewin the accountant stood with his camera” (2002a, 236–7), the narrator reveals how the photograph is not a “natural” or “authentic” snapshot of normal life, but is instead structured fi rst by Genewin’s gaze, later by the narrator’s own, and also by its presence in an exhibition in Frankfurt. The apparent ethical dubiousness of these passages prompts us to read backwards along a chain of translation from the inclusion of this image in The Emigrants, through all its prior stages of existence, revealing the history not only of its transmission, but also the way that it has been employed as an element of rhetorically oriented discourse. In other words, the way in which Sebald makes visible the process of mediation by which the weavers have come to be present in his texts exemplifies not only Benjamin’s claim that any artefact bears the imprint of the victors’ atrocities, but that “barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another” (256). The narrator’s description of the weavers in The Emigrants therefore performs, through uncomfortable and apparently counter-ethical conjunctions, an unpicking of the patterns that have woven the apparently natural texture of history. In doing so, the narrator makes visible the constellations formed by his own act of inscription, the moments of history that he represents, and a number of points of mediation in between. The same can be said of the encounters throughout The Rings of Saturn, with each presenting a constellation of the narrator’s position, and the mediations by which each particular historical episode came to be known to him. However, the later text encompasses history on a more expansive scale than The Emigrants, and hence contains a more pervasive potential for complicity. The ubiquity of the symbiosis between artistic representation and atrocity is made explicit during the narrator’s conversation with a Dutchman named Cornelius de Jong in the bar of the Crown Hotel in Southwold. De Jong describes how the capital generated by the slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries continues to circulate and accumulate, and goes on to note that the patronage of the arts has long been one of the means of lending legitimacy to monies garnered in this way (2002b, 194). Art has, at times inadvertently, profited from a slave economy, and these profits have been disseminated and inherited by those who had no direct role in the creation or perpetuation of that system. Not only has this capital continued to accumulate, but the use of the art industry to legitimise

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the wealth generated by this slave economy created the cultural climate, institutions, and markets which served as enabling conditions for artists to work and prosper.8 De Jong concludes his train of thought on this instance of symbiosis with an image that concretises Benjamin’s notion of the pervasion of civilisation by barbarity, giving voice to his feeling that it is as if “all works of art were coated with a sugar glaze or indeed made completely of sugar” (194). Sebald, through his narrator, attempts to make the reader aware of this potential, by making visible the historical constellations of which the text forms one point. As a belated witness to atrocity, his concern is to create a text which also requires the reader to recognise and reflect upon the problematic process of witnessing. According to J. Hillis Miller, there exists an aporia inherent in reading. He posits two forms of reading. The fi rst is to read innocently, allegro, for identification and the creation of “internal theatre.” The second is critical reading, conducted lento, with the aim of demystification (118–22). He argues that without the fi rst, “innocent” mode of reading, there is nothing to demystify in the text: the two forms of reading are thus mutually dependent, and he concludes by recommending trying to “read both ways at once, impossibly” (159). The presence of atrocity further complicates the act of reading, particularly with regard to the question of identification. For Robert Eaglestone, this impasse becomes more pressing in literature that represents the Holocaust. He echoes Miller in arguing that identification is an inherent part of reading, occurring because of “basic assumptions about narratives and reading.” However, he also argues that such identification becomes problematic when it takes place through reading Holocaust narratives because it makes the incomprehensible seem to be comprehensible, and perhaps tritely so (22).9 A concern with the difficulties of reading ethically is central to Sebald’s use of form in The Rings of Saturn. Clearly, he is careful to avoid encouraging the kind of overidentification associated with transparent realism that could be regarded as a type of voyeurism; where he encourages identification, as is the case in the closing passage of The Emigrants, he does so deliberately and with ethical intent. The jarring effect of this passage is the result of his juxtaposition of personal experience with historical material, the kind of mixing of genres that Gilmore argues can test the limits of representational genres. Gilmore writes that “testimony refers not only to bearing witness, but to the protocols in which it must be offered” (5), and it is these protocols that The Rings of Saturn, like other contemporary limit-case narratives combining history and fiction, attempts to hold up to scrutiny. By this, I mean that the text challenges the rules and expectations of the genres from which it is constructed, and in doing so elicits more critical forms of reading, although achieving such a critical stance is far from straightforward. As Benjamin notes, the language in which history is transmitted is that of the victors. The act of reading is, therefore, constantly fraught with the possibility of entering into a complicitous relationship with this language.

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The danger thus exists that the erudition of Sebald’s narrator, and of the readings that he offers throughout the text, are a product of the same discourses that have produced the atrocities which he strives to describe: in John Beck’s formulation, “The Rings of Saturn, as the deforming power of representation, is the carrier of catastrophe and also its historian” (88). Therefore, even though Beck argues that the whole text is “a space for and of reading” (77), the danger remains that the reader will be embedded in the language of the victors, and will therefore fail to adequately witness the histories of atrocity present in the text, or indeed to reflect sufficiently on the process of witnessing in which they are engaged. The ethics of the form employed in The Rings of Saturn therefore stem from Sebald’s desire to encourage modes of reading that are attentive to the processes of mediation in which all representation is involved. The magnitudes present in the text offer this opportunity, particularly in the narrator’s use of juxtaposition as a means of avoiding the narrative tools normally employed to ensure comprehensibility, namely, linear temporality, cohesion, and causality. This lack leaves space for the reader to make connections across the digressive episodes of the novel. For example, the narrator gives a description of Somerleyton Hall, including a camphorwood chest which, he speculates, may have been used by a former occupant of the house on tours of the colonies, and which now contains “copper kettles, bedpans, hussars’ sabres, African masks, spears, safari trophies, handcoloured engravings of Boer War battles” (35). No explicit connections are made between the presence of these trophies in the estate and the suffering and exploitation involved in their acquisition. However, in the case of Somerleyton, these connections are suggested in echoes of these passages contained in other digressions in the text. For example, in a later section the narrator recounts the histories of Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement and their involvement in the Congo. In this passage, the construction of a railway link to the upper reaches of the Congo is mentioned (120). Somerleyton is in fact built on the back of a fortune accumulated largely through railway construction, including that which takes place in colonial territories. Although the narrator does not ascribe the estate’s wealth outright to colonial exploitation, the connections are there to be made by an alert reader. This is not an isolated incident, and similar echoes throughout the text allow Long to identify a general concern in The Rings of Saturn with the way in which the features of modernity (such as industrialisation, the exploitation of natural resources, and the spread of transport networks) are employed as forms of control. In the case of the Belgian Congo, this control enables one of the most horrific periods of colonial exploitation (2007, 80–3). A similar juxtaposition takes place around the narrator’s description of the tomb of his namesake, Saint Sebolt. He lingers on the symbolism of the sarcophagus, his eye roaming over the complex iconography before coming to rest on the reliquary in which lie the remains of the saint, “the

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harbinger of a time when the tears will be wiped from our eyes and there will be no more grief, or pain, or weeping and wailing” (86–8). The reader is again left to make the connection between an apparently innocuous episode and a later reference to historical extremity. In this case, the reference to barbarity is one of the most explicit in The Rings of Saturn, which is the description of the episodes of ethnic cleansing that took place in Bosnia in the 1940s. The narrator describes a photograph which shows a severed head still with a cigarette between its lips shortly after an execution, and on the next page an image appears to reproduce what he describes as “a kind of rudimentary cross-bar gallows on which the Serbs, Jews and Bosnians [ . . . ] were hanged in rows like crows or magpies” (96–7). When the narrator claims that the Croatian militia responsible for the massacre had “its hand strengthened by the Wehrmacht and its spirit by the Catholic church” (97), this acts on other passages of the text: not only does the Catholic Church’s complicity in the Balkan massacres render absurd the promises of redemption and freedom from suffering that the symbolism of the tomb evokes, but it also contaminates the terms of the aesthetic order employed by the church and which also serve to sustain its power and legitimacy. In this way, Sebald requires the reader to recognise the relationship between apparently unrelated episodes. This is not to say, however, that Sebald absolves the writer entirely of any ethical responsibility by placing the burden of interpretation on the reader. He remains aware throughout of the potential for his own writing to create centripetal energy around traumatic events, but is also alert to the ethical risks of such representations. His concern with the ethics of inscription becomes apparent in the passage in which the narrator describes Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. The painting depicts the public dissection of a petty thief named Aris Kindt, who had been hanged only hours before. One of the most commonly cited passages in the criticism on The Rings of Saturn, most critics take the narrator’s description of the painting at face value, with Long identifying the dead figure of Kindt as an example of the “disciplined body” (2007, 135) whose humanity has been effaced as a result of the “Cartesian rigidity” of the operation. The ethics of Rembrandt’s inscription are evident in his representation of the wounded body of Kindt. His apparently naturalistic representation of the corpse is in fact, as the narrator points out, an illusion. The hand with which Dr. Tulp begins the dissection is “grotesquely out of proportion” and anatomically the wrong way round. The narrator thus surmises that the “unshapely hand signifies the violence that had been done to Aris Kindt” (17). In this light, Christian Moser reads this passage as a “rectification,” which functions by reinstating the suffering body through the disfigurement of a realistic representation (50–2). Rembrandt, and Sebald’s narrator in turn, thus seem to make the wound speak for the dead man’s suffering. However, while the narrator’s sympathy with Kindt is part of a representational antidote to the crushing forces of rationality, the reproduction of

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Rembrandt’s painting also raises the ethical problem of appropriation. The painting is fi rst reproduced in full, across a two-page spread, then on the following page a much smaller section which the narrator identifies as the “exact centre point” of the painting’s meaning, namely, Kindt’s deliberately distorted hand, is displayed again. The narrator writes that it is Rembrandt alone who “sees that greenish annihilated body, and he alone sees the shadow in the half-open mouth and over the dead man’s eyes” (17), yet the fact that the painting has been reproduced means that it is no longer Rembrandt alone who sees the scene in this way. By reading the narrator’s gloss on the image, all those who come into contact with this particular mediation of the painting (that is, its reproduction in The Rings of Saturn) are encouraged to interpret it in the terms that he suggests. Furthermore, in this second image, even as the narrator criticises the dehumanising logic of Cartesian thinking through his reading of Rembrandt, his selective reproduction of the image effaces those who overlook the dead body of Kindt, and thus erases the audience upon whom the painting’s dynamics of visibility and spectatorship rely. To look at the second image in isolation is to obsess with the wound at the risk of forgetting the system that has created that violence. In providing both images, the narrator acts to create a tension between the centripetal energy with which the smaller image draws the viewer’s eye towards Kindt’s wounded hand, and the centrifugal energy of mediation and dissemination. The narrator’s presence encourages an awareness of both of these energies, with his partial reproduction of Rembrandt and his description of the distorted hand locating it as a touchstone of meaning and signification. At the same time, however, the narrator’s reproduction of the smaller image causes us to ask what exactly it is that we are witnessing when we look at the reproduced painting and produces an awareness that witnessing the event of Tulp’s dissection of Kindt can only take place, for those alive over three hundred years later, through the centrifugal energies by which representation is disseminated. This tension is typical of the ethical risks that Sebald is willing to take in order to prompt active and critical readings of the stories mediated into his own texts. This willingness, and the stakes that it involves, are particularly evident in a passage which makes reference to the Holocaust. The narrator follows a passage which describes the history of herring fishing, which includes the numbers caught and killed, with a textual reference to BergenBelsen and a double-page photograph of dead bodies in a forest (59–61), themselves present as part of a digression into the life of Major George Wyndham Le Strange, who was present at its liberation in 1945. For Long, this is part of an “archival” structure which produces equivalences rather than hierarchies, and “which results in a reduction of qualitative difference to mere quantitative difference and thwarts the attempt to determine which textual events are more important and which are less” (2007, 143– 4). However, and in a similar way to the narrator’s interpretation of Rembrandt’s painting, this incident employs a tension between centripetal and

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centrifugal energies. This juxtaposition positively invites such a reduction to quantitative equivalence, but the ethical purpose of this risk taken by Sebald lies in the question of who exactly it is who makes this reduction. Long is correct in his assertion that “the text itself offers no criteria according to which either of these events—the killing of herring for food and the murder of the Jews—can be privileged over the other” (2007, 143). If no criteria are present in the text by which these two events are deemed to be equivalent to each other, then such equivalence must be an imposition from the reader. Reading these passages as straightforward equivalences is to read their textual representations as the isolated symbols of a historical event. However, as my comments on magnitude earlier in this article have suggested, The Rings of Saturn acknowledges the interconnectedness of events and histories. As such, Sebald’s concern is not only with the event itself, but also with the history of that knowledge, and with the rhetorical orientation of the mediations by which those events have come to be present in the narrative. To reduce herring fishing and Bergen-Belsen to numerical equivalences is itself a significant act of interpretation, and one that asserts one form of order by stripping away the details provided by the narrator. Reading in this way thus elides the information about the employment of herring fishing as an economic necessity, as a rhetorical example of “mankind’s struggle with the power of Nature,” and as a tool in scientific progress (Sebald 2002b, 53–57). It also disregards the mediations that occurred between Le Strange’s participation in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, the presence in Sebald’s narrative of the photograph presumably taken by Le Strange, and the article from the Eastern Daily Press, which the narrator relates, and which describes how the major spent his life dining in silence with the housekeeper to whom he left his entire fortune (57–63). These details and mediations occupy significantly more space than their articulation in terms of the numbers of dead; while recognising equivalences and connections across different sections of the narrative is necessary in order to trace the effects of atrocity, any reading of The Rings of Saturn also needs to remain attentive to specificities as well as scale, if ethically dubious impositions of order, through the act of interpretation, are to be avoided. This balancing act between scale and specificity creates the oscillation between centripetal and centrifugal energies that I have described. The traumatic events represented in The Rings of Saturn act with centripetal force, demanding that they be witnessed by those living, reading, and writing generations later. However, Sebald always balances this imperative with the knowledge that any act of representation or interpretation carries its own ethical risks. The text maintains this tension through the construction of Benjaminian constellations woven from a mixture of fiction and history, and from personal, archival, and material sources. By presenting these sources in a pattern of digression and return, Sebald creates a text that asks the reader to remain alert to the connections between different episodes within the text, to the historical processes that lie behind the immediately

190 Ivan Stacy visible, and also to the way in which interpretation itself is an imposition of order. For these reasons, The Rings of Saturn functions as an ethically alert, limit-case trauma narrative. Narratives centred on collective traumas often employ form as a means of attempting to express or perform traumatic experience. Sebald, as a German born in 1944, is always aware of his position at the periphery of such events. Neither perpetrator nor victim, he is a belated witness to the events of the Second World War and, more broadly, to the legacy of European modernity of which (and from within which) he writes. However, Benjamin’s influence can be seen in Sebald’s concern that witnessing, as a process involving both reading and writing, is contaminated by the discourses and values of history’s victors. As such, Sebald’s use of form in The Rings of Saturn seeks to bear witness to the specific histories of suffering encountered by the narrator during his walk through Suffolk. At the same time, it seeks to situate these stories within the broader scope of history, acknowledging the magnitude of the ongoing effects and mediations of atrocity. Out of this exploration arises the need to make visible the networks of complicity in which we remain implicated. Oscillating between digression and return, The Rings of Saturn seeks to tread a delicate line between the extremes of historical distance and identification, between reading empathically and reflectively, and hence to elicit an ethical form of witnessing on the part of those who belatedly encounter the knowledge of atrocity. NOTES 1. Luckhurst argues that the whole of Sebald’s œuvre can be classified in this way, alongside Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces, and Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments. Identifying Austerlitz as an apotheosis of these aesthetic tendencies, he argues that it “explicitly embraced the organizing notion of dissociation and recovered memory to explore post-Holocaust subjectivity” (87). 2. Eaglestone remarks that identification “has a strong ethical significance, especially in relation to the Holocaust, not least in that, as a process, it often leads to the ‘consumption’ and reduction of otherness” (6). 3. Hell suggests that a loss of sight is often related to a loss of masculinity in post-war German literature, although she notes that the issue of masculinity is less of a concern in Sebald’s work (15). 4. Benjamin’s use of the term “barbarism” in the “Theses” usually implies an absence of civilisation or civilised values. This is a slightly different usage to “barbarity,” which tends to refer explicitly to acts of cruelty, although there is some overlap between the two terms. In this article, I use the latter term, as my concern is with Sebald’s representation of atrocity; despite the slight difference in terminology, I do not feel that this represents a significant divergence from Benjamin’s meaning, given that he notes that the historical materialist “cannot contemplate without horror” the origins of civilisation’s “cultural treasures” (256). 5. “Against the Irreversible: On Jean Améry,” published in On the Natural History of Destruction (143–68).

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6. Again, see Luckhurst for examples of this tendency: his discussion of Austerlitz focusses on the representation of traumatised subjectivity (111). 7. Dalia Kandiyoti describes Jakob Beer and Athos’s approach to history in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces in strikingly similar terms. See Susana Onega’s comment on this in her article in this volume. 8. The Booker Prize is one such example of this tendency. As Susie O’Brien (798) notes, the prize was inaugurated by Booker McConnell, a company which operated sugar plantations in Guyana. 9. For the purposes of my own argument, I suggest that Eaglestone’s concern with identification also extends to other narratives which represent limitcase events, that is, any event of such extremity that it may induce psychological trauma.

WORKS CITED Atwood, Margaret. Cat’s Eye. New York: Anchor Books, 1988. Print. Barker, Pat. The Regeneration Trilogy. London: Viking, 1996. Print. Beck, John. “Reading Room: Erosion and Sedimentation in Sebald’s Suffolk.” W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion. Eds J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. 75–88. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. 253–64. Print. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print. Ceuppens, Jan. “Tracing the Witness in W. G. Sebald.” W. G. Sebald and the Writing of History. Eds Anne Fuchs and J. J. Long. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2007. 59–72. Print. Eaglestone, Robert. The Holocaust and the Postmodern. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Print. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2001. Print. Hell, Julia. “Eyes Wide Shut: German Post-Holocaust Authorship.” New German Critique 88 (2003): 9–36. Print. Laub, Dori. “An Event without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival.” Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. 75–92. Print. Levi, Primo. If this is a Man and The Truce. Trans. Stuart Woolf. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979, Print. . The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Print. . The Periodic Table. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. London: Michael Joseph, 1985. Print. Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2000. Print. Long, J. J. W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. Print. . “W. G. Sebald: The Anti-Tourist.” The Undiscover’d Country: W. G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel. Ed. Markus Zisselberger. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. 63–91. Print. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.

192 Ivan Stacy Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces. New York: Vintage International, 1998. Print. Miller, J. Hillis. On Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Moser, Christian. “Peripatetic Liminality: Sebald and the Tradition of the Literary Walk.” The Undiscover’d Country: W. G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel. Ed. Markus Zisselberger. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. 37–62. Print. O’Brien, Susie. “Serving a New World Order: Postcolonial Politics in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.” Modern Fiction Studies 42.4 (1996): 787–806. Print. Santner, Eric. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2006. Print. Sebald, W. G. Austerlitz. Trans. Anthea Bell. London: Penguin, 2001. Print. . The Emigrants. Trans. Michael Hulse. 1992. London: Vintage, 2002a. Print. . The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. 1995. London: Vintage, 2002b. Print. . Vertigo. Trans. Michael Hulse. 1990. London: Vintage, 2002c. Print. . On the Natural History of Destruction. Trans. Anthea Bell. London: Penguin, 2004. Print. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 2006. Print. Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. Print. Wilkomirski, Binjamin. Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood. Trans. Carol Brown Janeway. New York: Schocken Books, 1996. Print.

11 “Separateness and Connectedness” Generational Trauma and the Ethical Impulse in Anne Karpf’s The War After: Living with the Holocaust 1

Silvia Pellicer-Ortín

“While the Holocaust is culturally available as a reference for most postwar writers and citizens, we who are and yet aren’t so intimately connected with it police the distinction between the survivor and the rest with care” (Karpf 2008, 314). These words appear at the end of Anne Karpf’s autobiographical work The War After: Living with the Holocaust, originally published in 1996, summarising some of the main issues raised within its pages: the turn of the Holocaust into a common theme of contemporary debates and the ethical aspects concerning its representation, the special role of the so-called second generation of Holocaust survivors in feeling (dis)connected (from)to their predecessors’ traumatic experiences, and the problematic concept of survivor itself. These are some of the main topics that will be tackled in this chapter. To begin with, The War After should be contextualised within the proliferation of life-writing in its different manifestations and the growing critical concern with autobiographical genres (Marcus 179; France and Saint Clair) that runs parallel to the emergence of trauma studies in the 1990s. The trauma critic Roger Luckhurst has described the phenomenon as a “memoir boom” (117), while Leigh Gilmore has asserted that the “memoir has become the genre” of the new millennium (1, emphasis in original). This recent phenomenon has created a variety of subgenres, such as autobiography, literary biography, autofiction, memoir, autobiografiction, biomythography (Marcus 179; Henke xvi). Alison Light and Roger Luckhurst are two of the many critics who believe that these new autobiographical genres usually tackle challenging aspects concerning the narrativisation of unspeakable individual and collective traumas. In keeping with this, Victoria Stewart has focussed exclusively on autobiographical works written by women in direct relation to the two world wars and the Holocaust, and she explains that many women writers of the twentieth century have dealt “in narrative terms, with recovering and recording the events through which they have passed” (10). This should be related to the fact that the last decades have become the time when “marginalized groups

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and marginalized experiences have claimed their space among the body of autobiographical narratives” (Hammel 121); that is, different minority sectors of society have chosen the autobiographical mode to voice their traumatic experiences of suffering and alienation. However, their works had gone almost unnoticed until the emergence of this recent critical interest in autobiography. Along with this, Leigh Gilmore, in The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, asserts that “the age of memoir and the age of trauma may have coincided” (16) and she argues that a new life-writing genre has emerged out of this complex relationship: the “limit-case autobiography.” According to Gilmore, a limit-case autobiography is a testimonial project that offers original alternatives to the traditional autobiographies so as to make the representation of trauma possible. More concretely, these liminal autobiographies blur the boundaries between autobiography and fiction, history, legal testimony, psychoanalysis, and theory (14), showing the conflicting relationship between the representation of trauma and the representation of the self. These contradictions have given way to new features that characterise these liminal genres, such as the predominance of individual versions of history, the fusion of literary and non-literary genres, the construction of embedded narratives, the presence of a variety of testimonial dimensions, or the use of self-reflexive comments on trauma. As I will attempt to demonstrate, Anne Karpf’s The War After displays all these features.

