History, memory and nostalgia in literature and culture 1527508765, 9781527508767, 9781527514539, 1527514536

Table of contents :
Table of Contents......Page 6
Foreword......Page 8
Remembrance of Journeys Past......Page 10
Beyond Nostalgia......Page 23
“The Past Is A Foreign Country”......Page 34
Memory, Identity and Displacement in Heshel’s Kingdom by Dan Jacobson......Page 47
Personal Landscape......Page 63
“Where is the Place Where it All Really Happened?”......Page 74
I Mourn Thee Now......Page 90
Liars, Similes and Story-tellers in The Blue-Guitar (2015) by John Banville......Page 112
Devaluating Testimony......Page 133
Postmemory and Copresence in Lisa Appignanesi and Emilia Degenius......Page 145
Whose Memory? Contemporary Narratives of the Japanese American World War II Internment......Page 166
History, (Non)Memory and the Ideological Uses of Genre......Page 182
Material Reflections......Page 198
Forgetting Or Making To Forget......Page 222
A Matter of Life and Death......Page 238
The Second Eric Sanderson......Page 250
The Witch and the Memory in Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching Series......Page 265
Views on Racial Categorization in William Faulkner’s and Kathryn Stockett’s Novels......Page 273
Contributors......Page 297

Citation preview

History, Memory and Nostalgia in Literature and Culture

History, Memory and Nostalgia in Literature and Culture Edited by

Regina Rudaitytė

History, Memory and Nostalgia in Literature and Culture Edited by Regina Rudaitytė This book first published 2018 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2018 by Regina Rudaitytė and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-0876-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0876-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword ................................................................................................... vii Remembrance of Journeys Past: Nostalgia, Melancholy and the Duty of Memory in Contemporary British Travel Books ..................................... 1 Jan Borm Beyond Nostalgia: Notes on History and Memory of the Soviet Era in Lithuanian Postcolonial Fiction ............................................................. 14 Almantas Samalaviþius “The Past Is A Foreign Country”: On the Nostalgia of Literature............. 25 Eric Sandberg Memory, Identity and Displacement in Heshel’s Kingdom by Dan Jacobson ........................................................................................ 38 Irena Ragaišienơ Personal Landscape: Ford Madox Ford, War, and the Mind ..................... 54 Andrea Rummel “Where is the Place Where it All Really Happened?”: Lost Landscapes in the Poetry of Lars Gustafsson................................................................ 65 Maria Freij I Mourn Thee Now: Nostalgia in John Banville’s Novel The Sea ............. 81 Linara Bartkuvienơ Liars, Similes and Story-tellers in The Blue-Guitar (2015) by John Banville: Anamnesis and Forgery .............................................. 103 Thierry Robin Devaluating Testimony: The Unreliability of Memory and the Writing of History in Stan Douglas’s Klatsassin .................................................. 124 Maria Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou

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Table of Contents

Postmemory and Copresence in Lisa Appignanesi and Emilia Degenius: Life Writing of the Polish Diaspora......................................................... 136 Elizabeth Kella Whose Memory? Contemporary Narratives of the Japanese American World War II Internment ......................................................................... 157 Lena Ahlin History, (Non)Memory and the Ideological Uses of Genre: Alternate Scenarios and Dystopian Visions............................................. 173 Marzena Sokoáowska-ParyĪ Material Reflections: The Scope of Memory in Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda .................................................................................. 189 Rnjta Šlapkauskaitơ Forgetting Or Making To Forget: Memory, Trauma and Identity in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant..................................................... 213 Deimantas Valanþinjnas A Matter of Life and Death: Mr Darcy and Memory in P.D. James’s Death Comes To Pemberley .................................................................... 229 Renata Zsamba The Second Eric Sanderson: Multi-Textuality, Identity and Memory in Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts ................................................................ 241 Dorisa D. Costello The Witch and the Memory in Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching Series ..... 256 Olena Tykhomyrova Views on Racial Categorization in William Faulkner’s and Kathryn Stockett’s Novels ................................................................ 264 Ingrida Eglơ Žindžiuvienơ and Teodor Mateoc Contributors ............................................................................................. 288

FOREWORD The eve of the new age has alerted us to the conflicted nature of historical memory that defined the 20th century while simultaneously assaulting us with new historical upheavals that demand responsibility and critical consideration. Roland Barthes‘s concept of historical discourse being a form of ideological elaboration, an imaginary elaboration, presupposes the assumption that it might not be problematic to distort and falsify history, to imprint subjective opinions and handy interpretations on the popular imagination. As the historical text bears traces of the writing subject, the element of deception is remarkable, thus historical memory easily lends itself to forgery and false or at least subjective projections. History, memory can easily become a field and a tool of political manipulations, a playground to exercise ideological and social power. Records of historical experience and historical negotianism have been shown to be inextricably bound to power structures, institutional dynamics, currents of globalization, social dreams, and personal desires. So how do we think about the past, about history, about memory, how does memory function? Is history an objective account, a collection of dry reliable facts? Or is it an imaginative narrative, tinged with nostalgia, a projection of our wishful thinking, the workings of our subjective perceptions and attitudes, states of mind? The essays in this volume focus on the relevance of the past to the present and future in terms of the shifting attitudes to personal and collective experiences that have shaped dominant Western critical discourses about history, memory and nostalgia. What theoretical frameworks lend themselves best to the study of historical complexities and emotional ambiguities that respond to them? How do we grasp the rhythms and forms of longing? How does nostalgia unfold with regard to space and time? The scholars take issue with the epistemological, hermeneutic, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of the representational practices through which we revisit and revise the meaning of the past. Their essays collected in this volume deal with diverse thematic subjects, particularly focusing on history as narrative, alternative histories, memory, the discourse of nostalgia, the Proustian search for lost time, identity and historical agency, trauma. Regina Rudaitytơ

REMEMBRANCE OF JOURNEYS PAST: NOSTALGIA, MELANCHOLY AND THE DUTY OF MEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH TRAVEL BOOKS JAN BORM

Memory is perhaps not surprisingly a central notion in contemporary travel writing. There are a number of reasons for that including the fact that travel writers often go on journeys in the footsteps of someone nowadays, possibly retracing their itinerary or discussing it in their own writing. Travelogues are also frequently used to note change, both internal and external. Thirdly, writing about one’s own journeying is an act of memory in a way, even if the British author Jonathan Raban (b. 1942) likes to radically distinguish between travel itself and the preparation of a manuscript: “Writing–real writing, in the iron discipline of a book–is the mirror opposite of travelling. A book is a strictly subordinated world. Its logic, of symbol and metaphor, is at once tantalizingly suggestive and ruthlessly exclusive” (Raban 2012: 234-5). But the process of leaving out bits and pieces probably starts earlier in most cases, during the note taking. Having little to say about Belgrade in his well-known travel book L’usage du monde [1963], the Swiss author Nicolas Bouvier (1929-1998) remarks that he was not able to say a lot about the city since he had been busy feeling happy there all the time1, adding that one cannot be judge of one’s own wasted time or if one wasted one’s time. Le temps perdu–the allusion to Marcel Proust’s famous novel is manifest and clearly hints at the problematic role of memory in travel writing. Writing up travel is about remembering it all and trying to make parts of it come alive on page within 1

Nicolas Bouvier, L’usage du monde [1963], Paris: Payot, 1992, p. 44: (à Belgrade) “Si je n’étais pas parvenu à y écrire grand-chose, c’est qu’être heureux me prenait tout mon temps. D’ailleurs, nous ne sommes pas juges du temps perdu.” – “The reason why I did not manage to write much there was that feeling happy was taking up all of my time. Besides, we are not judges of wasted time” (my translation).

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a framework that imposes not only selection–after all memory tends to be selective–but re-composition to make elements fit into an aesthetic whole if one agrees with David Lodge in considering the contemporary travelogue as a non-fiction novel of sorts (Lodge 1997: 8). This central and complex role of memory in the travel book also becomes immediately apparent if one looks at the genre’s history. Countless travelogues deal with the author’s pilgrimage to a country or a place, such as the Holy Land for instance, or the place where family members died in deportation like Finns, Lithuanians and Poles in Siberia to name but a few examples. An author might also want to reach a destination dreamed off since childhood like Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989) in Patagonia, as we will see below. Travel and writing about it may be a means of chasse spleen – to free oneself from all-invasive melancholia like Robert Burton tried to in his monumental Anatomy of Melancholy, a text we will also return to below. Grand Tours were undertaken to see the most famous remains of Antiquity. Ethnographers have been obliged time and again to conclude that they have come almost too late to see a culture alive and that it is their duty to remind and to alert readers of this sad state of affairs–a trope known as ethnographic mourning. Finally, one could argue that a primitivist stance is partly an effort to remember earlier, supposedly happier days. Be that as it may, memory is clearly one of the key vectors of travel writing. If memory is identity, as Julian Barnes’ narrator suggests in England, England,2 and given the importance of memory in travel, it follows that identity issues also play a key-role in travel literature. This may concern both personal and collective history, as well as the emotions, ideas and memories or souvenirs that come with places we are going through or remembering. In this chapter I will argue that the remembrance of one’s own childhood, the sense of restlessness owing to feelings of melancholy, if not nostalgia, as well as the idea of a “duty to remind readers” of certain facts and figures are the three principal manifestations of memory in contemporary travel books. As we will see, these themes are highly prominent in a number of important works published since the 1970s up to the point of making us consider memory as one of the central motifs in contemporary travel writing.

From memory to nostalgia One of the most famous British travelogues to have been published in the last 40 years is Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia [1977]. The memorable 2

Julien Barnes, England, England: “Since memory is identity” (p. 251).

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opening section of the book is preceded by an epigraph quoting in the French original some lines from Blaise Cendrars’ long poem Prose du Transsibérien [1913]: “Il n’y a plus que la Patagonie, la Patagonie,/ Qui convienne à mon immense tristesse…”, introducing the notion of (immense) sadness. The narrative then starts off with a childhood memory of the author’s: “In my grandmother’s dining-room there was a glassfronted cabinet and in the cabinet a piece of skin. It was a small piece only, but thick and leathery, with strands of coarse, reddish hair. It was stuck to a card with a rusty pin. On the card was some writing in faded black ink, but I was too young then to read.” (Chatwin 1979: 6). The author the goes on to remember a conversation with his grand-mother, explaining in a humorous vein that his grandmother thought this piece of skin to stem from a brontosaurus whereas we are really dealing with a giant sloth, an extinct animal that to used to live in a giant cave, Chatwin’s ultimate destination in Patagonia to find a replacement for the skin that had been lost since. The resonance of these opening lines is particularly strong if one connects them with the rest of the book. The glass-fronted cabinet is thus less to be seen as indicative of realism or an effet de reel of sorts, as it were, but rather as a way of introducing the theme of perception and possibly distance (in time). The reddish hair somehow goes with the rusty pin, the notion of rust suggesting the passing of time (from earliest age to the moment of composition), but also the souvenir of long bygone days, enhanced by the image of faded ink. Travelling Patagonia thus becomes a way of trying to recover if not one’s childhood, at least some of one’s own earliest memories. “I Always Wanted to Go to Patagonia” is the title of an autobiographical essay Chatwin published later3. To what extent this is really true shall be of no concern here. More importantly, the giant sloth motif at the beginning is the device Chatwin found for introducing the quest theme (i.e. the journey to Patagonia is-partly-undertaken to find a replacement for the lost piece of skin), a way of structuring this highly 3

“I always wanted to go to Patagonia” (New York Review of Books, 1983), reprinted in Chatwin 1997: 3-14. Here is the passage explaining where the phrase stems from, pp. 13-4: “One afternoon in the early 70s, in Paris, I went to see the architect and designer, Eileen Gray, who at the age of ninety-three thought nothing of a fourteen-hour working day. She lived in the rue Bonaparte, and in her salon hung a map of Patagonia, which she had painted in goache. ‘I’ve always wanted to go there,’ I said. ‘So have I,’ she added. ‘Go there for me.’ I went. I cabled the Sunday Times: ‘Have Gone to Patagonia’. In my rucksack I took Mandelstam’s Journey to Armenia and Hemingway’s In Our Time. Six months later I came back with the bones of a book that, this time, did get published.”

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original narrative. Indeed, Chatwin ended up leaving out most of the parts concerning himself that had featured in the first draft of the narrative described to his parents as “a 3-inch pie of manuscript, much of which will have to be scrapped when I come to the revision.”4 In the same message he also alludes to the part of his book that deals with one of his distant relatives, the sailor Charlie Milward, who had spent some years in Patagonia, written stories about it which partly feature in Chatwin’s book, and sent the piece of giant cloth alluded to in the beginning of the text. Sailor Milward is obviously part of the memory set if one can call it such in the narrative, the theme being enhanced by this allusion to Milward’s own apparent homesickness or at least fond memories of home: “The extraordinary thing about Milward is that he could never shake off Birmingham. The house in Punta Arenas is pure Edgbaston arts and crafts.”5 But according to Chatwin, Milward must have been fond of Patagonia too, judging by the objects he collected, including the animal skin he sent back home. Colin Thubron (b. 1939), author of more than ten travel accounts and President of the Royal Society of Literature, has also recently reflected on the function of these remains of the past in his elegiac To a Mountain in Tibet: “My feet slow on the trail. But my memories come too hard for quiet thought. With the death of a last parent, material things–old correspondence, a dilapidated house, a pair of slippers, emerge like orphans to enshrine the dead. My mother threw away nothing” (Thubron 2012: 54). Thubron’s itinerary is a pilgrimage to some holy places in order to pay homage to his family members who disappeared in recent times. It is striking to note how memories here seem to be invasive, slowing down the traveller’s pace, demanding attention to the point of making Thubron reflect on the very question of what should be kept and what the role of the keeper is: “How to decide what is to survive, what is to perish? The value of things no longer belongs to cost or beauty, but only to memory” (Thubron 2012: 54). Though the objects might facilitate a return into one’s own childhood, this inner experience may be somewhat burdensome: “The past drops away into the waste-paper basket and oblivion, and in this monstrous disburdening, grief returns you to a kind of childish dependence. You sift and preserve (for whom?) and cling to trivia. You have become the guardian of their past, even its recreator” (Thubron 2012: 4

Bruce Chatwin, Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin (ed. Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare). London: Vintage, 2011, p. 249-251 (letter to Charles and Margharita Chatwin from Fishers Island/New York, 25 Aug 1975), p. 249. 5 Id.

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55). The image of the guardian betrays a sense of static memory to be set off against the idea that memories then also become the object of reworkings, a creative process of recomposing the past, a bit like the travelogue resetting the experience of the traveller within the framework of a sustained narrative. The idea of travel permitting oneself to recover a sense of one’s own past is a frequent theme, even a common trope in contemporary travel writing as Jonathan Raban’s and Redmond O’Hanlon’s (b. 1947) accounts go to show. What, then, is the function of this topos? Arguably, the return to childhood in these texts could be seen as a reworking of the feeling of nostos that aches and propels the epic traveller in Antiquity, the term at the root of the notion of nostalgia–the longing for, yet impossible return to a former if not original and presumably happier state. Continued engagement with this idea may then lead to more or less prolonged pangs or even states of melancholia, the theme we presently turn to.

Of travel as a cure for melancholy Having studied archaeology at Edinburgh University for a couple of years, Bruce Chatwin then worked on a book about nomadism he was originally thinking of calling The Nomadic Alternative6 and which he later presented as “a kind of ‘Anatomy of Restlessness’ that would enlarge on Pascal’s dictum about the man sitting quietly in a room” (Chatwin 1997: 12) since the notion of restlessness was the central object of his reflection in a manuscript that is extant but which he decided not to publish. In a letter to his friend Deborah Rogers written in 1987 he refers to what he calls his own “’incurable restlessness’” (Chatwin 2011: 493). The author was actually seriously ill at this stage, being infected with HIV. The term “incurable” may be a hint at his deplorable state at that moment but also no doubt alludes to the fact that he never stopped reflecting about the nature of nomadism and his own condition. The poet and Hellenist Peter Levi (1931-2000) paid homage to his friend as an excellent travel companion in the preface to the paperback edition of The Light Garden of the Angel King: Journeys in Afghanistan, an account originally published in 1972: “it will be obvious from every page of this book that I was extremely fortunate in the travelling companion I did have, Bruce Chatwin. Most of our best observations and all the best jokes were his; and it was he who was interested in nomads” (Levi 1984: 15). Chatwin had written himself a piece entitled “A Lament for Afghanistan”, his preface to 6

See his letter to Tom Mashler collected in Chatwin 1997: 75.

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a new edition of Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana in 1981, a classic title first published in 1937 that counted among Chatwin’s favourite travelogues. The term “lament” is telling. Chatwin is not only mourning the loss of Byron as he explicitly states in the text later collected in his volume What Am I Doing Here [1989], but also the days when travels in Afghanistan were still possible before the Soviet Union decided to invade the country. Of course, Chatwin’s emotion evokes the idea of nostalgia first: “But that day will not bring back the things we loved: the high, clear days and blue icecaps on the mountains” (Chatwin 1989: 293). It also needs to be linked with his most successful book The Songlines [1986], a reworking of several journeys to Australia into one narrative that he preferred not to call a travel book since the effort of reconstructing, not-to-say fictionalising, the experience of several trips into one whole was hard to pass off as an authentic account of one particular journey. Being ill while he was working on the book, Chatwin may have had a sense of running out of time. In any case, he decided to include a remarkable and highly original section entitled “From the Notebooks”, running up to some 40 pages in the paperback edition (Chatwin 1987: 163-205), composed of quotes and his own comments and thoughts about human restlessness, taking as a starting point Blaise Pascal’s famous reflection on man’s incapacity to remain seated within a room for a sustained period of time: “‘OUR NATURE LIES in movement; complete calm is death’” (Pascal quoted by Chatwin 1987: 163). The line is followed by a quote from Baudelaire’s diaries: “‘A study of the Great Malady; horror of home’”, a comment by the narrator introducing the central theme: “The most convincing analysts of restlessness were often men who, for one reason or another, were immobilised: Pascal by stomach ailments and migraines, Baudelaire by drugs, St John of the Cross by the bars of his cell. There are French critics who would claim that Proust, the hermit of the cork-lined room, was the greatest of literary voyagers”, two more reflections on obsessive wanderlust of some monks and even Petrarca, as well as a line from a letter written by Rimbaud: “‘What am I doing here?’” Chatwin’s assembling of this material is worth commenting on at some length. In a letter to Murray and Margaret Bail written in February 1986, he referred to his work in process thus: “As for my own ‘Awful Mess’ I’ve now got to the critical stage in which there is a sudden shift from Australia, in order to answer Pascal’s assertion about the man sitting quietly in a room. If it comes off, then I’m on the downward stretch. If not, then there’s a real crisis” (Chatwin 2011: 435). He was obviously not the first author to have meditated and enlarged on Pascal’s reflection. After

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all, we find the same question in D.H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia [1921]: “Why can’t one sit still?” (Lawrence 1981: 7), but Chatwin’s efforts in trying to find answers or to make different voices answer one another are far more sustained, reflection, as we pointed out already, a lifelong concern, if not obsession to him. Indeed, Baudelaire’s observation may be considered as an accurate description of Chatwin’s own restlessness, changing homes frequently, preferring to write his manuscripts in the houses of friends and ironically ending up settling in a former school in Oxfordshire in a place called “Homer End”. References to religious or spiritual wanderings are frequent in Chatwin’s writing. The notebook section strikingly ends with a quote from St John Moscus’ Spiritual Meadow, a famous text that William Dalrymple (b. 1965) draws on as the principal intertext of his travelogue From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium [1997]. As to Rimbaud’s question, Chatwin decided to adapt it as a title for the last book he was able to put together, a collection of articles, essays and other pieces, unexpectedly leaving out the question mark in the title, however, to indicate that he was not referring to a moment of doubt but to a permanent state of affairs at a time when he was terminally ill. To return to Pascal once more, his remarks about the man in the room stem from a fragment of his Pensées entitled “Divertissement”. Pascal argues that man’s predicament of seeking to divert his mind from essential questions is the cause of much trouble in the world but Chatwin may well have engaged in Pascal’s thoughts in view of his interest in nomads as opposed to settlers, repeatedly suggesting in his writing that health was in movement and many problems arising from people settling and possessing grounds and goods. In the notebooks section of the Songlines one notably finds the expression solvitur ambulando translated as “‘It is solved by walking’” (Chatwin 1987: 171). The project of writing an anatomy of restlessness and the idea of travel as a cure lead us to one of Chatwin’s key references, Robert Burton’s (1577-1640) monumental Anatomy of Melancholy [first edition 1621], a title that clearly inspired Chatwin for his own tentative effort. Robert Burton is introduced in the notebook section of the Songlines in the following terms: “sedentary and bookish Oxford don–devoted an immense amount of time and scholarship to showing that travel was not a curse, but a cure for melancholy: that is, for depressions brought on by settlement” (Chatwin 1987: 169). Burton did of course develop a number of remarks on the healing potential of travel, a relatively brave attempt given that Erasmus of Rotterdam still had felt the need a hundred years earlier to justify his own wanderlust in a very carefully-worded letter in order to

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avoid being accused of inconstancy, if not idleness7. It might be worth remembering that Burton accounts for his own enterprise of writing on melancholy as the very cure for his own condition: “I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy” (Burton 2001: 20). Regarding the healing potential of peregrination, Burton observes that “there is nothing better than change of air in this malady” (Burton 2001: 62) or “no better physic for a melancholy man than change of air and variety of places, to travel abroad and see fashions” (Burton 2001: 67), recommending outdoor activities like hunting, hawking, fishing and different types of sport including football, but also “to make petty progress” (Burton 2001: 74), i.e. walking. In the notebook section Chatwin suggests the following etymology: “In Middle English, the word ’progress’ meant ‘a journey’, particularly a ‘seasonal journey’ or ‘circuit’” (Chatwin 1987: 197). The desire for a change of place (or air) leads on to movement, walking to the journey and potentially – or even logically– to improvement if one admits that Chatwin thus manages to conjure up both the archaic and the modern sense of the term. Even if the author insists that “‘moral’ or ‘material’ forms of progress were unknown until the seventeenth century” (Chatwin: 1987: 197), the affirmation appears somewhat tongue-in-cheek since it seems hard to lose the modern sense from sight in the given context. Travel is supposed to be a means of curing many ills, including lovesickness (“Travel is an antidote to love”–Burton 2001: 199, more or less successful, see Eugene Onegin) and even for the armchair traveller there are pleasures to be got out of reading travel accounts (Burton 2001: 89). 7

In a letter to the humanist Marcus Laurinus dated April 5, 1518, Erasmus wonders to what extent travel may be seen as a form of inconstancy: “Quod si constantiae virtus in hoc sita est, vt quam diutissime locum eundem occupes, prima laus debetur saxis ac truncis arborum, proxima conchis ac spongiis. Non est in vicio commutare locum, sed perperam commutare vicium est7.” See Erasmus of Rotterdam, letter to Marcus Laurinus, Louvain, 5 April 1518, in The Complete Letters of Erasmus (ed. P.S. Allen), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913 (reissued 1992), p. 267. I have consulted Walter Köhler’s German edition of his letters: Briefe (ed. and tr. Walther Köhler), Wiesbaden: Dietrich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1947, p. 192: “Besteht die Tugend der Standhaftigkeit darin, solange wie möglich an einem Ort zu sitzen, so gebührt das erste Lob den Felsen und Baumstrünken, das nächste den Muscheln und Schwämmen. Es ist kein Laster, den Platz zu wechseln; aber zu unrecht ihn zu wechseln, ist ein Laster” – which I suggest to render in English as follows: “If the virtue of constancy consists in staying put in one place for as long as possible, praise should go first and foremost to rocks and tree trunks, then to mussels and mushrooms. There is nothing wrong with changing places, but to do so without justification is wrong indeed.”

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What about Chatwin’s own journey to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego? Did it bring a cure? Was it meant to have a healing purpose after all? As the author-narrator explains at the beginning of the text, the point was to find a replacement for the lost piece of giant sloth skin. These are the memorable terms in which Chatwin accounts for the apparently successful accomplishment of his own quest. The scene takes place at the cave – Cueva del Milodon – close to the fittingly named Ultima Esperanza or Last Hope Sound: “And then, poking out of a section, I saw some strands of the coarse reddish hair I knew so well. I eased them out, slid them into an envelope and sat down, immensely pleased. I had accomplished the object of this ridiculous journey. And then I heard voices, women’s voices, voices singing: ‘María… María… María…’” (Chatwin 1979: 182). The comic tone and the term “ridiculous” help to debunk the myth of the traveller as a kind of epic hero achieving his task. Still, the convention Chatwin set out to follow as a structuring device for his account has been respected – a masterstroke that announced a new, more nuanced approach of authors to their own journeys in writing. The cave is the one that Charlie Milward found the piece of skin in alluded to in the beginning, as Chatwin explains to John Kasmin in a message sent in 1975 (Chatwin 2011: 244). Whether he really did find a replacement there is somewhat beside the point. More importantly, his own achievement in reaching the cave is relativized. Chatwin’s narrative is in fact largely dedicated to figures of exile he met in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, as well as the sad story (hence the epigraph) of the pure-blooded indigenous populations having completely disappeared–which leads us to the duty of memory.

Devoir de mémoire Chatwin retraces a number of more or less famous itineraries, including the story of Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid in Patagonia, the history of the revolutionary movements of anarchists in southern Patagonia8 or his relation Charlie Milward. It may seem at first that the epigraph is a reference to Chatwin’s own experience, feeling somewhat sad about the loss of his childhood, hence the prominent place given to the remembrance of the lost piece of skin at the beginning of the text. But as I have already pointed out above, this choice is mainly a way of structuring 8

Chatwin drew largely on the writings of the historian Oswaldo Bayer whose book Los Vengadores de la Patagonia Trágica (Buenos Aires: Editorial Galerma, 19724) he had reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement in 1976, the review entitled “The Anarchists of Patagonia”, collected in Chatwin 1997: 115-128.

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the narrative. It becomes clear from what follows that the sadness is very largely related to the tragedy of the indigenous populations of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego having been either massacred by white settlers or died through contact with them, notably from infectious diseases. Chatwin’s admiration for the Yaghans is manifest: “The Yaghans were born wanderers though they rarely wandered far. […] The layers of metaphorical associations that made up their mental soil shackled the Indians to their homelands with ties that could not be broken. A tribe’s territory, however uncomfortable, was always a paradise that could never be improved on” (Chatwin 1979: 130). Unfortunately, he is obliged to tell the sad story of a paradise lost. At the same time, introducing the notion of sadness–tristesse–in the epigraph is a way to acknowledge the impact of one of the most influential texts to have been published after the Second World War to alert public opinion about the tragic destiny of indigenous peoples around the world, Claude Lévi-Strauss’ famous Tristes Tropiques [1955], with its famous opening line “I hate travelling and explorers” (Lévi-Strauss 1976: 15). Chatwin had attended Claude Lévi-Strauss’ lecture in Oxford in 1973, the year the second English translation of Tristes Tropiques came out. Chatwin also sets out to “accuse” in Zola’s fashion, notably when he tells the tale of one Alexander MacLennan, active in the region in the 1890s, the so-called “Red Pig” (Chatwin 1979: 111-12). In contrast, Chatwin narrates the story of Grandpa Felipe, presented as the last pure-blooded Yaghan left, thereby engaging in what is commonly called ethnographic mourning (I am the last one to witness/I have met the last survivor of etc.), a trope that brings us close to the idea of the duty to remember, a trope that is a powerful driving force in a number of contemporary travelogues. Another striking example I would like to turn to at present is Colin Thubron’s narrative In Siberia [1999]. The laconic title is an evident reminder of Chatwin’s earlier book and may even be read as a kind of homage. Like Chatwin, though in a less persistent way, Thubron wonders what he is doing out there, in the vastness of Siberia. The opening chapter is entitled “Hauntings”, introducing the theme of Siberia as a place of haunting memory, in the present case, the city of Yekaterinburg and the story of the last Russian Tsar having been shot there with his family, a place of memory (lieu de mémoire) the Russian authorities finally failed to eradicate from memory in recent years. Further down the line, Thubron stops over in Omsk, an infamous halt on the way into deportation for Dostoevsky and later Solzhenitsyn (Thubron 1999: 52). He is systematically interested in the different layers of memory relating to a particular place or what is called in French the thickness –l’épaisseur–of a particular memory

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place, as he does here in relation to Omsk: “Next morning, outside the big, unlovely cathedral, which in Stalin’s day had been a cinema, I found a coach-load of pilgrims setting off for a rural monastery. They welcomed me on board” (Thubron 1999: 52). The scene is not only factual, but also symbolical, the narrator thus naming what he had engaged in right from the start, a kind of pilgrimage to a number of sinister-sounding Siberian sites such as the former gulag of Vorkuta, accounting both for the history of the places visited and the remains still to be seen: “But the town was slipping away, and before us unrolled a ghastly no man’s land. For miles its grasslands bunched and undulated with scars of vanished buildings; and some forgotten war, it seemed, had littered its surface with scrap-iron and ruin” (Thubron 1999: 38). The term “scars” is revealing. Remembering the wounds of the past may not be a way of healing them but paying respect to those unfortunate enough to have died during wars forgotten since. The thought of so many dead souls gives the traveller the impression of moving among a largely anonymous crowd of ghosts: “I tried to remember any individual who had died there – a Mandelstam, a Babel. He might have stirred some sharp, particular loss. But I knew of no one. Only a nameless nation of the dead, whom I could not quite separate from its persecutors” (Thubron 1999: 38). The traveller’s predicament is manifest: how to react to so much suffering and account for it? Talking to a former inmate, Thubron notes, or rather, admits: “I felt like a voyeur, ashamed, but I ask: ‘What was it like, the work?’ […] She starts to rock a little on the sofa, backwards and forwards, heavily. Her head turns to the television, where the soap opera is proceeding among yachts and tuxedoes. ‘It was hardest when we built the roads. So many died!’” (Thubron 1999: 44). The contrast between the images on television and the lady’s memories is moving, illustrating Thubron’s candid approach and subtle narrative technique. Like Chatwin, Thubron’s narrator is clearly concerned with lending voice mainly to the other, thereby reducing the importance of his own presence, an attempt at some form of reflexitivity to break away from the convention of largely focusing on the traveller as the central hero in travel accounts of the previous age. Engagement with the multiple layers of the past also characterises Sara Wheeler’s circumpolar account The Magnetic North, parts of which are dedicated to the Russian Far North. Once again, it is important to remind readers of the changing fortune of a particular place, in this case the famous Solovki Monastery on the Solovetsky islands in the White Sea. Wheeler has chosen this emblematic place of Russian faith as the final destination and the last, soothing symbol to take away back home, as well as a sign of hope. The chapter is entitled “The Spirit Lives: The Arctic in

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Remembrance of Journeys Past

European Russia”. An excerpt from Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago serves as the book’s epigraph. This is how she portrays this exceptional place of memory today: “The monks have returned to chant, perhaps for the forgiveness of others. Just as dignified integrity outlasted cultural destruction among the Inuit, a sense of quiet redemption lived on among the bone yards of Stalin’s White Sea camp. It was a good place to end” (Wheeler 2009: 303). Here, the duty of memory opens the road to a way of redemption. What are the principal functions, then, of memory in contemporary travel books? Travelogues are no longer about geographical discovery, though exploration does continue to represent one of its themes. The personal dimension of discovering different parts of the world for oneself apart, travellers invariably revisit places more or less frequently described by their predecessors, introducing factors of change. This may include the description of people, monuments and phenomena before they might disappear, that-is-to-say ethnographic mourning. Similarly, alerting the audience about contemporary problems and potential threats such as climate change as well as the dangers of oblivion (of one’s own and other people’s past) is a powerful vector in contemporary travel writing. At a moment when news are globalized and increasingly poorer in terms of cultural expertise reflected, it is crucial to have these authors voicing their remembrance of things past, representing various–if not thick–layers that the memory of a place consists of. Travelogues too are a “medium of collective memory9”, to borrow a phrase from Herbert Grabes, and they continue to play an important role as one of the principal means to represent diversity.

Works Cited Barnes, Julian. England, England [1998]. London: Vintage Books, 2012. Bouvier, Nicolas. L’usage du monde [1963]. Paris: Payot, 1992. Burton, Robert. Anatomy of Melancholy (ed. Holbrook Jackson, introd. William H. Gass). New York: New York Review of Book, 2001. Cendrars, Blaise. “Prose du Transsibérien”, in Du monde entire, Poésies completes 1912-1924. Paris: Gallimard, 1994, 27-45. Chatwin, Bruce. In Patagonia [1977]. London: Picador, 1979.

9

Herbert Grabes, “Introduction”, in Herbert Grabes (ed.), Literature, Literary History and Cultural Memory, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, “REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 21”, 2005, p. xiv.

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—. “Introduction” in Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana [1937]. London: Pan Books, 1981. —. The Songlines [1986]. London: Penguin, 1987. —. What Am I Doing Here. London: Jonathan Cape, 1989. —. Anatomy of Restlessness. Uncollected Writings [1996] (ed. Jan Borm and Matthew Graves). London: Picador, 1997. —. Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin (ed. Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare). London: Vintage, 2011. Erasmus of Rotterdam. The Complete Letters of Erasmus (ed. P.S. Allen). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913 (re-issued 1992). —. Briefe (ed. and tr. Walther Köhler). Wiesbaden: Dietrich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1947. Grabes, Herbert (ed.). Literature, Literary History and Cultural Memory. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2005. Lawrence, David Herbert. Sea and Sardinia [1921]. New York: Penguin, 1981. Levi, Peter. The Light Garden of the Angel King: Journeys in Afghanistan [1972]. Harmandsworth: Penguin, 1984. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques [1955] (tr. John and Doreen Weightman). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Lodge, David. The Practice of Writing [1996]. London: Penguin, 1997. Raban, Jonathan. Driving Home [2010]. London: Picador, 2012. Thubron, Colin. In Siberia. London: Chatto & Windus, 1999. —. To a Moutain in Tibet [2011]. London: Vintage, 2012. Wheeler, Sara. The Magnetic North: Notes From the Arctic Circle. London: Jonathan Cape, 2009.

BEYOND NOSTALGIA: NOTES ON HISTORY AND MEMORY OF THE SOVIET ERA IN LITHUANIAN POSTCOLONIAL FICTION ALMANTAS SAMALAVIýIUS

The Curious Case of Lithuanian Postcolonialism Suggestions and eventually some attempts to apply the theoretical/analytical framework developed by postcolonial studies to the study of (post)Soviet Lithuanian literature and culture were made at least as early as 19961; however, it took more than a decade before these scholarly interests were finally legitimized both internationally and locally. Among other things, the publication of a large collection of academic articles under the title of Baltic Postcolonialism, edited by American Lithuanian literary scholar Violeta Kelertas, ended a period of prolonged hostility (not to mention openly negative views) to this approach in Lithuania and dispelled suspicion and skepticism among those scholars who preferred to limit the interpretations of postcolonialism to geographical areas like Africa or Asia previously dominated by European colonial powers. As any serious student of postcolonialism knows, these studies underwent their own evolutionary process and shifted an initial fixation that was exclusively on cases of “classical” colonialism. Their mental geography expanded, finally embracing societies that were initially excluded from postcolonial scrutiny. Edward W. Said was among the very few Western scholars who drew the attention of students of literature to the fact that imperial Russia was in fact a colonial enterprise involved in colonial activities in the Caucasus, Central Asia, as well as Eastern Europe. Though he never 1

See, for example, my article “In quest of Postcommunist Studies” published in Lithuanian as “Postkomunizmo studijǐ klausimu“, Kultnjros barai 11 (1996): 11-14 and later reprinted in Almantas Samalaviþius. Kaita ir tĊstinumas: kultnjros kritikos esơ, Vilnius: Kultnjros barai (2008): 11-20.

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focused on an analysis of Soviet or czarist Russian colonialism, in his renowned and influential book Culture and Imperialism, Said made a brief comment suggesting that Russia was not at all “tax exempt” from colonial ideology or policies. In the introduction to this well-known book, Said emphasized that there are several empires that I do not discuss: the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian, the Ottoman, and the Spanish and Portuguese. These omissions, however, are not at all meant to suggest that Russia domination of Central Asia and Eastern Europe have been either benign (and hence approved of) or way less imperialistic.2

Furthermore, he noted that Russia acquired its imperial territories almost exclusively by adjacence. Unlike Britain or France, which jumped thousands of miles beyond their own borders to other continents, Russia moved to swallow whatever land or people stood next to its borders, which in the process kept moving farther east and south.3

Literary scholar Violeta Kelertas in an article published as early as 1999, gave a timely notice that Although much has been written about various locations and forms of postcolonialism, the empire that constituted the Soviet Union has been little discussed in these terms and Baltic scholars, both in and outside the countries themselves, are only now beginning to realize the utility of this approach.4

Though some Lithuanian researchers, including the author of this article, had long realized the “utility of this approach” as Kelertas calls it, it was nev”rtheless not at all easy for Lithuanian postcolonialism to make its way into the geographical realm of postcolonial studies. As Karlis Raþevskis has insisted, the inclusion of the Baltic societies into a category covered by postcolonial theory/studies was somewhat delayed for numerous reasons and, according to him,

2

Said, Culture and Imperialism, xxiii. Ibid., 10. 4 Kelertas,“Perception of the Self and the Other in Lithuanian Postcolonial Fiction“, 9. 3

16

Beyond Nostalgia What complicates matters even further in the case of the Baltic States is that leftist critical theory in general is implicated in a long history of misperception or miscomprehension of the Soviet system. In this sense it could indeed be said that the Baltic countries have been doubly disadvantaged: victims of World War II, they were further victimized by the Cold War that followed, since the latter prevented them from being seen as the victims of the former. In terms of the Cold War, East Europeans belonged to the political right by definition and therefore count on little sympathy from the left. Thus, for a long time, the Soviet Union benefited from a curious sort of blindness afflicting a good many Western intellectuals. So much hope and ideological capital had been invested in the idea of a bright future for humankind, for which the USSR seemed to stand, that many thinkers simply ignored or refused to accept the evidence of such a well-documented fact as the Soviet slave labor system.5

American postcolonial scholar David Chioni Moore was among those theorists who strongly supported the thesis of the legitimacy of Baltic postcolonial studies in an influential article published in the proceedings of the Modern Language Association and eventually re-published in the collection of Baltic Postcolonialism. According to Moore, who discussed various historical forms of colonialism, if “dynastic” colonization cannot properly characterize the Russo-Soviet experience, it might be profitable, I would argue, to consider the Baltic and Central European states as a distinct fourth case I call reverse-cultural colonization. Once again, the standard Western story about colonization is that it is always accompanied by orientalization, in which the colonized are seen by their masters as passive, ahistorical, feminine, or barbaric. However, in Russian-Central European colonization this relation is reversed, because for at least several centuries Russia has, again, been saddled with the fear or belief that it was culturally inferior to the West. Mittel-European capitals such as Budapest, Berlin and Prague were therefore seen in Russia, at least by some, as colonial prizes, rather than as burdens needing “civilizing” from their occupiers. In return, the Baltic and Central Europeans often saw the colonizing Russo-Soviets as “Asiatics.”6

Furthermore, Moore has rightly emphasized that there had been a basis of colonization on other than “a Western model” and, accordingly, the Russian colonial experience embodies yet another difference from that of France and Britain: a rhetoric of revenge or, indeed, return. Only several

5 6

Raþevskis, “Toward a Postcolonial Perspective of the Baltic States”, 171. Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet”, 26.

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centuries before, Muscovy was a Mongol vassal state, and Central Asia’s khans held European slaves into the 19th century. For those who would characterize Russians as different from the peoples to their south and east, the 19th century Central Asian colonizations thus become revenge. But for those other who held that Russia was already partly “Asiatic”, from Russian Eurasianists and Scythianists to Western European Russiorientalists, Russia’s Central Asian conquest constituted a return.7

Quite interestingly, the rhetoric of revenge is currently once again exploited in various contexts by propaganda channels of Putin’s regime in Russia that does not seem to give-up its centuries-long imperial policies. No matter how or in which analytical terms one chooses to interpret the form of czarist and eventually Soviet colonization in the Baltic region, it is obvious that occupation lasting for more than half a century until the spectacular fall of the Soviet empire in 1990, can be rightfully considered as a form of colonization, including the variety of cultural and social consequences that followed. Despite occasional attempts to debunk the fact of the colonization of the Baltic states, the latest of which is the statement of Russian literary scholar Evgeny Dobrenko, who in recent debates at a scholarly conference in Vilnius, fiercely refused to admit that Soviet Russia instead of “liberating” had in fact occupied and then colonized the Baltic states and Lithuania.8 Dobrenko’s passionate but equally weak arguments that during the later Soviet era a number of Soviet Russian citizens somewhat enviously viewed Lithuania and other Baltic states as a “Western“ part of the Soviet domain, in my opinion, can be taken as a kind of pro-Soviet ideology in disguise rather than serious analytical statements containing any historical validity. Quite interestingly, these remarks correspond to ambiguous statements of other prominent Russian intellectuals, like, for example, the film-maker Alexander Sokurov who during his recent visit to Lithuania insisted that Lithuania submitted itself to the Soviet Union rather than being occupied. Such curious statements in themselves could be an interesting focus for a more elaborate study; however, the scope of this paper does not allow for further elaboration on this highly interesting subject. It should be added, though, that in addition to the scholarly activities of Baltic scholars in different geographic locations–the US, Canada as 7

Ibid., 24. See the opinion presented by professor Evgeny Dobrenko in a closing discussion of the international conference “The Literary Field Under the Communist Regime”, held in Vilnius in 2015 and published as “A Discussion on Methodologies for Researching Soviet Literary Space”. In Colloquia 35 (2015): 147-162.

8

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Beyond Nostalgia

well as Eastern Europe–the present legitimacy of Baltic postcolonialism was strongly supported by the development of Irish postcolonial studies. Both countries have a lot in common; among many other things both were colonized by their very close and stronger neighbor. Some of the Irish scholars working in the field of postcolonial studies have taken into consideration that it was Russia that introduced colonial regimes in the Baltic area immediately after it occupied the region in 1940, eventually lost it to Germany and won it back towards the end of World War II.9

Nostalgia: Real, Imagined or Misconceived? Quite recently, there have been some repetitive arguments about the more and more widespread nostalgia for the Soviet period among Lithuanian citizens, especially among the sociologists and anthropologists researching the post-Soviet Lithuanian space. Based on a certain amount of field-research, these studies suggest that Lithuanians are longing for at least some realities and certainties of the Soviet era and this longing, among other things, is expressed by the labels used in present manufacturing and the advertising of various goods, for example, food.10 Anthropologist Neringa Klumbytơ, who teaches anthropological disciplines at Miami University, Ohio, USA, in her recent study based on field-research done in Lithuania a few years ago, strongly emphasizes the phenomenon of the socalled “Soviet sausage renaissance” as witnessed by the popularity of this brand in proportion to other brands of the same daily foods offered by shopping malls in Lithuania. In addition, her thesis is supported by the sociologist Irena Šutinienơ, who has been conducting ongoing research at the Lithuanian Center for Social Studies into the collective and cultural memory of the Soviet period. Recently, she has maintained that Qualitative studies of postcommunist nostalgia prove that people are longing not for the very reality of the Communistperiod, but for those ideas and fantasies that structured it in the past, hopes, discourses and feelings that while being projected into the Communist past provide meaning to their experience of the present.11

9

Chamberlain, Decolonization, 75. See Klumbyte, “The Soviet Sausage Renaissance”, American Anthropologist 112 (1), (2010): 22-37. 11 For more deatailed arguments see Šutinienơ, “Sovietmeþio atmintis šiuolaikinơjơ Lietuvoje: ambivalentiškumas ar nostalgija“, Sociologija. Mintis ir veiksmas 32 (2013): 152-175. 10

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These inquiries encourage one to raise a question whether residents of contemporary Lithuania exhibit a truly nostalgic attitude toward their Soviet past or if this alleged “nostalgia“–a strange longing for the certainties of the Soviet epoch–masks their ambiguous feelings toward the lack of prosperity in their present lives? This leads us to another question– whether the thesis of nostalgia is supported by Lithuanian literature? It is perhaps worthwhile to examine whether feelings of this kind of nostalgia are exhibited in contemporary Lithuanian literature; the more so that literature is among other things sometimes viewed as a kind of reflexive and imaginative “social mirror” of a particular historical period. Though such an inquiry perhaps requires more detailed study than the scope of the present article can allow, I will permit myself the limitation of focusing only on a few (selective) examples of contemporary Lithuanian prose dealing with the realities of the post-Soviet era as well as with memories of the Soviet one. Though I have no intention to debunk the thesis of anthropologists and sociologists looking into the subject of nostalgia, my attempt is to find out whether this phenomenon is really as profound and lasting as some anthropologists and sociologists seem to suggest.

History and Memory in Lithuanian (post) Soviet Prose A number of Lithuanian writers provided powerful literary images of the Soviet colonization even before the collapse of the Soviet regime took place, and even without ever referring to the phenomenon of colonization as such. Novels like The Enchanted City by Romualdas Lankauskas published as early as 1988, or Vilnius Poker by Riþardas Gavelis published in 1989, among many other things, were literary commentaries on the Soviet era. None of these novels exhibited any feelings of nostalgia for the system slowly falling to pieces in the late 1990’s. Instead they dealt with how power and prolonged colonization distorts almost all aspects of the subjugated and colonized society. Both visions, however, were somewhat different. Lankauskas’s short yet impressive novel written in an Orwellian manner was extremely ironic; Gavelis’s novel was far more gloomy and depressing, suggesting that decline and degradation captures all of those involved in the colonial regime: both the perpetrators and the victims suffer from a distorted political, social, and cultural malaise. Moreover, as one can deduce from the narrative provided by Gavelis, no one is a hero, since even the main protagonist VV (Vytautas Vargalys) or his vital élan– his senior teacher and guru Gediminas Riauba–can hardly aspire to this status. Like the other characters of Vilnius Poker, they embody the “dark side” of the inner self. This is especially true in the narrative associated

Beyond Nostalgia

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with VV: though he himself was tortured and perhaps even maimed by the KGB interrogators, his own attitude towards other fellow humans or even those closest to him, like his lover Stefa, is built on an unequal and even a sort of masochistic relationship. Through its rich imagery, Vilnius Poker reveals a very vivid panorama of the Soviet era, though mostly represented by the decaying city of Vilnius that has ceased to contain symbols of a former glory; instead, these symbols have started to represent the city’s ultimate fall portrayed by its total loss of masculine powers. The body of the city in Vilnius Poker “comes to a stop”, it “turns into stone“, “stinks” or is even presented to the reader as “an old depraved exhibitionist”, “a corpse in whose entrails the worms probably still crawl”. The novel’s Vilnius no longer boasts its glorious architectural symbols; on the contrary, a structure like the once famous Gediminas Tower is described as a “short blunt phallus”. And even its main river–the Neris– is described as “the river of memory”; nevertheless, It remembers nothing itself; it just carries other memories. It’s not true that you can’t wade into the same river’s stream twice. Heraclitus was mistaken, or more accurately he had some other city in mind, certainly not this river. The water of the Neris turns and turns in a circle, you can wade into the stream many times. You can scoop up a handful of water that saw the founding of Vilnius, drink a gulp the Iron Wolf once drank. You fling a pebble into the murky current, it plops into the water, and its echo summons some ancient sound, words pronounced once upon a time–maybe even your own. The Neris remembers everything; it’s a miraculous river, you just need to hear it talking.12

Alas, the memories of the river, like all those associated with Vilnius are anything but glorious. Thus, among his other notable contemporaries, for example, Jurgis Kunþinas, Gavelis described the realities of the Soviet era without any nostalgia or longing for the “hell lost”. This is especially true speaking about literary narratives published during the period of national resurgence and those that appeared after the fall of the Communist regime in 1990. Like their predecessors in the 90’s, most of the important younger writers who ascended Lithuania’s literary scene after Vilnius Poker was published, did not and do not seem to exhibit any longing for this period of captivity either. In his novel Murmuring Wall (2008) that might be well described as aspiring to the metaphor of the 20th century, Sigitas Parulskis reflects on this period without any nostalgia either. His view is far more 12

Gavelis, Vilnius Poker, 26.

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ironic, detached and occasionally supplied with some black humor. The prose writer Herkus Kunþius–one of the most prolific Lithuanian authors of the post-dependence period with some two dozen novels, collections of short-stories and essays as well as a number of plays written for the theater to his credit–continues to revisit issues of history and memory in his writings. His most recent novels, A Lithuanian in Vilnius (2011) and A Dervish from Kaunas (2014), as well as his earlier collection of short stories To Betray, to Renounce, to Vilify (2007) are all focused on the period of Soviet domination. His earlier novel titled The Anthology of a Drunkard published in 2009 is, among other things, a literary glimpse into the Soviet period and the role played by vodka. The author is well aware of certain cultural aspects of the Soviet “drinking culture”: in that period hard drinking, though formally considered a social vice, was largely appreciated and even encouraged in order to stop people from thinking about the essence of the repressive colonial system and, what is perhaps even more important, to refrain from any actions against the regime. Kunþius’ novel A Lithuanian in Vilnius might well be classified under the title of “postcolonial”, and not only because the author presents a narrative covering the events that happen “after dependence” or “after colonialism”. Postcolonial theorist Ato Quayson has rightly observed that postcolonialism does not necessarily mean “after”, as postcolonialism denotes relations that are associated with the experience of colonialism and its consequences both in the past and in the present.13 Thus Kunþius’ novels, and A Lithuanian in Vilnius in particular, can be considered truly postcolonial narratives as the author is concerned with issues of cultural and personal hybridity and identity that are of utmost importance to postcolonial authors engaged in reexamining these issues. The narrative of A Lithuanian in Vilnius encompasses many layers. Among other things, the author makes numerous references to the period of dependence. The main protagonist of this novel, Napoleonas Šeputis returns to Vilnius–the city of his youth–on the occasion of the nomination of Lithuania’s capital to the status of culture capital of Europe. Unlike his predecessor Riþardas Gavelis, who presented an impressive quasi-sociological theory of homo Lithuanicus in his Vilnius Poker, Kunþius avoids philosophizing and relies more on memory’s work while depicting the realities of the Soviet era. While wandering in the streets of Vilnius after he had suffered minor injuries from a car-accident and eventually escaped from the hospital where he had been cared for, Šeputis encounters buildings and spaces that trigger reminiscences of the Soviet period. Curiously enough, the 13

Quaison, Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process, 2.

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Beyond Nostalgia

protagonist’s memories are strongly associated with his service in the Soviet army. Šeputis’s narrative of his still very intact memories of military service, is presented with humorous overtones or occasionally black humor. The stupidity and senselessness of daily rituals are rendered as vividly as if they had happened a day or two before. While wandering along the streets of Vilnius, the novel’s protagonist evokes his time in the military and brings back to life the most “memorable” moments of his service bordering between comedy and nightmare. Šeputis’s very much alive memory brings back the colorful characters that he met during his military service in the Soviet army. One of these is general Gaurylius, a retired military officer who treats the protagonist to kefir and white bread while Šeputis, during this time of his military service, provides private services to the retired general, building a garage for the old man. Though he never dares to confront the aging general with questions, Šeputis, nevertheless, realizes that he could have listened to the narrative of comrade Gaurylius, an honored cultural activist of the Lithuanian SSR. Not only about his native village of Židikai, World War II, the glorious way of the 16th Lithuanian division or military political academy named after Lenin where he received higher party education. Retired general Gaurylius–on condition that he himself wished–could have told him about the post-war years, about the decisions of the military tribunal and circumstances under which he, then just a lieutenant, signed orders to execute individuals and burry them in Tuskulơnai–on the bank of the river Neris, in front of St. Peter and Paul’s Church. Eventually it was found out that the mass grave there contained no less than 700 victims.14

The whole narrative is full of references to such “commonplace” situations and the ambiguous characters, who represent the colonizers and the colonized, all of them affected by power relations and the hierarchy set by the colonial regime. The narrative of Kunþius’ novel, though more humorous (in terms of black humor), is far less nightmarish than that of Gavelis’s Vilnius Poker. However, it is devoid of any nostalgia or even occasional warm feelings. The Soviet period is presented as an era of absurdity, ambiguity, lies, and underlying social madness shared by both the oppressors and the oppressed. His most recent novel, A Dervish from Kaunas, is another glimpse back into the Soviet times. Though located in another city, Kaunas, which used to be the interim capital of Lithuania during the period of Polish occupation of the Vilnius region in the years 1922-1940, the novel once again presents a narrative focusing on the 14

Kunþius, Dviveidis romanas, 167. My translation.

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realities of the Soviet era. Like A Lithuanian in Vilnius, it is equally devoid of any nostalgic feelings but is full of irony, sarcasm, and black humor peculiar to his earlier rendering of the Soviet experiences.

Concluding Notes Though this paper contains just a few glimpses at Lithuanian postcolonial fiction including several important novels that appeared before the collapse of the Soviet colonial regime in Lithuania and other Baltic states as well as some written during the recent decades, these as well as other fictional narratives provide little evidence, if at all, of the alleged feelings of nostalgia for the life in the Soviet era. Instead, most literary texts are based on a critical attitude toward the colonial period, and the imagery of the novels and shorter fictional texts contain irony, sarcasm, and black humor in their fictional accounts of the realities of the Soviet era. Most prominent Lithuanian writers of fiction today are more likely to be inclined to revisit and re-examine the era of dependence through a critical lense, exhibiting a distance from the realities of the colonial period rather than mediating any feelings of sympathy or nostalgia for the period when Lithuanians and other Balts were deprived of their freedom and statehood. Though I would not be inclined to doubt the validity of the findings of recent sociological and anthropological research, the causes of nostalgia should perhaps be sought in the dissatisfaction with some of the present social and economic realities and the failure of neoliberal policies pursued by several successive Lithuanian governments on both the Left and the Right. In my opinion, the signs of nostalgia speak more about the contradictions in our present social life rather than represent a collective attitude toward the past.

Works Cited Chamberlain, Muriele E. Decolonization, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Dobrenko, Evgeny. “A Discussion on Methodologies for researching Soviet Literary Space”, Colloquia 35 (2015): 147-162. Gavelis, Riþardas. Vilnius Poker, translated by Elizabeth Novickas, New York: Open Letter, 2009. Kelertas, Violeta. “Perceptions of Self and the Other in Lithuanian Postcolonial Fiction.” In Baltic Postcolonialism, edited by Violeta Kelertas, 251 - 269. Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2006. Klumbytơ, Neringa. “The Soviet Sausage Renaissance”, American Anthropologist 112 (1) (2010): 22-37.

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Kunþius, Herkus. Dviveidis romanas: Lietuvis Vilniuje. Dervišas iš Kauno, Vilnius: Kultnjros barai, 2015. Moore, David Chioni. “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post Soviet: Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique”, In Baltic Postcolonialism, edited by Violeta Kelertas, 11-31. Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2006. Quayson, Atto. Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Raþevskis, Karlis. “Toward a Postcolonial Perspective on the Baltic States”. In Baltic Postcolonialism, edited by Violeta Kelertas, 165-182. Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2006. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage, 1994. Samalaviþius, Almantas. “Postkomunizmo studijǐ klausimu”, Kaita ir tĊstinumas: Kultnjros kritkos esơ. Vilnius: Kultnjros barai, 2008. Šutinienơ, Neringa. “Sovietmeþio atmintis šiuolaikinơjơ Lietuvoje ambivalentiškumas ir nostalgija”, Sociologija. Mintis ir veiksmas 32 (2013): 152-175.

“THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY”: ON THE NOSTALGIA OF LITERATURE ERIC SANDBERG

In 1953 L. P. Hartley wrote that “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”1 Today, this sentiment may appear even more resonant, more significant––even more true––than it did to Leo Colston, the narrator of The Go-Between, a novel that is, in the words of Douglas Brooks-Davies “not only nostalgic” but “is about nostalgia: about the recovery of lost memories where those memories are not only personal [. . .] but collective and cultural.”2 We live, like Colston, in a world that seems in many ways separated from the past by an unbridgeable gulf. We live in societies oriented towards the now and the tomorrow, and are members of a global civilization obsessed with a complex present seemingly free of historical continuity. While we may no longer possess a naïve sense of perpetual progress towards a better future, the myriad tomorrows inherent in every new technological development, every new consumer product, every new digitally mediated social transformation, do tend to draw us ever further away from both our personal pasts and our collective histories. The past, as Hartley indicates, can come to seem fundamentally different from our present lives: separate, inexplicable, and foreign. Yet, again like Colston, we cannot seem to tear our eyes away from this unreachable past, and our present, for all its ‘nowness,’ seems nonetheless stubbornly rooted in and connected with history. There are a number of possible ways of explaining this. Jean Baudrillard’s argument that “when the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning,” offers a powerful post-modern approach to thinking about our connection to the past.3 As our world transforms itself with increasing 1

L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (London: Penguin, 2000), 5. Douglas Brooks-Davies, introduction to The Go-Between, by L. P. Hartley (London: Penguin, 1997), xi. 3 Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in A Postmodern Reader, ed. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), 347. 2

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“The Past Is A Foreign Country”: On the Nostalgia of Literature

ferocity, as the gap between the way our lives are experienced and our ability to meaningfully process that experience widens, the past comes to feel, indeed to be, ever more relevant, ever more charged with meaning, particularly in contrast to a present that if not meaningless, certainly eludes easy explication. In this present that is unable to provide us with adequate tools for self-realisation and self-definition, the past takes on an ever more important role. Another way of thinking about our obsession with the past would be to locate it within the traditions not of post-modernity, but of modernity: what we are dealing with may be a past which, to paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, has now been dying for a very, very long time, and a present that has been waiting for a very, very long time to be born. If we exist suspended between a past which is gone (yet lingers), and a present that seems immanent, yet perpetually recedes before our outstretched hands, nostalgia may well be one response to this precarious situation, one of the “morbid symptoms” of modernity to which Gramsci refers.4 However this nostalgic orientation is conceptualized, what seems clear is that rather than moving steadily forward, we seem to be perpetually falling backwards. This tendency can be observed in many different forms. It occurs politically, as in the repeated re-ignition of history’s buried fires, be they burning on the Crimean peninsula or the plains of the Euphrates. It occurs culturally, as in the persistent return of cultural production and consumption to the past in a restless and always unsatisfied attempt to reinterpret, reuse, or recirculate that which was seemingly finished. And it occurs personally, as our lives fail again and again to achieve escape velocity, and fall backwards, spent, towards their centre of gravity, the past. To look back on our childhoods, as Colston does in The Go-Between, and at the worlds in which they occurred––for him the ostensibly idyllic summer of 1900 spent at Brandham Hall, filled with a “glory brighter than the sunshine,” but for each of us a different time and place––is to encounter an uncanny difference, something which is at once utterly separate from us and strangely, or in Freud’s terms, “secretly” familiar: “the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar.”5 This unfamiliar familiarity of the past, and a powerful attraction towards it, is one of the key intellectual and emotional features of our present moment: to borrow

4 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publisher’s Co., 1971), 276. 5 L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 62.; Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Peter Simon (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 947.

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Fredric Jameson’s terminology, we could think of it as the (or perhaps more modestly, a) “cultural dominant” of our era.6 * This retrospective orientation, this obsession with a past at once achingly familiar and unobtainably remote, is observable in all major forms of cultural production. Consider contemporary cinema, with its endless reiteration and recirculation of previous material, its sequels and prequels, remakes and reboots, its seemingly endless Star Wars and Star Treks, its adaptations and re-adaptations. Or take the contemporary pop music industry, which circles obsessively around the music and performers of the 1960s. However, the literary, broadly construed, is, I would argue, our most explicit repository of cultural memory; it is the place where the past lives most actively and with the most self-awareness; it is the place in which the past is written and, perhaps, the place where the past writes us; and it is the place in which we work through our memories of the past in an explicitly contemporary context. The relationship between literature and nostalgia is, I am arguing, a central feature of contemporary literary culture. Evidence of this nostalgic tendency abounds. Like the film industry, the publishing world is reluctant to leave successful past works alone: hence the recent ‘continuations’ of works by writers including Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, and P. G. Wodehouse. Similarly, genre fiction set in historical eras, like C. J. Sansom’s Tudor-era detective series, or Philip Kerr’s World War Two noir novels have been hugely successful. In addition, James F. English has very recently presented empirical evidence that even contemporary high-culture novels (he uses prize-nominations as a criteria to define this slippery and inevitably controversial category) have come in recent years to focus more on the past, with a marked increase, from 20% to over 50%, in historical settings over the period from 1960 to 2013.7 This represents a major shift in literary production and consumption, and the increasingly nostalgic orientation of our culture is one way to explain the change. As Andrew Piper and Eva Portelance put it, “the long-forgotten modernist mantra of

6 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 4. 7 James F. English, “Now, Not Now: Counting Time in Contemporary Fiction Studies,” Modern Language Quarterly 77.3 (2016): 406-411, accessed December 26, 2016. http://mlq.dukejournals.org/content/77/3/395.full.pdf+html.

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‘make it new’ appears increasingly, if not entirely, to have given way to a greater high-cultural sensibility of retrospection.”8 * But even if the scale of literature’s engagement with the past in ways that are recognisably nostalgic has expanded, the link between literature and nostalgia is certainly not a new phenomenon. Indeed, writing––at least some of the times and in some of its forms––is arguably an inherently nostalgic art form. At its most basic level it is a set of techniques that allows us to preserve voices from the past into the present. As Walter J. Ong points out, the “commitmentofthewordtospace” which occurs when oral language becomes written language “enlargesthe potentiality of language almost beyond measure,” and one of the keys here is the ability of language, inherently ephemeral, to persist over time.9 Writing is petrified language, a relic of vanished words: in Margaret Atwood’s evocative description, a “whisper from the past, [. . .] the voice your ghost would have, if it had a voice.”10 Writing is our attempt to make the vanished past speak again, and this attempt is as old as literature itself.11 Looking back, then, to some of the foundational texts of the Western literary canon, we find a cultural and narrative formation that is clearly nostalgic. This is the nostos, or story of homecoming, which appears in a variety of guises throughout classical literature, and which is, incidentally, half of the etymological root of the word nostalgia, the second half deriving from the Greek word for pain.12 In ancient Greek literature, 8

Andrew Piper and Eva Portelance, “How Cultural Capital Works: Prize-winning Novels, Bestsellers, and the Time of Reading,” Post45, May 10, 2016, accessed December 26, 2016, http://post45.research.yale.edu/2016/05/how-cultural-capitalworks-prizewinning-novels-bestsellers-and-the-time-of-reading/. 9 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 2002), 7. This is not to ignore the ability of oral cultures to use a range of techniques to preserve language over time in oral form, but to point out that the ability to do so is qualitatively different in literate cultures. 10 Margaret Atwood, Maddaddam (London: Virago 2014), 344. 11 As the quotation from Atwood implies the temporality of nostalgic literature is anything but straightforward: the ghost she refers to would logically come after you, yet it seems to speak out of a past you can never experience. What seems to be indicated here is the way the present exists in a state of constant tension between past and future. 12 Marigo Alexopoulou, “Nostos and the impossibility of 'a return to the same': from Homer to Seferis,” New Voices in Classical Reception Studies 1 (2006), accessed December 26, 2016, www2.open.ac.uk/ClassicalStudies/GreekPlays.;

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nostos sometimes occurs as a temporary impulse, a counterpoint to other dominant energies.13 One example of this can be found in the Diapeira episode in Book Two of the Iliad, in which Agamemnon (rather foolishly) decides to test the Achaeans’ resolve by telling them that the war is lost, and that they should return home. When he does so, his men are overcome with nostalgia: “the cry reached heaven of men longing for home.” 14 So powerful is this emotional reaction that it takes an act of divine intervention on the part of Hera and Athena to prevent the flight of the Greek army, and the untimely end of the Trojan War. This episode of nostos thus acts within the greater narrative of the Iliad to highlight the emotional stress under which the participants in the war against Troy labour. Nostos could, however, also have a much more pronounced narrative impact, shaping an entire story as it does in Homer’s Odyssey, that tale of a much-desired, long-deferred, frequently threatened, and ultimately violent homecoming. A modern interpretation of this seminal tale, Nikos Kazantzakis’ 1938 The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, arises out of the recognition of the fundamental and tragic impossibility of nostos. Indeed, this is one of the elements of Kazantzakis’ poem that makes it quintessentially modern. What he adds to the Homeric nostos is the acknowledgement that the person who returns home is no longer the person who left home, the people he returns to are not the people he left behind, and that even the place he left has changed in his absence. It is worth stopping here to note the gendered nature of the concept of nostalgia––the pronouns used here are not accidental. The literary tradition strongly associates the longing for home, or nostalgia, with male figures, the embodiment of home with female. Odysseus’ name has become, after all, synonymous with lengthy and arduous travel and with the difficulty of returning home, while his wife Penelope is perhaps the most notably persistent domestic figure in our literature, spending an astonishing twenty years keeping the home fires burning. In Kazantzakis’ retelling, however, soon after bringing his odyssey to a close, and thus ostensibly accomplishing his nostos, Odysseus finds “nostalgia,” MOT Oxford Dictionary of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), accessed December 26, 2016, https://mot.kielikone.fi/mot/OUYO/netmot.exe?motportal=80. 13 I am using the term ‘literature’ here to refer to texts that arise out of oral cultures. See Ong’s Orality and Literacy pages 10-15 for a discussion of oral ‘literature,’ pages 18-30 for a discussion of the oral nature of the Homeric texts. 14 Homer, Iliad, trans. Caroline Alexander (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 2: 153-154.

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himself in conflict with both wife and son, repelled by the stale routines of a life now foreign to him, and in turn little more than an intrusive outsider to a wife more than capable of running her own home and a son ready to step into his own life. Despite his longing for home, and the prodigious efforts he has made to return there, Odysseus is forced to acknowledge, to his grief, that he must leave again: With silent strides Odysseus then shot back the bolt, passed lightly through the courtyard and sped down the street. Some saw him take the graveyard's zigzag mountain path, some saw him leap on rocks that edged the savage shore, some visionaries saw him in the dead of night swimming and talking secretly with the sea-demons, but only a small boy saw him in a lonely dream sit crouched and weeping by the dark sea's foaming edge.15

What is particularly interesting here is not just the modern acknowledgement of the impossibility of homecoming, and thus of a particularly sharp bite to the pain of nostos, which is now seen as an essentially unfulfillable longing, but also the way literature can be seen as doubly nostalgic. First, Kazantzakis offers a particularly clear, and particularly moving, example of the theme or subject of nostalgia, in which the desire for and the impossibility of achieving that thing called home contributes to the content of a literary work as a compositional element, either as a dominant plot structure or as a moment of emotional illumination and intensity. Secondly, the very fact that he has looked back to the Odyssey for his main character and point of narrative departure indicates a more structural way in which literature, or perhaps cultural production more generally, is nostalgic, looking back to its predecessors for material, using an interpretation of the past to make sense of the present. This pattern, in which a desire for the past operates both as a theme and as a structuring principle, is one of the more interesting ways in which contemporary literary culture is shaped by its engagement with the past. * Another example of this dual form of literary nostalgia can be seen, although perhaps less explicitly, in the relationship that exists between Thomas Hughes 1857 novel Tom Brown's School Days and J. K. Rowling’s 15 Nikos Kazantzakis, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, trans. Kimon Friar (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958), 2.457-464.

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Harry Potter series. Both of these narratives were hugely popular in their original forms, both have been repeatedly adapted across media platforms, and both have been tremendously influential in shaping the popular vision of schooling. And they are, most importantly for my purposes, linked by a nostalgic orientation towards the past. Tom Brown's School Days is an open exercise in what Alan Gribben describes as “Victorian nostalgia.” 16 The narrative consists of memories (for some readers moving, for others sickly-sweet) of a vanished past, the public school world of Thomas Arnold’s Rugby circa 1830, mediated through the everyman (or every child) figure of Tom Brown. It is full of evocative descriptions of a world––both physical and social––that was, according to the narrator, already slipping into memory by the second half of the nineteenth century. It is thus in a sense doubly nostalgic: its writer, narrator, and original readership would have experienced it as a text dealing in nostalgia for a world slipping into the past, but still readily graspable, certainly one within living memory, and one which while in many ways different from contemporary experience still possessed many points of cultural contact. They could, at least in many cases, have themselves remembered elements of the world Hughes depicted, and thus experienced a sort of first-hand nostalgia for their own school days. Readers today can only experience it, however, as a text dealing with a time so remote in terms of sentiment, habits of thought, and patterns of behaviour as to be almost fantastic, and our nostalgia responds at least as powerfully to the nostalgia of the narrator as to our own sense of the lost past. We are in effect being nostalgic about someone else’s nostalgia. Tom Brown's School Days is certainly nostalgic. While it has a powerfully didactic and moralizing element (these elements of the text have not aged particularly well), it is above all else an exercise in the powers of reconstructive memory, of the ability of literature to evoke the places, people, and events of the past in a way that creates the powerful sensation of their continued existence in the present. As the narrator notes at the conclusion of the novel, “I little thought last long vacation, when I began these pages to help while away some spare time at a watering-place, how vividly many an old scene, which had lain hid away for years in some dusty old corner of my brain, would come back again, and stand before me as clear and bright as if it had happened yesterday.”17 The past, lost in 16 Alan Gribben, “Manipulating a Genre: ‘Huckleberry Finn’ as Boy Book,” South Central Review 5.4 (1988): 15, accessed December 26, 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3189046. 17 Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 380.

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darkness, is reconstituted here as a radiant present, in one of literature’s characteristic acts of transformation. Something about these reconstituted memories has been extraordinarily resonant: the novel, as mentioned, has inspired numerous adaptations, from a Classic’s Illustrated comic to a 1971 BBC serial and a 2005 film, to the delightfully satirical Flashman novels of George Macdonald Fraser, which take the eponymous villain of Hughes’ novel as their loathsome protagonist. But perhaps the greatest cultural impact of the book, “generally considered to mark the debut of this genre,” is the model it offered J. K. Rowling for her fantastic public school Hogwarts and the adventures of her school-children characters.18 The impact of Rowling’s work on a generation of readers needs little elaboration––she has been credited with everything from saving reading to an anticipated improvement in college-level reading and writing abilities.19 As Elizabeth A. Galaway has pointed out, however bizarrely controversial such a claim may be among die-hard Potter fans, the links between Rowling’s work and the historical school-boy genre are indisputable.20 Hughes, and other works which followed in the wake of his novel, provided a literary model of the school as a valid site for narrative, and as an arena for personal and moral development through the struggle between good and evil, both internally and externally. Like Tom Brown's School Days, Rowling’s novels are nostalgic, although not in the same open commemorative fashion. In an insightful discussion of Rowling’s work and its place in contemporary culture, Andrew Blake looks at the Harry Potter series in relation to the useful, if not euphonious, concept of “retrolution,” a process by which “either the old is remodelled so that it can contain the new, or the new is represented as traditional.”21 What is more important for my purposes, the precise nature of the high-octane mix of past and present blended by Rowling is 18

Paul M. Puccio, “At the Heart of ‘Tom Brown's Schooldays’: Thomas Arnold and Christian Friendship,” Modern Language Studies 25.4 (1995): 58, accessed December 26, 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3195488. 19 Annette Van, “Novel Futures,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 43.1 (2010): 160, accessed 26 December, 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27764383.; Edward Duffy, “Sentences in Harry Potter, Students in Future Writing Classes,” Rhetoric Review 21. 2 (2002): 170. accessed December 26, 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3092999. 20 Galway, Elizabeth A. Galway, “Reminders of Rugby in the Halls of Hogwarts: The Insidious Influence of the School Story Genre on the Works of J. K. Rowling,” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 37.1 (2012): 66-85, accessed December 26, 2016, doi: 10.1353/chq.2012.0011. 21 Andrew Blake, The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter (London: Verso, 2002), 8.

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the fact that this is an example of what seems to be a rule––not the rule, it should be noted, but a rule––of literature: not only does Hogwarts find its analogue in the fictionalized and nostalgically rendered Rugby of Tom Brown’s School Days, but part, and I do not want to speculate how large a part, of the attraction of her books derives from their nostalgic evocation of a world that has not just vanished into memory, but is in fact composed of cultural memory, a palimpsest of textual representations of an always unobtainable locus of lost authenticity. The Harry Potter books offer us a memory of a memory, a way to relive an already mediated past through culturally familiar forms of expression. Nostalgia in literature is not, or is not just, a longing for a vanished past, or an evocation in writing of that past. It is also a longing for vanished representations of a vanished past. * It seems, then, that nostalgia is, or can be, both a subject of literature, and a way in which literary texts relate to each other (or are brought into relation by writers and readers) across time. It is also possible that it is something more, something closer to the ‘essential’ nature of the literary– –if the rhetorical conceit is permissible. Perhaps the single greatest, or to avoid another loaded rhetorical term, the most historically and critically notable example of the way nostalgia is not just a feature of the literary, a subject it can choose to explore or to ignore, or indeed a set of relations between literary texts and their forebears, but is part of its constituent processes, is Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. This is, of course, an observation that will surprise no one. Catharine H. Savage’s description of Proust as a writer whose works are “directly inspired by nostalgia” is typical, while Vladimir Nabokov’s characterization of the seven novels of the work as a “treasure hunt where the treasure is time and the hiding place is the past” puts an interesting inflection on the relationship between time and the past: time is something we lose, moment by moment, and where else could we look for the time we have lost but in the past?22 But both help us identify Proust’s work as one of colossal, allencompassing nostalgia, an attempt, through writing, to have the past again. To follow Nabokov once more, Proust sets out not to simply describe the past but to evoke it in the present.23 The “key,” Nabokov goes 22 Catharine H. Savage, “Nostalgia in Alain-Fournier and Proust,” The French Review 38.2 (1964): 167, accessed December 26, 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/385210.; Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (London: Picador, 1983), 207-208. 23 Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, 208.

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on, “to the problem of re-establishing the past turns out to be the key of art” (208). By re-creating the past, one creates art. The idea being advanced here, then, is that there is an intimate link between nostalgia, the attempt to satisfy it through writing, and the nature of literary art. The Proustian narrator of La recherché claims in the final volume of the work, Le Temps retrouvé, or Finding Time Again, that the past is more than a record of events: “An hour is not just an hour, it is a vessel full of perfumes, sounds, plans and atmospheres.”24 The work of the writer is to find a way to link the full sensory and affective charge of the vanished past with the present moment. But this relationship between the present and the past is more than a literary technique: it is for Proust “what we call reality [. . .] a certain relationship between these sensations and memories which surround us simultaneously.”25 That which is most real, and that which it is the duty of literature to record, is not the always-ephemeral present, but the always-ephemeral present as it interacts with memories of other always ephemeral presents, the past and the now intertwined in an inseparable nostalgic embrace. Proust points out, that there is “a unique relationship which the writer has to rediscover” between the sensation of now and the sensation of then, in order “to protect them from the contingencies of time,” to complete, in other words, the nostalgic operation of restoring a past that was seemingly, and achingly, absent, and at the same time to secure the present in all its fullness.26 In Proust’s work this act of connection between present and past is carried out through a powerful physical sensation which acts as a catalyst for the narrative process of memorial evocation––the famous madeleine (and the less frequently cited lime-flower tea with which it is served). This device––what Nabokov describes as the “combination of a present sensation [. . .] with recollection, a remembrance, of the sensuous past”–– has been used recently in another narrative that is nostalgic both in terms of its structure, theme, content, and in its relationship to the literary tradition.27 This is Karl Ove Knausgård’s six-volume work of autobiography, Min Kamp, or My Struggle, published between 2009 and 2011 and received internationally with huge acclaim as, in the words of critic James Wood, “an extraordinary example of literary courage.”28 It is 24 Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Petterson (London: Penguin, 2003), 197. 25 Ibid., 197. 26 Ibid., 198. 27 Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, 249. 28 James Wood and Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Writing My Struggle: An Exchange,” The Paris Review, accessed December 26, 2016.

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hardly a startling observation that this work is in many ways Proustian. In his New York Times review of the second volume of My Struggle, for example, Leland de la Durantaye identifies la recherche as My Struggle’s “precedent,” pointing out that “Knausgaard’s work resembles Proust’s in more ways than one.”29 It is certainly true that Knausgård’s work is a protracted exercise in nostalgia that is self-consciously built on the Proustian model of memory. In the first volume, the Knausgårdian narrator sees a face in the “knots and grain” of his office floor which reminds him of on occasion when he saw a similar face on TV in his childhood.30 The connection of the two events leads to a memory––or, more accurately, a nostalgic re-experiencing of the past: “In the second it took to fill the coffee pot, I saw our living room before me, the teak television cabinet, the shimmer of isolated snowflakes against the darkening hillside outside the windows [. . .]. With the images came the atmosphere of that time [. . .]. And with the atmosphere an almost uncontrollable longing.”31 Here again, then, is an instance of contemporary literary production that is nostalgic both in terms of theme––a work that takes the forgotten past and our longing for it as its subject matter––and structure insofar as it looks to the past for models of how literature can succeed in re-animating that which is at once so far away, and so near. This unbearable longing for the past, this nostalgia, then, is a key component, both emotionally and structurally, and on both small and large scales, of the literary imagination, of our urge for stories that give us access, or the illusion of access, to both those parts of ourselves and those social formations which we can no longer experience. It is also a way of accessing things beyond our experience––the distant past, the world as it existed before our time––that were not, but can through reading become part of ourselves. Nostalgia, this implies, may not just be as Fred Davies has argued “a distinctive aesthetic modality in its own right,” but also one of the primary constitutive elements of literature.32

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6345/writing-emmy-struggle-em-anexchange-james-wood-karl-ove-knausgaard. 29 Leland de la Durantaye, “Book 2 of ‘My Struggle,’ by Karl Ove Knausgaard,” Sunday Book Review, The New York Times, June 21, 2013, accessed December 26, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/books/review/book-2-of-my-struggleby-karl-ove-knausgaard.html?ref=books. 30 Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 1, trans. Don Bartlett (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2013), 190. 31 Ibid., 190-191. 32 Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free Press, 1979), 73.

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Works Cited Alexopoulou, Marigo. “Nostos and the impossibility of 'a return to the same': from Homer to Seferis.” New Voices in Classical Reception Studies 1 (2006). Accessed December 26, 2016. www2.open.ac.uk/ClassicalStudies/GreekPlays Atwood, Margaret. Maddaddam. London: Virago, 2014. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra.” In A Postmodern Reader, edited by Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon, 342-375. New York: State University of New York Press, 1993. Blake, Andrew. The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter. London: Verso, 2002. Brooks-Davies, Douglas. Introduction to The Go-Between, by L. P. Hartely. London: Penguin, 1997. xi-xxix. Davis, Fred. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press, 1979. de la Durantaye, Leland. “Book 2 of ‘My Struggle,’ by Karl Ove Knausgaard.” Sunday Book Review. The New York Times. June 21, 2013. Accessed December 26, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/books/review/book-2-of-mystruggle-by-karl-ove-knausgaard.html. ref.books. Duffy, Edward. “Sentences in Harry Potter, Students in Future Writing Classes.” Rhetoric Review 21.2 (2002): 170-87. Accessed December 26, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3092999. English, James F. “Now, Not Now: Counting Time in Contemporary Fiction Studies,” Modern Language Quarterly 77.3 (2016): 395-418. Accessed December 26, 2016. http://mlq.dukejournals.org/content/77/3/395.full.pdf+html. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Peter Simon, 929-952. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. Galway, Elizabeth A. “Reminders of Rugby in the Halls of Hogwarts: The Insidious Influence of the School Story Genre on the Works of J. K. Rowling.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 37.1 (2012): 66-85. Accessed December 26, 2016. doi: 10.1353/chq.2012.0011. Gribben, Alan. “Manipulating a Genre: ‘Huckleberry Finn’ as Boy Book.” South Central Review 5.4 (1988): 15-21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3189046. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. New York: International Publisher’s Co., 1971.

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Hartley, L. P. The Go-Between. London: Penguin, 2000. Homer. Iliad. trans. Caronline Alexander. New York: HarperCollins, 2015. Print. Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Kazantzakis, Mikos. The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. Translated by Kimon Friar. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958. Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle: Book 1. Translated by Don Bartlett. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2013. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Literature. Edited by Fredson Bowers. London: Picador, 1983. “nostalgia.” MOT Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Accessed December 26, 2016. https://mot.kielikone.fi/mot/OUYO/netmot.exe?motportal=80. Ong Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 2002. Piper, Andrew, and Eva Portelance. “How Cultural Capital Works: Prizewinning Novels, Bestsellers, and the Timeof Reading,” Post45. May 10, 2016. Accessed December 26, 2016. http://post45.research.yale.edu/2016/05/how-cultural-capital-worksprizewinning-novels-bestsellers-and-the-time-of-reading/. Proust, Marcel. Finding Time Again. Translated by Ian Petterson. London: Penguin, 2003. Puccio, Paul M. “At the Heart of ‘Tom Brown's Schooldays’: Thomas Arnold and Christian Friendship.” ModernLanguage Studies 25.4 (1995): 57-74. Accessed December 26, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3195488. Van, Annette. “Novel Futures.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 43.1 (2010): 157-62. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27764383. Wood, James and Karl Ove Knausgaard. “Writing My Struggle: An Exchange.” The Paris Review. Accessed December 26, 2016. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6345/writing-emmystruggle-em-an-exchange-james-wood-karl-ove-knausgaard.

MEMORY, IDENTITY AND DISPLACEMENT IN HESHEL’S KINGDOM BY DAN JACOBSON IRENA RAGAIŠIENƠ

Dan Jacobson’s (1921-2014) Heshel’s Kingdom (1998), referred by critics as “a family memoir,”1 “travel-autobiography,”2 “a case study,”3 to mention a few, recounts the writer’s family history against the backdrop of settings which map their personal and cultural identity. Drawing on memory studies, this paper examines the constellation of themes entwining memory, identity and displacement as revealed in the narrator-subject’s engagement with the family’s past and his own identity. The notion of displacement will be considered with respect to twofold displacement, defined by Angelika Bammer as “the separation of people from their native culture either through physical dislocation […] or the colonizing imposition of a foreign culture.”4 The analysis also refers to Henri Lefebvre theory of the production of space to bring together the notions of place, memory and history as factors shaping personal and collective identity. Dan Jacobson, a holder of several prestigious writing awards such as “W. Somerset Maugham Award for a first collection of essays Time of Arrival; the H. H. Wingate Award for his novel, The Confessions of Josef Baisz; and the J. R. Ackerley Prize for autobiography, for Time and Time Again,” was “born and educated in Johannesburg, South Africa. Jacobson was a teacher and journalist before the publication of the first novel, The Trap, in 1955.”5 In 1976, “he accepted a position in the English department at University College, London. In 1995, he became professor emeritus.”6 Jacobson wrote eleven novels, “two collections of short stories, a 1 Lewis Ward, Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Narratives: Towards a Theory of Transgenerational Empathy, 142. 2 Chaim Potok, J.Weekly.com., n.p. 3 Geoffrey V. Davis, “The Territory of My Imagination”, 368. 4 Angelika Bammer, “Introduction”, xi. 5 Potok, J.Weekly.com., n.p. 6 Ibid., n.p.

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collection of essays, two volumes of criticism and [four] books of travelautobiography,” Heshel’s Kingdom being one of them.7 Central in the book, according to Geoffrey Davis, is the description of “the migration of Lithuanian Jews to South Africa and the fate during the Holocaust of those who remained behind” as well as Jacobson’s visit to Lithuania, the birthplace of his maternal ancestry.8 Travel as a way to gain insight into family history invites placing Jacobson’s book in line with narratives of return, in this case to postcommunist Eastern Europe, where the removal of the Iron Curtain in the 1990s lifted the barriers to exchange of ideas and movement of people.9 During this period, homecoming emerged as a frequent thematic configuration in fictional10 and autobiographic narratives11 by writers of East-Central European origin.12 As argued by Milda Danytơ, many of such “texts about ‘going back’ emphasize pain and loss more than pleasure or recovery. Returning may create a new form of exile, as the idealized homeland vanishes upon contact with present realities.”13 Heshel’s Kingdom depicts a similar sense of a pull towards the land of the family’s past and a mixture of shock, disbelief and disillusionment in the ancestral homeland, which Jacobson visits after the death of his mother, when he becomes overwhelmed by a compelling desire to take a glimpse of her “small, lost, mythical home town, which she had left eighty years before, within weeks of her father burial in this very spot.”14 He finds it equally important to understand his relationship with his maternal grandfather, the Rabbi of a small town in northern Lithuania, Varniai, and with his faith. To make it possible, the narrating subject considers it necessary to experience the ancestral birthplace as the “lived space” in Henri Lefebvre’s sense15, that is, to experience it directly and to engage in free, associative signification of the place: I had wanted to be here physically, to become a part bodily of the locale in which my grandparents spent most of their adult lives; where my mother 7

Ibid., n.p. Geoffrey V. Davis, “‘A Deeper Silence”: Dan Jacobson’s Lithuania”, 54-55. 9 Polouektova, Ksenia, “‘Is There a Place Like Home?’ Jewish Narratives of Exile and Homecoming in Late Twentieth-Century East-Central Europe,’” 433. 10 Milda Danytơ, “Narratives of ‘Going Back’: A Comparative Analysis of Recent Literary Texts by Canadians of East European Origin”, 12-16. 11 Polouektova, “‘Is There a Place Like Home?’” 433. 12 Ibid., 433. 13 Danytơ, “Narratives of ‘Going Back’”, 12. 14 Dan Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom, 192. 15 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 362. 8

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Memory, Identity and Displacement in Heshel’s Kingdom had passed her entire childhood. I had wanted to see, touch, smell, hear what had been to them as intimate, and as much taken for granted, as Kimberley16 had once been to me.17

According to Lefebvre, the “lived space” is “the passively experienced space, which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate” in order to create meaning of the space as experienced in the physical encounter with the place.18 This “lived space” is a constituent of Lefebvre’s triad of conceptualization of space, the other two being “the perceived space” and “the conceived space”. The former is associated with “spatial practices”, uses of places, and motives behind the uses, which as such contribute to “master[ing] and appropriate[ing]”19 physical territories as institutionally organized physical spaces. The latter, “the conceived space,” or “representations of space” is the order that is placed on spaces in terms of planning and ideology manifested as maps, signs and codes, conceptualizing symbolic information on space, “conveyed by images and signs,”20 that both provide meaning to spaces and regulate spatial practices.21 In Heshel’s Kingdom, the yearning to visit the locales that constitute the map of the ill fate of Lithuanian Jews and the history of the writer’s family is what directs the narrated subject’s spatial practices. The geography of the pilgrimage underscores the reasons of the narrator’s choices and exposes complexities not only in terms of the relationship between the representational space as striving of the imagination to create a space in its own images, and the representations of space as the order imposed on space but also in terms of sources of the order. As Geoffrey Davies has noted: On two occasions—his visits to Fort IX and to the old Jewish cemetery at Kelme—Jacobson is made aware of the difficulty the Lithuanians themselves experience in facing up to the fact that the Nazis who murdered the Jews in the country were assisted by Lithuanian collaborators. At Fort IX, for example, we learn that although the memorial does now identify the dead as Jews, it fails to record the fact that the assistants of the Nazis were Lithuanians […] and this is because the authorities refused to allow the addition; likewise at Kelme, where the local authorities were equally 16

Kimberley is a place in South Africa where Jacobson lived until his early adulthood. 17 Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom, 184-85. 18 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 38. 19 Ibid., 38. 20 Ibid., 233. 21 Ibid., 37-39.

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reluctant to have anything like the actual numbers of those killed on the 22 stone placed at the memorial site—presumably for the same reason […].

In the production of space, the marking of the lived space, the representational space, turns on questioning of signs/codes in the conceived space, or the representations of space, as regards the involvement of countries in the Holocaust and the representation of the historical justice and memory. The discourses that inform the meaning of the conceived space require reading of the codes that define and determine the use and perception of the space, as Angelika Bammer would have it, against “a shift […] from deconstructive critiques of the metaphysics of presence to critical analysis of the politics of identity.”23 The shift manifests itself as “the surge […] of interest in identity and difference.”24 “These analyses,” Bammer states, are framed, on the one hand, by studies of identity formation on the level of state and national culture and, on the other hand, by debates over “identity politics” on the level of individuals and groups constructed around such categories as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and their various intersections.25

Bammer points out that “the oppositional politics” involved in such an approach imply “negative systems critique and affirmative practical politics,” an approach that is “not unrelated to the deconstructive dilemma of needing to step outside and remain inside the same systems.”26 Applied to critical reading of texts, “this might mean that we should read history and its texts similarly: from the inside out to the outside in,” which is, against other texts and “documents from the same period.”27 The following sources exemplify the many-voiced scholarship, seeking justice and reconciliation, against which the relation between the lived space and the conceived space in Jacobson’s description of his interpretation of space may be read: Ezra Mendelsohn’s The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars, Dov Levin’s The Litvaks: A Short History of the Jews in Lithuania, Manfred Gerstenfeld’s The Abuse of Holocaust Memory: Distortions and Responses, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meir, and Israel Bartal’s Anti-Jewish Violence: 22

Davis, “‘A Deeper Silence’: Dan Jacobson’s Lithuania”’, 60. Bammer, “Introduction”, ix. 24 Ibid., ix. 25 Ibid., ix. 26 Ibid., ix. 27 Ibid., ix. 23

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Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History, Robert van Voren’s, Undigested Past: The Holocaust in Lithuania, Alfonsas Eidintas’s Jews, Lithuanians and the Holocaust, Christoph Dieckmann and Saulius Sužiedơlis’s The Persecution and Mass Murder of Lithuanian Jews during Summer and Fall of 1941, Robertas Pukenis’s Historical, Social and Political Aspects of the State of Israel in the Context of the IsraeliPalestinian Conflict, Arnjnas Bubnys’s The Holocaust in Lithuania between 1941 and 1944, to mention but a few. Jacobson’s narrative addresses the multidimensionality of scholarship on the tragic fate of Lithuanian Jews, as well as exposing the issues of subjectivity and interpretation in the presentation of history.28 The following episode serves as a case in point: This led him to ask when the Jews had arrived in Lithuania (some time in the fourteenth century, not long after the Lithuanian tribes had been united by their first King, Gediminas); and from where they had come (either from Germany or south Russia, or both, depending on which historian one chose to believe); and why they had come (at the invitation of successive kings and grand dukes, who had wanted to use their skills as merchants and scribes in order to build a state out of a semiwilderness). And what had Lithuania become afterwards? A part of Russia? A ‘dual monarchy’ with Poland? A part of Prussia? Yes, all of these; while remaining stubbornly itself throughout, in language and in the minds of its native people. And the Jews too had stuck it out, intermittent pogroms and the mass migrations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries notwithstanding. When the Second World War began with Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, almost a quarter of the population of Vilnius was Jewish. Within weeks that proportion was greatly increased by the thousands of refugees who had fled eastwards from Poland after the German blitzkrieg on that country. The ‘lucky’ ones among them were deported to Siberia during the subsequent, brief Russian occupation of the city, a few managed to flee with the hastily retreating Russian army; the rest were trapped when the Germans arrived. Of these, all but a handful were dead by the end of the war.29

In the quotation above, the narrator-subject presents a one-paragraph summary of his conversation with his son in a cafe in the old town of Vilnius, where they discuss their family history in the context of the history of the Jews in Lithuania and the history of the country. Jacobson’s 28

Cf., e.g. Adam Schaff, History and Truth; Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, The Oral History Reader; Jennifer Jensen Wallach, Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow. 29 Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom, 114-15.

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conceptualization of the problematic relationship between history and truth, implied in his suggestion that an individual stance on history “depend[s] on which historian one chose to believe,” recalls a discussion among scholars, “working on memory and transmission within and beyond the study of the Holocaust,” which Marianne Hirsch summarizes as centred on “the ethics and the aesthetics of remembrance in the aftermath of the catastrophe.”30 Hirsch refers to Raul Hilberg, who after completing his massive, 1,300-page book The Destruction of the European Jews—and, indeed, after dismissing oral history and testimony for their factual inaccuracies—deferred to storytelling and to poetry as skills historians need to learn if they are to be able to tell the difficult history of the destruction of the Jews of Europe.31

Hirsch envisions genres engaging with memory as sources that can “broaden and enlarge the traditional historical archive with a ‘repertoire’ of embodied knowledge32 that had previously been neglected by many traditional historians.”33 In light of the above, Jacobson’s memoir as narrativization of multiple embodiments, including the social, economic, corporeal and politic aspects of embodied life34 presents a case of engagement with discourses that affect embodiment, by extension identity as recognition of sameness and difference with regard to aspects such as class, ethnicity, culture and state, among others, that determine identification along social and personal planes.35 Narrativization of memory and identity, then, as “the imposition of a narrative or narrative-like elements on real experiences or events”36 functions as a means of ordering memory and experience and is used as “intrinsic to the process of human meaningmaking.”37 This resonates with Richard Kearney’s contention that the emplotment of a personal narrative into narratives of culture or group 30

Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust, 2. 31 Ibid., 2. 32 See also Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson who argue that “autobiographical acts are inescapably material and embodied” (Smith and Watson, “Introduction,” 11). 33 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 2. 34 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives: Reading Autobiography, 49-50. 35 Steph Lawler, Identity: Sociological Perspectives, 2-3. 36 “Narrativization in English”, Literary Theory, Oxford Dictionaries, n.p. 37 Mark Freeman, “Narrative as a Mode of Understanding: Method, Theory, Praxis”, 32.

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gives structure and meaning to life as well as “provides us with one of our most viable forms of identity—individual and communal.”38 In Heshel’s Kingdom, the discourse of identity contains a reflection on the relationship between the individual and the collective memory. Aleida Assmann defines this relationship as embedded in socially constructed subjective individual experiences, since memory is formed as a result of “interaction with other individuals and interaction with external signs and symbols.”39 When such mediated memory is textualized, “the individual’s memories become part of an intersubjective symbolic system and are […] no longer a purely exclusive and unalienable property.”40 Because of such intersubjective and dialogic nature of memory, according to Assmann, “human beings do not only live in the first person singular, but also in various formats of the first person plural.”41 Thus viewed, “each ‘we’ is constructed through specific discourses,” regulating “inclusion and exclusion and suggests that to acknowledge the concept of collective memory is to acknowledge the concept of some collective identity.”42 In the context of massive trauma, the concept of collective identity is frequently framed as sharing in, what Lisa Appignanesi calls “transgenerational haunting.”43 It is identified as knowledge that impinges accidentally, as it were, on the consciousness and memory, the reconstruction of which is “imbricated in broader, more ‘significant’ historical experience and conflict.”44 Such latent presence links with postmemory, which, according to Marianne Hirsch, refers to a number of controversial assumptions: that descendants of victim survivors as well as of perpetrators and of bystanders who witnessed massive traumatic events connect so deeply to the previous generation’s remembrances of the past that they identify that connection as a form of memory, and that, in certain extreme circumstances, memory can be transferred to those who were not actually there to live an event.”45

38

Richard Kearney, On Stories, 4. Aleida Assmann, “Transformations between History and Memory”, 50. 40 Ibid., 50. 41 Assmann, “Memory, Individual and Collective”, n.p. 42 Ibid., n.p. 43 Quoted in Nicola King, “Hindsight and Sideshadowing in Recent British and Irish Autobiography”, 31. 44 Ibid., 38. 45 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 2-3. 39

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It is also acknowledged that the “inherited memory” is different from memory of primary witnessing.46 Dan Jacobson’s first degree relatives escaped the Holocaust since, after the death of his maternal grandfather, the Rabbi of a small town in northern Lithuania, Varniai, his grandmother with her nine children left homeland and sank new genealogical roots in Kimberley, South Africa, where the poverty-stricken family immigrated in 1919. To show transgenerational interdependence, the writer ironically states: “In fact, if he had not died prematurely, I would never have been born.”47 Jacobson’s narrator-subject recognizes the aspect of the collective as part of the personal identity when he states that Like many others I suffer from a recurring nightmare, and have done so ever since my childhood. Though it is peopled by different characters and is enacted in a different setting each time, the dream has always been the same, whenever and wherever I have dreamt it.48

The awareness that the characters in the dream are the Holocaust witnesses emerges from the description of the petrifying effect experienced by the dreamer: “I have become an object, a thing as rigid as iron bar.”49 The description of the inner state, hinged on the simile “as rigid as iron bar,” may also imply identification with the psychic numbing of the Holocaust victims and then the realization of differences between his own experience and that of the primary witnesses: “Except that an iron bar is incapable of feeling terror and horror at its own condition.”50 Acknowledging the quasireality of the dream, he admits: “Nightmares like these perhaps bring me as close as I can ever come to the fate of blood relations I have never seen and known about, other than the manner of their death.”51 Such moments counterbalance the scepticism regarding the narrator-subject’s perception of his cultural identity and signal his embracing of collective identity as dominant identity.52 The book opens with a reminiscence of yearning to “look directly into the depths” of a gaping chasm in South African diamond mines, extending “hundreds of feet across, thousands of feet in depth.”53 The representation

46

Ibid., 3. Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom, 3. 48 Ibid., 105. 49 Ibid., 105. 50 Ibid., 105. 51 Ibid., 105. 52 Stuart Hall, “lntroduction: ldentity in Question”, 598. 53 Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom, ix. 47

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of gazing into the yawning chasms is imbued with an awe authenticating the experience of the uncanny: The contrast between the banality of the earth underfoot and the emptiness that yawned fatally from it, a single place ahead, was irresistible. There was no compromise between the two. Only an edge. On this side, life. On that, its unimaginable opposite.54

The language in the description of the lived space, in Lefebvrean sense, reveals hindsight of an adult,55 whereas the description of the child’s preoccupation with looking into a chasm, an archetypal symbol of the unconscious and the repository of memory, evokes Alina Molisak’s statement that “children and grandchildren of survivors often write from the perspective of having grown up with their families’ history functioning as their childhood stories.”56 The psychic archaeology encoded in the urge to reach out into the depth of the void, in the Freudian sense, summarized by Nicola King as “the analogy between the recovery of the buried past and the excavation of an archaeological site”57 recurs in the description of the setting dominated by mines in “south Devon,” where Jacobson’s family moved after they had left South Africa.58 The narrator recalls moments of contemplation in “woodland riddled with disused copperworkings” where he would “make solitary visits to various disused mine shafts”59: I could never visit one of these pits without looking for something to throw into it. Once I tossed in a book I had been carrying in my jacket pocket. Call it an act of literary criticism. Most of the objects–stones, lumps of earth, bits of branch– simply went straight down; others I would throw up in the air, for the pleasure of seeing how they appeared to hang momentarily over the middle of the shaft before falling. Then I waited for the sound each made when it hit the bottom. The reverberations from below were sometimes no louder than a discreet cough; sometimes almost as loud as a train shunting. Occasionally I also heard sounds like chimes or cries.60 54

Ibid., ix. See also Nicola King, “Hindsight and Sideshadowing in Recent British and Irish Autobiography”, 27-40. 56 Alina Molisak, “Figures of Memory: Polish Holocaust Literature of the ‘Second Generation’”, 190. 57 Nicola King, “Introduction”, 11. 58 Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom, x. 59 Ibid., x. 60 Ibid., x-xi. 55

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Alongside with the attempts to excavate the past in order to discover the ‘truth’ behind the haunting presence, the re-membering is undercut by an instance of Nachträglichkeit, afterwardness, which is re-interpretation of remembered events in response to “fresh circumstances in the life of the subject,” as King puts it.61 The afterwardness is implied in the naming of the throwing of a book “an act of literary criticism.” In this way, the narrator shows his informed position on the relationship between the event and narrative, and by doing so disengages from direct affective relationship with the events and actants, whose tragic fate is metonymized as “chimes or cries.” Linked to the symbolism of excavation, is the discovery of “a volume of Talmudic ‘Responsa,’” written by Jacobson’s great-grandfather, “Rabbi Zvi Yakov Oppenheim of Kelmơ, who had died before the book appeared in 1920.”62 Once that link is discovered in a disorderly cave-like room of the narrator’s uncle, it becomes a stimulus to visit the land of family roots to reconsider the ambivalence through which he had regarded the hybridity of his identity: Whenever I thought about the unimaginable regions where my dead grandfather lay, the emotions I chiefly felt were fear, bewilderment and something resembling pity. Disbelief too: at finding myself linked so closely to a world so strange to me which had yet produced the parents I knew, loved, admired, depended on–and whom I wished I could change from what they were.63

Among the reasons that complicated the subject’s identity, there was his parents’ adherence to the native language and religion. These aspects of identity might not have affected the family’s status as “British subjects (in those late imperial days)”64 in South Africa as much as they had complicated the narrator’s sense of personal and cultural identity. These aspects of the self are affected by the mental image of the countries that his family’s genealogical roots cross. He pieces them together from the palimpsest of his parents’ narratives about Latvia, the home country of his father, and Lithuania, the country of origin of his mother. These countries are imagined as “backward, poverty-stricken, prison like?” places “where nobody had the vote, nobody went to the movies, nobody had a telephone; where nobody played rugby, cricket or tennis. Above all, perhaps, it was a country where English—the language of the dominant group […] and our 61

King, “Introduction”, 17. Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom, 100. 63 Ibid., 73. 64 Ibid., 74. 62

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passport to a sophisticated, worldwide culture—was not spoken.”65 Any missing, common reference points provoke hostility towards the land, which he associates with values that made the family’s assimilation and functioning within diaspora setting difficult. During the trip to homeland, when the plane is landing, the narrator tries to discern traces of the nation within the contours of the landscape: My first impression of Lithuania was of its emptiness. The further east the plane flew, the less demarcated the landscape became, the fewer were the roads crossing it, the more readily were vehicles to be seen. Ploughed fields turned into pasture lands, pastures into woods, woods into water, water into tussocky heaths and marshes. Each change was marked by a simple, limited change of colour. No one appeared to be moving in the villages randomly dotted about.66

The physical contours of the landscape are informed by mental corollaries stemming from the fact that “in Lithuania, more than 95 percent of the 220,000 Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.”67 The historical facts lead the narrator to see the country as “a region where so many memories, an entire nation of memories, had been effaced.”68 The narrator’s stance epitomizes differences between memory and history, defined by Pierre Nora as follows: “Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.”69 History obtains its foundation in abstraction, universality and objectivity in explication of causal relations. Memory, on the other hand, is “by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural, and yet individual,” founded on concrete experience, materiality and sensory perceptions.70 When Jacobson’s narrator visits Holocaust sites such as Paneriai, the deathbed of Jews from the Vilnius ghetto, Fort IX,71 or Jewish cemeteries in Varniai and Kelmơ, he tries to establish a connection between memory and history defined above. In the absence of relatives, he is unable to test the objectivity of the historical information that he had acquired from 65

Ibid., 74. Ibid., 109. 67 Manfred Gerstenfeld, The Abuse of Holocaust Memory: Distortions and Responses, 67. 68 Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom, 99. 69 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire”, 8. 70 Ibid., 9. 71 Valstybinis Vilniaus Gaono žydǐ muziejus/The Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, n.p. 66

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sources available to him against the missing relatives’ memories of the history of Lithuanian Jews. Thus, the concrete experience within physical places becomes a form of Nachträglichkeit, weaving together knowledge of history and memory that mediates between individual and collective pasts and thus exposes “the shifting relationship between past and present selves,” to quote Nicola King’s phrase.72 What is more, as Irit Dekel states, visiting Holocaust sites, visitors go beyond the spatially and temporally determined reality of the present and “the boundaries of discourse about the past.” Such transcendence produces “a space for self-realization and transformation, in which they explore their relations to the past and to present memory politics.”73 What instigates such processes is “the memorial’s lack of stated meaning, alongside the impossibility of representing the Holocaust.”74 Such a view dovetails with Henri Lefebvre’s concept of place as social space synthesizing its material, cognitive and ideological aspects and reflecting social relations discernible in the produced spaces. Thus defined, social space emerges as an outcome of social activities involved in its production through its use and signification, and as evidence of socially dominant discourses designating place to regulate social practices and reproduction of social relations.75 While describing places as material referents of memory, Jacobson reflects on the symbolic contents of places by considering how spatial practices, uses of places, interact with discourses on places, representations of space, which, as per Lefebvre’s triangle discussed above, refer to its intended uses. Jacobson observes that Jewish memorials do not contain any traces of antisemitism and considers this as an outcome of state politics on history.76 The point is substantiated by reference to a legal document, stating that “The Republic of Lithuania will not tolerate any display of antisemitism.”77 Yet, he expresses his awareness that representations of space were affected by the soviet occupation of Lithuania, when synagogues were used as storerooms and only one of the nine-six synagogues remained in Vilnius. He records these facts during his visit to Lithuania at the dawn of the country’s independence.78 However, sadness overcomes upon noticing abandoned and poorly maintained graveyards 72

King, “Introduction,” 3. Irit Dekel, “Ways of Looking: Observation and Transformation at the Holocaust Memorial, Berlin”, 71. 74 Ibid., 71. 75 Ibid., 76; Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 37-39. 76 Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom, 177-178. 77 Ibid., 178. 78 Ibid., 141-142. 73

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and finding few traces of the Jewish past in Vilnius, where “almost a quarter of the population […] was Jewish” and which used to be the “Jerusalem of the north.”79 Given these points, it may be stated that although the book is not devoid of tensions that can be gleaned from the representation of memory, identity and displacement/relation to the ancestral homeland in terms presented by Nicola King, Henri Lefebvre, Angelika Bammer and others, the ending suggests that reliving personal memories in places imbued with collective memories allows the narrator to integrate some aspects of the remembered past into the self. That he envisions transmission of memories, hence mediated identities, as an inevitable natural cycle of generations is suggested in the description of the graveyard as the Web of Life. As the narrator walks through the cemetery and looks at the gravestones that “stand or lie deep in grass,”80 he watches the natural process of change in nature. Overgrown grass tumbles over on the graves of the dead. Nonetheless, on their bent stalks, ripened seeds can be noticed which are ready to fall into the ground to extend the life force. The dead soul of the cemetery is offered life by a cloud of dandelion seed puffs that fill the space with ephemeral forms: “Carved into the nearest tombstones are names exactly like those I had seen in Varniai. I wade through the grass as if through water to reach this one, that one, a third, a forth. The dead lie for hundreds of yards in all directions around me.”81 On the other hand, the mobility of the dandelion seed puffs echoes Angelika Bammer’s description of postmodern sense of identity as being both here and there and neither here nor there at one and the same time. It is in this sense and for this reason that marginality and otherness increasingly figure as the predominant affirmative signifiers of postmodern identity. Indeed, it would appear, almost by definition, that to “be” in the postmodern sense is somehow to be an Other: displaced.82

Paraphrasing Wolfgang Iser, one may argue that the text “is potentially capable” of alternative “realizations” since “each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own way, thereby excluding the various other possibilities.”83 As a concluding thought it may be pointed out that the possibilities for reading Dan Jacobson’s memoir were much guided by 79

Ibid., 188. Ibid., 210. 81 Ibid., 210. 82 Bammer, “Introduction”, xii. 83 Iser, quoted in Green and LeBihan, Critical Theory and Practice, 185. 80

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appreciation of the book as a record of mediated memory connecting to discourses that shape its construction, the textualization of which serves as a locus of dialogue on the role of memory in the re-construction of self and dis-place(ment).

Works Cited Assmann, Aleida. “Transformations between History and Memory.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 75(1): 49-72, 2008. —. “Memory, Individual and Collective.” In The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis. 2009. Viewed 12 July 2016. http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199270439.0 03.0011. Bammer, Angelika. “Introduction.” In Cultural Identities in Question: Displacements, edited by Angelika Bammer. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994. Bubnys, Arnjnas. The Holocaust in Lithuania between 1941 and 1944. Vilnius: The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, 2005. Danytơ, Milda. “Narratives of ‘Going Back’: A Comparative Analysis of Recent Literary Texts by Canadians of East European Origin.” In Literature and Folklore: Comparative Literature in Eastern Europe and the World. Theories and Interpretations. University of Latvia, 2005, 680: 12-16. Davis, Geoffrey V. “The Territory of My Imagination.” In The CrossCultural Legacy: Critical and Creative Writings in Memory of Hena Maes-Jelinek, edited by Gordon Collier, Geoffrey V. Davis and Marc Delrez. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2017. Viewed 08 January 2017. https://books.google.lt/books?id=LoFyDQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcov er&hl=lt&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. —. “‘A Deeper Silence’: Dan Jacobson’s Lithuania.” In Africa Writing Europe: Opposition, Juxtaposition, Entanglement, edited by Maria Olaussen and Christina Angelfors. Series Editors Gordon Collier, Hena Maes-Jelinek and Geoffrey V. Davis. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. Dekel-Chen, Jonathan, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meir, and Israel Bartal (eds.). Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010.

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Dekel, Irit. “Ways of Looking: Observation and Transformation at the Holocaust Memorial, Berlin.” Memory Studies. Viewed 08 January 2017. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1750698008097396. Dieckmann, Christoph and Saulius Sužiedơlis. The Persecution and Mass Murder of Lithuanian Jews during Summer and Fall of 1941. Vilnius: Margi Raštai, 2006. Eidintas, Alfonsas. Jews, Lithuanians and the Holocaust. Vilnius: Versus Aureus, 2012. Freeman, Mark. “Narrative as a Mode of Understanding: Mathod, Theory, Praxis.” In The Handbook of Narrative Analysis, edited by Anna De Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou. 1st ed. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2015. Gerstenfeld, Manfred. The Abuse of Holocaust Memory: Distortions and Responses. Jerusalem: Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs Institute for Global Jewish Affairs, 2009. Green, Keith and Jill LeBihan. Critical Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 1996. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Jacobson, Dan. Heshel’s Kingdom. London: Penguin, 1999. Jensen Wallach, Jennifer. Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2008. “Jerusalem.” Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs Institute for Global Jewish Affairs, 2009. Viewed 02 December 2016. http://jcpa.org/text/holocaustabuse.pdf. King, Nicola. “The Poetics of Memory in Post-Totalitarian Narration.” In The Poetics of Memory in Post-Totalitarian Narration. CFE Conference Papers Series No. 3, edited by Johanna Lindbladh. Lund: The Centre for European Studies (CFE) at University, 2008. Viewed 14 July 2016. http://www.cfe.lu.se/sites/cfe.lu.se/files/confpap3.pdf —. “Introduction,” Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Lawler, Steph. Identity: Sociological Perspectives. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Levin, Dov. The Litvaks: A Short History of the Jews in Lithuania. Translated from the Hebrew by AdamTeller. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2000.

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Mendelsohn, Ezra. The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. “Narrativization in English.” Literary Theory. Oxford Dictionaries. Language Matters. Viewed 02 March 2016. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/narrativization. Perks, Robert and Alistair Thomson. The Oral History Reader. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016. Polouektova, Ksenia. “‘Is There a Place Like Home?’ Jewish Narratives of Exile and Homecoming in Late Twentieth-Century East-Central Europe.” In The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium, 1st edition, edited by John Neubauer and Borbála Zssuzsanna Török. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH&Co.KG, 2009. Potok, Chaim. J.Weekly.com. Friday, January 30, 1998. Viewed 07 January 2017. http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/7467/biographies/. Pukenis, Robertas. Historical, Social and Political Aspects of the State of Israel in the Context of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Due to be released; cited with the permission from the author. Schaff, Adam, History and Truth. Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press. 1976. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. “Introduction.” In Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/ Image/Performance. Eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. —. A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives: Reading Autobiography. 2nd ed. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Valstybinis Vilniaus Gaono žydǐ muziejus/The Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum. Viewed 28 July 2016. http://www.jmuseum.lt/index.aspx?Element=ViewArticle&TopicID=2 48. van Voren, Robert. Undigested Past: The Holocaust in Lithuania. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011. Ward, Lewis Henry. Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Narratives: Towards a Theory of Transgenerational Empathy. Doctoral Dissertation. University of Exeter, 2008.

PERSONAL LANDSCAPE: FORD MADOX FORD, WAR, AND THE MIND ANDREA RUMMEL

The centennial anniversary of World War I is itself a study of history, memory and nostalgia. As we remember World War I, the pages and pages of war writing that have come down to us are relevant in an obvious way– they record, describe, re-imagine the past, they are often primary evidence of individual experiences of collective history. Among these literary testimonials and attempts to turn history into story or tame what Carlyle termed “the Chaos of Being” into linear narrative,1 personal interrogations and reconfigurations of war experience stand among the most significant: Max Saunders among others has stressed the importance of life-writing texts as sources for cultural memory and argued that biography stands as a central form of textual memory production due to its more complex, possibly more authentic forms than historiographic writings.2 This paper will look at one such key example: Ford Madox Ford’s No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction relates personal war experience and not only tries to make sense of the past through an interweaving of fiction and autobiography but, focusing on landscape as a structuring principle, connects memory, nostalgia and narrative in a novel aesthetic strategy.

Ford Madox Ford, war and writing Ford Madox Ford is perhaps best known for his pre-war writings and his most-read novel is certainly The Good Soldier, set in pre-war Germany. Ford had lived in Germany before the war, even tried to obtain German citizenship,3 and it is interesting to observe his changing attitudes as the war breaks out. Having returned to England, Ford enlists for active service as early as summer 1915. He writes two large propaganda books 1

Thomas Carlyle, “On History”, 55; See also Peter Widdowson, Literature, 136. Max Saunders, “Life -Writing, Cultural Memory, and Literary Studies”. 3 See Max Saunders, A Dual Life. Vol I. The World Before the War. 2

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against the Germans before active service–When Blood Is Their Argument and Between St Denis and St Georges, completed by the end of 1915. In both books we find Ford writing of the war as the breakdown of all ethics, of an event that “marks a definite retrogression in civilization”, yet also voicing his strong conviction of the necessity of this war, which he enters and continues to be part of with “the sole purpose (…) of helping to preserve France and Civilisation”.4 Ford then leaves from Cardiff for France on July 13th, 1916. The few textual fragments we have of his writings subsequently seem to suggest that the war virtually silenced him as a writer. Most obviously perhaps, Ford discusses this in a short essay entitled War and the Mind, written on September 15th, 1916, in Ypres. Thinly disguised as an authorial figure called Miles Ignotus, Ford records how I have asked myself continuously why I can write nothing–why I cannot even think anything that to myself seems worth thinking! – about the psychology of that Active Service of which I have seen my share. And why cannot I even evoke pictures of the Somme or the flat lands around Ploegsteert? With the pen, I used to be able to “visualize things”– as it used to be called. (…) But as for putting them into words! No: the mind stops dead, and something in the brain stops and shuts down (…).5

It is really only after the war that Ford begins to write again. We know his superb post-war tetralogy Parade’s End as perhaps “the finest novel about World War I”6 but this comes only significantly later and his first attempts at an autobiographical novel (True Love and a GCM) begin postwar in 1919, just before being demobilised. As Max Saunders has argued, Ford “felt he had a duty to represent the war” from very early on and was very clear that he “wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time”.7 Even during the war, Ford had argued that a “novelist’s job is to record”, that “our job in life (…) is to extract, for the sake of all humanity and of the humaner letters, all the 4

Ford Madox Ford, “Que Pensez-Vous de la France?” In: War Prose, 215. Ford Madox Ford, “A Day of Battle” by Miles Ignotus, part 1: Arms and the Mind. In: War Prose, 36. Cf. also “Literary Portraits – LIII. The Muse of War”, Outlook, 34, 12.9.1914. In War Prose, 209: “I am unable–absolutely and hopelessly unable–to write a poem about the present war. (…) I simply cannot do it. I should like to; but the words do not come. There is a blank sheet–and then…nothing.” 6 Max Saunders, “The Finest Novel About World War I”. 7 Max Saunders, “Life - Writing, Fiction and Modernism in British Narratives of the First World War”, 108. 5

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poetry that is to be got out of the war.”8 True Love and a GCM, however, remains unfinished and his second attempt at an autobiographical work of fiction is No Enemy, beginning as a series of sketches in the New Statesman in the same year (1919, published only in 1929).

No Enemy and the textualization of memory Max Saunders calls No Enemy “the strangest” of Ford’s war books.9 Compared to other autobiographical writings that have shaped British literary memory of WWI, No Enemy deploys complex strategy. The novel is a long conversation between the fictional poet “Gringoire”–easily an alter ego of Ford’s–and the actual writer of his story, nameless or called “the Compiler”. It is perhaps this retreat into fictionality and the indirect rendering of experience that allows Ford to write again: Ford is writing about himself and his pre-narrative war experience in an act of fictionalization as Gringoire, yet he moreover interposes a nameless narrator and thus also a potential instance of unreliability or distortion. The two voices have clearly rival ideas of how to turn experience into story or “truthfully” represent the past: the poet Gringoire makes it very clear that, to him, “the stuff of war-reminiscences concerns itself almost as much with what war has made of a man as with the pictures that he saw”10 while contrary to that, the complier “had come to get war-reminiscences from a practising poet” (NE, 51). Consequently “these colloquies resolved themselves into a continual struggle of wills” (NE, 51). I will return to the issue of personal truth of representation below but Ford’s need to see himself as a character in a novel already introduces the novel’s main theme on its very first page: memory, remembering, turning past into story, is something very debatably and subjectively rather than universally true. No Enemy thus debates the problematics of retrospection and the focus of cultural memory and differs from much other world war two fiction in its emphasis on the function and value of remembering. As the novel opens to tell us that “The writer’s friend Gringoire, originally a poet and Gallophile, went to the war” and proceeds to record “the war-reminiscences of a contemplative and sensitive soul”, the compiler tells us that No Enemy is

8

Ford Madox Ford, “Literary Portraits – LI. The Face of Janus”. Outlook, 34, 29.8.1914. In: War Prose, 209. 9 Saunders, ibid., 109. 10 Ford Madox Ford, No Enemy. A Tale of Reconstruction, 52.

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the story of Gringoire just after…Armageddon. For it struck the writer that you hear of the men that went, and you hear of what they did when they were There. But you never hear how It left them. You hear how things were destroyed, but seldom of the painful process of Reconstruction (NE, 7-8).

It is not images of war that make up this book’s reminiscences, personal memory here becomes a story of reconstitution, “How the war has changed his heart is here recorded. This is therefore a Reconstructionary Tale” (NE, 11). I would like to argue here that No Enemy is a reconstructionary tale in a double sense. Not only does it, in its layered fictionality, allow Ford to write again, to textualize his own recent experience, it also allows him to reflect on strategies of textualization–while the process of writing and textualising also forms part of the process of reconstructing identity and self. In this respect, No Enemy seems particularly suited to the concepts interrogated in this volume and appears like fictional theory of what the Compiler will term “mnemonics” (NE, 14). Where Max Saunders, writing on life-writing and cultural memory generally, has argued that “our memories are always already textualized…as representations or mediations or narrativizations of the event, they have always begun to turn the event into something else”11, No Enemy debates cognitive processes and alternative models of textualization. One of the strong points of the book, I would argue, is its conscious debate of story, memory, nostalgia and self.

Landscape, memory and the symbolization of space No Enemy is divided into two parts. The first part of the book is entitled Four Landscapes, and it is this first part that I will focus on for my argument here: Four Landscapes debates the textualization of memory and uses landscape as an organisational principle for individual reminiscence. As Ford’s fictional alter ego Gringoire recounts his memories, he remembers the war through landscape and structures his account to the Compiler around spatial memories. In doing so, he moves from concrete and experienced (the experience here, is, of course, Ford’s) to iconic or imagined space. Firstly, all of the “landscapes” are memories of moments of quietness in war, moments when concentration on nature and landscape rather than on war action seemed possible:

11

Max Saunders, “Life -Writing, Cultural Memory, and Literary Studies”, 323.

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Personal Landscape: Ford Madox Ford, War, and the Mind The psychological speculation wasn’t very profound…it merely amounted to saying that when you are very busy with a job, you do not much notice what is going on around you. You don’t, of course. And, in the end, that is the basic idea that underlies these records of four landscapes. Gringoire was simply trying to state–or rather illustrate–the fact that during the whole of the period from the 4/8/14 till the date when the German plenipotentiaries appended, in the Salle des Glaces, their signatures to the peace treaty, he only four times achieved a sufficient aloofness of mind to notice the landscape around him (NE, 60/61).

As such, the memory of perception is always connected to a certain state of consciousness: “During the four years that the consciousness of the war lasted, he had noticed only four landscapes and birds only once–to know that he was noticing them–for themselves. Of course, one has memories of aspects of the world–but of a world that was only a background for emotions” (NE, 14). In this first sense, Gringoire’s landscapes are memories of concrete and intense spatial experience, connected perhaps to a certain escapism from the atrocities and constant “minding” of WWI. In this pastoral escapism, however, there is a trace of nostalgia that becomes evident in a superimposition of the imagined on the concrete. Gringoire inscribes what he calls “pictures that he saw” on the actual spaces remembered, and there is one central imago Gringoire connects to the “landscapes that remain real to me” (NE, 26). The imagined vision is what Gringoire calls “the castle in the air; the simulacrum; the vision of the inviolable corner of the earth” (NE, 34), a recurring escapist idea of a “gingerbread cottage” set in the countryside and connected to ideas such as peace, beauty, self-sufficiency, security, the end of strife: In Dunmow station it had been merely an intellectual idea… But on the downside behind the Somme, it came differently. It came like one of these visions… it didn’t connote any locality…It was just country–but perfectly definite, rather an untrimmed and a rather hidden spot without a hard road going to it…and with the feeling that many birds were lurking in bushes and watching me, as birds watch. You see the idea – sanctuary! (NE, 35) I suddenly began to see bits of a landscape that has pursued me ever since – until now here I sit in it. Not quite a landscape; a nook rather; … You understand the idea – a sanctuary” (NE, 34).

In a second sense, then, Gringoire’s landscapes superpose an imagined ideal on the real. This imagined ideal is interestingly connected not only to a remembered pastoral pre-war world but likened repeatedly also to the cottage Ford inhabits with Stella Bowen in Sussex as he writes No Enemy–

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and thus to a post-war real Fordian self. The landscape memories are in this complex sense both real and imagined worlds.12 They are moments of connecting an imagined “simulacrum” to concrete space. This makes them symbolizations or semiotizations of space that link to nostalgia and desire, “that little vision of English country, coming then, was really a prayer” (NE, 37). Closely connected to a visionary moment, No Enemy’s idea of landscape is a both perceived and wished-for one. As such, however, memory is also distinctly connected to forgetting in No Enemy. The escapist desire for the otherworldly past or future sanctuary is connected to being able to forget the present realities of war, something often enough impossible for Gringoire who in war is constantly, even on leave, haunted by responsibility and fear, “they wouldn’t, you see, let me forget the poor dear fellows who were still in the trenches” (NE, 62). If the landscape moments are thus connected to both remembrance (of concrete space/the imagined sanctuary) and to forgetting (of the real atrocities of war), this makes No Enemy a curious war reminiscence–it is an account really of the moments where forgetting war and in this sense reconstruction (even though perhaps only evasion through escapism into the imagined) appears a possibility. Gringoire himself accounts for this escapism into the imagined by what he calls “psychological facts”, a war-time nostalgia for times without constant worry and fear, as he asserts that “people out here whose life is not gay, who are expatriated, far from our homes […] suffer, I assure you, from a very real nostalgia” (NE, 70). He ties this nostalgia to his own subconscious longings, “my subconscious mind was trying to assure itself that “appry la gair finny” there would be a sanctuary” (NE, 35). It is this nostalgia and desire for peaceful surroundings, that makes him conjure up real-and-imagined worlds filled with “rather symbols than concrete objects” (NE, 30). In this, Gringoire’s landscapes are both past versions, present memories and future visions which intimately connect to self and identity.

12 I am here thinking of Edward Soja’s definition of space as generally real-andimagined: Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace. Journeys to Los Angeles and other Realand-Imagined Places. Simon Schama’s differentiation of nature and landscape and his definition of landscape as “imagination projected onto wood and water and rock”, that is, as principally culturally constructed and invested with personal politics, is useful as well, Landscape and Memory, 61. Ford clearly projects a personal cultural and social idea onto the vision of concrete landscape.

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Landscape, nostalgia and the temporalization of space At the same time, Gringoire’s landscapes are what Ellen Lévy has termed temporalizations of space.13 To Gringoire, landscapes represent “moments” and instances when the “heavy mist” of war lifts itself and vision returns: Gringoire had four landscapes, which represent four moments in four years when, for very short intervals, the strain of the war lifted itself from the mind. They were, those intermissions of the spirit, exactly like gazing through rifts in a mist. Do you know what it is to be on a Welsh mountain side when a heavy mist comes on? Nothing remains. You are there by yourself. (…) it was just so with the three or four landscapes that my friend saw during the war (NE, 14).

In this, Gringoire’s landscape moments could remind one of modernist techniques such as Virginia Woolf’s moments of being, they are moments of “really seeing” (NE, 24, 26, 40, 61). As I have argued above, Gringoire experiences a transition from the real into the imaginary or even transcendent in such moments, where “the veil lifted for a second” (NE, 19) and then “the curtain closed again” (NE, 15). Like Woolf in her moments of being, Gringoire connects these momentary visions to a particular emotionality, speaks of a “throwback to days when the Gods were nearer” (NE, 25), and his landscape moments appear inherently connected to the idea of seeing the real. This idea of “the real” is an oppositional visionary world to the reality of war–only as soon as the “curtains close again” around Gringoire he is transported back to the present reality of war: “The Essex flats became again, slowly, visible land, planted with war-food... –once again every fact in the world was just a part, just a side-light of the immense problem. Once again nothing existed for itself” (NE, 20). The landscape moments are in this sense escape from “the immense problem” of WWI–a form of individualised heterotope outside of war, transporting him to a particular form of seeing and being.14 Focussing on landscape and rural environment is an escapist vision into an idyllic past or future that connects to and becomes part of Gringoire’s 13 cf. Ellen Lévy, “time is spatialized, a road into the past; space temporalized, two time zones, or three, imprinted on a single place”, “Maplines: Visions of France in Ford Madox Ford’s No Enemy”, 108. 14 Cf “before August, 1914, I lived more through my eyes than through any other sense, and in consequence certain corners of the earth had, singularly, the power to stir me” (NE, 13) and “’it is only today’, my friend went on, ‘that I see again a little nook of the earth’” (NE, 13).

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sense of self: both the Compiler and Gringoire make a point of the fact that “those three landscapes became part of his immediate self” (NE, 26) and that they “will remain part of myself to the end of my life” (NE, 26).

“Some trick of mnemonics”: accuracy, unreliability and the real-and-imagined The relation of concrete and visionary, of landscape and self, however, is an interesting one as it is connected to a double psychology or perhaps even two sides ultimately to Ford’s self. Gringoire repeatedly speculates on two strategies of seeing or observing. He opposes the “poet’s mind” which he also refers to as a secondary or unconscious mind with its “consideration of the beautiful” (NE, 41) to the soldier’s surface or conscious mind that “saw, without seeing, and memorized without associations–just names attaching to dark patches in a great plain…” (NE, 40).15 Lastly this links back to the idea of the concrete as a locus for imagined vision but, I would like to argue, it also connects to two forms of memory or, to use Astrid Erll’s terminology, two modes of remembering.16 On the one hand, the accurate visuality of remembered landscape is a repeatedly stressed point of Gringoire’s and his landscapes are most graphically clear, “he remembered with an extreme clearness, as in the little paintings of Van Eyck” (NE, 26). Memory here appears as something reliable and verifiable as well as repeatedly retrievable. On the other hand, the precision of Gringoire’s spatial memory is frequently impacted by a momentous impressionism and unreliability and he makes it clear that “I am not so much concerned to describe these landscapes, or to prove the quality of my memory, as to establish the psychological facts about the four landscapes” (NE, 30). At times, Gringoire becomes aware of subconscious connections to the past through automatized associations in the present, “the Portsmouth guns of the 28/6/19 sounding through the birds’ voices from the hill opposite the Gingerbread Cottage brought it all back. Poets are like that and have these visions” (NE, 24). This almost Proust-like and more associative rendering of memory makes Gringoire’s narration move back and forth and complicates the idea of reliable and retrievable memory. Memory instead becomes something inherently connected to impressionistic vision and present realities, and as such turns into a continuous process of re-visioning and re-presenting, informed by 15

Cf “one was so preoccupied, so shut in one’s self, that these things were not objects that one looked at for themselves. They were merely landmarks” (NE, 14). 16 Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2011.

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both past nostalgia and present-day desire. While Gringoire claims utter precision of his spatial memory on the one hand we thus also find him complaining and worrying about the “trick of mnemonics” (NE, 14) and the unreliability of what he seemingly most accurately remembers: “I daresay I should get some of it incorrect” (NE, 27). As No Enemy seems to argue, memory is a double-natured thing that implies two modes of remembering (the factual and the impressionistic), mirroring Gringoire’s two selves or two modes of perception and thought (the poet and the soldier’s mind) and the corresponding two strategies of vision (the imagined and the concrete): memory, just as landscape, is a real-andimagined. If the workings of memory, then, are a highly complex construct already to Gringoire, this becomes once more complicated in the Compiler’s rewriting of Gringoire’s story. The Compiler stresses the unreliability of Gringoire’s narratives: “For instance, as to the detraining at Railhead in that dawn: he had distinctly the feeling that there was a woody, dark bank and a plantation of trees in which the thrushes sand right up against the flat of the line. There wasn’t really.” (NE, 27) Almost as a proof of this, the Compiler himself quickly loses count of the number of Gringoire’s visions to be retold in the first section of the book entitled “Four Landscapes”, and tries to invoke ”the three or four landscapes that my friend saw during the war” (NE, 14). Even the chronological numbering of landscape visions appears impossible as Gringoire quite erratically moves from memory to memory in narration: “I began talking the other day with the idea of describing four landscapes–the great guns from Portsmouth now remind me, though I have written only of two, of yet a fifth” (NE, 22). If Gringoire’s rememberings are complicated, however, the fact that we have them mediated through the Compiler implies a secondary act of construction which lastly must fail: as Gringoire, half-way through his narration, states, “But even that isn’t my fourth landscape” (NE, 37), we realize that in fact it is not four but many more landscape moments and visions he combines. If memory is here a constructive act, the doubling of narrative voice and the compiling of past fragments into a mosaic-like palimpsest opposes “the compiling” of memory to linear narrative–it is lastly not even clear who authors Gringoire’s landscape moments and projections of the past, even if both narrators claim distinctly concrete and seemingly most accurate memories and renderings. In its complex layering and re-presentation, No Enemy highlights the double nature of memory as both highly visual and seemingly real and as distinctly unreliable and unstable.

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Conclusion: A Tale of Reconstitution Ford’s landscapes, then, are visual memory-scapes that seemingly transform momentous experience into visionary tableaux symbolic of emotional and psychological longings. Unlike Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire or the idea of a mnemotope they are not collective but distinctly personal visions. They are representations of moments of individual desire and in their nostalgia for a “sanctuary” against war also escapist strategy. As superimpositions of an imagined simulacrum–a gingerbread cottage set in the country–on concrete landscapes experienced in the war they are also chronotopoi which structure the textualization of memory and connect past and future ideal worlds into a composite vision that offers the possibility of reconstruction of self in a synthesis of a past and future idyll. In this sense No Enemy really is A Tale of Reconstitution–while it purports to remember war it problematizes the accuracy of concrete remembrance and transforms memory into vision, moving from recording war experience to the psychology of war and the necessity of the mind to regain and reshape in forgetting. In this, it is perhaps the truer and more complete realization of the project Ford had attempted in 1916 when he wrote his short essay “War and the Mind”: between Gringoire, the Compiler and himself he becomes able, once again, to “visualize things” while, to us, he leaves an impressive record of “the psychology of that Active Service of which I have seen my share” as well as of the double nature of remembrance and of the problematics of turning past into story. In all its impressionistic unreliability the past must be central to any “Tale of Reconstitution” – and it is the strategies of narrating this tale and of textualizing the past that will be central to the production of any present and future selves, texts, or realities.

Works Cited Carlyle, Thomas. Selected Writings. Edited by Alan Shelston. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Ford, Ford Madox. War Prose. Edited by Max Saunders. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1999. —. No Enemy. A Tale of Reconstruction. Edited by Paul Skinner. Manchester: Carcanet, 2002. Lévy, Ellen. “Maplines: Visions of France in Ford Madox Ford’s No Enemy”. In: Ford Madox Ford, France and Provence, edited by

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Dominique Lemarchal and Claire Davison-Pégon. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2011, 107-117. Saunders, Max. A Dual Life. Vol I. The World Before the War. Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. —. “Life-Writing, Cultural Memory, and Literary Studies”. In Cultural Memory Studies. An Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin, New York: DeGruyter 2008, 321-331. —. “The Finest Novel About World War I”. The New York Review of Books, 58:8, 12 May 2011, 61-62. —. “Life Writing, Fiction and Modernism in British Narratives of the First World War”. The RUSI Journal, 159:4, 2014, 106-111. Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. London: Fontana, 1996. Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace. Journeys to Los Angeles and other Realand-Imagined Places. Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996. Widdowson, Peter. Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

“WHERE IS THE PLACE WHERE IT ALL REALLY HAPPENED?”: LOST LANDSCAPES IN THE POETRY OF LARS GUSTAFSSON MARIA FREIJ

This paper explores the imagery of Lars Gustafsson’s childhood landscapes, and the possibility of poetry to salvage the (imaginary) homeland. Gustafsson, like Heaney, digs for memories, like treasures or like trinkets. Such fragments make the building blocks for many of his poems, underpinning nostalgia for places doubly abandoned: places both temporally and physically distant—his expatriate stint no doubt having a strong impact. That is not to say that Gustafsson’s poetry, while certainly heavily focused on memory, the childhood landscape, and identity, is in itself nostalgic—rather, such themes are treated with an absolute awareness, concreteness, and directness, which suggests a metanostalgia at play. Gustafsson’s imagery evokes the dusty roads, the deep forests: the distinctly Swedish romanticised and stripped bare simultaneously. The landscape contains that which is familiar, but also that which seems alien, even threatening. He returns to other traditional melancholy devices, the mirror being a dominant motif underscoring the illusiveness of reality and the tenuous boundary between self and the Other. This border is one frequently crossed, blurring the boundary between past and present physical spaces and the landscapes of the mind. The loss and absence drive this (re-)creation of memory and the internalisation of the landscape. As such, the objective reality of space is undermined: memory and dream become inseparable: “Summers, where did you all disappear to?” he asks in “Four Short Poems”1, asking too what happened to the boy that was. He evokes in this deceptively simple question the loss of place, of self, and of time. Gustafsson’s work provides rich material for the investigation of

1

In Elegies and other Poems by Lars Gustafsson, Christoffer Middleton ed., line 2.

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(meta-)nostalgic themes, and to the exploration of the nature of memory as simultaneously salvaging and imprisoning the expatriate poet. This is thus an exploration of the poetry of Lars Gustafsson through the lens of the childhood landscape, one that posits that for an expatriate poet, such as Gustafsson was for a period of twenty years, the landscape is doubly lost: it is both temporally and physically distant. Such a dislocation opens wide the crack to let nostalgia flow, but Gustafsson’s “absolute horror of metaphor”2 and simple imagery does not let nostalgic and melancholy devices take over. Yes, his fondness for traditional melancholy devices—the mirror, the forest, the well—is prominent, but his exploration of the boundary between self and Other refuses to place itself in any classically melancholy or nostalgic tradition. The focus lies on a selection of Gustafsson’s poems in which the childhood landscape is particularly relevant, and these poems form the foundation of a discussion of the relationship that his imagery creates between past and present, between distance and presence. As such, memory as a notion, is the very stuff with which Gustavsson’s poetry is woven. He creates a narrator marked by a distinct Otherness, a self that never quite belongs, neither in the past nor in the present, neither in the childhood landscape nor in that in which the adult dwells. This and the inevitable passage of time are strong themes in Gustafsson’s “Four Short Poems,” which at once function independently and as a whole. The poem presents an interesting temporal tension, where the narrator is briefly in the present, immediately turns to the past, and then to a past persona or self. The questions asked in the poem are questions of time and space/place, and create an inextricable relationship between the two. The first stanza is primarily centered on those central concepts, and introduces the boy, and the father—notably Gustafsson does not use any possessive pronoun—and the landscape itself: So this summer comes to an end: summers, where did you all disappear to? The boy who with a dark look saw all those clouds coming up over the sunlit fields. And the father, on his blue bicycle, always riding against the wind in his bright parka, enormous barns in the fields at dawn,

2

Söderström, Bilden som byggsten, 21.