THE GENERATIONS BORN AFTER Karpf’s autobiographical work should be placed within the trend of hybrid life-writing narratives written by British-Jewish female writers inaugurated in the 1990s. This is a group of writers who had never before talked or written openly about their Jewishness and their Holocaust experiences, and had so far remained on the margins of the British literary canon (Behlau and Reitz 9). Apart from The War After, other works such as Leila Berg’s Flickerbook (1997), Jenny Diski’s Skating to Antarctica (1997), Linda Grant’s Remind Me Who I Am, Again (1998), or Eva Figes’s Journey to Nowhere (2008) demonstrate that these writers have tried to make sense of their and their families’ experiences of immigration and the Holocaust in their writings (Hammel 131). The provenance of this group of writers is diverse—for example, Karpf’s family comes from Poland, Elaine Feinstein’s from Russia, and Figes’s from Germany—and they belong to different generations—some of them, such as Figes, are fi rst-generation immigrants, and others, such as Karpf or Grant, belong to the second and third generations, respectively. However, their productions share many features: most of their works are concerned with history and with reliving the past in their present narratives; they show obvious signs of foreignness and raise questions about the Jewish identity of their protagonists; the Holocaust appears as a

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haunting presence; and the transgenerational transmission of trauma usually occurs among the members of the families represented. In addition, when the events recounted are related to the Holocaust, its representation becomes even more complex, because of the specific ethical and historical imperative ruling this sort of liminal life-writing to avoid trivialisation about these facts (Lang 38). Norma Rosen has described this as the “double-bind of the Holocaust,” an event which is “as nearly impossible to write about as to avoid writing about” (qtd. in Sicher 1998, 23). The contradictions produced by the unspeakability of these events and the need to talk about them become more prominent when concerned with the children of Holocaust survivors. This is the case of Anne Karpf, whose Polish parents survived the Holocaust and immigrated to Great Britain after World War II, having survived the Nazi regime of annihilation. Although Sicher argues that there is “no narrative about the Holocaust that elides the breakage” that this historical episode has brought to our understanding of history and humanity (1998, 2), this breakage is even greater for those who did not go through the horrible experiences themselves but inherited its consequences and were affected by them in an indirect way. The difficulties of the subsequent generations to assimilate and connect themselves with the traumatic experiences undergone by their elders become obvious even in the problematic surrounding their designation. Some critics, such as Ernst van Alphen, have refused to use the term “second generation” as, drawing on Helen Epstein’s path-breaking work Children of the Holocaust (1979), he argues that “the parents/children relationship is not qualified in terms of continuity. The parents are survivors, but it is not suggested that their offspring, by definition, are victimised by that legacy” (476). In other words, the term “survivor” “implies too close a continuity between generations that are, precisely, separated by the trauma of the Holocaust” (Hirsch 109). Another critic, Eva Hoffman, has named the offspring of survivors as the “hinge generation” and the “guardianship of the Holocaust” (xv); while Efraim Sicher has referred to them as “memorial candles” (1998, 24), a metaphor alluding to the traditional Jewish funeral services. These problematic aspects derive from a range of issues. Firstly, the children of Holocaust survivors usually have to face the contradictions between the desire to forget their families’ past and their moral obligation to remember it. Secondly, as Sicher has argued, the second generation, which “bears the scar without the wound” (1998, 27), is even more impelled than the Holocaust generation to seek understanding, because they need to impose some meaning on the “burden” (1998, 35) that has accompanied them throughout their lives. Critics like Sicher, Marianne Hirsch, Ernst van Alphen, and Ellen Fine have explained that this group normally suffers from what has been called “memory holes” or mémoire trouée, a term originally coined by a second-generation survivor, the French novelist Henri Raczymow, in his essay “La mémoire trouée” (1986) to describe “a loss of memory of what was destroyed in the Holocaust and not transmitted” (qtd.

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in Sicher 1998, 29). All these critics explain that the second generation has become the recipient of their ancestors’ traumatic memories, through their silences or repetitive stories, and of the collective memory of the Holocaust, which becomes a burden for them as they fi nd it difficult to negotiate and incorporate those memories in their lives. Thirdly, this burden may develop into feelings of shame, guilt, and exclusion (Fine 195), symptoms which are similar to those of traumatic processes. In short, this generation acts as a kind of “bridge between the past and the future” (189): the children of survivors are the links that seem to provide some continuity to their families’ memories. However, this continuity is never completely achieved since, although the children usually have a strong desire to establish a natural link with their parents, they fail to do so; there will always be an intrinsic disconnection with the parents’ past and with their own “absent memories” (van Alphen 487). For all this, in this chapter, I will use the term “second generation,” as this is the one employed by Karpf throughout her work (2008, 142 and passim) and because, although I agree with the idea that the continuity between Karpf’s and her parents’ experiences is never completely achieved, the main conflict represented in The War After resides in establishing those generational links in a healthy way. Forgetting the term “generation” in the work of this writer would disregard the main aspect she tries to renegotiate. In the following pages, I would like to demonstrate that a way of bridging that discontinuity and allowing the second generation to achieve a meaningful sense of family history and identity is to fi ll the gap left by the Holocaust by writing liminal autobiographies. From Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s pioneering “talking cure” (3–17) to Suzette A. Henke’s concept of “scriptotherapy” (xii–xiii), there has been a generalised consensus that narrative is a specially effective way of making sense of the blanks left by trauma in the conscious mind of the subject. In the case of collective traumas like the Holocaust, art may become “a vehicle for the second generation to make the event comprehensible to themselves as well as to a wider audience” (Feinstein 201). This would explain why “‘second generation’ writers and artists have been publishing artworks, fi lms, novels, and memoirs, or hybrid ‘postmemoirs’ [  .  .  .  ], with titles like After Such Knowledge, The War After, Second-Hand Smoke” (Hirsch 105), all of them highlighting the belated response to the past that they attempt to provide through these writings. Nevertheless, such representations may only be achieved through new aesthetic forms capable of adapting to that extraordinary reality in an ethical way (Feinstein 201; Sicher 1998, 6, 307; Ganteau and Onega 8, 17, 19), forms which are incompatible with previous realist modes of representation. Bearing these ideas in mind, I will attempt to demonstrate that The War After is a limit-case autobiography born out of Anne Karpf’s need to fi nd an ethical form to articulate and heal (Karpf 2008, 260) not only her suffering, as a Jewish child of Holocaust survivors living in foreign Britain, but the suffering of her parents and the community

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of British-Jewish survivors as well. My working hypothesis is that Karpf’s need to fill the gap, to create a bridge connecting her story to that of her parents and, by extension, to that of Holocaust survivors in general, has fostered the writing of this liminal work, a collage made up of the fragmentary pieces of her individual, familial, and collective past.

WRITING TRAUMA IN THE WAR AFTER Born in London on 8 June 1950, sociologist and journalist Anne Karpf and her sister, Eve, were brought up listening to their Jewish parents’ stories of survival. Their mother, Natalia Karpf (née Weissman), was born in Krakow and, before the war, she was on her way to becoming a very good concert pianist. By then, she had married her fi rst husband, who did not survive the Holocaust. Their father, Joseph Karpf, was born on the border of the Russian part of Poland and, after studying in Vienna, he ran his father’s business. However, their destinies took an unexpected turn by the outbreak of World War II. It may be argued that Natalia succeeded in surviving the Holocaust thanks to her musical abilities. Amon Goeth, the commandant of the Nazi concentration camp in Płaszów, made her perform for his birthday party, which allowed Natalia and her sister to be transferred from the cells in the camp to the work camp. If they had not been relocated, they would have probably died in Płaszów and would not have managed to survive Auschwitz, where they were confi ned until the liberation of the camps in 1945. Josef Karpf was moved across various camps in Russia before he joined the Polish army and finally survived the war by working for the Russian Ministry of Agriculture. Once the war was over, Natalia and Josef met, decided to marry and start a new life in London in 1946. Their stories marked Anne Karpf’s life not only at the personal level, but also at the professional one, since she has devoted a great part of her research to studying the Holocaust, this book being the culmination of her long personal and academic journey. Karpf acknowledged the uniqueness of this work when she commented: “I’ll never write another book like The War After—of this, I’m certain. My family memoir recounts the experiences of my parents [ . . . ]. But it’s also my own, intensely personal story, about the impact of the Holocaust on the generations born after” (1996, n.p.). Most critics have underlined the book’s complexity. For instance, Andrea Hammel has described it as “an innovative autobiography, partly an account of her life as the daughter of Shoah survivor parents and partly a socio-historical analysis of the British attitude towards the Shoah” (122). And Phyllis Lassner has argued that Karpf “adds testimony, political history, and psychological analysis to the story of the enmeshed relationship between the character and fate of her survivor parents and her own” (104). These comments reinforce my hypothesis that this is a limitcase autobiography.

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This assertion is fi rstly supported by the book’s structure, which does not follow the chronological order of traditional autobiographies (Buell 47–69), but moves instead between the past and the present of the narrator and her parents’ lives. The book is divided into three parts. In the fi rst, there is a combination of Karpf’s memoir with the recorded testimonies of the interviews she held with her parents in the 1980s and 1990s in order to compile all the information about their lives before, during, and after World War II and the Holocaust. Part II tries to place Karpf’s family’s experience in its historical context: it consists of a study of the post-war period, the history of the Jewish people in Britain, and the main theories about the second generation of Holocaust survivors. Finally, in the last part Karpf addresses her status as a child of Holocaust survivors in a more personal way. This is the most autobiographical part, as she narrates key episodes such as her own motherhood experiences, her father’s illness and death, and her journey of reconciliation with her parents’ past. Taking into consideration the facts that, as Gilmore argues, generically hybrid autobiographies share a common treatment of time, employing devices such as flashbacks, which “represent not only disorientation in time, but also indicate a dissonance within the self that can represent memory” (93), and that one of the main impulses behind limit-cases is the author’s need to understand some unassimilated past events (73, 90, 93), it is easy to see that The War After fulfi ls the requirements of the subgenre, both in its treatment of time and in its purpose, which is to understand the fracture in the narrator’s and her parents’ lifetimes, as the narrator herself explains: “We’d been raised on stories about the fractures in our parents’ lives and the hiatus in their history” (8). This treatment of time illustrates the Freudian tenet that some period of time has to elapse in order for the fi rst symptoms of trauma to be experienced by the subject. Freud referred to this as the “period of latency,” which is “the time that elapsed between the accident and the fi rst appearance of the symptoms,” a sort of “incubation period” which is previous to the manifestation of the symptoms of trauma (2001, 67–68). This notion has been basic for contemporary theories of trauma. For instance, Cathy Caruth points to belatedness as one of the key features of traumatic events: “the period during which the effects of the experience are not apparent, [ . . . ] the successive movement from an event to its repression to its return” (7). This trauma-related temporal belatedness characterises the narrative structure of Anne Karpf’s work and, in more general terms, is common to most liminal autobiographies, which are usually written after that period of latency, when the subject is already experiencing acting-out symptoms and needs to go back to the past and assimilate it in order to face the future. Further, together with the rupture of linearity and the belatedness that predominates throughout the book, various dimensions of time coexist simultaneously in The War After. Lassner described this technique in terms of “juxtaposition(s)” (112) and remarked that: “instead of ascribing a causal relationship between

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her parents’ horrific experiences and her own, the book juxtaposes them” (108). As these words suggest, the juxtaposition of Karpf’s suffering with the traumatic experiences of her parents enhance the sense of (dis)connectedness between them. Thus, it becomes clear from the very beginning that, for Karpf, family stories become part of our “DNA” as encrypted messages that are transmitted across generations (2008, 17). Such words explain why this autobiographical work requires various dimensions of time to coexist: the narrator’s past and present, her parents’ and previous ancestors’ pasts, and the times when anti-Semitism and the Jewish diaspora emerged. These temporal periods impregnate the “DNA” of Karpf’s family so that they cannot be either separated or completely united: to tell Anne’s story means to tell the story of her ancestors. Another defi ning feature of these experimental autobiographies that can be found in The War After is the combination of genres (Gilmore 14; Stewart 14), reflecting the impossibility of representing trauma in a simple way and the difficulties in constructing a continuous narrative out of Karpf’s fragmentary memories. The War After mainly belongs to the genre of the memoir, as it narrates the main experiences of the author’s life and shows her attempts to impose a logical order on those events she did not understand when she was young, as is acknowledged at the beginning of the narration: “I can’t remember when we were fi rst told about the war [ . . . ]; it just seeped into our home, like some peculiarly mobile fog and took up residence” (4). The need to understand the repressed sadness that impregnated their family life is what motivated Karpf’s belated response to the original traumatic events: the writing of The War After. As most trauma critics have explained, although “the transgenerational effects of the Holocaust on the offspring of survivors remain a subject of considerable controversy” (Kellermann 207), the second and following generations tend to inherit their parents’ traumas through a process of transgenerational transmission which is unavoidable until the traumatised subject identifies his or her own trauma (Early 21). For the purposes of my study, I will rely on Natan P. F. Kellermann’s explanation of the process as follows: The mechanism of transmission of trauma [ . . . ] is assumed to be a more multifaceted process, involving various overt and covert kinds of parent–child learning experiences, including internalization, projective identification, modeling, socialization and vicarious learning. Apparently, it seemed to occur both indirectly through the implicit influences of early childhood and more directly through the communication styles, childrearing practices and family interactions of parents later in life. The transmission of trauma may thus be seen as a kind of subtle parental mediating process through which the psychological burdens of survivors are somehow transferred to their children from early infancy on, continuing to reverberate throughout childhood, adolescence, adulthood and beyond. (208)

200 Silvia Pellicer-Ortín In The War After, the autobiographical episodes describe the different stages in the traumatic process the narrator has suffered. The fi rst part of the book shows Karpf’s process of acting out her transgenerationally transmitted trauma (LaCapra 21). At this stage, the narrator experiences many of the symptoms that have been identified by Kellermann, such as internalisation, projective identification, and vicarious learning. At the psychological level, she also evinces an obsession with death and the compulsive fear of losing the loved ones (5, 99). And she is also prey to feelings of guilt (14), self-hatred (41), shame and anxiety (43), the continuous need of success, and an excessive sense of responsibility towards her parents (14–15). In addition, the traumatic symptoms manifest themselves at the physical level, as the narrator recounts that she was always sick when she was a child (7), she suffered from eating disorders (9), chronic sinusitis (10), and skin problems (19), which evolved into the compulsive self-destructive rituals of scratching her skin as an adult (98, 126). This can be identified as the most obvious symptom of trauma showing the internalisation and projective identification of her parents’ suffering, in Kellermann’s terms (208). As Efraim Sicher observes, this psychosomatic eczema represents “the skin as a container or envelope of traumatic material” (2005, 137). The narrator describes the way in which these symptoms have evolved from childhood to adulthood and she “juxtaposes” her symptoms with her parents’ testimonies in order to highlight the causal correlation between both. The fi rst part of the narrative goes crescendo as regards the evocation of these symptoms until she realises that, after all, she has to face her problems and start psychological therapy (102). Then, the narration depicts the possibility of working through her trauma (LaCapra 21–22) in the following comment: “I tri[ed] to reconstruct it now, all I have to go on are fragments of memory and recollected feelings—psychological fossils” (43). From Freud’s theories onwards, the metaphor of the fossil has been largely used in both fictional and autobiographical trauma narratives and critical studies (Abraham and Torok) to depict the process through which the repressed traumatic memories have to be uncovered in order for the subject to reintegrate them in the ordinary narrative memories (Janet 421–33). In the case of The War After, the writing of this autobiography becomes the most obvious attempt to dig up those traumatic memories and show the results of that process. In a recently published article (2012), Susana Onega argues that the form of trauma narratives responds not only to the difficulty of verbalising trauma, but also to the need to attenuate the shock of its transmission by providing a pattern of meaning capable of making it assimilable into the cultural reality of the group, without distorting the true nature of the event, and that this pattern of meaning is provided by archetypal forms of storytelling like fairy tales and myth. Echoing this, Karpf frequently refers to the Holocaust using the vocabulary of myth, fables, and fairy tales (193, 252, 284–5), for instance, in the following, very telling comment:

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The Holocaust was our fairy-tale. Other children were presumably told stories about globins, monsters and wicked witches [ . . . ]. How does a child cope with information about the past brutalisation of its parents? [ . . . ] You mythicise it, structure it round the rhetorical devices and narrative features of other fables you know. (94) Here, the narrator explains the process through which so many survivors have integrated the history of the Holocaust into their own mythology (Brauner 32; Pellicer-Ortín 2012, 202) as part of a reality that can only be explained through the language of fable. Karpf realises that fairy tales have helped her impose some pattern of meaning on her traumatic memories and the traumatic experiences of her parents. This could also be related to the extensively analysed Jewish myth of origins according to which many works dealing with the Holocaust “are accounts of mythological origins, a doubling that is a dislocation, an attempt to write the blank nothing of what is repressed or forgotten” (Sicher 2005, 24). The atrocious nature of the events they have endured has forced survivors to think that what happened to them has to do with their mythical destiny, symbolised by the tales that Karpf alludes to in this passage. Together with the metaphoric language of fairy tale and myth, the pages of The War After are suff used by the discourse of psychoanalysis and trauma studies, another pertinent trait of limit-case autobiographies (Gilmore 67). The presence of this type of discourse in liminal narratives highlights the self-conscious nature of most of these works, usually produced once the author has gone through a healing process of self-knowledge. In The War After, mainly in the second part, readers encounter a great variety of terms from Freudian psychoanalysis and the discipline of trauma studies, such as acting out (Karpf 2008, 272, 99), trauma envy (126), PTSD (200), and so on, which the narrator uses to describe the suffering of her parents, always highlighting their strong resilient abilities (140), and her own traumatic process: such symptoms of acting out, such as the compulsive scratching of her skin in the same place where her mother had a tattoo with the camp number, which shows an excessive identification with her mother’s pain (106), or the process towards working-through and the sessions of psychological therapy, in the course of which she realises that she had always been directing her anger inwards, hurting herself psychologically and physically (102). Besides the memoir, the genre of testimony has an obvious presence in The War After at various levels, as it contains Karpf’s own testimonial narration and the testimonies of her parents translated into narrative in the form of an interview, giving place to the question–answer episodes that characterise the narration. In these sequences, her parents’ voices are mediated by Karpf’s questions and editing. This situates her parents’ testimonies en abyme inside Karpf’s, a structural pattern suggested by her remark: “it is as if my parents’ experience had become my own” (44), which reinforces the

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connection between their life stories. In fact, this is a pattern that repeats itself in some other generically hybrid autobiographies, such as Eva Figes’s Journey to Nowhere (2008) and Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After (1995).2 In their narrations, Anne Karpf’s parents, Josef and Natalia, report their suffering during the Holocaust and their attempts to build a new life afterwards. The most relevant aspect of both testimonies may be their desire to leave the horror behind, which Anne, the first-level narrator, describes as their extremely resilient nature (96). In fact, she remembers how she used to blame them for preferring to look in another direction as, for example, when Natalia Karpf explains that she does not even remember the number tattooed on her arm since she prefers not to look at it (89). The testimonies of Karpf’s parents respond to the traditional format of testimonial genres, with Natalia and Josef/the survivors talking to Anne/the addressee and secondary witness to their traumatic narration. Normally, this kind of testimony is not carried out easily, mainly for the speakers who release their traumatic experiences; however, in Karpf’s work the listener seems to be affected more than the speakers themselves. The narrator initially refuses to hear her parents’ testimonies; when she listens to the taped interviews many years later, she eventually recognises that she was extremely reluctant to advance from the year 1936 onwards as if she did not want to face the crude reality that came afterwards (67). And she also falls prey to the type of selective amnesia that characterises traumatic experiences when she acknowledges that one year after having recorded her parents’ testimonies she was unable to remember almost anything they had told her (115). Theoretically, the addressee of a traumatic testimony should not overidentify with the victim but empathise with her/him (Levinas 105). That is, the secondary witness should keep an ethical distance between him or herself and the victims, experiencing only what LaCapra has described as “empathic unsettlement” (41). Here, this is not possible as the narrator is unable to detach herself from her parents’ stories. However, the achievement of this ethical distance is a necessary step in the comprehension by their daughter of their real suffering, as is illustrated in the third part of the book, where she realises that their resilience was their only way of surviving the Holocaust. This is depicted when the narrator returns to one of her mother’s recordings: When I [Natalia Karpf] think of all the people I lost—my brother, my father [and she named a long list], I don’t know why I didn’t hang myself. How could I survive, go on living after all that, and after losing Josef too? [ . . . ] Yet I get up and I’m happy to be here in this lovely flat, and to live. (311) The reader is also offered a fi nal conciliatory reflection by Karpf’s mother on the reluctance she and her husband experienced when they had to tell their traumatic stories to Anne and her sister, Eve, for fear of traumatising them, coupled with the need to have them know the truth (158).