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where is the place where it all really happened?3

The stanza begins and ends with questions—about the passage of time and the veracity of memory: does a place exist if it exists only in memory? Did it ever exist? The tone is typically Gustafsson: the sparsity in use of adjectives, the brevity with which an existential question is evoked— almost in passing—and the clarity of the images presented. The images provide just enough to invite a filling in of the many gaps, and never directs or imposes a complete description. Gustafsson’s belief that “The ‘poetical’ has very little to do with poetical effects,” that “as a rule it just harms poetry because it is, implicitly or explicitly, a means of persuasion”4 lays the foundation for his practice: his works are, at a first glance, beguilingly simple. Göran Hermerén argues that “the dominant style in Scandinavian aesthetics today [sic] […] is somewhat prosaic: to strive for clarity and write directly, keeping metaphors and literary allusions to a minimum”5. This places Gustafsson in a distinctly Swedish context also in terms of stylistics, at least for a certain time-period. There is, in his work, a kind of minimalism, a voice that strives for clarity and a focus on the image as bearer of all meaning. Details like the blue of the bicycle, and the father riding it against the wind do not only encourage visualization, but make it nigh impossible to resist it, despite it being a rather minimalist description. The second stanza, or poem, if you will, evokes the struggling of man against the elements in a more concrete manner than the father “always riding against the wind”—whereby the boats are adrift—their freedom becoming their undoing as they are exposed to their surroundings. The internalization of this landscape leads to rot and decay: The tired old boats, in the first autumn storm they break their moorings, and away they drift, heavy, taking on water, melancholic— as if to philosophize,

3

In Elegies and other Poems by Lars Gustafsson, Christoffer Middleton ed., lines 1-11. 4 Quoted in Söderström, Bilden Som Byggsten: Om Lars Gustafssons Poetik och Lyriska Praktik, 25. 5 Hermerén, “Scandinavian Aesthetics”, 27.

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There is a longing to belong to the landscape, but the landscape is also hostile. The very water that gave them buoyancy and provided their possibility to be what boats are supposed to be is now their undoing. Their freedom is a chimera—without their moorings they become undone as, adrift, they take on water and slowly rot. The battle against the elements plays out differently in the stanzas: the father’s struggle appears lifelong—“always” (my emphasis)—but the boats’ battle is lost as the landscape is drowning them. They drift aimlessly, melancholically. Their freedom is thus an illusion: they lose meaning without moorings. This notion is extended in the following stanza where it is the narrator who is without moorings: One day life stands mildly smiling all at once on the other side of the stream and asks: but how did you get there?7

Though mildly, the question life asks is everything but mild. It implies two things: that life and the narrator are separate—in direction and in location, and that aimlessness or even rootlessness, is closely linked to pointlessness. Here, where it is the narrator who is adrift, and an ambivalent relationship to the landscape is created. Though on dry land, he is on the other side of the stream—the suggestion is that he is on the wrong side of the stream—and there is no answer to life’s “mild” question. The final poem reiterates the stance that something important is missing. Those who “wash themselves with sand” have something in common; they are migratory, transitory—and “must miss out on something”. But what is it that they are missing out on? It is at the very core of the poem(s) that what we strive to establish is unestablishable: All those who wash themselves with sand: desert birds, hermits, I don’t know all of them, must miss out on something. 6

In Elegies and other Poems by Lars Gustafsson, Christoffer Middleton ed., lines 12-19. 7 Ibid., lines 20-24.

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What? Not the streaming, Not what stays put. The cold? The freshness?8

The poem is riddled with the melancholy question of time, and the destruction and oblivion it wreaks. In combination with recurring theme of loss or reclamation of spaces lost, there is a duality at play, one that suggests that Gustafsson’s work is not itself nostalgic, but that it is concerned with the subject of nostalgia, or, in a sense, that the poem is metapoetically addressing itself. The melancholy element is an existential one that arises from the landscape itself: from the deep forests, stormy skerries, and the never quite light, never quite dark, summer nights. The breeding-grounds for the melancholy imagery and sentiment are most often located in Sweden, and notably, in the childhood landscape. Per Helge, in reference to Gustafsson’s collection Variations on a Theme by Silfverstolpe, argues that childhood is present in virtually every line: Gustafsson “recreates it [childhood], and its landscape not the least, in what appears to be an attempt to salvage it into a sustainable form”.9 This form is one that resists what Helge calls “formal time”10. Such a resistance is clearly at play in “The Well, Then and Forever”, where we find the poet trapped in a memory of childhood, not just in its events, but in the mood that the events, or imagined events, evoke. Gustafsson plays with temporal shifts to highlight the complexities of time and identity. In this poem, we find again classical images of melancholy, such as the mirror and the shadow. These are common features in his work: in the poem above, life asks the question from “the other side of the stream”. Gustafsson’s mirrors, then, are suggested not only by real mirrors, but by the surfaces of lakes and rivers. Perhaps the most prominent device in his work, though, is the recurrent image of the well, and such is the case in “The Well, Then and Forever.” The well is simultaneously beauty and threat: its lid is painted green in the spring, then carefully secured to prevent drowning. As in the poem above—water is simultaneously a source of life and potentially life-threatening. The Well, Then and Forever As long as we had that summer cottage the well’s cover was always repainted green in the spring.

8

Ibid., lines 25-32. Helge, “Barndomen, Landskapet: Två Stora Teman i Lars Gustafssons Poesi”, 15. 10 Ibid. 9

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“Where is the Place Where it All Really Happened?” The lid was always carefully locked to keep me from falling in. And when it was opened and the pail splintered the perfection of the surface, across the concrete walls you could see “thousands of glistening reflexes.” One time we pulled up a living fish, which was interpreted to mean we had sunk the well too close to the lake. Where else could we have dug? Einar and Uncle Knutte dug the well; the mixture of the cool well and the July heat gave Einar a terrible case of pneumonia. According to legend he was to have treated it by imbibing an entire bottle of Grönstedt’s brandy “without delay and in a single context.” I was very afraid of falling into that well. I have been falling for decades into that well and am on my way toward the surface, that dark which will be shattered into “thousands of glistening reflexes.” But I no longer know from which direction I am approaching, from daylight or dark bottom.11

Here, the poet/child begins on one side of the mirror: “the pail splintered the perfection of the surface,” but ends up not knowing in which reality he exists: in the imagined one or in the objective reality. Like Alice reading via the looking-glass, the poet can only read himself through the mirror, through the Other, and so the mirror underscores the illusiveness of reality, the tenuous boundary between self and Other. Söderström observes: “The thin membrane materialises as a barrier for thought, an invisible but impenetrable barrier which becomes a metaphor for the 11

In Elegies and other Poems by Lars Gustafsson, Christoffer Middleton ed.

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border to the possible but unrealised worlds”12. The poet’s position changes in a complex manner: the childhood self is evoked by the reminiscing adult, family members are sketched briefly but with details that reveal true characters, and then, in one swift line, the childhood self merges with the narrator; the tense shifts from past to the perfect indicative to the present indicative: “I was very afraid […] I have been falling for decades […] and am on my way toward the surface” (my emphasis). The presence is absolute, and in the dark of the well, no direction can be distinguished. As such, the brief moment of presence is immediately compromised—the moment turning existentially complex, where the I does not know its direction. The internalization of the landscape, of the memory, and the transformation the poet undergoes illustrate Gustafsson’s treatment of the nostalgic and the experience of memory. The shift from the description of a memory to the insertion of the narrator suggests that the separation of the two is impossible. The narrator is his memory, and the memory is constructed and re-constructed by the narrator. An impossible symbiosis, the two create and re-create each other constantly. There is thus a resistance of Helge’s “formal time”—it is in the interplay between past and present, presence and absence that Gustafsson excels. The surface itself, despite Gustafsson’s “absolute horror of metaphor”13, becomes the, almost non-existent, space for the quest; through its own liminality it becomes the vehicle to express the near-futile search: “Elegy: On the Surface” maps this liminal zone of knowing and unknowing: In the surface, in the surface of the water’s edge, only there. In the hair-thin transition between air and water. And thus in a layer which can be passed through, but in which no one can remain. In this surface, glittering and non-existent, is where you shall seek. And there you cannot seek.1415

The surface is at once absence and presence. It is a layer that can be “passed through” but in which “no one can remain”—again he revisits the impossibility of actual presence and the futility of the quest. Why, then, continue it? Why search in an impossible space for an impossible answer? 12

Söderström, Bilden Som Byggsten: Om Lars Gustafssons Poetik och Lyriska Praktik, 185. 13 Quoted in Söderström, Bilden Som Byggsten: Om Lars Gustafssons Poetik och Lyriska Praktik, 21. 14 My translation (“Elegi: På ytan” orig.). 15 Gustafsson in Söderström, Bilden Som Byggsten: Om Lars Gustafssons Poetik och Lyriska Praktik, lines 1-6. 181.

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The search for an imaginary homeland may be futile, but it is in the construction of the impossible that the complexities of the expatriate life can be expressed. Even without the twofold loss that the expatriate experiences, the temporal displacement alone acquires here a vehicle. Gustafsson argues that poetry “has to settle for saying something about that which allows itself to be said, to be empirical, to make visible that which allows itself to be made visible, to win its experiences step by step”16—it is the experience that he addresses, and that which does not allow itself to be said, remains unsaid. Childhood is irretrievably lost. As Helge points out: “the pain evoked which comes from the memory of the childhood’s endless backyards with the children and their voices echoing against the planking, is totally naked, since the loss is irrecoverable”17. Or, from a Freudian perspective we can look at childhood as “the individual historical past within the adult that haunts the present, and is—almost irretrievably—lost and gone”18. Here we are looking at loss at its most melancholic point: the mourning of that which is totally out of reach because it exists in another time, another landscape. But the art of remembering is not merely recreating the past as it happened; it is more importantly an act of re-creation in that events are given a pattern and meaning they never had before: “for Gustafsson, memory is a special art form and the procedure when we remember something is a strongly artificial process”19. Indeed, the metaphorical excavation of the mind which is digging deep into memory, is represented in the first stanza of Gustafsson’s “Seven Very Small Events”: Early memories, fume from childhood, green bits of bottleglass dug from earth.20

This absence manifests itself in a sort of homelessness. During Gustafsson’s expatriation from Sweden for some twenty years, he lived and worked in Texas. This exile in combination with the preoccupation 16 Quoted in Söderström, Bilden Som Byggsten: Om Lars Gustafssons Poetik och Lyriska Praktik, 33. 17 Helge, “Barndomen, Landskapet: Två Stora Teman i Lars Gustafssons Poesi”, 18. 18 Steedman, “Maps and Polar Regions: A Note on the Presentation of Childhood Subjectivity in Fiction of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, 77. 19 Längle, “Några Bilder från Ett Minnespalats eller ett Porträtt av Konstnären som tysk Poet”, 31. 20 In Elegies and other Poems by Lars Gustafsson, Christoffer Middleton ed., lines 1-3.

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with childhood as a door to the adult self leads to a sense of alienation and a search for home: Gustafsson’s childhood in Västmanland becomes the poet’s “utopia”21; “childhood and landscape […] is one: the path to a homeland”22. Ingemar Friberg argues that “the homelessness is a sort of underlying base in Gustafsson’s poems”23. Arguably, due to the obsession with childhood, and with its past landscapes, the homelessness itself becomes the theme and noman’s-land becomes the place of dwelling. For a displaced writer like Gustafsson, the only links of continuity and coherence can be found in the narration of self and sense of place, and though his imaginary homeland is deeply rooted in the images of the childhood, it manifests itself in a highly complex manner. There is a sense of homelessness in being at home in displacement, of finding a resting place in between places that is discernable in his work, as in these lines from “Fuga Canonica”: My own homeland is not here and much brighter. […] It was my real homeland. (And I was not there. I have never been there24)25

Helge comments that Gustafsson’s homecoming occurs in “a brighter country which is, if not a Gnostic homeland, then at least one of an earthly equivalence. As unobtainable as, other than in thought, the Christian heaven. Thus, one must create one oneself, write one for oneself!”26 The return to images of the past suggest that the past has become a (re)invented and (re)imagined place of dwelling. To escape to the past creates a certain homecoming. Söderström argues that “Gustafsson’s poetry wants to save the images to, in accordance with an orphic ideal, re-establish the paradise lost”27. It seems that in order to do so, the poet must remain in limbo—a place neither here nor there, a place of waiting, memory, and images. 21 Helge, “Barndomen, Landskapet: Två Stora Teman i Lars Gustafssons Poesi”, 15. 22 Ibid., 16. 23 Friberg, “Tjänarinnan, Lars Gustafsson och Ursprunget”, 45. 24 My translation (“Fuga Canonica” orig.). 25 Quoted in Helge, “Barndomen, Landskapet: Två Stora Teman i Lars Gustafssons Poesi”, 28. 26 Ibid. 27 Söderström, Bilden Som Byggsten: Om Lars Gustafssons Poetik och Lyriska Praktik, 129.

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For an expatriate writer these contrasts become more visible. Gustafsson in “Austin, Texas,” quoted here in its entirety, elaborates on how the new context can never quite compare with the old one: Austin, Texas A small, peaceful place where I could go about my own affairs, without reproaches. I’ve searched for something like this since the first day of elementary school. But it wasn’t easy to know that something like it actually existed. And, truth to tell, every country I live in was a foreign country How strange, not to say unaccustomed: to stay, to remain. The first time was a spring night in 1972. The whole world was dark, warm, humid: incomprehensible from the airplane steps on. Groped for a window. But was already outside. I checked in at Villa Capri, a motel that’s been gone for a number of years. Weinstock and Rovinsky picked me up in the thundering, warm rain, both in net undershirts, and the lightning photographed their still young, energetic faces with black beards. Strongest were the smells of rotting wood, vegetation, mud, and Southern honeysuckle. I forgot my raincoat at the motel. Just as Dr. Freud would have liked! But there was music in the humidity. It came from every street. Ballads and blues and a special kind of

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pensive jazz. It resembled nothing else I’d heard. It came from warmer air, smelling of earth. For a decade now, it’s been my everyday life. The large, serious faces of my students, grocery bills, and the dog digging overmuch in the rose bed. For Benjamin, it’s all natural. But never really for me. Never again to need my wool mittens, sleeping like nice kittens in the closet! A place where everything grows, if you only drop it into the ground, under large trees that are made happy when the wind starts blowing. Certain things remain forever incomprehensible: the storm of insect sounds on hot nights, the mysterious warm darkness. A solitary trumpet blue as night, from a lighted window. Sunrises when the whole world is on fire and the black herons sit, heavy like Hugin and Munin, in old dead river trees. Rovinsky doesn’t live here anymore, and Weinstock’s hair and beard are white. The telephone is ringing and wants to sell me credit cards. Office buildings grow and acquire glass fronts, black as the river. But the shade under the trees is what it is, and in the river under the bridge giant carp are sleeping, that will be there forever, and no boy will catch.28

28 In Elegies and other Poems by Lars Gustafsson, Christoffer Middleton ed. 1921.

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Faraway Sweden, and (eventually deteriorating) Austin, Texas, are lost and found places within the fragile space of the poem. Gustafsson’s deceptively simple and sparse diction becomes the vehicle for a complex layering of time, space, and (re)invention of self: in Austin, before darkness falls again, and the glass fronts of the office buildings become “black as the river”, the homeland lost is briefly recovered. A few points are particularly worthy of discussion here: that Austin is presented as the place the narrator has searched for since childhood—a homeland of his dreams that he was not sure actually existed. This homecoming is manifested also in its unusualness: it is strange to “stay”, to “remain” and to feel as if that is the right thing to do. The reception is warm, as is the rain, and the faces are young and energetic. Still, there is a sense of displacement: “For Benjamin, it’s all natural. / But never really for me. / Never again to need my wool mittens, / sleeping like nice kittens in the closet!”29 The seed of displacement even in a poem largely focused on homecoming is planted here, and then, the inevitable havoc that time wreaks manifests: Austin is falling apart—the gnostic homeland does not hold. Time passes, people age, and move away. The city that was a city of discovery, jazz, and belonging, is corrupted by office buildings and consumption. The eventual loss is hinted at much earlier in the poem, with the motel the Villa Capri being gone already for a number of years— Gustafsson’s temporal shifts again creating ambivalence and a lack of moorings in contrast to the primary theme. Though the mirrors are present here too, they are man-made and reflect only black—the office buildings are intruders in this environment. As Nancy Doubleday suggests: Somehow the act of modification of landscape to create ‘home’ has simultaneously created not-home, which has also been distinguished from domesticated land by being called ‘nature.’ In essence, the identification of home with the modification of landscape is a source of almost inevitable alienation from nature.30 (196)

We return, then, to the river, and its illusive carp, uncatchable, and we return to the boy, who is perhaps the same boy who since elementary school dreamed of a place like this. He will not, nor will any other boy, ever catch the fish, but he knows it is there, symbol of all that is unable to be pinned down and made his.

29 30

Ibid., lines 33-36. Doubleday, “Arctic Worlds and the Geography of Imagination.” 196.

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Gustafsson returns again and again to bodies of water, and their surfaces. In “The Eel and the Well”31 we see these familiar Gustafsson themes: the well, the darkness, the “Gnostic darkness”32, and the difficulty of distinguishing between the self and the Other. In this piece, he takes a different approach to the process of internalization. While the language is, as previously, simple, and metaphors and similes avoided, the poem in its entirety functions as a metaphor: The Eel and the Well In old time Scania, there was a custom: In the deep black wells they placed delicate eels straight from the sea. These eels then stayed their whole life imprisoned in the darkness of the deep wells. They keep the water crystal clear and pure. When once in a while the eel gets caught white, frighteningly big, in the pail, blind, slithering in and out of its body’s riddles, unknowing, everyone hurriedly lets it sink. I often feel like I am not just in the place of the eel but well and eel at the same time. Imprisoned in myself, but this self is already something else. I am there. And I wash it with my slithering, muddy, white-bellied presence in the dark.33

Again, the objective reality of space is undermined. No longer can the poet be sure where the ‘I’ ends and the Other begins. There is, as Söderström puts it, in relation to another poem of Gustafsson’s, a constant feeling of being “trapped in your own self”34. Arguably, “The Eel and the Well” is an extension of “The Well, Then and Forever,” in which the narrator does not know from where he is approaching—up or down, past or present: here, he has become the eel, and in a further extension, is both eel and well simultaneously—and the 31

Gustafsson, Där Alfabetet har Tvåhundra Bokstäver: Samlade Dikter 19811991. 59-60. 32 Helge, “Barndomen, Landskapet: Två Stora Teman i Lars Gustafssons Poesi”, 17. 33 My translation (”Ålen och brunnen” orig.). 34 Söderström, Bilden Som Byggsten: Om Lars Gustafssons Poetik och Lyriska Praktik, 51.

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place has become truly internalized. In “Öfvre Slottsgatan (ii)”, Gustafsson writes: so hard for the eye in these dark rooms to separate dream from memory, to separate the street from the soul!”35

Indeed, how hard to separate reality from the imagined, the eel from the well, the well from the self, that which was from that which is. Interesting here, too, are the riddles of the body, be it the eel’s or the narrator’s, which once fished from the depths of darkness and memory, are too frightening to address. Unveiling the past is a costly, labour-intense, and arduous task—better to let the body and its secrets drop down to the unknown depths of the mind again. The well/past is the keeper of the self that is too daunting to confront, and symbiotically they will continue to keep each other clean and unseen. While Potteiger and Purinton certainly have a point in saying that “stories link the sense of time, event, experience, memory and other intangibles to the more tangible aspects of place”36, their notion does not delve into the polemic of a past and largely (re)invented landscape: “truth to tell,” writes Gustafsson, in “Austin, Texas,” “every country I lived in / was a foreign country”37. In that sense, the expatriation is one that affects us all, when we from all kinds of distances try to see through the lingering fog of childhood. Gustafsson’s poems are doors opening to different interpretations of self and self-identity. Time passed is never really past, but intermingles with the present identity and place. Likewise, the present self inserts itself into the past, reframes it, is physically inserting itself into its spaces. The cohabitation of past and present selves in each other’s temporal spheres means the poet is never really present, but perhaps never really absent. It is in the space of the poem that there can finally be some sense of homecoming.

35 Gustafsson in Söderström, Bilden Som Byggsten: Om Lars Gustafssons Poetik och Lyriska Praktik, lines 22-25. 36 Potteiger & Purinton, Lanscape Narratives, ix. 37 In Elegies and other Poems by Lars Gustafsson, Christoffer Middleton ed., lines 7-8.

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Works Cited Doubleday, Nancy C. “Arctic Worlds and the Geography of Imagination.” In Nature and Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Ed. Anne Buttimer and Luke Wallin. Vol. 48. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999. 189-200. Friberg, Ingemar. “Tjänarinnan, Lars Gustafsson Och Ursprunget.” In Fem Författardagar: Samlade Föreläsningar Från Författardagarna Vid Mälardalens Högskola 1996-2000. Ed. Birgitta Ivarson Bergsten. Västerås: Mälardalen University Press, 2001. 41-67. Gustafsson, Lars. “Four Short Poems.” In Elegies and Other Poems by Lars Gustafsson. Ed. Christopher Middleton. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2000. 58-59. —. “Fuga Canonica in Barndomen, Landskapet: Två Stora Teman i Lars Gustafssons Poesi.” In Fem Författardagar: Samlade Föreläsningar från Författardagarna vid Mälardalens Högskola 1996-2000. Ed. Birgitta Ivarson Bergsten. Västerås: Mälardalen University Press, 2001. 15-30. —. “Seven Very Small Events.” In Elegies and Other Poems by Lars Gustafsson. Ed. Christopher Middleton. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2000. 38-39. —. “The Eel and the Well.” In Där Alfabetet Har Tvåhundra Bokstäver: Samlade Dikter 1981-1991. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1994. 59-60. —. “The Well, Then and Forever.” In Elegies and Other Poems by Lars Gustafsson. Ed. Christopher Middleton. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2000. 42-43. —. “Öfvre Slottsgatan (ii).” In Bilden Som Byggsten: Om Lars Gustafssons Poetik Och Lyriska Praktik. Hans Söderström. Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2003. 5051. —. “Elegy: On the Surface.” In Bilden som Byggsten: Om Lars Gustafssons Poetik och Lyriska Praktik. Hans Söderström. Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2003. 181. —. “Austin, Texas.” In Elegies and Other Poems by Lars Gustafsson. Ed. Christopher Middleton. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2000. 19-21. Helge, Per. “Barndomen, Landskapet: Två Stora Teman i Lars Gustafssons Poesi.” In Fem Författardagar: Samlade Föreläsningar från Författardagarna vid Mälardalens Högskola 1996-2000. Ed. Birgitta Ivarson Bergsten. Västerås: Mälardalen University Press, 2001. 15-30.

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Hermerén, Göran. “Scandinavian Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51.2 (1993): 177-83. Längle, Ulrika. “Några Bilder från Ett Minnespalats eller Ett Porträtt av Konstnären som Tysk Poet.” In Fem Författardagar: Samlade Föreläsningar Från Författardagarna Vid Mälardalens Högskola 1996-2000. Ed. Birgitta Ivarson Bergsten. Västerås: Mälardalen University Press, 2001. 41-67. Potteiger, Matthew and Jamie Purinton. Landscape Narratives. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 1998. Steedman, Carolyn. “Maps and Polar Regions: A Note on the Presentation of Childhood Subjectivity in Ficion of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” In Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation. Ed. Steve and Nigel Thrift Pile. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. 77-92. Söderström, Hans. Bilden Som Byggsten: Om Lars Gustafssons Poetik Och Lyriska Praktik. Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2003.

I MOURN THEE NOW:1 NOSTALGIA IN JOHN BANVILLE’S NOVEL THE SEA LINARA BARTKUVIENƠ

To say “I have no place to go” is to admit to a desperate circumstance. (Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place, xiii)

Devalued throughout modernity, the concept of place has been eventually acknowledged as a complex phenomenon partaking in the lived experience of a human subject. The work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice MerleauPonty, Henri Bergson, and Gaston Bachelard prepared the ground for a further inquiry into the phenomenon of place not only in philosophy, but also in literary theory and criticism, and social sciences. As regards literary theory (cultural semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism and postmodern theory) and criticism, place was affirmed mostly as some spectral segment of the concept of space (as theorized by Yuri Lotman, Mikhail Bakhtin, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Edward Soja, Fredric Jameson etc.) in close alliance with time. It has been only now (for the past few decades) that a distinction between space and place has been made and place has been given an in-depth and comprehensive analysis in the works of the phenomenological thinkers of place like Edward S. Casey, Jeff Malpas, David Carr, Donald A. Landes, and many other powerful voices (Michael Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari etc.) in the scholarly fields inside and outside phenomenology and literary theory. In phenomenological thought on place, the Heideggerian being-in-theworld is substantiated as being in a place-world, i.e., to follow E. S. Casey, place is understood as an ontological-existential (dwelling) structure of human experience: "[P]lace serves as the condition of all existing things...To be is to be in place."2 Place is accorded “a power to direct and stabilize us, to memorialize and identify us, to tell us who and what we are 1 2

J. W. Dalby. Poems. London: H. Hetherington, 172-173, 1822. Casey, Getting Back into Place, 15-16.

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in terms of where we are (as well as where we are not).”3 With all its extensiveness and complexity, rethinking of place came along with rethinking of memory (thinking per se is “a return, a coming back, a placing or replacing í with the caveat that it is a placing back into that which we never really leave”4) as human memory is constituted not only through time but also place. Remembering, as Casey argues, is not only temporal (“It would remain largely disembodied”5), it is also placial: memory is always aligned to the materiality of place. Place and memory are compelling narrative trajectories in The Sea (2005), a novel by the Irish writer John Banville (b.1945). It is a novel whose narrative centres on place and memory acting to enable an exploration of our own being and an exploration of our experiences through a (re)exploration of place. It is through the engagement with place that the memories of dying and death are re-collected and the experience of mourning and remembrance, loss and displacement, longing and belonging are grasped as a whole. Banville’s The Sea traverses the lanes of places of remembrance, loss and grief which unfold in the landscape of contemporary Irish literature alongside John McGaherrn’s That They May Face the Rising Sun (2001), the Northern Irish poets Seamus Heaney (essays Place and Displacement, The Sense of Place (1977)), Michael Longely etc. In their poetry, memory-places like theatres of the battlefields of the Great War, telling the stories of horror; kitchens, affirming family affinity and affection etc. are complex and dense amalgams of memory. Memory and mourning is what the critic Joanne Watkiss in her article “Ghosts in the Head: Mourning, Memory and Derridean ‘Trace’ in John Banville’s The Sea” focuses on as she notes that it is the mourning that drives the narrator and the protagonist of The Sea “to places of the past; as he is obsessed with memory […] he is seeking out spaces that act as archives of his past: solid structures that contain firm memories for him to return to [...] Max’s saturation in the mourning process has compelled him to revisit sites of the past, linking mourning inextricably to significant places in memory. Place instigates mourning and mourning instigates

3

Ibid., xv. Malpas, “The Remembrance of Place”, accessed October 15, 2016. http://jeffmalpas.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/The-Remembrance-ofPlace.pdf 5 Casey, Remembering, 182. 4

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place. His memories are thus enriched by his journey through different spaces.”6 Indeed, the place for withdrawal throughout mourning is endowed with singularity and significance. For all its materiality, it is a liminal place with its qualities of emotion and affect. The aim of this essay will be to clarify the interpretive ambiguity as to why Max Morden desires a return to Ballyless rather than any other place. What is it about Ballyless that draws him back now when he is in his sixties? Is it the physical interiority of the place that summons the mourner to re-implace himself in the present? What is the nature of the alliance between self and place and how deep does it run? Does his return home to Ballyless accomplish homecoming if homecoming, as a starting-place of self, and as a need to return to the same, is very often a need to return to the same place which, as Edward S. Casey defines it, is “no particular place at all?”7 I will, therefore, argue that Max withdraws to Ballyless because of an ambiguous nostalgic yearning he is feeling soon after his wife Anna dies. It is not only the death of his wife that he is grieving; it seems, there is a lot more to the feeling of loss that he is confronted with: he is summoned to address something that cannot be recovered, something that cannot be returned to since it is elusive and spectral. I will, therefore, look into Max’s journey back to Ballyless in the light of nostalgia narrative of longing for a place of belonging which is neither ever present nor ever absent from the density of lived experience. With all its ontological ambiguity and involution, nostalgia gestures towards the acute desire for the place that is the home of the self; an acute longing for a place that does not exist or has never existed, unless it is imaginary. I will employ the phenomenological method which is descriptive as it uses phenomenological reductions to understand the meaning innate to human experience. Through hermeneutic interpretation, the concept of place will be developed specifically throughout the essay as it investigates how it informs and is informed by memory. In the first part of my analysis I will discuss the body as itself a place: I will look into the narrative of Anna’s displacement as it takes a form of illness (and death) as it partakes in the narrative framework of displacement throughout the novel. As I look into Anna’s illness (and death), I draw on the (post)phenomenology of illness and death as they are explicated in the phenomenological works 6

Watkiss, “Ghosts in the Head: Mourning, Memory and Derridean ‘Trace’ in John Banville’s The Sea”, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 2 (March 17, 2007), 56, accessed October 4, 2016, https://irishgothichorror.wordpress.com/issue2/ 7 Casey, “The World of Nostalgia”, 366.

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of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Dylan Trigg (who in his works on the phenomenology of place draws on Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer etc.), and the phenomenological research on illness by Fredrik Svenaeus and Drew Leder. In the second part of the reading of The Sea, I will rely on Martin Heidegger, and the phenomenologists of place like Edward S. Casey and Dylan Trigg. The two trajectories of reading will be sharing the concepts of “implacement”, as “being concretely placed“, and “displacement”/ “disimplacement”, as “being unplaced”, as formulated by Casey in his phenomenological study Getting Back into Place (2009). In (post)phenomenology of illness and death, and place, the body is a place, a “here”; therefore, displacement, as it comes in the form of illness, assumes the shape of otherness: it imposes itself over the lived body and, as an alien presence, disrupts and deprives the body of its embodied placement in the world, leaves it estranged. The lived body, as it has a new host, is then left alienated as one’s being-in-the-world assumes the form of not-being-at-home-in-the-world, i.e., of being uncanny/ unhomely (Unheimlichkeit), of being (ontologically) homeless.8 On the other hand, unhomeliness is inherent to our existence, it is sheltered by being-at-homein-the-world; in other words, the two structures of existenceíbeing-athome and not-being-at-home–implace each other, but it is in illness when one of them recedes into the background, and it is illness that takes the place of health and with itíthe control of our being-in-the-world.9 “Well, Doctor,’ she said, […] is it the death sentence, or do I get life?”10 When Anna learns about her conditioní“Mr Todd launched into a forceful disquisition, polished from repeated use, on promising treatments, new drugs, the mighty arsenal of chemical weapons he had at his command”11 ía mutual awareness befalls both Anna and Max in that “from this day forward all would be dissembling. There would be no other way to live with death.”12 There is a silent acknowledgment of the other subjectivity as it comes in to assume residence within Anna’s body, to take control over it, to displace and estrange it:

8

Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”, 147-182. Svenaeus, “The Phenomenology of Health and Illness”, Handbook of Phenomenology and Medicine, 94. 10 Banville, The Sea, 16. 11 Ibid., 17. 12 Ibid., 23. 9

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Arrived home, we sat outside the house in the car for a long time, loath of venturing in upon the known, saying nothing, strangers to ourselves and each other as we suddenly were. 13 Embarrassment, yes, a panic-stricken sense of not knowing what to say, where to look, how to behave, and something else, too, that was not quite anger but a sort of surly annoyance, a surly resentment at the predicament in which we grimly found ourselves. 14

When illness pervades one’s lived experience, leaves it a stranger to itself, panic-stricken and resentful, as Max puts it, the body articulates itself as uncanny/ unhomely/ homeless (placeless); in other words, what has been invisible (articulable) becomes visible, the inside passes over to the outside/ the outside disturbs the inside. Whatever is inside is passed over to the outside through a visible change in the outer appearance. As the illness is progressing, Anna’s body makes the arrival of the other host visible and lived from within: Her belly was swollen, a round hard lump pressing against the waistband of her skirt15; I recalled walking in the street with Anna one day after all her hair had fallen out”16; Her hair had begun to grow again, in a halfhearted fashion, as if it knew it would not be needed for long; it came out in patches, lank and black and greasy-seaming, like a cat’s licked fur.17

The arrival of the other host makes Anna hostage to her own body, it is acting on her as it forces her to withdraw from the world (so as to return to herself); as the ill body is acting as an intruder, it produces “two distinct experiences, one cognitive in focus and the other corporeal, both of which dwell in the same body.”18 Anna, with her hair fallen out, with her belly swollen, barefoot, “in her hospital-issue bleached white smock, wheeling her drip-feed stand–she called it her dumb-waiter,”19 seems to have acknowledged the presence of another self and its corporeal experience; at the same time it seems that she has intuitively/viscerally acknowledged that with another being in her body there is a change in perspective: it has become partial; therefore, “I see “myself” not from the outside, but

13

Ibid., 18. Ibid., 22. 15 Ibid., 18. 16 Ibid., 183. 17 Ibid., 179. 18 Trigg, The Memory of Place, 290. 19 Banville, The Sea, 176. 14

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through a mirror that augments my gaze.”20 To balance the two experiences, Anna takes to taking photographs of other patients, i.e., their mutilated bodies; it is the photographs, as they protocol both the inside and the outside of the body, that make visible the behaviour of the body in illness in that the body is no longer in control of itself, it cannot control it being maimed by illness; the corporeal disquiet testifies to that the body itself becomes a site of estrangement/ displacement; “the body gains a material reality of its own [...] the flesh gains independence, its desire for unity is at odds with the self-consciousness of reason”21; the photographs, to draw on Merleau-Ponty, give “visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible”22: Then there were the photographs themselves. They might have been taken in a field hospital and devastated city. There was an old man with one leg gone below the knee [...] An obese, middle-aged woman was missing a breast, the flesh where it had been recently removed all puckered and swollen like a giant, empty eye-socket. A big-bosomed, smiling mother in a lacy nightdress displayed a hydrocephalic baby with a bewildered look in its otter’s bulging eye. The arthritic fingers of an old woman taken in close-up were knotted and knobbed like clusters of root ginger.23

The photographs allow Anna to see herself/ her inside condition from the outside. At the same time, the photographsías she takes themíopen her own inside: “She seemed not to be looking through the lens, at her subject, but rather to be peering inward, into herself, is search of some defining perspective, some essential point of view.” 24 In the photographs of the patients that Anna takes, the outside of the body, i.e., the private pathologies of the bodies or parts of their bodies (a body with a missing breast, an empty eye-socket etc.) emerges as an alien, anonymous inside presence which, in the form of the deformed and somewhat obscene, abominable and repugnant to the senses body25, foregrounds itself; as a host subject, it is moving from within outside, as it amplifies the corporeal and drags it from inside to the outside of its concealment. As the corporeal in illness is dragged outside, it is thematized, i.e., the body is made to appear dysfunctional. As Drew Leder notes, the dysfunctional body is thematized but as in a dys state–i.e., dys signifying 20

Trigg, The Memory of Place, 290. Ibid., 205. 22 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind”, 360. 23 Banville, The Sea, 181. 24 Ibid., 173 25 Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 9. 21

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“bad”, “ill”, and “diseased”. The ill body is a dis-eased body in the situation which provokes bodily dys-appearance, i.e., “dys-appearance is a mode through which the body appears to explicit awareness.”26 In other words, the body dys-appears as it announces it no longer can do what once it could. Whereas, what it could once do, disappears; it disappears because something else prowls into the way I live my own-body. The body which is one’s embodied placement is estranged but at the same time, it seems, it is most familiar and intimate, i.e., uncanny. The body finds itself nostalgic, i.e., in a precarious position between memory (the lived experience of the past) and imagination (anticipation of restoring memory’s exigency). “When we are nostalgic, we take pictures.”27 If nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, if nostalgia is a symptom of being caught in displacement28, the pictures of the dys-/ (dis)appearing bodies that Anna takes íí are the pictures of a profound displacement, the photographs of the nostalgic bodies that once were lived, for the bodies they have once been and can no longer re-enter: A boy with a canker embossed on his cheek, intricate as a mandala [...] a fat old wild-haired woman with her slack,blue-veined legs lifted and knees splayed, showing off what I presumed was a prolapsed womb [...].29

It is impossible to re-enter as the body is displaced, be it inside or outside. The displaced body, i.e., the body of an alien host, is a nostalgic body, it longs for the habitual self, for the existential unity. As the limbless bodies in Anna’s photographs are given the centrality of not-being-athome, the unity of the self is put into question and the body’s discontinuity, i.e., its longing for the world which no longer exists, is given a foregrounding thematic content. On the other hand, a limbless body with the phantom limb manifests itself as the sense of a part of the body which is absent, yet it is constitutive of and partakes in a life-world, extends the self in and through the world. In other words, the lived body does not “end with its own materiality.”30 Therefore, as the lived body “does not end with its own materiality,” the frontier of the alliance between the body and the objects used become ambiguous as the body subsumes the materiality of the place and the place (with its objects) assimilates the body. In Anna’s case, it is her wheeling 26

Leder, The Absent Body, 86. Sontag, On Photography, 11. 28 Casey, Getting Back into Place, 37. 29 Banville, The Sea, 182. 30 Trigg, The Memory of Place, 295. 27

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drip-feed stand in the hospital as much as her camera and the photographs of the ill bodies that she leaves behind, and eventually and fundamentallyíAnna’s (and Max’s) house. Since it was possessed (owned) and dwelled within, the house takes a form of an imprint of Anna’s body. Trigg notes that “when worldly things exist for long enough alongside their owners, then a reversal of nature occurs: the thing assumes the controlling role, preserving the identity of the owner long after the owner has died.”31 After Anna’s death, Max leaves everything intact, moves to sleep in the spare room rather than stays in the bedroom: “I have moved by then from what had been Anna’s and my bedroom into the spare room over the kitchen, which used to be the nursery and where the bed was low and narrow, hardly more than a cot.”32 Our relationship with things, to follow Merleau-Ponty, is in close proximity: “each speaks to our body and to the way we live. They are clothed in human characteristics (whether docile, soft, hostile or resistant) and conversely they dwell within us as emblems of forms of life we either love or hate. Humanity is invested in the things of the world and these are invested in it.”33 After Anna’s death, the house retains the aspect of her being within its own texture. It is not (only) the arrangement of the things in the house, it is a particular life assumed from within it, i.e., it is not (only) the arrangement, it is the things which have assimilated a presence of their owner. Therefore, it is then the house that has taken up with a personal presence of Anna, after her death. The house embodies Anna, her being, and “signifies an elemental mystery in which the invisible is clothed in the visible.” 34 If the things assimilate a personal presence of their owner, it is then “some kind of invisible communion that is activated, of which the visual sight plays only a part”35; it is through the things in that place that our bodies become aware of the agency of some invisible presence. Soon after Anna’s death, Max feels that the house he owns now is not a place which implaces him, i.e., anchors him, and is an integral part of his self-hood however imperfectly or temporarily: “I could not have stayed there a moment longer. After Anna’s death, it went hollow, became a vast echochamber.” 36 It seems that the house is in “an invisible communion” with its owner, i.e., Anna. With the house which goes “hollow”, becomes “a 31

Ibid., 296. Banville, The Sea, 68. 33 Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 63. 34 Trigg, The Memory of Place, 296. 35 Ibid., 298. 36 Banville, The Sea, 146. 32

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vast echo-chamber”, i.e., with the house which after Anna’s death loses “the density of human experience” 37 and turns into an open vacuum, and with Max feeling displaced within his own implacement (“There was something hostile in the air, too, the growling surliness of an old hound unable to understand where its beloved mistress has gone and resentful of the master who remains”38), the lived dialectics no longer provides a place of Being;39 Max no longer feels he is “at home” while at home. The house (“Our house, or my house, as supposedly it was now”40) seems to be in its “growling surliness” abjecting Max’s presence within its premises. Indeed, the house í should we think of the house as a dwelling place whose accessibility, to follow Edward S. Casey, “presupposes the presence and activity of the inhabitant’s lived body”41 í assumes a powerful agency since the house as a dwelling place becomes the extension of its owner’s body: “the longer we reside in places, the more we feel “at home” in our dwelling places, the more they become places “in our own bodily image.”42 With the house as the bodily image of its owneríAnnaíwho is now dead, the fundamental character of Max’s being at home rather than feeling “at home” assumes a form of angst, i.e., ‘not-being-at-home’/ uncanny,43 whereby the familiar and the usual are disrupted. Angst, on the other hand, is not a condition of subjective experience which befalls one under certain circumstances, for example, someone’s death. Angst, as Heidegger explains, is indefinite, i.e., it “does not know what it is about which it is anxious.”44 To further follow Heidegger, “what oppresses us is not this or that, nor is it everything objectively present together as a sum, but the possibility of things at hand in general, that is, the world itself [...] this means that that about which Angst is anxious is being-in-the-world itself.” 45 In other words, as angst pierces through one’s being, the one through the experience of uncanniness/ not-being-at-home is befallen with the feeling of unhomeliness although the “worldliness persists, as do the ontic lives of beings.”46 37

Casey, Imagining, xi. Banville, The Sea, 146. 39 For more: Heidegger, Being and Time. 40 Banville, The Sea, 146. 41 Casey, Getting Back into Place, 116. 42 Ibid., 120. 43 Heidegger, Being and Time, 176-177. 44 Ibid., 174. 45 Ibid., 175. 46 Trigg, The Memory of Place, 305. 38

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Through angst, indeed, the worldliness persists: Max is aware that the house as a dwelling place is his place, i.e., it is his implacement, but at the same time the house as a place is not that of his own life (at the moment). Max feels he must be somewhere else, not where he is. Merleau-Ponty notes that “I can ‘be somewhere else’ while staying here, and if I am kept far away from what I love, I feel out of touch with the real life.”47 Max’s dream í as an agency which amalgamates the modalities of the past into a whole í is that what gives presence to what has been temporarily displaced in Max’s lived experience, i.e., it is the dream that ontologically validates homecoming for Max: A dream it was that drew me here. In it, I was walking along a country road, that was all. In was in winter, at dusk, or else it was a strange sort of dimly radiant night, the sort of night that there is only in dreams, and a wet snow was falling. I was determinedly on my way somewhere, going home, it seemed, although I did not know what or where exactly home might be. […] I was calm in myself, quite calm, and confident, too, despite not knowing rightly where I was going except that I was going home. I was alone on the road. [...] But I woke into the murk of dawn not as I usually do these days, with the sense of having been flayed of yet another layer of protective skin [...] Immediately then, and for the first time in I do not know how long, I thought of Ballyless and the house there on Station Road, and the Graces, and Chloe Grace [...] it told me what to do, and where I must go.48

As Merleau-Ponty says, “in dreaming as in myth we learn where the phenomenon is to be found, by feeling that towards which our desire goes out, what our hearts dread, on what our life depends.”49 It is in his dream that Max comes to a certain visceral certainty about what he desires, what his heart dreads, on what his life depends. Although much remains opaque within the dream, at the same time there is a high degree of certainty that “this was a journey of surpassing but inexplicable importance, one that I must make and was bound to complete.”50 It is in his dream that the feeling of homecoming (and homelessness) is summoned; homecoming, as Casey explains, is not about actual former home, that is, the literal house. “What matters most now is the fact of return to the same place.”51 Max returns to Ballyless, the seaside village, which one summer saw the arrival 47

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 286. Banville, The Sea, 24-26. 49 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 285. 50 Banville, The Sea, 24-25. 51 Casey, Getting Back into Place, 290. 48

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of the Grace family to the summer house called the Cedars; it was also the summer which saw Max enter into a somewhat incompatible and discordant relationship with the Grace family, and finally, it was the summer which claimed the twins Chloe and Myles: they quietly walked into the sea to never come back. As homecoming is taking place, it implicates certain alliances “with those who still remain there; with those who were once there but are now dead or departed; with my own memories; with my own current self, disparate as it doubtless is from the self who once lived in this same place; and above all with the home-place I once left.”52 Soon after Max has that dream of walking homeward in the snow, he leaves his house and journeys down to Ballyless: When we arrived I marveled to see how much of the village as I remembered it was still there, if only for eyes that knew where to look, mine, that is. It was like encountering an old flame behind whose features thickened by age the slender lineaments that a former self so loved can still be clearly discerned. We passed the deserted railway station [...] and there it was all before me, the hill road, and the beach at the bottom, and the sea. [...] There are moments when the past has a force so strong it seems one might be annihilated by it.53

Not only does he pass by the deserted railway station, takes the hill road towards the beach, Max also passes by and through many other places: the Cedars house (the house that the Grace family would rent that particular summer), Station Road, the Cliff Walk (“whatever cliffs there may once have been the sea had long ago eroded”54), the Strand Café, “advertising cigarettes, Navy Cut, with a picture of a bearded sailor inside a lifebuoy”55; on his way he walks by the “houses, shops, two hotels – the Golf, the Beach – a granite church, Myler’s grocery-cum-post-office-cumpub, and then the field – the Field – of wooden chalets one of which was our holiday home, my father’s, my mother’s, and mine”56 etc. Almost each place that he passes by, takes or crosses, has its history: as he stops by Duignan’s lane, “ambling between tangled hedges of hawthorn and dusted-over brambles,”57 he remembers that “here as a boy I would walk down every morning, barefoot and bearing a dented billycan on my way to 52

Ibid., 291. Banville, The Sea, 46-47. 54 Ibid., 12. 55 Ibid., 13. 56 Ibid., 13. 57 Ibid., 51. 53

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buy the day’s milk from Duignan the dairyman [...] Now here I was at the farm gate again […] an ill-painted sign on the gate-post warned trespassers of prosecution.”58 As he disobeys the warning, Max walks on to the premises of the farm and intrudes upon the stillness of those who dwell on it. Throughout an awkward conversation with an “elderly young woman” who lives now in the house where once the Duignans lived, Max learns that some of the Duignan family members had died already, some are in a nursing home “somewhere along the coast.”59 It seems that as Max cuts across the Duignan field, passes through and over some other places, and approaches the Cedars house, he not only remembers what these places looked like when he was a child, he also recollects the sounds in alliance with some of the places: he remembers the creak of the gate at the Cedars on which Myles would swing: (“[…] creaked in the sea breeze on its salt-rusted hinges, an echo of the gate at the Cedars on which for all I knew the boy was swinging yet”60). It becomes apparent that the place always holds us fast bodily and memorially. Body memory and place memory hold and enfold each other into a whole. Therefore, as Max re-enters the places, he seems to be re-entering not only the places per se but also the past of a world that is gone forever; one is reminded of it by its extant traces, if any (visible). As he rents a room in the Cedars house and gets settled, he muses over how “the Cedars has retained hardly anything of the past, of the part of the past that I knew here. I had hoped for something definite of the Graces, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, a faded photo, say, forgotten in a drawer, a lock of hair, or even a hair-pin, lodged between the floorboards, but there was nothing, nothing like that.” 61 It follows that homecoming is not only an alliance with those who still remain there and do not offer their names once they are intruded upon; with those who were once there but are now dead or departed; homecoming is also about retaining the (temporal) continuum of the self. And it is imagination, as Trigg suggests, that “contributes to the continuity of the memory of place, and thus the unity of the bodily self.”62 Since his journey is a homecoming journey, as Max has explained it to himself, there is an implication that the one who goes home, will be taken in: “Having to go home is having to go back to where you will be taken in – in a place in which you can move about with ease 58

Ibid., 51-53. Ibid., 56. 60 Ibid., 13. 61 Ibid., 39. 62 Trigg, The Memory of Place, 169. 59

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and familiarity. […] Here, in this now, you are received as a person who belongs to this place, a home-person who calls for being welcomed back.”63 Therefore, with Max navigating through different places in the village (here and there/ near and far / above / below, ahead/ behind, left/right etc.)64, taking a walk along the beach, reentering the Cedars house, to follow Casey, “cross-seams and overseams conjoin in the dense double stitchery of body-in-place and place-in-body.” 65 In other words, if we follow the line of thought that there is a reciprocal agency between place and self, Max expects to be “taken in” as a “home-person who calls for being welcomed back”66, i.e., he expects a certain degree of reciprocal affinity with the places he traverses. However, what Max gets is a considerable ambiguity, rather than reciprocal affinity, especially when it comes to the people-in-places: the woman who now lives in the Duignan family house does not partake in the pursuit of the place memory that Max is after. Miss Vavasour is not in this pursuit either (“The conversation did not flow. Miss Vavasour was nervous still [...]).”67 The ambiguity, paradoxically, befalls one once “memory enters the scene.”68 The paradox lies in that “memory plays a fundamental role in uniting self and world”69; the tension, to go further by Trigg’s phenomenological thought, arises in that how place retains its meaningful presence as it is imposed over by a static image of memory, “whereby the lived past is superimposed on the still-unfolding present.”70 Max says: “Memory dislikes motion, preferring to hold things still, and as with so many of these remembered scenes I see this one as a tableau.” 71 Once Max enters the Cedars, he notes the following: “The hall I did not recognize at all. […] I do not recall there having been a hallway here. [...] I found that the model of the house in my head, try as it would to accommodate itself to the original, kept coming up against a stubborn resistance.”72 The static image of the memory of the inside of the house that Max has imposes itself over the present unfolding moment; and as it happens, the image is somewhat foreign to the present lived experience of 63

Casey, Getting Back into Place, 300. Ibid., 43-105. 65 Ibid., 103. 66 Ibid., 300. 67 Banville, The Sea, 148. 68 Trigg, The Memory of Place, 171. 69 Ibid., 171. 70 Ibid., 171. 71 Banville, The Sea, 221. 72 Ibid., 156. 64

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the place (“Everything was slightly out of scale, all angles slightly out of true. […] I experienced a sense almost of panic as the real took hold of the things I thought I remembered […]”73) unless imagination is summoned. Imagination, as a unitary act, “reconciles the otherness of the world with the insidedness of the subject. More specifically, the imagination can be seen to blur the divisions between inside and out, meaning that “belonging” to place is not interrupted by the discontinuous breaks in memory.”74 It is because of the imagination that integrates the discontinuity between the memory of the place and the present experience of the place that Max feels he belongs to the Cedars house, i.e., he calls the place home (“a place of refuge”) although the house has never been it to him: When Miss Vavasour left me in what from now on was to be my room I threw my coat over a chair and sat down on the side of the bed and breathed deep the stale unlived-in air, and felt that I had been travelling for a long time, for years, and had at last arrived at the destination to where, all along, without knowing it, I had been bound, and where I must stay, it being, for now, the only possible place, the only possible refuge, for me. 75

The discontinuities between Max’s memories of the place (the village and the Cedars house) and the present (fragmented) moment, does not preclude a sense of reciprocal affirmation or unity; in other words, Max evokes the village and the Cedars house imaginatively, i.e., as he rediscovers the place, and seeks to re-implace himself in the present, he seeks reciprocity with the place. To re-implace oneself is to make an alliance between place and self (the “in” of the self); in other words, “the efficacy of places” should be looked for “within our intimate lives”. These are the lives we live from within, in ourselves”76; the alliance between the physical interiority of the place and the interiority of the self “runs thick as it runs deep.”77 The alliance is grounded in the memory of place the depth of which is measured by its “thickness”; as Casey frames it, remembering (recognizing, reminiscing) possesses a depth “not easily penetrable by the direct light of consciousness […].”78 Its “thickness”, to further follow Casey, lies in that it is constituted through its sediment of layers, i.e., a set of memories of a 73

Ibid., 156. Trigg, The Memory of Place, 172. 75 Banville, The Sea, 157. 76 Casey, Getting Back into Place, 311. 77 Casey, Remembering, 268. 78 Ibid., 265. 74

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concentrated emotional significance which clusters around a particular place.79 The place is the Cedars house and the seaside the memory of which has accumulated into the sediment of a set of memories about the Grace family. These memories are of a concentrated emotional significance to Max (as much as to Miss Vavasour) taking in the feelings of loss and mourning. The thick texture of the memory of the Graces and that particular (traumatic) summer enfolds in sedimentary layers of ever-growing density as Max traverses the places of his (troubled) childhood, he pauses outside the Cedars house first as he, among many other things, remembers their motorcar (“it was a low-slung, scarred and battered black model with beige leather seats and a big spoked polished wood steering wheel)” 80, their voices inside the house (“the girl laughed again and gave a wild, warbling cry of mock-panic”)81, Mr. Grace (“As he turned back to the house his eye caught mine and he winked”) 82. Max also remembers the first time he saw, rather than heard, Chloe (“she was markedly pale and soulful of expression”)83, Mrs. Grace (“she had been in the sea and was wearing a black swimsuit, tight and darkly lustrous as sealskin [...]”) 84, and Myles (“at his father’s feet, pouting moodily and delving in the sand with a jagged piece of sea-polished driftwood […]”)85, and Rose (Miss Vavasour), the nursemaid of the twins Chloe and Myles. However, the density of the memory of the Grace family becomes suffocating (by the end of the narrative Max attempts suicide by walking into the sea). The thickness of memory, to go by what Casey formulates, “exists in relation to what we might call the factor of the "unresolved remainder."”86 Ballyless for Max is a place of unresolved and unredeemed remainders, which “run as thick as they run deep.”87 What has not been resolved by Max is his discordant sexual infatuation with Mrs. Grace (“And I have fallen in love with Mrs. Grace”88; “at times the image of her would spring up in me unbidden, an interior succubus [...]”89), the 79

Ibid., 265. Banville, The Sea, 6. 81 Ibid., 7. 82 Ibid., 7. 83 Ibid., 27. 84 Ibid., 28. 85 Ibid., 27. 86 Casey, Remembering, 266. 87 Ibid., 268. 88 Banville, The Sea, 32. 89 Ibid., 88. 80

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ambiguously intimate relationship between the twins Chloe and Myles (“I got up the nerve to ask Chloe straight out to tell me […] what it felt like, this state of unavoidable intimacy with her brother – her other! […] ‘Like two magnets’, she said, ‘but turned the wrong way, pulling and pushing’” 90 , the muteness of Myles (“his muteness was a pervasive and cloying emanation. He said nothing but was never silent”91, his own childhood love for Chloe (“when exactly I transferred my affectionsí […] – from mother to daughter I cannot recollect”92), and, among some other things (Rose’s secret), the death of Chloe and Myles, who “stood up and waded into the sea [..] they were far out now, the two of them, so far as to be pale dots between pale sky and paler sea, and then one of the dots disappeared. After that it was all over very quickly, I mean what we could see of it.” 93 The memory of the traumatic experience of Chloe’s and Myles’s death (walking into the sea and drowning themselves) has remained as an unconscious presence (an “unresolved remainder”) within Max and has left him within the “phantom zone”, in which, as Trigg says, “the opposing modes of memory and flesh feed upon one another”94, and at the heart of which “is the moment whereupon the rational self catches sight of the body being reconstituted for a different history.”95 It has not been once when Max would see himself maintained at a distance, estranged through and from the immanence of his body: I was plagued by coincidences; long-forgotten things were suddenly remembered; objects turned up that for years had been lost. My life seemed to be passing before me, not in a flash as it is said to do for those about to drown, but in a sort of leisurely convulsion [...] in preparation for the moment when I must step into the black boat on the shadowed river with the coin of passage cold in my already coldening hand. [...] And even years before that again, standing for instance with Mrs Grace [...] or sitting with Chloe [...], I was there and not there, myself and revenant, immured in the moment and yet hovering somehow on the point of departure.96

It is the sea, it seems, that has the power to mediate the estranged body (“myself and revenant”), which, as Max implicates, at times is maintained at a distance. The two–conscious and unconsciousíselves are kept at a 90

Ibid., 81. Ibid., 83. 92 Ibid., 140. 93 Ibid., 244. 94 Trigg., The Memory of Place, 253. 95 Ibid., 253. 96 Banville, The Sea, 97-98. 91

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distance but in close proximity to each other. The reunion, though, is not simple as the two selves “retain a temporal distance from each other. […] We witness an amorphous fusion of those selves […] that simultaneously belong and do not belong.” 97 It is the sea, which claims the lives of Chloe and Myles, where Max’s displacement begins; for Max, the departure from a home-place begins here and with it further displacements induce feelings of desolation. On the other hand, it is the sea that has power to provide the ground for reunion (healing) between the two selves. The sea, to return to Casey, is the “ground for vessels that float on it and count on it for support”. “Ground means such things as justifying reason, […] supporting structure–all of which imply firm stability, “something to stand on,” “being well-grounded,” ”having a sound basis.”98 Casey adds that “without a sense of stable ground – [...] – we are lost: abandoned, desolated and prevented from proceeding further.”99 Indeed, Max feels he is groundless, desolate, displaced, left in ruins. It is not only the traumatic memory of Chloe and Myles that leaves him in ruins and adds to the density of the memory of place; an “unresolved remainder” is the memory of Anna’s presence (absence) in Max’s life: “I make myself think of her, I do it as an exercise. She is lodged in me like a knife and yet I am beginning to forget her.”100 What Max is testifying to is his coming to the realization of how little he knew Anna: “I mean, how shallowly I knew her, how ineptly. I do not blame myself for this. Perhaps I should. [..] The truth is, we did not wish to know each other.” 101 He confessedly admits that what he found in Anna was the fantasy of himself, the “medium of his transmutation”, “the fairground mirror in which all my distortions would be made straight.” 102 As Anna’s condition was declining, he also confesses to wishing Anna drown herself in the bath: “I imagined her slipping down without a sound in the enormous old claw-footed bath until her face was under the surface and taking a last long watery breath.”103 As Max confesses, whom does he speak to? Does his confession implicate the possibility of forgiveness? If the possibility of forgiveness is implicated, then who is there to forgive the confessor?

97

Trigg, The Memory of Place, 264. Casey, Getting Back into Place, 212. 99 Ibid., 212. 100 Banville, The Sea., 215. 101 Ibid., 215. 102 Ibid., 216. 103 Ibid., 154. 98

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In summary, all the unresolved remainders in the thickness of memory are remanents, i.e., what is left behind, remaining. The remanents linger in our memory like ghosts or revenants which haunt us. It is only through mourning-remembering (‘memory’ in Old English murnan for “mourn, remember sorrowfully”), as Casey writes, that these remanents/revenants are transformed into remnants: "But it is precisely because mourning is a slowly enacted process of working-through that it manages to transform such remanents/revenants into genuine remnants: exorcising the ghosts of their external haunting power and aiding us in identifying with what is left.”104 It seems that homecoming for Max is also a process of mourning, i.e., working-through itírememberingíto transform the remanents/revenants into remnants and coming to acceptance of what has been left. If Max is the one who has been left to transform remanents into remnants, if he is the one who has been left to mourn, i.e., to come to terms with what has been left í mourning is in close alliance with an act of delaying, pausing; etymologically, delaying, pausing in Old Irish is maraim, i.e., "I remain”í he is the one who has remained, the one who is a remainder/remanent. As a remainder, Max is dis-implaced in his implacement: he neither belongs to the past nor is he fully in the present. Homecoming is, therefore, never completed; it is, in its essence, spectral (etymologically, ‘home’ is akin to ‘haunt’), with its referent in question. As the nostalgic body submits to yearning for the outside world making the inside of the body weary (dis-implaced), Max is summoned to complete what has been left incomplete; however, to resolve whatever has been left unresolved, to acknowledge the event means being able to acknowledge the place (if place is coincident with events and things in the past) and to acknowledge the place, one needs to return to the place to “reexperience the memory of the event in its visceral reality.”105 Upon his return to Ballyless, Max revisits the past places in the village; these past places and the experience of these places return to him. As they return to him, the body “becomes less the center of lived experience and more the threshold to a place distinct from the one I currently inhabit.”106 The human body becomes its own doppelganger: “thus, my concept of “I” is met not simply with another “I”, but instead with a “non-I”107; it is another subjectivity that comes in: “but who is it that lingers there on the strand in the half-light […] What phantom version of me is it that watches us – them – those three children – as they grow indistinct in that cinereal air 104

Casey, Remembering, 237. Trigg, The Memory of Place, 208. 106 Ibid., 290. 107 Ibid., 291. 105

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[…]?”108 In this lived experience, it seems, that Max’s self-presentation is both being not regarded and being present regarding the world-undernostalgement from afar. Ballyless is a past world/ the lived world (of his childhood); the past world is a lost world, a world that no longer exists; it is the ‘world-undernostalgement”109: it cannot be re-joined, neither can it be re-experienced or re-entered because past “was never strictly present.”110 It follows then that nostalgia is a sense of longing for a world in a place that was never present and yet never absent from one’s lived experience. Ballyless, therefore, as a place which has never been absent, is a place-in-particular, i.e., a place which has certain empirical features111: it is geographically locatable in the narrative, it is the locus of Max’s childhood, it is also the locus of his discordant relationship with the Grace family, it is the locus of death, too; it is the seascape-deathscape which claimed Chloe and Myles (for no apparent reason), it is the locus of the Cedars house, rented by the Graces, and now run by Miss Vavasour. Yet, Ballyless is also a plenum-of-places, “an encompassing whole made up of particular places in dynamic interaction with each other.” 112 As the world which has never been present, it is the world-undernostalgement; a world which is “in between”: “definite and unattainable.”113 It is the world that has vanished, leaving very scarce traces of the past, “a world that has become irretrievably past and that arrays itself, as we remember it now, in a plenitude of places.”114 Ballyless is like a nostalgic noema, the phenomenon of “gathering” which brings together “our whole life project.”115 The moment of “gathering”, of coming to a grasp of one’s life, is essential as “we do not thematically have ourselves together; we are not perpetually in possession of ourselves.” 116 It follows then that nostalgia is a sense of longing for a place which if it has ever been present, it has been present as a no-place. Etymologically and grammatically, Ballyless is a no-place, a place without a place, a void, i.e., the place name Ballyless consists of two affixes – a common Gaelic

108

Banville, The Sea, 137. Casey, “The World of Nostalgia”, 364. 110 Ibid., 365. 111 Ibid., 377. 112 Ibid., 378. 113 Ibid., 379. 114 Casey, “The World of Nostalgia”, 380. 115 Hart, “Toward a Phenomenology of Nostalgia”, 405. 116 Ibid., 405. 109

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prefix of town names in Ireland ‘bally’, meaning “place of’”117 – and the suffix “less”, signifying the absence “of the thing mentioned”. It follows that Ballyless is “a place ofíwithout a place”, i.e., Ballyless is a phenomenon of paradoxical reciprocity between presence and absence, place and no-place. Ballyless is a place, grammatically approached, a sum of a prefix and a suffix with its stem absent. Its stem is missing like the nostalgic noema which has its noematic kernel, but “presents itself as not recapturable.”118 It is a place and a no-place devoid of its materiality. It is a place of nostalgia; it is a place in “between”. Heidegger maintains that our being-in-the-world (Dasein) is “the “between” [Zwischen] which has the character of a mid-point that is open and thus sheltering, between the arrival and flight of gods and man, who is rooted in that “between.”119 With gods who have departed (“They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights [...]”,120 Max remains “in between”, i.e., dis-implaced within his own implacement, rooted in his rootlessness and estranged in the midst of the place which is his home-place but at the same time it is the place which presents itself as not recapturable. To further follow Heidegger, “enowing and Dasein are still fully hidden and will remain strange for a long time yet. For there are no bridges, and the leaps are not yet accomplished. Lacking is the depth of an experience of truth and mindfulness that is sufficient to both [...].”121 It follows then that being-inthe-world is a journey/ passage, not necessarily to the places that are fixed, or to the places that have roads and bridges. There is never a direct passage to where we are going or need to go, the passages are always discontinuous. Sometimes one must “take off for the leap, by which alone a beginning and specifically the other beginning – as constantly overtaken by the first one – can begin.”122 Max leaves the Cedars when his daughter Claire comes to Ballyless to take him back home: “[…] that I must pack up and leave the Cedars forthwith and let her take me home – home, she says! – where she will care for me [..] What am I to do? […] Oh, yes, life

117

“On Irish Names and Their Evolution” (accessed November 10, 2016). http://www.wesleyjohnston.com/users/ireland/geography/placenames.html 118 Hart, “Toward a Phenomenology of Nostalgia”, 399. 119 Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 23. 120 Banville, The Sea, 3. 121 Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 23. 122 Ibid., 162.

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is pregnant with possibilities.”123 Taking off for the leap is abandoning everything familiar, expecting nothing in return immediately. Eventually, if homecoming, as a being-in-the-world, is journeying from one place to another, if homecoming is being in “between”, then place is also in the midst of its own (thematic) contents; as it is its own midst, it gathers its members together: histories, experiences, memories, things. An act of departure from the place is the moment of transition to the new place one is about to enter. As the transition from one place to another is intermittent, something is lost en-route. Loss is always painful whatever form it may assume, but perhaps the most difficult is “the loss of loss itself: somewhere, sometime, something was lost, but no story can be told about it; no memory can retrieve it; a fractured horizon looms in which to make one’s way as a spectral agency, one for whom a full “recovery” is impossible, one for whom the irrecoverable becomes, paradoxically, the condition of a new [...] agency.”124 Once there is no possibility of knowing what/who has been lost, and what/whom one mourns, how is the one mourned?

Works Cited Banville, John. The Sea. London: Picador, 2005. Butler, Judith. “Afterword: After Loss, What Then?” In Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Edited by David Eng and David L. and Kazanjian. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, Ltd. Casey, Edward S. Getting Back into Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. —. “The World of Nostalgia.” In Man and World (20), 361-384, 1987. —. Imagining. A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. —. Remembering. A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000. Eng, David L. and David Kazanjian, eds. Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, Ltd. Hart, James G. “Toward a Phenomenology of Nostalgia”. In Man and World 6 (4): 397-420, 1973.

123 124

Banville, The Sea, 261. Butler, “Afterword: After Loss, What Then?” 467.

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Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996. —. “Letter on Humanism.” In Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger. Edited by David Farrell Krell. London: Routledge, 2010. —. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning).Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989. Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind.” In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited by Galen A. Johnson. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Evantson, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993. —. The World of Perception. Translated by Oliver Davis. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Svenaeus, Fredrik. “The Phenomenology of Health and Illness.” In Handbook of Phenomenology and Medicine, edited by S.Kay Toombs. Springer Science+Business Mecia, B.V. 87-108. ISBN 978-94-10105364-4. Trigg, Dylan. The Memory of Place. A Phenomenology of the Uncanny. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. —. On Photography. New York: RossettaBooks, LLC, 2005. Watkiss, Joanne. “Ghosts in the Head: Mourning, Memory and Derridean ‘Trace’ in John Banville’s The Sea”, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (2), 4 October 2007, at: https://irishgothichorror.wordpress.com/issue2/

LIARS, SIMILES AND STORY-TELLERS IN THE BLUE-GUITAR (2015) BY JOHN BANVILLE: ANAMNESIS AND FORGERY THIERRY ROBIN

“What a memory I have, to retain so many things and so clearly; I must be imagining them.”1 “The past beats inside me like a second heart.”2

The Blue Guitar (2015) by prize-winning and critically acclaimed Irish writer John Banville (born in Wexford in 1945) is but the latest development–his 17th novel as it stands–in his long series of works all dealing–sometimes obliquely–with the construction of personal or collective memory, truth, knowledge and art. One remembers his science tetralogy–from Doctor Copernicus in 1976 to his 1986 Mefisto, as obvious instances of how the subjective perception of events, be they scientific phenomena or historical upheavals are all rendered through the puzzling figure of the unreliable narrator–whose Banvillean archetype may well be Freddie Montgomery in The Book of Evidence. In The Blue Guitar precisely themes take more after Banville’s “art trilogy”, from his 1989 masterpiece The Book of Evidence–whose title is deliberately mentioned as a metafictional hint3– to Athena (1995). As The Guardian’s critic Andrew Motion states in his review of The Blue Guitar, “Novels with plots that are slight or familiar-seeming tend to compensate by pumping

1

Banville, The Blue Guitar, 221. For more on stories and lies see also ibid., 224, 244. 2 Banville, The Sea, 13. 3 Banville, The Blue Guitar, 242.

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up the idiosyncrasy of the narrative voice.”4 Far from the historical ground-breaking discoveries in physics or astronomy informing Kepler (1981) or Doctor Copernicus, The Blue Guitar actually offers a “cubist approach to the truth”5, and also to one’s past and memories into the same bargain. As Oliver Otway Orme, its first-person narrator, neatly summarizes about death, oblivion and subjectivity in the book proper: It has always seemed to me that one of the more deplorable aspects of dying, aside from the terror, pain and filth, is the fact that when I’m gone there will be no one here to register the world in just the way that I do.6

Hence The Blue Guitar is a book about the importance of the subjective “registering” of events, also as a consequence about the perception and reconstruction inherent in all narratives, be they Lyotardesque master narratives,–as in Banville’s 1973 Birchwood which is a very partial mockgothic rendition of Irish History–or mere individual itineraries–like Orme’s in The Blue Guitar or Max Morden’s in The Sea (2005). This essay purports to shed light on this founding problem constitutive of Banville’s work and perfectly analysed by Frank Ankersmit: […] as has been pointed out by constructivists and narrativist philosophers of history, historical reality itself is just as invisible to the eye as the God of the iconoclast, we know it only in and by its representations. […] Of that reality we can therefore say that it is as much made as found, and the impossibility of distinguishing clearly between these two is not so much a thesis about the vagueness of the borderline between fiction and history […] as a questioning of these words themselves if applied to historical writing.7

This essay will first endeavour to show to what extent The Blue Guitar is in keeping with the rest of Banville’s literary canon. Secondly, after explaining why the very process of “registering” events, data and facts is central to the plot, I will explain how the logic of comparison reveals the ambivalent aesthetic and moral agenda in Banville’s novels. Finally and conversely, we will conclude insisting on the crucial importance of the 4

Andrew Motion “The Blue Guitar by John Banville review – a tale of art, theft and adultery” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/28/the-blue-guitarjohn-banville-review-novel 5 Ibid. 6 Banville, The Blue Guitar, 11, my emphasis. 7 Frank R. Ankersmit, History and Tropology, The Rise and Fall of Metaphor, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, 190.

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binary oscillating between anamnesis and forgery in the book, which proves as central to it as the binary dissociating artistic and historical representations in Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit’s 1994 seminal essay History and Tropology, The Rise and Fall of Metaphor.

History vs stories Precisely Banville goes further than merely assert an overlapping ambiguity between stories and History, he actually posits the final prevalence or endurance of fiction, story-telling or construction of the truth, “this extraordinary fairy-tale thing [we] fashion for ourselves out of what [seems] so much detritus.”8 To Banville eventually what is worth pondering over is the problematic presentation not to say performance of historical reality as analysed by Ankersmit: We may conclude […] in the writing of History that we cannot properly speak of historical representation at all. For, the term representation requires the presence of an independently given (historical) reality which is, next, represented in and by historical writing. […] And in accordance with the postmodernist fascination with performance, one could at most say that historical writing offers us a presentation (instead of a representation) of the past.9

In other words, as made explicit by Ankersmit, to most postmodernist critics, historical writing is performance and the past does not exist per se independently of the performance of the act of writing History, which proves problematic to do in a strictly objective thoroughly comprehensive unbiased fashion. That is why by postmodernist standards writing novels and writing History have more in common than one may expect. Though Ankersmit goes to great lengths to criticize this viewpoint, he acknowledges its cogency. This emphasis on the performance inherent in writing History comes in handy to account for the swarming presence of actors, art historians, writers of sorts or mere artists in Banville’s work. In other words, art is ubiquitous to account for human experience in both individual and collective terms. As in The Blue Guitar, where we are faced with a problematic representer of reality that is a painter called Orme. The very name of this painter is a clear indication of the thorny disconnection from or tainted presentation of reality. The identity of the narrator can be apprehended though a series of riddles and assonances. Oliver Otway 8 9

Banville, The Blue Guitar, 244. Ankersmit, History and Tropology, The Rise and Fall of Metaphor, 191.

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Orme, that is a triple “O” or even “zero”, is introduced in an ominously reflexive manner: Orme. That’s my name. A few of you, art lovers, art haters, may remember it, from bygone times. Oliver Orme. Oliver Otway Orme, in fact. OOO. An absurdity. You could hang me over the door of a pawnshop. Otway, by the by, after an undistinguished street where my parents lived when they were young and first together and where, presumably, they initiated me. Orme is a plausible name for a painter, isn’t it? A painterly name. It looked well, down at the tight-hand corner of a canvas, modestly minuscule, the O an owlish eye, the r rather art-nouveauish and more like a Greek W, the m a pair of shoulders shaking in rich mirth, the e like–oh, I don’t know what. Or yes, I do: like the handle of a chamber pot. So there you have me. Orme the master painter, who paints no more. What I want to say is10

This speech by the narrator ends bluntly after the verb “is” and none other could underscore more blatantly the force of semblance or narrative representation through words and language that is the arrangement of words and word patterns on paper to account for the outside world. Words and names keep drawing the reader’s attention though onto their ambivalent status in the book as regards their relationship with reality, just like letters and sounds described through baroque images and tropes underlining their own arbitrary or purely conventional nature. The initials are seen as “an absurdity”. “O O O” sounds skeptical at best, or pointing to sarcasm and comical denial. The concept of plausibility is put forward by the same narrator: “Orme is a plausible name for a painter, isn’t it?” Paradoxically, the same narrator who pretends to think Orme is a very apt name for a painter, asks for the reader’s approval and by doing so emphasizes his own lack of certainty expressed through the question: “a plausible name for a painter, isn’t it”, just as if the whole topic was a matter of plausibility, or willing suspension of disbelief in front of some obvious fake or scandalous fraud. Later Orme lets his anxiety slip by remarking “Authentic: there’s another word that always worries me.”11 Thus the narrator’s identity is defined right from the start in reflexive terms as an unlikely tale, something vaguely absurd, a fiction where oozes a permanent anxiety of fraudulence. It is also defined through far-fetched visual analogues concerning the letters, as though the name referred to nothing but to the mysterious nature of signs and to language itself. Orme looks like “an owlish eye”, “an art-nouveauish curve”, “a pair of shoulders 10 11

Banville, The Blue Guitar, 4. Ibid., 167.

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shaking with mirth” and… “a chamber pot.”12 The list is baroque and ends farcically in self-deprecation through the unlikely scatological “chamberpot”. This reinforces again the chasm separating language and names from reality or reality from its representation, as hinted at by the artist on the brink of a painter’s block: One day I saw the problem, just like that, and nothing was to be the same again. And what was the problem? It was this: that out there is the world and in here is the picture of it, and between the two yawns the man-killing crevasse.13

This strongly echoes Ankersmit’s tropological comparative approach to History and art: With regard to representation, it will be obvious that the artist is in a more comfortable position than the historian. We can emphasize […] the uncertainties of our visual perception of the world of things as much as we like, but we should never let this make us forget that landscapes and human faces, and so on, are given to us in a way that the past never is. […] there is room in art for a simple "look and see" ideology that could never be plausible in historiography. There is, so to speak, a "synonymy" between the objects as represented by the artist and the objects themselves that is painfully absent in the historical representation of the past. […]14

Part of the angst felt by the narrators in Banville’s books can be accounted by the insecurity due to the convergence not to say confusion between codes of artistic representation and historical representation. It is as if the artist felt permanent guilt derived from the realization of his own imposture as regards the depiction of an ultimate ideal truth. Guilt therefore constitutes a leitmotiv in the novel.15 The man-killing crevasse is that of subjectivity which is not fully accepted by the same narrators who feel like they are liars, frauds. The portmanteau word coined by Banville to refer to this con artist’s status is unmistakable, it is that of the “painster”. The word “painster”, in addition to conjuring up a whole world of pains and sufferings, hesitation and torment, also refers to the archetypal figure of the trickster16, tampering with the truth be it that of the 12

Ibid., 167. Ibid., 29. 14 Ibid., 116. 15 Ibid., 24, 40, 41, 47, 61, 66, 68, 81, 94, 163, 166, 179, 211, 216, etc. 16 According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, a trickster tale, in oral traditions worldwide, is “a story featuring a protagonist (often an anthropomorphized animal) 13

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representations brushed by painter or the novelist. The Banvillean unreliable narrator strikes again with a vengeance taking after Freddie Montgomery’s final avowal in The Book of Evidence when asked by the inspector how much of his story was true: “True, inspector? I said. All of it. None of it. Only the shame”.17 Otway, by the way, far from referring to an obscure street somewhere in Ireland, might well refer to the English playwright Thomas Otway, who died of poverty after an affair with the earl of Rochester’s lover that is Elizabeth Barry. Otway is mostly famous for writing The Orphan or the Unhappy Marriage in 1680. This implicit indirect reference to cuckoldry and a playwright in the narrator’s very name deepens the allegorical reading and mise-en-abyme observable in the novel. As a matter of fact, it is a literal rendition of the Shakespearean hackneyed pre-Goffmanian18 adage that “The world is a stage”19 (As You Like It, Act II, sc. 7, 1599). The first thing I ever stole, the first thing I remember stealing, was a tube of oil paint. Yes I know, it seems altogether too pat, doesn’t it, since I was to be an artist and all, but there you are. The scene of the crime was Geppetto’s toyshop up a narrow lane off Saint Swithin Street –yes these names, I know, I’m making them up as I go along.20

Let us note in passing the revealing difference between the fact “I stole” and the immediate qualification and correction “I remember stealing”, because according to the narrator you never really remember actual facts but your perception of them. Of course, the explicit reference to Collodi’s Pinocchio, is a reference to the narrator as a self-confessed

who has magical powers and is characterized as a compendium of opposites. Simultaneously an omniscient creator and an innocent fool, a malicious destroyer and a childlike prankster, the trickster-hero serves as a sort of folkloric scapegoat onto which are projected the fears, failures, and unattained ideals of the source culture. While Banville’s novels are –strictly speaking–obviously far from folklore or oral tales, they still exhibit features similar to the “compendium of opposites”, that is “simultaneously an omniscient creator and an innocent fool, a malicious destroyer and a childlike prankster” who serves as a scapegoat “onto which are projected the fears, failures, and unattained ideals of the source culture”. https://global.britannica.com/art/trickster-tale 21 December 2016. 17 Banville, The Book of Evidence, p. 220. 18 Erving Goffman famously stated that “All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify”. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 72. 19 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, sc. 7, 139. 20 Banville, The Blue Guitar, 17, my emphasis.

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liar implied in “I know I’m making them up as I go along”. The whole process of anamnesis is described powerfully through the original sin committed by the narrator in Geppetto’s toyshop. Geppetto’s real name is not Geppetto of course but to the narrator’s tentative admission: His real name was Johnson or Jameson or Jimson, I can’t remember exactly, but I called him Geppetto because, with his fuzzy white sidelocks and those rimless specs perched on the end of his long thin nose, he was a dead ringer for the old toy-maker as illustrated in a big Pinocchio picturebook that I had been given as a gift one Christmas. By the way, I might say many things about that wooden boy and his yearnings to be human, oh yes, many things. But I won’t.21

Tentative, partial anamnesis has to do with comparison and similarities to fill in the gaps. This strategy reveals his own grievous aesthetic agenda as if the Banvillean narrator were permanently mourning the hypothetical loss of access to total authenticity in the very act of attempting to remember things or to represent beings and objects drowned in the past. Tropes involving prepositions or conjunctions such as “like” or “as” or even “as if/though” reveal the obvious finding that representations and memories are but partial, imperfect, faulty, incomplete not to mention downright subjective. But precisely it is in the very nature of art to provide that personal idiosyncratic prism. In The Blue Guitar that subjective approximation or approach won’t do and is a source of frustration as when Otway tries to remember his first painting only to own up he is making it up once again, filling the gaps, reinventing lost details: I wonder what my first painting was of. Can’t remember. Some sylvan scene, I imagine, with leaves and stiles and moocows, all laid out perspectiveless under a goggling egg-yolk sun. I’m not sneering. It’s true I was merely happy at first, dabbling and daubing […].22

To sum up the narrator’s perception of himself, one could quote this avowal when he heaps abuse upon himself: “What a sham, what a selfdeluding, shameless sham you are.”23 This reflects the condition experienced by most characters in Banville’s novels, be they actors, spies or scientists. All exhibit a sense of both embodying and suffering from deception and masquerade. This is quite tangible when the narrator, Professor Kreutznaer declares at the end of Ghosts (1993) talking about 21

Banville, The Blue Guitar, 19. Ibid., 28. 23 Ibid., 172. 22

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his favorite painter called Vaublin: “My writing is almost done: Vaublin shall live! If you call this life. He too was no more than a copy, of his own self. As I am, of mine.”24 The only compromise remaining for Banville’s narrators is therefore that of peripheral, contiguous or indirect representation conveyed through comparison. The question the reader is entitled to ask is why bother about such an ideal faithfulness to reality if precisely one is not concerned with realism? The problem occurring with the logic of analogy is necessarily that of the gap between the actual object itself (known as the tenor in rhetoric) and its peripheral though similar analogue (known as “the vehicle”), be it scientific, pictorial, literary, political, artistic in any sense of the latter word. This conceptual fuzziness or blurred quality of the vehicle is probably what conveys the unmistakable yet confusing postmodernist flavour to Banville’s work. But to an extent Banville’s postmodernism is based on a relative misunderstanding. Through his wily cunning, jaded, puzzling and simultaneously puzzled characters, Banville seems to have always lamented the demise of a realism allegedly more faithful to the truth observable in the outside world and whose best sophisticated promoter–far from a Beckett or a Joyce–may have been Henry James, as Banville himself willingly acknowledged: Henry James is the supreme stylist. I think he's the greatest novelist, as a novelist. He may not be the greatest artist as a writer, but he is certainly the greatest novelist. If you look at the body of work that he left behind, and those last three novels, […] Henry James, in those late novels, really catches something of what it is to be conscious. […] if I were to admit to any influence, it would be to Henry James.25

Hence strictly postmodernist readings of Banville’s work may be more revealing of his readers or their Zeitgeist proper than of Banville’s actual creative agenda. The second consequence of this acknowledgement is that the gap between reality and representation which yawns at the reader, and which also exists through, by, and because of language, keeps being illustrated through the same key trope throughout Banville’s The Blue Guitar as well as throughout his books in general. The vague sense of odd inadequacy, of bizarre almost jocular emptiness lying at the heart of things and beings is constantly being reminded to the reader and developed through lexical networks of the very same trope that is the Banvillean simile, a masterpiece of tongue-in-cheek humour in itself, as when Orme, the biter bit or cuckolded cuckold notes on returning home with mock 24 25

Banville, Ghosts, 245. Interview by Jill Owens. “John Banville: The Powells.com Interview”.

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grandiloquence: “I’m like an artilleryman who every so often glimpses through a rent in the flying cannon smoke a devastated landscape where wounded figures stumble blindly, coughing and crying.”26 But as Jen Webb reminds us in her overview of the philosophy of representation, there is no such thing as an innocent trope or representation, for an underlying theory of knowledge always bolsters a network of tropes: Even a perfect resemblance will be perfect only because it fits with ideas we might have about perfection, and about the thing it resembles. What is important here is that all uses of representation to make meaning are fundamentally epistemological. That is, they are not just about communicating something, but are based on theories of knowledge. There is no simple mirror of the world, but only ways of seeing that are inflected by philosophical and hence ideological perspectives. Slavoj Zizek argues that ideology is a ‘generative matrix that regulates the relationship between visible and non-visible, between imaginable and nonimaginable’27 (1994: 1). We can only see, or make sense of what we see, on the basis of how we understand the world to be. 28

Christopher Prendergast in The Triangle of Representation concurs and further explains the historical background that saw the birth of representation emphasizing the part played by “the knowing subject who observes”: […] as a concept supplying a regulatory matrix of thought, representation, notwithstanding its ancient lineage, is an essentially modern invention, one of the master concepts of modernity underpinning the emergence of what Heidegger called the Age of the World Picture, based on the epistemological subject/object split of the scientific outlook: the knowing subject who observes (‘enframes’ is Heidegger’s term) the world-out-there in order to make it over into an object of representation.29

The paradox in Banville’s novels is that “the knowing subject who observes” and makes similes also keeps acknowledging he does not know that much. Coherently so, The Blue Guitar is rife with similes. They imply a fragmentation, a border between the thing itself, what it is compared with, implying a stylistic distance between the actual object and the way it is rendered, represented, perceived… This distance is more blatant with similes than it is with metaphors due to the blunt necessary grammatical 26

Banville, The Blue Guitar, 187. Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 1. 28 Jen Webb, Understanding Representation, 18, my emphasis. 29 Christopher Prendergast, The Triangle of Representation, 2. 27

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markers–be they prepositions or compound conjunctions as we have already listed, introducing comparison, such as, “like”, “as”30, “as if”, “as though”, etc. To better understand what is at stake with similes, we can rely on the following definition given by Kay Wikberg: “A simile can be defined as a figurative expression used to make an explicit comparison of two unlike things by means of the prepositions like, (as)…as, or the conjunctions as, as if, as though.”31 Consequently, through similes, what is paradoxically underscored, emphasized is that sense of difference in spite of the similarity observed, as made clear by Wikberg when she refers to the “comparison of two unlike things”, implying a displacement, or some shifting movement of slippery ever-elusive referents, not to mention the eventual possible evasion or concealing of the original object. Similes therefore highlight the observer’s perception, their bias, their outlook, their idiosyncrasies, their ideology, their cultural propensities, etc. As Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen sum up in their 1996 essay entitled Reading Images the Grammar of Visual Design: Reality is in the eye of the beholder; or rather, what is regarded as real depends on how reality is defined by a particular social group. …reality may be in the eye of the beholder, but the eye has had a cultural training, and is located in a social setting and a history.32

And the simile is the trope that obviously indulges, reveals, gives out the observer, the beholder, the representation-maker for what they are. In The Blue Guitar, the observer is Oliver Otway, the narrator who compares himself to Autolycus–the son of the Olympian god Hermes–and thinks he is “like that unfunny clown, a picker-up of unconsidered trifles (3)” that is, in less pompous words, a plain thief. In this simile, the whole contradiction characterizing Banville’s prose is made clear: the artist is both the son of a god and an unfunny clown, a thief. Let us see how this amphibological tropological strategy based on similes works in the novel through a couple of compelling instances.

30 Banville, The Blue Guitar, see epigraph by Wallace Stevens: “Things as they are/are changed upon the blue guitar”, my emphasis. 31 Kay Wikberg, “Phrasal similes in the BNC”, 128. 32 Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images the Grammar of Visual Design, 163.

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“[I]t is in the surface that the essence resides”33 Let us recall first that tropology is the study of figurative language–that is tropes–in speech and writing. If after Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett, tropes as forms are content and content forms34, it is definitely worth pondering over its main representative in the novel. The narrator realizes this dominance of form while “in seeking to strike through surfaces to get at the core, the essence”, he had “overlooked the fact that it is in the surface that the essence resides”. He adds his “effort wasn’t to reproduce the world, or even to represent it. The pictures [he] painted were intended as autonomous things, things to match the world’s things, [their] unmanageable thereness.”35 The Blue Guitar is about failure, the inevitable failure to get to the impossible core of things. The narrator sums up his whole doomed project in yet another simile: “painting, like stealing, was an endless effort at possession, and endlessly, I failed.”36 This is expressed in the following extract, which is located at the beginning of the third and last part in the book after the narrator has escaped from his mistress and been found out. It is replete with similes: Wonderful weather we had for the funeral, yes, a positively sumptuous day. How callous the world can be. Foolish to say so, of course. The world feels nothing for us –how many times do I have to remind myself of the fact? –we don’t even enter its ken except perhaps as a stubborn parasite, like the mites that used to infest Gloria’s myrtle tree. It is late November and yet autumn has come back, the days smeared all over with sunlight dense and shiny as apricot jam, heady fragrances of smoke and rich rot in the air and everything tawny or bluely agleam. In the night the temperature plunges […] At the faintest zephyr the trees rustle excitedly, like girls shimmyingly in their silks. Yet there is a tinge of darkness to things, the world is shadowed, dimmed as it seems by death. Above the cemetery the sky looked more steeply domed than usual […] I never know where to position myself at funerals, and always seem to end up treading on some poor unfortunate’s last long home. […] Made sure I had a view of the two widows though–for there are two of them, or as good as – standing on opposite sides of the grave, avoiding each other’s eye. They appeared very stark and dramatic in their swoop-brimmed black hats, Polly, […] who looked self-important and cross […] while Gloria stood with a hand pressed under her heart, like I don’t know what: like the Winged Victory of Samothrace or some such grand figure, damaged 33

Banville, The Blue Guitar, 58. Beckett, “Dante ... Bruno. Vico ... Joyce”, 14. 35 Banville, The Blue Guitar, 58. 36 Ibid.,58. 34

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In this quote we find the isotopy of mirror-like symmetry, appearances and looks through verbs such as “seem”, “look”, “appear”, “watch”, behold”, “see”. Beyond the idea of essence or meaning being confined to the surface, what is underlined here, is the crucial part played by observation and perception. As Kress and Leeuwen assert: “Reality is in the eye of the beholder.”38 But that reality is conveyed through similes with a dozen occurrences of “like” or “as”. These occurrences are either uncannily eerie: the sunlight is dense and shiny “as apricot jam”, the trees rustle “like girls shimmying in their silks”, or pejorative when the human subject is compared to “a stubborn parasite” or human beings are perceived like “the mites that used to infest Gloria’s myrtle tree”. A work of art is resorted to express an idea of the scene. The narrator’s wife is “like the Winged Victory of Samothrace or some such grand figure, damaged and magnificent”, that is the famous headless armless statue on display at the Louvre. This ekphrastic notation clearly points to the idea that the world can only be understood in fragmented, maimed terms of analogy and comparison. But what is striking in the passage is once again the idea that the painter, standing for the more universal figure of the artist is convinced he fails to register the world faithfully, properly: “like I don’t know what”39, going as far to imagine that “Maybe it wasn’t death but failure [at seeing the world properly][he] was afraid of”40 just as if his mission were to convey an absolute idea of the truth outside his own perspective. One immediately recognizes another instance of the agonizing 37

Banville, The Blue Guitar, 183-185, my emphasis. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images the Grammar of Visual Design, 163. 39 Banville, The Blue Guitar, 184. 40 Banville, The Blue Guitar, 185. 38

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convergence and confusion of historical and artistic codes of representation at play in Banville’s work, that most of his narrators seem to relish lamenting while giving in to the same playful confusion. The second extract under scrutiny is shorter and rampant with Banville’s aesthetic ontological agenda: There was a ceaseless clamour of voices behind me in the big hall, a rolling heavy swell out of which there would spurt now and then, like a fish leaping, a shriek of some woman’s tipsy laughter. I had been drinking but I don’t believe I was drunk; all the same, as I talked to Polly […] I had the sense of dawning illumination, of sudden epiphany, that so often comes at a certain stage on the way to drunkenness. She seemed not newly beautiful, exactly, but to radiate something I hadn’t noticed before […] the very being of her being. […] anyway who’s to say that what we see when we’re drunk is not reality, and the sober world a bleared phantasmagoria?41

Laughter here is first conveyed through an unexpected maritime metaphor that is “a rolling heavy swell”, and then particular bursts of laughter are described once again through a baroque unexpected simile, tipsy women’s shrieks are compared to “fish leaping”. The notion of epiphany is both rendered and experienced ironically. Sense, “dawning illumination, epiphany” pave the way to drunkenness and stupor. Epiphany is anything but Joycean,42 it is tautological, reflexive and leads nowhere but to “the very being of […] being”, its “thereness” already mentioned.43 Here epiphany can be equated with some farcical deflation, some sense of being a fraud… This betrays yet again the prominent status of the observer and the allegedly shameful limits of their perception. In The Blue Guitar, this solipsistic narcissistic navel gazing indulged by the observer often leads to images of insanity as when Oliver Orme thinks of himself as “the painster in a padded cell, straitjacketed and manacled to the bed, muttering in a monotone the one word over and over, me me me me me me me me me me me.” Elsewhere, following the same thread of the impossible totalizing of objective experience including the experiencer, Oliver Orme remarks:

41

Banville, The Blue Guitar, 6-7. For more details on Joyce and the notion of epiphany as illustrated in Dubliners or Stephen Hero, see Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971, 18. 43 See the “unmanageable thereness” of “the world’s things”, Banville, The Blue Guitar, 58. 42

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Liars, Similes and Story-tellers in The Blue-Guitar by John Banville How strange to think that I shall never see myself from behind. […] I could rig up an arrangement of mirrors though that would be to cheat. Anyway I would be conscious of looking at myself, and selfconsciousness, that kind of self-consciousness, always leads to falsity, or misconception, at least. […] I can’t be natural in front of a mirror. […] I approach my reflection like an actor stepping on to the stage–as don’t we all?44

This echoes the limits of representation inherent in individual perception and representation, as explained by Jen Webb through photography and an analogue with mirrors. As she notes: This effect is perhaps even more obvious in the case of photographs, as Kate Bowles describes […], especially photos of the self. A photo may remind you of an event, but it does not take you there–not literally. And moreover, while it is ‘you’, at one level, it is not really you. If you look at it, you might say or think ‘that’s me’. […] It is not you […]. It is a photograph, merely the capturing on paper of light and shade, line and point, at a particular moment and in a particular place. Nor does it really look like you, to you: for one thing, we experience the world from the inside out, looking out through the holes in our skulls. When looking at a photograph of me, I experience the world looking in, from the outside: something that is pretty disturbing if I think about it to any extent. A second problem is that I know myself only in mirror image – what I see when I look in the mirror. A photograph reverses this. For example, I have a mole under my left eye; I know it is the left because I can touch it. But in my mirror reflection it is on the right hand side. When I see photos of myself, I look subtly wrong – the mole is on the ‘wrong’ side (not the side I see from the inside out, but the side the world sees, from the outside in).45

Jen Webb develops her treatment of the perplexing flaws and shortcomings of representation through the mirror motif and its disturbing symmetries. Language which serves as a mirror held up to reality displays similar worrying flaws identified by Oliver Otway Orme in The Blue Guitar when he says: “How treacherous language is, more slippery even than paint.”46 Webb argues that “Gilles Deleuze explains this uncomfortable [jarring] experience by referring to the idea of representation as a mirror.”47 She underlines the paradox that this symmetry of art, photography, etc “is not the mirror of resemblance (similitude) but the 44

Banville, The Blue Guitar, 211. Webb, Understanding Representation, 27, my emphasis. 46 Banville, The Blue Guitar, 48. 47 Webb, Understanding Representation, 28. 45

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mirror of difference.”48 To make her point clearer, she resorts to the question of names much in the same way that the narrator in The Blue Guitar starts his tale analysing his own unlikely name and initials “OOO”49, later turned into mock interjections “Yours oh, oh, oh, so longingly.”50 Webb remarks about names: “Take, for instance, your own name: it is you, and at the same time it is not you, but just a collection of alphabetical shapes or uttered sounds. You (the thing itself) and your name (the designation that stands in for you) simply circulate.”51 To conclude her demonstration, she quotes from Gilles Deleuze’s famous essay The Logic of Sense: It is a two-sided entity, equally present in the signifying and the signified series. ... Thus, it is at once word and thing, name and object, sense and denotatum, expression and designation, etc. It guarantees, therefore, the convergence of the two series which it traverses but precisely on the condition that it makes them endlessly diverge. It has the property of always being displaced in relation to itself.52

One can but only agree with Webb when she concludes that in photographs, in our names, in political representations, in artistic representations, we are always present and not present, always weaving back and forth between our phenomenological sense of ourselves, and our having been reduced to a sign.53 This problematic almost schizoid relationship between reality and its problematic representation through language is rendered throughout the The Blue Guitar by the mirror motif. No wonder then that we should note the novel is strewn with mirrors, looking-glasses, and symmetries.54 Paintings, photographs, narratives, performances are so many more or less imperfect reflections of the world. The contemporary–and more often than not provocative–American philosopher Harry Frankfurt goes so far as to assert that it is never possible to communicate the full truth, that, indeed, “every use of language without exception has some, but not all, of the characteristics of lies.”55 This is strongly corroborated by the narrator himself in The Blue Guitar when he draws a cogent parallel between cuckoldry and story-telling: “one never 48

Ibid., 28. Banville, The Blue Guitar, 3. 50 Banville, The Blue Guitar, 64. 51 Webb, Understanding Representation, 28. 52 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 48. 53 Webb, Understanding Representation, 28. 54 Banville, The Blue Guitar, 81, 82, 98, 107, 135, 141, 153, 189, 191, 210, 211. 55 Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit, 9. 49

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gets to the truth entirely. Something is always elided, passed over, suppressed, a date skillfully falsified, a rendezvous presented as something it was not, a phone call almost overheard that is abruptly suspended in mid-sentence.” 56 Banville goes on to explain that even if “one were to be offered the whole truth, unvarnished, one wouldn’t accept it, since after the first twitch of suspicion everything becomes tainted with uncertainty, bathed in a bile-green glow.”57 Eventually, the novel can be read allegorically as a reflection on the deceptive or necessarily incomplete nature of representations in art while aspiring to abide by the ethical imperative to be faithful to facts and reality characterizing historical representations. This dual seemingly disjunctive nature of the novel is due to the retrospective ambition of the tale where the narrator tries to recount the impossible story of his life much as he is “well aware how spurious can be the glow that plays over remembrances of childhood”58 (33) while he is also reflecting on the value of his paintings. The novel is therefore allegedly both about art and about life not to mention history–with the presence of Cromwell hovering in the background –,59 very often mixing up painting and writing as in the following exchange between Oliver and his odd Doppelgänger-like sister Olive: ‘Stories?’ I said. ‘What do you mean, stories? It’s pictures I do–did. I’m a painter. Was.’ ‘Oh I thought it was stories.’ ‘Well, it isn’t. Wasn’t.’60

Though Orme’s story can be read, of course, as a book by a painter on painting. Hence the impressive number of references to diverse painters throughout History to be found in the book61: Tiepolo (9), Manet (9, 223), Matisse (13, 60), Bonnard (13), Leonardo Da Vinci (21, 24), Caspar David Friedrich (28), Botticelli (32), Courbet (38), Daumier (38), Poussin (60), Pontormo (99), Bosch (99), Dürer, (114), El Greco (134), Fuseli (141), Arp (146), Lautrec (147), Sickert (147), Caravaggio (199), Cézanne (200), Fragonard (201), Vaublin (a fictional painter created by Banville himself 56

Banville, The Blue Guitar, 224. Ibid., 224. 58 Ibid., 33. 59 Ibid., 89, 103. 60 Ibid., 213-214. 61 In this paragraph, page numbers in The Blue Guitar are indicated directly in brackets for convenience purposes. 57

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in Ghosts, 201, 223), Rossetti (215), Burne-Jones (215), Tenniel (217), etc. But ultimately it is not satisfactory to read it as a Künstlerroman. Rather, yet again, it demonstrates to what extent Banville recycles, merges or confuses the two complementary modes of representation, that of art and that related to facts through History. Ankersmit allows us to identify the similarities between both of them: The painter has a frame, a canvas, the laws of perspective that allow him to define these contours and lines of demarcation. Although one might argue […] that historians have a similar expedient at their disposal in the speculative systems, this expedient is often rejected by practicing historians, and if it is not, it remains vague and unreliable. The reliance upon chronology (a kind of historical perspective), causality, psychological or sociological laws, and so on, is the most obvious alternative. […] The only clear contours the past has are of a modal nature: they distinguish between what did happen and what might have happened but did not […]. However, the contours the artist has to deal with are contours within the world seen by him. The contours for the historian are such that they distinguish between what is and what is not.62

But Ankersmit finally insists on the radical divergence between artistic representation and History: In the world in which we live and which is represented by the artist, we all recognize familiar patterns (trees, human beings, buildings, and so on); but, in the past, such patterns are never given but always have to be developed or postulated. Although, admittedly, at an elementary (and therefore not interesting) level, certain patterns also tend to recur in the past, as soon as we come to the much more interesting level of historical debate, historical phenomena are never recognized in the way we recognize the objects of our daily life. In history, it is as if we had to recognize a rabbit or a duck in the well-known rabbit-duck drawing without ever having seen a duck or a rabbit. The historian's practice is in some ways the reverse of answering the Rohrschach test: the historian has to find a hitherto unknown pattern in a medley of relatively familiar things human beings did, wrote, or thought in the past.63

Jen Webb eventually reconciles these two epistemological agendas reminding us that we need representations because “they enable us to obtain and to express an insight into the nature of things. That is why we have artistic representation, historical representation and political 62 63

Ankersmit, 117. Ankersmit, 117-118.

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representation. [...] For representation defines reality; and that is why we could not possibly do without it.”64

Conclusion: “It was aesthetics: it was all, always, an aesthetic endeavour.”(172) The The Blue Guitar can be regarded as an ‘anti-Künstlerroman’ which expounds the faulty modalities of the construction of representations of reality and truth. It craves for totalization, verisimilitude and faithfulness to reality much as a historian would do while ironically acknowledging its own inevitable status as a partial work of art, which will not, cannot overlap the infinity of details of the actual world. In a word, it seems to resist its own artistic nature only to better play with it. The ensuing result is quite Banvillean, the book is the book of evidence of a true artistic lie, that is a paradox redolent of the famous Cretan Epimenides paradox, also known as the ‘liar paradox’ enunciated in the novel by the narrator’s wife: “At least be honest and admit you’re a liar,”65 which keeps Oliver Orme “mulling for days.”66 This uxorial summons incidentally identifies the limits of all representations: those inherent in the sign systems which are to be understood both within themselves and without, that is in the outside world generating them. Eventually, novels by Banville illustrate the same bemused perplexed nostalgic outlook on a founding sense of loss, the same never-ending aporia, the same disturbing ceaseless lack of symmetry between interminable series of facts, events, objects, beings, signifieds, and fictions, signs, not to mention signifiers. Orme broods on this boundless riddle by broaching the excruciating idea of the end: The notion of an end, I mean the possibility of there being an end, this has always fascinated me. It must be mortality, our own, that gives us the concept. I shall die, and so shall you, and there’s an end, we say. But even that’s not certain. … [I]n our fallen finite world, anything one sets out to do or make cannot be finished, only broken off, abandoned. For what would constitute completion? There’s always something more, another step to venture, another word to utter, another brush-stroke to be added. The set of all sets is still a set. Ah, but tarry a moment. There is the loop to be considered. Join up the extremities and the thing can go on forever, round and round. That surely, is a sort of end. … All the same, outside the loop there is nothing. Well, there is of course, there’s a great deal, there’s 64

Webb, 26. Banville, The Blue Guitar, 211. 66 Ibid., 211. 65

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almost everything, but nothing of consequence to the thing that’s going round, since that is completed in itself, in a swirling infinity of its own.67

As Orme comes to realize there is neither teleological nor merely terminal ending in sight: “There’s always something more.”68 But while postmodernist fiction–from Thomas Pynchon to John Barth–normally openly endorses this gap as an aesthetic agenda, Banville, while retaining the same primum mobile so to speak, gleefully bemoans the frustrations ensuing from that loss of innocence. Hence his floating ‘contrarian realism’, which is so prone to postmodernist analyses. The final image in the book closes the loop, it is that of a reminiscence, a memory from childhood grounded into pretence and nothingness. It is a description of the time when the narrator, as a child suffering from a childhood disease and having a very high temperature resulting in his sweating a lot in his bed, was brought solace by his father: It was my father, however, who brought me, each night, a particular and exquisite moment of tender respite when, slipping into my room last thing, he would put his hand under my head and lift it a little way in order to turn up, deftly and with remarkable dispatch, the cool side of my sodden, hot and reeking pillow. I have no doubt he knew that I was awake, but it was an unspoken convention between us that I was awake, and unaware of the little service he was doing me. I, of course, would not let myself fall asleep until he had been and gone. What a strange thrill, half of happiness and half of happy fright, I would experience when the door opened […] spreading a momentary fan of light across the bedroom floor, and the tall gangling figure crept towards me, like the friendly giant in a fairy tale. How odd his hand felt too […] my head would seem to weigh nothing–all of me, indeed, would seem weightless, and for a moment I would float free, from the bed, from the room, from my self itself, and be as a straw, a leaf, a feather, adrift and at peace on the soft, sustaining darkness.69

Again, similes loom large and convey a feeling of oddity–close to magic realism: the father is like “the friendly giant in a fairy tale”70 and the narrator floats free from everything including himself “as a straw, a leaf, a feather on the sustaining darkness.”71 The final image is not just about mystery, nothingness, frailty, it is also about the childish nostalgia for a 67

Ibid., 222. Ibid., 222. 69 Ibid., 250, my emphasis. 70 Ibid., 250. 71 Ibid., 250. 68

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soothing sense of order and relief brought about by a father–not to say an ideally authorial–figure. Again grammatical markers of comparison such as “like” and “as” are to be found. The demonstration endures that understanding and knowledge as well as the sense of an ending are but peripheral and due to analogy. The simile is the last rhetorical weapon left for the melancholy “Künstler”… Banville once said in an interview: “For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.”72 That pearl is caught by Banville on paper both diffidently and beautifully.

Works Cited Ankersmit, Frank R. History and Tropology, The Rise and Fall of Metaphor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Banville, John. Athena. London: Secker & Warburg. 1995. —. Birchwood. London: Secker & Warburg, 1973. —. The Blue Guitar. London: Random House, 2015. —. Doctor Copernicus. London: Secker & Warburg, 1976. —. Ghosts. London: Secker & Warburg, 1973. —. Kepler. London: Secker & Warburg, 1981. —. Mefisto. London: Secker & Warburg 1986 —. The Book of Evidence. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989. —. The Sea. London: Picador Pan Macmillan, 2005. Beckett, Samuel. “Dante ... Bruno. Vico ... Joyce”, in Our Examination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. London: Faber & Faber, 1972. Beja, Morris. Epiphany in the Modern. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale, ed. C.V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Frankfurt, Harry. On Bullshit. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Trickster-tale”, https://global.britannica.com/art/trickster-tale, Last updated 4-6.2007. Last Accessed 21 December 2016. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1956. Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images the Grammar of Visual Design, London: Routledge, 1996. 72

David Robinson, “Interview: John Banville, author of Ancient Light”.

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Motion, Andrew. “The Blue Guitar by John Banville review – a tale of art, theft and adultery” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/28/the-blue-guitar-johnbanville-review-novel, Friday 28 August 2015 14.00 BST. Last accessed 22 December 2016. Owens, Jill. Interview by Jill Owens. “John Banville: The Powells.com Interview”, http://www.powells.com/post/interviews/john-banville-thepowellscom-interview, 5 April 2010. Last accessed 20 December 2016. Prendergast, Christopher. The Triangle of Representation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Robinson, David. “Interview: John Banville, author of Ancient Light”, 7 July 2012. Last accessed 22 December 2016. http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/interview-johnbanville-author-of-ancient-light-1-2397605 Shakespeare, William. As You Like It, (1599), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Webb, Jen. Understanding Representation, London: Sage, 2009. Wikberg, Kay. “Phrasal similes in the BNC”, in Sylviane Granger, Fanny Meunier (eds), Phraseology: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2008. Zizek, Slavoj. The Metastases of Enjoyment, London: Verso. 1994.

DEVALUATING TESTIMONY: THE UNRELIABILITY OF MEMORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY IN STAN DOUGLAS’S KLATSASSIN MARIA KYVELI MAVROKORDOPOULOU

Introduction Historical research and questions regarding its representation have been a long–term interest of the art field, but within the recent past (in conceptual art for example) few artists have addressed historical themes. Surprisingly enough, in the last three decades, the attention has shifted and contemporary art has gradually developed a stronger interest in aspects of history that have remained overlooked or unresolved. There is an increasing number of artists whose practice starts with research in archives, demonstrating the relatively new stature of the artist as historian, as Mark Godfrey suggests1, or others who deploy an archival form of research.2 In this regard, art works and exhibitions concerning colonial history seem to occupy a critical position as a part of our past that remains debatable and unconcluded. This new concern is gaining more and more of a following in the art world, where works that elaborate a critical approach on colonial history proliferate, expanding to diverse aspects of this same history, ranging from the Spanish conquest of the Americas to more recent forms of colonization. Responding to the aftermath of colonial rule, contemporary post-colonial art has established itself as a new category in the art world and, very frequently, the moving image appears as the medium par excellence for dealing with these historical subjects. The most common artistic strategy of such practices is the blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction, a strategy that usually ends up constraining the historical truth (if such a term is possible) to an unknown 1 2

Mark Godfrey, "The Artist as Historian," October, no 120 (April 2007): 140–72. Hal Foster, "An Archival Impulse," October, no 110 (Fall 2004): 3–22.

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zone, leaving the spectator in doubt. This ‘fictionalization’ is achieved through different means, but more often than not, the documentary form is the preferred method. Departing from the fact that we, as spectators, have less and less trust in documentary images today, several artists create works that intentionally make ambiguous historical conclusions through the moving image, in order to bring into question official historical narrations. The work of Ursula Bieman in North Africa or Walid Raad in Lebanon stand as typical examples of this tendency.3 In this paper, we chose to focus on a work of art, namely a film installation, that inscribes itself in the fictionalising tendency of contemporary art, choosing, however, a different apparatus for tackling history: Stan Douglas’s film installation Klatsassin 4 (2006). We will argue that through its distorting approach to the concept of testimony, the work produces the collapse of testimony per se as a tool for historical research. The notion of testimony, provided by Paul Ricœur in his work La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli5, will guide our argument throughout the article. Through an analysis of the different narrative deconstructions the artist employs, we will try to defend that Stan Douglas, by mediating already existing historical facts, gives birth to a new reality that is uncertain and subjective. The duration of the work is roughly six days, thereby being difficult to describe shortly. The use of an unbearably long process of narration, as a temporal technique revealing an unsure historical past, will constitute the principal line of our argument. Finally, a brief word on the reason we chose to linger over Klatsassin, instead of a fictional documentary. Klatsassin becomes interesting precisely because of its purely cinematic features, that will be further examined at the end of this article: it distinguishes itself from the fictional documentaries performed by a great number of artists today, in that the installation develops a unique, more straightforward stance towards the strategy of fiction thanks to its rejection of the confusing veracity of contemporary documentary images.6 The 3

The following book gives an excellent overview of these works: T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis. Durham, London: Duke University Press Books, 2013. 4 Klatsassin is the name of a Tsilhqot’in chief, executed the 26 October 1864. In the case of the film installation, the name is given the following meaning: we do not know your name. Source: http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/klatsassin_9E.html (02.01.2017). 5 Paul Ricœur, La Mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli, (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000) All quotations from this wok are author's translation. 6 Although the comparison of these genres is not of our concern here, differentiating between them may help us to distinguish Klatsassin from

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Hollywood–esque ambiance of the film, with its historical costumes and cliché characters of a Western7, makes it even more difficult to distill the historical truth.

Stan Douglas: the artist as historian The case of Klatsassin Canadian visual artist Stan Douglas, usually associated with the Vancouver School of conceptual photography, works mostly with time– based media; his work is clearly inscribed in the so–called historical turn in contemporary art.8 His films usually relate to the history of his native Canada, and suggest recombinant narratives that permit new, contradictory readings and conclusions of established historical narration. By revolving around obscure parts of history and by twisting linear, unified narratives into a deeply confusing plot, Stan Douglas's work deconstructs traditional cinematic modes of narration. This can be achieved through several strategies: by reinserting a historical scene into a present location, as he did recently with the Woodward’s building installation Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 or by making a film with almost infinite permutations, like his work Suspiria (2003). Infinite narrative permutations are also the strategy Douglas chooses in the case of Klatsassin. The work is a single– screen installation, inspired by a particular event that took place during the gold–rush era in Canada and includes two series of photographs and a high–definition video projection. But first, let us introduce the work though the words of the artist: I looked at the history of this area—the way people dressed, the way they interacted, where they came from, and so on. In Klatsassin, I don’t think any two characters are the same nationality or speak the same language. They’re all from different places, scrambling to get their gold. It reminded me of today—people from the US and Europe trying to get the most

documentary fictions. For an in–depth analysis of the documentary shift in contemporary art, see: Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl eds., The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Document and Contemporary Art. Berlin, Annandale-onHudson, NY: Sternberg Press / Center for Curatorial Studies, 2008. 7 Stan Douglas calls the work a dub western, in his typical manner of appropriating existing Hollywood genres (including murder mysteries and the Western). Christine Ross, The Past is the Present; it's the Future too - The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art. London, Oxford: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013, 288. 8 For the historical turn in contemporary art see: Godfrey, "The Artist as Historian", 143.

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valuable thing in the world out of the earth in a place where they’re not really welcome.9

These words by Stan Douglas reveal the procedure for the creation of the work. Operating like a historian, the work is set in the region of the Cariboo mountains and is developed some years after the foundation of the colony of British Colombia. In the mid nineteenth century, in the region of the Cariboo mountains in British Colombia, the local Indian population Tsilhqot’in responded to the migration of American and European investors with an uprising. The video, set in 1864, focuses on the hostility between the Tsilhqot’in tribe and the settlers seeking gold on the Tsilhqot’in Plateau. More specifically, in the Western regions of Canada, one of the richest deposits of gold was found in 1864. One of the main problems was that this particular site was very difficult of access and as a consequence, one of the miners’ main projects was to construct a road crossing through Tsilhqot’in territory. As expected, the native population was hostile towards the presence of the miners due to the death of thousands of their people during an epidemic of smallpox some years before, as the Natives were more susceptible than the Europeans and the Americans. In 1864, the chief of the Tsilhqot’in Indian population, Klatsassin, led a war party that killed ten construction workers and wounded numerous others. In turn, the colonizing gold seekers reacted by hiring a group of mercenaries to hunt down the Indians. The manhunt turned out to be fruitless, revolving around a series of misunderstandings among the two sides of the conflict—until a gold Prospector sent a gift of tobacco, which the chief interpreted as a peace offering. When Klatssasin showed up with seven of his men, five of them were arrested and hung, while two of them were released. A further eight managed to escape and were never found. This person, called the Prisoner, comes back to Stan Douglas’s film Klatsassin.

Accepting the missing parts of History Set in the context of the gold rush, the film is part of the artist’s corpus of works dealing with the issues of memory and historical truth in Canada’s colonial history. We could situate the film installation in a relatively new category of works in the field of contemporary art: as illustrated above, the last twenty years have witnessed a strong interest in 9

Michael Ned Holte, ''Stan Douglas Talks about "Klatsassin'', 2006, Artforum 45, no. 2 (October 2006).

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the redefinition of history through the practices of the moving image. Amongst these works of art, one could distinguish a subcategory inscribing in this larger interest; frequently wishing to go against the very terms of testimony, witness, evidence and truth, several artists today attempt to challenge those terms that imply epistemological certainty and consensus.10 The piece examined here is an emblematic example of this new direction in current artistic production: before anything else, Klatsassin is essentially a compilation of conflicting testimonies. The narrative unfolds in a long series of 5–minute testimonies, given by a native Indian on the run, describing different moments revolving around the murder of an officer. The process of the narration is unbearably long, to such a degree that it is impossible to actually know what happened. Moreover, the artist employs an algorithm to intensify this so that it is even more in doubt: the historical narratives performed in the installation are structured by the use of computer–generated algorithms that sequence and recombine scenes with every loop until the exhaustion of all the possible combinations. The narratives succeed one another without hierarchy and are inscribed in a finality without resolution. It would take almost a week for all the permutations to play out, according to Douglas; more precisely, it would take about six days to see the piece in all its different variations.11 As a result, the spectator enters the so-called “unknown” zone in history, remaining completely ignorant regarding how the events truly unfolded. Testimony, after testimony, after testimony, the mystery is never solved. As art historian Iris Dressler notes, "in Douglas’s work, time (…) falls out of joint with and as a system."12 Klatsassin is thus situated in between fiction and reality, taking its starting point from the event of the escaped Indian, but choosing to narrate it in an unconventional manner: by presenting different versions of the story of the escapee. Before moving on to the concept of testimony, it seems appropriate to linger briefly on the strategy of fictionalizing history in contemporary art, one of the main artistic methods employed in Klatsassin. Fiction and history are two notions whose combination might seem hazardous to many. However, in the following section we will argue that Douglas’s 10 One could think of the importance several artists attribute to trials in contemporary art: the work of Hito Steyerl constitutes an important example in this regard. 11 Ross, The Past is the Present; it's the Future too, 288. 12 Iris Dressler, "Specters of Douglas", in Stan Douglas: Past Imperfect – Works 1986-2007, (eds.) Hans D. Christ and Iris Dressler, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008, 20.

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approach to both terms produces the possibility to insert new insights into history, by pointing out the messy fragments of historical truth. The artist, through his practice, accepts that there is a past which is nevertheless partially lost or untraceable, and can only ever be reconstructed to a certain degree. It is precisely these missing parts of history that both inform and shape the bulk of his research in this historically disputed territory that is the Tsilhqot’in plateau. As has been argued by art historian Paolo Magagnoli, and contra postmodern theorists like Fredric Jameson,13 fiction in contemporary art practice, transforms the Platonic dichotomy between the real and the representation because images are viewed as part and parcel of the real itself, rather than as the incomplete and illusory representations of eternal and inaccessible truths.14 As such, Magagnoli seeks to develop a productive conception of fiction in the field of contemporary art, one that conceptualizes historical truth as a result of a mnemonic process. Countering Fredric Jameson's skepticism of fiction or representation as generating a lack of critical distance and ideology, Magagnoli pleads for a notion of truth that is primarily defined by its processual quality. This is the kind of approach to the complex relationship between history and truth that we are attempting to develop in the case of the piece of Stan Douglas.

Questioning the value of testimony The truth Stan Douglas is seeking to grasp, however, is a deeply elusive one. Agreeing to work with an uncertain past, the artist does not establish a traditional historical investigation process, but rather emphasizes our inability to (properly) reconstruct the past. As Kristin Ross puts it, the artist invites us ‘to go with irresolution - to take up as it were Marc Bloch’s suggestion that the historical narrative is not simply a representation of the past but a representation of humans in time.’15 Stan Douglas achieves in inviting us to go with irresolution – that is to intensify historical doubt, through the following features which accomplish rendering the concept of testimony completely irrelevant (especially through the narration of an incredible number of contradictory testimonies, 13 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1991,18. 14 Paolo Magagnoli, ''Documentary Fictions: New Concepts of Truth and Representation in the Works of Anri Sala and Hito Steyerl'', Object, no 12 (January 2011): 41–59. 15 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trns. Peter Putman, New York: Knopf, 1953, 27. Cited in Ross, The Past is the Present; it's the Future too, 295.

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namely 890). Before examining these features, let us take a closer look at an example of one of these testimonies: the following short conversation takes place between the Prisoner, the Frenchman (who serves here as a translator) and the Constable, who presides as the judge. The dialogue includes three different languages: Prisoner (in Tsilquo’in): “He had no honor. I am glad he is dead. He deserved to die by my hand.” Frenchman (in Tsilquo’in): “That only he deserves?” Prisoner: “He only deserves that.” Frenchman (in English): “He doesn’t understand.” Prisoner: “The white man had no honor. He was a liar and a thief. I was glad to watch him die.” Frenchman: “He says he hated the Deputy and he killed him.” Constable: “He killed him?” Frenchman: “You understand.” 16

Well, in fact we are not quite sure we understand. The excerpt thereby unveils the core of the communication problems emerging throughout the narrative process of the testimonies. This scene does not simply add a humorous tone to the viewing experience, but represents a typical discussion at the Tsilhqot’in Plateau during the period. Preceding our more thorough analysis of the aesthetic interventions Douglas uses, we should try to imagine the feeling of experiencing, as spectators, similar, fruitless conversations following one after the other in a totally random order. With this in mind, it comes as no surprise that the most apparent feature is the slowness of the accumulation of the testimonies. Usually, extreme slowness stimulates deeper observation, but, in Klatsassin’s context, this observation is never gratified. In stark contrast with this remark, slowness in our case becomes manifest not via extremely long takes or technical manipulations that slow down the image. Slowness, in Douglas’s piece, creates more of a frustrated, emotional state to the viewer by virtue of an understated mode of narration that takes multiple forms in the film.Secondly, as Douglas himself noted when interviewed,17 the officers and the locals do not share a common language, and more often than not, the officers themselves come from different countries and are unable to 16

Dialogue retrieved and copied from an image of the catalogue of the exhibition Klatsassin, that took place in Vienna at the Secession in 2006. It includes a selection of short dialogues from the film installation. Ariane Beyn and Stan Douglas, Stan Douglas: Klatsassin, Bilingual edition, Köln: Walther König, 2008, 68. 17 Holte, ''Stan Douglas Talks about "Klatsassin'', 2006'', 233.

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communicate amongst one another. For instance, as we read above, some of the dialogues are conducted in three different languages (French, English, and Tsilhqot’in). As a result, contradictory testimonies only propagate throughout the course of the viewing experience and ascertain an intentional state of confusion. Perhaps the most important result is the breakdown of the notion of testimony as such. As the philosopher Esteban Lythgoe suggests, testimony is above all evidence, and therefore depends on an unresolved question; thus it is precisely this dispute over an unresolved question that is the precondition of the possibility of testimony.18 In turn, this would mean that a statement will only be considered a testimony if it is relevant to the dispute between antagonistic positions. If there is no such dispute, there is no testimony at all. Paul Ricœur has written extensively on precisely this topic. In his work La Mémoire, l’Histoire, l’Oubli, he gives the following definition of testimony: ‘Testimony is the fundamental structure of transition between memory and history.’'19 For the French philosopher, who has examined the concept since the 1970’s, testimony, or at least an ordinary notion of testimony, is the first step of historical writing and for the possibility of a historical narrative. He understands the term as a link between the past and the present: as a result, when narrated, testimony brings together two temporal levels: that of the event, which references the past, and the present of the narration. The strategy he employs in order to investigate the term is a simple one: by investigating the everyday concept, he attempts to discover its essential components.20 The person who declares something has an epistemic advantage towards the audience, because she or he was present in the declared event.21 The audience must trust him or her, but cannot do it in the same way the audience would trust other sources of knowledge: essentially, a testimony broadens our knowledge in a way that reason, memory, or experience does not and cannot. As a result, testimony acquires a clear cognitive precedence when it comes to the reconstruction of history.

18

Lythgoe, Esteban, ''Ricoeur’s Concept of Testimony'', Analetica Hermeneutica, Volume 3, (2011): 1–16, 4. 19 Ricœur, La Mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli, 201. (We should keep in mind that this particular book uses the example of the genocides of the 20th century). 20 Ibid., 202. 21 Lythgoe, ''Ricoeur’s Concept of Testimony'', 7.

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Revisiting cinema As described above, the slowness of the accumulation of the different contradictory testimonies constitute one of the most pivotal features of Klatsassin. The narratives succeed without any hierarchy and are thus inscribed in a finality without resolution, creating the impression that history ceases to pass.22 Testimonies cease to be clues to a possible resolution, and instead they are transformed into obstacles and therefore exist to infinity, inscribed in a computer generated endless timespan.23 In this respect, one the most frequent quotes in Klatsassin, is the following: "I don’t care if it’s a lie, as long as it’s a good one", which is the favorite saying of the Prospector. In fact, a similar method, but without the technological support, can be found in the Japanese crime mystery film Rashômon by Akiro Kurosawa dating from 1950. This reference is explicitly mentioned by the artist, who found inspiration in Kurosawa’s representation of contradictory testimonies.24 Stan Douglas engages once more with the history of cinema, blurring the boundaries between film and contemporary art. Rashômon is a seminal film in the history of cinema that has influenced not just the moving image, but culture at large. Its very name has come to stand for concepts such as the relativity and the unreliability of truth, and the inevitable subjectivity, of memory25 (notions often glorified by contemporary artists). The film also focuses on contradictory testimony and, more precisely, the reported stories of the same murder; a noble woman who was raped in the forest and her samurai husband was murdered. Akiro Kurosawa delivers four different versions of the crime, each one being completely different from the rest. The narrators become completely unreliable, and therefore the narrative deployed is nonlinear, through a series of contradictory flashbacks of those involved. Each witness testifies in front of an invisible judge: we never see nor hear her. Positioned in front of the camera, it is as if the spectator becomes the judge. As in Klatsassin, it becomes impossible to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Gradually, the testimonies pile up and lose credibility. The similarities of the two films are quite obvious, and especially the mise en scène is very similar. Klatsassin appropriates the use of flashbacks from Rashômon, that constitute an integral part of the film. In this manner, 22

Ross, The Past is the Present; it's the Future too, 291. Ibid., 295. 24 Holte, "Stan Douglas Talks about 'Klatsassin' 2006 ", 233. 25 For an analysis of the film see: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/195-therashomon-effect (02.01.2017) 23

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present and past fuse into one another in the narration and add up to the general confusion generated by the film. Comparatively, testimony, as Ricœur puts it, constitutes a link between the past and the present: when narrated, testimony, in the same way as flashbacks, brings together two temporal levels: that of the event, which references the past, and the present of the narration.26 Another key point, shared in the two films, concerns the position of the witnesses. Akiro Kurosawa positions the witnesses in front of the camera, as if there was an invisible judge behind the camera. The spectator never sees the judge and risks taking up that role. Stan Douglas positions the witnesses in a similar manner. In this regard, Cristine Ross goes as far as questioning the existence of an actual judge sometimes: "Is the judge even there?" she asks.27 Although such a question may be plausible, it is not of major importance. Above all, the impression one has after viewing some fragments of Klatsassin is the following: different witnesses narrate different versions of the same event and regularly these separate accounts are evenly credible. Nevertheless, Douglas's work in general, and more precisely Klatsassin, raises an additional question that touches upon issues related to the exhibition display: his films and installations are presented at both cinemas and museums (at least in the case of our case study). Depending on the location the work is shown at, the impression it produces changes. For instance, Klatsassin premiered at the 2006 Vancouver International Film Festival and then in 2007 was shown in the Secession Gallery in Vienna. Being confronted with a testimony on screen, and subsequently taking the position of a judge as a real one is nowhere to be seen, is doubtlessly a different experience when one sits in a movie theatre. In this way, the piece also invites discussions from film studies that may lead to a different outcome, as the spectator as judge position may be exacerbated when sitting in the dark for hours. In either case, however, Klatsassin illustrates the dilemma of historical research: if history is dependent on a there has been, then the necessity for evidence to prove is relative, just as testimony is.28

26

Ross, The Past is the Present; it's the Future too, 293. Ross, ibid., 292. 28 Ricœur goes so far as to state that everything starts not from the archives, but from testimony. Ross, ibid., 293. 27

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Conclusion As we have seen, Klatsassin seeks to unsettle the audience’s memory and thus continues Stan Douglas’s long running interest in the false liability of our capacity to recount past events. The film questions what is seen as a direct entry into the past and shows how unreliable, inconclusive, and constructed such historical tools can be. Narrating the past folds into a totally inaccurate procedure that Stan Douglas exacerbates with the methods examined above. Time, as a structuring principle of film, is stretched to infinity, as the cinematic strategy of a linear narration of a plot is abandoned. The beginning–middle–end structure is dropped behind as impertinent when it comes to remembering the past: by deconstructing the ricœurian fetishism to testimony, the artist doesn’t refuse that something has happened. On the contrary, he points out the futility of historical accuracy through testimonies as a starting point for reconstructing history. In this sense, the structure of the work reveals to us Stan Douglas’s position towards the writing of history: ‘History could have gone one way or another.’29 The work stands out from the so called “historical turn” in contemporary art. If there is a renewed interest in taking up historical injustices and reexamining them, as art historian Claire Bishop illustrates in her forthcoming book OS XXI (working title), this is usually done by presenting raw archival material. Stan Douglas, in turn, restages past events not as a possible door to a forgotten reality, but to highlight the ambiguity of the elements historical writing relies on. Instead of giving the illusion that history can be boiled down to bare facts, the artist stretches the complexity of historical writing, and the conflictual readings one can have of the past. In this manner, Klatsassin leads us to a deeper consciousness about the past and the present and the necessity to constantly reevaluate the dominant narratives history is made of.

Works Cited Articles Foster, Hal, "An Archival Impulse," October, no 110 (Fall 2004): 3–22. Godfrey, Mark, "The Artist as Historian," October, no 120 (April 2007): 140–72. 29

As said in her talk at the Padeion University, Athens entitled: "Contemporary Art and the Society of Attention in the XXI Century", 19th December 2016. Source: http://www.sgt.gr/gre/SPG1853/, (03.01.2017)

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Holte, Michael Ned, ''Stan Douglas Talks about "Klatsassin'', 2006'', Artforum 45, no. 2 (October 2006). Lythgoe, Esteban, ''Ricoeur’s Concept of Testimony'', Analetica Hermeneutica, Volume 3, (2011): 1–16. Magagnoli, Paolo, ''Documentary Fictions: New Concepts of Truth and Representation in the Works of Anri Sala and Hito Steyerl'', Object, no 12 (January 2011): 41–59.

Books Beyn, Ariane and Douglas, Stan, Stan Douglas: Klatsassin, Bilingual edition. Köln: Walther König, 2008. Bloch, Marc, The Historian’s Craft, trns. Peter Putman. New York: Knopf, 1953. Demos, T.J., The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis. Durham, London: Duke University Press Books, 2013. Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991. Lind, Maria and Steyerl, Hito (eds.), The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Document and Contemporary Art. Berlin, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Sternberg Press / Center for Curatorial Studies, 2008. Ricœur, Paul, La Mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000. Christine Ross, The Past is the Present; it's the Future too - The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art. London, Oxford: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013. Stan Douglas: Past Imperfect – Works 1986-2007, (eds.) Hans D. Christ and Iris Dressler. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008.

Web sources http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/klatsassin_9E.html (02.01.2017). https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/195-the-rashomon-effect (02.01.2017) http://www.sgt.gr/gre/SPG1853/ (03.1.2017)

POSTMEMORY AND COPRESENCE IN LISA APPIGNANESI AND EMILIA DEGENIUS: LIFE WRITING OF THE POLISH DIASPORA ELIZABETH KELLA

… still worse things happen in the world every day than my little troubles, and so I wait to tell about myself until the world has become a better place… —Anette Sallmander 1

The concept of postmemory has been advanced within Holocaust studies to account for the ways that the strong cultural and individual memories of Holocaust survivors impact on members of the next generation. The concept has subsequently been extended to the children of other traumatized groups, including those oppressed under East European communism.2 Theoretical formulations emphasize a combination of distance and closeness in those who relate their own stories or those of their parents in autobiography and family memoir. In this article, I examine postmemory and emotion in relation to life writing by two women writers of the Polish diaspora, each of whom has a familial connection to the Holocaust as well as to Polish anti-Semitism under communism. Born about 10 years apart (1946 and 1955), Lisa Appignanesi and Emilia Degenius share Jewish backgrounds, parental experiences of WW II, and both parental and personal experiences of anti-Semitism. Both emigrated from post-war Poland, but at different junctures in history and in their lives. Appignanesi left with her family at about age 2 and went on to Canada at about 5, arriving in 1951, and Degenius travelled as an 1 Anette Sallmander, “Om förintelsens minnesdag,” Tankar för dagen (“On Holocaust Memorial Day,” Thoughts for the Day), (January 27, 2015; Stockholm: Swedish Radio P1), radio broadcast. “…fortfarande varje dag händer det värre saker i världen att berätta om än mina bekymmer, och därför väntar jag att berätta om mig tills världen har varit ett bättre plats…” (np). This article is part of a larger project generously funded by the Baltic Sea Foundation. 2 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 19 and Hirsch, Family Frames, 22.

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unaccompanied minor to Sweden in 1972, at age 17. Appignanesi’s parents, who had survived forced labor and ghetto life, as well as the anxieties of passing as non-Jewish, sought to escape persecution in Poland directly after the war. By contrast, Degenius’s father was stationed in the USSR during the war, during which his first family was murdered in Treblinka. In the renewal of anti-Semitism in Poland leading up to the events of March 1968, he was divested of his law practice and died in 1967.3 Her mother later arranged for their two daughters to emigrate separately, and died just two weeks after Degenius’s arrival in Sweden. Both writers thus have a second-generation tie to the Holocaust, but also a tie to Communist-ruled Poland—strong in the case of Degenius. Appignanesi made a career writing in English, publishing her autobiography/family memoir, Losing the Dead, in 1999. Emilia Degenius became a practicing psychiatrist, and published her autobiography/family memoir, Skating in Warsaw (Åka Skridskor i Warsawa), in Swedish in 2014. Though reviewed in the major Swedish newspapers, it has not yet been translated.4 While writers of the Polish diaspora who write in English or other major languages have received some critical attention, in spite of the challenges of reading across national literatures, less attention has been given to those who write in Swedish.5 Examining works across geographies and languages 3

Appignanesi, Losing the Dead, 81. Appignanesi comments on “The wave of hysterical anti-Semitism which swept Poland in 1967 after the Six-Day War” when Soviets withdrew support for Israel, siding with Arabs, and anti-Jewish policies were set in place under Mazcar, with the approval of Jamulka, then head of Polish Communist Party. Political strife in the Party led to thousands of Jews being expulsed from Poland and the party, accused of Stalinist crimes. In March of the following year there were student protests which spread at the same time to Prague and culminated in the Warsaw Pact and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Between 1968 and 1972 about 2,700 Jewish refugees came to Sweden from Poland (Stare, “The History of the Swedish Jews”, 41). 4 See Högström’s review in Dagens Nyheter or Zawall’s review in Svenska Dagbladet. All translations of Degenius’s text are my own. 5 Among first-person accounts of the Holocaust in Swedish, by writers of Hungarian and Romanian backgrounds, are Magda Eggens’s, Om stenarna kunde tala (1997), and Hédi Fried’s Skärvor av ett liv, published first in translation in England in 1990, then in Swedish in 1992. Swedish criminologist Jerzy Sarnecki, who came from Poland to Sweden as a young man in 1969, published his father’s memoir/biography, Hilarys historia, in 2013. Elwira M. Grossman writes about the lack of vocabulary to discuss “multicultural writing created by ‘displaced women’, that is to say women who have lived in different countries, speak different languages and write in a language of their choice which is not necessarily what usually passes for a ‘native tongue’” (“Toward the Literature of Transcultural

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contributes to an appreciation of the variety of aesthetic treatment of historical oppression, and the range of representational strategies forged by postmemory writers of the Polish diaspora. In this article, I argue that Appignanesi’s and Degenius’s unique, hybrid texts draw on different modes of representation in order to evoke in themselves and their readers a sense of “emotional copresence” with events in the past. According to Marianne Hirsch, herself a daughter of Romanian Holocaust survivors as well as the foremost theorist of postmemory, members of “the generation after” have a special tie to history, which they “remember” through emotional and imaginative investment in the memories of others, frequently parents, whose stories, photographs, and day-to-day actions impart a strong sense of the dire, life-changing circumstances they have lived through.6 Hirsch proposes that “postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection.”7 For Hirsch, this conceptualization is important for respecting and preserving the integrity of survivor memory and testimony, on the one hand, and for acknowledging that historical traumas can indeed exert intergenerational effects, on the other. Insistence upon generational distance hinders the appropriation of the position or story of the victim, and insistence upon “deep personal connection” ensures an affective relation with the traumatic past. This affective relation on the part of the writer is quite complicated, however. According to Hirsch, “second-generation fiction, art, memoir, and testimony are shaped by the attempt to represent the long-term effects of living in close proximity to the pain, depression, and dissociation of persons who have witnessed and survived massive historical trauma”.8 Moreover, the generation after is at risk of being “dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness” and concomitantly of “having one’s own life stories displaced, even evacuated” by ancestors.9 Idioms”, 61). Such writers, and such writing, she notes, fall outside our common framework of both national literatures and academic disciplines. 6 I use the terms “generation after,” “postmemory generation,” and “postgeneration” interchangeably, to refer broadly to life writers at some degree of spatial and/or temporal remove. Second, third, and 1.5 generation are more specific terms. There are numerous ways each of these designations can blur and fail. Leslie Morris sees postmemory in even broader terms, as something distinct from experience which “unfolds as part of an ongoing process of intertextuality, translation, metonymic substitution, and an constant interrogation of the nature of the original” (Morris, “Postmemory, Postmemoir”, 293). 7 Hirsch, Family Frames, 22. 8 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 34. 9 Ibid., 5.

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As the Swedish artist quoted in the epigraph to this article expressed it, on radio in 2015: I gradually understood that I was a child of two parents who had survived concentration camps. My mother and father had been exposed to physical and psychological abuse and persecution. They had lost everything: their families, relatives, home, culture, home countries. And I had been deeply influenced by that, even though I had not been part of it. Because our family’s communication was always overshadowed by worse things having happened, my own problems were made trivial. This has made it complicated to tell about what has been relevant and important for me. 10

These emotional complications—of feeling one’s own experience is trivial, of feeling “overwhelmed” or “dominated” by one’s parents’ stories or by subsequent feelings of guilt and resentment, tempered by love and empathy—combine with ethical complications—of telling one’s own as well as someone else’s story without appropriating voices of suffering, without inflating one’s own importance, or without exploiting reader fascination with violence. Postgeneration writers of autobiography and family memoir face emotional and ethical constraints as they struggle to carry forward stories from the past, their own and that of their parents or families, “without unduly calling attention to [them]selves.”11 The exigencies of postmemory life writing might thus be said to at least partially contradict the autobiographical impulse. At the very least, the exigencies of such writing tend to bring it in line with postmodern theories of autobiography that challenge the presumed autonomy of the autobiographical subject, emphasizing multiple subject positions, the relationality of identity, and the social character of memory, not least because of the way that parental stories tend to be embedded in the story of the postmemory life writer. The Holocaust and other forms of cultural trauma command a place in postmemory autobiography and memoir by virtue of their grave significance for the life writer, at the same time as the writer did not experience the 10

Sallmander, “Om förintelsens minnesdag”, np. ”Så småningom förstod jag att jag var barn till två föräldrar som hade överlevt koncentrationsläger. Mor och far hade varit utsatta för fysiska och psykiska kränkningar och förföljelse. De hade förlorat allt: sina familjer, släkt, hem, kultur, hemländer. Och jag hade blivit djupt påverkat av detta, trots att jag inte hade varit med om det. Eftersom familjens kommunikation alltid överskuggades av att det hade hänt värre saker, gjorde mina egna problem triviala. Detta har gjort de komplicerat att berätta om det som har varit angeläget och viktigt för mig” (my transcription). 11 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 2.