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Characteristically, they conclude that whether or not the parents tell their children the truth, there is never a suitable means of doing it, that is, there is no appropriate way of transmitting the painful knowledge of the Holocaust. The testimonial act represented in Karpf’s memoir should also be seen in the light of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s emphasis on the value of testimonies for the preservation of historical memories for future generations (52–74). This happens because the speaker transmits a testimony to a listener who receives the other’s truth, a truth that has not only individual meaning, but also collective implications (204). The collective value of Karpf’s family memoir is clear. The book shows a sustained interest in portraying a collective picture of the victims of the Holocaust, mainly those who migrated to Britain after the war (Karpf 2008, 165–7). Ultimately, the fi nal words of the recordings of her mother illustrate another related goal of this book: to keep the memories of this dark episode of history alive so as to avoid its repetition. Her sadness when she sees that similar episodes of war and suffering are happening again, for instance, in the Balkans War, is very telling in this respect (161). In addition, the historical, critical, and scholarly discourses interplay with the genres mentioned. The bulk of the book is characterised by an abundance of precise historical data, even in the parents’ testimonies, although it is in the intermediate part that the features of academic and historical writing predominate. Following the conventions of academic writing, Karpf quotes from and paraphrases the main scholars in Holocaust studies in what becomes a review of the key aspects in this field. Thus, she analyses many of the prejudices and problems that Jewish immigrants had to face in Britain after World War II (178–9), as she remarks that there has always been a persistent anti-Semitism in British society (214), and she claims that the British-Jewish need to speak out their traumatic experiences in these harsh terms: It’s as if children of survivor’s reluctance to speak in the fi rst person, and treat their experience as legitimate in its own right and not simply with reference to their parents’, has combined with the British demand for reticence and politeness, to inhibit (or at least delay) the emergence of a distinctly British second generation. (245) This comment endorses the effort made by second and third British-Jewish generations of writers to acquire a voice in the British socio-cultural panorama. Karpf also offers a review of the studies about the traumas of the posterior generations of Holocaust survivors which, as Lassner argues, “represents a national etiology of psychological deprivation that would infect the Second Generation” (112) and which, as she explains, constitutes an essential part of her understanding of trauma. As she began to learn more about the psychological studies on the effects of World War II and the Holocaust on the so-called second generations of survivors, she discovered many behaviour patterns that

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echoed the traumatic symptoms she had experienced throughout her life (142). The healing effect of this research becomes clear when Karpf says that, after attending the First International Conference of Children of Holocaust Survivors in Israel (145), she realised that: “[she] hadn’t lived the central experience of [her] life—at its heart, at [hers], was an absence” (146). In other words, familiarising herself with the theory and meeting other people in a similar situation—what Judith Lewis Herman has described as the vital importance of the feeling of commonality for survivors of trauma (214)—helped her notice the gap at the centre of her life, a gap that, once the period of latency was over, she has obviously tried to fill in by writing this memoir. I would like to stress the importance of this part of the book for the general purposes of The War After, since this middle part provides a kind of theoretical guide for the analysis of the book; that is to say, the theory that critics may use to examine it is already within the text itself. The fact that at the core of Karpf’s memoir we fi nd a piece of historical and theoretical research points to her need to study objectively all those aspects that have influenced her life emotionally. The possibility of considering this part a self-guide for the author and a guide for the readers demonstrates that neither memoir and history nor theory alone can provide the key to understand the Holocaust in the case of second-generation survivors such as Karpf, that it is the interplay of all of them that may help them assimilate it. The structural complexity and generic hybridity of The War After would support Berel Lang’s claim that a “discourse that includes the manifold forms of testimony, including memory, history, and literature” (qtd. in Horowitz 288) is the best mode to access and represent the Holocaust. Part III shows a return to the memoir, focussing on Karpf’s motherhood experiences and the reconciliation with her parents, which is “juxtaposed” with the diary form that chronicles her father’s fi nal year. The last entry of this diary becomes a turning point in the narration when Karpf fi nally accepts death as something natural: 1995 [ . . . ]. The fear that my father might die has been replaced by the knowledge that my mother—and P [her husband], and me, and even B [her child]—undeniably will. For the fi rst time, I recognise the meaning of the term “a natural death.” (282, emphasis in original) After detaching herself from her parents (135) in order to achieve the psychological autonomy that she needed, and after overcoming the feelings of rage towards their resilient attitude and experiencing a growing love for them (138), her father’s death marks the beginning of her healing. This healing process is mostly fulfilled by her physical and spiritual journey back to her parents’ land, a recurrent motif in contemporary British-Jewish writings (Brauner 34; Pellicer-Ortín 2012, 206). After her father’s death and during her second pregnancy, Karpf describes the fi rst encounter with her parents’ homeland as the shocking moment in which she realised that the mental construction she had created of her parents’ past belonged to

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a real place, that the country really existed, and then she acknowledged that: “Immediately, both my connection and lack of connection with it became apparent” (294, emphasis added). These words depict how the narrator directly encounters the problematic and contradictory disconnection with her family land. The misencounter with that reality she had imagined so many times becomes real, provoking an uncontrollable upsurge of emotions. Visiting her parents’ houses and coming across the traces of the Holocaust victims triggers off an incessant need to cry; however, as she says, she was crying not only for her parents’ survival, but for all those who could not survive (298). Karpf’s crying represents the cathartic moment when she was fi nally conscious of the meaning of the Holocaust, the moment when she fi nally connected herself to her ancestors’ land, and, although her initial reaction was to argue that she did not want to transmit her future child the traumatic legacy of the family (301), she fi nally realised that, even though the journey had been painful, “it had been a healing experience” (309). This reflection demonstrates the inherent contradiction in any working-through process between the need to acknowledge and to forget the traumatic past, even though the same contradiction has helped the narrator empathise with her parent’s suffering (311). Regarding the other features that allow us to characterise The War After as a limit-case autobiography, it is important to underline the collective component of this memoir, which is mainly effected through the polyphonic mixture of voices and the various levels of testimony. As Gilmore explains, limit-cases do not seek to provide universal versions of history (43); rather, they offer readers versions of history that had been previously ignored because they belonged to minority groups. This is the case of British-Jewish writers such as Anne Karpf, who even mentions that there is no such a thing as a Jewish literary tradition in Britain (2008, 51). Starting from the individual, liminal autobiographies characteristically move to the familial and the collective versions of traumatic historical events to show that trauma shatters the boundaries of self-representation (71–72). The erasure of the limits between literary and non-literary genres and the juxtaposition of individual, familial, and collective traumas in The War After demonstrate that Karpf’s personal traumas cannot be addressed in isolation, that she needs to put them in the context of her family, the collective history of the Jewish people, and the previous critical works on the Holocaust. Only when she does so is she able to put her pain into words and acknowledge her trauma in the three fi nal chapters of the book.

THE ETHICAL WAR: GENERATIONAL (DIS) CONNECTIONS AND THE HEALING OF TRAUMA As the book advances, readers realise that Karpf has been representing the ethical dilemmas she has experienced during her life, which she describes as an inner war: “I’d had to go through a war of my own before being able

206 Silvia Pellicer-Ortín to have a child” (Karpf 2008, 146). The narrator has described the difficult relationship with her parents, her problems in understanding their resilience in front of the Nazi horror, her doubts about British-Jewish identity, and her troubles when trying to connect herself with the history of the Holocaust. Although this ethical war is constant in the memoir, it increases when the narrator has children, as she wonders how they will connect themselves with a foreign land and with a painful family history (255). Again, the difficulties—mentioned by van Alphen and other Holocaust critics in the introductory section of this chapter—in establishing some continuity across generations, together with her problems when creating stable emotional bonds with her adoptive land and with her offspring, are embodied in the problems she had when feeding her fi rst baby (256). However, the concluding chapter offers a certain way out of the narrator’s pain, the ethical dilemmas, and the lack of continuity recounted in the book. After facing her repressed traumas and obtaining a relative sense of continuity with her parents’ lives, she declares that, although a complete working-through does not exist (313), she has managed to solve most of the dilemmas that had been haunting her. The best proof of that is the writing of this memoir, which constitutes the fi nal stage in her healing process, demonstrating the powerful effect of scriptotherapy. As Lassner has explained, “Karpf’s book could be written only when she had established her own professional and personal life and was able to come to terms with the relationship between her parents’ cataclysmic shifts in moderating their stories and her own” (106). It could also be said that Anne Karpf managed to write through her and her parents’ traumas belatedly, when the period of latency was over, when she started to identify her mental and psychic symptoms of trauma, when she was able to face her parents’ traumatic testimonies, when as a mother she needed to provide some sense of continuity to her offspring. This book relates the life-long process of establishing an ethical connection with the past for many children of Holocaust survivors. Yet, Karpf hints that the traces of trauma, the feeling of having a hole at the centre of one’s life, and the symptomatic fear of losing those one loves will always be part of their identities, as illustrated in these episodes: My family was big on coats. [ . . . ] Virtually none, in their view, was thick enough. How many sheep gave their fleeces for my parents to be satisfied that I was sufficiently warm I couldn’t say. (2008, 3) I can’t believe how much connectedness and separateness I’ve attained. It’s a windy day and I’m going out with B. “Put your coat on.” I plead, “You’ll be cold.” “No, mama.” She replies, “I’m not cold.” You are. (317) Many pages and years separate these two passages and two generations space them out, as the fi rst episode refers to Anne’s parents’ symbolic obsession with cold and the second shows Anne reproducing the same behaviour

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towards her child. Clearly, the same worry persists, and the coat becomes a metaphor for the traumatic fear of loss transmitted across generations. This demonstrates that the traumatic traces will always be there, (dis)connecting the various generations of survivors. Nevertheless, the arrival of the third generation of survivors is described in a much more positive light as they may become the healing link that provides some continuity between the two previous generations: “B’s birth completed the healing process between my parents, P, and me” (260). I would like to end this study with some of the narrator’s fi nal words, which summarise the result of her working-through process thanks to the encountering with her parents’ (hi)stories: “I am not a case-history—my own path is far more bumpy and circuitous, this story doesn’t end with all problems neatly solved, although through the process of transcribing my parents’ tapes I do feel some kind of resolution” (313). Although Karpf does not want to be considered a case-history or to be reduced to a set of psychological symptoms, it seems undeniable that The War After constitutes a great example of trauma narrative displaying all the traits of liminality: in terms of form, as a generically hybrid autobiography; in terms of the events represented, on the limits of history and representation; in terms of the ethical limits imposed by the awe-inspiring episode of history we call the Holocaust and by her own family bonds; and in terms of the affective disconnection upon which the children of Holocaust survivors, such as Anne Karpf, have had to build their lives, their lives “after.” NOTES 1. The research carried out for the writing of this chapter is part of a project fi nanced by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (METI) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) (code FFI2012– 32719). The author is also thankful for the support of the government of Aragón and the European Social Fund (ESF) (code H05). 2. See Pellicer-Ortín (2011).

WORKS CITED Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. 1987. London: U of Chicago P, 1994. Print. Behlau, Ulrike, and Bernard Reitz. Jewish Women’s Writing of the 1990s and beyond in Great Britain and the United States. M.U.S.E. 5. Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2004. Print. Berg, Leila. Flickerbook: An Autobiography. London: Granta Books, 1997. Print. Brauner, David. Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Print. Buell, Lawrence. “Autobiography in the American Renaissance.” American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991. 47–70. Print.

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Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Print. Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and After. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1995. Print. Diski, Jenny. Skating to Antarctica. 1997. London: Virago, 2005. Print. Early, Emmett. The Raven’s Return: The Infl uence of Psychological Trauma on Individuals and Culture. Illinois: Chiron Publications, 1993. Print. Epstein, Helen. Children of the Holocaust. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. Print. Feinstein, Stephen C. “Mediums of Memory: Artistic Responses of the Second Generation.” Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz. Ed. Efraim Sicher. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1998. 201–51. Print. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print. Figes, Eva. Journey to Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land. London: Granta Books, 2008. Print. Fine, Ellen S. “Transmission of Memory: The Post-Holocaust Generation in the Diaspora.” Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz. Ed. Efraim Sicher. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1998. 185–200. Print. France, Peter, and William Saint Clair. Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography. 2002. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2004. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “Moses and Monotheism.” 1939. Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis and Other Works. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XXIII. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Vintage, 2001. 1–137. Print. Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. “On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication.” 1893. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. II (1893–95). Eds and trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson. London: Vintage, 2001. 3–17. Print. Ganteau, Jean-Michel, and Susana Onega, “Introduction.” Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction. Eds Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011. 7–19. Print. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 2001. Print. Grant, Linda. Remind Me Who I Am, Again. 1998. London: Granta Books, 1999. Print. Hammel, Andrea. “Representations of Family in Autobiographical Texts of Child Refugees.” SHOFAR 23.1 (Fall 2004): 121–32. Print. Henke, Suzette A. Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s LifeWriting. London: Macmillan, 1998. Print. Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. 1992. London: Pandora, 2001. Print. Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29.1 (2008): 103–28. Print. Hoff man, Eva. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. Print. Horowitz, Sara R. “Auto/Biography and Fiction after Auschwitz: Probing the Boundaries of Second-Generation Aesthetics.” Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz. Ed. Efraim Sicher. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1998. 276–94. Print. Janet, Pierre. L’évolution de la mémoire et la notion du temps. Paris: Chahine, 1928. Print.

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Karpf, Anne. The War After: Living with the Holocaust. 1996. London: Minerva, 2008. . “On The War After. Anne Karpf.” 1996. Accessed on 18/04/2012 at: http://www.faber.co.uk/article/2008/12/war-after-anne-karpf/. Web. Kellermann, Natan P. F. “The Long-Term Psychological Effects and Treatment of Holocaust Trauma.” Journal of Loss and Trauma 6.3 (July–September 2001): 197–218. Print. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Print. Lang, Berel, ed. Writing and the Holocaust. New York and London: Homes & Meier, 1988. Print. Lassner, Phyllis. Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being: Or, beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Linguis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998. Print. Light, Alison. “Writing Lives.” The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Literature Vol. 1. Eds Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 751–67. Print. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge, 2008. Print. Marcus, Laura. Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1994. Print. Onega, Susana. “Affective Knowledge, Self-Awareness and the Function of Myth in the Representation and Transmission of Trauma. The Case of Eva Figes’ Konek Landing.” Journal of Literary Theory 6.1 (2012): 83–102. Print. Pellicer-Ortín, Silvia. “Testimony and the Representation of Trauma in Eva Figes’ Journey to Nowhere.” Atlantis: The Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies 23.1 (June 2011): 69–84. Print. . “‘At Last I Knew What It Meant to Be a Jew’: The Jew as a Foreigner in Eva Figes’ Little Eden: A Child at War.” Comparative Critical Studies Xenographies 9 (June 2012): 197–211. Print. Raczymow, Henri. “La mémoire trouée.” Pardès 3 (1986): 181. Print. Sicher, Efraim. The Holocaust Novel. New York: Routledge. 2005. Print. Sicher, Efraim, ed. Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1998. Print. Stewart, Victoria. Women’s Autobiography: War and Trauma. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print. van Alphen, Ernst. “Second-Generation Testimony, Transmission of Trauma, and Postmemory.” Poetics Today 27.2 (Summer 2006): 473–88. Print.

12 Hybridity, Montage, and the Rhetoric and Ethics of Suffering in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces 1

Susana Onega

FUGITIVE PIECES AND THE ARTISTIC REPRESENTATION OF SUFFERING Anne Michaels’s fi rst novel, Fugitive Pieces (1996), is the work of a poet and, as such, is written in a terse and highly troped and melodious style that, like Paul Celan’s Death Fugue, 2 raises the doubt fi rst expressed by Theodor Adorno in “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft” about the ethicality of writing poetry “after Auschwitz.”3 The similarity of the novel’s title to that of Celan’s poem overtly directs the readers’ attention to this ethical question, suggesting a conscious intent on Michaels’s part to demonstrate that it is indeed possible and necessary to write poetry after Auschwitz. In this, Michaels may be said to be following the path opened by Adorno himself when, eleven years after this anti-poetry pronouncement, he nuanced his original view on the matter, on the consideration that: The abundance of real suffering tolerates no forgetting [ . . . ]. Yet this suffering, what Hegel called consciousness of adversity, also demands the continued existence of art while it prohibits it: it is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still fi nd its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it. The most important artists of the age have realized this. (2002: 188) As these words were published in 1962, it seems evident that Adorno was referring to the right of direct survivors of the Holocaust to fi nd consolation and keep the memory of their suffering alive, not to the right of later generations of poets who, like Anne Michaels, do not even have a familial relation to it.4 In the case of “after-Holocaust” writers like Michaels, the question of the danger of artistic commodification of the Holocaust is even more pressing as there are many who believe that later generations have nothing meaningful to say about the Holocaust, much less so by means of art. However, there are also others, such as the Jewish writer and critic Thane Rosenbaum, who argue that the victims of the Holocaust died twice, in body and soul, and that it is the task of the later generations “to

Hybridity, Montage, and the Rhetoric and Ethics of Suffering 211 look even beyond the Six Million” to imagine “the story of the aftermath,” which “is not one of physical death and defilement but of spiritual loss and soul murder” (492). Similarly, Marianne Hirsch underlines the importance of the imagination in the construction of what she terms “postmemory,” that is, the recollection of the Holocaust “through an imaginative investment and creation” by those who have “arrived too late” to experience it for themselves (22). Michaels’s novel belongs in this category, as Nicola King suggests when she describes “Fugitive Pieces as a novel which attempts to provide a ‘site of memory’ [ . . . ] as a generation which experienced the Holocaust directly begins to die out” (121). Although Michaels did not attempt to represent the atrocities of the Holocaust directly, as the novel contains two autobiographical memoirs written many years after the war, the fact that it is written in a highly poetic style became a critical bone of contention. As Merle Williams and Stefan Polantinsky have pointed out, early critics such as Donna Coffey or Meira Cook expressed a pressing concern that “the lyricism of its language has aestheticised the Holocaust, therefore obscuring the horror of genocide” (7), while others, such as Susan Gubar or Meredith Criglington, retorted that it is precisely the lyricism of the novel that invites the “empathic unsettlement” (LaCapra 78) of the readers and facilitates their role as addressees/belated witnesses. Williams and Polantinsky add their own perspective on the issue by arguing that, though valuable, the insights of these critics “seem to overlook shaping aspects of Michaels’s linguistic creativity, especially the subtly reflective subtext which traces out the contours of her overt narrative” (7). This remark points to the existence of a self-conscious element in the novel that sets the supposed aestheticism of the poetic style into question, bringing to mind both Leigh Gilmore’s (2001) thesis about the hybridisation of autobiography as a response to trauma and Michael Rothberg’s contention that the representation of the Holocaust demands the joint rethinking of the categories of realism, Modernism, and postmodernism (9).5 The generic and modal complexity of Holocaust narratives postulated by Gilmore and Rothberg are already suggested by the irony cast on the novel’s title by its wealth of intertextual connotations. As Donna Coffey has pointed out, “the word ‘fugue’ is contained in the word ‘fugitive’” (29), so that it simultaneously evokes “Petrarch’s title Rime scarse, scattered rhymes, for his collection of poems, largely elegies, to his beloved Laura”; “the musical pieces” performed or listened to by several characters in the novel; and the possibility that “Paul Celan’s famous Holocaust poem ‘Death Fugue’ may also lurk in the background” (29).6 Implicitly drawing on the critical tradition initiated by Peter Viereck that associates Nazism with Romanticism, Coffey contends that this intertextual allusion to Petrarch’s elegies already points to “Anne Michaels’s attempts to reinvent the pastoral in a way that forces it into collision with the events of the Holocaust” (28).7 And, although she is well aware that “[a] potential critique of Fugitive Pieces is that in engaging with the pastoral fantasy of the

212 Susana Onega Nazis, Michaels unconsciously replicates it” (39), she concludes asserting that “Michaels expands the idiom of Holocaust literature by redefi ning [the German myth of] blood and soil and by refusing to accept Nazi appropriation and proprietorship of the pastoral” (48). Coffey’s interpretation of the novel as an attempt to counteract the German myth of blood and soil is well argued and casts significant light on Fugitive Pieces. However, the critic’s admission that Michaels carries out this work of replication “unconsciously” qualifies her own assertion. What is more, this interpretation does not take into account at least two other important intertextual references suggested by the title. One is the fact, pointed out by Patty Kelly, that “[p]athologies of memory associated with PTSD include Dissociative Fugue,” a mental disorder “characterized by sudden, unexpected travel away from home or one’s past and confusion about personal identity or the assumption of a new identity” (97–8). This allows Kelly to read the word “fugue” in the title as an allusion to the “trauma-time motif” ruling the novel (98), and to contend that it prefigures both the disjointed and repetitive nature of the text and Michaels’s “resist[ance to] an integrated, cohesive account of the Holocaust, while at the same time she holds history accountable” (97). The other evident intertext of Michaels’s novel is more disturbing, because of its incongruity: Fugitive Pieces is the title of Lord Byron’s fi rst collection of poetry, printed in 1806 privately and anonymously “for the perusal of a few friends to whom they are dedicated,” as Byron wrote in the preface (12). This allusion to a morally dubious and artistically unremarkable work gives a parodic turn to the testimonial, the musical, the pastoral, and the traumatological connotations of the title, placing Michaels’s fictional opera prima on a par with the Romantic poet’s highly autobiographical and mischievous piece of juvenilia. This parodic element works paradoxically both to reinforce and to undermine Michaels’s Romantic leanings, as it creates an ironic tension between what can be interpreted as an acknowledgement of the tradition she belongs in and a self-conscious admission of her inadequacy to write “after Auschwitz.” My contention is that the intertextual complexity, contradictoriness, and self-consciousness of the title are consonant with the excessiveness of the romance as a mode that, as argued elsewhere (Onega and Ganteau x–xx), is a salient feature of contemporary trauma fiction, and also with the requirements of Holocaust representation as theorised by Gilmore and Rothberg.