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event first-hand. Another way to put this is that, in postmemory, the experience of trauma or oppression is variously mediated. It is close in terms of affect, but far away in terms of time and space. It involves a “deep personal connection” to the past, but at a spatial and temporal remove. This paradox at the heart of Hirsch’s definition, and of the phenomenon itself, raises questions: How does such a deep personal connection to the past come about in the writer? Can a similar connection be elicited from readers? Is this connection a psycho-social consequence of certain types of upbringings or familial relations? Perhaps most importantly, is it destined to fade, and if so, what does it then become? Does it become history? What role does imagination, empathy, art, or learning have in the maintenance, development, or transmission of historical experience? Taking her cue from another writer of the Polish diaspora, Eva Hoffman, Hirsch attempts to resolve some of these definitional issues by viewing postmemory as a “generational structure of transmission” rather than an identity position, and by distinguishing between what she calls familial and affiliative memories.12 The former is “an intergenerational vertical identification of child and parent occurring within the family”— what Hoffman calls the literal second generation— and the second is an “intergenerational horizontal identification that makes that child’s position more broadly available to other contemporaries”—Hoffman’s postgeneration.13 Hirsch’s readings of postmemory writers, photographers, and visual artists highlight the aesthetics of postmemory as pathways towards affiliative positions. In other words, she considers representational strategies and the ability of postmemory generation writers to reach out broadly through culture. In examining the life writing of Appignanesi and Degenius, I find it useful to set Hirsch’s questions and insights in relation to Caroline Wake’s critique of the theories of witnessing. Wake analyses situations in which a “primary witness” who has experienced an event directly is interviewed by a “secondary witness” who facilitates (or impedes) the testimony, and in which others “witness” this interview via a video or digital recording. Analyzing key texts about Holocaust testimony and witnessing,14 Wake

12

Ibid., 35. Ibid., 36. 14 Wake departs from Shoshana Felman’s account of her university students becoming traumatized by witnessing videotaped testimony of Holocaust survivors, and commentary by Dominick LaCapra, Geoffrey Hartman, and others who object in some regard to the dilution of the ideas of trauma and witness. I share a concern 13

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uncovers a tendency to implicitly place witnesses in a hierarchy, in which a witness’s spatiotemporal proximity to a traumatic event is strongly privileged, and a witness’s spatiotemporal distance, introduced through, for example, videotapes or other recordings, constitutes an inferior position. These assumptions about witnessing, Wake claims, conflates what she terms spatiotemporal co-presence with emotional co-presence, the first involving physical presence in space and time and the second involving emotional bonding, above all a feeling of empathy, without which testimony may fail.15 To account for the nuances of our highly mediated, and remediated, experiences, she suggests, we must understand that while emotional co-presence is necessary for witnessing, spatiotemporal co-presence need not be. Indeed, insistence upon the superiority of the witness who is close in time and space to trauma or oppression “leave[s] little room for those who inherit the world in the wake of such catastrophes.”16 From within the field of media studies, Wake therefore develops a theory of tertiary witnessing, which she defines as “a paradoxical combination of spatiotemporal distance and emotional co-presence.”17 Tertiary witnessing encompasses two models, immediate and hypermediate: In the former, spectators are spatiotemporally distant but through the ‘transparency’ of the medium they experience themselves as spatiotemporally copresent. This in turn creates a sense of emotional copresence. In the latter, spectators are spatiotemporally distant and experience themselves as such because the medium does not recede but rather remains in view. Yet despite this distance, or perhaps because of it, spectators can still experience emotional copresence.18

I find Wake’s two models reminiscent of modernist, realist and postmodernist modes of representation. In both types of tertiary witnessing, Wake argues, an emphasis is placed on the spatiotemporal separation of the (primary) witness from his or her testimony, and this separation is with the use of the term “witness”, but nevertheless argue here for the relevance of Wake’s ideas, largely compatible with those of Hirsch, in emphasizing mediation. 15 Wake refines Shanyang Zhao’s taxonomy of copresence. Zhao and Elesh subsequently define copresence as a social relationship that allows for mutual contact, and it can occur both as a face-to-face situation or a face-to-interface situation, and the latter thus “liberates copresence from the constraints of time” (“Copresence as ‘Being with’”, 571). 16 Wake, “Regarding the Recording”, 123. 17 Ibid., 113. 18 Ibid., 113, my italics.

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what allows a tertiary witness to practice or rehearse listening, seeing, interpreting the witness. When combined with emotional co-presence, defined in terms of active, empathetic attention, this type of separation becomes a condition of possibility for ethical witnessing, and, in my extension, for ethical reading. In what follows, I examine the ways in which both Appignanesi and Degenius struggle with the loss and recovery of memory—parental, personal, and archival—as well as with the witnessing and transmission of memory through their literary endeavors. Both are “second generation” writers, but they might also be said to occupy positions of secondary witnesses, seeking to attend to their parent’s first-hand accounts of their survival of WW II. In Degenius’s case, moreover, the author is simultaneously a first-generation or primary witness to anti-Semitism in communist Poland. Combined with Hirsch’s theory of postmemory, Wake’s analysis of the mediation involved in witnessing helps us understand how each author’s shifting positions and literary techniques are directed towards creating the conditions for empathic tertiary witnessing or empathic reading among readers. Achieving and eliciting emotional copresence is paramount for the life writing of these writers of the Polish diaspora. They make use of different strategies in order to do so. * According to one critic, Lisa Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead “emerges as a story constructed from the absence of one, a narrative of interpretation and questioning.”19 This hybrid text which, like Degenius’s, straddles genres of autobiography, biography, family history, fiction, and memoir, begins with the death of her father, who died in a London hospital, where he became terrified by his delirious, imagined return to an SS camp and where he began speaking urgently in Yiddish, a language he had not used with his daughter for decades. His death makes it impossible for her to question, confirm, or embellish her father’s story, as does her mother’s later lapse into Alzheimer’s disease. Thus, Appignanesi’s undertaking—of learning about and writing her family history—takes place as she experiences her access to their stories being cut off. Her motivation comes from being gradually but newly haunted by questions about a family history that never interested her before, but that she wants to be able to answer as her children grow into adulthood. As a teenager and young adult, Lisa was unable to bear witness to her parents’ 19

Lassner, Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust, 123.

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wartime stories. She saw the eruptions of their past into her young life as a hinder to the achievement of normalcy in Canada, unhappily underscoring the family status as “Odd Canadians” or Jewish immigrants.20 The adult narrator, however, repeatedly expresses regret for “not paying enough attention to our childhood stories of war and emigration.”21 Her belated retrieval and reconstruction of her connection to the past is thus also an act of reparation, an expression of a desire to restore the dead to memory—her own and her children’s, and the readers of her memoir who, in the logic of her expressed motivation, function as a kind of proxy for her children. She implicitly conceptualizes her readers as family, and she views her postmemory work—remembering, interviewing, reading, travelling to Poland, writing—as a particular type of memorial, a way to remember the lost dead, and thereby to “lose them properly.”22 Also prominent is Appignanesi’s sense that, as she puts it, “mine is the last generation for whom the war is still a living tissue of memory rather than a dusty and barbaric history of facts and statistics.”23 In this quotation, Appignanesi positions herself in relation not only to her family, but to her generation, a postgeneration. In Hirsch’s terms, she envisions both a filial tie and an affiliative connection to others. Moreover, Appignanesi constructs memory in contrast to history. Memory is described in biological terms—“a living tissue”—while history comprises dry facts and statistics. Memory is also affective and sensual, “an emotional climate, a thick set of sights and smells and sounds and imprinted attitudes…”24 Her emotional connection is one that will help other members of her generation as well as that of her children, to understand the Holocaust and its legacy. These descriptions correspond to Hirsch’s account of postmemory as involving “deep personal connection” to the past, and they also resonate with Wake’s understanding of emotional copresence. But however valued memory is in Appignanesi’s text, it is also ambiguous, able to “pollute as well as clarify”, and it is as ephemeral, 20

Appignanesi, Losing the Dead, 66. Ibid., 96. 22 Ibid., 22. Writing about transcultural life writing produced in Canada by people born in Eastern Europe, including Appignanesi, Alfred Hornung observes: “Moments of personal crisis, such as the illness and imminent death of parents, coincide with historical moments of change in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Communist Block in 1989. Both the private and the public ruptures in life and history become the primary motivation for writing one’s life” (“Return Visits,” 14). 23 Appignanesi, Losing the Dead, 6. 24 Ibid., 6. 21

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fragile, and unreliable as the bodies and minds of her parents.25 The effect of disease on her mother is devastating: “She can only return and return again to what she has already told me, scraps of unruly experience which refuse the consecutive shape of story. Her memory has taken on the randomness of dream, unconstrained by any order or external prodding.”26 The difficult emotions of dealing with her parent’s degeneration evoke in the writer a sense that she is a “bad daughter,” but also augment her need to restore her mother: “I need to undo her diminishment. I don’t want this image of her to usurp all others.” 27 Moreover, her mother quits talking about the war while Appignanesi is writing about it: “I don’t know whether this is because she feels I have stolen it from her or that she has given it to me. In any case, the onus has been transferred.”28 Appignanesi’s use of the passive grammatical construction here, together with her emphasis on what her mother might “feel”, cloud the issue of whether or not she has appropriated her mother’s war memories. But with this transfer of the burden of witnessing, Lisa feels compelled “to put these fragments into some kind of sequence”; she must “set her [mother’s] memories now side by side with the fuller versions I remember from childhood and my own youth.”29 In this account, Appignanesi’s postmemories become more reliable than her mother’s memories. In Wake’s critique of the privileging of spatiotemporal presence, she argues that: sometimes a secondary witness (such as an analyst or historian) might in fact be more authoritative than the primary witness, in the sense that he or she may have a better understanding of the event in its entirety.30

This appears to be Appignanesi’s claim about the “Survivor Interview” her mother recorded for a research team prior to her illness. Lisa considers that interview fragmentary: “Each fragment makes sense on its own, but nothing coheres… My mother’s story is devoid of history.”31 Indeed, this is the claim Losing the Dead makes: Lisa’s mother’s journal, given to her by her children and grandchildren to encourage her remembering, remains 25

Ibid., 6. Ibid., 7. 27 Ibid., 89; 90. Like Degenius, Appignanesi writes about the desire to make her mother a war-time heroine. Both writers display great ambivalence about their mothers’ abilities to survive WWII and Communism, wondering whether their mothers used their sexualities to gain favors. 28 Ibid., 247. 29 Ibid., 91, my emphasis. 30 Wake, “Regarding the Recording”, 123. 31 Appignanesi, Losing the Dead, 92. 26

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empty; it is up to Lisa to supply a coherent family memoir.32 Appignanesi constructs memory in her text as a near unmediated experience, powerful but threatening to engulf the witness, and thus also in need of being brought into the realm of historical understanding, through postgenerational mediation.33 Thus, in spite of her valorization of memory and her comment about dusty history, dry facts and statistics do attract Appignanesi. She immerses herself in history books: “I read and read. History makes sense of memory. It gives one a grid for individual experience.”34 Besides the view of memory as individual and history as collective embedded in this formulation, Appignanesi clearly relies strongly on historical knowledge and discourse to construct her memoir.35 This is particularly apparent in the long middle section of her narrative, appropriately titled “Excavations”, which alternates between chapters that relate her parent’s pre-war and war-time experiences and chapters that tell of her own two return visits to Poland. The first visit, in 1988, occurs after her father dies, and it is suggested that his death frees her to reconsider the attitude towards Poland he held, and that she had “unconsciously or unthinkingly” adopted—that Poland is “a desecrated cemetery. Mud and shit and bones and ash and scavenged graves. You don’t play tourist in shit. You don’t grow sentimental over shit.”36 In Poland, Appignanesi finds herself unable to see much more than multiple confirmations of Polish anti-Semitism, and she leaves Poland without regret. It is only as her mother’s condition degenerates, and Lisa’s interest in understanding becomes acute, that she realizes how incomplete her understanding is: “My parents’ wartime story refuses to ground itself. I

32

Ibid., 87. This is reminiscent of Hirsch’s understanding of “re-memory” (The Generation of Postmemory, 82-85), which I view somewhat differently, as Toni Morrison’s conceptualization of a powerful engagement with history, not unlike the emotional copresence Wake writes about. 34 Appignanesi, Losing the Dead, 92. 35 One passage illustrates something of her preferred method: Having visited Poland with a Polish-speaking friend the two discuss the origin of the word cham, meaning “boor” or “peasant”. Her friend insists it is Polish, but Appignanesi thinks it is Yiddish: “… when I get back to London, I check it out. The word does indeed come from Yiddish and is used to designate a plebe or common man, unlearned, uncultured…” (my emphasis, 119). Though the elitism of the phrase goes unremarked, this factual confirmation allows her to reflect on the “osmosis between Polish and Polish-Jewish cultures” (119), to take a rational, historical view of the relations between these groups. 36 Appignanesi, Losing the Dead, 81; 80. 33

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cannot smell its rubble or bombs or fear. I cannot see its hostile faces.”37 She therefore undertakes a second journey, together with a Polish-born and Polish-speaking friend, in order to “make [Lisa’s] mother’s memories real, to return her past to both of us.”38 This journey occurs after the fall of communism, and it involves deeper excursions into the archives of the Jewish Historical Institute and other agencies, as well as to places her parents lived, to the town in which she was born. In other words, the return trip involves seeking out archival records but also a sensual, embodied experience of place, the sites of, especially, her mother’s memory. Appignanesi’s second return trip appears to be undertaken in order to narrow or transcend the spatiotemporal distance between her and her parents. She seeks the materiality of place to compensate for the immateriality of time and the failures of historical discourse. But place fails, at least in part: her childhood home has been knocked down and her grandmother’s grave is impossible to locate. Moreover, official records uncovered in Poland prove far from infallible; information is missing, names are misspelled, and there is no record of her own birth, or that any of her family have ever lived in Lodz. This second return trip illustrates Hirsch’s point: “Narratives of return are quest plots holding out, and forever frustrating, the promise of revelation and recovery […].”39 Nevertheless, the trip does foster in her a sense of emotional co-presence, of deep personal connection, with her parents that had previously been missing. Her present-tense narration of her return trip is alternated with past-tense literary and imaginative renditions of their memories. Thus, the narrative form of Appignanesi’s family memoir documents the spatiotemporal distance between generations, but simultaneously gives voice to the emotional co-presence achieved by the writer. The memoir concludes with the observation that “official history refuses to coincide with family memory. Everything is open to invention.”40 Things appear to be as Hirsch suggests, that the “moment of disclosure and satisfaction serves only to raise another set of questions that defer any possibility of narrative closure.”41 Although this conclusion, as well as that of the Afterword to the 2013 reprint, emphasizes the role of invention and imagination in understanding the past, I would suggest that Appignanesi’s text works towards and ends with a strong sense of closure and equanimity derived from achieving a coherent, albeit postmodern, historical narrative. 37

Ibid., 92. Ibid., 110. 39 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 205. 40 Appignanesi, Losing the Dead, 252. 41 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 205. 38

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Her desire is to order uncontrollable memories, to make sense of her own and those of her parents. As she notes in her opening, “writing has to entail come kind of order, even if the voyage into the past is always coloured by invention.”42 In Losing the Dead the order that is imposed is historical. The clear divisions into parts, with the long “Excavations” section being most substantial, the alternating chapters in that section which chronologically relate war-time experiences, replete with dates, places, political events, government decrees, and so on, and similar chronological accounts of return journeys to Poland before (1988) and after (1997) the fall of Communism, clearly signal the textual affinity with historical discourse, understood in a postmodern sense as narrative constituted by the interplay between history, memory, and imagination. Let me now turn to Emilia Degenius’s “autobiographical fiction”. The very first sentence of Skating in Warsaw establishes the style and the voice of the narrator. This voice is strikingly different from the fairly measured and often ironic prose of Appignanesi’s work. Degenius’s style relies on very long sentences, containing considerable, almost compulsive repetition, varied by sections of very short sentences, often simply fragments. Indeed, I am reminded of Hirsch’s point that postmemory tends to be “obsessive and relentless.”43 The text has no formal chapter divisions. Similar to Appignanesi’s work, and exemplary of the tendency for immigrant autobiography to divide into two, Skating in Warsaw has two narrative strands, one primarily in the narrative present of Sweden, and the other in the past of Poland. The narrative present is italicized, and sometimes reproduces the official documents that Degenius succeeds in locating. The book reads as stream-of-consciousness or interior monologue, though it includes several direct addresses to imaginary interlocutors.44 Skating in Warsaw begins by establishing memory and forgetting as a theme: I don’t remember the good-bye, the actual waving, nor the moment when the train gives a lurch, the lurch of a train being set into motion, I don’t remember which way it rolls first, forward or backward, if it has to back out of the train station first, nor whether the open window is on the train

42

Appignanesi, Losing the Dead, 8. Hirsch, Family Frames, 22. 44 In the narrative present, the autobiographical I sometimes directly addresses her mother and father, though both are deceased. There are also direct addresses to unspecified others, possibly the reader of the text. 43

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This opening emphasizes departure, emigration and exile. But the opening also emphasizes the loss and uncertainty of memory. Although she “seems to remember” (“vill minnas”)46 the moment of her departure from Poland to Sweden in 1972, her memories are tentative, uncertain. “I don’t remember” is repeated throughout the section, and indeed becomes a motif through the entire book. In the first pages, it is sometimes alternated with other phrases nuancing the narrator’s memory and knowledge of the past; she is certain about some things (“säker på”), but other things she merely believes (”tror”) or thinks she knows (”har för mig att jag vet”). The unreliability of Emilia’s personal memory is thus foregrounded from the start. Losing the Dead highlights the difficulties of intergenerational transmission of family memory; Appignanesi’s struggle is primarily with retrieving her parents’ memories. In Skating in Warsaw, Degenius additionally struggles to gain access to her own memories of her family and life in Poland prior to her emigration, which seem to have been repressed. In personal communication, the author has stated that she understands her forgetting of her Polish past as a response to trauma and as a strategy for survival through assimilation in Sweden. Having just turned 17 when she left Poland to join her sister in Sweden, Emilia might be expected to have more memories of her childhood and a greater understanding of her family’s situation in Poland, but her memories are, like those of Appignanesi’s mother, fragmentary, incomplete, contradictory, painful. Her motivations for excavating her family history are fraught with ambiguity and resistance. In the text, Emilia expresses anger and frustration about being urged to remember what she has forgotten, by finding out more about the past. She suggests that the unidentified addressees, possibly readers, are crazy for insisting that Emilia should try 45

Degenius, Åka Skridskor i Warszawa, 9. “Jag minns inte avskedet, själva vinkandet, inte när tågvagnen rycker till, det där rycket när ett tåg sätts i rörelse, jag minns inte åt vilket håll det rullar först, framåt eller bakåt, om det måsta backa sig ut ur tågstationen först, inte om det neddragna fönstret är på vagnens högra sida, eller på den vänstra, jag minns inte om jag gråter, om ni gråter, kanske Filip, kanske Tomek, kanske vi alla, både ni och jag.” All translations are my own. 46 The Swedish phrase vill minnas is best translated as seem to remember, expressing some hesitancy, but the literal translation, want to remember, is suggestive for its expression of a desire for memory.

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to find out “the truth” about her family, for Emilia insists that hers is not an ordinary genealogy (“en släktforskning vilken som helst”).47 As she puts it: “there is no track that can lead me there, all traces end abruptly, most of them end with the parent, possibly with the child, they end in a ghetto, they end in a cattle car, they end in a camp, they end in a march, there or away from there…”48 Invoking Holocaust imagery, this passage establishes a parallel between the destruction of Jewish family lines under Nazi rule and under the communist regime in post-war Poland. Later in the text, this parallel is reiterated, as she recalls the everyday anti-Semitism experienced by her and her family in communist Poland: “We are not crowded into a suffocating death in a cattle car. We don’t end up in a camp… We are not expelled from school. We are only harassed there. We are placed under conditions of impending threat.”49 Indeed, the continuity of anti-Semitism through time and over geographies gains momentum throughout the work, and for Emilia it undercuts her project; how can her family history end in other than the undoing of family? Through her excavations of the past, Emilia learns of her father’s mother, first wife, and daughter, also named Emilia, dead in Treblinka, her half-brother’s alienation from their mother, and she gradually recalls her father’s dispossession and death, her sister’s emigration, her mother’s illness, her friend’s betrayal, the dissolution of the idyllic childhood symbolized in the image of skating in Warsaw, her unwilling emigration, and the death of her mother just three weeks later.50 The loss of family, according to Aleida Assman and others, is a considerable hinder to recollection, because even personal memory is social in character, connected to shared memories in families, generations, and cultures. Individual memory operates “not only via lived experience, but also via interacting, communicating, identifying, learning, and 47

Degenius, Åka Skridskor i Warszawa, 14. Ibid., 15. “… det finns inget spår som kan leda mig dit, alla spår tar tvärt slut, de flesta slutar vid föräldern, möjligen vid barnet, de slutar I ett getto, de slutar i en boskapsvagn, de slutar i ett läger, de slutar under en marsch, dit eller därifrån…”. 49 Ibid., 168. “Vi trängs inte till kvävningsdöden I en boskapsvagn. Vi hamnar inte I något läger… Vi stängs inte av från skolan. Vi bara trakasseras där. Vi försätts i ett tillstånd av annalkande hot.” 50 In private conversation with the author in November 2016, Degenius said that the text’s silence concerning her inheritance of the name Emilia is her parents’ silence—who spoke little and made little of the assignment of the name Emilia. I find this a trenchant suggestion of the way that life writing of the postmemory generation can be subtly shaped by parental experience, of the way the text respects some parental silences, even in such an intimate, personal area as the author’s name. 48

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participating.”51 Thus, for example, when Degenius’s memory of a detail about her mother’s funeral contradicts that of her sister, she feels anxiety, because her sister’s memories: “…are the only ones I have, the only home I have left, each memory a piece of the puzzle, a fixture in my reconstructed childhood home, safest if it is I who am mistaken, who remembers wrong.”52 Personal memory needs a familial or other social context, and can be difficult to verify when family members have been lost or radically reduced in number. The loss of home, of a social context that bears up memory, is strongly linked in Degenius’s text to the loss of language. While Appignanesi also comments on her “mystifying relationship” with Polish, able to understand but not speak the language and therefore in need of an interpreter, Degenius is almost hyper aware that she has lost a great deal of her Polish, including its relation to cultural practices.53 For instance, she finds herself unable to understand how a telephone book is constructed in Poland, and in her first written contacts with agencies in Poland she realizes that bureaucratic words are not in her dictionary. For her, Polish is “a disappeared language, repressed by fate, now forced to return, of necessity now, of a different necessity this time…”54 First in her written interactions, then in her spoken ones, Polish returns to Degenius through the practice of stubborn repetition: “… I don’t give up, I read and reread, until the words come back, I have discovered that they do come back, one after the other, a remarkable phenomenon…”55 When she finally is able to access her father’s account of his life, on file in the offices of the Bar Association in Warsaw (Advokatföreningen i Warszawa), her fear and excitement, as well as her imperfect command of Polish, shape the way she reads: [I] leaf through the pages, skip over, leaf back, pause here and there, with throbbing heart…am hindered by words I don’t understand, words I cannot interpret, no order to the reading, it feels important, pressing, 51

Assman, ”Re-Framing Memory”, 40. Degenius, Åka Skridskor i Warszawa, 197. “…hennes minnen är de enda jag har, det enda hemmet jag har kvar, varje minne en pusselbit, en möbel i mitt återinredda barndomshem, säkrast att det är jag som misstar mig, att det är jag som minns fel.” 53 Appignanesi, Losing the Dead, 83. 54 Degenius, Åka Skridskor i Warszawa, 144. “…ett försvunnet språk, som trängts bort av öden, som nu tvingas tillbaka, av nöden nu med, denna gång av en annan nöd.” 55 Ibid., 144 “...jag ger inte upp, jag laser och laser om, tills orden kommer tillbaka, jag har upptäckt att de gör det, ett efter ett, ett märkligt fenomen…” 52

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urgent, I hold the story of my father in my hands, the only one I have, the only one I ever had…56

Through this reading and learning strategy, she begins to slowly understand, as she puts it: not just the words, I begin to understand more than them, I begin to sense, I don’t yet know what, just a vague feeling, can it be a feeling of a home? Is this how it feels? is this how a language feels?, a first language, a mother tongue?, which is more than words, more than grammar… which is the tone and nuances and between the lines and question marks and exclamation marks…”57

Degenius’s style of writing, with its repetitions, breaks, compulsive returns, mimics her way of re-learning Polish and regaining her memories of her life before emigration. It seeks to “realistically” represent her consciousness as it works through trauma to remember, relearn, and make the past comprehensible to and in the present of the reader as well as the author. The uncertainty of personal memory is compounded by the unreliability of public record, particularly in post-Communist Poland, but also in Sweden. Much like Appignanesi, Degenius initially desires a truthful story, an explanatory narrative. For instance, she requests and receives information from the Swedish Migration Agency (Migrationsverket), but finds it inadequate: “I had imagined a story. A story that remembers. That explains. That takes care of a seventeen-year-old girl. Political emigrant. Which of us said that? Could hardly be me. I don’t know what that is.”58 Similarly, when she does finally visit the Institute for National Remembrance (IPN) archive in Poland, she is cautioned against believing the files because “what is in the files is […] the intelligence office’s truth, 56

Ibid., 200.“[jag] bläddrar, hoppar över, bläddrar tillbaka, stannar upp här och var, med bultande hjärta, [...] hindras av ord jag inte förstår, ord jag inte kan tyda, ingen ordning på läsandet, det känns viktigt, angeläget, bråttom, jag håller berättelsen om min far i mina händer, den enda jag har, den enda jag någonsin haft [...].” 57 Ibid., 145. “… inte bara orden, jag börjar förstå mer än dem, jag börjar ana, vet ännu inte vad, bara en vag känsla, kan det vara känslan av ett hem?, är det såhär det känns?, är det såhär ett språk känns?, ett första språk, ett modersmål?, som är mer än orden, mer än grammatiken, […] som är tonen och nyanserna och mellan raderna och frågetecknen och utropstecknen […]” 58 Ibid., 154. “Jag hade föreställt mig en berättelse. En berättelse som minns. Som förklarar. Som tar hand om en sjuttonårig tjej. Politisk emigrant. Vem av oss sade det? Knappast jag. Jag vet inte vad det är.”

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the informer’s truth, that truth need not be true…” 59 Degenius’s autobiographical work illustrates the problems that can emerge when institutionalized history becomes compromised, for example, by the erasures or falsification of records, “such as those perpetrated by totalitarian regimes,” or by the exigencies of survival under such regimes.60 Her desire for official archives, in both Poland and Sweden, to supply a full account that adequately compensates for the blanks in her own memory and her knowledge is, in fact, continuously disappointed, somewhat as it is for Appignanesi. Because of Degenius’s double position as both first- and secondgeneration witness, both primary and secondary witness, there are other ways to fill in the gaps in her memory. I have already discussed her struggles with relearning Polish. What is more, her return visit to Poland does, in fact, trigger embodied, sensory memories. While Appignanesi ironically muses on the failure of her first trip to her natal city, Lodz, to propel her into a “Proustian vertigo,” Degenius is overwhelmed by painful memories as she walks the streets of her old neighborhood in Warsaw: “her feet remember” her walks home from school with her best friend, but retracing her steps also triggers memories of her friend’s betrayal and Degenius’s later refusal to help her leave Poland.61 Though both writers place their memories and the memories of others in relation to official documents, archives, and histories, and though both also undertake and recount return journeys to Poland, Degenius displays a deeper distrust of historical discourse and rational analysis. One revealing passage begins with her wondering why she and her family were kept so long in Poland, in spite of the decree “encouraging” Jews to leave Poland: I don’t understand why you hold us back. Why so long. For such a long time. From the fall of 1967 to the spring of 1971. For the first stamp [approving her sister’s emigration]. Until the winter of 1972 for stamp number two [approving Degenius’s emigration]. Even longer for stamp number three [for her mother]. It took too long. It didn’t make it in time. I

59

There are a number of interesting silences in Degenius’s narrative. She does not comment, for instance, on finding her own name on several of these applications, leaving it unclear if she wrote them herself or if her mother wrote them with or without her knowledge and permission. “…ni ska inte tro att ni får veta sanningen, att det som står i akterna är sanningen, de är underrättelsetjänstens sanning, informatörens sanning, den sanningen behöver inte vara sann...” (195). 60 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 33. 61 Appignanesi, Losing the Dead, 83 and Degenius, Åka Skridskor i Warszawa, 231.

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can find no explanation. No answer. The only one I find is that you don’t 62 want us here.

The section ends, however, by refusing any explanation: I have changed my mind. I don’t want any explanation. I don’t think I want to understand. To understand would be to be able to explain. It would be to claim that there is an explanation. And an answer that explains. Like an oh yeah, now I get it! It would be to justify. To justify that which cannot be 63 justified.

Emilia retains this emotional and ethical stance in her visit to Poland, where her strongest insight is that an “anti-Semitic childhood” is a childhood that makes one “forever homeless.”64 Ultimately, the text does not completely reconcile the two narrative strands. The italicized narrative suggests some sort of emotional resolution as the adult narrator traces her old path through her Warsaw neighborhood; she pictures herself wandering in her own footsteps, hand in hand with the child she once was, both of them sad, but holding hands and talking, affirming one another and the importance of remembering, in spite of the pain that memory brings. Yet, the implied resolution is undermined as the last italicized words return to the narrator’s negative emotions: “a childish need to be right, the adult’s hope for justice, my own conviction that it is possible to revise the ending of the story, vengeful?, not at all, or maybe, I don’t know, should I?, take revenge on whom?”65 Moreover, the book ends 62

Degenius, Åka Skridskor i Warszawa, 167. “Jag förstår inte varför ni håller oss kvar. Varför så länge. Under en så long tid. Från hösten 1967 till våren 1971. För den första stämpeln. Till vintern 1972 för stämpel nummer två. Än längre för stämpel nummer tre. Den dröjde för länge. Den hann inte fram i tid. Jag hittar ingen förklaring. Inget svar. Den enda jag hittar är att ni inte vill ha oss här.” 63 Ibid., 168. “Jag har ändrat mig. Jag vill inte ha någon förklaring. Jag tror inte att jag vill förstå. Att förstå vore att kunna förklara. Det vore att påstå att det finns en förklaring. Och ett förklarande svar. Som ett jaha, nu fattar jag! Det vore att rättfärdiga. Att rättfärdiga det som inte kan rättfärdigas.” 64 Ibid., 221. “Hemmet i antisemitismens barndom tar ifrån dig ditt hem, tar ifrån dig varje hem, gör dig för alltid hemlös.” In a personal email to the author, November 30, 2016, Degenius specifies that her trauma derives from her homelessness. She writes that “My trauma meant that Poland took from me all that was my home; father, mother, homeland, and even the concrete home, and everything in it. I was not even able to bring my birth certificate with me and was forced to recreate myself, so to speak, which according to J[ean] Amery is not possible, not completely.” 65 Degenius, Åka Skridskor i Warszawa, 235.

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not in the present of writing, but in the hardly more comprehensible past, as the young emigrée Emilia wonders if it has all been a dream: “Am afraid every time I hear the Internationale. Get goose bumps on my arms, the hair on my head and the back of my neck stands up. What is happening? Has Poland come here? Have I dreamed it all?”66 Insisting upon immediacy rather than historical distance, Skating in Warsaw finally refuses to fully explain the events it partially, uncertainly, and emotionally reconstructs. By way of its strategy of calling attention to the (re)constructed nature of memory and the past, of keeping in full view the limits of historical representation, Appignanesi’s postmodernist memoir enables something akin to Wake’s hypermediate tertiary witnessing. Like the author, readers cannot but be strongly aware of their socio-temporal distance from the events that have occurred, but, as Wake notes, this distance does not preclude emotional co-presence. Arguably, Appignanesi’s own strong emotions about being a bad daughter and poor listener help engender the conditions for readers to empathize with her and with her parents. Degenius, too, draws attention to the constructedness of memory and archives, but her refusal to create or find closure in her text guarantees that strong emotions about the past are carried into the author’s present, as well as the present of empathetic readers. To conclude, the imagination, as well as historical archives and official records, are enlisted in both these works of postmemory by women authors of the Polish diaspora, written in English and in Swedish. They both seek to convey their own sense of emotional involvement with their parents’ lives, at the same time as their life writing offers possibilities for readers to gain a sense of emotional co-presence with them. Relying on a postmodern perspective which keeps the medium of transmission in view—the constructedness of narrative, the literariness, the irony—Appignanesi’s textual choices might elicit in the reader the affiliation that Hirsch theorizes and the position of hypermediate tertiary witnessing discussed by Wake. The stream of consciousness that characterizes Degenius’s text, though formally innovative, nevertheless adheres to the convention of modernist realism familiar to many readers, and thus one might say that her writing makes the medium transparent, as readers seem to have direct access to her thoughts. Indeed, this corresponds to Degenius’s own idea of writing as corresponding to her thought processes, capturing thoughts before they disappear, recovering memories. As she puts it: “…I believe 66

Degenius, Åka Skridskor i Warszawa, 235. “Blir rädd varje gång jag hör Internationalen. Får gåshud på armarna, håret reser sig på hjässan och bak i nacken. Vad händer? Har Polen kommit hit? Har jag drömt alltihop?”

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this is how we think, and remember, one thought gives rise to the next, one memory leads to the next…”67 Both life writers finally demonstrate that art and the imagination can make possible the conditions for emotional copresence and an empathic engagement with history.

Works Cited Appignanesi, Lisa. Losing the Dead. London: Virago, 1999. Assman, Aleida. “Re-framing memory. Between individual and collective forms of constructing the past.” In Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, edited by Karin Tilmans, Frank Van Vree, Jay Winter. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2010: 3550. Degenius, Emilia. Åka Skridskor I Warszawa. Stockholm: Ersatz, 2014. Eggens, Magda. Om stenarna kunde tala. Stockholm: Rabén and Sjögren, 2005. Fried, Hédi. Skärvor av ett liv. Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2016. Grossman, Elwira M. “Towards the Literature of Transcultural Idioms: Ewa/Eva Stachniak and Lisa Appignanessi.” In Displaced Women: Multilingual Narratives of Migration in Europe, edited by Lucia Aiello, Joy Charnley, and Mariangela Palladino. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014. 61-69. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012. —. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. Hornung, Alfred. “Return Visits: The European Background of Transcultural Life Writing.” The European Journal of Life Writing. Vol II (2013): 10-24. Högström, Jesper. “Emilia Degenius: ‘Åka skridskor i Warszawa.’” (”Emilia Degenius: ’Skating in Warsaw’). Dagens Nyheter. December 1, 2014. Accessed October 8, 2015. http://www.dn.se/dnbokrecensioner/emilia-degenius-aka-skridskor-i warszawa/. Lassner, Phyllis. Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust: Displaced Witnesses. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 67

Emilia Degenius, e-mail message to author, November 29, 2016. “Jag brukar saga att jag ‘skriver som man tänker’, fångar tankarna i farten innan de försvinner, jag tror att det är så vi tanker, och minns, en tanke föder nästa, ett minne leder till nästa, på ett ungefär…”

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Morris, Leslie. “Postmemory, Postmemoir.” In Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945-2000, edited by Leslie Morris and Jack Zipes. London: Palgrave, 2002: 291-306. Sallmander, Anette. “Om förintelsens minnesdag,” Tankar för dagen (“On Holocaust Memorial Day,” Thoughts for the Day), (January 27, 2015; Stockholm: Swedish Radio P1), radio broadcast. Sarnecki, Jerzy. Hilarys Historia: Samtal med Hilary Sarnecki 14 september 2007-12 augusti 2008. Stockholm: Carlsson,Ass 2013. Stare, Jaqueline. “The History of the Swedish Jews.” The Jews of Sweden: Their History and Tradition. Trans. William Jewson. Stockholm: The Jewish Museum, 2004. 5-45. Wake, Caroline. “Regarding the Recording: The Viewer of Video Testimony, the Complexity of Copresence and the Possibility of Tertiary Witnessing.” History & Memory, 25, no.1 (2013): 111-44. Zawall, Emi-Simone. “Antisemitismens manga ansikten.” (“The Many Faces of Anti-Semitism”). Svenska Dagbladet. October 22, 2014. Accessed October 3, 2015. http://www.svd.se/antisemitismens-mangaansikten. Zhao, Shanyang and David Elesh. “Copresence as ‘Being With.” Information, Communication & Society, 11, no.4 (2008): 565-583. Accessed November 23, 2016. DOI: 10.1080/13691180801998995.

WHOSE MEMORY? CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVES OF THE JAPANESE AMERICAN WORLD WAR II INTERNMENT LENA AHLIN

After the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, about 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent on the West coast of the U.S. were rounded up and “evacuated,” as the contemporary euphemistic term was, or sent to prison camps. In May 2016, The Guardian published an interview with 80-yearold Madeleine Sugimoto, who was sent to an internment camp at the age of five. In the interview, Sugimoto articulates the parallels she finds between Donald Trump’s election campaign rhetoric on particularly Muslim immigrants and the racialization and ideas of the “enemy within” that characterized the internment: “I’m not sure he even knows the history,” she said, “he never mentions it, or whether he has any concept of how people lost everything and were incarcerated without trial.” In fact, Trump was asked by Time magazine in the wake of his Muslim ban whether he would have supported the internment of Japanese Americans in the war. In an evasive answer, he said that he might have. Sugimoto believes the collective amnesia that surrounds this blot on American history is not a purely academic matter but a burning priority of today. “People do not remember,” she said, “and that makes it easier for Trump to fan the flames.”1

Sugimoto thus emphasizes the importance of knowing one’s history, and her characterization of the internment as part of a “collective amnesia” suggests that there are still many people who do not like to be reminded of this wartime trauma. Her reactions to Trump’s statements show that remembrance of the past is vital for present politics. Does it matter who gets to tell the stories of our past? 1

Pilkington, “Japanese American internment survivor.”

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Ann Rigney reminds us that literature has an important role to play in “creating shared narratives and hence in collectivizing memory”2; an observation which raises the question of who gets to formulate these shared narratives. This article focuses on literary representations of the incarceration and considers the work of third generation JapaneseAmericans, like Julie Otsuka and Kimi Cunningham Grant, who are bringing to light their own family past in their narratives, in relation to the work of Sandra Dallas, as a representative of the current interest in internment fiction by non-Japanese authors. What might be at stake when the internment is depicted by authors like Dallas who do not have the same kind of personal relationship to it that the Japanese American authors do? Are authors like Dallas3 broadening national self-understanding, or do they commodify the incarceration as an exciting topic of historical fiction lending itself readily to motifs of secrecy, betrayal, and guilt? An important starting-point for the following analysis is Jan Assman’s distinction between communicative and cultural memory: communicative memory designates lived, embodied memories, while cultural memory refers to institutionalized and mediated memories (Assman’s terms correspond roughly to Halbwachs’ distinction between “social” and “historical” memory).4 At this historical moment, 70 years after the end of World War II and the Japanese American incarceration, we are in a transitional phase between these two forms of memory. How is the transition from communicative to cultural memory reflected in contemporary fiction? How do the internment narratives of American authors of Japanese ancestry differ from those of authors for whom this wartime trauma is not a lived experience?

Japanese American Internment Narratives: Silence, Shame and Collectivity Looking at the internment as a literary topic, we find that in the decades immediately after the war there are very few examples of fictional representations of this trauma, most famously Mine Okubo’s Citizen 13660, 1946; Monika Sone’s Nisei Daughter, 1953, and John Okada’s No2

Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott, 6. Some other recent examples of novels in which the wartime internment figures are Katherine Fitzmaurice’s A Diamond in the Desert (2012), Sophie Littlefield’s Garden of Stones (2013), James Ellroy’s Perfidia (2014) and Lisa See’s China Dolls (2014). 4 Assman, “Communicative and Cultural Memory”, 117. 3

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No Boy, 1957. It takes until the 1970s and 80s before we begin to see more works dealing with the Japanese American experience at “camp” in the form of autobiographies, or memoirs, written by former internees or their children. In these writings, the personal and family past is often merged with the public past, as the investigation of what actually happened at camp is closely linked to the search for identity and an answer to the question of what it means to be a Japanese American. In many cases, the writing and publication of these texts is an almost therapeutic activity for the former internees (or their descendants), filling “a ‘void’ in their personal history” created by the silence around the incarceration of their parents and grandparents.5 Julie Otsuka represents the third generation (Sansei), that is, Americans of Japanese descent with no direct experience of the incarceration, but to whom the memory of this trauma has been passed on by parents and grandparents. In interviews, Otsuka has said that she absorbed knowledge about camp “osmotically” and that there was “a subterranean line of anger”6 running in her family that finally found an outlet in When the Emperor Was Divine. These descriptions call to mind Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory,” which she uses to analyze the “transgenerational transmission of trauma.” Hirsch uses the term to analyze the effects of the Holocaust, which left its mark on the children and grandchildren of the survivors leading them to seek a creative outlet for their experiences. However, Hirsch emphasizes that it is relevant to “numerous other contexts of traumatic transfer” as well.7 It is this notion of postmemory and the transference of lived memories of the internment that makes it possible to read Julie Otsuka’s and also Kimi Cunningham Grant’s texts as examples of “communicative” memory. In the case of both Otsuka and Cunningham Grant, this transgenerational transmission of trauma was, to a great extent, wordless and surrounded by silence. The narrative of the incarceration is laced with shame and humiliation and was kept secret by many of the internees. For this third generation, writing about the incarceration has often involved a laborious process of excavation facts that have been suppressed for decades. One of the reasons why the internees often remained silent about their experiences at camp is the comparison with the concentration camps of the Holocaust.8 Mitsuye Yamada explains how the reports about the atrocities in Europe silenced 5

Nagata, “Echoes From Generation to Generation”, 62. Oishi, ”Secrecy and Anger.” 7 Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory”, 106–107. 8 For a discussion of further reasons for their silence, see Ahlin, “All we wanted to do”, 2015. 6

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the Japanese Americans after the war, so that “when asked, ‘What was it like?’ one could only respond, ‘It wasn’t that bad.’”9 Yamada’s description illustrates how groups of victims of certain traumas are often set against one another in the struggle for public recognition. Against such anunderstanding of collective memories as “competitive,” Michael Rothberg proposes the idea of memory as “multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing and borrowing; as productive and not privative.”10 Multidirectional memory destabilizes the fixed connection between group identity and collective memories and allows for the recognition of how memories intersect and interact. Thus, instead of letting the memory of the Holocaust overshadow other traumatic experiences, Rothberg suggests that we can use “the presence of widespread Holocaust consciousness as a platform to articulate a vision of American racism past and present.”11 Thinking of the relationship between the Holocaust and the Japanese American internment in this way makes it possible to move beyond comparisons of levels of suffering to an interrogation of the relationship between memory, racism and silence. Kimi Cunningham Grant’s Silver Like Dust (2011) seeks to tell the story of her grandmother’s imprisonment at Heart Mountain. Here, too, silence appears as a central structural device as the writer often finds her grandmother still very unwilling to recall such painful memories. In the Prologue, Cunningham Grant describes how she as a 9-year-old girl finds out about her grandmother’s imprisonment in a concentration camp: With furtive glances toward her parents, my mother hissed this information, softly, like a confession. Or maybe it was more like an apology. I didn’t ask any questions upon hearing this news, I think because I was afraid. Afraid of the way my mother’s dark eyes looked at me solemnly, as though she were entrusting me with some grave secret. Or perhaps I was afraid of the answer, of the weight that the why behind this revelation might bring to my small shoulders. Whatever my reasons, all I knew at the time was that my Obaachan and Ojichan [grandmother and grandfather] had been imprisoned for being Japanese, and I concluded from this conversation that there was something inherently bad about being Japanese, that there was something to be sorry about.12

The secrecy and silence surrounding the topic of the incarceration is evident here. The passage clearly depicts the complexity of the situation: 9

Yamada, “Legacy of Silence”, 40. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 3. 11 Ibid. 12 Cunningham Grant, Silver Like Dust, 2-3. 10

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the girl thinks of her mother’s revelation in terms of an “apology” and concludes that what she apologizes for is her ancestry. The initial belief that the Japanese Americans were treated like criminals because they had actually done something wrong thus gives way to the realization that it is their lineage and appearance that makes them “guilty”. The internalization of guilt was quite common among the internees and, as the passage describes, it was an attitude that was passed on to children and grandchildren. Cunningham Grant then goes on to reflect on her own childhood behavior, as she was desperately trying to fit in, to be an “American” when she grew up: Of course, I was oblivious to the fact that in all my efforts to be unJapanese, I was joining that same old—and very Japanese—narrative of haji, or shame, that my mother had been participating in when she’d whispered her secret about my grandparents. The same one that had kept my family silent about those years in a Wyoming prison camp. 13

While the feeling of shame made young Kimi want to escape her Japanese ancestry, these efforts paradoxically connect her even more closely to her past. The shame at being Japanese that was provoked by the internment is here described as a very typical Japanese American experience: an experience that is compelling enough to reverberate across several generations. Silver Like Dust shows how the World War II internment appears in the form of “postmemory,” affecting the granddaughter’s search for an American identity, but also serving as a creative mainspring. Julie Otsuka’s novels also dramatize how being labeled as the “enemy” gives rise to a sense of guilt and shame. In The Buddha in the Attic (2011), the narrator that represents the community of Japanese women describes how their husbands, now facing the threat of evacuation, lie awake at night assessing the possible implications of their past actions: “Surely there must be something they had said, or done, surely there must be some mistake they had made, surely they must be guilty of something, some obscure crime, perhaps, of which they were not even aware.”14 Here, too, we see how the fact that they have been singled out and treated like criminals makes the Japanese American characters feel like lawbreakers. The feeling of guilt is also compounded after the war. When the Emperor Was Divine describes the public commemoration of the war effort, in which the Japanese American family’s only place is that of the “enemy”. 13 14

Ibid., 4. Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic, 91.

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For them, there are no “victory parades”, and no cheering crowds “welcoming the good men home.”15 Instead, they are met with neglect or hostility and respond with silence: And so we mostly kept to ourselves. We moved silently through the halls with our eyes fixed on some imaginary point far off in the distance. If there was whispering behind us—and there was—we did not hear it. If the other students called out to us unkindly—and they did, not often, but often enough—we did not hear them. In class we sat in the back where we hoped we would not be noticed … We spoke softly and did not raise our hands, not even when we knew the answers. We followed the rules.16

This is only one example of how even though they are released from camp, the characters’ sense of confinement continues. The surrounding community still treats them with suspicion and their fear of once again being singled out and punished for who they are effectively silences them. As Cheryl Glenn reminds us, “the meaning of silence depends on a power differential that exists in every rhetorical situation.”17 In this situation it is clear that the former internees are powerless because they are still seen as the enemy. Glenn goes on to observe that “the question is not whether speech or silence is better, more effective, more appropriate. Instead, the question is whether our use of silence is our choice (whether conscious or unconscious) or that of someone else.”18 In the negotiation between silence and speech in Otsuka’s text, the rhetorical choices of the Japanese Americans are severely limited, or even entirely determined, by their fellow students, and their silence is born of the knowledge that no one is prepared to listen to them: their experiences remain unspeakable. The narrative perspective is significant here, as the use of “we” emphasizes the silencing of Japanese Americans as a group. This firstperson plural voice is used only in the chapter devoted to life after camp; highlighting the shared experience of Japanese Americans and suggesting that the confusion of life after camp has gone on for decades leaving its mark on subsequent generations as well. The other chapters of When the Emperor Was Divine each have one central character as focalizer: the Mother, the Girl, the Boy, and finally there is a chapter in the first person singular, which tells the story of the father as a representative of the many Japanese American men detained and interrogated by the FBI. There is 15

Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine, 119. Ibid., 121-22. 17 Glenn, Unspeakable, 9. 18 Ibid., 13. 16

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thus no privileged voice in the text, but a multiplicity of perspectives inviting us to see the complexity of the topic. Multi-voiced narratives, like Otsuka’s, are a particularly effective tool for authors investigating repressed or disenfranchised groups, as the multitude of perspectives create a possibility for challenging cultural hegemony. The first-person plural narrator also appears in Otsuka’s second novel, The Buddha In the Attic (2011), where it is used to give voice to the picture brides who come from Japan to the U.S. in the early part of the twentieth century. This reference to the collective experience can serve to protect the individual by providing a sense of affiliation. As Brian Richardson points out, authors may use the plural voice to “represent the collective thoughts and sensibilities of marginalized groups that have formed close bonds…The ‘we’ voice is particularly able to tell these otherwise neglected or silenced narratives.”19 The notion of forming “close bonds” is relevant to representations of the internment as it suggests that strength can be gained through the recognition of a shared experience. The claim can thus be made that the chorus of voices—at times united to a collective “we”—that appear in Otsuka’s texts is simultaneously a formulation of solidarity and subjectivity and a call for an alternative national narrative. In a study of the increased frequency of the plural narrator in contemporary American literature, Ruth Maxey suggests that it may relate to the 9/11 attacks. This trauma generated an intense political discourse of nationalism and xenophobia, causing some writers to respond by attempting to articulate an alternative sense of national collectivity. Maxey explains: “The desire to examine other Americas beyond the specific socio-religious values of Bush’s Republicanism—or beyond a perceived ‘mainstream,’ authoritarian, privileged version of national history—may have compelled writers to offer their own American ‘we.’”20 The choice of narrative perspective is thus a politically charged act: an attempt to resist a national discourse in which one does not want to be included. It also underlines that the stories of Otsuka and the multi-voiced text of Cunningham Grant, are products of the contemporary twenty-first-century context. While the past is their subject matter, their texts should also be understood as interventions in and of the present. Kimi Cunningham Grant’s Silver Like Dust employs a dual perspective as the author inserts her own voice into her grandmother’s story. Cunningham Grant’s reflections on historical circumstances and questioning

19 20

Richardson, “Representing Social Minds”, 210. Maxey, “The Rise of the We Narrator,” 10.

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of her grandmother’s reactions and motives, illustrate the present need to rearticulate the past. She writes: As I listen to my grandmother talk, I cannot help noticing the contradiction—the odd and complicated problem of what preceded what. Japanese immigrants were not legally allowed to become citizens. They were not hired by white employers. They were not permitted to integrate in social spheres. And yet they were criticized by the public and the media for just that: for not fitting in, for keeping to themselves, for not being “bona fide citizens,” for not being American. Perhaps not surprisingly, both the government and the media played a role in developing the notion of “the yellow peril.”21

The passage illustrates how Cunningham Grant, puzzled by the contradictions of the past, brings together her family history and the national history in a way that is characteristic of collective memory. Additionally, these attempts to probe and comprehend past experiences illustrate a need to create what Van Wyck Brooks once called a “usable past” (1918), describing the “mobilization of American memory as a resource for a more democratic American future.”22 In other words, Cunningham Grant is engaged in a retrospective reconstruction of the past that suggests that it is only by remembering and learning from the past that we can fully understand—and perhaps transform—the present. In this narrative there is no merging of the two voices of grandmother and granddaughter; their perspectives remain separate and emphasize their different perceptions of the historical trauma. The intergenerational dialogue and time-span of Silver Like Dust shows even more explicitly than When the Emperor Was Divine that contemporary representations of the internment are not confined to depictions of what happened between 1942 and 1945. Instead, they suggest that this trauma can only be fully understood if the silence of its aftermath and the effect on subsequent generations are taken into account.

The Internment: An American Memory How then do the narratives of Otsuka and Cunningham Grant relate to mediated contemporary narratives of the internment, which do not originate in lived or communicative memory, but inscribe themselves within cultural memory? Bestselling author Sandra Dallas picks up on the 21 22

Cunningham Grant, Silver Like Dust, 23-24. Blake, “The Usable Past”, 423.

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theme of the incarceration and how it was perceived by non-Japanese (white) Americans in her novel Tallgrass (2007). Dallas has no personal memory of the internment: her novel stems from an “imaginative engagement with the past”23 enabling her to create a fabricated memory of this traumatic event. Noting in the novel’s introduction that it would be “presumptuous”24 of her to assume the viewpoint of the Japanese Americans, Dallas has chosen to center her story on the young girl Rennie, who lives in a small, rural town in Colorado where the fictional camp Tallgrass is erected after the Pearl Harbor attack (Tallgrass corresponds to real-life Amache near Granada, Colorado). In the first-person voice of the adult Rennie looking back at the turbulent war years, we are told about how Rennie’s family are among the few in the community who react to the injustice done to the inmates. Throughout the novel, they do their best to support the Japanese in any way they can: by taking on laborers from camp to help with the harvest; by entrusting one of them to enter their home and work as a housemaid, and supporting them against suspicions of involvement in a gruesome murder case. Soon after the camp has been built, a town meeting is held at which the farmers discuss how the internment camp will affect their community. Rennie’s father (Loyal Stroud) recognizes the need for help with the beet harvest now that several of the young men in the village have enlisted. He is the first to ask if he can hire some Japanese workers from camp and is met with hesitation by the other men in the community, who fear that this will endanger the white women of the town. By the reactions of the young protagonist and narrator, Rennie, we can clearly see what kind of men are hostile to the Japanese: “If you let me hire a few of those Japanese boys, I’ll be responsible for them,” Dad said. “Maybe you don’t care about what one of ‘em does to your wife and girl, Stroud,” Mr. Spano said slowly, then spit onto the classroom floor. Danny Spano looked at his hands then, but Beaner Jack, who was sitting next to Danny, gave a sharp laugh. If Danny hadn’t been such a jerk, I might have felt sorry for him. But Danny’d always been a jerk. It was an awful thing to be a Spano.25

“Being a Spano” in Dallas’s text clearly means being the town baddy; the Spano family are prejudiced, narrow-minded and generally no-good. As Rennie’s mother notes a little further on: “That Mr. Spano is mean 23

Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott, 6. Dallas, Tallgrass, viii. 25 Ibid., 35. 24

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enough to step on baby chicks.”26 It is then safe to place stereotypical remarks about the Japanese Americans in the mouths of people like this who are so clearly unlike the characters that the reader is asked to identify with, that is, Rennie and her parents. When she discovers a racial slur scribbled on the blackboard in the classroom, Rennie notes that “some dope had drawn a cartoon in chalk on the blackboard of a Japanese man and underneath it was a misspelled caption: ‘Your a sap Mr Jap.”27 The portrayal of the writer as someone who cannot spell, using the possessive pronoun “your” instead of the contracted form of the verb, adds to the impression that only people who are uneducated, uncouth and generally bad-mannered hold such prejudices. Racism and support of the incarceration is thus made out to be the exception rather than the rule. Dallas’s enterprise can be understood in the light of Levy and Sznaider’s discussion of “cosmopolitan memory” and “traditional” vs “critical narratives.” They write: While traditional and exemplary narratives deploy historical events to promote foundational myth, the critical narrative e mphasizes events that focus on past injustices of one’s own nation. Cosmopolitan memory thus implies some recognition of the history (and the memories) of the “Other.”28

In my reading of Tallgrass, Dallas balances uneasily between the critical and traditional narrative. While the choice of topic suggests a potentially critical narrative, the plot undercuts such an interpretation. On the whole, Dallas’s narrative feeds into a national self-image in which the white American is still the rugged individualist, who is not afraid of taking matters into his own hands, who has a healthy disrespect for authority and an innate sense of justice. Centering her narrative on a white family, who are the moral core of the story, who choose sides from the beginning and through various acts of bravery and self-sacrifice support the Japanese to the end reinforces the traditional, dominant national narrative of justice and equality as central American values. While Tallgrass lacks the complexity needed to really challenge the “traditional narrative”, its greatest strength is that it brings in the perspective of the perpetrator into this mediated version of internment memory suggesting that the trauma should be understood as part of a shared past.29 26

Ibid., 38. Ibid., 37. 28 Levy and Sznaider, “Memory Unbound”, 103. 29 Cf. Ibid. 27

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In her second novel dealing with the incarceration, Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky (2014), Sandra Dallas revisits the imaginative camp Tallgrass. This time, she has reconsidered the notion of ‘presumptuousness’ as the central consciousness of this third-person narrative is the young Japanese American girl, Tomi, who is sent to camp with her family. As the red, white and blue of Dallas’s title indicates, ‘what it means to be an American’ is a central theme of the narrative and the climax of the novel is when Tomi wins first prize in an essay competition in which students were asked to write on the topic “Why I Am an American.”30 The prize-winning essay reminds us of the American dream of hard work leading to financial success and a better life and the constitutional ideal of equality. In addition, Red Berries brings up issues like why people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated and not Germans, who were also enemies of the U.S. in WWII, and the racial explanation for this inconsistency. In this way, Dallas contributes to the recognition of the history and memories of the Other that Levy and Sznaider find constitutive of cosmopolitan memory. Both Tallgrass and Red Berries suggest that a recognition of a shared past informs Dallas’s enterprise. They are mediated versions of the national past that do not seek to represent authentic personal memories, but clearly resonate with contemporary concerns of citizenship and belonging. Dallas quite openly encourages her readers to see the connections between the past and the present as she makes the following reflection in the foreword to Tallgrass: “I could not help but wonder if there were a corollary between the Japanese evacuation of World War II and the detainment at Guantanamo. That concern led me to write Tallgrass.”31 This reflection suggests that the memory of the World War II internment must be kept alive and shared by as many Americans as possible. Today’s victims may be tomorrow’s perpetrators but through a critical engagement with the past, readers are made to ask questions about justice, equality and liberty that are fundamental to American identity. As the analysis of Sandra Dallas’s works has shown, the memory of the internment is fruitfully considered as an American, and not merely Japanese American, memory. Yoshiko Uchida, the author of the autobiographical Desert Exile (1982), which tells the story of her own incarceration in the desert camp Topaz, helpfully formulates the memory work that internment narratives perform. At the end of Desert Exile, Uchida says that she wrote the book for 30 31

Dallas, Red Berries, 226-29. Dallas, Tallgrass, iix.

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young Japanese Americans who seek a sense of continuity with their past. But I wrote it as well for all Americans, with the hope that through knowledge of the past, they will never allow another group of people in America to be sent into a desert exile ever again.32

What Uchida is saying here is that narratives about the internment may serve significant “in-group” purposes, reinforcing Japanese Americans’ sense of identity by formulating narratives about their past. Then she goes on to suggest that there is something to be learnt from the past— something that may, in fact, affect all Americans. Uchida is thus opening up for a discussion of the memory of the internment as belonging not only to the victims, but to the perpetrators and bystanders. In the following section, the internment will be considered not as a specifically Japanese American, or even American, memory, but as a memory with an even farther reach.

The Internment: Beyond American Memory Moving on to a discussion of the internment as a global memory, let us first return to the notion of a usable past. Andreas Huyssen suggests that today, as we seem to suffer from being exposed to too much information and potential memory, we need to be able to differentiate what can be forgotten from what must be remembered: “If we are indeed suffering from a surfeit of memory, we do need to make the effort to distinguish usable pasts from disposable pasts.”33 The notion of a “usable past” calls attention to the continuous process of creating a past that serves certain purposes in the present that is characteristic of collective memory-making. How then do we make this distinction between what is usable and what is disposable? The obvious answer to this question may seem to be that the works of the Japanese American authors are usable because they bear authentic witness to the past, while the works of non-Japanese authors are disposable because they lack the authenticity that comes from lived experience. However, I have already begun to suggest that the narratives of Dallas are potentially useful for the parallels that are drawn between present and past, and for her willingness to bring in the perspective of the perpetrators. In addition, it has previously been established that Rothberg’s conception of memory as multidirectional rests on the recognition of the fundamental instability of identity. Memories of a shared past always 32 33

Uchida, Desert Exile, 154. Huyssen, “Present Pasts”, 38.

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involve relationships with our “others” in a way that makes it as impossible for groups to claim ownership of memories, Rothberg says, as it is for memories to own groups.34 Another dimension is added to the question by Alison Landsberg, who claims that fiction has the potential to create what she terms “prosthetic memory.” By this, she means a form of memory generated by an encounter with a mediated representation of the past, such as a novel, a film, or at a museum. If this encounter is sincere and engaging we may be influenced by other people’s memories, and even take them on as our own experiences of past events through which we did not live. If such a feeling of connectedness occurs between audience and work, it is no longer important to distinguish between lived and prosthetic memory, argues Landsberg, but what is important is whether the acquisition of the mediated memory actually leads to a change of attitude or action.35 By taking on the prosthetic memory of the internment, a reader’s subjectivity and politics in the present might be changed and herein lies the transformative potential of the texts. Furthermore, Landsberg draws on the portability of prosthetic memory to reach a conclusion similar to Rothberg’s. The conception of memory as transportable undermines the connection between memory and identity, as well as the notion of memories being “owned” by certain groups. Instead, they invite us to “to inhabit other people’s memories as other people’s memories and thereby respecting and recognizing difference.”36 From this perspective, the memories of Otsuka and Cunningham Grant do not exclusively belong to them and others who share a similar history. Instead, these memories can be taken on by a larger audience. Landsberg has a very positive view of this process and suggests that “this opening up of once private or exclusive group memories might not be negative or damaging, for the act of publicizing a group’s memory increases its chances of attaining social and political recognition.”37 Reading Dallas in this light we may come to appreciate the publicity her works enjoy and her attempt to evoke the empathy of readers who may not share the class or ethnic position of the victims of the internment. It is clear that her novels generate historical knowledge, which may serve to counteract the amnesia that Madeleine Sugimoto identified in the interview quoted at the beginning of this article. In this way, Dallas’s novels perform important memory work.

34

Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 5. Ibid., 45-48. 36 Ibid., 24. 37 Ibid., 11. 35

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As we are moving into the domain of cultural memory 70 years after the internment, prosthetic memories will increasingly take the place of lived memories. It is their capacity to make readers ‘inhabit the memories of others’ that make present and future internment narratives usable. As the previous analysis has indicated, there is a marked difference between the narratives of Otsuka and Cunningham Grant on the one hand, and Dallas on the other. If a narrative is to have the capacity to make a reader take on somebody else’s memory as their own, it must evoke empathy and reflection. This effect is ultimately a question of the individual reader’s personal response that is difficult to predict. However, it is reasonable to assume that a certain narrative complexity facilitates the reader’s willingness to engage with a historical narrative to the extent that it is incorporated into her/his memory. A narrative perspective allowing for a multiplicity of voices to be heard, as we have seen in Otsuka’s and Cunningham Grant’s texts, is one important factor in achieving such complexity. Their willingness to address silence, both thematically and structurally, so that the reader is encouraged to ask further questions and to fill in narrative gaps is another device shared by Otsuka and Cunningham Grant. However, these are negligible aspects of Dallas’s texts, which thus fall short of functioning as critical narratives, and risk failing to generate prosthetic memories. Today, the wartime internment of Japanese Americans is “a known historical outrage”38 and the violations of World War II may appear to belong to the past. However, Madeleine Sugimoto reminds us that the internment may function as an important touchstone for present politics. As this analysis has shown, contemporary Japanese American authors turn to multi-voiced narratives to capture the complexities of the internment and its aftermath. The future will show whether the election of Trump will give rise to further attempts by authors to articulate an alternative national narrative and whether the plural voice will be the preferred voice with which to do it. In a discussion of post-9/11 American literature and its concern with public and private history, Michael Rothberg observes that “since the attacks of 2001, citizenship has been aggressively re-racialized, borders have been locked down, civil liberties curtailed.”39 In such an environment, it is small wonder that many contemporary American authors turn to the internment as a cautionary example of how history repeats itself. Forgetting one’s history may lead to the repetition of the 38 39

Park, “Alien Enemies”, 136. Michael Rothberg, “A Failure of the Imagination”, 155.

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past, as we see in Trump’s rhetoric where Muslims have taken the place of the “enemy within”. While the stories of Otsuka and Cunningham Grant are important documents of the transgenerational transmission of trauma, the narratives of Dallas—limited and riddled with difficulties as they are— help break the silence and end the amnesia surrounding the internment. Finally, the recognition of the portability of memory points to its international reach in our global age. With this insight comes the challenge to put the internment narratives—and their lessons about exclusion and racialization—to local use. For non-American readers, it is relevant to ask how our own regional histories, past and present, relate to the beliefs and practices that characterized the wartime internment and that are reflected in Trump’s statements today. What would happen if we thought of the internment not merely as a Japanese American memory, and maybe not even just an American memory, but considered it in a transnational context in an attempt to sound out its “local resonance?”40 I would suggest that it is in this way that the narratives of this trauma can be most usable in the present.

Works Cited Ahlin, Lena. “‘All we wanted to do, now that we were back in the world, was forget’. On Remembrance and Forgetting in Julie Otsuka’s Novels.” American Studies in Scandinavia 47:2, 2015. 81-101. Assman, Jan. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. 109 – 118. Blake, Casey Nelson. “The Usable Past, the Comfortable Past, and the Civic Past: Memory in Contemporary America.” Cultural Anthropology 14.3 (1999). 423-435. Cunningham Grant, Kimi. Silver Like Dust. One Family’s Story of America’s Japanese Internment. New York: Pegasus Books, 2011. Dallas, Sandra. Tallgrass. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007. —. Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky. Ann Arbor: Sleeping Bear Press, 2014. Glenn, Cheryl. Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today, 29.1 (2008): 103–128. 40

Levy and Sznaider, “Memory Unbound”, 92.

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Huyssen, Andreas. “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia.” Public Culture, 12.1 (2000): 21 – 38. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Levy, Daniel and Nathan Sznaider.”Memory Unbound: the Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory,” European Journal of Social Theory 5: 1, 2002. Maxey, Ruth. “The Rise of the ‘We’ Narrator in Modern American Fiction.” European Journal of American Studies. 10:2 (2015). 2 – 13. Nagata, Donna K. “Echoes From Generation to Generation.” In Last Witnesses, edited by Erica Harth, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2001. 61 – 71. Oishi, Gene. “Secrecy and Anger. Interview with Julie Otsuka.” HoCoPoLitSo: The Writing Life. Jan. 26, 2013. Web. 15 May 2013. Otsuka, Julie. When the Emperor Was Divine. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. —. The Buddha in the Attic. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. Park, Josephine. “Alien Enemies in Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine.” Modern Fiction Studies, 59. 1 (2013): 135–55. Pilkington, Ed. “Japanese American internment survivor hears troubling echoes in Trump rhetoric,” The Guardian, 28 May, 2016. Accessed on 23 September, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/28/japaneseamerican-internment-survivor-donald-trump-rhetoric Richardson, Brian. “Representing Social Minds: ‘We’ and ‘They’ Narratives, Natural and Unnatural.” Narrative 23:2, 2015. 200 – 212. Rigney, Ann. The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Rothberg, Michael. “A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post9/11 Novel. A Response to Richard Gray.” American Literary History 21.2 (2009). 152-58. —. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Shea, Renée. “The Urgency of Knowing: A Profile of Julie Otsuka.” Poets and Writers, September/October 2011. Web. 15 Jan. 2013. Uchida, Yoshiko. Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1982. Yamada, Mitsuye. “Legacy of Silence.” In Last Witnesses, edited by Erica Harth, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2001. 35 – 46.

HISTORY, (NON)MEMORY AND THE IDEOLOGICAL USES OF GENRE: ALTERNATE SCENARIOS AND DYSTOPIAN VISIONS MARZENA SOKOàOWSKA-PARYĩ

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld attributes the immense popularity of alternate histories where the Third Reich wins the Second World War to the “normalization” of the era of Nazism, a process much due to the gradual “disappearance of older generations of people who personally experienced [those] historical events, and the maturation of new generations bearing a less personal relationship to them.”1This does not mean, however, that such blatantly implausible scenarios as invented by Daniel Quinn in After Dachau (an Afro-American woman is reincarnated in a pure Aryan) and Stephen Fry in Making History (a male contraceptive pill is sent back across time to ascertain that Adolf Hitler will never be born) do not have an underlying ethical goal. As Rosenfeld emphasizes, the effect of “normalization” may be a “universalization” of the past which allows to “expand its relevance” by both “explaining the origins of a given historical event […] with generalizing concepts that focus on the role of broader universal tendencies instead of particular historical circumstances” and “invoking specific historical events [to] raise awareness about, and ultimately ameliorate, present-day social, economic, and political problems.”2 Dystopia is a genre that “places us directly in a dark and depressing reality, conjuring up a terrifying future if we do not recognize and treat its symptoms in the here and now,”3 and both authors’ constructions of a chilling alternate/dystopian ‘past-present’ reality serve to augment the desired trans-historical and trans-national relevance effect. 1 Rosenfeld, Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, 10. 2 Ibid., 11–12. 3 Gordin, Tilley, and Prakash, “Introduction: Utopia and Dystopia beyond Space and Time”, 2.