GENERIC HYBRIDITY, STRUCTURAL DUPLICITY, AND STYLISTIC HOMOGENEITY IN FUGITIVE PIECES Echoing Rosenbaum’s view on the task of post-Holocaust writers, Michaels combines in Fugitive Pieces two complementary stories of “spiritual loss and soul murder”: Part I contains the unfi nished memoir of the life-long

Hybridity, Montage, and the Rhetoric and Ethics of Suffering 213 struggle for spiritual rebirth written in his mature age by Jakob Beer, a child survivor of the Polish Holocaust who heard, but did not see, the murder of his parents and the abduction of his sister Bella by the Nazis, while he was hiding in a narrow space behind the wallpaper in the cupboard of the family home (6). He then lived in the woods for several days in a state of shock and starvation, burying himself in the earth and covering his head with leaves (8) during the day and roaming the woods for edible herbs and roots during the night, until he was found by Athos (Athanasios Roussos), a Greek archaeologist who was digging for prehistoric remains on the boggy marshes of Biskurpin. Athos, who assumed the role of koumbaros or godfather to the pitiful boy (14), managed to cross the frontier with him and kept him hidden in his house on the Greek island of Zakynthos. After the war, Athos accepted a job as professor of geology at the University of Toronto and took the child with him to Canada, where he would grow up to become a poet, a poetry translator, and also a university professor. The second narrative contained in Part II is, like the fi rst, an autobiographical account, this time written by Beer’s biographer, Ben, an ex-student of Beer’s who shares with him a love of poetry and geology. The son of Polish survivors of the Holocaust who had migrated to Canada after the war, Ben is the victim of a transgenerational trauma transmitted to him through the ominous silence of his parents, who never managed to talk about their atrocious experiences to their son, including the deaths of his elder siblings, Hanna and Paul (252). Both narrations are, then, presented as real-life accounts, with Ben acting both as author-narrator of his and his parents’ life stories, and as editor, and possibly ghost writer, of Beer’s unfi nished memoir, as it was Ben who, after the poet’s untimely death, found the manuscript by chance and edited it for publication. The possibility that Ben might have acted as ghost writer is suggested by the visual and phonetic similarity of their names (Beer, Ben), added to by the fact that “Ben” in Hebrew means “son” (253); by an implausible coincidence of jobs, tastes, and thoughts that has led the critic Dalia Kandiyoti to refer to Ben as Beer’s “double” (313); and, we may add, by the disturbing identicalness of the poetic styles of both memoirs, which is so strong that, in a fi rst reading, it takes some time to realise that the author-narrator of Part II is not Jakob Beer but his admirer Ben. This effect is enhanced by the repetition of some of the chapter titles: the four chapters into which Part II is divided repeat the titles of four of the six chapters that compose the fi rst: “The Drowned City,” “Vertical Time,” “The Way Station,” and “Phosphorus.” This repetitiveness is simultaneously undermined, however, by the difference in the number of chapters and in the order of presentation of the last two chapters, which is reversed in the second account: “Phosphorus” and “The Way Station.” This produces an effect of stylistic saturation and structural circularity that works to arrest the linear progressiveness suggested by the age of the autodiegetic narrators and the sequential position of the two narratives. Yet another element that sets this progressiveness

214 Susana Onega into question is the fact, pointed out by Marita Grimmwood, that “Ben’s interpretation of Jakob is flawed” (123). According to this critic, Ben makes mistakes he should not have made if he had written his own account after fi nding and reading Beer’s memoir. Thus, for example, “the reader but not Ben can provide an explanation” for objects he fi nds in Jakob’s house on Idhra, which had an important symbolic value for the poet (123). Ben’s silence about the affectively charged symbolic meaning of these objects is interpreted by Grimmwood as evidence that he is “a failed reader, an overinterpreter, who eventually comes to acknowledge that his ‘mistake would be to look for something hidden”’ (123). Although there is no denying that Ben’s capacity for empathy has been seriously damaged by his parents’ emotional paralysis, the absence of references to the affective meaning of Beer’s memorabilia could also be attributable to a sheer lack of knowledge, pointing to the fact that Ben might have written the bulk of his account before he found and read Beer’s manuscript. The fact that Ben’s narration is printed as a sequel to that of Jakob does not necessarily mean that he could not have written it earlier, before Beer died and he visited his house on Idhra. If this were so, then Ben’s addressee would be the still living Beer, a possibility that makes more sense than assuming that Ben is addressing his memoir to the dead poet. This interpretation is reinforced by Ben’s comment that he was impelled to write his life story moved by the reading of Beer’s poems (not his memoir) (206). This and the fact that Beer is Ben’s explicit addressee suggest that the younger man’s memoir might have originated as a letter written to the famous poet by an admiring younger friend and colleague. At the same time, however, the striking stylistic identicalness of the two narratives and the fact that Ben’s memoir contains italicised fragments not only of Beer’s poems (for example, 266–8) but also of short stories about other Jewish children in hiding (for example, 148–9, 157–9), which had been written by Beer (134) and found and read on Idhra by Ben (157), undermine this interpretation, calling attention to the wrongness of attempting to relate both narrations chronologically, instead of realising that “it is less important to know what occurrence is the point of departure than to establish the relation that unites them” (Amfreville 140, my translation). As Marc Amfreville acutely argues, this relation relies on “a play of echoes, repetitions and enchainment,” productive of a repetitive “rime” (181, 168, my translation), that brings to the fore their “contrapuntal structure,” itself evocative of a fugue (181, 163, my translation). Arguably, this contrapuntal structure works to set the individuality and sequentiality of the two narrations into question, suggesting that they form part of a larger collective trauma narrative made up of the unison formed by the testimonies not only of all the direct survivors of the Holocaust, but of the subsequent generations as well. The effect produced by this unison—comparable to the musical “middle voice” mentioned in one of the italicised fragments (162)—is overtly alluded to by Beer in a self-conscious metacomment on the Hebrew tradition of referring to forefathers as “we” instead of “they”:

Hybridity, Montage, and the Rhetoric and Ethics of Suffering 215 This encourages empathy and a responsibility to the past but, more important, it collapses time. The Jew is forever leaving Egypt. A good way to teach ethics. If moral choices are eternal, individual actions take on immense significance no matter how small: not for this life only. (159–60) In the light of this comment, the thematic repetitiveness, structural duplicity, and stylistic homogeneity of the novel may be said to be aimed at provoking the collapse of sequential time (chronos) and the creation of a presentness that responds to the ancient Greek concept of kairos (“the supreme moment”)—that indeterminate and epiphanic time in which a special event takes place that calls for action and transformation. As Amfreville suggests, this concept of kairos can be related to the Freudian notion of Nachträglichkeit or deferred action (French après-coup), as both signal the arrest of linear time in favour of repetition and return to an earlier event (140). Thus, to the sense of empathy and shared responsibility transmitted by the palimpsestic accumulation of testimonial voices in Beer’s and Ben’s narrations, another notion is added: that of the collective acting out of an atrocious past trauma that is still endlessly relived as present and which can only be worked through if we are ready to contemplate it from the joint backward perspective that will reveal its true significance.

LOSS, MOURNING, MELANCHOLIA, AND THE SHADOW PAST OF WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN The suggestion that the two individual testimonial narratives that compose Fugitive Pieces form part of a single and ever-present collective trauma is already suggested in the short editorial note that appears at the beginning of the novel. In it Jakob Beer’s memoir is introduced as a genuine piece of Second World War testimonial writing, on a par with “countless manuscripts—diaries, memoirs, eyewitness accounts—[which] were lost or destroyed,” “deliberately hidden,” “concealed in memory,” or “recovered, by circumstance alone.” This description gives yet another turn to the meaning of the title, suggesting that the “pieces” that constitute the novel are “fugitive” in the sense that they survived by sheer chance and are only two among numberless petits récits in Jean-François Lyotard’s sense of the term, each offering its own individual and partial, though immensely significant, view of the atrocity of the Shoah. Beer himself is presented against this background as a flesh-and-blood poet and translator of posthumous war writings, who died in Athens, in the spring of 1993, at the age of sixty in a car accident that also cost the life of his (pregnant) wife, Michaela. His personal testimony of the Holocaust is explicitly addressed to a collective addressee/witness formed by all the living and dead victims he loves: Athos, Bella, his fi rst and second wives, Alex and Michaela, and his friends Maurice and Irena (191).

216 Susana Onega The key to the writing of this memoir is provided at the beginning of Beer’s narration when, reflecting on the event that changed the course of his life, he realises that all he remembers of the murder of his parents is the sounds he heard from his hiding place of the door breaking open and the spit of buttons falling from the dish where his mother kept them. But worse than the memory of those sounds was that he could not remember any emitted by Bella (10). The silence surrounding her abduction constitutes the mnemonic gap at the centre of the traumatic experience that Jakob will attempt to fill in by imagining his beloved big sister telling him stories or playing her favourite piano “pieces” by Beethoven and other German masters. And he will also attempt to mitigate his longing and memory failings by creating images of familial bliss through the juxtaposition of present and past idyllic moments. Thus, for example, he juxtaposes his evenings watching Athos reading with the memory of similar peaceful and joyful evenings with his mother sewing, his father reading the daily papers, and Bella studying music (19). Jakob Beer’s decision to write his testimonial memoir in the spring of 1992, when he is approaching sixty, may be interpreted as evidence that he is attempting to come to terms with his Holocaust trauma by putting it into words, thus transforming his traumatic memories into narrative memories (Janet 438–50). However, Beer himself never consciously envisioned his memoir as a healing narrative. Rather, like the creation of images of familial bliss, the writing of his memoir was prompted by his inability to mourn their deaths adequately, as he himself suggests when he calls it “[a] biography of longing” (17). This fact would explain why Beer’s narrative is aimed not so much at recovering and placing the events of his past in their proper context, but at imagining into being what he describes as the “shadow past [ . . . ] shaped by everything that never happened” (17); in other words, imagined events belonging in that speculative category of time that T. S. Eliot called, in “Burnt Norton,” “what might have been” (189), which Eliot associated with the (elegiac) yearning for the loss of primeval innocence. As we know, Eliot did not see much purpose in following “the path which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened, / Into the rose-garden”; he was well aware of the futility of the attempt as: “What might have been is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of speculation” (189). With Eliot’s sobering warning in mind, it is easy to see that Jakob’s attempts to imagine a blissful alternative family past to compensate for the incontrovertible fact of his traumatic loss are the product of a deeply set and long-lasting melancholia, so that when he sat down to write he was still caught in the acting-out phase of his unresolved trauma. Given the fact that, during this phase, the victims of trauma are compelled to repeat the shocking past event as if they were experiencing it in the present (Freud), it can be concluded that Jakob’s juxtaposition of really lived moments of harmony and love in his adult life with created images of moments and persons belonging in the shadow past of what might have been indicates that he still lives in this traumatic present and is incapable of moving on

Hybridity, Montage, and the Rhetoric and Ethics of Suffering 217 to the healing phase of working-through which would allow him to differentiate and place chronologically past and present events. Still, the writing of the memoir may be said to signal a turning point from the fi rst to the second phase. Prompted by his return to Greece with his newly married second wife, Michaela, Beer’s autobiographical narration may be said to exist at the limit between history, which aims at the gathering and chronological ordering of facts, and memory, which selects facts according to their emotional significance for the subject. In Beer’s own words: “History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers” (138). The sentence “Every moment is two moments” (138 and passim) becomes a refrain expressing Beer’s awareness of his being torn between these two realities: the events he is morally compelled to imagine or dream of and the actually lived. As a Holocaust survivor, the middle-aged Beer has developed physically and intellectually from child to adult along with historical time, while emotionally he is still paralysed at the moment in the past when the Nazi soldiers broke into his house and destroyed his family. If he is to overcome this paralysis and mournful melancholia, he will have to reconcile memory and history, or in Eliot’s terms, he will have to realise that: “What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present” (189). As I will attempt to show, Beer fi nds the possibility for this unification by substituting the Hegelian conception of historical progress through empty time for Walter Benjamin’s notions of constellation and history as catastrophe, ruled by Messianic time.

HISTORY AS CATASTROPHE, MONTAGE, AND THE POWER OF REVERSAL IN FUGITIVE PIECES In Illuminations, Walter Benjamin famously exposed the need to abandon the sequential interpretation of events in cause-and-effect terms and assume instead a relational interpretation of the past in the light of present occurrences based on the idea, strikingly similar to Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit, that it is the present perspective that makes past events historically significant: A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a defi nite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the “time of the now” which is shot through with chips of Messianic time. (2007, 263) With Benjamin’s words in mind, the duplicity, redundancy, and circularity of the two narrations analysed above may be said to respond to Ann Michaels’s attempt to present the stories of Beer and Ben from the relational

218 Susana Onega perspective recommended by Benjamin as an alternative to dialectical world history. As Benjamin further explains, this perception of history in terms of constellations is best exemplified by the gaze of the angel in Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus: His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise [ . . . ]. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (257) Benjamin believed that historical events are made up of “moments of danger” that flash up in the memory as images (2007, 255) and that, like Klee’s angel, historians must cast an all-encompassing backward glance on these images from their own present so as to avoid the danger of empathising with the victors (256). Translating this into the structure of the novel, it may be stated that, in Fugitive Pieces, Michaels tries to create an alternative to the historical representation of the Shoah as a chain of dialectically determined and ordered events by assuming the angel’s all-encompassing backward glance. From this perspective, the striking homogeneity of the two narrators’ poetic styles, suggestive of the traditional Jewish “we,” and the baffling similarity of their names, tastes, jobs, and roles may be said to work to substitute the expected linearity of the two sequential narrations for a presentness that is in keeping both with the notion of trauma time and with the ever-recurrence of mythical, or in Benjamin’s terms, Messianic time. As we have seen, this presentness is conveyed through the topoi of doubling and transgenerational heritage, the homogeneity of narrative styles, the repetition of chapter titles, the reversal of the order of writing with respect to the order of publication of the two narratives, and the juxtaposition of real and imagined events synthesised in the motto “Every time is two times.” This sentence, which provides the model on which the novel is built, alludes both to the deferred action of trauma and Athos’s assumption that the key events in human and natural history form part of a single catastrophe. As the titles of Chapters I and III (or II in the second narrative) suggest— “The Drowned City” and “Vertical Time”—the stories of physical and spiritual survival of the two narrators-characters are set within a palimpsestic natural background of floods, storms, and hurricanes that seemingly transforms the linear progressiveness of historical time into a cataclysmic cosmic structure of recurrence that visually replicates Benjamin’s relational understanding of history as a constellation of catastrophic events. The fact that Primo Levi referred to the victims of the Holocaust as sommersi (“the drowned”) (1986) makes the equivalence between this atrocious historical catastrophe and natural catastrophes explicit.

Hybridity, Montage, and the Rhetoric and Ethics of Suffering 219 From this relational perspective, the palimpsestic disposition of the “moments of danger” lived by Beer and Ben and kept in their traumatic memories as fl ashing images and their constant attempts to combine poetry and geology and to juxtapose human and natural catastrophes would acquire a larger significance as they would become integral parts of the unitary whole sought for by Benjamin. Jakob suggests as much when, describing Athos’s habit of comparing natural phenomena, civilizations, and places belonging in the remote past and in the present, he implicitly compares his godfather’s relational approach to the Angelus Novus’s backward glance: “Athos’s backward glance gave me a backward hope. Redemption through cataclysm; what had once been transformed might be transformed again” (101). This allusion to the redemptive potential of Athos’s archaeological activity points to a spiritual component in the unitary and all-encompassing vision he (and Beer) strenuously strove to achieve, which is central to Benjamin’s conception of history. As Dalia Kandiyoti puts it, “Jakob has been trained by Athos to see time and place bifocally—to be able to perceive both the present and the past, the invisible and the visible in places” (320).8 In her introduction to Illuminations, Hannah Arendt explains that Benjamin’s interest in Marxism was extremely peculiar and limited to one particular aspect of the doctrine of the superstructure, only briefly sketched by Marx: What fascinated him about the matter was that the spirit and its material representation were so intimately connected that it seemed permissible to discover everywhere Baudelaire’s correspondances, which clarified and illuminated one another if they were properly correlated, so that fi nally they would no longer require any interpretative or explanatory comment. (11) The allusion to Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) points to the influence of surrealism and symbolism on Benjamin’s thinking. Baudelaire’s sonnet “Correspondances” (c. 1852–56?), fi rst published in Fleurs du mal (1875), is considered to be “the preliminary manifesto of the French movement” (Dorra 8). As Henry Dorra explains: Baudelaire postulates in it a universal harmony that accounts for relationships between the intangible and the tangible; he implies that the gifted poet perceives these through bare hints provided by nature. And he stresses the evocative and expressive power of such stimulants as perfumes, colours and sounds on the senses as well as his belief on the equivalence of their aesthetic impact. (1) According to this description, the universal harmony knitting together the material and the immaterial worlds can be perceived only by those poets

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sensitive enough to capture the sensorial messages provided by nature. Most importantly, these poets can also create a similar effect by aesthetic means. This idea, whose well-known roots lie in German Romanticism, situates poetic language and the symbol in particular in a privileged position with respect to science in the role of granting significance to self and world. As Shelley famously put it in Defence of Poetry: Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life. [ . . . ] But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unappreciated combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil of the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were unfamiliar. (para. 13) As Dorra explains, Baudelaire moved beyond this Romantic formulation to a symbolist position in several respects, including a visionary stance that can be traced back to his paradoxical conception of the artist as “a detached observer of the drama of his life and an active participant in it,” which led him to the notion of “dédoublement, literally the doubling of the artist’s personality” (7). Thus, while Shelley’s hypersensibility was aimed at lifting the veil of the hidden beauty of the world, Baudelaire used it to cultivate what he himself described at the end of his life as “hysteria with delight and terror” (in Dorra 7). As Dorra further explains, set against “an outwardly cold demeanour, in keeping with the dogma of impassivity, his hysteria implied a state of trancelike awareness that transformed the objects of everyday life into apparitions endowed with spiritual meaning” (7). This description of Baudelaire’s external impassivity coupled with an intense internal turmoil productive of trancelike states and ghostly apparitions could easily be applied to the experience and behaviour of Jakob Beer, a hypersensitive poet, like Baudelaire, who strenuously sought to establish the Swedenborgian correspondences that would allow him to knit together the visible and the invisible into a harmonious whole. As we know, Beer learnt this relational method from Athos, who, using imagery uncannily evocative of the temporal duality of trauma as well as of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “rhizome,” taught him to see the folds of geological strata as evidence of “the way time buckled, met itself in pleats and folds” (30). This description offers a metaphoric parallel with the anti-progressive, relational structure of the two narratives, as is suggested by Jakob’s realisation that “[t]he present, like a landscape, is only a small part of a mysterious narrative. A narrative of catastrophe and slow accumulation” (48), and he “fantasised with the power of reversal”: looking at the photographs of heaps of shoes and other personal belongings stored “at Kanada,” he imagines bringing back their owners to life by

Hybridity, Montage, and the Rhetoric and Ethics of Suffering 221 pronouncing their names (50). In this example, Beer creates a Benjaminian constellation by conflating his present as a refugee in Canada, the actual country, with the bountiful promised land imagined by the inmates of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp that had led them to call “Kanada” the area with the workhouses containing the objects taken from the prisoners on arrival. Echoing Hebrews 11:35, Beer imagines raising the owners of these objects to life again by the mystical invocation of their names in the form of a “pangram” (50), that is, a sentence containing each letter of the alphabet. Throughout the novel, Beer and also Ben, following Athos’s example, will constantly carry out this sort of relational work with words, conflating human and natural catastrophes across time and interpreting them in the light of the present. Thus, in the two chapters entitled “The Drowned City,” Beer’s description of the prehistoric settlement in Biskurpin near Jakob’s family home that was flooded by the Gasawka River (5) is set against Weston, near Toronto, that was flooded by the Humber River in 1954, sweeping Ben’s family house away. As another example, when Athos and other archaeologists excavate Biskurpin, they fi nd incontestable evidence of important Stone and Iron Age settlements in Poland, which the Nazis fi nd necessary to destroy because it contradicts their interpretation of history (6). Athos himself barely escapes the fate of his colleagues, who are all murdered after he flees with Jakob to Greece, for the same reason. The act of excavation, thus, acquires a symbolic meaning that is made explicit by Ben’s comparison of the bog mummies he sees in National Geographic with Holocaust victims waiting for unearthing and recognition: The faces that stared at me across the centuries, with creases in their cheeks like my mother’s when she fell asleep on the couch, were the people without names. They stared and waited, mute. It was my responsibility to imagine who they might be. (221) Ben’s acknowledgement of his responsibility to imagine who the anonymous victims might be echoes Beer’s desire to invoke the inmates of Auschwitz back to life through the mystical invocation of their names. Again, the similarity of the two narrators’ thoughts and the conflation of prehistoric and recent historical events is representative of the Angelus Novus’s all-encompassing backward glance. According to Kandiyoti, this “anachronistic vision” is employed by the protagonists to “[reforge] history in terms different from those created by the usurpers of history” (323). In fact, what they are attempting to do is to transform what Beer described as “amoral” history into “moral” memory, substituting “the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in synagogue” for “the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps” (Michaels 138). This task is ethical as well as redemptive as it seeks to recuperate the lost identities of the anonymous “Six Million” and restore the truth about the Shoah, so they can rest in peace at last. And it is also

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healing in that it can help the protagonists overcome the loss of their families, friends, and identities, and create a new sense of place in their country of adoption. Unlike Shelley, therefore, and more in line with Baudelaire and Benjamin, Beer’s, Ben’s, and Athos’s constant comparison of human and natural catastrophes across time is not aimed at gathering a glimpse of transcendental beauty, but to “illuminate” the erased and obliterated past in the light of the present. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin exemplified his notion of historical constellations by imagining a nineteenth-century collector interpreting the objects of the past from his present perspective. In the “Translators’ Foreword,” Howard Eiland and Kevin MacLaughlin summarise the effect of this collector’s backward glance in terms that deserve to be quoted in full: Welcomed into a present moment that seems to be waiting just for it— “actualized,” as Benjamin likes to say—the moment of the past comes alive as never before. In this way, the “now” is itself experienced as preformed in the “then,” as its distillation [ . . . ]. The historical object is reborn as such into a present day capable of receiving it, of suddenly “recognizing” it. This is the famous “now of recognizability” (Jetzt der Erkennbarheit) which has the character of a lightning flash. In the dusty, clattered corridors of the arcades, where street and interior are one, historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and momentary come-ons, myriad displays of ephemera, thresholds for the passage of what Gérard de Nerval (in Aurélia) calls “the ghosts of material things.” Here, at a distance of what is normally meant by “progress,” is the ur-historical, collective redemption of lost time, of the times embedded in the spaces of things. (xii) This kaleidoscopic bursting of time brings about what Rolf Tiedemann describes in “Dialectics at a Standstill” as the “eschatological end of history,” which, in its turn, signals the awakening from myth and “the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth” (944). This conception of “authentic time” is mystical: the leap out of history is followed by the entry of the Messianic kingdom. This Messianic conception of time lies at the core of Benjamin’s defi nition of the present as catastrophe (945).9 The problem with this mystical conception of time is that it presupposes an act of creation and a teleological plan for humankind and nature that would be beyond the ability of human perception and understanding to judge. The postulation of this plan would provide the justification of a fi nal cause and purpose for the suffering provoked both by natural catastrophes and humanly engineered atrocities. It would, therefore, set into question not only the unprecedented character of the Holocaust, but, most disturbingly, the agency and responsibility for the crimes committed by the perpetrators. It is this teleological aspect of Benjamin’s conception of history as

Hybridity, Montage, and the Rhetoric and Ethics of Suffering 223 catastrophe that problematises the otherwise clearly ethical attempt made by Anne Michaels to recuperate and keep alive the collective memory of the Holocaust in Fugitive Pieces. As I shall attempt to demonstrate in the following section, Michaels attempts to solve this problem by granting Michaela and Naomi the agency necessary to bring about the possibility of healing and reconciliation.