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In After Dachau (2001), Quinn effectively outlines the socio-political mechanism that allows for the exclusion of an imagined ‘Other’, accentuating the need for a more comprehensive perspective on antiSemitism and racism, urging for a more critical scrutiny of official (hi)stories, and, finally, warning against the ethical consequences of the loss of an empathetic connection with the past that is inevitably generated by temporal distance. Though it seems that the purpose of the alternate dystopian reality in Making History (1996) is to reaffirm Germany’s historical culpability for the Second World War and the Holocaust, Fry’s novel may well be interpreted as an ideological and ethical renunciation of rewriting history by—precisely—rewriting history, as to underscore the inherent fictionality of counterfactual writings. In After Dachau there appears to be nothing amiss about the presented world. The beginning of the novel revolves round the protagonist’s obsession with reincarnation overtly stated to have started in the early 1990s. As the son of one of the wealthiest New York families, Jason Tull can afford to commit himself to searching for the so-called “Golden Case”, i.e. a case providing unquestionable evidence of the transmigration of souls.4 It is not until the change of millennium that Jason comes across a newspaper story about a curious case of a twenty-six year old woman who, after a car accident, behaves as if she were a different person altogether. It turns out that the long-dead Afro-American Gloria MacArthur is ‘resurrected’ within the body of Mallory Hastings. It takes a long time before the ‘other-worldliness’ of the dystopian reality is fully laid bare in the novel, and only when Jason takes Gloria to a history lesson at school that the full meaning of the title of the novel comes to light. After the great ‘victory’ of the Nazis that changed the entire world, a new calendar was created, with 1943—the date of the alleged Battle of Dachau—becoming the zero year. Thus, all the dates provided in the text are A.D. as “After Dachau”, an idea obviously borrowed from Aldous Huxley’s canonical dystopia. Quinn’s version of a “brave new world’ is inhabited by the Aryan race, all other races having been successfully exterminated. This does not mean, however, that all people, though they look the same, are equal. Quinn’s seemingly perfect Aryan world is socially divided, the working classes exploited for the benefit of the upper classes, and, in an overtly Orwellian manner, all citizens are constantly under surveillance. The paradox inherent in the utopian ideal is that it is all too prone to become a dystopian horror: “Every utopia always comes with its implied dystopia—whether the dystopia of the status quo—which the utopia is 4

Quinn, After Dachau, 24.

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engineered to address, or a dystopia found in the way in which this specific utopia corrupts itself in practice.”5 In Hegelian terms, to achieve a utopian existence is to achieve a state of perfectness that requires no change and thus is prone to transform into life-in-stasis, a potential source of social discontent, i.e. dystopia. The population in Quinn’s novel is said to have accepted their world as a utopian dream come true. Yet, the racial standardization of societies across the world results in cultural and social inertia. The three books that Jason chooses at random at a library prove to be one and the same narrative: “Like me, the characters in these novels travel the world, knowing with absolute assurance that the people we’ll see in Tokyo or Shanghai or Johannesburg or Bombay will be as uniformly white as the people in Paris or Chicago or Sydney.”6 The manner in which Jason tries to rationalize this literary/racial homogeneity reveals it as a desperate attempt to convince himself of the righteousness of the world he has begun to doubt in: “We live in a world that is stable—wonderfully stable, blessedly stable, as it deserves to be for the race that is the pinnacle of cosmic development.”7 As Jason explains to Gloria, “we believe in making [good things] as good this year as we did last year—as good as they were in my grandfather’s day and in his grandfather’s day.”8 The abandonment of progress in all fields of human existence creates a reality that becomes a burden precisely because it does not evolve into anything new: “We’re ninety-nine percent sure that what we have is truly a wonderful Aryan paradise […]. But then there’s that other one percent that makes us wonder what the hell is wrong with us.”9 This “wonderful Aryan paradise” managed to persist uncontested for over two thousand centuries due to the substitution of memory by “an agreed-upon fiction”10, a definition of history very close to Rene Girard’s understanding of myth as “a [narrative] scheme which disguises the violence itself and exonerates the perpetrators.”11 The Aryan utopia came into being by means of a world-scale genocide. However, this genocide was effectively translated into a story of both a necessary and natural ‘purging’: “it was time for the Aryan people to suppress their natural magnanimity and do what had to be done next to safeguard the future of 5

Gordin, Tilley, and Prakash, “Introduction: Utopia and Dystopia beyond Space and Time”, 2. 6 Quinn, After Dachau, 137. 7 Ibidem. 8 Ibid., 132 9 Ibid., 133. 10 Ibid., 136. 11 Golsan, Rene Girard and Myth: An Introduction, 82.

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the human race.”12 According to Girard, violence stems not from difference but similarity. As long as there is a difference between two competing sides (be it individual persons, social groups, or nations), no violence will ensue, yet, when the mechanism of mimetic desire renders both sides interchangeable, conflict is inevitable. The only solution is finding a scapegoat: The rite aims at the most profound state of peace known to any community: the peace that follows the sacrificial crisis and results from the unanimous accord generated by the surrogate victim. To banish the evil emanations that accumulate within the community and to recapture the freshness of the original experience are one and the same task.13

The elimination—by means of either expulsion or extermination—of the scapegoat necessitates the production of the perpetrators’ version of the past, a myth that would rationalize the process of victimization of guiltless individuals or communities: “The rite […] permits them to escape their own violence, removes them from violence, and bestows them all the institutions and beliefs that define their humanity.”14 In Quinn’s novel, it is said during the history lesson that the aim of the Jews was to “supplant the Aryans as the elite of the human race”15, and by instigating both the First and the Second World Wars, to gain racial, economic and political hegemony in the world.16 Re-reading these alleged ‘truths’, constituting the foundational myth of the world conjured in Quinn’s alternate history, through Girard’s theory, the evil attributed to the Jews is the evil the Aryans are themselves guilty of: Ritual requires the sacrifice of a victim as similar as possible to the ‘monstrous double.’ The marginal categories from which these victims are generally drawn barely fulfill this requirement, but they provide the least unsatisfactory compromise. Situated as they are between the inside and the outside, they can perhaps be said to belong to both the interior and the exterior of the community.17

Hence the re-designation of genocide as a ‘battle’, which rendered extermination an inevitable and ‘natural’ outcome, with the civilian 12

Quinn, After Dachau, 124. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 103. 14 Ibid., 306. 15 Quinn, After Dachau, 108. 16 Ibid., 117. 17 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 271–272. 13

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victims recast into roles of an enemy possessing the same capacity to kill as the Aryans; as the history teacher tells Gloria, “any battle is a campaign of deliberate extermination […]. Soldiers who are shooting at each other and throwing bombs at each other aren’t just doing it for fun.”18 Gloria accuses Jason of being a “Nazi” in the meaning of “not-see”19, i.e. people who refuse to acknowledge their moral accountability for the discrimination of other ethnic groups and races carried out by their community in the past. By playing on the sound of the word ‘Nazi’, Quinn extends its meaning to encompass a universal tendency towards writing unwanted truths about one’s community into a (hi)story effectively exonerating this community from all historical responsibility. Quinn’s protagonist begins his personal rebellion against “the pious lies […] that we were acting for the good of humanity when we exterminated the native peoples of Asia, Africa and the New World,” and “[representing] the systematic extermination of all these people […] as a sort of sacred undertaking”20, thus underscoring the need for a Girardian scrutiny of the ‘mythical’ element in the grand-historical narratives that have evolved round various forms of violence. As Susan Sontag has rightly stated, “what is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulation: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened.”21 In After Dachau, Quinn highlights the problem of temporal distance due to which memory is inevitably supplanted by an official narrative, one accepted by all as ‘true’ for there is no longer anyone left who remembers the events that brought the new Aryan world order into being: “You actually don’t know, do you,” Mallory said, dazed. “You actually believe [Dachau] was a battle.” Miss Crenevant gave her a not unkindly smile. “As much as I believe that Thermopylae or Hastings or Verdun were battles.”22 “[We] occupy a world in which the Great War is essentially the stuff of legends, just as the Trojan War must have seemed in Gloria MacArthur’s day. The Jews have hardly more reality for us than the dragons of the Middle Ages, and the Merchant of Venice inhabits the same fairy-tale universe as the Pied Piper of Hamelin.”23 18

Quinn, After Dachau, 120. Ibid., 130. 20 Ibid., 215. 21 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 76. 22 Quinn, After Dachau, 120. 23 Ibid., 137. 19

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History, (Non)Memory and the Ideological Uses of Genre [Jason] “I assume you know who Adolf Hitler was.” [Mr. Dial] “Of course. The so-called Hero of Dachau. A semi-legendary character, I assume, like William Tell.”24 [Gloria] “I’m through calling you a murderer, Jason. It doesn’t do me any good, and it certainly doesn’t do you any good. You might as well apologize for killing Julius Caesar.”25

Temporal distance inevitably obliterates human memory, which results in the loss of an empathetic connection with the past. When Jason is apprehended for trying to find books by Jewish and Afro-American authors, he is told to think of the only three words that would guarantee his release. These words contain the truth of the world he is living in: “No one cares.”26 Each part of After Dachau is preceded by an epigraph taken from Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality, all of which provide a significant interpretative frame on the author’s use of the theme of reincarnation: Forgotten: Bodies do not always stay buried Found: It is much easier to dig one large grave than to dig many small ones Risen: The dead, as we have seen, can literally emerge from their graves if the conditions are right.27

In “A Note to the Readers”, Daniel Quinn has asserted that “[he] employ[s] fantastic elements in [his] novels when they serve [his] purpose”, and that “[he has] no personal belief in reincarnation or in the transmigration of souls, and it’s no part of [his] intention to promote these beliefs.”28 Gloria MacArthur/Mallory Hastings was intended as a deliberately incredible character, having the right to ‘exist’ only within the borders of a conjured dystopian fantasy, serving to underscore the very real and pressing need for the “embodiedness” of memory. Advocates of the concept of “embodied memory” put forth the claim that “memories are embodied in a particular person’s sensations, feelings, techniques and gestures”, with these “habitual and emotional experiences [being] both a reservoir of memories and a mechanism for generating them.”29 It is not 24

Ibid., 185. Ibid., 175. 26 Ibid., 217. 27 Ibid., 1, 93, 177 respectively. 28 Ibid., 231. 29 Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering, 79. 25

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Gloria’s soul that enters Malory’s body in Quinn’s novel, but her memory – for memory needs a body, particularly in a reality in which all bodies have been destroyed. Mallory takes Jason down into the tunnels which two thousand years earlier were the hiding place for Afro-Americans: “’They took the bodies away, obviously’, Mallory went on. ‘I suppose they could hardly leave them there.’”30 An obvious parallel arises here with the burning of the bodies of Jews in the crematoria of the concentration camps, where the destruction of the bodies served the eradication of memory. Canonical authors of dystopian novels (Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale) have used the genre for the purposes of a veiled warning against the threats facing their contemporary world. After Dachau foregrounds the inevitable consequences of temporal distance. The United States owes its identity to ethnic and racial discrimination/extermination, as much as Europe owes its identity to the Holocaust. And yet, who remembers? The indispensable “embodiedness” of memory, underscored by citations from the book on vampires, should, of course, be read metaphorically as both the possibility and ethical necessity of unearthing the ‘bodies’ of a long gone past. In the tunnels still remaining beneath the city of New York, where “all sorts of things were covered and forgotten down here”31, Gloria recovers a photograph of herself from before two thousand years, the concrete evidence of the existence of other races prior to the Aryan hegemony, a fact that convinces Jason that he must commit himself to restoring the still available “textures of memory”32, including “The Interpretation of Dreams by a Viennese Jew,” as well as “several purely literary works […] from authors with names like Stein, Kafka, Zangwill and Büchner.”33 Tangible remnants of the past can always be found, and they are our only potentially-empathetic connectors to the past: These lieux de mémoire are fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it. […] Lieux de mémoire originate with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries,

30

Quinn, After Dachau, 175. Ibid., 145. 32 The phrase is taken from the title of James E. Young’s 1993 study, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. 33 Ibid., 223. 31

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The purpose of Jason’s exhibition in which the recovered visual and textual artifacts are to be displayed is not only to make people know their past, but, most importantly, to counteract the prevailing empathetic estrangement: “We didn’t expect sales, we hoped for interest, attention. Then one night we got really lucky. Someone heaved a paving stone through the front window. We were ecstatic. Someone got it. Someone cared.”35 The central role of Afro-American Gloria MacArthur in Quinn’s novel may be read through Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory which “posits collective memory as partially disengaged from exclusive versions of cultural identity and acknowledges how remembrance both cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal and cultural sites.”36 Gloria’s story opens with what Rothberg defined as that “malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being through their dialogical interactions with others.”37 Quinn’s depiction of the simultaneous social exclusion and final elimination of both Jews and Afro-Americans is in perfect accordance with Rothberg’s repudiation of “a hierarchy of suffering” produced by the construction of collective memory in opposition to another: I reject the notion that identities and memories are pure and authentic— that there is a “we” and a “you” that would definitively differentiate, say, black and Jewish identities and black and Jewish relations to the past. I differ from both of these positions because I reject two central assumptions that they share: that a straight line runs from memory to identity and that the only kinds of memories and identities that are therefore possible are ones that exclude elements of alterity and forms of commonality with others. Our relationship to the past does partially determine who we are in the present, but never straightforwardly and directly, and never without unexpected or even unwanted consequences that bind us to this whom we consider the other.38

34

Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”, 12. Quinn, After Dachau, 225. 36 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, 11. 37 Ibid., 5. 38 Ibid., 4–5. 35

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It is Jason’s meeting with a reincarnated Afro-American woman that leads him to the publishing of “the diary of another young woman who was hunted down for extermination, a Jewish teenager named Anne Frank” (230). What is more, it is stated that in her lifetime Gloria had worked with the leading artists of the abstract expressionist movement, including Jackson Pollock. Quinn exploits the fact that Pollock was inspired by the Native Americans’ technique of sand painting and puts the following sarcastic remark into the mouth of his Aryan character: Mallory seemed to think that I should live in a sackcloth and ashes because my ancestors exterminated the original inhabitants of Asia and Africa to make room for people like me. I made a mental note to ask her if Jackson Pollock lived in a sackcloth and ashes because his ancestors exterminated the original inhabitants of North America to make room for people like him.39

“By the end of the 19th century”, writes historian David E. Stannard, “the worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed [happened], roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people.”40 By interrelating the extermination of Native Americans, the genocide of the Jews, and the victimization of Afro-Americans, Quinn is effectively advocating a ‘seeing’ (knowing and understanding) of the past through the lens of transhistorical convergence, rather than historical exceptionality. In contrast to Quinn’s After Dachau, there are two realities in Fry’s Making History. The novel is divided into two parts, with Book One set in contemporary England and Book Two in a dystopian United States after PhD history student Michael Young and Professor Leo Zuckerman successfully change the course of history. The preposterous plot, the blending of diverse genres (the campus novel, the combat narrative, science-fiction, dystopia), as well as the inclusion of chapters written in the form of film scripts, altogether create the impression that Fry is inviting readers to participate in a humorous formal game. And yet, the message of the novel is serious. It is for a reason that Fry chose his protagonist to be an aspiring historian. Likewise, it is not a coincidence that the chapters comprising the first part of the book are given titles suggesting that the eponymous “making history” is akin to “making coffee”, “making breakfast”, “making love”, “making up”, “making music”, “making movies” or “making amends”, and the chapters in the 39 40

Quinn, After Dachau, 137–138. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, 146.

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second part of the novel have titles that foreground the multiple meanings and uses of “history”, be it “local history”, “military history”, “medical history”, “personal history”, “political history”, “modern history”, “family history”, or “official history”. The hint as to the interpretation of these specific titles, encompassing an intricate idiomatic play on all that one can make, and an intriguing list of all possible histories one can think of, resides in the “puzzle” that baffles the protagonist and his dystopian alterego: The puzzle that besets me is best expressed by the following statements: A. None of what follows ever happened. B. All of what follows is entirely true. Get your head round that one. It means that it is my job to tell you the true story of what never happened. Perhaps that is a definition of fiction.41

The construction of two realities in the novel invites a comparative approach that must lead to the conclusion that if the world that comes after the elimination of Adolf Hitler from history is so much worse than the one that we have now, then perhaps we should reassess our judgment of the present, a conclusion that is very much at odds with the conventional uses of the dystopian genre. The troubling aspect of Fry’s novel is the acknowledged indebtedness to Daniel Goldhagen’s “brilliant Hitler’s Willing Executioners.”42 In the novel, thanks to a “Temporal Imaging Machine”43, Adolf Hitler is never born, yet this does not prevent the Holocaust. The genocide of the Jews is carried out far more effectively by the alternate ‘Führer’, Rudolph Gloder, whose strategic genius allows for the Third Reich to win the war and dominate the world. Gloder is stated to have refrained from an ostentatious anti-Semitic policy in the inter-war years, preferring to use Jewish intellectuals first before eliminating them, due to which he gained technological superiority over the Allies during the Second World War. The male contraceptive pill sent over across time by Michael Young and Leo Zuckerman contaminates the water of Brunau-am-Inn in Austria (birthplace of Adolf Hitler). In effect, all the men living there are unable to become fathers, a fact that inspires Gloder to use the contaminated water to eliminate all Jews after the Second World War, as well as other races, a less ‘visible’ method of extermination than death-camps. Hence the 41

Fry, Making History, 8, 238. Ibid., 574–575. 43 Ibid., 147. 42

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acceptance of Nazism across the world in the aftermath of the victory of the Third Reich. The plot of Fry’s alternate (hi)story is constructed round the principle of determinism, defined by Niall Ferguson as “the teleology of the traditional narrative form”, wherein “the end literally precedes the beginning.”44 This means interpreting history from the standpoint of the outcome of the events, rather than going back towards the point in the past where still variable scenarios were possible and—in that time—considered. The key figure in Fry’s novel is Leo Zuckerman, a German (Axel Bauer), given the identity of a Jewish prisoner of Auschwitz by his father, an SS doctor,45 so as to save him from the repercussions of the Allies. Axel has a prisoner number tattooed by his father, so as to gain the appearance of a victim. His mother deliberately starves him and herself, for they must look as if they went through the hell of the concentration camps, which allows them to join a group of survivors of the notorious death marches and thus fool the victors. They go the United States as Zuckermans because, as Axel’s mother tells him on her deathbed, “in this world it is better to be a Jew than a German.”46 Yet, she also tells him in her final moments how difficult it was for her to accept an identity for herself and her son that was so alien to her convictions: “We were people with families, with ideals, with feelings. I don’t want you to be ashamed. Axi, I want you to be proud.”47 In the alternate reality without Adolf Hitler, and yet one in which the Third Reich wins the war, Axel Bauer does not hide behind a stolen name, however, knowing the secret of the Brunau water, he cannot shed the burden he is doomed to carry: “He was the same Leo all right. The same overwhelming burden of inherited guilt, the same fanatical belief that he could and must atone for his father’s guilt.”48 He participates in Michael’s plan to change the course of history, yet once again, in order to restore the real course of events. Whatever ‘history’ Leo/Axel is part of, his father’s culpability does not change: It was genes, genes, and nothing but genes. I mean, look at Leo’s father. Dietrich Bauer. A son of a bitch, who goes to Auschwitz to help wipe out

44

Ferguson, “Introduction. Virtual History: Towards a ‘chaotic’ theory of the past”, 66,67, respectively. 45 In the “Acknowledgments” to Making History, Fry writes: “The details of the life and career of SS Doctor Bauer are closely based on those of his mentor, the real-life-doctor, Johaness Paul Kremer who was captured by the British and did keep a diary of his three months at Auschwitz […],” 574. 46 Ibid., 201. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 547.

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Fry appears to have no doubt that an ‘alternate’ German leader would not have changed the fate of the Jews. Here, his indebtedness to Goldhagen’s work is unquestionable: While members of other national groups aided the Germans in their slaughter of the Jews, the commission of the Holocaust was primarily a German undertaking. Non-Germans were not essential to the undertaking to the perpetration of the genocide, and they did not supply the drive and initiative that pushed it forward. […] this was above all a German enterprise; the decisions, plans, organizational resources, and the majority of its executors were Germans.50 To be sure, it is sometimes appropriate to use institutional or occupational names or roles and the generic terms […] to describe the perpetrators, yet this must be done only in the understood context that these men and women were Germans first, and SS men, policemen, or camp guards second.51

The problem with Fry’s idea of the contaminated Brunau water is that it has, disconcertingly, too much similarity with the real-life plan of the so called Jewish “Avengers”: “[They] planned to inflict on Germany not the targeted killing of guilty men, but the same fate the Nazis had inflicted on the Jews: indiscriminate killing on a massive scale. Their chosen method was the poisoning of the water supply of five German cities”.52 Here, there would be a space for a more comprehensive analysis of an obvious ‘national’ historical guilt in the context of an ethically-problematic ‘national’ retribution, transcending the limitations of Goldhagen’s study, yet Fry does not choose to follow this path. According to Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, it was predictable that Stephen Fry, as “the son of an Austrian-Jewish mother whose family fled to England in the 1930s (and who lost many relatives in the Holocaust)”, would “focus on the German people’s role in supporting the Nazis.” 49

Ibid., 453–454. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, 6. 51 Ibid., 7. 52 Freedland, “Revenge.” See also Rich Cohen, The Avengers, 2000. 50

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Rosenfeld writes that “Fry’s endorsement of Daniel Goldhagen’s scathing indictment of the German people […] makes it especially likely that his novel’s focus on the culpability of the German people was intentional.”53 In an interview, however, Fry speaks of his novel’s message in far more universal terms than his text actually allows for. He appears to be ideologically disengaging himself from Goldhagen when he says that “if we only believe [the Holocaust is] something nasty to do with Germans, then essentially, the only answer is to round up all the Germans and put them in ovens. And obviously no one is suggesting that.”54 If underscoring German historical culpability is not, despite Fry’s fascination with Goldhagen, the aim of the novel, then what is? Rosenfeld argues that “the novel’s overwhelmingly comic tone strongly suggests that it was written with the lighthearted intent to entertain rather than instruct.”55 For reviewer Michiko Kakutani, “the voice that Mr. Fry employs in this novel is not so different from the one he used in his earlier comic novels”, but “the problem is that this time Mr. Fry has tried to make the death of six million people part of his joke, and the joke isn't funny—it's repellent.”56 The reality brought about in result of the sending of the contraceptive pill is far worse that the ‘real’ world in which the novel starts. It is a dystopian world inhabited by one race and where homosexuality is a crime, not to mention the eradication of “our” culture: “indeed, Gloder’s destruction of the Jews is treated as just another consequence of Michael and Leo's tinkering with history, along with such amusing consequences as the disappearance of the Beatles and movies like Casablanca and The Third Man.”57 Both Daniel Quinn and Stephen Fry write their fictive scenarios of the fictive consequences of the fictive victory of the Third Reich into a dystopian reality, though their aims are different. If the genre is so frequently appropriated by contemporary writers, it is primarily because “today, more than ever, dystopia matters. It magnifies some of the most critical issues […] that are still central to our societies today.”58 The popularity of dystopia amongst readers can be explained in terms of present threats: “the postmodern world has produced hundreds of millions of human beings who out of individual and collective fear prefer to 53

Rosenfeld, The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism, 303. 54 Robinson, “Interview with Stephen Fry.” 55 Rosenfeld, The World Hitler Never Made…, 303. 56 Kakutanii, “Plotting to Erase Hitler from History.” 57 Ibid. 58 Baccolini, “Living in Dystopia”, 45,

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approach nightmarish visions of the present and the future in an attempt to exorcise their own ghosts.”59 Quinn lays bare the dangers stemming from temporal distance, namely an inevitable empathetic estrangement that may well lead to an uncritical acceptance of one’s history which, in fact, is no more than a narrative that serves the political interests of the state in the present: “History provides much fuel for nationalism. It creates the collective memories that help to bring the nation into being. The shared celebrations of the nation’s great achievements—and the shared sorrow of its defeats—sustain and foster it”60, “History is about remembering the past, but is also about choosing to forget.”61 Quinn meticulously depicts the flawed nature of a homogenic society, consistently underscoring the need to be aware of the fact that such homogeneity can only be achieved by a brutal elimination of all groups ideologically finger-pointed as the ‘Other’. The lack of an empathetic connectedness with the past (to be overcome only through critical knowledge that allows to see one’s nation as a perpetrator—and not only hero or victim) may well lead to a repetition of the evil that took place in the past. If After Dachau is a novel with a universal warning, so pertinent today when we see the resurgence of nationalisms across the world, it is because Quinn uses dystopia precisely for “its ability to reflect upon the causes of social […] evil as systemic” as “its very textual machinery invites the creation of alternative worlds in which the historical space-time of the author can be re-presented in a way that foregrounds the articulation of its economic, political, and cultural dimensions.”62 If the dystopian-present in Quinn’s novel depicts the dangers inherent in nations being complacent ‘not-sees,’ Fry’s intricate genre game-play appears to serve two major purposes. First and foremost, the dystopian world he conjures accentuates that our reality is not as bad as we deem it to be, for the evils of the Second World War taught nations to cherish the values of freedom and openness to all forms of ‘otherness’, be it race or sexual orientation: “Fry’s ultimate decision to restore history to its rightful course and allow the novel’s protagonist […] to blithely saunter away as if nothing had happened suggests that the writer was driven by a much more positive assessment of the contemporary world.”63 However bleakly we may perceive our present social and political condition, it is still not a world inhabited only by white heterosexuals. If there is any warning to be inferred from Fry’s novel, it is directed against 59

Gallardo, “Dystopia is You”, 39. MacMillan, The Uses and Abuses of History, 81. 61 Ibid., 113. 62 Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia, xii. 63 Rosenfeld, The World Hitler Never Made…, 303. 60

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‘playing’ with the past in the form of alternate story-telling, his ridiculous plot ostentatiously laying bare the ‘fictionality’ of the outcome of counterfactual scenarios (a literary play on the rhetorical device of apophasis), for, in the words of Walter Rathenau, Foreign Minister in the Weimar Republic, “History does not conjugate in conditionals, it speaks of what is and what was, not what would be or what would have been.”64

Works Cited Baccolini, Rafaella. “Living in Dystopia”. In Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, On Screen, On Stage, edited by Fatima Vieira. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, 44–45. Evans, Richard J. Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History. London: Little, Brown, 2014. Ferguson, Niall. “Introduction. Virtual History: Towards a ‘chaotic’ theory of the past.” In Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, edited by Niall Ferguson. New York: Basic Books, 1999 [1997], 1–90. Freedland, Jonathan. “Revenge.” The Guardian (26 July 2008). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/26/second.world.war Fry, Stephen. Making History. London: Arrow Books. 2004 [1996]. —. Interview by Tasha Robinson. A.V. Club (September 22, 2004) http://www.avclub.com/article/stephen-fry-13891 Gallardo, Pere. “Dystopia is You.” In Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, On Screen, On Stage, edited by Fatima Vieira. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, 37–39. Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Transl. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1977 [1972].

64 Evans, Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History, 177. Richard J. Evans is one of the harshest critics of the counterfactual trend in recent historiography, and one of his strongest arguments is that counterfactual histories depict only one possible scenario of what could have happened: “What would have occurred if other contingencies had intervened along the way? There is no way of knowing, because once you let the counterfactual genie out of the bottle, anything might happen. Conditional statements of such hard-edged certainty are foreign to the historian’s way of going-about-explanation, which is always tentative and involves considerable use of the word ‘probably’ […]. The key, of course, lies in designating one cause as more operative than others. Historians usually construct a hierarchy of causes—primary causes, secondary causes, main causes, subsidiary causes and so on—which affect different parts of the explanation”, 82–83.

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Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1996. Golsan, Richard, J. Rene Girard and Myth: An Introduction. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Gordin, Michael D., Helen Tilley and Gyan Prakash, “Introduction: Utopia and Dystopia beyond Space and Time.” In Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility, edited by Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010, 1–17. Kakutani, Michiko. “Plotting to Erase Hitler from History,” New York Times (April 21, 1998) http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/21/books/books-of-the-timesplotting-to-erase-hitler-from-history.html MacMillan, Margaret. The Uses and Abuses of History. London: Profile Books, 2010 [2009]. Misztal, Barbara A. Theories of Social Remembering. Maidenhead, Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2003. Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, Colorado and Oxford, UK: Westview Press, 2000. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representation, No. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring, 1989), 7–24. Quinn, Daniel. After Dachau. Hanover, New Hampshire: Zooland Books, 2001. Rosenfeld Gavriel D. The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. —. Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin Books, 2004 [2003]. Stannard, David E. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Young, J. James. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993.

MATERIAL REFLECTIONS: THE SCOPE OF MEMORY IN PETER CAREY’S OSCAR AND LUCINDA RNjTA ŠLAPKAUSKAITƠ

If ’t were not so, what did become Of my heart when I first saw thee? I brought a heart into the room, But from the room I carried none with me. If it had gone to thee, I know Mine would have taught thine heart to show More pity unto me; but Love, alas! At one first blow did shiver it as glass. —John Donne, The Broken Heart

Peter Carey’s Booker-winning novel Oscar and Lucinda has been generously praised for how its marked fascination with the eccentric, the exquisite, and the fabulous is conveyed through the metafictional as well as magic realist aspects of the narrative as a (post)colonial parable. Taking its cue from the analytical concerns for the issues of cultural transplantation and legitimation of British colonial presence in Australia, this paper examines the novel’s visual saturation and its alignment with material culture as facets of memory work inscribed in the narrative. To the extent that the story is organized around the figure of a glass church, the house of prayer has both material and metaphorical significance for the refraction of memory that unfolds in Carey’s novel, problematising the act of seeing and seeking the past. Read within the conceptual framework of thing theory, representations of Victorian engagement with material culture reveal new implications for how cultural continuity sought legitimation in the colonial economy. Above all, our reading of the narrative as a way of thinking through things sheds light on the central dichotomy of the physical vs. the metaphysical, which structures the unpredictable correlations between subjects and objects in the novel.

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Thinking (about) Things Human agency in the world is always mediated through and accompanied by material presence. However, Western intellectual history from Plato to Heidegger shows that the material circumstances of human life have often faced reticence, if not outright ridicule, in the taxonomy of philosophical thought. In her Introduction to Evocative Objects Sherry Turkle observes: “We live our lives in the middle of things. Material culture carries emotions and ideas of startling intensity. Yet, only recently have objects begun to receive the attention they deserve.”1 Arjun Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things (1986) was one of the earliest, groundbreaking attempts to reconsider the role material objects play in the construction of social value. For Appadurai, like the other contributors to his volume who follow Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism, the social transactions in which things participate in the form of commodities, gifts, and loans constitute the social life of things as agents in the human economy of desire. But it is the vectors of the social movement of objects that are most revealing not only about the uses of things, but also about the contingencies of social context that underlie the human systems of value, where social formations are elucidated through the consumption of manufactured goods. As Appadurai explains: Even if our own approach to things is conditioned necessarily by the view that things have no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions, and motivations endow them with, the anthropological problem is that this formal truth does not illuminate the concrete, historical circulation of things. For that we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things. Thus, even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.2

In this line of thought, objects are understood as epistemological specimens defined by their social mobility along the lines of economic exchange. While capable of giving insight into the ties that bind our social identities to regimes of power and representation, Appadurai’s neoMarxist approach is limited in that it only sees man and object as coextensive and misses out on the ontological properties of things 1 2

Turkle, Evocative Objects, 6. Appadurai, The Social Life of Things, 5.

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themselves. Without altogether dismissing the social praxis of the material world, Ellaine Freedgood nevertheless aptly observes in The Ideas in Things: We might say that the commodity is both a material object and a trope: it is literal as a lion is a lion, and figurative as a cubit stands for justice. The commodity stands for something that is and is not immediately clear to its beholders, but the extraordinary thing is that we have imagined commodities such that they are somehow capable of letting us know that we have turned them into figures: we need to literalize them in order to refigure them, that is we need to re-materialize them in order to understand their value differently, less abstractly.3

In calling for a new connection between materiality and conceptuality, Freedgood invites us to strip objects of the symbolic qualities we ascribe to them and reconstitute them in the fullness of material life, giving preference to metonymic, rather than metaphorical, readings. To put it otherwise, when conceived primarily (or only) as marketable goods, defined by the accretions of symbolic value through economic vigour, material things escape our attention to how objects resist the laws of commerce by breaking down or falling into misuse, which is to say by entering a discursive domain in which they no longer operate as (potential) property, but reveal passions that cannot be altogether converted into possessions. Turkle’s idea of evocative objects seems to be particularly relevant here: We find it familiar to consider objects as useful or aesthetic, as necessities or vain indulgencies. We are on less familiarground when we consider objects as companions to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought. The notion of evocative objects brings together these two less familiar ideas, underscoring the inseparability of thought and feeling in our relationship to things. We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with.4

The power of evocation suggests that things have purchase on us that cannot be reduced to the purchases we perform as agents of social leverage; in fact, it is through our multivalent relations with objects that we discover our own objecthood in light of the indifference of things. Although recent critical interrogations of the status of objects have been largely congruent with the broader critique of the culture of late 3 4

Freedgood, The Ideas in Things. Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel, 27-28. Turkle, Evocative Objects, 5.

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capitalism and its consumerist ethos, they also suggest an increased intellectual interest in the power objects command and the metaphysical depth they hold. The two theoretical frameworks I would like to consider here are Graham Harman’s conceptualisation of the object within the parameters of object-oriented ontology and Bill Brown’s distinction of object vs. thing in his thing theory. The pertinence of the inanimate world to philosophy that Harman points out is in line with the wider speculative turn in recent philosophical debate over the scope of realist metaphysics, of which The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (2011), edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Harman, is a good example. Although, as Harman himself admits, the term “speculative realism” has by now contracted into the field known as object-oriented ontology rather than expanded into a more diversified ground of dialectical philosophical musings, the unifying idea persists, which is that “[…] objects have a certain potency as philosophical personae that provokes reactive operations [...]”5 Unlike social theorists, who see objects as gaining significance in mobile correlation with social activities, the proponents of object-oriented ontology disturb and disrupt the ties, whether social, cognitive, or emotional, that indenture objects to human will and make them amenable to thought in the moral economy of social transactions. For Harman, by contrast, objects are irreducible either to their material qualities or their social performance; they matter also because they are metaphysical. The fault he finds with dominant philosophical reasoning about objects is the binary trap of what in The Quadruple Object he calls undermining and overmining, where objects are either dismissed as “too specific to deserve the name of ultimate reality”6 or “are important only insofar as they are manifested to the mind, or are part of some concrete event that affects other objects as well.”7 In defending the metaphysical status of objects, Harman brings together Husserlian phenomenology and Heidegger’s analysis of broken tools, whereby he configures a quadruple ontography that “maps the basic landmarks and fault lines in the universe of objects.”8 While partaking of Husserl’s idea of the mutual constitution of the intentional consciousness and intentional object, this ontography operates on the distinction between the sensual (available to perception) and the real object (beyond human consciousness), thus acknowledging its debt to Heidegger’s observations about how objects withdraw from human access, concealing their being 5

Harman, The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, 22. Harman, The Quadruple Object, 10. 7 Ibid., 11. 8 Ibid., 125. 6

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from human experience. Insofar as Harman argues for the object’s autonomous reality beyond human access, he offers to think about it through the four-fold structure of relations between the sensual object, the real object as well as its sensual and real qualities: While there may be an infinity of objects in the cosmos, they come in only two kinds: the real object that withdraws from all experience, and the sensual object that exists only in experience. And along with these we also have two kinds of qualities: the sensual qualities found in experience, and the real ones that Husserl says are accessible intellectually rather than through sensuous intuition.9

It should be said that Harman’s analytical template does not give any privilege to theoretical abstraction, claiming instead that theorising about objects has no more direct access to the reality of things than their practical use. In this view, the unknowability of objects is conditioned by the inherent inadequacy of relations in which they participate: The only way to do justice to objects is to consider that their reality is free of all relation, deeper than all reciprocity. The object is a dark crystal veiled in a private vacuum: irreducible to its own pieces, and equally irreducible to its outward relations with other things.10

This is to say that in object-oriented metaphysics, objects must have autonomy from relations to humans, if they are to be things in themselves. But more crucially, humans themselves are thought of as objects among others, who, in however relating to objects, inevitably form new ones: “[…] any relation immediately generates a new object.”11 While not without its shortcomings, Harman’s object-oriented ontological model enables us to think about objects as both accessible to human consciousness and capable of agency that exceeds it. In this respect, it seems fair to say that the metaphysical reality of things always escapes us and thus the quest for a cultural consensus as regards the human encounters with non-human matter ever continues. Much like Harman, Bill Brown is averse to the idea that the mutual relation between humans and objects can be reduced to social consumption through commoditisation. In his paper “Thing Theory”, published in Critical Inquiry in 2001 and later republished in his edited volume Things, Brown borrows the Heideggerian idea of how the being of the broken tool 9

Ibid., 49. Ibid., 47. 11 Harman, The Quadruple Object, 117. 10

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reveals itself through withdrawal to make a pithy distinction between objects and things, which characterises the domain of thing theory. Curiously, the object/thing dichotomy rearticulates Harman’s concern for the metaphysical inaccessibility of real objects at the same time as it nurtures the neo-Marxist interest in the social lives of tokens of the material world: As they circulate through our lives, we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture – above all, what they disclose about us), but we only catch a glimpse of things. We look through objects because they are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful, because there is a discourse of objectivity that allows us to use them as facts. A thing, in contrast, can hardly function as a window. We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.12

What Brown is saying is that when thought of as a latency or an excess13 which accounts for the mystery of matter, thingness has repercussions for our view of identity in that it makes us reconsider how inanimate objects impede and structure human subjectivity and how they affect human interrelations. In pleating together folds of social and cultural studies, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and literary scholarship, Brown’s thing theory illuminates the interdependence of the discourse of matter and the matter of discourse, tracing the collision of physical and conceptual things in the poetic imagination as much as the physical act of writing and reading. Above all, the conceptual entry into the vicissitudes of the material universe that thing theory inaugurates solicits an inquiry into the intellectual crossovers between things, thoughts, and language, a task Brown takes up in A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature, a critical study of the aesthetic engagement with objects in 19th-century American fiction. Taking its cue from William Carlos Williams’ Modernist dictum “no ideas but in things”, A Sense of Things explores how the materiality of the tactile and visual world affected the poetic vocabulary by invading the cultural imaginary of industrial capitalism in the wake of the Civil War. In 12 13

Brown, Things, 4. Ibid., 5.

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this regard Brown unknowingly reiterates Turkle’s observation about the evocative power of objects, showing how the emerging commodity culture of the 19th century took purchase of people who used them equally as mediums of despair, distress, desire, and social durability, so that material possessions not only became part of the somatic and intellectual life of their owners, but also gave substance to social institutions that came to define American culture. Above all, the social order of things Brown’s study foregrounds paves a way for our awareness of the mutual imbrication of ethical and economic imperatives in that the obligations material culture imposes on human subjects demand moral responsibility that may threaten our notions of subject and object, as in the case of 19thcentury dioramas displaying Western ethnographic research in the form of life-groups that objectified culturally exotic subjects: “As much as anthropologists wanted to exhibit ‘not things, but men,’ they did so in part by representing men as things.”14 To the extent that it acknowledges the epistemological limitations of theorising driven by the view of things as economic incentives, Brown’s reading of American literature calls for a materialist phenomenology that does not shy away from the essential illegibility of things that underlies our interactions with objects in the shared capacity for, among others, memory and forgetting, intimacy and detachment, deception and truth, presence and absence, surface and depth. What is key to this approach to literary texts is the understanding that poetic representations have a double nature not unlike objects and humans, because in turning things into poetic images, the art of writing doubles the phenomenal world by adding its own artifice to it. This metamorphosis encapsulates the moral contract between the animate and the inanimate world and submits itself to an “indeterminate ontology where things seem slightly human and humans seem slightly thing-like.”15 Arguably, then, in the end thing theory capitalises on the evocative power and transformative promise of things in directing our attention to the way objects, by finding their way into words, confer upon them their own ambiguity and thus become a source of phenomenological fascination that, through its eruptive and alluring force, reveals the unexpected human affinity to things.

14 15

Brown, A Sense of Things. The Object Matter of American Literature, 97. Ibid., 13.

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Victoriana and Visual Materiality Following Brown’s observations in A Sense of Things, this paper proceeds with the idea that aesthetic attentiveness to visual and material culture has survived to this day as a literary pivot of the Victorian age, an aspect of aesthetic thought that resonates in contemporary Australian neoVictorian novels of, among others, Richard Flanagan, David Malouf, and Peter Carey. As Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss note in their “Introduction: Spectacles and Things – Visual and Material Culture and/in Neo-Victorianism”, […] neo-Victorianism is largely an endeavour to explore the nineteenthcentury past through historiographic (meta)fictions, processes of remembering and forgetting, spectrality, (em)plotting, self-reflexivity, and/or nostalgia. Questions concerning how artworks perspectivise and emplot the past, how they recreate the period’s materiality, or how they position the reader in order to re-visualise the Victorian era are part and parcel of the neo-Victorian project.16

The 19th-century taste for objects and scopophilia has been critically examined across various disciplines, most notably in such publications as Luiza Calè and Patrizia Di Bello’s Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Cultures, Simon Goldhill’s The Buried Life of Things, Janell Watson’s Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust, John Plotz’s Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move, and Jeff Nunokawa’s The Afterlife of Property, to name but some. In 19th-century literature the appeal of the material world found its verbal motivation in deep pockets of detailed description that elevated physical objects to a new aesthetic significance. As Freedgood notably remarks: The Victorian novel describes, catalogs, quantifies, and in general showers us with things: post chaises, handkerchiefs, moonstones, wills, riding crops, ships’ instruments of all kinds, dresses of muslin, merino, and silk, coffee, claret, cutlets – cavalcades of objects threaten to crowd the narrative right off the page.”17

16

Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, “Introduction: Spectacles and Things – Visual and Material Culture and/in Neo-Victorianism”, 2. 17 Freedgood, The Ideas in Things. Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel, 1.

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This “proprietary imagination”18 forges a textual plot where aesthetic objects, commodities, and portable property collide, collude, and circulate in the sites of industry, domesticity, and decadence to enlist the reader’s physical senses that enhance the experience of reading and pulls the body towards thought by virtue of the sense, both material and conceptual, of things. Undoubtedly, Victorian attitudes to visual materiality were galvanised by a broader 19th-century politics of taste, which was itself calibrated by a rapid technological advancement that initiated new ways of perceiving and appreciating the sensual world.19 In effect, by probing the system of exchanges and relays between the world of art, science, and commerce, postcolonial neo-Victorian literature has powerfully brought to surface the ideological nature of bonds that ensured the volatility of commodity culture’s relation to British imperial expansion. With the freedom of critical distance that hindsight affords, postcolonial neo-Victorianism, both in the form of art and scholarship, marshals its critical and aesthetic resources to highlight the political implications of marketing material objects and their modes of production and consumption, attitudes that not only shaped the colonial regimes of power, but also, by introducing the optical devices used in photography, museology, and science, ushered in new material dimensions of viewing that interfered with indigenous cognitive mappings as well as simulated colonial spectacles for the metropolitan viewer. As the contributors to Empires of Vision amply demonstrate, colonial conquests relied on the support of visual conquests that imposed an imperial lens as a device for measuring the culture and humanity of the colonial Other. Rachel Teukolsky makes a similar point in The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics: The late-Victorian formation of the discipline of anthropology coincided with a kind of scientific objectification that took its authority from overwhelmingly visual metaphors. These metaphors worked to create the Other as a detached, definable object, automatically exoticized by the very nature of the spectatorial model of knowledge.20

Unsurprisingly, the significance of the optical props as models for thinking and textual conditioning dovetails with the neo-Victorian 18

Brown, A Sense of Things. The Object Matter of American Literature, 157. Calè and Di Bello, Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Cultures, 4. 20 Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics, 209. 19

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examination of the material conditions of 19th-century cultural practices, with a particular emphasis on the ideological reciprocity that visual transactions and the social mobility of things discovered in colonial discourse. This is one of the reasons why neo-Victorian novels, like Peter Carey’s Booker-winning Oscar and Lucinda, offer such fertile ground for an intellectual mining of material and immaterial repositories of value that premised Victorian ventures into the British colonies of 19th-century Australia.

Vitreous Textuality in Oscar and Lucinda As Helga Ramsey-Kurtz suggests in her analysis of consecration rituals in neo-Victorian Australian literature, material aesthetic encounters are indisputably crucial to our appreciation of Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda. It is a postmodern historiographic metafiction, set both in England and Australia that revolves around a glass church, which is used as an object of a wager between the novel’s two protagonists, English missionary Oscar Hopkins and Australian owner of a glass manufacturing company Lucinda Leplastrier. For Ramsey-Kurtz, Carey’s literary endeavour puts forth a critique of imperialist greed “by examining the conflation of spiritual and material enrichment so conveniently auxiliary to any justification of European expansionism.”21 Of key importance, in this context, is the issue of the novel’s take on colonial history, whose dominant narrative, Ramsey-Kurtz argues, calls for the narrator’s corrective which “[…] insists on recreating confidence in humankind’s capacity to do better than the recorded history of European expansion makes us believe it can do.”22 While sharing the idea of the complexity and contingency of the colonial settlement as presented in the novel, I would nevertheless like to refocus our attention on the thought-provoking presence of physical objects around which Carey’s protagonists organise their lives. The glass church cannot be underestimated: as an object and an image, it gives substance to the narrator’s desire to elucidate his family’s history and in doing so, sheds light on the unpredictable ways in which things and humans derive moral kinship from each other. A historiographic narrative that it is, Oscar and Lucinda selfconsciously tethers material visuality to textual emplotting. Which is to say that the materiality of the church, i.e. it being made of glass, shapes the 21

Ramsey-Kurtz, “Tokens or Totems? Eccentric Props in Postcolonial Reenactments of Colonial Consecration”, 304. 22 Ibid., 307.

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nature of the narrative as an optical instrument designed to inspect the past. It recruits the physical qualities of glass and transfers them to the metaphorical plane, wherein we recognise the narrator’s historiographic lens as both reflecting and refracting past events in light of his limited knowledge and boundless material imagination: There would have been no church at Gleniffer if it had not been for a Christmas pudding. There would have been no daguerreotype of Oscar Hopkins on the banks of the Bellinger. I would not have been born. There would be no story to tell.23

Notice how the narrator wagers his own existence and that of the story on a gustatory object, whose extraordinariness is bound to Oscar’s father’s belief that the pudding “was the fruit of Satan”24, a thing of metaphysical menace rather than just a delectable meal. Absurd though it may seem, his tasting of the pudding has consequences that move young Oscar away from his father’s home into the house of their Anglican neighbour, then to theological studies and gambling at Oxford and finally to the life as a missionary in Australia, where he becomes the narrator’s great-grandfather. To the extent that the narrator is moved to tell the story by the daguerreotype of Oscar, as much as his church, it is reasonable to say that he is conceptually repeating his great-grandfather’s journey, for the photo is equally a physical object as it is an image of a man, i.e. a pictorial objectification of Oscar. A visual matrix for the processes of memory, the daguerreotype seems to confer its epistemological authority on the greatgrandson’s narrative, while at the same time certifying its discursive doubleness as both a transparent object and an oblique thing in need of verbal illumination. As Julia Breitbach cogently puts it along the lines of thing theory, Photography thus characteristically seems to be divided in itself, or, in more affirmative terms, to be a site where objecthood and thingness complement each other – the one submissive to human intellection, the other resisting discursive domination.25

In terms of Brown’s distinction between object and thing, the same may be said about the narrative of Oscar and Lucinda, which presents itself as a portable object in the form of a published novel, yet capable of 23

Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 6. Ibid., 12. 25 Breitbach, “The Photo-as-Thing. Photography and thing theory”, 35. 24

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transcending its physical format by virtue of the faculty of the imagination of its readers, so that in our reading experience we are reminded of how thought assumes a physicality of its own. Carey seems to agree with John Berger’s observation in Understanding a Photograph that “the true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.”26 The mutual constitution of clarity and obscurity that characterises the narrative as a mirror of the photographic image may be read as a means of mediating the spectral presence of the Victorian past for which Carey’s narrator acts as a ventriloquist. Seeing as the novel foregrounds the glass church as an evocative object, it seems apt to remind ourselves of Mark Llewellyn’s comments on how neo-Victorian literature uses the reflective modality of glass as a textual means of historical hermeneutics: “The ‘invisible layer of matter between the seer and the seen’ could usefully be viewed as the textual layering of the contemporary novel and its Victorian narrative, the text becoming almost a glass permitting a double-viewed reflection.”27 We should not, therefore, overlook the fact that Oscar’s daguerreotype, to which his great-grandson refers in the opening paragraphs, is kept under glass, thus highlighting the conceptual link between glass and photography as a visual means of constructing knowledge. The lucidity associated with glass ties in with the notion of photography as a transparent medium of the past: By way of their sheer materiality on the one hand, and their seeming transparency of a bygone reality on the other, photos seem to lend a vicarious stability and substantiality to fickle memories, providing structural support, factual evidence, and narrative coherence to human biographies.28

Yet, the internal divisions of photography as a conceptual medium cast into doubt its epistemological promise, for, as Susan Sontag powerfully contends, the limit of photographic knowledge of the world is that, while it can goad conscience, it can, finally, never be ethical or political knowledge. The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist.29 26

Berger, Understanding a Photograph, 19. Llewellyn, “Spectrality, S(p)ecularity, and Textuality: Or, Some Reflections in the Glass”, 26. 28 Breitbach, “The Photo-as-Thing. Photography and thing theory”, 37. 29 Sontag, On Photography, 23-24. 27

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I would argue that the narrator’s compelling wish to tell his own version of how the church was brought to Gleniffer is inseparable from the sentimentalism that he finds in his mother’s tale: “My mother always told the story about the church in a way that always embarrassed me. There was an excess of emotion in her style. There was something false.”30 To this end, it is tempting to assume that Carey’s narrator puts his faith in glass as the optics of material experience that conveys his sense of things true and fair. But, as Isobel Armstrong’s monumental study of Victorian glass culture demonstrates, glass is no less spectral by nature than photography. Its duplicitous character as both a translucent medium and an oblique barrier beckoned public attention during the Great Exhibition of 1851, housed as it was in the Crystal Palace, which was itself modelled after glass conservatories meant for the cultivation and research of exotic horticultural specimens. The dialectics of glass, from which Oscar’s church derives its ambiguity, follows from the internal contradictions of its antithetical material, which structures and deflects human perception of self and others. To quote Armstrong: Transparency is something that eliminates itself in the process of vision. It does away with obstruction by not declaring itself in the process of vision. But the paradox of this self-obliterating state is that we would not call it transparent but for the presence of physical matter, however invisible – its visible invisibility is what is important about transparency. It must be both barrier and medium.31

Our understanding of the ambivalence of glass structures has consequences for how we interpret Carey’s narrator’s story as a historiographic medium. Again, we are reminded of the physical process involved in turning geological matter into vitreous material: Sand, the ‘useless’ ‘debris of our globe’ worn away from siliceous rocks and eroded into progressively finer grains in aeons of geological time, is the prime constituent of glass. Its transformation, pure transparent matter derived from waste matter, artificial matter derived from primary matter, confirmed the magic of a transition from nature to culture: it even appeared to reverse the process of mortality, moving from death to life, a form of resurrection seizing the imagination with aesthetic wonder.32 30

Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 2. Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds. Glass Culture and the Imagination, 18301880, 11. 32 Ibid., 6. 31

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Arguably, then, glass epitomises the material conditions of the narrator’s textual practice: like glassmaking, his storytelling performs an alchemical transformation of the dust and debris of time into a new substance that initiates a scopic potency for a visceral desire for the past, on the one hand, and the deictic control that the glass regime executes in creating the illusion of transparent access, on the other. In opening the novel with the chapter titled “Church”, Oscar’s greatgrandson testifies to how his thinking about the glass object(s) in the story goes hand in hand with his historical imagination. For the church is not the only glass object in the narrative’s material economy: for example, Mrs Williams, a servant of Oscar’s father, we are told, has “a little glass cage within the kitchen”33 where she takes the liberty of brushing her hair; like any other Victorian naturalist, Theophilus Hopkins uses optical devices to determine the presence of God in the natural world or measure his son’s health34 and he also gives away bottles for Oscar’s journey to Australia35; Lucinda collects her mother’s jam jars after her death36 and even the doll she is presented with as a child comes from the Crystal Palace exhibition37. The visual texture of the narrative subsists on the materiality of glass that absorbs the mental processes of the narrator’s memory. This is to say that the spectral quality of glass gives impetus to the novel’s specular consciousness that takes hold of material objects in order to, pace Steven Connor, “draw, drain and detain our thinking” about the past and “make thinking accessible as a kind of thing”38. To put it more simply, glass is not just an object of the narrator’s cognition, but also a thing that substantiates his subjectivity as a reflecting agent in that “thinking about things is unavoidably a kind of thinking about the kind of thing that thinking is.”39 What follows from this observation is that we need to examine how the narrator’s pattern of thoughts structures the regime of visual materiality in Oscar and Lucinda and how the thingness of glass objects ties in with the conflict between the physical and the spiritual that the novel unfolds. Within the novel’s figurative system glass is a viscous matter that binds Oscar, an English orphan who rebels against the dogma of the Plymouth Brethren as preached by his father, to Lucinda, an Australian 33

Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 13. Ibid., 25. 35 Ibid., 213. 36 Ibid., 99. 37 Ibid., 75. 38 Connor, “Thinking Things”, 3. 39 Ibid. 34

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orphan and heiress, who defies the social expectations of the Victorian middle classes and uses the capital she has inherited from her parents to buy a glassmaking company in Sydney. Both characters are oddballs by Victorian standards and while Oscar dismisses his father’s teaching and leaves home on the grounds that God confirmed his reasoning that his father was wrong to deprive him of the plum pudding by “smiting” the father when he was collecting specimens at sea40, Lucinda purchases the glass manufacturing factory partly because she feels guilty about having the money she did not earn herself and partly because as a daughter of a strong woman, friend of George Eliot, Lucinda looks down upon the social conventions that deprive Victorian women of the opportunities provided to men. This is how the narrator comments on Lucinda’s acquisition: It would be easy to see this purchase – half her inheritance splurged – on the first thing with a FOR SALE sign tacked to it – as nothing more than the desire to unburden herself of all this money, and this may be partly true. But the opposite is true as well, i.e. she knew she would need the money to have any sort of freedom. It is better to think about the purchase as a piano manoeuvred up a staircase by ten different circumstances and you cannot say it was one or the other that finally got it there – even the weakest may have been indispensable at that tricky turn on the landing. But of all the shifting forces, there is this one burly factor, this strong and handsome beast, i.e. her previous experience of glass via the phenomenon known as larmes bataviques or Prince Rupert’s drops.41

The metaphor the narrator employs to explain the financial transaction is an interesting one because it contrives an analogy between moving a piano and negotiating female passions, reducing Lucinda’s wits to an object of gentle mockery at the expense of elevating the piano to a thing capable of extraordinary motion. His reference to Prince Rupert’s drops, however, seems to undo this tease by recalling an emotional reason that moved the Australian heiress to buy the glassworks, namely her memory of her father breaking a solid droplet that had resulted from dripping molten glass into cold water: “He looked at Lucinda and gave a gruesome sort of grin. Then he put the tail of the Prince Rupert’s drop between the blade and handle and forced the blade hard home.”42 This memory comes to us as a double reflection, having made its way through the refractory system of both Lucinda’s and the narrator’s mind’s eye. It is not unlike a glass structure, although hardly accidental like the Prince Rupert’s drop, a 40

Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 20. Ibid., 128. 42 Ibid., 131. 41

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liminal space of obscure transparency that achieves what Armstrong calls transitive seeing, “an inlet, particularly for women, into real and imagined space, and a moment where reading – since we view the viewer – becomes a reflexive and textual act of seeing.”43 The narrative’s self-reflexivity in Oscar and Lucinda is both literal and conceptual. For one, the narrator makes a point of referring to the material circumstances of his writing by way of addressing his reader: You need not ask me who is Prince Rupert or what is a batavique because I do not know. I have, though, right here beside me as I write (I hold it in the palm of my left hand while the right hand moves to an fro across the page) a Prince Rupert drop – a solid teardrop of glass no more than two inches from head to tail.44

The proximity of glass to the narrator’s writing hand reinforces the conceptual significance of glass for the narrative self-awareness. In this respect, the accidental provenance of the batavique stands in sharp contrast to the ambitions of the Victorian glass industry, which was anchored in the work performed by the lungs of the souffleur, the glass blower, who moulded glass with his breath. This is why Armstrong concludes in Victorian Glassworlds that to look through glass in the mid-nineteenth century was most likely to look through and by means of the breath of an unknown artisan. The congealed residues of somebody else’s breath remained in the window, decanter, and wineglass, traces of the workman’s body in the common bottle, annealed in the substance he worked.45

The spectral, and sometimes corporeal, presence of the glassmaker’s breath offers itself as a metaphor for the narrator’s writing, wherein his breath, both literally and figuratively, as a way of thinking, moulds the vitreous verbosity of his tale. The mental fossils we encounter in this glass-like structure are indicative of a consciousness that is tracing its own apertures of thought. This may be what accounts for the magnifying effect of Carey’s neo-Victorian aesthetics, for, to quote Armstrong, “the real function of a mediating transparency is as much to reflect as to be seen

43 Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds. Glass Culture and the Imagination, 18301880, 124. 44 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 128-129. 45 Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds. Glass Culture and the Imagination, 18301880, 4.

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through. Consciousness, doubled as reflection, can achieve reflective awareness.”46 Perhaps because of its crucial dependence on the body of the glassworker, glass makes visible the uneasy correlations between economic and spiritual transactions in which it participates. For Lucinda, glass becomes a means of forging friendships, particularly with the local vicar Dennis Hasset, with whom she studies sample bottles: “My bottles, she thought. Blue, amber, clear; bottles for acid, pickles, poison, beer, wine, pills, jam, bottles with vine leaves, laughing jackasses, flowers, gum nuts, serpents and PROPERTY OF imprinted on their underside.”47 Seeing herself as a businesswoman enables Lucinda to look upon the glassworks as both her passion and property, so much so that when visiting the glassworks in Trent, London, and Nottingham, she finds herself impatient to go back to Sydney: The pear wood they used to turn the foot of a vase would be soaked, not just in water, but in mineral oil, and she was suddenly made impatient to return – as impatient as she had been to leave – to the aroma of burnt pear wood, mineral oil, and the acrid chemical smells of sulphates and chromates oxidizing to green and yellow.48

Curiously, the olfactory impact of the English glassworks on her body revives her somatic memory of what essentially is a colonial enterprise, her Sydney glassworks being an extension of British imperialist entrepreneurship. However, Lucinda is too innocent to consider the imperial lens that measures her glass factory as a partner in Australia’s moral commitment to the idea of English values, an ignorance that dovetails with her indifference to bourgeois morality, patriarchal propriety, and xenophobia. She treats her engagement in glass manufacturing much like she treats her need for gambling, as a passion of the mind and, perhaps less consciously so, a stand-in for emotional comfort of which she was deprived by the death of her parents. It is their mutual love of cards that first brings Oscar and Lucinda together on a ship sailing to Sydney. A means to hedge enjoyment, Lucinda also uses card playing as a way of getting to know people, even her labourers at the factory, but we are told that “within a month they sent a message to her…that they did not think it ‘proper’ that this practice

46

Ibid., 12. Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 151. 48 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 200. 47

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continue.”49 For Oscar, though, his long-lasting compulsion, which began as a wager on his father’s error of judgment and was scrupulously cultivated at horse races during his studies of theology at Oxford, is explicable in metaphysical terms: Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier. We bet – it is all in Pascal and very wise it is too, although the Queen of England might find him not nearly Presbyterian enough – we bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it. We calculate the odds, the return, that we shall sit with the saints in paradise.50

Both of their passions mirror the passion with which glass is moulded, both literally and metaphorically51, and it is glass that eventually brings their gambling to the test. What is most interesting about Oscar’s remarks, though, is how he conceptualises a wager as a metaphysical bond that tethers material life to its metaphysical destiny, so that he looks at social transactions with the eyes that can overcome material impediments and ascend toward transcendental light. Oscar’s reasoning is reminiscent of how Armstrong interprets the ambivalence that surrounds glass as a material substance formed by the worker’s breath: Yet glass [is] the spectre of his breath. So it insist[s] on both material and ontological meanings, a substance invoking matter and spirit, and the tension between them, ‘inert matter’ and the breath moulding it from within. Glass [i]s literally a paradoxical ethereal substance.52

It is for this reason that we find the glass church at the centre of Oscar and Lucinda’s attempts to accord with the demands of social life in Sydney. The church is a symbolic embodiment of the aporia that describes the protagonists’ gambling, a form of metaphysical contract as much as a social transaction. If Lucinda is only mildly disturbed to find a mirror image of herself in the priest, Oscar’s parishioners at Randwick are outraged to discover him playing cards with a lady and this discovery costs the young priest his job. Ironically, the knowledge of Oscar’s weakness, which prompts the bishop to dismiss him, relies on the qualities of glass as a visual medium. By the

49

Ibid., 227. Ibid., 262. 51 Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds. Glass Culture and the Imagination, 18301880, 24. 52 Ibid., 5. 50

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time Lucinda takes note of the face of Mr Judd, a local butcher, pressed to Oscar’s window, it is too late: Lucinda should have made allowances for the glass. It was not plate, but crown, of uneven thickness and marred by a yellow tinge produced by salts in the sand. You can say she should have reacted more scientifically. She did not. She saw a butcher’s face with hairy eyebrows. She saw a pig snout of unnatural yellow. That the face was partly veiled by a patch of condensation did not make it seem less terrifying.53

Even though throughout the novel Carey makes use of Oscar as a linchpin for humorous set-ups, such as this one, the comic latitude helps to expose a conflict of vision that runs through the story as a result of postmodern streamlining of Victorian pretensions. This collision of scopic regimes, wherein we observe the Victorian techniques of observation and judgment, is an invitation to rethink the hermeneutic possibilities of scrutinising the visual economy of Victorian ethics. For as much as Oscar is publicly denounced for gambling, he is no less discredited for having engaged in such “sinful” activity with a lady, who came to his house without a chaperone. The latter seems to cast the decisive dice for the bishop, who, we learn, is himself a card-player and “something on the geegees”54. It is truly subversive, then, though equally charitable, of Lucinda to offer the young priest a job at her glass factory and a home in her residence. The ambivalence of Oscar and Lucinda’s relationship is eventually what tropes the glass church for our endless speculation. Although both are in love with each other, Lucinda is unsure if she wants to get married, whereas Oscar believes that she has promised herself to Dennis Hasset, who has been moved to a new vicarage. Oscar’s idea for a glass church to be delivered to Hasset as a gift from Lucinda mines the architectural structure with meaning as a metaphor for love. In delivering the church himself, he hopes to win her heart against all odds: “[…] it was all born out of habits of mind produced by Christianity: that if you sacrificed yourself you would somehow attain the object of your desires.”55 Even more so, considering that moving the church is reminiscent of the medieval transfer of sacred remains, an act for which the word “metaphor” was used, the glass church in Oscar and Lucinda is a metaphor both conceptually and literally. For Lucinda, however, initially the glass 53

Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 314. Ibid., 324. 55 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 388. 54

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construction metonymically aligns with the vitreous ambience of the Crystal Palace: Her true ambition, the one she would not confess to him, was to build something Extraordinary and Fine from glass and cast iron. A Crystal Palace, but not a Crystal Palace. A conservatory, but not a conservatory. Glass laced with steel, spun like a spider web – the idea danced around the periphery of her vision, never long enough to be clear.56

A metonymic reading of the glasshouse as a progeny of the Crystal Palace lays bare the intellectual operations of British imperialism, which endows Lucinda’s glass design with the aura of metropolitan culture that ensures the tenacity of English values in the colonies. Significantly, the glass structure of the Crystal Palace was largely contiguous with the design of a conservatory, which, as Armstrong shows, had relevance for the imperial control of colonial specimens and scientific taxonomies: Managing light and accelerating growth through technology, the conservatory, while it offered an aesthetic of freedom, could not but question the nature and control of our species being, based as it was on experiments with the hybridity and cross-fertilization of flora. Its function was to store under glass exotic botanical species culled from all over the world, juxtaposing indigenous and exotic varieties: it intimated abundance, but it could not but act out a horticultural imperialism that raised questions about the colonizing role.57

In this respect, even Oscar’s idea of the church as a vehicle of divine light58 stands in league with his early dream of missionary work in the Australian wilderness. Like Lucinda, he is ignorant of the material practices of, what Terry Smith calls, “calibration, obliteration, and symbolization”59 which the colonial missions were invested in and which resulted in the cultural annihilation and appropriation of indigenous people. Oscar’s own excruciating journey taking the church up the Bellinger River becomes a visual testimony to the contradictory meanings of glass as capable of accommodating both Oscar’s spiritual innocence and his companions’ violent racism. In the end, what affects the indigenous 56

Ibid., 366. Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds. Glass Culture and the Imagination, 18301880, 167. 58 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 375. 59 Smith, “Visual Regimes of Colonization: European and Aboriginal Seeing in Australia”, 267. 57

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people most is the sight, the stories, and the suffering of the opium-infused Reverend Hopkins himself, while the glass gleans a response that recognises its capacity for destruction, both literal and metaphorical: “This was the first thing they noticed – that it cuts. Cuts trees. Cuts the skin of the tribes.”60 The status of the glass church as portable property further problematises our understanding of its role in the novel’s moral economy. For one, it is worth remembering John Plotz’s critical reading of how Victorian portable assets operated as an index of Englishness, sustaining the asymmetry of power relations in the British Empire.61 Crucially, also, as an object of a wager, the glasshouse is tied to Lucinda’s and Oscar’s inheritances and is thus stamped with the sign of commodity capitalism. For even though neither of the protagonists thinks in economic terms, their betting on the delivery of the church presupposes a social transaction, where Lucinda’s gift to Hasset moves in search of a misplaced obligation to reciprocate. Arguably, because of the density of figurative meanings the church is inscribed with, neither of the protagonists is able to interpret the other’s intention and, like their glass construction, both become lost objects in the material economy of love. Particularly Oscar, who, having delivered the church to Hasset, succumbs to the sexual ministrations of a local woman and ends up marrying her and planting the seed of the narrator’s grandfather’s life. In the symbolic structure of the wager, metonymy wins over metaphor for the moral force of the sexual transaction overrides that of the economic transaction which served as a metaphor for Oscar and Lucinda’s uncorrupted connection. Unlike in Victorian fiction, there is no “safe estate”62 in Oscar and Lucinda and the only way the characters can regain their agency is in their “rhetorical afterlife”63, as a figment of neoVictorian imagination that reciprocates the gift of 19th-century material culture. Without underestimating how the social mobility of the glass church defines its biography in Carey’s novel and, in doing so, unveils the scopic intersections and interjections between the life of objects and the lives of people, it is no less important to see if the narrative has an eye for the consciousness of things. Having completed his journey, which may be

60

Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 477. Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move, 2. 62 Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property. Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel, 9. 63 Ibid., 14. 61

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read as a mirror image of the glassworker’s shift, also called “a journey”64, Oscar “no longer thought that the glass church was a holy thing.”65 In this we recognise Oscar’s sense of guilt for the misery he brought to innocent bystanders who got in the way of his passions: “He begged God forgive him his complacency, his pride, his wilful ignorance. But even as he prayed he felt himself polluted almost beyond redemption.”66 The prayer recalls the metaphysical bond of the wager that tied him to the church as a transcendental vessel, a house of God. Unsurprisingly, then, this is where the glasshouse exceeds its identity as an object of social exchange, as it sinks on the crumbling lighters of the boat that holds it, taking Oscar with it: “The water rose. Through the bursting gloom he saw a vision of his father’s wise and smiling face, peering in at him. He could see, dimly, the outside world, the chair and benches of his father’s study. Shining fragments of aquarium glass fell like snow around him.”67 The thingness of the glass object manifests itself in its indifference to human life: in effect, the act of sinking dramatically visualises the radical withdrawal of the thing from human access: “Water rose into the church. There was nothing to stop it.”68 Water itself derives a quasi-sentient presence through personification: “And when the long-awaited white fingers of water tapped and lapped on Oscar’s lips, he welcomed them in as he always had, with a scream, like a small boy caught in the sheet-folds of a nightmare.”69 What is remarkable about Carey’s aesthetic insight here is his discovery of the concurrence of birth and death that binds man and thing in a secret covenant. Not only are we shown that humans die, like things do, but also that, in fact, the thing’s withdrawal from human objectification inaugurates a shift in human subjectivity itself, to the point where it announces itself through withdrawal into death. Within the novel’s figurative system, this coming into being is a reversal of the passion that guides the glassblower’s breath in bringing glass into presence. In broader terms, though, what marks Oscar as a subject is his subjection to the thing, for, as Connor notes, “the human subject comes into being, as its name might suggest, in being cast down.”70 Which is to say that Oscar’s death and birth as a subject coincide in a radical display of the power of things. 64

Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds. Glass Culture and the Imagination, 18301880, 39. 65 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 517. 66 Ibid., 518. 67 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 519. 68 Ibid., 518. 69 Ibid., 519. 70 Connor, “Thinking Things”, 5.