LEVINASIAN ETHICS AND THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN FUGITIVE PIECES One of the aspects of Fugitive Pieces some critics tend to fi nd fault with is the fact that Michaels’s main characters are male and that the women are given very minor roles in the novel. However, as Marita Grimwood, among others, has not failed to realise, there is an uncanny similarity between the name of Jakob Beer’s second wife, Michaela, and Ann Michaels’s family name that suggests a willed identification of the flesh-and-blood writer with her character (125). This identification already points to the importance the author gives to the women in the novel, especially to Michaela in the fi rst memoir, and to Ben’s wife, Naomi, in the second. Jakob Beer’s fascination for his fi rst wife, Alexandra McLean, is based on her intellectual and physical appeal. The daughter of a British Medical Officer who had served in Crete during the Second World War (Michaels 129), Alex had been fi lled by her father with romantic stories about Europe, which she combined with a passion for music and palindromes. Jakob is fascinated by her bird-like beauty and the intimations of freedom she conveys (130). However, on their wedding night, he dreams of his sister Bella and when the visitation vanishes, he is panic-stricken by the thought that Bella’s ghost might never visit him again: “How will she ever fi nd me here, beside this strange woman? Speaking this language, eating strange food, wearing these clothes?” (126). This tantalising reflection shows the depth of Beer’s survivor guilt and the abysmal gap separating him from his bride, who will never be able to take Bella’s place. Unable to relegate his beloved ghosts to the past where they belong, Jakob is unable to enjoy the love and happiness Alex offers him, while Alex, a sympathetic gentile with no real grasp of the plight of the Jewish people during the war, is unable to understand the depth of Jakob’s trauma. Beer’s guilt-ridden and melancholic remark brings to mind Dominick LaCapra’s comment that, in certain cases, traumatised subjects show a paralysing “fidelity to trauma”: “Those traumatized by extreme events, as well as those empathizing with them, may resist working through because of what might almost be termed a fidelity to trauma, a feeling that one must somehow keep faith with it” (22). As LaCapra further observes, “one’s bond with the dead, especially with dead intimates, may invest trauma with value and make its reliving a painful but necessary commemoration or memorial to which one remains dedicated or

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at least bound” (22). Thoroughly devoted to this painful task of commemoration, Jakob chooses to continue summoning the ghosts of the past instead of moving on to the phase of working-through, as Alex wishes him to do. Inevitably, the matrimony breaks after five years and Beer remains single and aloof for eighteen more (175), immersed in a melancholic mood of unresolved trauma that permits his beloved ghosts to live on in his dreams. This situation changes when he meets Michaela in the house of common friends. Twenty-five years younger than him (177), Michaela is a museum administrator and a historian (175–6), and she has the advantage over Alex of sharing with Jakob a Jewish background. The aloof and depressive middle-aged man and the compassionate young woman take to each other immediately. When Michaela invites him for tea in her apartment, Jakob “is struck frozen by a feeling of homecoming” (178), and as she comes back barefoot from the kitchen with the tea tray, Jakob reflects: Now I see in Michaela’s face the goodness of Beatrice de Luna, the Marrano angel of Ferrara, who reclaimed her faith and gave refuge to other exiles of the Inquisition. . . . In Michaela’s face, the loyalty of generations, perhaps the devotion of a hundred Kievan women for a hundred faithful husbands [ . . . ]. In Michaela’s eyes, ten generations of history. (178) What Jakob recognises in Michaela is the abnegation and hospitality of exemplary Jewish women across centuries that he associates with the sixteenth-century Beatrice de Luna but could be taken further back, as Emmanuel Levinas does in “Judaism and the Feminine Element” (1969, 33–73), to the biblical Rebecca (Genesis 24), the young woman whose hospitality is tested by Eliezer, Abraham’s servant, to see if she is adequate for Isaac. Central to Levinas’s philosophy is the idea that, in order to be truly human, we must make an ethical move away from the self and towards the Other so as to look at the Other in the face (1981, 1991). This assumption of ethical responsibility for “the absolute other”—exemplified by Levinas in the abnegation and hospitality of Rebecca and extended by Jakob to Jewish women in general—produces a crisis of identity, as the subject assumes a position of kenosis: “The feat, for the being, of detaching itself, of emptying itself of its being, of placing itself ‘back to front,’ and, if it can be put thus, the feat of ‘otherwise than being’” (Chalier 1991, 121). As R. Clifton Spargo explains, according to Levinas, the most extreme form of “dislocation of the coherence of identity” is achieved in the empathic contemplation of the death of the Other: “By intimating the capacity to be moved apart from our intentions or preconceptions, our emotional relation to the death of the other describes a state of receptivity far surpassing the self’s practical capability in the world” (28). It is this innate capacity to empathise with and take responsibility for the suffering of the Others that differentiates Michaela from Alex (and also from Ben), and eventually makes it

Hybridity, Montage, and the Rhetoric and Ethics of Suffering 225 possible for Jakob to put his traumatic family story into words. After listening attentively to his narration, Michaela starts crying. Her empathic tears are described by Jakob as light and heat entering his bones and conveying to him “[t]he joy of being recognized and the stabbing loss: recognized for the fi rst time” (182). After having encountered the all-loving, empathetic addressee/secondary witness he needs for his “talking cure” (Freud), Jakob falls asleep—“the fi rst sleep of [his] life”—and again dreams of Bella, but this time Michaela is also included in the dream: “Bella sits on the edge of the bed and asks Michaela to describe the feel of the bedcover under her bare legs ‘because you see, just now I am without my body’” (182). As Jakob himself realises, this dream marks the beginning of his recovery: “Each night heals gaps between us until we are joined by the scar of dreams” (183), but he is also aware that the working-through of trauma is a slow process: “Happiness is wild and arbitrary, but it is not sudden” (185). It is after experiencing Michaela’s empathetic and all-loving response, and realising that she also has her own familial ghosts (187), that Jakob takes his young wife to Athos’s house on the Greek island of Idhra and starts writing his memoir (191). In the second narrative, we learn that, a few months after Jakob and Michaela are killed in a traffic accident, Ben fl ies to Idhra with the aim of fi nding Beer’s notebooks. At this stage, Ben is increasingly jealous of his wife, Naomi, because, while he had always felt like a stranger, plagued by the “damp” and “eery” silences of his parents (204), Naomi could easily communicate with them: “Right from the start Naomi seemed to know us. She gave her heart, natural as breathing” (233). As this remark suggests, Naomi, like Michaela and the biblical Rebecca, possessed the Jewish women’s innate capacity for unrequited love, and she was always ready to make the ethical move towards the Other demanded by Levinas that Ben, too preoccupied with himself, could not make: “Naomi stood on fi rm ground and stretched out her arm. I took her hand, but otherwise did not move” (234). When Ben discovers that his mother had told Naomi about the death in the extermination camp of two siblings he knew nothing about, he is so furious that he decides to leave his wife. It is then that he fl ies to Idhra and has an affair with an American girl, who fi nds by chance the notebooks of Beer’s unfi nished memoir. After reading these notebooks Ben begins to understand why his parents, and also Beer, felt so at ease with Naomi and could confide their darkest secrets to her. On his return fl ight from Idhra, Ben promises himself to amend the mistake he had committed with his wife, and he realises at last that behind his parents’ silences there was a vital lesson on the importance of mutual support and unrequited love: “Like a miraculous circuit, each draws strength from each other. / I see that I must give what I most need” (294). Ben’s acknowledgement that he must give the love he so much needs points to a new understanding of his obligation to make the ethical move away from the self and towards the Other exemplified by Rebecca, Michaela, and Naomi. At the same time, his description

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of his parents’ relationship as a miraculous circuit allowing them to draw strength from each other may be said to function as an iconic image of the anti-linear circuit the novel itself deploys through the juxtaposition of the accounts of Beer and Ben, respectively a survivor from and a witness to the Shoah, belonging in successive generations and linked through the empathic bonds created by their fully poetic and imaginative testimonial narratives in a relational constellation of postmemorial recollections that defies the cause-and-effect linearity of historical representations and signals the way to the possibility of healing, reconciliation, and the fruition of love. NOTES 1. The research carried out for the writing of this article is part of a project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) (code FFI2012–32719). The author is also thankful for the support of the government of Aragón and the European Social Fund (ESF) (code H05). 2. Entitled “Todesfuge” in its original German and written in its defi nitive form in 1945, the poem was fi rst published in a Romanian translation written by Celan’s close friend Petre Solomon in 1947. See Felstiner 27–28. 3. The essay was published singly in 1951, and then collected in Prisms (1955). 4. According to Donna Coffey, “Michaels is a Jewish Canadian author whose father emigrated from Russia after the Second World War. As one who is neither a survivor nor the child of a survivor (although her father’s experiences during the Second World War are not known, and he was a Jewish emigrant who fled the wreckage of the war), Michaels is a latecomer to the tradition of Holocaust literature” (28). The writer herself has qualified this assertion by remarking that although it is difficult to know the reasons for her father and grandfather’s emigration, “I’m sure they were economic; I’m sure there was a question of persecution” (in Brown 55). 5. See also the introduction to this volume. 6. This connection with the Holocaust is reinforced by the possibility, pointed out by Coffey, that the word “pieces” in the title “could be a translation of ‘stücken’” (42), a word used by the Nazis to dehumanise their Jewish prisoners, as is explained in the novel (Michaels 163). 7. In 1941 Peter Viereck published Metapolitics, an original work tracing the historical roots of Nazi racism and Messianism to German Romanticism, which he saw as the excess of rationalism and its polar opposite. This view was rediscovered and expanded on in the 1990s. A revised and expanded edition entitled Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler, was published in 2004. 8. J. J. Long uses similar terms to describe the narrator’s approach to history in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1–3). See Ivan Stacy’s comment on this in his article in this volume (271). 9. In The Time That Remains, Giorgio Agamben analyses Paul’s concept of “ho nyn kairos, the time of the now” (2) in the context of the Judeo-Greek tradition. He explains that, in the Letter to the Romans, Paul defi ned kairos as “the contraction of time, the ‘remaining’ time [ . . . ] represent[ing] the messianic situation par excellence, the only real time” (5–6), and he argued that Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” contain a number of unacknowledged parallels with Paul’s Epistles, including his concept of remaining time.

Hybridity, Montage, and the Rhetoric and Ethics of Suffering 227 WORKS CITED Adorno, Theodor W. “Commitment (1963). Trans. Francis McDonagh. Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate within German Marxism (1977). Afterword Fredric Jameson. London: Verso, 2002, 177-195 . Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. 1955. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1981. Print. Agamben, Giorgio. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Trans. Patricia Dailey. 2000. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005. Amfreville, Marc. Écrits en souff rance. Paris: Michel Houdiard Éditeur, 2009. Arendt, Hannah. “Introduction: Walter Benjamin, 1892–1940.” Illuminations: Essays and Refl ections. Trans. Harry Zohn. 1968. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. 1–55. Print. Baudelaire, Charles. “Correspondances.” Les Fleurs du Mal. 1867. Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire. Ed. Geoff rey Wagner.  New York: Grove Press, 1974. Accessed on 12/01/2014 at: http://fleursdumal.org/poem/103. Web. Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Prepared on the basis of the German volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann. 1982. Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap P of Harvard U, 2002. Print. . Illuminations: Essays and Refl ections. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. and Intro. Hannah Arendt. Preface by Leon Wieseltier. 1968. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Print. Brown, Mick. “A Labour of Love.” Telegraph Magazine 31 January 1998: 52–7. Print. Byron, Lord George Gordon Noel. Fugitive Pieces. Ed. and intro. Peter Cochran. 2009. Accessed on 11/06/2012 at: http://petercochran.fi les.wordpress. com/2009/03/ fugitive_pieces.pdf/. Web. Celan, Paul “Death Fuge.” 1945. Paul Celan: Poems: A Bilingual Edition. Ed. and trans. Michael Hamburger. New York: Persea Books, 1980. 50–3. Print. Chalier, Catherine. “Ethics and the Feminine.” Re-Reading Levinas. Eds Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. London: Athlone, 1991. 119–29. Print. Coffey, Donna. “Blood and Soil in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces: The Pastoral in Holocaust Literature.” Modern Fiction Studies 53.1 (Spring 2007): 27–49. Print. Cook, Meira. “At the Membrane of Language and Silence: Metaphor and Memory in Fugitive Pieces.” Canadian Literature 164 (2000): 12–33. Print. Criglington, Meredith. “Urban Undressing: Walter Benjamin’s ‘Thinking-inImages’ and Anne Michaels’ Erotic Archaeology of Memory.” Canadian Literature 188 (2006): 86–102. Print. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. 1980. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Dorra, Henry. Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology. 1994. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1995. Print. Eiland, Howard, and Kevin McLaughlin. “Translators’ Foreword.” The Arcades Project. Walter Benjamin. 1982. Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap P of Harvard U, 2002. ix–xiv. Print. Eliot, T. S. “Burnt Norton.” 1935. Four Quartets, in Collected Poems 1890-1962. 1935. London: Faber and Faber, 1974. 189–95. Print. Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. 1995. Nota Bene Series. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through.” (“Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis.”) 1914. The Standard

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Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XII (1911–15). Eds and trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson. London: Vintage, 2001. 145–56. Print. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 2001. Print. Grimmwood, Marita. “Postmemorial Positions: Reading and Writing After the Holocaust in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces.” Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes 12 (2003): 112–29. Print. Gubar, Susan. “Empathic Identification in Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces: Masculinity and Poetry After Auschwitz.” Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.1 (2002): 249-76. Print. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. Print. Janet, Pierre. L’évolution de la mémoire et la notion du temps. Paris: Chahine, 1928. Print. Kandiyoti, Dalia. “‘Our Foothold in Buried Worlds’: Place in Holocaust Consciousness and Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces.” Contemporary Literature 45.2 (2004): 300–30. Print. Kelly, Patty. “Trauma Narratives in Canadian Fiction.” The Fallible Body: Narratives of Health, Illness & Disease. At the Interface Research and Publications Project. Eds Vera Kalitzkus and Peter L. Twohig. Oxford: Interdisciplinary P, 2010, 95–104. Accessed on 07/07/2012 at: http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ publishing/id-press/ebooks/the-fallible-body/. Web. King, Nicola. Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000. Print. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Print. Laub, Dori, and Daniel Podell. “Art and Trauma.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 76.5 (October 1995): 991–1005. Print. Levi, Primo. Sommersi e i salvati. Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1986. Print. Levinas, Emmanuel. “Judaism and the Feminine Element.” Judaism 18.1 (1969): 33–73. Print. . Otherwise Than Being: Or, beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. 1974. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. Print. . Totality and Infi nity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. 1961. London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. Print. Long, J. J. W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. Print. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Lyotard, Jean-François, Le Différend. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983. Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces. 1996. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1998. Print. Onega, Susana, and Jean-Michel Ganteau. “Introduction: Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Narrative.” Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature. Eds Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature Series. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. 1–14. Print. Rosenbaum, Thane. “The Audacity of Aesthetics: The Post-Holocaust Novel and the Respect for the Dead.” Poetics Today 27.2 (2006): 489–95. Print. Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Print. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry.” Part I. 1840. The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. 2. Ed. M. H. Abrams. 1962. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1979. 782–94. Print.

Hybridity, Montage, and the Rhetoric and Ethics of Suffering 229 Spargo, R. Clifton. Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust and the Unjust Death. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. Print. Tiedemann, Rolf. “Dialectics at a Standstill.” Trans. Gary Smith and André Lefevere. “Addenda” to Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap P of Harvard U, 2002. 929–45. Print. Viereck, Peter. Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004. Print. Wieseltier, Leon. “Preface.” Walter Benjamin. Illuminations: Essays and Refl ections. 1955. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. vii–x. Print. Williams, Merle, and Stefan Polantinsky. “Writing at Its Limits: Trauma Theory in Relation to Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces.” English Studies in Africa 52.1 (May 2009): 1–14. Print.

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Contributors

Marc Amfreville is Professor of American literature at Paris-Sorbonne University (France). He has written many articles on nineteenth-century authors, three book-length studies, Charles Brockden Brown: la part du doute (Paris: Belin, 2000); Pierre or the Ambiguities: l’Ombre portée (Paris: Ellipses, 2003); a two-hundred page essay on trauma and its representations in North American literature, Écrits en souff rance (Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2009); and a few papers on contemporary authors. He edited and revised the translation of Melville’s Pierre or the Ambiguities (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2005); he coedited and revised the French translation of William Faulkner’s Snopes’ Trilogy. He also translated and edited Charles Brockden Brown’s hitherto unpublished in France Ormond, or the Secret Sharer (1799) and more recently coedited the fi rst volume of F. S. Fitzgerald’s Complete Works in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (This Side of Paradise and Flappers and Philosophers [Paris: Gallimard, 2012]). He wrote the chapter “American Gothic” in A Literary History of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009) and a volume-length Histoire de la littérature américaine (together with Antoine Cazé and Claire Fabre; Paris: PUF, 2010). In 2010, he opened a seminar on the representation of trauma at the Sorbonne that gathers literary academics from all over France and specialists of various other fields, psychoanalysis, psychology, history, sociology, and so on. He was president of the French Association for American Studies for three years (June 2009–June 2012) and is now the French delegate for the European Association for American Studies. Gerd Bayer is a tenured faculty member (Akademischer Rat) and Privatdozent at Erlangen University. He previously taught at the University of Toronto, at Case Western Reserve University, and at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He is the author of “Greener, More Mysterious Processes of Mind”: Natur als Dichtungsprinzip bei John Fowles (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2004); the editor of Mediating Germany: Popular Culture between Tradition and Innovation (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006), of the Europe volume of The Greenwood

232 Contributors Encyclopedia of World Popular Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007), and of Heavy Metal Music in Britain (Farnham, Surrey, U.K.: Ashgate, 2009); and the co-editor, with Rudolf Freiburg, of Literatur und Holocaust (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009), and, with Ebbe Klitgård, of Narrative Developments from Chaucer to Defoe (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). He has published articles on postmodern and postcolonial literature, urban studies, popular culture, Holocaust studies, and cinema studies. His book-length study about genre and early modern narratives is currently under review and he is currently working on a four-volume edition of unpublished material by John Fowles (under contract with Pickering & Chatto). Rudolf Freiburg is Professor of English Literature at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität of Erlangen-Nürnberg. He is the co-founder and speaker of the Interdisciplinary Centre of Contemporary Literature and Culture. In his monograph Autoren und Leser: Studien zur Intentionalität literarischer Texte (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Peter Lang, 1985), Freiburg analysed the problem of “literary intention”; in 1992, he qualified as a professor with a study of Samuel Johnson’s essayism. He is co-editor of several books, including Swift: The Enigmatic Dean (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1998), Do You Consider Yourself a Postmodern Author?: Interviews with Contemporary English Writers (Münster: LIT Verlag 1999), Kultbücher (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004), “But Vindicate the Ways of God to Man”: Literature and Theodicy (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2004), Literatur und Holocaust (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009), and Alter(n) in Literatur und Kultur der Gegenwart (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012). He has written many articles on eighteenth-century literature (Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Richardson), twentieth-century literature (John Fowles, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift); and twentyfi rst-century literature (Ian McEwan, Sebastian Barry, Philip Roth). Jean-Michel Ganteau is Professor of Contemporary British literature at the University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 (France). He is at the moment in charge of the postgraduate programmes and chairs the Doctoral School (ED58). He is the editor of the journal Études britanniques contemporaines (volume 45 was released in December 2013). He is the author of two monographs: David Lodge: le choix de l’éloquence (Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2001) and Peter Ackroyd et la musique du passé (Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2008). He is also the editor, with Christine Reynier, of five volumes of essays: Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Literature (Montpellier: Publications Montpellier 3, 2005), Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Arts (Montpellier: PULM, 2007), Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British Literature (Montpellier: PULM, 2010),

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Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British Arts (Montpellier: PULM, 2011) and Ethics of Alterity. Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature (Montpellier: PULM, 2013). He has also edited three volumes of essays in collaboration with Susana Onega: The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960s (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), Trauma and Ethics in Contemporary British Literature (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010), and Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). He has edited special issues of various journals (Études anglaises, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens). He has written extensively on contemporary British fiction, with a special interest in the ethics of affects (as manifest in such aesthetic resurgences and concretions as the baroque, kitsch, camp, melodrama, romance) in France and abroad (other European countries, the US), as chapters in edited volumes or in such journals as Miscelánea, Anglia, Symbolism, Cambridge Quarterly, and so on. His new research project addresses the ethics of vulnerability in contemporary British fiction. Leigh Gilmore is the author of The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001) and Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self Representation (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994), and co-editor of Autobiography and Postmodernism (Boston: U of Massachusetts P, 1994). She has been Professor of English at The Ohio State University and Visiting Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She was the fi rst holder of the Dorothy Cruickshank Backstrand Chair in Gender and Women’s Studies at Scripps College and is currently a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School. She has published articles on autobiography and feminist theory in Feminist Studies, Signs, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Biography, American Imago, Prose Studies and Genders, among others, and in numerous collections, including Telling Tales: Autobiographies of Childhood and Youth (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels (Madison, WI: The U of Wisconsin P, 2011), Teaching Life Writing Texts (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008), Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays (London: Routledge, 2005), and Just Advocacy? Transnational Feminism, Women’s Human Rights, and the Politics of Representation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2005), Leigh Gilmore and Beth Marshall’s “Girls in Crisis: Rescue and Transnational Feminist Autobiographical Resistance” (Feminist Studies,  36.3  [2010]: 667–90). She received the fi rst Claire Goldberg Moses Award for the most theoretically innovative article of the year in the journal Feminist Studies. She is currently completing a book on chronic pain and life writing.