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Arguably, this logic characterises the narrator too, as he borrows his hermeneutic license from the discursive legacy of Victorian glass culture. His ability to remember is staked on his surrender to things, which subject him to the past of Victorian Australia. In subjecting himself to the contradictions of glass as both object and thing, Oscar’s great-grandson ultimately beholds himself as a subject, by rendering himself as a thought process, which Connor, pace Michel Serres, conceptualises as that which “allows the subject to be born, or reborn, in and out of its very disappearance […].”71 Most importantly, this metaphysical transaction calls for a reciprocity in Carey’s readers as beholders of his novel, to which they have to submit in order to be granted their own readerly subjectivity. In Carey’s neo-Victorian antipodes, being, like writing and reading, is having a wager with things.

Works Cited Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Glassworlds. Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830-1880. Oxford: OUP, 2008. Berger, John. Understanding a Photograph. London: Penguin Books, 2013. Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine and Susanne Gruss. “Introduction: Spectacles and Things – Visual and Material Culture and/in Neo-Victorianism.” Neo-Victorian Studies 4: 2, (2011): 1-23. Breitbach, Julia. “The Photo-as-Thing. Photography and thing theory.” European Journal of English Studies 15: 1, (2011): 31-43. Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things. The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. —, ed. Things. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press, 2011. Calè, Luiza and Patrizia di Bello, eds. Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Cultures. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Carey, Peter. Oscar and Lucinda. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. Connor, Steven. “Thinking Things”. Textual Practice 24 (1), (2010): 1-20.

71

Ibid., 5.

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Freedgood, Ellaine. The Ideas in Things. Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. Goldhill, Simon. The Buried Life of Things. How Objects Made History in Nineteenth-century Britain. Cambridge: CUP, 2015. Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Object. Winchester: Zero Books, 2011. Llewellyn, Mark. “Spectrality, S(p)ecularity, and Textuality: Or, Some Reflections in the Glass.” In Haunting and Spectrality in NeoVictorian Fiction. Possessing the Past, edited by Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham, 23-42. London: Palgrave, 2009. Nunokawa, Jeff. The Afterlife of Property. Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Plotz, John. Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Ramsey-Kurtz, Helga. “Tokens or Totems? Eccentric Props in Postcolonial Re-enactments of Colonial Consecration.” Literature and Theology 21, no. 3 (September 2007): 302-316. Smith, Terry. “Visual Regimes of Colonization: European and Aboriginal Seeing in Australia.” In Empires of Vision: A Reader, edited by Martin Jay and and Sumathi Rawaswami, 267-279. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Penguin Books, 1979. Teukolsky, Rachel. The Literate Eye. Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics. Oxford: OUP, 2013. Turkle, Sherry. Evocative Objects. Things We Think With. Cambridge: The IMT Press, 2007. Watson, Janell. Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust. The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities. Cambridge: CUP, 1999.

FORGETTING OR MAKING TO FORGET: MEMORY, TRAUMA AND IDENTITY IN KAZUO ISHIGURO’S THE BURIED GIANT DEIMANTAS VALANýINjNAS

Kazuo Ishiguro is undoubtedly one of the best known and well-selling contemporary British authors, famous for his novels The Remains of the Day (1989), When We Were Orphans (2000) and Never Let Me Go (2005). Ishiguro’s sixth and latest novel The Buried Giant (2015), despite receiving appraisal in a number of reviews, still puzzled many readers and critics because of his experimentation with genre conventions, although The Buried Giant is quite often labeled as fantasy literature.1 But even so, some critics found it difficult to consider Ishiguro’s novel as “fantasy” (for instance, Laura Miller’s review is titled “Dragons aside, Ishiguro’s “Buried Giant” is not a fantasy novel”, where the author claims that the novel is “a strange hybrid of genre and realism that doesn't always connect”2), and for readers familiar with the author’s earlier works, the novel’s setting seemed a bit confusing. The Buried Giant is set in the alternative-reality Britain, somewhere around 5th or 6th century AD, some years after King Arthur’s death. The land is plagued by a strange phenomenon, popularly called “mist”, when everyone in the country is bound to forget even the most recent events. An elderly Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off on a journey to find their long-gone son, who they believe lives in a village a couple of days away. On the way they meet a Saxon warrior Wistan, a wounded Saxon boy Edwin and a Knight of the Round Table and King Arthur’s nephew, Sir Gawain. Throughout the course of their journey Axl and Beatrice learn that the oblivious mist is caused by the enchanted breath of the she-dragon Querig, and that it is the mission of warrior Wistan to slay the creature and free the land from this oblivious state. 1

Hodson, “The Ogres and the Critics: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant and the battle line of fantasy”. 2 Miller, “Dragons aside, Ishiguro’s “Buried Giant” is not a fantasy novel”.

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Even though this medieval landscape is filled with mystical creatures such as ogres, pixies and dragons, nevertheless Ishiguro remains faithful to some of his trademark themes and issues – particularly, the centrality of memory, which, according to Yugin Teo, “is among the most important themes that form the basis of Ishiguro’s novels.”3 The Buried Giant in this respect is no exception: memory, and especially the mediation between remembering and forgetting, functions in the novel not merely as a backdrop for the narrative, but, I argue, as a core of individual and collective identities. The aim of this paper is to investigate the ways Ishiguro engages with the topic of traumatic memories both on the personal and collective levels and to explore whether memory and acts of remembering and forgetting are autonomous or ideologically conditioned. I argue that Ishiguro masterfully employs some of the genre conventions of fantasy literature to comment on the functioning of memory in the time of war in different historical and ideological contexts, exposing it not merely as individual, but also as collective, and therefore cultural and national, phenomenon.

Personal trauma, memory and forgetting Studies of memory take up a large part of contemporary critical and scholarly literature. It is not surprising, as Yugin Teo points out: The role of memory has implications for both the individual and the collective; without memory, we would not have a sense of who we are as individuals, and without the provision of shared memory, a group of individuals would not have a collective identity.4

Paul Ricoeur in his seminal study Memory, History, Forgetting distinguishes several types of memory: blocked memory, manipulated memory and forced memory. The first one functions on the pathologicaltherapeutic level and is more personal while the second and the third function on the ideological and ethico-political levels and could be treated as more collective.5 This classification signals the specific nature of memory as a phenomenon and its distinctive fluctuations: between personal and collective, between remembering and forgetting and between autonomy and control. That these three types of memory are also 3

Teo, “Testimony and the Affirmation of Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go”, 127. 4 Teo, Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory, 1. 5 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 68-69.

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inseparably linked to the issues of forgetting, indicates the fragile nature of identity as it is prone not only to various “abuses” (to use the Ricoeurian term) but also different traumatic experiences as well. This special relation between memory, remembering and forgetting and personal/collective trauma is articulated in The Buried Giant. In order to understand how memory functions in the novel, it is essential to start the discussion on the personal level, as the novel also unfolds beginning with the personal narrative of Axl and Beatrice and their individual relation to memory and, especially, forgetting. Both of them are very much concerned about finding their son, even though the reason why he left them is not explained (or, perhaps, forgotten due to the effect of the mist), and because of this Axl and Beatrice are distressed by the mist which strips them off of their memories, as either of them is often heard lamenting: “(…) but it’s cruel when we can’t remember a precious thing like that.”6 Both of them also show a firm determination to break away from the mist’s power and to “(…) make all those memories come back.”7 Axl and Beatrice are willing to have all of their memories back – both positive and negative, as they are sure that whatever these memories are, they won’t affect their relationship, as Axl suggests: “The feeling in my heart for you will be there just the same, no matter what I remember or forget”.8 However, the closer they get to the dragon’s den, the more doubts they have about whether they need to remember everything from their past, as it is also suggested by Father Jonus: “Yet are you certain, good mistress, you wish to be free of this mist? Is it not better some things to remain hidden from our minds?”9 Father Jonus’s question in the first half of the novel foreshadows the major plot twist, because as the novel progresses and the mist of oblivion starts fading out, the traumas of the past have a crushing come back on the characters. After the mist fades away, we learn that Beatrice was not faithful to Axl and that their son, having learnt about this, left them and re-settled in the neighboring village, where he died of plague shortly afterwards. We also learn that Axl forbade Beatrice to visit their son’s grave. These domestic, family traumas are concealed from the characters by the mist, and this oblivious state, if a bit confusing, seems necessary for Axl and Beatrice to carry on with their family life and retain their love for each other, as it is especially evident from the way Axl addresses his wife: never by her name, but by “Princess”. 6

Ishiguro, The Buried Giant, 34. Ibid., 51. 8 Ibid.,51. 9 Ibid., 179. 7

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Therefore the principal dilemma of the novel lies in the question of whether an individual indeed needs a complete recollection of the past. In this context Paul Ricoeur uses the term of “blocked” (or repressed) memory to indicate its therapeutic meaning and value. The title of the novel signifies precisely the same idea: here Ishiguro uses the metaphoric association between the topography of Britain and the topography of human psyche, as “the buried giant” is a part of a landscape, as well as a metaphor for all the concealed (or buried) traumas. At the start of their journey, Beatrice warns Axl about the giant: But there is one place we need to be cautious. Axl, are you listening to me? It’s when the path goes over where the giant is buried. To one who doesn’t know it, it’s an ordinary hill, but I’ll signal to you and when you see me you’re to follow off the path and round the edge of the hill till we meet the same path on its way down.10

The buried giant stands for all the buried (repressed) memories and traumas. The careful precautions characters of the novel attempt to take for not stepping over the “buried giant” demonstrates eagerness of a person to rather detour than touch upon the hidden traumas of the past. Trauma has particular qualities, as explained by Cathy Caruth: “In its most general definition, trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena.”11 It is important to note that Caruth emphasizes the traumatic experience as not fully assimilated and that trauma is bound to return in the form of uncontrollable and unconscious hallucinations or dreams. This idea of trauma may be used to explain the visions characters frequently experience in the novel. It is especially explicit in the dungeon, where Sir Gawain transports the couple from the monastery. Here, in the underground passage Axl, Beatrice and Gawain step onto something which each of them sees differently. Beatrice first discovers that the things she stepped on are the remains of dead infants: “What are all these skulls, sir?” Beatrice suddenly asked the knight. “Why so many? Can they all have belonged to babies? Some are surely small enough to fit in your palm.”12 The fact that it’s only Beatrice who can see dead babies and not Axl or Gawain indicates the maternal response of Beatrice to her personal loss of her son which relates to the collective experience and trauma of the 10

Ishiguro, The Buried Giant, 34. Caruth, Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History, 11. 12 Ishiguro, The Buried Giant, 199. 11

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Saxon village slaughtering (where many infants were killed). On the other hand, Axl also sees a pile of bones, but of grown-up men, indicating his personal trauma of war and the failed attempt to negotiate peace between Saxons and Britons. Sir Gawain, on the other hand, denies seeing anything, yet the trauma of his participation in the war and the slaughtering of the Saxon village slips through in his response to Beatrice when she asks about the skulls of infants she saw: “What is you suggest, mistress? The skulls of babes? I’ve fought men, beelzebubs, dragons. But a slaughterer of infants? How dare you, mistress!”13 The centrality of trauma to the discourses of memory is also emphasized by Dominick LaCapra in his recent investigation on trauma’s links to memory and history: Trauma brings out in a striking way the importance of affect and its impact on memory, pointing both to traumatic memory in the form of posttraumatic effects (repetition compulsions, startle reactions, overreactions, severe sleep disorders, including recurrent nightmares, and so forth) and to the challenge to work through them in a viable but perhaps never totally successful fashion.14

As it is also suggested by Cathy Caruth, trauma “is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. This truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language.”15 What is evident from these observations is also affirmed by Paul Ricoeur that “trauma remains even though it is inaccessible, unavailable.”16 Therefore the act of forgetting or even the willingness to forget the trauma may never be successful, as is evident from the narrative of the novel. LaCapra and Ricoeur mention “repetition compulsion”–a concept developed by Sigmund Freud. In his article “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” Freud discusses the persistent ability of trauma to haunt a person in a particular way. Freud suggests that “the patient does not remember anything at all of what he has forgotten and repressed, but rather acts it out. He reproduces it not as memory, but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, being aware of the fact that he is

13

Ishiguro, The Buried Giant, 199. LaCapra, “Trauma, History, Memory, Identity: What Remains?”, 377. 15 Caruth, Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History, 4. 16 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 445. 14

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repeating it.”17 In other words, the patient “prevents the traumatic event from becoming conscious.”18 Freud’s concept of repetition compulsion may be evoked to explain particular narrative instances in The Buried Giant as there are quite a number of repetitions in the novel. It could be even argued that repetitions function as a certain structuring literary device for the novel which makes sense if read and interpreted in the context of the above mentioned ideas by Sigmund Freud. Most of these cases in the novel appear when individuals attempt to deal with their personal traumas. One of the cases occurs at the start of Axl and Beatrice’s journey, when they hide from rain in an abandoned mansion and where they meet a boatman and an old woman. The boatman exclaims: “Whenever I come here, within an hour of my arrival, this old woman will enter through that arch. She’ll sit herself down and taunt me hour by hour, night and day”.19 When constructing the character of the boatman, Ishiguro employs the mythical references to the Greek myth about the river Styx and the boatman who transfers souls of the deceased to the Underworld. Similarly as in the Greek myth, we can interpret the boatman in The Buried Giant as a mediator between the worlds of the living and of the dead, ferrying dead people to the spiritual realm called “the island”. This is where the boatman transferred an old woman’s husband (signaling his death). The woman cannot acknowledge the death of her husband and repeatedly confronts the boatman (or death itself) by cursing him “with the most horrible curses”20 and slaying small and helpless creatures (rabbits). The persistent repetition here functions as a denial of truth and unwillingness to accept the traumatic events related to the death of a loved person. However, the most significant repetitions are found in the dialogue exchanges between Axl and Beatrice. These repetitions could be attributed to the imitation of the courteous medieval language, but, on the other hand, they can be interpreted as the unconscious engagement with the traumatic events. The two most frequent sets of repetitions occur when Beatrice and Axl, while responding to the questions about the nature of their journey, explain once and again that they travel to visit their son who is anxiously waiting for them. One more case in point is Beatrice’s repetitive question: “Are you still there, Axl”? and Axl continuously gives the repetitive answer: “Still there, Princess”. These repetitive questions “Are you still there” can be interpreted as the subconscious guilt related to 17

Freud, The Penguin Freud Reader, 505. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 445. 19 Ishiguro, The Buried Giant, 41. 20 Ibid., 41. 18

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the infidelity committed by Beatrice in the past and the fear that their fragile marriage relations may break off and that Beatrice’s husband may leave her again as he did once before. Similarly, the persistent reassurance that Axl’s and Beatrice’s son is waiting for them could be interpreted as a repressed acknowledgment of their son’s death. Therefore the trip Axl and Beatrice take to visit their son is actually a trip to his grave, as deep down the suppressed knowledge of his death resurfaces as an enactment of the trauma of the once forbidden visit to his grave. So far in this article the analysis concentrated on individual characters and their personal traumatic experiences. Nevertheless it is important to emphasize that the mist in The Buried Giant affects not only Axl and Beatrice (and other individual characters), but also the whole country, indicating that Ishiguro aims at constructing the narrative of the novel in such a way where instances of personal amnesia should be regarded as part of a much larger phenomenon, i.e. collective forgetting, and this aspect will be the focus of the next section of this article.

Collective memory: war, trauma and manipulated forgetting The emergence of collective memory studies was propelled by Maurice Halbwachs in the early twentieth century. Halbwachs’ main argument was that individuals remember as group members because individuals are, in fact, a product of social interactions.21 This idea facilitated a specific approach in cultural studies that memory “is concerned not with individual experience, but with practices of remembrance that are defined and shaped by the surrounding culture.”22 Halbwachs’ ideas were later expanded and analyzed in different contexts, particularly through the possibilities of linking the two domains of memory–personal and collective. One of the possible ways to think about the collective is not only through collective memory, but also through collective trauma. This relation is discussed by Paul Ricoeur in Memory, History, Forgetting where he confirms that the personal may be easily extended into the collective: “It is the bipolar constitution of personal and community identity that, ultimately, justifies extending the Freudian analysis of mourning to the traumatism of collective identity. We can speak not only in an analogical sense but in

21 22

Halbwachs, The Collective Memory. Whitehead, Memory, 124.

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terms of a direct analysis of collective traumatisms, of wounds to collective memory.”23 As we already discussed in the previous section of this article, the mist of oblivion in The Buried Giant conceals particular personal traumas of the characters, but these personal traumas are triggered, or at least stimulated, by the same events: war and ethnic conflict between the Britons and Saxons. Therefore individual experiences are determined by larger historical processes making personal traumas to be a part of collective (or national) ones as well. In many works related to collective traumatisms, war and personal/collective traumas are intricately linked. It is particularly evident from numerous scholarly works dedicated to specific historical moments, such as the Holocaust or Hiroshima / Nagasaki bombings, and how survivors and subsequent generations were marked by traumatic legacies of these events. As noted by Anne Whitehead, even a specific classification of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was introduced by American Psychiatric Association as a response to experiences related to the Vietnam War.24 The centrality of war in building nation-states and, therefore, national identities is also emphasized by Paul Ricoeur in Memory, History, Forgetting where he states: It is a fact that there is no historical community that has not been born from a relationship that we can name an original relation to war. What we celebrate under the names of founding events are essentially acts of violence (…).25

What is important to note here is the emphasis on violence as inseparable from wars and also the possible cause of war related traumatisms. War appears as a backdrop of Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant as well. Even though there is a certain sense of national peace and tranquility at the time of the narrative, the reader soon learns that the events actually unfold in the aftermaths of a war between the Saxons and Britons and violent ethnic cleansing. These events left an imprint on characters, and marked their social and family relations with particular traumatic associations. Therefore the dilemma we encountered in the previous section of the article on individual forgetting can be extended to the collective (or national) level, posing a question whether a nation needs to remember everything from its past, the issue which Anne Whitehead also raises in Memory by stating that “in the context of the collective, a degree of 23

Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 78. Whitehead, Memory, 114. 25 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 79. 24

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forgetting is as important as remembering for allowing the community to function in the aftermath of social and historical catastrophes.”26 In The Buried Giant Ishiguro contemplates on how national existence is possible with the burden of collective trauma and on the ways a nation may cope with it. This may also be closely related to the question of whether nations, as collective entities, autonomously choose of what to forget and what to remember. Paul Ricoeur in Memory, History, Forgetting describes particular processes when the state interferes in the production of memory. He calls it manipulated memory–the practice which is similar to what Suleiman describes as “political instrumentalization” of memory: The emphasis on memory has been justly criticized because it can lead not only to dogmatism and kitsch but to political instrumentalization of every kind, including some very bad kinds. As has often been pointed out about the bloody ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia, collective memory of ethnic humiliation or of religious conflict can be put to cynical political uses.27

Similarly, memory for Paul Ricouer is not only concerned with particular events, but it also constitutes a form of knowledge. Therefore the functioning of memory may be read in the Foucauldian way as knowledge/power relations. This idea is also emphasized by Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith, who have suggested that “what a culture remembers and what it chooses to forget are intricately bound up with issues of power and hegemony, and thus with gender”28, indicating that there may also be a gender-based dimension in the approach of how collective memory could be controlled, reproduced or abused. Kazuo Ishiguro constructs the narrative of The Buried Giant to expose and critique similar practices of the abuses of memory. The complex relations between the Britons and the Saxons and the tension between these two ethnic groups are seemingly lessened at the time of the narrative. This period of peace, however, is not natural, but a product of the mist of forgetfulness. The mist itself is not a natural phenomenon and is evoked by King Arthur. The reason for such an action is because King Arthur violated the peaceful agreement between the Britons and Saxons, set by Axl many years ago, sending his troops into Saxon villages and slaughtering everyone, women and children including. In order to prevent revenge from the Saxons, King Arthur employs his most trustworthy 26

Whitehead, Memory, 14. Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War, 7. 28 Hirsch, Smith, “Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction“, 6. 27

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comrades for the special mission. Magician Merlin charms the breath of the she-dragon Querig transforming it into the mist of oblivion, and Sir Gawain becomes the guardian of Querig so that no one could slay her and release the memories. Evidently, Ishiguro in The Buried Giant constructs a national identity as never autonomous since national (collective) memory is being controlled by the state apparatus of power, since it is King Arthur who controls the memory as well as the production of the national past. Moreover, the control of the past and the memories requires different sorts of manipulations – starting from enslaving and enchanting the she-dragon and finishing with a collaboration between the church and the state (as the monks at the monastery Axl and Beatrice visit on their way know about the causes of the mist but keep cooperating with King Artur’s authority in concealing the truth). The traumatizing events of war and violence are forcefully made to be forgotten and are replaced with alternative memory narratives–a common practice in instances when memory becomes the object of state control, as explained by Paul Ricoeur: “The resource of narrative then becomes the trap, when higher powers take over this emplotment and impose a canonical narrative by means of intimidation or seduction, fear or flattery (…) stripping the social actors of their original power to recount their actions themselves.”29 Similarly, in The Buried Giant the slaughter narrative fades away into oblivion and alternative memories of celebration and admiration are implanted into the popular consciousness, as promptly assured by Sir Gawain: “Our beloved Arthur brought lasting peace between Briton and Saxon (…). So it was that the conquered, no less than those who fought at his side, saw his fairness and wished him as their king.”30 The mayhem and slaughter caused by Arthur’s orders are forgotten and replaced by the narratives of Arthur the noble, protector of the weak (women, children and old men). The truth is soon buried and forgotten, and the real causes of the mist are explained by the supernatural–either that the God himself has forgotten the people or that the oblivion is caused by his wrath. In this context we may argue that the genre choice made by Ishiguro to write a novel in the tradition of fantasy literature is a rather fertile ground to experiment with the notions of reality and history. As argued by Rosemary Jackson in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, “the fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced,

29 30

Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 448. Ishiguro, The Buried Giant, 126-127.

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made invisible, covered over and made “absent.”31 Similarly, Jan Shaw states that “fantasy opens up a space for the exploration of forbidden and repressed desires, allowing for their vicarious fulfillment though expression.”32 Therefore even though Kazuo Ishiguro in one of his interviews claims that the novel’s narrative could have been set anywhere and bears no specific geographical or historical references33, the fact, however, that Arthurian Britain is chosen as a setting for the novel is important. The characters of Arthurian mythology–King Arthur himself, Sir Gawain and wizard Merlin–are indeed inseparable figures from British national identity and popular imagination: preserved over centuries and numerous times reinvented in different historical contexts and circumstances. As observed by N. J. Nigham, “Arthur has been one of the most deeply contested historical ideas thrown up by insular history,”34 being evoked and reinterpreted numerous times from Historia Britonnum (where King Arthur is first mentioned as a certain historical figure) to contemporary cinematic representations. Indeed, the ongoing debate over the historical authenticity of King Arthur gave way to numerous historical manipulations, where his name was often evoked in connection with a constant shift of meanings of national identity. Thus Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant becomes not only another contribution to the vast corpus of Arthurian literature but also an attempt to engage in speculations on mythologized “Britishness” (something that Ishiguro did in some of his previous novels, most notably The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go). Fantasy fiction allows Ishiguro to play with mythological images and archetypes as well as with mythological-historical figures, weaving them into personalized narratives of his characters. By presenting his own version of King Arthur, Ishiguro demonstrates not only the multiplicity and endless possibilities of national narratives but also an important issue of how history and ideologies rewrite memory, where violence becomes forgotten and the causers of violence celebrated. Similarly to his novel Never Let Me Go, in The Buried Giant Kazuo Ishiguro continues to elaborate on the problematic relation between the individual and the nation state. As Yugin Teo observes in his analysis of Never Let Me Go, “there are two opposing forces at work in the novel: one is the desire of the nation to deny the existence of the clones, and the other is the clones’ desire to cling to their memories; one is a desire to forget, 31 Jackson, Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion, quoted by Shaw, “Feminism and the Fantasy Tradition: The Mists of Avalon”, 464. 32 Shaw, “Feminism and the Fantasy Tradition: The Mists of Avalon”, 464. 33 Wood, “Kazuo Ishiguro: Most countries have got big things they've buried”. 34 Nigham, King Arthur. Myth making and History, 7.

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the other a desire to remember.”35 Similarly, the hegemonic assault on memory in The Buried Giant triggers a resistance and is being challenged by the Saxon King and his emissary Wistan, the Saxon warrior who works on the mission to slay the she-dragon so that the collective amnesia would be banished. Dragon is a powerful symbol in many mythologies and is often related to the hero archetype. One of the readings of the dragon archetype is presented by Carl Gustav Jung. 36 He relates the archetype of Mother Dragon to the collective unconscious, and this archetype is found in the famous myth of a hero slaying the dragon, in which “the ego gains a foothold out of its unconscious matrix.”37 The idea is also supported by the fact that Querig takes on the voice of Edwin’s mother, this way relating femininity and maternity to the realm of the unconscious. The slaying of Querig becomes the ultimate act of awakening, as the state of oblivion is transformed into the conscious realization. Exposure of truth, however, also becomes a certain act of violence and extensive manipulations. It is evident in the character of Edwin, the Saxon boy, whose personal trauma is being manipulated for the cause of “greater truth”. The mysterious wound is intentionally inflicted on his body through a baby dragon in order to transform the boy into a mental connection with the she-dragon Querig. The memory of Edwin’s “taken” mother, who, as he states, is simply “travelling”, is actually the blocked truth that the mother is abducted by a passing gang of vagabonds. The fantasy of rescue is implanted into the boy’s mind and even if Edwin thinks that he acts of his own accord, in reality he complies with the manipulative strategy to lead the Saxon warrior Wistan to the she-dragon’s den. The way personal memories and traumas of the boy are manipulated demonstrates the “fragility of identity”38 when memories are being captured and abused by ideologies. Here trauma is articulated both mentally and bodily, since the Greek word trauma, or “wound”, originally refers to an injury inflicted on a body.39 The boy’s physical wound inflicted by a baby dragon directly connects to the mental “wound” or his childhood trauma of abducted mother, making both his mind, and his body prone to manipulations.

35 Teo, “Testimony and the Affirmation of Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go”, 128. 36 I would like to thank Dr. Irena Ragaišienơ for drawing my attention to the Jungian reading of the dragon’s archetype. 37 Salman, “The Creative Psyche: Jung’s Major contributions”, 61. 38 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 82. 39 Caruth, Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History, 3.

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Ishiguro chooses an image of a “mule” to emphasize the fragile and prone to manipulation identity. This is revealed in the barn, where Edwin hears his “mother’s” voice for the first time, instructing that everything the boy needs to do is to “go round and round the wagon, because you are the mule tethered to the big wheel. Round and round, Edwin.”40 Furthermore, Ishiguro also employs the imagery of a rope as a symbol of control. When Axl and Beatrice are approaching the she-dragon’s den, bringing the poisonous goat to be fed to the Querig, there they also see Wistan and “on his rope not a goat, but a Saxon boy to guide him.”41 The Saxon boy is equaled to the goat as both of them have no autonomy and are controlled and used as sacrificial objects for a “greater good”. Therefore, as in the case of forgetting, remembering is also not an autonomous act but is controlled by the Saxon King who seeks revenge on the Britons. The act of remembering could, and inevitably will, bring serious consequences, and it is fully acknowledged by Wistan who exclaims: The Giant, once well buried, now stirs. When soon he rises, as surely he will, the friendly bonds between us will prove as knots young girls make with the stems of small flowers. Men will burn their neighbors’ houses by night. Hang children from trees at dawn. The rivers will stink with corpses bloated from their days of voyaging.42

The buried giant here is once again used as a reference to a buried trauma: this time, the collective trauma of war and ethnical cleansing. Awakening of the giant thus stands for the excavation of painful memories and the wish for justice and revenge. This narrative line indicates the persistence of traumatic histories, as also pointed out by Schwab: “There is no history without trauma. Some lives will forever be overshadowed by violent histories, including colonial invasions, slavery, totalitarianism, dictatorship, wars, and genocide.”43 Ishiguro, however, is skeptical about the inevitability of collective dependency on traumatic history and presents a more optimistic possibility. Remembering may create hatred and a wish for revenge but it can also create the possibility to forgive: the reconciliation between Axl and Beatrice on the personal level could be extended to collective forgiveness as well. Halbwachs puts forward an idea that collective memory “is a current of continuous thought whose continuity is not at all artificial, for it retains from the past only what still 40

Ishiguro, The Buried Giant, 97. Ibid., 307. 42 Ibid., 340. 43 Schwab, Haunting Legacies, 42. 41

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lives or is capable of living in the consciousness of the groups keeping the memory alive.”44 Therefore there is always the possibility of retaining the memory, but learning to live with it–perhaps, constantly changing it as well, as the old members of the community would inevitably die and the new members will bring in some new memories. In The Buried Giant, even though Wistan orders Edwin to hate all Britons for the rest of his life, there is doubt in the boy’s heart as he observes the departing Axl and Beatrice: “As he heard this, something else came back to Edwin: a promise made to the warrior; a duty to hate all Britons. But surely Wistan had not meant to include this gentle couple.”45 Edwin, the Saxon boy, represents the new generation: the generation which already has a different relation with war and, potentially, also with a wish for revenge.

Conclusion This article has attempted to analyze Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant in the context of personal and collective (national) memory and trauma and the act of forgetting as both therapeutic and manipulative. A special emphasis in the novel is put on war and war-related encounters which mark individual and collective identities with particular traumatic experiences. In The Buried Giant Ishiguro explores the possible ways of dealing with these traumatic legacies and constructs a dilemma of whether it is important to have a complete recollection of the past–both on the personal and the collective levels. The illusory state of oblivious ignorance may be convenient both for the person and the nation, but the buried and repressed traumas will inevitably resurface again, most often in the uncanny, gruesome form. Therefore it could be argued that the novel suggests retaining the memory but also the possibility of forgiving in opposition to forgetting. The possibility of facing and acknowledging the past should start on the personal level and then transfer into the collective, because a state-forced forgiving (or amnesty) would constitute just another form of forgetting. In this way the reconciliation between Axl and Beatrice and their ability to forgive each other after facing the past (even if this remembering is a painful one) could be seen as an encouragement on the collective (national) level as well. In current approaches to memory studies, a great importance is given to testimonies - whether digital, video, written or oral. Yugin Teo notes that “testimony preserves the “trace” of past activity, and it is testimony that does not allow for crimes on a 44 45

Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 80. Ishiguro, The Buried Giant, 344.

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massive scale to be forgotten.”46 The question still remains of whether testimonies, similarly to memory, could be prone to ideological abuses and manipulations. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant may be interpreted as a kind of testimony of a pre-modern society which may not always have a possibility to speak for itself. This testimony is given by the enigmatic narrator of the novel. The omniscient narrator at the beginning of The Buried Giant gradually disappears leaving the narrative structure of a third-person narration (with the exception of two first-person “reveries” by Sir Gawain) just until the last chapter where the novel reverts back to the first-person narrator, who is revealed to be the boatman. As the boatman in the novel is the embodiment of death, one can conclude that in the times of political and historical manipulations and abuses of memory perhaps death alone is the only trusted witness and the ultimate truth.

Works Cited Caruth, Cathy. Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996. Freud, Sigmund. The Penguin Freud Reader (Selected and Translated by Adam Philips). London: Penguin Books, 2006. Halbwachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1980. Hirsch, Marianne, Valerie Smith. “Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction“. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2002, vol. 28, no. 1, 2002. Hodson, Richard J. “The Ogres and the Critics: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant and the battle line of fantasy”. 2016. http://repository.seinangu.ac.jp/bitstream/handle/123456789/1283/egn56v2_3-p45-66-hod.pdf? sequence=1, accessed 04.11.2016. Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Buried Giant. London: Faber and Faber, 2015. LaCapra, Dominick. “Trauma, History, Memory, Identity: What Remains?” History and Theory 55 (October 2016), 375 – 400. Miller, Laura. “Dragons aside, Ishiguro’s “Buried Giant” is not a fantasy novel”. Salon, 3 March 2015. http://www.salon.com/2015/03/02/dragons_aside_ishiguros_buried_gi ant_is_not_a_fantasy_novel/, accessed 04.11.2016. Nigham, N. J. King Arthur. Myth making and History. London: Routledge, 2002.

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Teo, Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory, 78.

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Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Salman, Sherry. “The Creative Psyche: Jung’s Major contributions”. In Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Jung. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Schwab, Gabriele. Haunting Legacies. Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Shaw, Jan. “Feminism and the Fantasy Tradition: The Mists of Avalon”. In Fulton, Helen, ed., 2009: A Companion to Arthurian Literature. West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2009. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Teo, Yugin. Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory. New York: Palgrave, 2014. —. “Testimony and the Affirmation of Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go”. Critique, 55 pg. 127–137, 2014. Whitehead, Anne. Memory. New York: Routledge, 2009. Wood, Gaby. “Kazuo Ishiguro: 'Most countries have got big things they've buried”. The Telegraph, 27 February 2015. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11436950/Kazuo-IshiguroMost-countries-have-got-big-things-theyve-buried.html, accessed 20.10.2016.

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH: MR DARCY AND MEMORY IN P.D. JAMES’S DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLEY RENATA ZSAMBA

P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley (2012) is a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice transformed into a detective story, no doubt due to James’s enthusiasm for Austen’s intimate world, a perfect setting for criminal acts. In her afterword to Death Comes to Pemberley, P.D. James claims that she feels ambivalent about sequels, which is “largely because the greatest pleasure for [her] is in the creation of original characters.”1 Undoubtedly, the old acquaintances return, yet the reader is fascinated by James’s brilliance in revising the high-class society, more precisely, Mr Darcy, in the context of crime. Given that the novel is a classic detective story written in the tradition of Golden Age writers, it is no surprise that it is also obsessed with memory. Although the memory question does not come up in the same context here as in Golden Age crime fiction, which often depicted pathological forms of memory due to war traumas, the tradition is not abandoned, as the main theme of the novel is closely related to the creation and the sustenance of the myth of Englishness. Mr Darcy, who is unquestionably the embodiment of quintessential Englishness, must experience the struggle between collective memory and his individual memory brought about by the death of Captain Denny in the woods of Pemberley. Unsurprisingly, he is also the one to be the worst affected by the murder and endures the most painful consequences of this crime. The murder haunts him not so much because of the horror of the dead body but rather because of the terrifying feeling of reality he must face. Consequently, his memory world slowly starts to crumble, resulting in the loss of his fixed/collective identity. While the genre itself is also about reconstruction–reconstructing the events preceding the victim’s death–in the deep structure of the present 1

James, P.D., Death Comes To Pemberley. London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 2012, 325.

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novel, Mr Darcy is fighting to reconstruct his memory world to eliminate undesired scenes conjured up by the investigation. The present paper seeks to explore how the relationship between Captain Denny’s death and the dissolution of Mr Darcy’s memory world is articulated by pointing out why reconstruction of his ready-made life at the end is crucial in P.D. James’s Death Comes To Pemberley. In the opening scene of the novel2, Elizabeth is preparing for the annual ball at Pemberley Hall. Although Elizabeth Darcy has only a minor role in the plot–sometimes ridiculed as she seems to be destined for domesticity–it may not be accidental that the reader has an insight into the undisturbed, repetitive life of Pemberley through her eyes. Elizabeth Bennet is an outsider at Pemberley Hall, one who has disadvantages, according to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, which are attributable to her lower social and financial background. It is hardly surprising then that, by learning the rules of the game to acquire the position of Mrs Darcy3, Elizabeth becomes the keenest observer of how life is constructed at Pemberley and of the extent to which it is based on a never-changing order of everyday practices. Lady Anne’s notebook regarding the script of the ball is still in use, “the guest list was still fundamentally the same…”4, the servants of the house “were the children and grandchildren of previous servants”5, implying that “the house and its history were in their blood”6. The children, Fitzwilliam7 and Charles, are also an assurance that “there would continue to be Darcys at Pemberley.”8 To understand this phenomenon in the construction of Darcy’s memory world, I quote from David Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country: “Linking oneself with ancestors and descendants lends continuity and intimation of immortality […].”9 Mr Darcy, “who was known as a proud man for whom family tradition and reputation were of the first importance”10, is the incarnation 2

”[…] the book begins in 1803 when Elizabeth and Darcy have been happily together for six years and are preparing for the annual autumn ball which will take place the next evening.” James, Death Comes to Pemberley, 326. 3 ”It was agreed that Pemberley, despite the unfortunate antecedents of its new mistress, now had every promise of taking its rightful place in the social life of the county as it had done in the days of Lady Anne Darcy.” Ibid., 18 4 Ibid., 20. 5 Ibid., 22. 6 Ibid. 7 Named after his father, Fitzwilliam Darcy. 8 James, Death Comes to Pemberley, 22. 9 Lowenthal, David, The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 61. 10 James, Death Comes to Pemberley, 18.

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of quintessential Englishness.11 Ina Haberman points out in Myth, Memory and the Middlebrow that “an exploration of Englishness […] needs to address various forms of memory”12 as well as “to tell stories about collective identity.”13 Darcy, as I will discuss later, understands perfectly that in the world of conventions, individuality might be an obstacle, one that only entails pain and self-recognition. He maintains remembering himself as Darcy of Pemberley, an English aristocrat validating “claims to power, wealth and property.”14 Nevertheless, “the aristocracy’s self-image of antiquity and permanence”15 prevents it from re-creating and reinventing itself over time, as David Cannadine suggests in his Aspects of Aristocracy. In this unspoiled life, however, there are two disturbing past events which no one is allowed to talk about. One is related to Darcy’s grandfather, who built a cottage for himself in the woods of Pemberley, became a recluse and finally shot himself. This stain on the family reputation is interpreted rather differently by Georgiana, Darcy’s sister: “He was the family failure, the Darcy who dishonoured his name because he put private happiness before public responsibilities…I hope he was happy in his solitude. At least he managed to escape.”16 Georgiana’s contempt for the family restrictions and approval of such nonconformist activity might also demonstrate her refusal to continue the past which is bound to paralyze her future life. Also, she may be more willing to acknowledge the social transformations resulting in the gradual decline of the aristocracy in the second half of the nineteenth century17, as suggested by her love for Henry Alveston, an impoverished aristocrat holding a respectable position as a lawyer. Darcy, on the other hand, has to hide his sympathy for this great-grandfather as a child since his father “had early indoctrinated in him the great obligations which would lie on his shoulders once he inherited, responsibilities for both the estate and those who served 11 He may also be viewed as a variant of Golden Age gentleman detectives, like Wimsey or Campion, having their roots in indefinite space and time. 12 Ina Haberman, Myth, Memory and the Middlebrow. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 26. 13 Ibid., 29. 14 Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, 52. 15 David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy. Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, 10. 16 James, Death Comes To Pemberley, 190. 17 “[…] the passing of the Great Reform Act of 1832 confirmed that the middle classes had superseded the aristocracy as the chief power in the state […]”. Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy, 5.

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and depended on it, which no elder son could ever reject.”18 To sustain Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley, he must remember the past which links him to his ancestors, more precisely, his earlier selves. This is crucial for “[his] sense of identity: what we were confirms that we are”19, says Lowenthal, adding that “loss of memory destroys one’s personality and deprives life of meaning.”20 Although it is easy for Darcy to distance himself from the ‘deviant’ acts of this great-grandfather, it seems that his guilty deeds connected with buying Wickham’s silence after the latter’s attempt to seduce Georgiana Darcy are impossible to erase from his memory: The knowledge that his sister had only avoided social disgrace and ignominy because he was rich enough to buy her would-be seducer’s silence was so bitter that he almost groaned aloud. He had tried to put humiliation out of mind in the happiness of his marriage but now it returned, made stronger by the years of repression, an intolerable shame and self-disgust made more bitter by the knowledge that it was only his money that had induced Wickham to marry Lydia Bennet.21

Such is Darcy’s frustration that “the name Wickham was never mentioned at Pemberley and the couple were excluded entirely from the house.”22 This silence comes to be broken the night before Lady Anne’s ball when Lydia Bennet appears at Pemberley Hall hysterically crying out that Wickham might have been shot. The realization that the Wickhams might return to Pemberley Hall is devastating for Darcy, and it is exactly at this moment that he becomes aware of his identity split into one which I would call ‘Darcy of memory’ and another, ‘Darcy of action’. In On Living in an Old Country, Patrick Wright reflects on this feature in literature23 as follows: “Nobody does much at all; indeed, to act is to reveal oneself evil, mad or at best the helpless victim of desperate circumstances.”24 Outside his artificial milieu he is just as corrupt as

18

James, Death Comes To Pemberley, 72. Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, 197. 20 Ibid. 21 James, Death Comes To Pemberley, 73. 22 Ibid., 19. 23 The focus of his analysis is Mary Butts’s Deep England as well as the modernist anxiety of losing touch with organic history. 24 Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain. London: Thetford Press Ltd., 1985, 115. 19

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anybody else, and the carefully constructed respectability25 is soon to be dissolved. The fact that he is not the helpless victim but the evil party, one who has dealt in sinful businesses for his own sake proves to be unbearable for him. Yet, the sight of Lydia brings it all back, resulting in the collapse of Mr Darcy’s convenient memory world. He faces the painful fact that nothing is natural about his memories, that “the past – the practices, the habits, the dates and facts and places, the very furniture of [his] existence – is an artifice.”26 The following passage demonstrates this agony: It seemed to Darcy that the great entrance hall of Pemberley, with its elegant furniture, the beautiful staircase curving up to the gallery, and the family portraits, had suddenly become as alien as if he were entering it for the first time. The natural order which from boyhood had sustained him had been overturned and for a moment he felt as powerless as if he were no longer master in his house, an absurdity which found relief in an irritation 27 over details.

The unendurable emotion generated by the encounter with his suppressed self, which might put an end to the timeless image of the Darcys, is enhanced by the disappointment that it is not Wickham but Captain Denny who has been shot. The wish to see Wickham dead appals Mr Darcy even though he knows that he would have an easier task to restore order in his own world if his wish came true. Finding Captain Denny’s dead body and Wickham with his hands bloody by his side adds much to his sentiment of losing ground, “a mental earthquake…in which all the comfortable conventions and assumptions…lay in rubble.”28 I suggest that the sight of the body is intolerable for two reasons: on the one hand, because “the corpse is shockingly out of place”29 – polluting the charms of the Pemberley estate – as Auden argues in “The Guilty Vicarage,” and, on the other hand, in Darcy’s acknowledgment that because the body is physically there, reality cannot be evaded any longer. To regain his position as the Darcy of memory, he must eliminate the body without 25

A feature in Golden Age writing which is always represented as suspicious, claims Catherine Kenney in The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers. Catherine Kenney, The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers. London: The Kent State University Press, 1990, 144. 26 Richard, Terdiman, Present Past. Modernity and the Memory Crisis. New York: Cornell University Press, 1993, 31. 27 James, Death Comes to Pemberley, 66. 28 Ibid., 124. 29 W. H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage,” Harper’s Magazine, May, 1948. n. p.

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hesitation but that still does not settle matters. Having Wickham back and involved in a murder case means another disgrace for the family, especially because “it had been his marriage to Elizabeth which had brought Wickham into his family […].”30 Darcy has violated the rules of the family by marrying the second daughter of a country gentleman with a modest income, which is regarded as the origin of all sorts of crimes in the eyes of his relatives. He has always felt his cousin’s, Colonel Fitzwilliam’s contempt for his marrying Elizabeth Bennet and placing “his desire for a woman above the responsibilities of family and class.”31 Following the discovery of Captain Denny’s body and Darcy’s return to Pemberley Hall, Darcy cannot help feeling frustrated in the company of Elizabeth.32 Stuck in a kind of nowhere, neither inside, nor completely outside, he must come to terms with himself. The still, static life of Pemberley provides life for his family and staff, whereas his actions to protect Pemberley imply guilt and sin. Refusing to eat and drink, he decides to visit Sir Selwyn Hardcastle, one of the three magistrates, in the hope of putting an end to the unfortunate events as soon as possible, nevertheless the “gallop into the night was a release into temporary freedom”33 from his marriage, and from himself. The fact that he can only have temporary pleasures may arise from Darcy’s awareness of the conservative view, which endowed the aristocracy, which stood for the nation, with a moral authority.34 He inherited the right to serve as a country magistrate at Pemberley and Lambton35 and, despite the fact that he cannot personally engage himself in Wickham’s trial, his taking action might be viewed as the result of a strong desire to undo the regrettable incidents and return to the past where nothing hurts.

30

James, Death Comes to Pemberley, 73. Ibid., 125. 32 There is also a strong ironic approach to the figure of Elizabeth. Unlike in Austen’s novel, P.D. James has created a rather boring, house-proud wife whose only concern amidst the subversive events is Darcy’s nutrition and talking to the servants. 33 Ibid., 89. 34 “ […] Edward Bulwer-Lytton addressed the identity of England. He welcomed the emergence of the middle-classes […] but he thought that a moral lead was required, and that only the aristocracy could offer that lead. From 1688 the English state had belonged to them”, argues Robert Colls. Robert Colls, Identity of England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 74. 35 “[…] the criminal law could also be seen as an instrument of upper-class rule over the rest of society, since those who made the law and those who implemented it came from the same superior social stratum.” Cannadine, Class in Britain, 47. 31

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One can witness two opposite processes unfolding in Mr Darcy’s character. In the first part of the novel, he suffers as his familiar, cosy memory world is gradually dismantled while he is inside, although he realizes that there is no other identity waiting for him outside, especially not in England where everybody has an allocated place “determined by […] ancestry, accent, education, deportment, mode of dress, patterns of recreation, type of housing and style of life”36, argues David Cannadine in Class in Britain. He also adds that the countryside where this traditional hierarchy of rank and degree had originated “still retained much of its credibility.”37 Consequently, instead of letting his carefully constructed reality dissolve, he takes action not behind the scenes but by reestablishing himself by means of relying on one of the images of the English aristocrat, which is that of the gentleman, the saviour, and the knight errant. Christine Berberich indicates in The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature that the English gentleman is not only a “symbol for quintessential Englishness”, but also “morally superior” and “deeply embedded in rose-tinted mediaeval notions of chivalry and knight errantry”, a figure who has always been defined as “the epitome of manliness.”38 Mr Darcy, facing the fear and the reality of being involved in Wickham’s trial, finds himself re-empowered in his new position and desperately sets out to protect his family. His firm intention to defend his own privileges and have Wickham out of sight for good is masked by the careful pretence to be there for others. The embarrassment Darcy feels due to his involvement in the whole case seems to be overridden by the belief that his presence and control might accelerate the legal proceedings, which in the eye of the public would be a benevolent act, and for him it would mean life again. His hypocritical statements, such as the one that getting a good lawyer for Wickham would be ‘his responsibility’ or the one about getting the case in London to have a fair trial for the welfare of the family would justify such suppositions. His visit to Lambton prison is a further example of demonstrating helpfulness for his own sake: But after a further thought, Darcy had decided that he had a duty to visit Wickham, at least once before the inquest. Not to do so would be taken throughout Lambton and Pemberley village to be a clear sign that he 36

Ibid., 22. Ibid., 28. 38 Christine Berberich, The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature. Englishness and Nostalgia (Aklershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2007), 12, 21, 22, 26. 37

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The prison is not unknown to Mr Darcy, who had made occasional visits there as a magistrate to be confronted with shocking experiences such as viewing the dead hanged body of a “mentally disturbed inmate”40 and which, eight years ago, left an everlasting horror in his mind. Passing the prison gate fills him with distress and unease at recalling the “dangling body and the stretched neck”41 and also experiencing the “prison smell of the bodies, food and cheap soap.”42 Feeling crime so close, however, evokes his aristocratic squeamishness, which might allude to the fact that the intention of doing justice and providing moral leadership are realized only in principle,43 as suggested also by his encounter with Wickham. Although neither of them speaks of the past, for Mr Darcy, the visit “had been uncomfortable…and singularly depressing.”44 All through the visit, which is not longer than half an hour, he keeps wondering how to get rid of Wickham. Afraid that his assistance might result in Wickham’s release, and that “he would have to support Wickham and Lydia, at least for the foreseeable future”45, he experiences frustration and is confronted with a moral dilemma. Nevertheless, the outcome of the first inquest puts an end to the possibility of choices. George Wickham is found guilty in the murder of Captain Denny, so Darcy is convinced that he must act as soon as possible, also because his self-image as a knight is reinforced by Dr Clitheroe’s, a distinguished lawyer’s, remark: “The peace and security of England depends on gentlemen living in their houses as good landlords and masters, considerate to their servants, charitable to the poor, and ready, as justices of the peace to take a full part in promoting peace and order in their communities.”46

39

James, Death Comes To Pemberley, 194. Ibid., 193. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 197. 43 This hypocritical attitude to evil, to ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is one of the basic features of Austen’s novels of manners which also influenced Golden Age writers in their reconstructing the past in their crime fiction. 44 Ibid., 196. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 217. 40

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The fact that the case is transferred to London does not only settle the puzzle of the whodunit but is crucial for other reasons as well. It is only in the city that the reader is given an insight into the social and economic transformations of late 18th- and early 19th-century England, which are perceived by Mr Darcy upon his arrival in London. In the city, unlike in the countryside, there was “a totally different society: crowded, tumultuous, rootless, mobile, restless, sometimes segregated […]”47, describes Cannadine. The well-known map of the English hierarchy residing in the countryside has no trace in the big city, illustrated by the following passage from the novel: “[…] Darcy felt that he was entering an alien state, breathing a stale and sour-smelling air, and surrounded by a large and menacing population. Never before had he felt so much a stranger in London.”48 Evidently, his image of himself as the impeccable English aristocrat is weakened in a space without the fixed points of his timeless identity, which impels him to re-experience the recollections of his past deeds again. When he admits to himself that “it was his own doing and no one else’s that had made Wickham part of his family”49, this does not lighten up his heart but aggravates his condition. Thinking about the verdict, he reckons that no matter what the result should be, he has to bear the horror of Wickham’s closeness to his family, which may contaminate the future generation of the Darcy family. In Forever England, Alison Light claims that “murder cheerfully rids the individual or the family once and for all of the burden of its past…Murder is in many ways the nicest thing that can happen to a family […].”50 Only after all the misery that Darcy has gone through does the reader understand Light’s argument. All through the investigation, Darcy copes with his two selves, one of which is based on the memory of the Darcys and the other related to action, the world of evil. The liberating feeling for everyone, however, comes from outside of Darcy’s power with a rather unexpected twist in the plot. Wickham gets acquitted due to the letter of the deceased William Bidwell, stating that he killed the Captain in Pemberley woods when he mistook Denny for Wickham. His rage against the latter was caused by Wickham’s havingseduced his sister Louisa, and left her with child. For Darcy, the liberating feeling of murder first comes with the closure of Wickham’s trial and next, a job opportunity for him in the New World. Given that the year is 1803, James reflects on two 47

Cannadine, Class in Britain, 46. James, Death Comes To Pemberley, 222. 49 Ibid., 224. 50 Alison Light, Forever England Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars. London: Routledge, 1991, 102. 48

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dominant historic events, the Napoleonic Wars–though mentioned only two or three times51–and the American Revolution, which induced remarkable changes in politics and society. A quote from Cannadine’s Class in Britain may better illustrate the social and political transformations in this historical period: “The American Revolution […] did assault public dependency, did undermine social inequality, did outlaw formal distinctions of status, and by so doing, it did create a new sort of society and a new way of looking at society, increasingly unlike that in England […] which had originally settled and spawned it.”52 Wickham’s invitation to the US is attributable to his bravery as a soldier in the army until 1800 and also to his expressing a desire to leave England to find freedom from the corruption of the Old World, as he puts it in the novel “[…] to shake off the soil of England for ever.”53 Learning about Wickham’s decision, Darcy finds his way back to the position of the benevolent knight, providing Wickham and Lydia with money to cross the ocean and settle down in Virginia. Darcy’s and Wickham’s separation from each other is also symbolic. Acknowledging that there is no allocated place for him in the social hierarchy controlled by the aristocracy, Wickham stands for the new, for the dynamic, and also he is the one who subverts the Edenic idyll of the high-class society. Darcy, on the other hand, realizes that he finds no place outside his memory world, as he reflects on this in the novel, “[…] the past is too much part of what I am […].”54 Wickham’s presence in his life represents the other of his self that is related to evil. Wickham’s attempt to seduce Georgiana, then the bribery for his silence, and finally Captain Denny’s dead body in Pemberley Woods are all part of this self which have no place in the idyll of the English aristocrat. Darcy also admits that Denny’s death was necessary for him in order to face his own responsibilities “perhaps for the first time.”55 But Darcy’s memory of Pemberley does not know categories, which could place these untruthful deeds in their rightful place. Following the Wickhams’ departure and the burial of Captain Denny’s body, the liberating feeling of murder is eventually conceived. In the final scene, which is rather an exaggerated happy ending, Elizabeth says to Darcy: “Let us look on the past as it gives us pleasure, and to the future with confidence and hope.”56 The conclusion 51 The world of wars and violence, which Austen deliberately did not deal with, remarks P.D. James in her Afterword to Death Comes To Pemberley, 329. 52 Cannadine, Class in Britain, 53. 53 James, Death Comes To Pemberley, 307. 54 Ibid., 314. 55 Ibid., 315. 56 Ibid., 323.

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of Mr Darcy’s adventure in his own memory evokes Lowenthal’s claim: “Above all, memory transforms the experienced past into what we later think it should have been, eliminating undesired scenes and making favoured ones suitable.”57 P.D. James’s novel is undoubtedly a daring experiment in transforming Austen’s iconic characters into morally transgressive figures in the context of crime. Pursuing the tradition of Golden Age writers, she was also preoccupied with portraying collective memory and the myth of Englishness through Mr Darcy and his constructed milieu isolated from the outside world. Being exposed to a murder case, however, leaves no character indifferent, especially because it allows for the intrusion of reality and the dissolution of Darcy’s unconscious existence. Nevertheless, James seeks to avoid harming the timeless presence of Mr Darcy and Pemberley Hall in the reader’s consciousness. By solving the mystery and eliminating evil, Mr Darcy succeeds in restoring his cosy memory world that can escape the erosion of time and reality.

Works Cited Auden, W.H. “The Guilty Vicarage. Notes on the Detective Story by an Addict.” Harper’s Magazine, May, 1948: n. pag. Accessed May 15, 2014. http://harpers.org/archive/1948/05/the-guilty-vicarage. Berberich, Christine. The Image of the English Gentleman in TwentiethCentury Literature. Englishness and Nostalgia. Aklershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2007. Cannadine, David. Aspects of Aristocracy. Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. —. Class in Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Colls, Robert. Identity of England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Haberman, Ina. Myth, Memory and the Middlebrow. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. James, P.D. Death Comes to Pemberley. London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 2012. Kenney, Catherine. The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers. London: The Kent State University Press, 1990. Light, Alison. Forever England. Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars. London: Routledge, 1991. Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 57

Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, 206.

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Terdiman, Richard. Present Past. Modernity and the Memory Crisis. New York: Cornell University Press, 1993. Wright, Patrick. On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain. London: Thetford Press Ltd., 1985.

THE SECOND ERIC SANDERSON: MULTI-TEXTUALITY, IDENTITY AND MEMORY IN HALL’S THE RAW SHARK TEXTS DORISA D. COSTELLO

Much of the attention paid to Steven Hall’s 2007 novel The Raw Shark Texts has rightly focused on its multi-textual aesthetic as it utilizes slipstream thematics to incorporate traditional prose, graphic novel typography, animation, indexes, film stills and photographs, and online text and forums in a meta/physical sensory experience that continues to evolve. Hall continues to release Un-chapters, or new fragmented passages in foreign language editions and other locales, which after translation, are shared in chat forums dedicated to the novel. With each new release and discovery the reader is required to reevaluate the text as new information, sometimes filling gaps in the narrative and sometimes overturning previous assumptions, comes to light. This readerly experience metafictitiously mirrors the protagonist, Eric Sanderson, as he gathers clues on his journey to literal/literary self-discovery, in this way providing an immersive experience as we, perhaps, self-identify with Sanderson. Yet, as innovative as these techniques of storytelling are, and as overt as quasidystopic tropes of identity-stealing cyborgs and world-dominating hivemind network interfaces may be, overlooked in the literature on this novel is the place language has in the construction of personal identity, which is, markedly, the central plot. In this novel, the word, at its most fundamental base of utterance and script, is the foundation of self and life. To quickly sum up the plot, the protagonist Eric Sanderson wakes up on the floor of his home with no memory of who he is, where he is, or how he got there. After searching the house, he finds a letter addressed to himself, letting him know that he should seek out Dr. Randle, a psychotherapist, who can assist him.1 Dr. Randall informs Sanderson that he has suffered a psychological fugue triggered by the trauma of the tragic death of his girlfriend, Clio Aames, several months previously, and that 1

Hall, The Raw Shark Texts, 10.

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this is not the first such episode of amnesia he has suffered. However, Sanderson soon begins receiving letters in the post written by himself, whom he calls the First Eric Sanderson, informing him that what he is suffering is not a nervous breakdown, as previously thought, but rather attacks from a conceptual predator called a Ludovician, a thought shark, which is slowly eating away his memory and identity.2 The Ludovician is able to hunt Sanderson through a lexical trail of mail, books, electronic messages, and even at times the words that comprise his very thoughts. He is instructed by his previous self to seek out an expert in the field of conceptual predators, Dr. Trey Fidorous, for help. Along the way, Sanderson is joined by the mysterious Scout, who bears a striking resemblance to his lost girlfriend, and has her own tale of tragedy and loss. Thus begins Sanderson’s journey of self-(re)discovery. What is most remarkable is that in this scenario, Hall conjoins language with identity, indeed making it impossible to have one without the other, which is my point to explore here. N. Katherine Hayles, a prolific scholar in the area of post-human subjectivities, including the ones found in this novel, helpfully notes that The Raw Shark Texts is a dual-linguistic narrative in that it is at once both material and verbal,3 that is, it combines the mimetic aspects a reader expects from the novel (i.e. showing) with diegetic representation (i.e. telling) that typifies non-literary texts such as indexes or manuals. She says that unlike most science fiction narratives, The Raw Shark Texts has “an involvement with its materiality as a verbal object made of words created by ink marks durably impressed on paper” giving its “imaginative world a conceptual depth and a materio-semiotic vibrancy.”4 Here she understands that the verbal narrative, that is the words themselves that comprise the plot and characters which we as readers discover and enjoy, are dynamically linked to the form which not only the printed words take on the material page, but also the use of diagrams and images, themselves made up of precisely placed words. One such instance, which may seem innocuous at first, but which intensifies the drama of the scene as well as establishes Hall’s use of text as both verbal and material components of his narrative, occurs when the Second Eric and Scout encounter the Ludovician after narrowly escaping the clutches of Mr. Nobody’s trap.

2

Ibid., 64. Hayles, “Material Entanglements: Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts as Slipstream Novel,” 130. 4 Ibid., 130. 3

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As the Second Eric runs to catch up with Scout, and make their getaway, the Second Eric first sees the Ludovician swimming, as it were, beneath the black and white floor tiles, as seen in Figure 15 below:

Figure 1: the Ludovician under floor tiles

Following this image, the Second Eric runs, only to hear his own footsteps, which are displayed on the page as: 5

Hall, 155.

The Second Eric Sanderson

244 thud thud thud thud6

If viewed closely, the image of the Ludovician through the floor tiles can be seen to be made from other portions of the novel itself, as the names Clio and Eric can be seen in the text making up the darkened tiles. The missing portions of the text, as in keeping with the fragmented nature of Eric’s search for his identity, are just enough to make discovery of the location nearly impossible, though the references to both Clio and Eric, and the words “Greek island,” “ancient,” and “Colossus”7 lead me to believe they are part of the First Eric’s journal chronicling his and Clio’s vacation on the Greek island of Naxos just prior to Clio’s deadly accident. Because of these traits and more, Hayles locates the novel in the genre of slipstream, which straddles the worlds of consensus reality—reality as we currently experience it—with more typical aspects of the science fiction genre where words literally come to life as we read them. For Hayles, this phenomenon comes as a reaction to digital communication and the fear of the ‘death of the novel.’ Jessica Pressman (2009) suggests that the “aesthetic of bookishness”8 is one such response to that fear. She posits that “these novels exploit the power of the print page in ways that draw attention to the book as a multimedia format, one informed by and connected to digital technologies.”9 In a clever reading of the introduction of the novel, when Eric Sanderson first regains consciousness and is in a state of panic until he discovers a letter left for him in his home, Pressman shows how both the verbal and material layers of The Raw Shark Texts are intertwined, indeed how bookishness as an aesthetic reinforces the vital connection between the novel as form and the novel as content. She writes how “the novel thus begins with a character reading and breathing himself back from near death, making synonymous and intertwined these two actions. Reading from paper the material imprints of the typewriter that the first Eric Sanderson used to communicate with his amnesiac self is depicted as a life-affirming and embodied action.”10 Julia Panko, in her article “Memory 6

Ibid., 156. Hall, 155. 8 Pressman, “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First Century Literature,” 1 9 Ibid., 1. 10 Ibid., 3. 7

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Pressed Flat into Text: The Importance of Print in Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts” (2011) likewise recognizes the dual modes of the novel, though she sides with print media as the preferred mode, rather than a symbiosis; however, she rightly notes how Hall’s use of non-literary texts “challenges the traditional boundaries of the print novel” while the novel also “posits textual inscription as its preferred form of storage.”11 This then, is the link between the material and the verbal that I wish to explore, and one that I feel is crucial to Hall’s construction of character and execution of plot. Though bookishness is hardly new, as one can argue that even early novels such as the multi-textual Moby Dick (1851) of Melville’s imagination is among the first in a long line that stretches to Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), The Raw Shark Texts utilizes this material/verbal dyad within the narrative, and also meta-fictively, in such a way that the form cannot help but be inextricably linked with its content of language-informed identity. First I’d like to explore the implications of this dyad within the construct of the narrative itself, and then I will show how these forms relate to the construction of identity. The Second Eric Sanderson’s own sense of identity is dependent upon both material and verbal aspects of the novel: his former self’s letters and journals (material) and the stories he is told by other characters like Scout and Dr. Trey Fidorous, and even those he himself tells later on in the novel (verbal). As an amnesiac, the Second Eric relies upon the material letters and journal entries left behind by the First Eric, or the stories told to him by Scout and Fidorous, both of whom knew the First Eric. Having nothing against which to judge them, he must take the narratives as they are, and it is only by later experience that he can either prove or disprove their veracity. At the same time, however, the distinction between himself and his predecessor, with his own lack of memory and the fragmented supply of information provided to him, creates the basis for his own nascent identity. From the start there is the First and the Second Eric Sandersons, the latter built against the scaffolding of the former, a ‘him’ and ‘me’ where these very pronouns announce the self and other as separate identities. The First Eric’s letters, addressed as they are to ‘Eric’ and signed off with “The First Eric Sanderson” compound this separation. Linguistically and emotionally, though not physically, they are two separate identities. The material and verbal language of the narrative separates them. Outside of the plot of the novel, though, these same features apply. The novel itself is material, that is, ink and paper, and includes typographical 11

Panko, 264-5.