234

Contributors

Marie-Luise Kohlke is Senior Lecturer in English literature at Swansea University, Wales, with main research foci in neo-Victorianism, trauma narrative and theory, gender, and sexuality. She is particularly interested in the intersection of tropes of violence and voyeurism in the cultural imaginary and in the often ambiguous, complex ethical implications of reader response. She is the general and founding editor of the peer-reviewed e-journal Neo-Victorian Studies (http://neovictorianstudies.com) and series co-editor (with Christian Gutleben) of Rodopi’s Neo-Victorian Series, including Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010), Neo-Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual and Cultural Politics (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), and Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the ReImagined Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012), with Neo-Victorian Cities: Re-Imagining Utopian and Dystopian Metropolises (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi) forthcoming in 2014. She has published articles and chapters on the trauma fiction of Liana Badr and Pat Barker, and on neo-Victorian women’s writing and biofiction, most recently “Neo-Victorian Biofiction and the Special/ Spectral Case of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus” in the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, 18.3 (2013): 4–21. Georges Letissier is Professor of British literature at the University of Nantes (France). He has published articles both in French and English (Aracne, Palgrave Macmillan, Rodopi, Routledge, Dickens Quarterly) on Victorian literature (C. Dickens, G. Eliot, W. Morris, C. Rossetti) and on contemporary British fiction (P. Ackroyd, A. S. Byatt, A. Gray, A. Hollinghurst, L. Norfolk, I. McEwan, G. Swift, S. Waters, J. Winterson). He has authored one monograph: The Good Soldier de Ford Madox Madox Ford (Nantes: Éditions du Temps, 2005). He has edited a volume entitled Rewriting/Reprising: Plural Intertextualities (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) and co-edited with Michel Prum L’héritage de Darwin dans les cultures européennes (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011). He has worked extensively on Dickens and After Dickens and published several essays: “‘The Wiles of Insolvency’: Gain and Loss in Little Dorrit,” (Dickens Quarterly 27.4, 2010): 257–72, “The Dickens Tropism in Contemporary Fiction” (Montpellier: Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 2012): 245–59, “The Havisham Affair or the Afterlife of a Memorable Fixture” (Études Anglaises, 2012, 65/1): 30–42, “The Neo-Victorian Novel: Contemporary Fiction Writing and Dickens Criticism”, Dickens’s Signs, Readers’ Designs. Eds Francesca Orestano and Norbert Lennartz, (Aracne, 2012): 75–101. His most recent publications on contemporary British fiction include “More Than Kith and Less Than Kin: Queering the Family in Sarah Waters’s Neo-Victorian Fictions,” Neo-Victorian Families, Gender, Sexual and Cultural Politics. Eds Marie-Luise Kohlke

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and Christian Gutleben (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2011): 365– 94, and “Hauntology as Compromise between Traumatic Realism and Spooky Romance in Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger,” Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature. Eds Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). Maria Grazia Nicolosi holds a position as Lecturer in English Literature at the former Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, now Department of Humanistic Sciences, of the University of Catania, where she has taught Renaissance, Restoration, and Contemporary English Literature. She has contributed to the Travel Literature Series of Agorà Edizioni directed by R. Portale; she has also contributed with translations to G. Persico’s five-volume anthology, Madonne, Maddalene e altre vittoriane (Torino: Agorà, 2006). She has published essays and a monograph on Angela Carter entitled Mixing Memories and Desire: Postmodern Erotics of Writing in the Speculative Fiction of Angela Carter (Catania: CUECM, 2004) as well as essays, a translation (Margaret Cavendish: Il mondo sfavillante. Catania: CUECM, 2008), and a monograph on Margaret Cavendish (“Drawing a Circle Round of Fine Conceit”: The Hermetic Cosmopoiesis of Margaret Cavendish, forthcoming). She has also published an article on Adam Thorpe in Romance and Trauma in Contemporary British Literature. Eds J.-M. Ganteau and S. Onega (London and New York: Routledge, 2012, 239–69), and also an article on Jenny Diski in the Proceedings of the 25th AIA Conference (Napoli: Liguori, 2012, 144–54) as well as a forthcoming essay on Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood in the Proceedings of the 5th ANDA Conference for ETS Edizioni. She is currently working on the metaphysical grotesque of select fiction by Angela Carter and Jenny Diski and completing a book on Adam Thorpe’s war novels. Susana Onega is Professor of English at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). She is a member of the Academia Europaea, a former Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, a former President of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies, and the Head of a competitive research team of twenty members currently working on the rhetoric and politics of suffering in contemporary narratives in English (http://cne. literatureresearch.net/). She has written numerous book chapters and journal articles (in Anglia, Anglistik, Connotations, Journal of Literary Theory, Symbolism, European Journal of English Studies, Recherches anglaises et nord-américaines, The European Review, Twentieth-century Literature, among others), on narrative theory, ethics and trauma, and contemporary literature (especially on Ackroyd, Coetzee, Fowles, Palliser, Waters, Winterson). She is the author of Análisis estructural, método narrativo y “sentido” de The Sound and the Fury de William Faulkner (Zaragoza: Pórtico, 1980), Form and Meaning in the Novels

236

Contributors

of John Fowles (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989—winner of the Enrique García Díez Research Award, 1990), Peter Ackroyd: The Writer and His Work (Plymouth: Northcote House and the British Council, 1998), Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd (Columbia: Candem House, 1999), and Jeanette Winterson (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006—shortlisted for the ESSE Book Award, 2008). She has edited Estudios literarios ingleses II: Renacimiento y barroco (Madrid: Cátedra, 1986) and “Telling Histories”: Narrativizing History/Historicizing Literature (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 1995, 2006). She has introduced, edited, and translated into Spanish John Fowles’s The Collector (Madrid: Cátedra, 1999) and has co-edited, with José Angel García Landa, Narratology: An Introduction (Longman, 1996); with John A. Stotesbury, London in Literature: Visionary Mappings of the Metropolis (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2001); with Christian Gutleben, Refracting the Canon in Contemporary Literature and Film (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004); with Annette Gomis George Orwell: A Centenary Celebration (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2005); and with Jean-Michel Ganteau, The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960s (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary Narrative in English (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), and Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). She is also the author of monographic sections on “John Fowles in Focus,” Anglistik 13.1 (Spring 2002): 45–107; “Intertextuality,” Symbolism: An International Journal of Critical Aesthetics 5 (2005): 3–314; and “Structuralism and Narrative Poetics,” Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide (2006): 259–79. Silvia Pellicer-Ortín is a Lecturer at the Department of English and German Philology and the Faculty of Education at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). She wrote her PhD thesis on the work of Eva Figes as a research fellow at the University of Zaragoza and is currently a member of its consolidated research team, Contemporary Narrative in English. She has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Cambridge and Reading and has delivered a number of papers related to her main fields of research, mostly on trauma and Holocaust studies, British-Jewish writers, autobiography, and feminism. She is the author of several articles dealing with these issues, and has co-edited, with Dr Sonya Andermahr, a volume of collected essays entitled Trauma Narratives and Herstory (London, Basignstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and a special issue of the journal Critical Engagements (vol. 5.1/5.2 [2012]) on the work of Eva Figes. Ivan Stacy is senior lecturer in English literature at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan. He completed his PhD, titled Narrative as Complicity:

Contributors

237

Atrocity, Culpability, and Failures of Witnessing in W. G. Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro, at Newcastle University (UK) in 2013. He has presented a number of papers on trauma and complicity in Sebald and Ishiguro, and is currently working on his monograph on complicity in post-war fiction. His other research interests include Bakhtin and the carnivalesque, intersections of science and literature (using the work of Bruno Latour), and teaching literature in cross-cultural environments. He has also co-edited with Arin Keeble, American Realism in a Time of Terror and Crisis: New Essays on The Wire. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014, forthcoming. Dianne Vipond is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, where she teaches courses in twentieth-century British and American literature and has been involved in the preparation of secondary school English teachers. Her research focuses on the work of John Fowles and Lawrence Durrell. She has presented papers and published essays on both writers and is the editor of Conversations with John Fowles (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999), co-editor of the special John Fowles number of Twentieth-Century Literature (1996), and of Literacy, Language, and Power (Long Beach, CA: California State UP, 1994). Her two most recently published essays are “Reading the Ethics of Lawrence Durrell’s Avignon Quintet,” in Durrell and the City: Collected Essays on Place. Ed. Donald P. Kaczvinsky (Plymouth: Fairleigh Dickinson UP; The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2012, 117– 30) and “The Search for Meaning in The Ebony Tower” in John Fowles Ed. James Acheson (New Case Book Series. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 132–45).

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Index

A Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok, 93, 123, 146, 200. See also crypt; cryptology; cryptophoria abreaction, 4–5, 59, 62, 124 achronicity, 93, 120 Ackroyd, Peter, 149, 152, 153n5; Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, 153n5 acting(-)out, 96, 201; collective, 215; phase (of), 75, 129, 216; process of, 3, 13, 200; symptoms (of), 198, 201. See also working-through Aktion, 168, 172; commandos, 165 Adams, Henry, 29, 33n10; The Education of Henry Adams, 29 Adorno, Theodor, 4, 15n1, 29, 71, 210; “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” 210 affect(s), 2, 12, 107–108, 113, 115; and rationality, 139; blocked, 133; dissociation of, 76; ethics of, 11; excess, 62; paroxystic, 13; repressed, 2, 132; theory of, 8; traumatic, 36, 43, 50n5 Agamben, Giorgio, 15n1, 109, 171, 226n9; The Time that Remains, 226n9 agency, 131, 222–3; human, 181; mythical, 184; of a misprision, 165 allegory, 49n1, 68n11 ambiguity, 74, 77, 113, 153n4 Amfreville, Marc, 4, 13, 173n6, 214–5 Amis, Martin, 90; Lionel Asbo: State of England, 90; Money: A Suicide Note, 90

amnesia, 79, 145, 160, 163, 202; figurative, 169. See also hypermnesia anachrony, 94 André, Jacques, 95 animal(s), 2, 58, 66, 99; cruelty, 61; farm, 58, 64; Others, 58; suffering, 59 apocalypse, 53, 66, 68n11; post-, 54; pre-, 64 appropriation, 59–60, 149, 184, 188; ethical problem of, 188; Nazi, 212; of (a) (the) past, 73–74; of stream of consciousness, 152; of the identities, 183 archive(s), 58, 60, 111, 159, 163; family, 159, 173 Arendt, Hannah, 115–6, 219 association of ideas, free, 2, 140 attachment, affective, 43 Atwood, Margaret, 53–67, 67n1, 67n2, 67n3, 67n5, 67n6, 68n11, 190n1; Cat’s Eye, 190n1; Oryx and Crake, 53–54, 56–57, 59–63, 66, 67n8; The Handmaid’s Tale, 56; The Year of the Flood, 53, 56, 58–59, 65–67, 67n1, 67n3, 67n5, 67n6, 67n9 Auschwitz, 4, 15n1, 22, 71, 165–6, 170, 181, 197, 210, 212, 221 autobiografiction, 193 autobiography(ies), 4, 6, 13, 23, 25–32, 33n, 33n7, 33n8, 33n11, 71, 73, 77, 79, 83, 160, 193–4, 197–200, 211; hybrid, 198, 205; liminal, 194, 196, 198, 202; limit-case, 194, 196–7, 201, 205, 207; truth in, 32; truthful,

240

Index

168. See also autofiction; autobiografiction; Gilmore, Leigh autofiction, 6, 193 autonomy, ethics of, 8; individual, 14; mutual, 101; psychological, 204

B Bacon, Sir Francis, 81 Backus, Margot Gayle, 123 Badiou, Alain, 8–9 barbarism, 4, 177,184, 190n4 Barnes, Julian, 77; Flaubert’s Parrot, 77 Barker, Pat, 146, 190n1; Another World, 146; The Regeneration Trilogy, 190n1 Barry, Sebastian, 70–83, 83n3, 83n5, 84n7; Annie Dunne, 74; On Canaan’s Side, 74; The Secret Scripture, 70, 72–74, 78, 80; The Steward of Christendom, 72, 74; The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, 74 Barzilai, Shuli, 62 Barthes, Roland, 141; texte limite, 141. Bate, Walter Jackson, 8 Baudelaire, Charles, 219; Fleurs du mal, 219–20, 222 Bauman, Zygmunt, 8 Bayer, Gerd, 13, 135n4 Beck, John, 186 Beckett, Samuel, 9–10, 40, 49, 50n5; Malone Dies, 40 belatedness, 42, 169, 178–9, 198; of trauma, 53. See also Caruth, Cathy; time Benjamin, Walter, 6, 9–10, 177, 180–5, 190, 190n4, 217–9, 222, 226n9; constellation(s), 6, 182–5, 189, 217–8, 221–2, 226; Illuminations, 217, 219; The Arcades Project, 222; “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 177, 190n4, 226n9 Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle, 113. See also Royle, Nicholas Benstock, Shari, 31 Berg, Leila, 194; Flickerbook: An Autobiography, 194 Bettelheim, Bruno, 151 Bhelau, Ulrike, and Bernard Reitz, 194 biography, 33n11, 71, 75, 77, 216; literary, 193 biomiography, 193

Blake, William, 59, 67n5; Songs of Innocence and Experience, 59; “The Tyger,” 59 Blanchot, Maurice, 39, 48, 50n4, 135n7, 151; désœuvrement, 48; other night, 50n4 Bloom, Sandra L., 4 bone(s), 43, 181, 225 Booth, Wayne C., 8 Boulter, Jonathan, 124, 135n7, 135n9 Brauner, David, 201, 204 Breuer, Josef, 1–3, 15n2, 120, 196. See also Freud, Sigmund; “On the Psychic Mechanisms of Hysterical Phenomena,” 3 Brooks, Bouson J., 62 Browne, Sir Thomas, 80–81, 182; Religio Medici, 81 Bruss, Elizabeth, 31 Burrows, Victoria, 41 Bush, Douglas, 81 Butler, Judith, 27, 29, 32, 99; Giving an Account of Oneself, 29 Byron, Lord George Gordon Noel, 212; Fugitive Pieces, 212. See also, Michaels, Anne

C camp(s), 108–9, 197, 221;concentration, 147, 197; death, 221; extermination, 165, 169, 225; football, 122; in Russia, 197; Moldavian, 5; Nazi, 11; number, 201; survivor(s) of, 109 Caporale-Bizzini, Silvia, 36–37, 46 Carter, Forrest (Asa Earl), 22; The Education of Little Tree, 22, 33 Caruth, Cathy, 10, 14, 36, 39–40, 42, 53, 57, 78–79, 101n5, 105–6, 113, 122, 135n8, 135n11, 143, 162, 167–8, 176, 198; Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 105; Unclaimed Experience, 135n11. See also belatedness catastrophe(s), 15n1, 54, 60, 78, 161, 178, 180, 186, 218, 219–21; history(-ical) (as), 13, 73, 82, 182, 217–8, 222–3; in permanence, 10; of the Second World War178; present as, 222; Theory, 143 Celan, Paul, 3–4, 204, 210–1, 226n2; “Death Fugue,”3, 204, 211;

Index “Deathfugue,” 4; “Deathtango,” 17n4 Ceupens, Jan, 182 Chabron, Michael, 24–25 Chalier, Catherine, 224 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 4 child(ren), 22, 45, 48, 50n4, 37, 58, 82, 120, 123–5, 127–9, 149–51, 161, 163, 165, 167, 195, 199–201, 203–7, 213, 217; abuse, 89; grandchildren, 161; Jewish, 213; London, 149; of (Holocaust) survivor(s), 2, 195–6, 198, 203–4, 206–7, 213, 226n4; stepchild, 125; trauma, 60; violated, 64, 75 childhood, 43, 45, 76, 89, 123, 125–6, 129, 134, 135n2, 149–50, 159, 164, 169, 199–200; memory (-ies of), 81, 133, 146; trauma(s), 75–76, 123, 134 Chodorow, Nancy, 36 closure, 49, 120; narrative, 129. See also disclosure Coe, Jonathan, 90, 137; The Closed Circle, 90; The Rotters’ Club, 90 Coffey, Donna, 211–2, 226n4, 226n6 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 56, 67n7, 96–97; “Limbo,” 96; “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 56 commitment, 13, 99, 126, 130, 138, 152; poetic, 97; political, 99 connectedness, 193; (and) separateness (and), 193, 206; (dis)-, 199; inter-, 139, 150, 189 continuous present, 139, 145, 147, Cook, Meira, 211 Cooke, Grayson, 65 Cornell, Drucilla, 8, 11 correspondences, Swedenborgian, 220 cross-mediality, 120 Criglington, Meredith, 211 Critchley, Simon, 48–49n3, 50n4 crypt(s), cerebral, 146; See also Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok cryptology, 93. See also Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok cryptophoria, 146. See also Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler, 71 Cummings, Scott, T., 83n2

241

D Davies, Terence, 149; Distant Voices, 149; Still Lives, 149; The Long Day Closes, 149; Davoine, Françoise, and Jean-Max Gaudillière, 94 Day, Elizabeth, 153n6 de Man, Paul, 25–27, 33n8 death(s), 37–38, 43–45, 47, 49, 49n2, 50n6, 54, 64, 81, 91, 98, 105, 107, 109, 112–3, 121–6, 128–9, 132–3, 143, 145, 149–50, 165–7, 169, 171, 182, 198, 200, 204, 213, 216; camp, 221; drive, 113; of the other, 45, 224–5; qua nothingness, 45; scene, 95; sentence, 45, 108; wish, 121. See also suicide(s) deception(s), 23–24, 26–27, 31–31 dédoublement, 220. See also double, the Defonseca, Misha, 21; A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, 21 Delbo, Charlotte, 202; Auschwitz and After, 202 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 220; rhizome, 220 Demidenco, Hellen, 21; The Hand that Signed the Paper, 21 Derrida, Jacques, 23, 93–94, 101n4, 159, 173; Spectres of Marx, 93 destruction, 123, 171, 173, 180–1; during the Shoah, 159; logic of, 173; of Jews, 165; of the European forests, 180; self-centred, 66 dialogism, 5, 7 dialogue(s), 4–6, 15–16, 24, 47–48, 111, 135n12; empathic, 6 diary, 79, 81, 129, 133, 204; form, 204; writing, 129 DiMarco, Danette, 62–63, 66, 67n6 Dinnerstein, Dorothy, 36–37 disclosure(s), 26–27. See also closure Diski, Jenny, 11, 36–49, 49n1, 49n3, 50n4, 50n5, 50n8, 50n9, 194; Like Mother, 37, 39, 41–43, 45, 48; On Trying to Keep Still, 50n9; Skating to Antarctica: A Journey to the End of the World, 37–40, 42–43, 46, 194 dislocation, 40, 201, 224 distance, 37, 60–61, 92, 153, 170, 172, 177–9, 202; empathy and, 149;

242

Index

ethical, 13, 202; historical, 190; of a play, 49; proximity and, 160, 170, 172 Doppelgänger, 111, 163. See also double, the Dorra, Henry, 219–20 double, the, 13, 33, 111, 213; concept of, 114; Siamese, 140. See also dédoublement; Doppelgänger Douglas, Ann, 123 Douglas, Mary, 27 Douglas, Norman, 149; London Street Games, 149 dream(s), 72, 78, 110, 116, 120, 122, 125, 128, 132–3, 168, 183, 224–5; day-, 121; dreaming, 130–1; life, 131; study of, 128 (see also Freud). See also hallucination(s) Durrell, Lawrence, 104–117, 117n1; Constance, 105–106, 108; “From the Elephant’s Back,” 110, 112–3; Justine, 106; Livia, 105; Monsieur, 105–106, 110– 11, 113; Sebastian, 205; The Alexandria Quartet, 104, 106, 111, 114; The Avignon Quintet, 104–107, 109–115, 117, 117n1; The Black Book, 104. See also Hogarth, Paul Dvorak, Marta, 67n8 dystopia(s),14, 53

28; and literature, 7; and norms, 28; and structural experimentation, 7, 157; and the aesthetics of excess, 7, 87; Blakean, 59; Christian, 71; confessional, 21, 27–28; dialogic, 14; discursive, 8, 10, 12–14, 40; Levinasian, 5, 14, 15n10, 223; liminal, 10–11, 30, 37, 41, 73; meta-,8, 107–108; narrative, 10, 59, 66; neo-humanist, 8; of affects, 11; of alterity, 8, 12, 14, 101; of autonomy, 8; of care, 8, 59; of (the) form, 1, 11, 49, 71, 186; of productivism, 8; of reading, 182 (see also, Miller J. Hillis); of suffering, 210; of the event, 9, 42; of trauma, 11; of truths, 8; of vulnerability, 8, 12, 97; postmodern, 8, 40 excess(es), 6, 25, 137; “Aesthetics of,” 7, 87; affect, 62; age of, 138; emotional, 2; formal, 97; of rationalism, 226n7; of overflowing time, 94; representation of, 137; strategies of, 11 excessiveness, 5; fluidity and, 5; of the romance, 5, 212 exile(s), 14, 78; of the Inquisition, 224 experimentalism, 8, 10, 138, 142, 144 exploitation, 14, 62, 123, 186; colonial, 186; labour, 123

E

F

Eaglestone, Robert, 8, 50n7, 185, 190n2, 191n9 Eakin, Paul John, 26, 29–30 Eiland, Howard and Kevin MacLaughlin, 222 Eliot, T. S., 133, 216; -ian universe, 24; “Burnt Norton,” 216–7; The Waste Land, 133 emplotment, 80 empowerment, 122 encephalitis lethargica, 138, 143 Enlightenment, the, 4, 6, 106 Enright, Anne, 93; The Gathering, 93 entropy, 180 Epstein, Helen, 195 ethics, 7–8, 11–14, 24–28, 41, 63, 66, 100–101, 104, 114–5, 120, 177, 179, 183, 187, 215; and aesthetics, 8, 104; and generic hybridity, 7; and (of) life-writing, 21,

fable(s), 37, 41, 46, 49, 49n1, 80, 200–1; postmodern, 36–38, 41 face(s), 60, 64, 78, 99, 107, 164, 169, 218, 221, 224; -to-face, 106–109; blank, 57, 64; duck, 59; look at the Other in the, 224; of the earth, 147; of the non-human Others, 59; (of) the Other(’s), 64 (see also Levinas, Emmanuel) fairy(-)tale(s), 13, 164–5,200–1; fairytale(s) 77; script, 143; undertones, 164 fake(s), 21, 23–33, 33n1, 65. See also fakery; hoax(es); memoir, fake fakery, 21–26, 28–33; autobiographical, 32. See also fake(s); hoax(es); memoir, fake family, 65, 73–4, 76, 107, 120–3, 125– 6, 128–9, 133–4, 149, 159–60,

Index 164–6, 194, 198–9, 205–6, 217; archive fever, 159, 173; bonds, 207; breakdown, 61; Catholic, 70; circles, 98; constellation, 120, 123–4; descendants, 161; history, 163, 196, 206; home, 221; members 25, 70, 121, 133; memoir, 197, 203; name, 36, 128, 223; past, 216; poor, 74; saga, 74, 83; secret(s), 89, 165; story(ies), 199, 225; relationships, 26; (Ur-); values, 70, 134. See also romance, family fantastic, the, 131, 137–9, 141 Fassin, Didier, and Richard Rechtman, 17n1, 100, 161 Faulkner, William, 95; As I Lay Dying, 95 Feinstein, Elaine, 194, 196 Felman, Shoshana, 3; and Dori Laub, 135n8, 171, 203. See also Laub, Dori Feldman, Allen, 57, 60 Felstiner, John, 226n2 fiction, 100; dystopian, 53, 57, 60, 62; See also genre; Künstlerroman; metafiction Figes, Eva, 194, 202; Journey to Nowhere, 194, 202 Fine, Ellen S., 195–6 First World War, 15n1, 138, 180 Fitzpatrick, David, 70 forgetfulness, 41, 77; ethical, 41; sovereign, 41–42 forgetting, 40, 188, 210; of transcendence, 41; pathological, 79; self-, 41 Foster, Hall, 7, 90 Foster, Roy, 71 Fowles, John, 104; The Magus, 104 France, Peter, and William Saint Claire, 193 Freud, Sigmund, 1–3, 13, 15n2, 75, 105–106, 112–3, 115, 120–1, 123, 125–6, 128–9, 134, 135n2, 162, 169–70, 172, 173n4, 178, 196, 198, 216–7, 225; “Civilization and Its Discontents,”162; “Construction in Analysis,” 170; “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” 169; “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” 162; “Introductory

243

Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,” 170; latency, 162; Moses and Monotheism, 162; “On the Psychic Mechanisms of Hysterical Phenomena,” 1; “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” 162; repetition compulsion, 75; screen memory(ies), 36, 105; talking cure, 120, 152, 225, 196; “The Future of an Illusion,” 162; “The ‘Uncanny’,” 112; “The Wolf-Man,” 163, 159; “Totem and Taboo,” 162. See also Breuer, Joseph; working-through Freiburg, Rudolf, 13 Frey, James, 21–24, 33n1; A Million Little Pieces, 21, 24 fugue, 211–2, 214; Dissociative, 212. See also Celan, Paul Fussell, Paul, 146–8

G Ganteau, Jean-Michel, 15n5, 146; and Susana Onega, 15n5, 73, 160, 196. See also Onega, Susana Garratt, Robert F., 74, 83n2, 83n5, 84n7 gender, 11, 27, 30 genocide, 170, 211; Native American, 22; survivors of, 159. See also Holocaust; Shoah genre(s), 6, 13–14, 21, 24, 31, 41, 53, 55, 61–62, 71–72, 80, 112, 179, 185, 193–4, 199, 203, 205, 232; anti-, 80; autobiographical, 179, 193; dialogic, 6; dystopian, 55; fantasy, 77; hybrid, 6; lifewriting, 194; liminal, 6, 194; limits of (representational), 177, 185; of historiographic metafiction, 80; of testimony, 201; of the memoir, 199; popular, 63; splicing, 62–3, 67n9; sub-, 6, 13, 24, 89–90, 104, 193, 198; trauma fiction, 176; testimonial, 170, 202 ghost(s), 11, 13, 44, 50n4, 56, 80, 93–4, 96, 113, 128, 222–5; story, 62; writer, 213. See also phantom; spectre ghost writer, 213 Gibson, Andrew, 8–10, 15n5, 40–42, 44, 47, 141–2, 144; discursive

244 Index ethics, 154; événémentialité, 42; ethics of the event, 42; event of language, 9, 47; intermittency, 50n5; Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel, 9. See also ethics Gilligan, Carol, 12, 98 Gilmore, Leigh, 33n8, 33n10, 33n11; Autobiographics, 33n8; The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, 194; and Elizabeth Marshall, 33n9 Gleitman, Claire, 72 god(s), 79, 107, 122, 126; ’s Gardeners, 58, 65; thunder, 122, 126–7 Goodin, Robert E., 98 Gordon, Avery F., 116; Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 116 Granofsky, Ronald, 9 Grant, Linda, 194; Remind Me Who I Am, Again, 194 Gray, Billy, 38, 41 Gregory, Marshall, 8 Griffiths, Anthony, 62 Grimmwood, Marita, 214 Gubar, Susan, 211 Gunnsmundsdóttir, Gunthrórunn, 38

H Hacking, Ian, 79; memoro-politics, 79; hallucination(s), 67n3, 67n4, 95, 163, 168, 170. See also nightmare(s) Hammel, Andrea, 194, 197 Harrison, Kathryn, 26; The Kiss, 26 Hartley, Heather, 62 haunting, 116, 161, 169, 172, 206; and possessing, 151; effect, 162; presence, 195; transgenerational, 167 hoax(es), 25, 27, 31–33, 33n1; deception of a 24; literary, 22; history of, 23. See also fake(s) Hayes, Hunter M., 140 Hegel, G. W. F., 111; Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, 111 Held, Virginia, 12, 98, 101 Hell, Julia, 178, 190n3 Henke, Suzette A., 196 Hiroshima, 133; Peace Memorial Museum, 64 Hirsch, Marianne, 36–37, 135n4, 161, 173n5, 195–6, 211. See also postmemory

history, 5–8, 15n6; 70–73, 80, 104–6, 111, 115, 148, 166, 177, 180–2, 184–5, 189–90, 191n7, 194–5, 203–5, 207, 212, 217–9, 221–2, 224, 226n8; alternative, 79; (and) fiction (and), 27, 108, 110, 185; and story-telling, 116; as a constellation, 218; as catastrophe, 8, 182, 189, 217 (see also Benjamin, Walter); as endless progress, 6; case-, 207; collective, 165, 205; communal, 105; construction of, 106; cyclical nature of, 177; effects of, 179; end of, 222; ethnic, 143; family, 163, 196, 206; felt, 74; generic, 120; interpretation of, 6, 221; Irish, 70–71, 74–75, 78–81, 83, 83n2; Japanese (twentieth-century), 128, 133; limits of, 207; national, 81; natural, 218; of civilisation, 180–1; of destruction, 181; of Galician Jews, 160; of herring fi shing, 188; of hoaxes, 23; of literature in Ireland, 83n4; of the genocide, 170; of the Hebrews, 172–3; of the Holocaust, 201, 206; of the Jewish people, 198; of the nation, 75; of the Templars, 111; of the Shoah, 165; medieval, 111; memoir and, 204; personal, 165; political, 197; postmodern notions of, 72; reconstructing, 138; reification of, 182; Sligo, 80; the self in, 27; troglodyte, 146; troubled, 141; rewrite, 71; US, 22; usurpers of, 221; world, 6, 218 Hoff man, Eva, 161, 173n5, 195; After Such Knowledge, 196 Hogarth, Paul, 114; The Mediterranean Shore: Travels in Lawrence Durrell’s Country, 114. See also Durrell, Lawrence Hollinghurst, Alan, 146 Holocaust, the, 3–4, 55, 104–105, 107–109, 113, 116, 160–1, 165, 171, 177–8, 181, 185, 188, 190n2, 193–8, 200–7, 210–12, 215, 222, 226n6; by bullets, 160, 165, 171; memory of, 196, 223; Polish, 213; survivor(s), (of the), 76, 193, 195–8, 203–4,

Index 206–7, 210, 213–4, 217; testimony of, 215; trauma (of), 195, 215; victim(s) (of), 203, 218, 221. See also genocide; Shoah horror(s), 39, 40, 53, 61–62, 81, 190n4, 202; Nazi, 206; of being, 38; of genocide, 211; of the Holocaust, 113; of war, 147; fiction, 62 Howells, Coral Ann, 58, 62, 67n1, 67n2 Hutcheon, Linda, 104. See also metafiction, historiographic hybridisation, 7–8, 92, 211; generic, 9 hybridity, 74, 210; formal, 130; generic, 7, 19, 74, 204, 212 hypermnesia, 160, 163, 169. See also amnesia

I identity, 9, 32, 91–92, 123, 131, 162, 165, 196, 212, 224; British-Jewish, 206; crisis of, 224; dispossession, 36; Jewish, 172, 194; national, 133; political, 115; postmodern, 60; racial, 9; self-, 37, 42, 47; sexual, 113; truth(telling) and, 23, 30 images, 188, 216, 218–9; memory as, 218; sensorial, 5 impressionism, 73, 81; lyricism and, 7; poetic, 79 indirection, 6–7, 12, 16, 36, 108, 149 interior monologue, 120, 152. See also stream of consciousness intermittency, 42, 50n5; aesthetics of, 10 intertextuality, 111 intratextuality, 111 invisibility, 92–93, 95, 100–101

J Janet, Pierre, 4, 200, 216 Japan, 123, 128–30, 132–3 Jeff reys, Stuart, 74 jouissance, 170 Jones, Ernest, Lionell Trilling, and Steven Marcus, 15n3 Joyce, James, 72, 75, 142, 148; Ulysses, 75, 111, 142, 148 Jung, Carl G., 162; -ian archetype(s), 78, 135n2

K Kanada, 220–1

245

Kandiyoti, Dalia, 191n7, 213, 219, 221 Kaplan, Ann, 38, 43, 125, 135n3 Karpf, Anne, 11, 193–207; The War After: Living with the Holocaust, 193–4, 196–201, 204–5, 207 Kellermann, Natan P. F., 199–200 Kellog, Carolyne, 145–6 Kelly, Patty, 212 Kertesz, Imre, 170; Fatelessness, 170 Khouri, Norma, 22; Forbidden Love, 22, 33 Klee, Paul, 182, 218; Angelus Novus, 182, 218 Kiefer, Anselm, 4 Kincaid, Jamaica, 29, 33n10 King, Nicola, 211 knot, 33n10, 138–9, 152, 153n5; concept of, 138–9; knottiness, 150; mother-daughter, 37, 43; primal, 143. See also Laing, Ronald David Kohlke, Marie-Luise, 13 Kristeva, Julia, 36–37, 49; abjection, 37; chora, 37 Krohn, Wolfgang, 81 Künstlerroman, 106, 110–111

L LaCapra, Dominick, 15, 76, 152, 153n4, 200, 202, 211, 223; empathic unsettlement, 152; Writing History, Writing Trauma, 161 Laing, Ronald David, 138, 144, 149, 152, 153n1, 153n2, 153n5; Knots, 138, 149, 153n1. See also knot Lang, Berel, 195, 204 Lanzmann, Claude, 4 Laplanche, Jean, 95; après coup, 215. See also Nachträglichkeit Lassner, Phyllis, 197–8, 203, 206 Latour, Bruno, 139, 144 Laub, Dori, 55, 57–8, 73, 76, 78–79, 150, 171, 178–9; and Daniel Podell, 3–7, 9, 160; “Art and Trauma,” 1. See also Felman, Shoshana Lejeune, Phillippe, 30, 32, 33n6 Letissier, Georges, 13 Levi, Primo, 147, 171, 180–1, 202, 218; If This Is a Man, 181; The Drowned and the Saved, 181; The Periodic Table, 180–1

246 Index Levinas, Emmanuel, 5, 9, 12, 14, 37–49, 49n1, 49n2, 49n4, 49n6, 49n7, 59, 64, 68n12, 107–108, 115, 224–5; excendance, 5; inquiétude, 12 (see also restlessness); il y a, 38, 49n4; ipseity, 37; “Judaism and the Feminine Element,” 224; meanwhile, 42–44; otherwise than being, 45, 224; Otherwise than Being: or, Beyond Essence, 9; “Reality and its Shadow,” 49n1; ruin of being, 13, 41; self-forgetting, 41; the Said, 9, 41, 46. See also ethics; face; Other, the; Otherness Levine, Michael G., 12 Lévy, Paule, 160, 173n3 Leys, Ruth, 178 life, 24–26, 37–38, 44, 47–48, 60–61, 65–66, 67n6, 73, 75–78, 81, 83, 89, 95, 109, 121–3, 126, 135n10, 146, 150–1, 164, 172, 184, 188–9, 199, 202, 204–6; adult, 50n4; after-, 147–8, 215–6, 220–1, 225; anarchic, 148; and death, 47, 109, 117; and writing, 31; biopolitical, 66; city, 147, 149; children’s, 149; conscious, 48; domestic, 220; dream, 131; family, 121, 199; forms, 59, 66; fragmented, 74; human, 65, 116; in London, 197; individual, 166; inter-all-, 66; Irish, 71; -lines, 81; loss of, 72; narrative, 22, 28–31 (see also life-writing); of ideas, 45; pain of, 37; real, 22, 77, 93; represent(ations of), 21, 27; -space, 114; story (-ies), 6, 24, 33, 39, 72, 74, 78, 80, 83, 202, 213–4; -style, 128; subterranean, 148; -times, 198; urban, 91; wish for, 1 life-writing, 4, 21, 23–32, 33n7, 193; genre, 194; liminal, 195; nonnormative, 28 (see also life narrative) Light, Alison, 193 limbo, 92–93, 96, 146; -like state, 96. See also Coleridge, Samuel Taylor liminality, 3, 12–13, 73, 132, 207 London, 90, 149, 153n5, 197; East, 149; fiction of, 148; Victorian,

149; the Woolwich arsenal in, 153n3 London, Jack, 149; The People of the Abyss, 149 Long, J. J., 178, 180 loss, 1, 15n9, 27, 54, 70, 72, 79, 93, 97, 122, 135n7, 172, 180, 215–6, 222, 225; fear of, 207; maternal, 37, 43, 49; melancholic, 44; of masculinity, 190n3; of memory, 195; of sight, 190n3; self-, 54; spiritual, 211–2 Luckhurst, Roger, 4, 15n1, 36, 60, 139, 176, 179, 190n1, 191n6, 193; The Trauma Question, 139 Lyotard, Jean-François, 9, 41, 108, 215 lyricism, 71, 211

M machine(s), 183; age, 152; manmatrix, 140; political, 100 Mackie, J. L., 8 magnitude(s), 177, 186, 189–90; of suffering, 176 Mahony, Christina Hunt, 71, 83n2; “Introduction,” 83n2 Malcolm, Janet, 27 Marcus, Laura, 193 Marshall, Elizabeth, 26, 33n1. See also Gilmore Martínez-Alfaro, María Jesús, 6, 17n4 Masson, Jeff rey Moussaiff, 27 Maurer, Michael, 70 McDonald, Robert, 114 McGregor, Jon, 11, 89–100; Even the Dogs, 89–97, 99–101; If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, 89; So Many Ways to Begin, 89 McHale, Brian, 112, 117 Meche, Jude, R., 70, 83–84n6 Melville, Herman, 44–45, 167–87; Moby Dick, 44, 168; Pierre, 167–8 memoir(s), 4–5, 21–9, 31–3, 33n1, 37–8, 40, 76, 193–8, 201, 206, 212–7, 225; autobiographical, 211; boom, 5, 193; ethics of, 25; fake, 5, 21–4 (see also fakes(s); fakery; hoax(es)); fictional, 13, 37; Holocaust 21; post-, 196; testimonial, 216; trauma, 22; truth-telling in, 21. See also autofiction; biography

Index memory(ies), 4, 5, 9, 24, 40, 42, 54, 58–59, 72, 75–77, 79, 83, 106, 109, 121, 125, 127, 131–2, 143, 149–1, 161–3, 168, 176–7, 179, 198, 204, 210, 215–8, 221; biographical, 125; buried, 113; childhood, 81; collective, 143, 196, 223; disjointed, 53; eidetic, 144; fragments of, 200; habit, 4; hole(s), 150, 195; lapses, 168; loss of, 195; mémoire trouée, 195; narrative, 4; pathologies of, 212; poetic, 78; recovered, 190n1; screen, 105; site of, 211; studies, 10; testimonial, 135n12; traumatic, 12, 72, 79, 132, 163, 176, 178–9 Mendelsohn, Daniel, 159–173, 173n3; The Lost, 159–60, 163, 166–8, 170, 173, 173n3, 173n5 metafiction, 104, 110–2, 116; historiographic, 13, 80, 104, 106; metafictionality, 111. See also metarealism metaphysics, 112; Eastern, 115; existentialist, 46 metaphor, 76–78, 112, 115, 146, 168, 195, 200, 207 metarealism, 104, 110, 112, 115–6. See also metafiction Michaels, Anne, 11, 190n1, 181n7 210–26, 226n4, 226n6; Fugitive Pieces, 190n1, 191n7, 210–2, 215, 217–8, 223. See also, Byron, George Gordon Noel Middleton, Peter, and Tim Woods, 40 Miller, J. Hillis, 177, 185 mimesis, 11, 31, 97; anti-, 11; symptomatic, 40 Mitchell, David, 120–34, 134n1, 135n6, 135n7, 135n8; Black Swan Green, 122; Cloud Atlas, 122; Number9Dream, 120, 122–5, 128, 130, 133–5, 134n10; The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, 122 mode(s), 7, 9, 11, 16, 30, 33, 160, 204; autobiographical, 194; choral, 91; contradictory, 9; ethical, 10, 23, 25; introspective, 138; narrative, 63; nostalgic, 120; of humour, 67n8; of life-writing, 31; of reading, 185–6; (of) representation(al), 40, 186; of

247

testimony, 16; of trauma, 123; romance as a, 7, 212; singulative, 94 Modernism, 6, 146, 152, 211; High, 137–8; the epistemological novel of, 112 Molinier, Pascale, Sandra Laugier, and Patricia Paperman, 100 monologue, indirect internal(-ior), 58, 152; interior, 120 monster(s), 50n4, 93, 201; story, 62 montage, 6, 210, 217; polyphonic, 149; Rothberg’s, 6–7 Moore, G. E., 8 Moser, Christian, 187 multiperspectivity, 74 Muselmann, 109; 153n4. See also Agamben, Giorgio myth(s), 70, 77–8, 101, 116, 146, 173, 182, 200–2; maternal, 37; of blood and soil, 212; of origins, 201; of Philomela, 78; mytheme, 143; mythology, 201. See also fantasy; fairy(-)tale(s)

N Nachträglichkeit, 75, 162–3, 173n4, 178, 215, 217. See also belatedness; Freud, Sigmund; Laplanche, Jean narrative(s), 5, 7–11, 14, 25, 28, 30, 40–43, 47, 49, 60–61, 67n2, 74, 76, 82, 89–100, 108, 112, 114–7, 121, 123–4, 126–7, 130, 133–4, 137, 144, 160, 163, 171–3, 176, 179, 182, 185, 189, 191n9, 194, 213–4, 216, 218, 220, 225; about the Holocaust, 195, 196, 199–201, 211; anti-totalising, 15n9; autobiographical, 26, 28, 194; castaway-survivor, 62; comfort women, 28; contemporary, 7, 93, 149; counter-, 122; disaster, 62; embedded, 194; ethics of, 10 (see also ethics); experimental, 8; family (romance), 120, 124, 128, 135n2, 161 (see also Freud); fragmented, 40; healing, 216; history and, 104; historical, 13; Holocaust, 185, 211; life(-writing), 22, 28–31, 194; liminal, 93, 97, 141, 201; limit-case, 83, 137–9, 141, 168,

248

Index

179, 185; linear, 72, 77; literary, 115, 126; meta-, 112; metarealistic, 112; multi-layered, 62; of catastrophe, 220; of trauma, 135n12; prose, 72, 101; quest, 62; testimonial, 4, 6–7, 215, 226; totalizing, 153; trauma, 1, 4–5, 8, 10–15, 36–37, 40, 45, 53, 61–63, 72–74, 83, 90–92, 95, 100, 120, 134, 153, 160, 190, 200, 207, 214 Nazis, the, 5, 108–109, 159, 163–4, 171, 212–3, 213, 221, 226n4 Nazism, 8, 211 neurosis, 170; Freud’s neurotica, 162 Nicolosi, Maria Grazia, 13 nightmare(s), 54, 61, 163. See also hallucination(s) Nordius, Janina, 38 norms, 12, 24, 26–32; ethics as, 26; of judgement, 30; of power, 30; of recognition, 99; social, 26, 29–30, 120 nothingness, 38, 43, 44–45, 50n6, 150–1 Nussbaum, Martha, 101

O O’Brien, Susie, 191n8 Onega, Susana, 2, 13, 15n7, 77–78,191n7, 106, 191, 200; and Jean-Michel Ganteau, 5, 11, 15n7, 15n8, 73, 83n2, 160, 196, 212. See also Ganteau, Jean-Michel oscillation, 177, 79–82, 189 Other(s), the, 5, 11–12, 14, 27, 33, 37, 41–41, 47, 55–57, 59–60, 64, 68, 92, 100–101, 114–5, 203, 224; abject, 37; absolute, 45, 224; animal, 58; being-for-the, 5; death of, 45, 224; encounter with, 115; face of, 64; move towards, 225; one-for-, 48; Other and the, 44–45; responsibility for, 11, 92, 100; self and, 107; self-exposure to, 47; vulnerability to, 101; wound of, 12. See also Levinas, Emmanuel; Otherness Otherness, 11, 14, 58–59, 152, 190n2; absolute, 64, 115; existential, 76; hostility to, 30; of the other,

115; primal, 37; radical, 11; sameness versus, 37 Ozick, Cynthia, 205; “The Shawl,” 205

P palilalia, 142, 152 paradigm(s), 104; limit-case, 138; psychoanalytical, 38; romance, 146; shift, 100; trauma, 3, 15, 17n1, 179 passivity, 39, 48 past(s), 36, 40, 42, 53–54, 56, 60, 73–74, 83, 83n5, 91, 93–97, 106, 117, 124, 127, 129, 132, 134, 143, 146, 150, 161, 162, 172–3, 183, 196, 198, 206, 212, 215–219; all-consuming, 54; ancestors’, 199; collective, 197; distressed, 36; erased and obliterated, 220; families’ (-ly), 195, 216; ghosts of, 223–4; historical, 128; inassimilable, 96; narratives of, 40; narrator’s, 199; Nazi, 178; objects of, 222; painful, 89; parents’, 196, 198, 204; photographs of, 168; re-enactment of, 63; reliving, 194; remote, 219; represent(ing) the, 178–9; shadow, 215–6; spectral presence of, 94; the English, 153n5; traumatic, 63, 93, 120–1, 129, 132, 205; traumatised, 131; traumatising, 131; unearthing the, 163; unreal, 169; writer’s real, 48. Pellicer-Ortín, Silvia, 13, 201, 204, 207n2 perpetrator(s), 28, 55, 71, 78, 83, 99, 178, 190, 222; guilt of, 4; guilty, 95; of violence, 78; paranoia of, 72; role, 65; trauma, 55 phantom(s), 123, 135n5, 164–5. See also spectre photograph(s), 109, 160, 163–4, 167–9, 183–4, 187–8, 220; narrative of the, 189 Podell, Daniel. See Laub, Dori poetics, 108, 168; Beckettian, 40; Modernist, 8; of liminality, 11, 73; of the fragment, 90 politics, 22, 104, 139; cultural, 33; memoro-, 79; of care 100

Index Pomeransev, Igor, 114 postmemory, 161, 170, 173n5, 211 postmodernism, 6, 8, 211; the ontological novel of, 112 postmodernity, 66, 80; consumerist, 61 post-traumatic stress disorder,72, 168; PTSD, 148, 201, 212 protection, legal, 26; paradoxical, 48; parental, 126 Proust, Marcel, 10, 26, 111 psychoanalysis, 5, 10, 38, 79, 162, 172, 194, 201; Freudian, 201 psychogeography, 140

R Raczymow, Henri, 195 Rancière, Jacques, 9, 116 realism, 5–7, 14, 112, 141, 144, 211; aesthetic, 144; and romance, 14; (dirty) magic(al), 36–37, 112, 131; transparent, 185; traumatic, 7, 15n9, 90, 93, 97, 100, 116, 131 (see also Rothberg, Michael) reality, 9, 11, 32, 39, 49n1, 55, 65, 74, 77–79, 81, 112, 115, 125, 130, 132, 135n8, 135n10, 160, 164, 167, 170, 196, 201–2, 205; alternate states of, 132; (and) fiction (and), 7, 111–2, 116; and its representation, 144; art and, 49n1; blank, 44; cultural, 200; diegetic, 132; inescapable, 99; material, 164, 170; of the extermination camps, 165; of the Holocaust, 55; of the text, 111, 116; of the violent event, 167; of trauma, 15n1; ontological, 131; prime, 114, 117; psychical, 160, 170; reconstructed, 163; social, 32, 130 récits, grands, 70, 79, 83; petits, 215. See also Lyotard, Jean-François Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn, 187–8; The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicholae Tulp, 187 repetition(s), 47, 63, 96, 113–4, 150, 176, 203, 213–4, 218; and return, 215; -compulsion, 57, 93; compulsive, 5; haunting, 36; narrative, 83n5; of analepsis, 54; of gestures, 141; semantic, 139

249

representation, 1, 4, 6–7, 21–22, 27–28, 33n8, 40–41, 73, 114, 130, 170, 173, 177, 179, 181, 186–9, 193–7; aesthetic, 126; artistic, 181, 210; dissociation of affect and, 76; historical, 226; limit-case, 83; limits of, 6, 11, 185; literary, 40; material, 219; mythopoeic, 126; narrative, 70; of a historical event, 15n6; of atrocity, 190n4; of excess, 137; of the event of modernity, 10; of Nachträglichkeit, 163; (of the) Holocaust, 210, 212; of suffering, 210; of the corpse, 187; of the wounded body, 187; of the self, 194; of the Shoah, 218; (of) trauma(’) (-tic events), 7, 13, 21, 26–28, 63, 83, 176, 179, 194; of traumatised subjectivity, 191n6; parodic (mis)-, 62; political, 28; realist modes of, 196; realistic, 187; reality and its, 147; resistance to, 57; satirical, 137; self-, 4, 21, 23, 25, 29–30, 32–33, 73, 177, 205; textual, 189; transparent, 25 repression, 70, 79, 163, 198; of affects, 3–4 resilience, 3, 10, 202, 206 Resnais, Alain, 133; Hiroshima mon amour, 133 restlessness, 12, 14. See also Levinas, Emmanuel reversal, 217–8, 220, 229; epistemological, 152; species, 137 Rimbaud, Arthur, 108; Lettre du voyant, 108 romance, the, 7, 9, 16, 63, 120; adventure, 62; excessiveness of, 212; family, 37–38, 120–1, 123–6, 128–31, 133–4, 135n2, 135n3 (see also Freud, Sigmund); medieval, 110; story, 63 Roorbach, Bill, 24–25, 29; Contemporary Creative Non-Fiction: The Art of Truth, 24 Rosen, Norma, 195 Rosenbaum, Thane, 210, 212 Rosenblat, Herman, 21; Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived, 21

250 Index Rothberg, Michael, 8–9, 13, 17n6, 90, 97, 116, 131, 211–2; Multidirectional Memory, 135n12; Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation, 8 Royle, Nicholas, 92–93, 96; Quilt, 92–93. See also Bennett, Andrew Ruddick, Sara, 36–37

S Santner, Eric, 180 satire, 83, 98; Menippean, 62 scriptotherapy, 196, 206 Sebald, W. G., 176–90, 190n1, 190n3, 190n4, 226n8; Austerlitz, 176, 190n1, 191n6; On the Natural History of Destruction, 178, 190n5; The Emigrants, 176; The Rings of Saturn, 176–90, 226n8; Vertigo, 176 Second World War, 1, 104, 176, 178, 190, 215, 223, 226n4 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 31; Touching Feeling, 31 Self, Will, 92, 137–53, 153n2, 153n3, 153n5; Cock and Bull, 137; Doctor Mukti and Other Tales of Woe, 145; How the Dead Live, 147; The Book of Dave, 137–8; The Butt, 137; “The North London Book of the Dead,” 147; The Quantity Theory of Insanity, 145, 147, 153n1; Umbrella, 137–50, 152, 153n1, 153n2 Seltzer, Margaret, 21–22; Love and Consequences, 21–22 Seltzer, Mark, 141 Seree-Chaussinand, Christelle, 70 Shakespeare, William, 38, 49n2, 76, 150; Hamlet, 49n2, 93; King Lear, 76, 150; Macbeth, 49n2; Romeo and Juliet, 49n2 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 220, 222; Defence of Poetry, 220 Shoah, the, 6–7, 159, 160–2, 171, 165–6, 197, 215, 221; representation of, 218; witness of (to), 171, 221. See also genocide; Holocaust; Lanzmann, Claude shock(s), 2, 38, 53, 78, 82, 116, 150, 161, 168, 200; after-, 148; shell, 72; state of, 213

Sicher, Efraim, 195–6, 200–1 silence(s), 28, 39–40, 45, 47, 49, 78, 91, 98, 108, 113, 116, 143, 189, 196, 213–4, 216, 225; denial and, 100; eloquent, 78; rhetoric of, 83 Simpson, Kathryn, 124, 135n3, 135n9 Simpson, O. J., 27; If I Did It, 27 Smith, Sidonie, 28–29, 33n1; and Julia Watson, 25–26, 33n7; Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 25 Snyder, Katherine V., 53–54; 67n4 Spargo, Clifton R., 224 spectre, 57, 135n5. See also Derrida, Jacques Stacy, Ivan, 13 Steiner, George, 15n1 Stewart, Victoria, 193, 199 stream of consciousness, 99,142, 144–5, 147, 150–2. See also interior monologue Styron, William, 105; Sophie’s Choice, 105 sublime, negative, 76 suicide(s), 33n10, 49n2, 60, 75, 79, 106–107, 109–110, 113, 116, 150, 159, 164–5; attempts, 36; bomber, 128; multiple, 113 surrealism, 81, 112, 219 survival, 3, 39, 42, 45, 63, 113, 117, 205; manuals, 48; spiritual, 218; stories of, 197; techniques, 81; redemptive, 60 survivor(s), 3, 21, 54–55, 57, 63, 66–67, 161, 171, 207, 226, 226n4; ageing, 171–2, 193, 195, 199, 201–1; Bolechow, 169; British-Jewish, 197; child(ren) (of) (Holocaust), 2, 196, 203–4, 206, 213, 226n4; guilt, 55, 223; (of the) Holocaust, 76, 193, 195–8, 203–4, 206–7, 210, 214, 217; (of the) Polish (Holocaust), 213; memories, 166; narrative, 62; of the camps, 109; of the genocide, 159; of trauma, 2, 77, 204; offspring of, 195, 199; -protagonists, 53; second(-)generation (of), 195, 203–4; Shoah, 197; testimony, 13, 57; third generation of, 207; trauma(ised), 67, 171 Swift, Jonathan, 75

Index Swift, Simon, 115 synecdoche, 81, 165, 173 Szasz, Thomas, 144

T technique(s), 146, 149, 152, 198; Chinese-box, 166; distancing, 108; literary, 160; of metamorphosis and transformation, 73; metafictional, 111; mise en abyme narrative, 113; realistic, 81; survival, 81 temporality, 40, 91–92, 95–97, 127, 142, 145, as traumatic symptom, 91; fractured, 179; liminal, 42; linear, 186; traumatic, 42–43. See also time terror, 38–39, 60, 110, 220; melancholic, 39; metaphysical, 37; traumatic 38 terrorism, eco-, 60 Testard, Jacques, 140, 144 testimonial, the, 23, 29, 212 testimony, 13–14, 24, 53, 55, 57–60, 73–74, 76, 82, 95, 149, 163, 166–7, 171, 178, 180–1, 185, 197, 202–5; crises of, 135n8; fictional, 53, 57, 62, 127; genre of, 201; legal, 194; of the Holocaust, 215, realistic, 149; survivor, 57; traumatic, 202. See also narrative(s) The Arabian Nights, 111 therapy, 2, 15n9, 70, 82; psycho-, 139, 145 (see also Freud, Sigmund and Joseph Breuer); psychological, 200–1; scripto-, 196, 206. Thomas, D. M., 105; The White Hotel, 105 time, 22, 32, 42–44, 53, 57, 60, 74–76, 81, 91–96, 127, 143, 145, 148, 153n5, 159, 174n7, 178–9, 187, 193, 198–9, 216, 218–22; (and) space (and), 60, 159, 178; arrow of, 163; authentic, 222; being and, 41; -bomb, 143; double, 61; disjunctions, 142; disorientation in, 198; empty, 6, 217; epiphanic, 215; even-, 148; gap, 161, 166; historical, 217–8, 222; kaleidoscopic bursting of, 222; layers, 142; kairos, 215, 226n9 (see also Agamben, Giorgio); life-(s), 198; limits of, 91; -line,

251

168; linear, 215; Messianic (conception of), 217–8, 222; mythological, 172; of the now, 217, 26n9; of traumatisation, 1; of truth, 222; of writing, 43; overflowing, 94; palimpsest, 145; pluridimensional, 95; remaining, 226n9; sequential (chronos), 215; stretched-, 94; trauma(tic) (and), 91, 95, 162, 218; trauma- motif, 212; -travel, 147; “Vertical,” 213, 218; zero, 64. See also Nachträglichkeit; temporality trace(s), 159; latent, 121; memory, 162; of atrocity, 180; of suffering, 180; of the Holocaust, 205; of the “saying,” 45; of trauma, 206; spectral, 54; traumatic, 207 transparency, 24–25, 29–30, 32, 33n10 trauma(s), 38–39, 41–42, 45, 48–49, 53–55, 57, 59–65, 67n1, 75–79, 81–83, 83n2, 89–91, 93–94, 97, 100, 101n5, 106, 109, 113, 120–2, 124, 127, 130–4, 135n8, 138–43, 146, 150, 153, 153n5, 160–4, 166–9, 172–3, 173n4, 174n7, 176, 178–9, 196, 198–200, 203, 205–6, 211, 214, 216, 218, 220, 223–4; age of, 139, 143, 194; alterity of, 11, 41–42, 48, 73; and survival, 42; art of, 72, 160, 172; (as) tangled object(s), 137, 139; belatedness of, 53; childhood, 60, 75, 123, 134; collective, 38, 90, 93, 95–96, 98, 100, 133, 161, 190, 194, 205, 215; discourse, of, 41;domestic, 149, 153n5; envy, 201; feminist, 37–38; generational, 193; healing of, 205; historical, 70; individual, 133, 173; individual and collective, 71, 160, 193; individual and communal, 97; inherited, 169; lacuna of, 54; limit-case, 76–77, 83; narratives of, 134n12; novel, 176; of ageing, 150; of helplessness, 165; of living on, 44; of maternal loss, 49; of recognition, 37; of the Holocaust, 195, 216; of the Shoah, 169; of the

252 Index vulnerable, 93; of war, 110; perpetrator, 54; physical and psychological, 72, 98, 191n9; political, 75, 100; psychic, 139, 143; representation of, 83, 194; repressed, 206; second, 163; spectral, 172; story(ies), 40, 73, 89, 202; studies, 105, 135n11, 193, 201; structure of, 38, 159; survivor(s) (of), 75, 77, 204; symptoms of, 200, 206; the Other’s, 60, 100; temporality of 42, 53; text, 167; theory(-ies) (of), 39–40, 48, 60, 122, 198; transgenerational, 93, 213; transmission of 195, 199; transmitted, 200; (Ur-) family(-ilial), 120, 160, 163–4; vulnerability of, 101; writing (about), 76, 106, 197 trivialisation, 195 Tronto, Joan C., 99–100 trope(s), 33n8; 43; Gothic, 146; of lifewriting, 27; of maternal loss, 43; of violence and voyeurism, 234; scientific, 62; the rhetoric of, 25

U uncanny, the, 53, 93, 110, 112–4, 116, 117n1. See also Freud, Sigmund undecidability, 73, 76, 144 unison, 62, 214 unpresentability, 108

V van Alphen, Ernst, 195–6, 206 van der Kolk, Besser A., and Onno van der Hart, 4 Vaughan, Henry, 153n5 verbigeration, 142, 152 Vickroy, Laurie, 36 victim(s), 1, 4, 28, 55, 56, 60, 71–72, 78, 82–83, 85, 99–100, 107, 153, 161, 163, 165, 167, 169, 171, 178–80, 190, 202, 215, 221; grandchildren of, 161; Shoah, 171; of a transgenerational trauma, 213; of persecution, 179; (of the) Holocaust, 203, 205, 210, 218, 221; (of) trauma, 4, 54, 100, 120, 151, 216; traumatised, 72, 78 Viereck, Peter, 211, 226n7; Metapolitics, 227n7

violence, 16, 27–28, 57, 72, 75, 78, 83n5, 89, 97, 107, 127, 135n6, 150, 163, 167, 173, 187–8; ethical, 29; gender, 11; household, 36; infanticidal, 127; of trauma, 16; perpetrator of, 78; physical, 130; sexual, 30, 62; social, 116 Vipond, Dianne, 13 void, the, 3, 7, 12, 48, 145, 151–2, 168; in the memory, 106; of trauma, 13 voyeurism, 170, 178, 185, 234 vulnerability, 11–12, 59, 90–99, 93, 96–100, 101n6; collective, 101; ethics, of, 8, 14, 97; paroxystic, 98; the Other’s, 101; traumatic, 89

W wake, the, 95 Walkowitz, Rebecca L., 182 Warner, Marina, 58, 66, 68n11 Waugh, Patricia, 111; Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of SelfConscious Fiction, 111 White, Hayden, 80 Whitehead, Anne, 14, 36, 90, 106, 183 Whitlock, Gillian, 22, 33n1 Wilkomirsky, Binyamin, 21–22, 190n1; Fragments, 21–22, 190n1 Williams, Merle, and Stefan Polantinsky, 211 Winfrey, Oprah, 21 witness(es), 53, 55–56, 64–65, 67n1, 70, 92, 95, 109, 161, 171; auxiliary, 55; -bearing, 53, 55–57, 63; belated, 177–8, 180, 185, 190, 211; collective addressee, 215; community of, 89; direct, 160; (empathetic addressee-) secondary, 202, 225; extradiegetic, 65;eye-, 31, 215; failed, 65; false, 65; fi rst-hand, 178; interviews of the, 160; invisible, 90; (of) (to) the Shoah, 171, 226; primary, 55; reader/-, 6; second generation, 13; secondary, 55; self-, 57; stories of the, 166; surviving, 159; to Others’ suffering, 55. See also witnessing witnessing, 10–11, 26, 56, 60, 63–64, 93–94, 170–1, 177–9, 185–6,

Index 188, 190; choral, 91; collapse of, 55, 171; community, 63; ethical, 23; level(s) of, 178–9; Others, 57, 67; process, 56; readers, 53; role, 55; theorisation of, 178; without witnesses, 53. See also witness(es) Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 104; The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 104 Woolf, Virginia, 72–73, 77, 79, 146; Mrs Dalloway, 146, 148; The Waves, 73 Wordsworth, William, 99, 101; “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” 99, 101 working-through, 13, 54, 122, 201, 206, 217, 223–5; (of) (collective) trauma, 55, 58, 225; process, 201, 207 World War II, 28, 104, 106, 110, 123, 128, 159–61, 165, 197–8, 203; literature, 104. See also Second World War wound(s), 11, 70, 74–75, 89, 97, 109, 121, 141, 143, 159, 176, 187–8, 195; -ing, 130; culture, 141; of Irish history, 71; (of) the

253

Other(’s) 11–12; multiple, 123; psychological, 127; traumatic, 48; story(ies), 89 writing (the), 32, 36–37, 41–42, 46, 48–49, 53, 111, 114, 122, 161, 171, 177, 179, 181, 187, 189–90, 194, 196; (about) trauma, 76, 106, 197; (about) war, 105, 215; academic, 203; act of, 6, 138; activity, 163; art of, 111; as a chemist, 180; as pregnancy, 48; autobiographical, 50n9, 177; barbarism of, 4; British-Jewish, 204; diary, 129; experimental, 153; ethicality of, 210; fiction(al), 111, 137, 142, 144–5, 153; form(s) of, 79, 137; fragmented, 90; historical, 203; letter-, 71; interrupted, 90; mnemonic, 127; of The War After, 199; order of, 218; poetry after Auschwitz, 4, 210; survive in, 48; techniques of, 81; testimonial, 3–4, 215; the time of, 43; trope for, 45; un-, 48; “white,” 45. See also life-writing