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flip-book animation sequences, film stills, and graphic illustrations that intersperse the text. It is also verbal, which includes the book-to-reader and reader-to-reader interface, in particular regarding the Red Cabinet illustration of the boat on the lake, which proves to be the crux of Hall’s premise of thought and identity transformation.12 We, like the Second Eric, rely upon the material and verbal aspects of the text, which are teasingly incomplete and so like Eric’s own incomplete memory. In this way, the novel utilizes what Hayles calls the “dangerous delights of immersive fiction,”13 as story and reality mirror one another, when “such descriptions create homologies between action in the diegesis, the materiality of the shark as it appears within the story and the materiality of the marks on the page.”14 With all of this in mind, I’d like to highlight the ways in which Hall’s novel illustrates—pun intended—the vital relationship between identity and language, verbal and material, with the Second Eric Sanderson, Mycroft Ward and Mr. Nobody as the most dynamic examples. First, though, I’d like to pause briefly to examine the nature of identity, and then link it to language as its most vital component. Several theorists argue that identity is both a social construct and dependent upon the presence of others, though they come to the idea from different angles. Judith Butler cites the performative nature of identity and the requisite of recognition from outside sources to validate that identity as key features, indeed necessary ones, to identity formation. In Undoing Gender (2004) she writes that the self can only be realized through her relationship with others, that “whatever consciousness is, whatever the self is, will find itself only through a reflection of itself in another.”15 Linguist Kamila Ciepiela (2011) writes that “since identity is a many-faceted phenomenon that is constructed only in the presence of others, individuals would not be able to address the problem if they did not communicate with others.”16 Using Derrida’s position that signification comes through discourse rather than an essential “I,” Ciepiela demonstrates that selfhood is constituted through language, a transaction between what she calls the ‘I’ and its interlocutor.17 Indeed, Derrida himself refutes the linguistic hierarchy of structuralists like Saussure, who found meaning in the signified rather than the sign itself, stating instead that “from the moment 12

Hall, 54-5. Hayles, 120. 14 Ibid., 120. 15 Butler, 147. 16 Ciepiela, Introduction, Identity Through a Language Lens, 8. 17 Ibid., 16. 13

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there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs.”18 Hence, like Derrida and Butler, Ciepiela maintains that the self is negotiated, is conceived and maintained, only with reference to that which it is not, that which is outside, here the speaker and the interlocutor, and through the medium of language in what she calls “counter-identification.”19 This then, is what I referred to previously with regard to the First and Second Eric Sandersons, whose use of language opposed the one to the other in such a way that they became, of necessity, two different subjects. In a similar way, Kwame Anthony Appiah (2005) notes that interaction is vital to the creation of individual identity, and he too acknowledges the role language plays in that creation. He writes that “an identity is always articulated through concepts…Indeed the very material out of which our identities are shaped is provided, in part, by what Taylor has called ‘our language’.”20 He goes on to say that this includes not only “the words we speak, but also other modes of expression whereby we define ourselves, including the ‘languages’ of art, of gesture, of love, and the like.”21 Signs, concepts, words. All of these communicative gestures form the foundation of Hall’s use of language as that which exists prior to being. In The Raw Shark Texts, we can see this dynamic illustrated in three of our characters: Mycroft Ward, Mr. Nobody, and, of course, Eric Sanderson. My first example involves one of the two primary antagonists of the novel, Mycroft Ward, whose name should sound markedly familiar, as it is a pun on the name Microsoft Word—as well as an oblique reference to Sherlock Holmes’ elder brother, Mycroft. Ward, whose story is narrated to us and to the Second Eric by Scout, began as a “gentleman scientist” at the end of the nineteenth century, who wanted to cheat death.22 To do so, he transfers his consciousness to a younger man’s body, in what he called “The Arrangement.” Scout explains: The system he devised was so down-to-earth and logical an accountant might have invented it. First, through the use of thousands of questions and tests, Ward succeeded in reproducing a very rough copy of his personality on paper. Then, through ‘the applied arts of mesmerism and suggestion’ Ward successfully imprinted this personality onto another person.23

18

Derrida, Of Grammatology, 50. Ciepiela, 10. 20 Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 20. 21 Ibid., 20. 22 Hall, 199. 23 Ibid., 200. 19

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Here we see that the identity that Ward transfers is constructed wholly of language—these thousands of questions and tests. Though we are told the actual procedure has been lost with time,24 Hall’s description insinuates that a person’s being can be summed up and constructed through words, and as words are meant as a form of communication, this means those words that have constructed a person can be transmitted to another. This is what Ward achieves, first to a single body, and later, as Scout explains, to hundreds and then thousands of people, including, accidentally and only partially, herself.25 This is not far from what the First Eric had hoped to achieve with the Ludovician in order to preserve Clio after she had died. Discovering in his research that the Ludovician has the capacity to contain indefinitely the memories and identities which he consumes, the First Eric hoped that he could transfer his memories of Clio into the Ludovician, where she could then live on.26 He writes to the Second Eric in a letter: “I did it all for a girl named Clio Aames. I loved her, Eric. So much. And she died…But. But but but. It feels strange to write this down—I think I believed I could change what happened, undo it, prevent it, save her life somehow after she was already gone.”27 Later, when speaking with Fidorous, the Second Eric puts all of the pieces together and comes to this startling conclusion: “He [the First Eric Sanderson] found one [a Ludovician] and gave himself to it. For Clio Aames. He did it for her, tried to save her life, preserve her after she was already gone.”28 The novel itself does not finally conclude whether the First Eric was successful or not in his attempt, though the striking similarities between Clio and Scout, and the ambiguous climax of the novel allow for this possibility. Depending on how one chooses to read the ending of the novel, this may be the fate of the Second Eric and Scout, as well. My second case of identity construction through language comes in the form of one of Ward’s lackeys, Mr. Nobody. On his hunt for answers, the Second Eric is lured to an abandoned hospital by a man calling himself Mr. Nobody, which of course, is not his real name, though the choice is quite telling, as indeed, words have tremendous power in this novel. Throughout the course of a painfully awkward interview, we discover that Mr. Nobody has been sent to entrap the Second Eric and use him as bait to catch the Ludovician. During the conversation, Mr. Nobody begins to 24

Ibid., 200. Ibid., 205. 26 Ibid., 273. 27 Ibid., 63. 28 Hall, 273. 25

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dissolve, literally, as it is revealed he too has been a victim of the Ludovician, and is now only being held together by pills containing the concepts of human form and personality. He is, as the Second Eric later remarks, “a concept wrapped in skin and chemicals.”29 However, their interaction attracts the attention of the Ludovician, who has been hunting for the Second Eric. But, just when it looks as if the conceptual shark will find its victim, it changes course, and attacks Mr. Nobody. Why does it do this? Earlier in their conversation, Mr. Nobody tells the Second Eric, “You don’t know who I am, do you?... I’m you, of course. We’re the same dead not-person.”30 In speaking these words, Mr. Nobody makes them so. He becomes the Second Eric at the critical moment when the Ludovician is homing in on its prey. Likewise, the Second Eric uses a different identity that he has assembled as a way to avoid the Ludovician. In the early stages of the novel, the First Eric sends the Second Eric information on how to avoid detection of the Ludovician. All of these techniques involve words and language in some way, including the use of Dictaphones, wrapping important documents in other people’s mail, and adopting the personality of someone else. In much the same way that Mycroft Ward was able to transfer his identity into another body through words, the Second Eric takes on the persona of Mark Richardson, a man whose description and habits the First Eric writes about and insists the Second Eric memorize to use as a cover.31 Here then, though it is only in the short term, and it does not have the deleterious effects of personality theft that Ward’s technique has, we can see yet again how Hall allows language to be the conduit through which identity is created and sustained. And so we finally move on to our protagonist, Eric Sanderson. In the above example we can see the Second Eric’s use of language to form identity, though this is perhaps a peripheral case. However, there are two major episodes that involve him, one a negative realization of identity, and one positive, which illustrate clearly the connection between language and identity, and the vital and, indeed, necessary link between them. The negative version of the known-self-through-language comes at the start of the Second Eric Sanderson’s narrative, where, as an amnesiac, he has no prior knowledge of the First Eric Sanderson. He says, “I know nothing about Eric Sanderson. How the hell could I claim to be him?”32 If knowledge is required for being, as both Derrida and Butler posit, then 29

Ibid., 178, emphasis mine. Ibid., 144. 31 Ibid., 151. 32 Hall, 19. 30

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Eric certainly cannot exist as the First Eric, or really, as the new Second Eric. In this way, the First Eric is irretrievable. Fidorous all but confirms this when he asks the Second Eric, “There’s nothing left of you, is there?”33, referring to the man he had known as the First Eric Sanderson. Similarly, the Second Eric is a separate and even incomplete person, as the materials (namely language) with which he reconstructs himself are inherently flawed. As I mentioned previously, Butler, Appiah and others show how identity is a reflective phenomenon, which requires a secondary, external base against which to compare and construct one’s own identity. In cultures and societies it is more wide-ranging, comparing, perhaps, a neighboring country’s ways to one’s own, or contrasting them. But the Second Eric has, at best, a fragmented foundation upon which to build. As so little remains of the First Eric except what he himself had written, and that only after several damaging encounters with the Ludovician, it is impossible to gain a full understanding of who this progenitor was, and therefore impossible to construct a new identity against the first. In one of the letters the First Eric sends the Second Eric, he admits: “I used to know so many things. The things I learned, the ways I learned to see and the things I believed possible, I think they might amaze you. Mostly now, all I have are splinters. Remains of things I was quick enough to write and preserve; fragments which seem to be increasingly incomplete and confusing to me now”.34 Later, while exploring in the underground hideout where the First Eric had originally encountered Dr. Fidorous, the Second Eric finds a journal entry where the First Eric writes: I’d written a sort of journal while we’d [he and Clio] been away and even reading through it for the first time I could see how full of holes it was…There’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles.35

Though the Second Eric is able to cobble together a sense of self through the collected letters and journals of the First Eric, as well as through what Scout and Dr. Fidorous tell him, it is at best incomplete due to the attacks of the Ludovician, and at worst, purposefully missing vital information or misleading, like when he finds that Scout has been lying to 33

Ibid., 272. Hall, 63. 35 Ibid., 412-413. 34

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him, or when Fidorous refuses to explain some of the theory behind what the First Eric initially intended with the Ludovician. However, in a nod to the meta-narrational dimension of the text, and harkening back to the idea of thought transmission that permeates it in each of the examples I’ve shared thus far, we see that the Second Eric does, finally, constitute himself through language, both in one of the climactic scenes of the text, and by the very novel we hold in our hands when we read. As bait to lure the Ludovician to a final confrontation, Dr. Fidorous instructs the Second Eric to write out the story of his life. So he begins: “I was unconscious. I’d stopped breathing”.36 These are the exact words that begin the novel, when the Second Eric wakes up on the floor of his home with no memory.37 In this moment, the Second Eric writes out what the reader is to presume is the entire novel we’ve been reading up to this point. In so doing, the Second Eric uses language to reconstruct himself, drawing on both the material sources we’ve seen throughout the text—the First Eric’s letters, the journal entries, the paper clues left behind—and the verbal sources—Dr. Randle’s suppositions about the Second Eric’s psychotic fugues, Scout’s story about Mycroft Ward, Dr. Fidorous’ story about the origin of the conceptual shark and the samurai warriors trained in meta-warfare. K. B. Wurth (2011), taking us through Locke and Hume, links together memory and identity, or in this case the Second Eric’s lack of both, by claiming that “personal identity is framed by the continued awareness and memory of oneself and one’s actions in a chain of memories of past selves remembering past selves.”38 He therefore argues that “identity is thus fictitious—a projection at best.”39 And that is exactly what the Second Eric’s life is comprised of: fictions. So too is the novel. They are, in this way, one and the same, and now we are a part of it as well. This is perhaps the most devious, and intriguing aspect of the novel, which we are introduced to through the letter found in the Red Cabinet. This letter establishes the premise upon which the rest of the The Raw Shark Texts lies: that thoughts can be transferred from place to place, and from person to person, through the vehicle of language. In short, the letter found locked away in the Red Cabinet asks the Second Eric, but certainly also us as readers, to imagine sitting on a boat in the middle of a placid lake. It describes in detail the feel of the boat, the ripple and coolness of the water, the sun on one’s face. And then, the letter lays it on us: 36

Ibid., 286. Ibid., 3. 38 Wurth, 122. 39 Ibid., 122. 37

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Now, right on that tap—stop. Stop imagining. Here’s the real game. Here’s what’s obvious and wonderful and terrible all at the same time: the lake in my head, the lake I was imagining, has just become the lake in your head. It doesn’t matter if you never know me, or never know anything about me. I could be dead, I could have been dead a hundred years before you were ever born and still—think about this carefully, think past the obvious sense of it to the huge and amazing miracle hiding inside—the lake in my head has become the lake in your head.40

What the writer of the letter once imagined transfers to the Second Eric Sanderson’s mind, lives there, as it were, not only as a duplicate, but as a connected thread. The letter goes on to describe that thread as “a purely conceptual stream with no mass or weight or matter and no ties to gravity or time…but nevertheless, a stream flowing directly from my imaginary lake to yours.”41 So too, when the reader reads the text, and now, just as I have shared with you. Language, in Hall’s example, brings life, shapes reality. Hall gives us a very literal example of words bringing life: the Ludovician itself. The novel provides several illustrations, and even flipbook animation, of the conceptual shark, which is constructed, quite literally, with words as we can see in Figure 2.42 In these graphics, and in the narrative used to describe the shark, we see a powerful illustration of what Hall has been doing all along with the other characters, like Mycroft Ward, Mr. Nobody, and both Eric Sandersons— he has been creating identities (villain, henchman, desperate schemer and lover) through the verbal and material modes of language. This is the essence of fiction, ironically: that which is not real becomes real. The author’s creation exists through the medium of language and coalesces in the minds of readers when that language is decoded (i.e. read). In this way we may see The Raw Shark Texts on one level as the triumph of the First Eric Sanderson’s initial scheme to preserve Clio after her death. In the climax of the novel, the Second Eric has a choice to make as he floats on a buoy surrounded by a thick fog and the scattered remains of their boat, equipment, and the Ludovician. A postcard he had of the island of Naxos, where he and Clio had holidayed together, mysteriously fades and changes into a picture of his home in England, as mundane and non-descript as the life he had been leading. He is able to reach through the postcard, and it is here that he realizes he must choose: he can return to 40

Hall, 54-55. Ibid., 55. 42 Ibid., 373. 41

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Figure 2: the Ludovician

his old life now that thee Ludocivian is gone, or he can remaiin in this world—whaat has been caalled Unspacee—with Scoutt. When he ch hooses to remain he ffinds “the im mage had gon ne altogether,, leaving the postcard completely blank.”43 Whhen he looks up, Scout haas appeared, as a has an island that loooks surprisinngly like Naxo os.44 Howeverr, the novel itself i does no ot end with tthis happily-eever-after. Included aftter this narrative is a newspaper article w with the headlin ne “Body of missing m man found,” which inform ms the reader that the body y of Eric Sanderson w was found in a construction n site in Greaater Manchestter.45 The next page iss of the back of a postcard d with a Greekk stamp and postmark, p addressed too Dr. Randle, Eric’s therap pist, written byy Eric, which h tells her that he is finne, but he is not n returning.46 The reverse side of the po ostcard is a film still from the moovie Casablanca, which sshows charactters Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund, plaayed by Hum mphrey Bogartt and Ingrid Bergman, B respectivelyy, sharing a coocktail and a loving look.447 Hayles lay ys out the 43

Ibid., 422. Ibid., 425. 45 Hall, 426. 46 Ibid., 427. 47 Ibid., 428. 44

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possible readings of these material documents against the written narrative. She first notes that the repetition of the names Dr. Randle and Ryan Mitchell in the newspaper article “implies that his [the Second Eric’s] journey through un-space has been the hallucinogenic rambling of a psychotropic fugue.”48 This reading suggests that none of the adventures in un-space, and even the existence of the Ludovician itself are real, but merely the delusion of a grief-stricken man. Thus, this reading has Eric die at the end, never having found answers or peace. The second possibility is that the events really happened, and indeed, the Second Eric and Scout live on after the events of the novel, together, as the postcard signifies “a moment that in this text is literally the last word, as if to contravene the film and insist happy endings are possible after all.”49 Hayles seems to leave the choice up to the reader, implying that the double meaning of the title The Raw Shark Texts with its homophonic counterpart “Rorschach Tests,” allows the reader the choice of interpretation depending on her investment in the text and in the outcome of the protagonist. I would suggest, however, not a choice between one or the other outcomes, but the inability to escape either outcome. One of the enjoyable aspects of the novel is its references to mythology, icons of popular culture and scientific theories, which pepper the narrative and add an additional layer of interpretation. One such reference is to “Schrodinger’s Cat,” a thought experiment created by Erwin Schrodinger to explain quantum superposition, which posits that a cat having been put in a box with a vial of poison is simultaneously alive and dead until the box lid is lifted and the proof given.50 One of the characters in the novel is Eric’s cat, Ian, who makes the trek with him and Scout to un-space and ultimately on the boat to battle the Ludovician. Mentioned, but never seen, is a second cat, Gavin. The Second Eric wonders “what sequence of events had made Ian a real cat and left Gavin existing only in words, in the text of a memory.”51 This reference to “Schrodinger’s Cat” opens the possibility, and really the unavoidability, that both endings of the novel are true at the same time. The Second Eric Sanderson dies in a construction yard in Manchester, having suffered from a psychotic episode after the death of his girlfriend, Clio Aames. And the Second Eric Sanderson, Ian the cat, and Scout travel to un-space, defeat the conceptual predator called the Ludovician and the plot of Mycroft Ward to replicate himself infinitely in the bodies of all 48

Hayles, 129. Ibid., 130. 50 IFL Science. 51 Hall, 108. 49

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mankind, and swim to safety to live life together on a beautiful island. Until we lift the lid of the box—or rather, until the author lifts it for us in the form of more Un-chapters, which reveal the truth, we live in a state of both. The marvelous verbal and material use of language necessitates both. Our reading of the novel resurrects Clio Aames, allows her to live on in perpetuity, each time the novel is taken up by a new reader. Likewise, the Second Eric’s identity is constructed by all of the material and verbal sources I have named previously, but also through the reader’s engagement with the material and verbal constructs of the novel itself. Identity is realized, can only be realized, through linguistic means, whether one is an amnesiac being hunted by a conceptual shark with a hunger for memories, or just an average reader of fiction.

Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. NJ: Princeton, 2005 Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. NY: Routledge, 2004. Ciepiela, Kamila. Identity through a Language Lens, 2011. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. Hall, Steven. The Raw Shark Texts. NY: Cannongate, 2007. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Material Entanglements: Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts as Slipstream Novel.” In Science Fiction Studies 38 (2011): 115-132. IFL Science. “Schrodinger’s Cat: Explained.” http://www.iflscience.com/physics/schrodinger’s-cat-explained/. Retrieved 14 January, 2017. Panko, Julia. “Memory Pressed Flat into Text”: The Importance of Print in Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts.” In Contemporary Literature 52.2 (2011): 264-297. Pressman, Jessica. “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First Century Literature. Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age. 48.4 (2009): 1-11. Wurth, K. B. “Posthumanities and Post-Textualities: Reading The Raw Shark Texts and Woman’s World.” In Comparative Literature 63.2 (2011): 119-141.

THE WITCH AND THE MEMORY IN TERRY PRATCHETT’S TIFFANY ACHING SERIES OLENA TYKHOMYROVA

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is a fantasy story world which encompasses 41 novels, several short stories and numerous companion editions (a cookery book, maps, guides, almanacs, etc.). The universe of Discworld is featured as a flat planet resting on the backs of four elephants carried through space on the back of a giant turtle. Working on this story world, Pratchett started out by attacking fantasy tropes and clichés and tapping into mythology, folklore (particularly British) and fairy-tales. Gradually, he came up with some completely new portrayals of fantasy archetypes and offered unorthodox solutions for classical fantasy conflicts. The discourse of Discworld, therefore, is often deemed revisionist and even subversive. One of the most obvious examples of reinventing a traditional character is the image of the witch. The word “witch” comes from Old English “wicca/wicce”, meaning someone practicing witchcraft regardless of their sex (“wicca” is masculine, “wicce” – feminine). The masculine “witch”, however, was eventually substituted by the words “wizards” and “warlock” while “witch” came to refer to women only. The image of the witch in literature and folklore was dominated by the doctrine of the Christian Church. Witches were thought to be in league with the Devil and possessing supernatural powers, such as turning into animals, flying, changing the weather, causing infertility, spoiling food, etc. The Early Modern period in European history was renowned for witch hunts that resulted in thousands of trials and executions. According to Diane Purkiss, a British historian, witchcraft was caught in the elaborate network of cultural meanings surrounding female identity:

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For women, a witch was a figure who could be read against and within her own social identity as housewife and mother.1

Witches were seen as those who could influence, mostly harm, the household and children, as well as reproductive abilities, thus reflecting people’s intimate fears and desires. “Witch-craze”, often accompanied by mass panic and hysteria, was the reason for the tragic fate of a multitude of women who became the victims of people’s inherent propensity to blame their misfortunes on someone else. Literary portrayals of witches, such as, notably, those in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, echoed these widely spread superstitions. But, in spite of the fact that people believed in the “wicked witch” stereotype, they still massively sought help from witches, often equated with “wise women” skilled in healing, midwifery and herb-lore. The belief in magic was strong, and many claimed to practice “white magic” redressing harm done by “evil hags”, as witches were also dubbed. Interdisciplinary research on the witch in history, which began in the 19th century and is still carried on, has shown that witchcraft is a complex phenomenon that escapes concrete definitions. Even the question of the origins of witchcraft is controversial: it has been often dismissed by some historians as a product of the imagination of the Inquisition and witch trials, while others have established connections with pre-Christian pagan religions and cults, particularly those relating to archaic fertility rites. Such connection places witchcraft in the ideological opposition to Christianity: This tradition also recalled a period when human society functioned without hierarchy – either matriarchal or patriarchal – and without gender, racial or strict class rankings. It was a tradition that affirmed the potential for humanity to live without domination and fear, something orthodox Christians maintain is impossible.2

Mircea Eliade, a famous historian of religion, considers witchcraft a rebellion fuelled by a desire to recover the lost world, the nostalgia for which haunts the mind.3 The image of the evil hag, however, persists into the modern day and is widely represented in popular culture (cartoons, TV series, art, etc.). Witches are universally portrayed as ominous and unpredictable, posing a threat to humanity and thus becoming antagonists 1

Purkiss, The Witch in History. Early Modern and Twentieth Century Representations, 94. 2 Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History, 117-118. 3 Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions: Essays in Comparative Religion, 91.

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of fictional heroes. As Margery Hourihan writes in “Deconstructing the Hero: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature”: These dark and dangerous women are the hero’s opponents and, unlike other females, they often play a major part in the story for they have broken out of the domestic sphere and are loose in the wilderness. They naturalize and justify male dominance because they show what iniquity uncontrolled femaleness is capable of. 4

Simultaneously, numerous attempts at deconstructing this image, as well as its narrative role, have been made throughout the media. In order to address and subvert the cliché of a wicked witch, Terry Pratchett creates several remarkable witch characters in his Discworld novels. These include Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, Magrat Garlick, Agnes Nitt and others (all in all, more than twenty witch characters). These are resilient and independent female personages, often viewed within the feminist paradigm: not only are they strong, but also responsible for the well-being of their respective communities. Becoming heroines, they do not resort to traditional fantasy male hero strategies, such as valour, questing and fighting; they embrace their task differently. According to Margery Hourihan, “the essence of the hero’s masculinity is his assertion of control over himself, his environment and his world.”5 Assuming control becomes the essence of witches’ femininity and witchcraft in Discworld. In accordance with the “wise woman” stance, witches take care of healing, midwifery and household problems that people might have, but the important thing is that they carry out these tasks by maintaining connection with the memory of the community and the land itself. Discworld witches are mediators between the people and the land, between life and death, between the mundane and the sublime. They are often presented as “liminal” beings, dealing with the “edges” of existence and realizing their potential fully through their grasp of the ways the human mind and memory work. Their liminality is not synonymous with marginalization that often accompanied historical figures thought to be witches; on the contrary, their unique status places them above the lands’ nominal rulers. In their appropriation of the land’s memory witches embrace it in its personal, historical and mythological dimensions, as it will be shown through the analysis of the Tiffany Aching series.

4

Hourihan, Deconstructing the Hero: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature, 175. 5 Ibid., 68.

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The series in question comprises five young adult novels set in Discworld (The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, Wintersmith, I Shall Wear Midnight and The Shepherd’s Crown) and features an adolescent witch Tiffany Aching from the Chalk Country, a green sheep-rearing land strongly resembling the South Downs in Britain. The novels are referred to as “a hymn to a time and a landscape”6, since they create a fantasy chronotope with a strong feeling of history and nostalgia. From the point of view of genre, they are coming-of-age novels targeting mainly the teenage audience, but enjoying a large readership among people of all ages. One of the reasons for this, as Cherith Baldry points out about all of Pratchett’s children’s books, is that they persistently pose serious questions and concern themselves with complicated issues, such as, for instance, differences in people’s perceptions.7 This is certainly true about young and talented Tiffany, who is the protagonist of the series and whose mental processes and perceptions are always in the limelight. Besides, there are many other witches in these texts, both old and young ones, whose portrayals are presented with the similar emphasis on the mind, memory and liminality. Making extensive use of such universal archetypes as personified seasons, fertility rites, and mythical quests to the Otherworld, Pratchett revisits the Celtic substrata of fantasy fiction and traces the ancient roots of British folklore, exploring its presence in the collective memory. Getting in touch with the memory of the land is an integral part of Tiffany’s self-actualization as a witch. Young Tiffany comes from a shepherding family that has lived on the Chalk for generations. Unlike other children, Tiffany questions everything around her and, significantly, her own thinking (which is referred to as having “Second Thoughts” in the novels). She also possesses “The First Sight”, the ability to see “what is really there”, that is, an unbiased perception devoid of cognitive fallacies. In her endeavours she is assisted by the clan of Nac Mac Feegles, or the Pictsies, a fairy race of small-sized Scottish-sounding belligerent, but fiercely loyal creatures. A very significant figure in the first novel is Granny Aching, an old wise woman, a skillful shepherd rather than a witch, but acting as a true ruler of the land, as opposed to the Baron, the nominal ruler. She dies, but leaves her memory behind and a lot of things are done in her memory. For Tiffany this is the personal layer of her own memory and it is up to her to assume the responsibility for the land after her granny’s death. Tiffany has “an instinctive ability to accept responsibility and to cope with threats to 6 7

Pratchett and Simpson, The Folklore of Discworld, 237. Baldry, “The Children’s Books”, 42.

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herself and others”8, and she soon learns that witchcraft is more about endless hard work and helping people who are unable to help themselves than about mysterious magic spells. In Wee Free Men the personal becomes the collective as Tiffany discovers her connection with the land in her own name (The Gaelic variation of her name, supplied by the kelda of Nac Mac Feegles, Tir-farthóinn means “Land under Wave”9). Fuelled by this association, she experiences an epiphany in which she envisages the geological history of the Chalk: …and then, like someone rising from the clouds of a sleep, she felt the deep, deep Time below her. She sensed the breath of the downs and the distant roar of ancient, ancient seas trapped in millions of tiny shells. She thought of Granny Aching, under the turf, becoming part of the chalk again, part of the land under wave. She felt as if huge wheels, of time and stars, were turning slowly around her.10

This newly remembered identity gives her strength and confidence to withstand her opponent, the Faery Queen who steals her little brother. All future conflicts will be similarly resolved by activating this significant connection. Another encounter with the collective memory takes place in A Hat Full of Sky, where Tiffany is threatened by a dangerous creature called hiver. A hiver invades one’s brain and strives to dominate it, often with drastic consequences. Among other things, a hiver is a collection of memories retained from the people it had previously inhabited, and it can be interpreted as an embodiment of the collective evolutionary past complete with its urges and mistakes. The whole situation and its resolution (with Tiffany giving the hiver a name and helping him die) contribute to Tiffany’s development and self-identification. Since the whole conflict unfolded in the mind and memory, the encounter enhanced Tiffany’s analytical skills and self-awareness, as well as her inherent connection with the land that she used to preserve her identity from the engulfing influence of the hiver. It is important to note that even after Tiffany frees her mind from it, some vestiges of the hiver’s memories are left behind and used by her in her further adventures. The collective memory is intertwined with the cultural and mythological layers, as Tiffany discovers in Wintersmith and I Shall Wear 8

Pratchett and Simpson, The Folklore of Discworld, 219. Ibid., 221. 10 Pratchett, The Illustrated Wee Free Men, 228. 9

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Midnight. Both novels feature powerful anthropomorphic personifications as Tiffany’s opponents, and to deal with each of them the young witch needs to delve deeper into the collective subconscious down to the level of ancient archetypes. The Wintersmith, whom she unwittingly challenges during the Dark Morris, an autumnal ritual dance, is the embodiment of winter and, according to the rules of the narrative imperative that permeate the universe of Discworld, the role of Lady Summer is thrust upon the unwilling Tiffany. Her task is, therefore, to preserve her human identity and resist the temptation to become a goddess, which turns the story into the epic conflict of Death and Immortality, a universal mythological and fantasy motif. The conflict must be resolved on the mythical level: the Nac Mac Feegles ensure that the true Lady Summer is fetched from the Underworld by a hero on a quest, while Tiffany kisses the Wintersmith to melt him down. She reaches this solution through the full awareness of herself and the scale of the situation, combining the sublime (the warmth of the sun that she channels through herself into the Wintersmith) and the mundane (her usual down-to-earthness): Where this takes me, there I choose to go, she told herself, letting the warmth pour into her. I choose. This I choose to do. And I’m going to have to stand on tiptoe, she added.11

Adrienne Kertzer mentions Terry Pratchett’s young adult novel Nation among the works that “offer alternate ways of contesting dominant cultural memories of the nation”12, and the same can be applied to I Shall Wear Midnight. The antagonist here is the Cunning Man, who is reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition and represents the human propensity to hate and instigate paranoid “witch-hunts”. The narrative reverses the well-known cultural pattern of “burning the witch”. Whether the historical “witch” who was burned at the stake is perceived as evil (as people in the past tended to do) or as an innocent victim (as is the norm today), the pattern places her in the passive and defeated role. Although Tiffany finds herself in the atmosphere of growing suspicion and hatred, she preserves her active role throughout the conflict (even in the dungeon she locks herself in and enjoys a good night rest). She finally commits the Cunning Man to flames, or, in other words, manages to overcome the superstition and paranoia in the minds of others and reestablish the witch as the protector of the community.

11 12

Pratchett, Wintersmith, 309. Kertzer, “Does Not Happen”, 211.

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The final novel in the series, The Shepherd’s Crown, published posthumously in 2015, ties up Tiffany’s setting in the Chalk with another major plotline in the story world: the arrival of the railway in Discworld. Technological advances in a fantasy world are often manifested through the motif of thinning, described in the “Encyclopedia of Fantasy” as “the passing away of a higher and more intense Reality”13, especially in Tolkien-influenced epic fantasy. In contrast to this, here thinning presupposes the passing away of the magic associated with malevolent races (such as Elves, skilled in “glamour”, that is, an illusion-making type of magic), which is seen as a desirable change. The death of Granny Weatherwax, the most powerful witch in Discworld, makes this change uncertain, as the borders between the human world and the Land of Faery weaken, facilitating the Elves’ invasion. It is up to Tiffany, who is Granny’s chosen successor, to protect the land from the invasion, which she accomplishes by mobilizing the local witches, as well as by establishing contact with the former Elven queen, banished by a usurper. Fully grown by now, she overcomes the remaining identity-relateddoubts and accepts her heritage (the symbolic shepherd’s crown as the embodiment of power on the Chalk) and her leadership among the witches, while cherishing other witches’ rights (as well as her own) to do things in their own unique ways: Boots, Tiffany thought. I wish I had brought Granny Weatherwax’s boots to wear for this fight. They would have given me strength. And then she stopped this thought. No. This is my land. My turf. My feet. My boots. My way.14

To sum up, the Tiffany Aching series comprises coming-of-age novels in which the protagonist encounters serious challenges on her way to maturity and by facing them embraces her identity of a witch. Coming to terms with her own self means being aware of her own time and place in the history of her land and people, of acknowledging her heritage and at the same time exercising her right to do things her own way rather than fill in someone else’s shoes. As different identities or narratives are imposed on Tiffany, she uses deep layers of her personal and collective memory together with her growing mental powers to withstand all that is alien to her, and realize her potential fully. Thus, the series offers young readers a positive, innovative image of the witch, whose chief “magic” ability is to be herself and to thwart intrusions, be it an intrusion into her mind, her 13 14

Clute and Grant, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 942. Pratchett, The Illustrated Wee Free Men, 239.

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body or her land. The active, responsible, down-to-earth heroine, portrayed with strong feminist sensibility, as well as Terry Pratchett’s much-loved humour, belongs among the most appealing characters in contemporary young adult fiction.

Works Cited Baldry, Cherith. “Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature.” In The Children’s Books edited by Andrew M.Butler, Edward James, Farah Mendlesohn, 41-65. Baltimore: Old Earth Books, 2004. Clute, John, and John Grant. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999. Eliade, Mircea. Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions: Essays in Comparative Religion. Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 1978. Kertzer, Adrienne. “Does Not Happen”: M.T. Anderson and Terry Pratchett. Imagine the Nation.” In Children and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood edited by Heather Snell and Lorna Hutchison, 211227. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2014. Ellerbe, Helen. The Dark Side of Christian History. New York: The Morningstar Books, 1995. Hourihan, Margery. Deconstructing the Hero: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature. London: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. Pratchett, Terry, and Jacqueline Simpson. The Folklore of Discworld. London: Doubleday, 2008. —. The Illustrated Wee Free Men. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2008. —. The Shepherd’s Crown. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2015. —. Wintersmith. New York: Harper Tempest, 2006. Purkiss, Diane. The Witch in History. Early Modern and Twentieth Century Representations. London: Routledge, 1996.

VIEWS ON RACIAL CATEGORIZATION IN WILLIAM FAULKNER’S AND KATHRYN STOCKETT’S NOVELS INGRIDA EGLƠ ŽINDŽIUVIENƠ AND TEODOR MATEOC

The aim of the article is to disclose similar tendencies in the texts by two American authors, William Faulkner and Kathryn Stockett, for questioning the role of personal trauma and its cause, which lies in the memory of cultural and racial stereotypes. In revisiting two of Faulkner’s novels of the Old South (The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Light in August (1932)), the authors of the article argue that they display a certain configuration of racial encounters that demonstrate the growing effort of a white, liberal consciousness to understand the racially other. Such narratives, in which black portraiture is central, posit the notion of race as constructed by denouncing the clichés and cultural taboos instrumental in consolidating the white identity, while simultaneously relegating the African-American traumatic experiences to those of marginality or exclusion. Although Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help (2009) represents the same issues, if of a different period, it similarly explores the personal trauma and examines traumatic experience, the cause of which is social marginality. Similarly to William Faulkner’s position, Kathryn Stockett focuses on the understanding of the other. In addition, Stockett employs the memory strategies of transmittance of trauma, which may suggest further problems of transgenerational trauma. These two authors, representatives of different literary periods, in a similar way, but employing different strategies, examine the personal trauma, project it onto a larger historical background and disclose the role of victimization in the personal trauma, which results in the loss of integrity and character of the South. The article explores the dimensions and the role of time and space in collective memory. Drawing on trauma theory, we examine how national or collective traumas become “ingrained in collective memories and

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provide reference points to draw upon when the need arises.”1 We also question the proximity of the author to a collective trauma and discuss ways of its representation in a work of fiction. Often the author’s standpoint is based on and influenced by personal experience. In addition, the dimension of time becomes one of the most significant issues in describing traumatic experience: the time span that separates the traumatic event(s) and the time of reflection on traumatic experience often determines the tone and style of narration. In addition, the dimension of time directly influences the concept of the place of trauma and may determine the symbolism connected with the place. In addition, the dimension of time is viewed from the perspective of the duration of the post-traumatic period. We raise a rhetorical question whether it is possible to determine the end of the post-traumatic period or its continuous duration. Moreover, the posttraumatic period in itself can be even considered a part of the collective trauma. Inevitably, the dimension of time is related to the generational transmittance of trauma and, thus, shapes national identity. Finally, different types of collective memory in view of the aspects of time and space/place will be discussed. When working on different projects together, we examined literary discussion of historical traumas in modernist and postmodernist literature. Therefore, we came to the conclusion that it would be valuable to search for some links between modernist and postmodernist fiction in conveying the trauma of the South or rather trauma related to the racial issues in the South of the U.S. This idea has encouraged us to take up two authors– William Faulkner (1897–1962), a famous American modernist, and a starting author Kathryn Stockett (b. 1969), both of them related to the Mississippi region and the trauma of the American South. This daring choice has not been randomly made and approached. It is this comparison that helps to better comprehend the ongoing trauma and its transgenerational effect. Another significant aim was to examine how the authors who represent different epochs deal with the trauma caused by racial discrimination. We were particularly interested in the relationship between fact and fiction in the representation of the long-lasting collective and personal trauma in a work of fiction, and questioned the dimensions of deep memory and common memory. In our research we investigated the issue if a work of fiction makes it possible to empathize and identify with those who have experienced trauma. We also considered the “mammy”

1

Neal, National Trauma and Collective Memory. Extraordinary Events in the American Experience, 7.

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figure from the aspect of traumatic experience and rendering of the transgenerational trauma. Dori Laub states that massive trauma, described in the “narrative of extreme human pain”, psychic and physical, bears “historical evidence” to the traumatizing events.2 Thus, a trauma novel definitely includes a realistic and historical dimension and is often based on the documents and testimonies of the traumatized. In the trauma novel, the reconstruction of collective trauma becomes a process of restatement, during which the response to the work of fiction contains both personal and transpersonal dimension. When distinguishing the crises precipitating a national trauma, Arthur G. Neal determines two types–“an acute crisis that impinges upon the normal course of events in an abrupt and dramatic fashion” and a “chronic, enduring, and long-lasting.”3 Kristiaan Versluys observes that many problems arise “in connection with the narrativization of collective trauma.”4 The scholar states that “as trauma is deemed to be unsayable, any saying of it may be seen as a cheapening, a reduction of its irreducible atrocity to something less threatening, more controllable.”5 E. Ann Kaplan observes that “politics intervenes in how […] trauma is ‘managed’” and states that “traumatic events may affect the discourse of an entire nation’s public narratives.”6 The results of repressed emotions, or repression, what Freud regarded as “a special defence mechanism in coping with trauma” may gain quite another form.7 For the survivor of trauma, Cathy Caruth observes, “the truth of the event may reside not only in its brutal facts, but also in the way that their occurrence defies simple comprehension.”8 This reasoning may aid in understanding the dangers that a trauma novel/trauma narrative may encounter: as van der Kolk and van der Hart have argued, “traumatic memories are the unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experiences, which need to be […] transformed into narrative language.”9 Van der Kolk and van der Hart pose a question whether “it is not a sacrilege of the 2

Laub, “Bearing Witness”, 57. Neal, 7-8. 4 Versluys, Out of the Blue. September 11 and the Novel, 11. 5 Ibid., 11. 6 Kaplan, Trauma Culture. The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature, 66. 7 Smelser, “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma”, 50. 8 Caruth, “Recapturing the Past”, 153. 9 van der Kolk and van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma”, 176. 3

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traumatic experience to play with the reality of the past,”10 as if predicting possible reactions to a trauma novel. Trauma narratives can recreate the experience for those who were not there–for example, readers of a trauma novel encounter someone’s experience, which may supplement their knowledge or inform them of the tragic event(s). Historical traumatic experience is the source that marks and defines contemporary individual identity as well as cultural identity. Trauma novels containing the transgenerational sharing of experience of violence, loss and suffering, disclose ethnic identity. Collective memories of massive trauma haunt descendants and re-inscribe the trauma on later generations. Thus, a trauma narrative, the theme of which is based on historical traumatic events, describes how they “change both individual and social identity”11; often such novels explore multidimensional pain, creating “continuing legacies of pain” that are passed from one generation to another12. Cathy Caruth observes that “the story of trauma, then, as the narrative of belated experience, far from telling of an escape from reality […] rather attests to its endless impact on a life.”13 E. Ann Kaplan rightly observes that “the question of when and how a national discourse can allow recognition of its past sufferings, or can permit knowledge about violent crimes […] to surface in the public sphere, is extremely interesting.”14 Kaplan also outlines the set of relationships to the perception of trauma: 1) direct experience of trauma (trauma victim); 2) direct observation of another’s trauma (bystander, one step removed); 3) visually mediated trauma (i.e. moviegoer, viewing trauma on film or other media, two steps removed); 4) reading a trauma narrative and constructing visual images of semantic data (news reader, three steps removed); 5) hearing a […] trauma narrative (perhaps the most complex of all the positions, since it not only involves both visual and semantic channels, but includes the face-to-face encounter with the survivor)15. Following Kaplan, different levels of the proximity to trauma narrative exist. Especially useful in this observation is the definition of different types of attitude to trauma narrative. In a similar way, the author’s (of the trauma narrative) proximity to trauma is important. Several types of authors of trauma narratives exist from the aspect of the dimension of time in the rendering of trauma: 1) the author – victim; 2) the author–the narrator of someone else’s traumatic experience; 10

Ibid., 179. Vickroy, 195. 12 Ibid., 218. 13 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 7. 14 Kaplan, 67. 15 Ibid., 91-92. 11

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3) the author–a creator of a fictional narrative, based on true facts. The discussion of the second group of authors leads us to the second understanding of time: What were the influential factors in the process of writing? What factors made the author of the narrative consider describing the traumatic experience? Therefore, the aspect of time is equally important in discussing the author’s and the reader’s roles and their influence on transgenerational trauma or different forms and meanings of recovery from it. As it has been already stated, the constructs of memory are naturally linked to or built on the dimension of time. Robert Eaglestone draws attention to the “rethinking of ‘afterwardsness’ and the structure of experience and time [which] is inextricably tied to language not only to the sinews of tense, but also through the deeper existential questions.”16 Another equally serious question is the one related to what is unforgettable and what its role in the process of recovery after trauma may be. The semantic meaning of recovery is worth our attention: (1) recovery may be used in the sense of getting over traumatic experience or (2) re-covering of the traumatic past. Accordingly, the time dimension can be applied to the discussion of these two meanings. Jenny Edkins suggests a new understanding of “trauma time”, implying the continuous aspect of it.17 Gabriel Schwab’s Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (2010) offers a useful standpoint to relate both the recovery after trauma and recovery of traumatic experience to the challenges that many authors of trauma narratives and readers may face in dealing with different types of trauma. Schwab’s formulation of “opening of the crypt” used to describe the process of narrating the traumatic experience: she ascertains that “secret pathways into the crypt […] hold the promise of transformation and social recognition.”18 Schwab states that “the process of traumatic encryptment and its impact on psychic and social life, thus “[… brings] a different social recognition to histories of violence not by revealing the silenced violent act but giving testimony to its lingering toxic effects and its transmission to those forced to suffer the silence.”19 Following such an allegoric view on the traumas of the past, it is possible to view the author’s role differently: there is certainly some danger included in this process of coming closer to the national crypt, 16

Eaglestone, “Knowledge. ‘Afterwardsness’ and the Future of Trauma Theory”, 18. 17 Edkins, “Time, Personhood, Politics”, 127. 18 Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma, 56. 19 Ibid., 56.

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opening it and uncovering the wounds of the past. Should it be done? Who has a right to do it? What is the purpose of this whole process? Will the opening of the crypt mark the end of the post-traumatic period or will it extend still further, resulting in the formation of “wound culture”20? As Arthur G. Neal observes, “conditions of trauma grow out of an injury, a wound, or an assault on social life as it is known and understood. Something terrible, deplorable, or abnormal has happened, and social life has lost its predictability.”21 These issues bring us closer to the aspect of place or space, related to traumatic experience. The place of trauma plays a very specific role: it functions to portray trauma’s effect through metaphoric and material means. Descriptions of the geographical place(s) of traumatic experience and the memory of them may express a larger cultural context, built on the clash of different social values that influence the recollection of the event and the reconfiguration of the self and even statehood. The physical environment offers the opportunity to examine both the personal and cultural histories attached to the described landscape(s) (we may call them traumascapes). Thus, in the trauma novel or other forms of trauma narratives, the place or setting becomes a structural element that organizes the memory and meaning of trauma. As Versluys states, “trauma must be given a place within one’s recollection in order to be (se)cured.”22 The place may become a signifier of trauma (for example, a Southern state in the U.S.), which functions most evidently and in different forms of memory. The memory place refers to an internalized place, which could be either remembered or imagined. The term ‘sites of memory’, coined by Pierre Nora (lieux de mémoire), denote any significant entity, material or immaterial, which has become a symbolic element of the material heritage of a community. Sites of memory are where culture crystalizes itself, and can include places such as archives, museums, or memorials; concepts or practices such as commemorative rituals; objects such as emblems or manuals; and symbols.23

The place may serve as a password among the witnesses and, therefore, can be recognized by the readers of the traumatic narrative. The place also can form or transform the memory sites and become a part of national or

20

Berlant in Schwab, 114. Neal, 4. 22 Versluys, 3. 23 Nora, in Whitehead, Memory, 161. 21

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collective memory. The place of trauma can in itself become a powerful symbol, on which collective memory is constructed. Different forms of mentioning or returning to it may lead to the understanding of “symbolic struggles”, as Neil J. Smelser has observed, “over the proper remembering of traumas.”24 The proximity (not necessarily physical) to the place of trauma can become one of the leading structures or themes of the trauma narrative. It may also help to inscribe trauma on collective memory. As Jeffrey C. Alexander states, it is important “to restore collective psychological health by lifting societal repression and restoring memory. To achieve this, many scholars stress the importance of finding–through public acts of commemoration, cultural representation, and public political struggle–some collective means for undoing repression and allowing the pent-up emotions of loss and mourning to be expressed.”25 These ideas also point at the significance of fictional narratives that disclose traumatic experience. We probably could not disagree with Neil J. Smelser, who states that collective memory is built of generation after generation engaging “in compulsive examining and reexamining, bringing up new aspects of the trauma, reinterpreting, reevaluation, and battling over symbolic significance.”26 Therefore, it is possible to state that collective memory “is a reservoir of hundreds of different renditions of the memory–some dead, some latent, some still active, some ‘hot’, but in all events many that are available for resuscitation.”27 Many scholars have observed the fluidity and flexibility of collective memory, which is similar to the description or levels/types of personal memory: habit (repetition)/pure memory (survival of personal memories in the unconscious) (Bergson); voluntary/involuntary (Proust). In her book Memory (2009), Anne Whitehead states that “memories are transmuted even as they are transmitted, and evolve as the society changes.”28 Anne Whitehead also states that “the ‘memory’ of traumas is thus not subject to the usual narrative or verbal mechanisms of recall, but is instead organized as bodily sensations, behavioral reenactments, nightmares, and flashbacks.”29 Delbo30 emphasizes a distinction between “deep memory” (bound with the senses) and “external memory” or “intellectual memory”. The term “collective memory” became a widely used term in the twentieth century. 24

Smelser, 50. Alexander, Trauma. A Social Theory, 12. 26 Smelser, 54. 27 Ibid., 54. 28 Whitehead, Memory, 39. 29 Ibid., 115. 30 Whitehead, Memory, 118. 25

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Maurice Halbwachs’ works on collective memory (On Collective Memory (1925; 1992) and Collective Memory (1950)) emphasized the fact that memory can be interpreted as a social phenomenon, and, thus, moved memory studies further from the understanding of memory as a ‘solitary act’ and pointing at its possible variants of collective performance. Group memory is seen as a special act of “shared concerns and ideas.”31 The close relationship between the individual memory and group or collective memory can be considered: collective memory may have a strong influence on the capacity of individual or personal memory; likewise, individual memory influences the generality of collective memory. Keeping closer to the dimensions of time and space, it can be observed that both types of memory can draw gap-filling elements from one another. This point of view has inspired many scholars to further investigate the role of collective memory: thus, new terms have recently appeared (“shared memory” corresponding to Halbwachs’ theory of collective memory); “common memory” (meaning collected memory). These discussions emphasize the platforms for the construction of shared and social memories. Another issue that becomes important when we consider collective trauma, is the distinction between collective and cultural memory. Here, the main aspect can be seen as the one related to the dimension of time: cultural memory is concerned with events from a more distant past, beyond living memory.32 The term collective trauma is used in this article to denote the sharing of traumatic experience and, consequently, collective memory to describe shared memory, emphasizing the inter-generational and cross-generation transmission. Following Jeffrey C. Alexander’s consideration of institutional arenas where narrative of social suffering may take place33, it is possible to create the levels on which collective memory functions: religious, aesthetic, legal, scientific, mass media, state bureaucracy and others (such as politics). On these levels special types of narratives and means are undertaken to construct collective memory. Alexander rightly emphasizes the relationship between collective memory and collective identity. As collective memory may influence shifts or changes in collective identity, this may result in “a searching re-membering of the collective past, for memory is not only social and fluid but also deeply connected to the contemporary sense of the self.”34 A different role of time can be interpreted: a regular return to the

31

Whitehead, Memory, 128-129. Whitehead, Memory, 132. 33 Alexander, 19-23. 34 Alexander, 26. 32

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past may be regular, but not exactly the same–with altered variants of rituals or description of trauma in narratives. When discussing the central issues of collective memory, it must be stated that it is built on the pillars of personal memory, which becomes collectivized and turns into a significant factor shaping collective identity. As Arthur G. Neal observes, “all collective traumas have some bearing on national identity. While in some cases national trauma results in enhancing a sense of unity within a society, in other cases collective traumas have fragmenting effects.”35 The dimension of time, which is most naturally exploited in collective memory, stands together with the collective memory of the place. These two aspects (time and place) are always useful in the discussion of collective traumas and memory of it. Set in northern Mississippi, Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury depicts the life of the Compson family and its gradual fall (financial disasters, loss of religious faith, reputation, tragic deaths of the family members, etc). Structurally, the novel is divided into four sections with different points of view: the first is written from the perspective of Benjamin “Benjy” Compson, a mentally sick 33-year-old man; the second section tells the story of his older brother Quentin Compson and his tragic death; in the third section, the point of view of Jason, cynical younger brother is applied; in the fourth and final section, the third-person-point of view is used; the fourth section is centered on Dilsey, one of the Compsons’ black servants. Mainly in this section, two worlds are contrasted–Dilsey’s family’s everyday life and the Compsons’ chaotic and turbulent life. The symbolism of Dilsey’s character and life leads to the indirect transtextual links between the Mammy figure in Faulkner’s and Stockett’s novels. It is because of Dilsey that the order in the family is at least attempted. In 1945, Faulkner wrote a “Compson Appendix” to be included with future printings of The Sound and the Fury. It contains a 30page history of the Compson family from 1699 to 1945. In the second section of the novel, Quentin’s deteriorating state of mind may refer to the described state of the South. The action in the fourth section focuses on Dilsey, who is contrasted to the downfall of the Compson family. The action takes place in 1928. It is through her character that we see the contrast to the destroyed owners. Dilsey Gibson is an observer of the destructive decline of the family: it is this feature of the observer that is also present in Stockett’s novel, however, with additional features and interpretation.

35

Neal, 29.

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Faulkner’s novel Light in August is set in a fictional Jefferson, Yoknapatwpha County, Mississippi, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi. In this novel, Faulkner explores themes of race, sex, class and religion in the American South. He describes a society, which is ruled by stereotypes and prejudices. The action takes place in the 1930s, when racial segregation was legalized in the South. The second plot line focuses on the life of Joe Christmas, who has suspicions about having African American ancestors. He shifts between black and white societies (at the same time “shifting” from one identity to the other), feeling an outcast in both. Finally, accused of a murder, he is hunted by the police, put in jail, manages to escape just before the trial, but is killed and castrated by Percy Grimm, the Captain of the State National Guard. Thus, both of Faulkner’s novels are grounded in the perception of the race in the secularized and antagonistic society or at least aim at exposing racial issues. In her debut novel The Help, Kathryn Stockett describes the life of the African American maids in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s. Using the first-person narrative perspective (African American maids tell their stories, while a white young woman helps to record their stories as well as stories of other maids and publish a book), the author creates a transgenerational link not only within the life stories of these characters but also creates indirect transtextual links with Faulkner’s texts. Thus, considering the issues of racial discrimination, the image of a black servant in the novels by Faulkner and Stockett can be treated as a key to transtextual links that convey the trauma of the South. The proximity of both authors to the trauma of the racial South leads to the idea that the authors take up the task of transmitting the trauma. Despite the structural differences among these novels, it is the “Mammy” archetype that functions most evidently as a transtextual bond between different periods. The background of this figure discloses the history of slavery, especially the line of African American female slavery in the U.S. In choosing the voice of an omniscient narrator, both authors turn into “learning witnesses”, to use Whitehead’s phrase36, and perform the role of the transfer of the racial trauma of the South. As Brown and Stentiford observe, the first three decades of the twentieth century were marked by the outbursts of race riots across the United States: for example, during the “Red Summer” of 1919, 25 race riots in different states took place.37 Such events as the march of the Ku Klux Klan in Washington, D.C. in 1928, or Supreme court procedures 36

Whitehead, Trauma Fiction, 8. Brown and Stentiford, The Jim Crow Encyclopedia: Greenwood Milestones in African American History, 128. 37

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over the issue of African American students being admitted to colleges and universities in the 1930s and later, as well as numerous other events and tensions across the country must have inspired many to consider racial issues. In 1947, President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights issued its 178-page report, calling for laws requiring states to end discrimination in education, mandating a ban against discrimination in the armed services, laws to guarantee fair employment practices for blacks, federal prohibition of lynching, repeal of poll taxes and other discriminatory voting restrictions, denial of federal grants when discrimination is in evidence, an expanded civil rights division at the Justice Department, creation of permanent civil rights commissions at the federal and state levels, specific federal ban on police brutality, and enforcement of a Supreme Court decision against restrictive real estate covenants.38 However, in reality, still a lot had to be accomplished: by 1949, at least 17 states (Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia), and the District of Columbia had enacted laws requiring racial segregation of public school children. Four other states–Arizona, Kansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming– provided for a local option in determining whether to segregate public education. Wyoming was the only state that did not exercise this option.39 In the 1950s, desegregation of public schools was the sign of different processes in society. As Brown and Stentiford state, the Baton Rouge bus boycott was the first of its kind in the American South that attempted to end segregation on city buses.40 The processes of enforced desegregation throughout the sixth decade; mainly, these and similar issues must have formed the basis for Stockett’s novel The Help, while the issues of racism in American society appeared gradually in Faulkner’s texts. More often than not, to be concerned with images of people usually means to focus on those considered outsiders in a culture. (‘Images of Whites in American Literature’, for instance, would be a very unlikely title). Moreover, in the case of black portraiture in white fiction such images are of an entire group of people placed together only on the basis of race, which is itself a problematic term. Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally significantly makes the point in an oft-quoted passage from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (“Good gracious! Anybody hurt?” When Huck replies: “No’m, killed a nigger”, her comment is: “Well, it’s lucky 38

Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, 38. 39 Brown and Stentiford, 104. 40 Ibid., 66.

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because sometimes people do get hurt.”)41 In a society that has not always considered Blacks “people”, attention to image is crucial, indeed. Aunt Sally’s remark helps to explain much of the polemic around images of blacks in (white) literature: are these images positive or negative? Stereotypical or realistic? Archetypal or idealized? More than half a century after Faulkner’s death and although the terminology has changed from “colored” and “Negro” to “Black” and “African American”, the writer’s freedom to present a variety of images without concern for audience reaction remains an issue that is still worth discussing. A lengthy elaboration on the topic is Sterling A. Brown’s essay “A Century of Negro Portraiture in American Literature” (1966). Covering the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s, Brown identifies a whole range of stereotypes found in pre-Civil War literature, especially in fiction by whites: (a) the contented slave/the wretched freed man (these two tellingly often occur in pairs), (b) the comic minstrel, (c) the persecuted victim, (d) the noble savage, (e) the submissive Christian, and (f) the tragic octoroon. Looking at post-Civil War fiction, again especially that by whites, he adds (g) the brute Negro and (h) the tragic mulatto.42 With several remarkable exceptions, figures of blacks are not usually central in Faulkner’s narrative; they are given “supporting roles”. In such early works as Soldier’s Pay and Sartoris, Faulkner’s own consciousness and prejudices coincide with those of his white characters. The roles performed by blacks are traditional ones–faithful servants, black mammies, train porters, and yard men–who appear as a validation of whiteness. In opposition to a stereotypical background for the blacks, always presented on the basis of group identity, white individualism is always foregrounded and exemplary. Blacks are always judged for what they do rather than for what they are; their performative roles are valued over their individual worth. In The Sound and the Fury, Quentin Compson praises total devotion and submission and echoes Faulkner’s own cryptic tribute to blacks: “They endured”. For Quentin, the behavior of the blacks has a quality of “shabby and timeless patience, of static serenity […] and paradoxical reliability”, showing “a fond and unflagging tolerance for white folks’ vagaries like that of a grandparent for unpredictable and troublesome children.”43 Such benign stereotyping is countered by malignant stereotyping: blacks as animals: “mules”, “coons”, “monkeys”, “wild buffaloes”. “They ain’t human”, says the sheriff of Go Down, Moses. The black man as rapist 41

Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 222. Brown, “A Century of Negro Portraiture in American Literature”, 63-96. 43 Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 107-108. 42

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and murderer, Joe Christmas, in Light in August, illustrates this stereotype in a paradoxical way. He kills Joanna Burden because she wanted him to become a reformable “nigger,” but in doing so, he endorses the white stereotype and proves to be unreformable; he acknowledges his black blood by acting according to the expectations of the white others. His subsequent death is meant to cleanse evil and reestablish the status quo. What is regarded as a violation of the southern laws serves, ironically, the social system and reinforces divisions in terms of color. Discussing the process of the writing of The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner had admitted that having failed to tell the story in the first three sections (from the pre-linguistic perspective of Benjy and then the narrative perspectives of Quentin and Jason, respectively), he tried to retell it more directly in the fourth, concluding section of the novel. A more balanced view of the Compsons’ household could have been provided by Dilsey’s narrative perspective. However, Faulkner chose to speak on her behalf and mediate her image through his omniscience. Basically, this choice of Dilsey’s narrative perspective has inspired the search for the same perspective in Stockett’s novel. Listening to the traumatic narratives or observing traumatic events and experiences, and then voicing them, makes two authors, Faulkner and Stockett, similar in this daring endeavor. Nevertheless, by recreating the domestic universe of her life and by bringing forth the qualities demanded by the performance of her daily chores, Dilsey, the black mammy, emerges, for the first time in Faulkner’s fiction, as a fully delineated character that is the bearer of positive human values. Her luminous presence is contrasted to the devilish character of Jason (for whom Dilsey is “somebody in the kitchen”) or with the arrogance of Miss Quentin (“you damn old nigger”) and her endurance and sense of purpose (“I does de bes I kin”) with the erratic, hectic life of Quentin. She is the detainer of the few, basic moral values: strength, endurance, compassion and altruistic love and this brings her close to Benjy and his intuitive sense of values, for Benjy cannot be judged in moral terms. It is noteworthy that the psychological distance Faulkner takes to look at Dilsey results in a portrait that appears to be idealized, a desired projection rather than a plausible prototype. The author never uses a black character as the centre of his consciousness, but prefers the agency of the white observer. It is true that Dilsey endures and this is seen as an affirmative quality. However, the statement has to be qualified by adding that such endurance is not tested in rebellion, or at least in protest, but in submission to the demands of her white masters. The author does not quite emphasize Dilsey’s otherness but rather presents it for close scrutiny. As a

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result of benign stereotyping (the “good nigger”) she is a rather narcissistic tribute paid to the old southern order, reinforcing the idea of benevolent racial superiority. R. P. Warren suggests that her treatment is “condescending,” while Ralph Ellison sees in her portrait “merely the comforting illusion of black forgiveness which the white man must cling to.”44 In Irving Howe’s opinion, Dilsey is the last of Faulkner’s major characters “who feels at home” in the South. Such assessment of the black servant challenges critical consensus and questions her image of a “moral archetype”: No sensitive reader would care to deny her strength and moral beauty, but I should like to register a dissent from the effort of certain critics to apotheosize her as the embodiment of Christian resignation and endurance. The terms in which Dilsey is conceived are thoroughly historical, and by their nature become increasingly unavailable to us: a fact which if it does not lessen our admiration for her as a figure in the novel, does limit our capacity to regard her as a moral archetype or model.45

However, Faulkner’s treatment of Dilsey is not one-dimensional; as the novel progresses to its climax, she gradually assumes a role that runs counter to the wide-spread stereotype of the submissive black: she becomes a moral yardstick used to judge the Compsons for having fallen short of their self-imposed obligations, judging them not in terms of race but in generic human terms. For Dilsey is the only character who lives in the present, as the moral survivor of a world that is epitomized by the fall of one of its aristocratic families, the Compsons. The image of a moral yardstick appears in Stockett’s novel: the judgmental opinion of the maids in their discussion of the white families they work for casts additional light on the character of the mammy. The image of a shadow, which is a recurrent motif in The Sound and the Fury, also appears, only in a lesser degree, in Stockett’s novel. However, it is through this image that both authors convey the traumatic experience and the long-lasting trauma of the American South. It is ironic that the only characters capable of achieving the solid sense of self that Quentin is seeking are the blacks: Dilsey, and also Deacon, the janitor who befriends Southern students at Harvard and who, while giving lip-service to the whites, is always capable of shedding “that self he had long since taught himself to wear in the world’s eyes”46 and returning to 44

Warren, Faulkner. A Collection of Critical Essays, 258. Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study, 107. 46 Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 99, 123. 45

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his authentic self. Louis Hatcher, “a man prepared for living”, who “displays a personal integration of self and harmony with the world,”47 with his primitive faith that he can keep danger at bay, by simply keeping his lantern clean, represents an alternative identity, deeply rooted in physical reality and human communion. This is exactly what Quentin is craving for and if he understands black behavior intuitively, he realizes that it will always remain inaccessible to him. The fact is, however, that as “a Southerner”, he is “always conscious of niggers”, and this is apparent in his stream-of-consciousness narrative by the constant presence of his “shadow,” suggesting a link between it and black identity. In his mind, the shadow becomes an almost autonomous creature, dark, histrionic, simultaneously fascinating and threatening. He both enjoys its presence and seeks to destroy it in the effort to remain “white” and “civilized.” This shadowy presence/absence, as Singal states, “embodies in concentrated form all the traits that southern whites have traditionally projected onto blacks in order to shore up the supposed ‘purity’ of white identity.”48 In Light in August (1932), the issue of race as “color” embodies a metonymical function which displaces the black character. Definition on an exclusively racial basis is a re-definition from the dominant standpoint of the white cultural ideology. Inward perception of personal worth runs counter the culturally-constructed image. In such a case, self-definition becomes problematic as it is attempted against heavy odds. Hence, the tragedy of the characters, who try to assert themselves violently, like Joe Christmas, is on display. The irony of his condition comes from the unresolved riddle of his birth. According to Faulkner, this is “the most tragic condition a man could find himself in–not to know what he is and to know that he will never know”49. He is, as Kazin felicitously put it, “a walking oxymoron”, both white and black, and neither. Moreover, he is a “tabula rasa […] on which anyone can write out an identity for him and make him believe it.”50 His negro blood is only a possibility. The much quoted scene at the orphanage, involving Joe and a black boy, might be the crucial moment in his life-long quest: “What you watching me for boy?” and he said, “How come you are a nigger?” and the nigger said, “Who told you I am a nigger, you little white trash bastard?” and he says, “I ain’t a nigger”, and the nigger says, “You are worse than that. You don’t know what you are. And more than that, you wont never know. You’ll live and you’ll die, and you wont never know…don’t nobody but God know what 47

Davies, 98. Singal, 106. 49 In Singal, 316. 50 Kazin, 148. 48

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you is.”51 Yet, Joe Christmas cannot accept the sentence; he feels he must know. The orphanage scene triggers the awareness of his self as estranged and foretells a future of alienation and loneliness. His sense of selfestrangement comes from internalizing his otherness, or, rather, from the judgments passed on him by hostile others. Racism draws its power from prejudices and misconceptions, from fictions shared by all his victimizers. The first of them is his grandfather, Doc Hines, the foul-mouthed racist and sexist, upholding the idea that only the white man can claim the dignity of humanity while women and blacks are of an inferior essence. Marginal as he may be in the narrative, Doc Hines is, nevertheless, an important presence, for he is not only instrumental in Joe’s struggle to identify himself but also as voicing general “truths” concerning race and gender. His behavior expresses itself as religious fanaticism, misogyny, or verbal violence. Nevertheless, when he says that Joe is black, the community believes him. This is so because the sexual myths that Hines invokes are cultural stereotypes to which the community subscribes, even though it realizes that Hines is fanatically obsessed with them. To be more specific, the white community of Mottstown, Jefferson, and elsewhere fear miscegenation because it “taints” white blood and confuses the distinctive categories of white and black. Consequently, this community fears black men and stereotypes them as rapists and defilers of Southern womanhood. Given these cultural constructions, when his daughter Milly is “seduced” by the circus performer and gets pregnant, he “naturally” assumes that the circus performer has “nigger” blood, since both Hines and his community see the sexual appetite of the black man for white women as part of his “nature”. The stereotypes and myths are so deeply in place, so naturalized, that as soon as the townspeople find a white woman murdered, they readily believe that it was an anonymous crime “committed not by a negro but by Negro”. Since this is a Negro’s crime, any person committing it could be categorized as “negro”, regardless of skin color. Joe’s second victimizer is his foster father, Simon McEachern, who taught him the harsh virtues of white Protestantism: manhood and a strong contempt for women. These are supposed to turn him into a white southern male, but as long as he believes himself to be tainted with blackness, he cannot accept them. As such, he is confronted with an impossible choice: simultaneously imprisoned and excluded from his white father’s value system. However strong his desire to assert his freedom and not take sides may be, he cannot break the circle of his fate. Ironically, death only will give him a recognizable identity: as a black that kills a white woman he 51

Faulkner, Light in August, 288-9.

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acts predictably, according to the expectations of the others, and becomes of service to the community only as a scapegoat. According to Andre Bleikasten, “through Christmas’s scapegoating racial purity is restored, white supremacy reaffirmed; through his emasculation the danger that hung over southern ladyhood is warded off.”52 In a community governed by such strict divisions, identities are distributed according to prevalent codes that function on an “either/or” basis which means that every identity is tied to a class, gender or race. In this respect, Joe Christmas is a living challenge to the community’s sanctioned norms: He never acted like either a nigger or a white man….. That was what made the folks so mad. For him to be a murderer and all dressed up and walking the town like he dared them to touch him, when he ought to have been skulking and hiding in the woods, muddy and dirty and running. It was like he never knew he was a murderer, let alone a nigger, too.53

These are the comments of the people on Joe’s behavior at Mottstown shortly before his capture. What “makes the folks so mad” is not so much the presumed miscegenation as the lack of any sign of it, the visible invisibility of his blackness. Joe’s presence subverts the “either/or” logic and, at the same time, points to the unacknowledged origin of racism, exposing it as a mere fiction, as a cultural construct. As to the process of identity formation in the case of Joe Christmas, Donald M. Kartiganer argues that the hero instinctively attempts to rebel against the cultural conditioning that has molded him and seeks to attain a genuine identity of his own. Given the color of his skin, Joe might have passed for a white if he had chosen to and could have thus enjoyed “a single identity” that would have spared him much trouble. That choice, however, would have required giving up the “black” part of his self which would have meant the surrender of his authenticity. That is why Joe is keen on preserving, to the very end, an identity based on “doubleness” and choosing “a wholeness that serves alike the dual sides of himself.”54 The races compete rather than mix in Joe Christmas; they claim him equally to the extent that his body may be said not to have a racial identity, but to be a site occupied by more than one (racial) identity. Given the lack of reliable information concerning Joe’s black blood, his racial status is 52

Bleikasten, 312. Faulkner, Light in August, 263. 54 Kartiganer, The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner’s Novels, 41-43. 53

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actually based upon a relationship with no positive terms. Being neither white, nor black, he can be both. Joe Christmas’s plight is indicative of how Faulkner had come to see the southern race relations in a radically new manner, different not only from his previous novel, but also from the prevailing cultural ideology of his time. Joe’s real predicament is a continuous psychological emasculation at the hands of white society stemming from the stereotyped racial identities embedded in his consciousness during his youth, a stealing of his manhood appropriately objectified by his effective castration, as a supposed black rapist, by Percy Grimm. In the Southern racist climate of the time, Faulkner suggests, to be black means to be unable to exercise one’s own true powers as a man. That is why what Faulkner provides here is a damning portrait of the wellsprings of Southern racism so advanced in its insights that it was decades ahead of its time.55

As J. B. Wittenberg remarks, what is striking in Faulkner’s novel is that, although primarily concerned with race, Light in August does not actually feature a significant character, which is “identifiably AfricanAmerican.” Thus, this “absence only emphasizes the text’s predominant concern with race as a linguistic and cultural construct rather than a biological given.”56 Indeed, it can be stated that in the course of the novel, Faulkner indirectly provides a meditation on the issues regarding racial notions in the American South in the early twentieth century and, simultaneously, explores the role of language in the construction of subjectivity. Tragic effects of unfounded racial categorization are dominant in the novel. The narrative intensifies these effects by examining the function of socio-linguistic structures set in the cultural context of a closed, xenophobic Southern town at the beginning of the twentieth century. In such a small town the ideology of the community is strictly codified and extremely judgmental of anybody or anything that challenges it. The only outcome for rebellious individuals is perpetual separation, flight or even death. By giving centrality to the notion of “race”, William Faulkner’s Light in August examines both the inevitable human tendency to categorize and classify and the validity of such categories themselves. This results in the discussion of the tragic paradox of racial designation and discloses the 55

Singal, William Faulkner. The Making of a Modernist, 175. In Fadiman, Faulkner’s ‘Light in August’: A Description and Interpretation of the Revisions, 24-25; 42-43. 56

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processes of how cultural constructs affect human subjectivity and determine the functioning of an entire culture. The sense of belonging and at the same time not belonging to a particular group is also questioned by Stockett in her novel The Help, where even the title suggests definitely more than “maids.” Victimization resulting from marginalization is at the core of the personal trauma in Faulkner’s and Stockett’s novels. The thematic approach in Light in August is echoed in Stockett’s novel, offering the reader a sense of transtextual transfer of collective trauma. In her novel The Help, Kathryn Stockett takes up a contrasted approach; she implies psychological closeness, and in doing this, she seems to do both setting the links with Faulkner’s way of describing African American characters and filling in the gaps in black portraiture. Faulkner never used a black person as the centre of his consciousness, but rather preferred the agency of the white observer, while Stockett uses both the white observer and the “Help’s” point of view, emphasizing the latter one. It is true that Faulkner’s Dilsey endures racial discrimination, which is seen as an affirmative quality in Faulkner’s novel. However, such endurance is not tested in rebellion or at least in protest, but in submission to the demands of her white masters. Stockett’s characters (African American maids) are already close to rebellion: in The Help, the mammy takes up a different role, and, therefore transmits the message more openly. Faulkner does not quite engage in discussing Dilsey’s otherness but seems to present her character for closer analysis. Stockett chooses a close examination of the mammy figure and the consequences of her existence in a fragmented society. In her book Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (2008), Kimberly Wallace-Sanders initiates the discussion of a peculiar type of Southern nostalgia related to the mammy image and considers the dangers of the isolation of this image from related social issues.57 Wallace-Sanders rightly notices that painful experiences, which are ingrained in the mammy image, are often disregarded in fictional and non-fictional accounts.58 Although it would be rather daring to state, Stockett’s novel The Help may be even considered a fictional variant of Wallace-Sanders’ study of the mammy figure. In fact, Stockett examines several types of the mammy (observers, critics, rebels, etc.); however, in all those characters the author discusses the trauma of racial discrimination. The structural organization of the novel (the set of different stories told by 57

Wallace-Sanders, Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory,

3. 58

Ibid., 57.

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black maids to the white woman “Miss Skeeter”) makes the narrative similar to the sharing of trauma or the process of the transfer of trauma. Black maids, the “helps”, agree to tell their life stories of servitude in the white families. These stories open the crypt of deeply hidden secrets, based on social and racial prejudices. The period of the 1960s, when the action in the novel takes place, is still the period of segregation in the South. Thus the very idea of telling or recording the stories which expose issues of racial discrimination is dangerous. One of the main characters (and the narrators) in the novel, a young white woman Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, finds and helps to disclose reasons for a fragmented and antagonistic society: segregated schools, buses, swimming pools, rest rooms, political rights and freedom, and many other problems existing in the South. As Neal states, “discrimination in voter registration, housing, college admissions, and employment relegated blacks to an inferior status.”59 The traumatism of humiliation and a sense of inferiority are the central issues disclosed in the novel. However, in Stockett’s novel, different from the strategies employed by Faulkner, the white person becomes the agent of the trauma of the South. In Faulkner’s texts the white person is only a silent observer, while in Stockett’s novel the white character becomes an active agent or “a learning witness.”60 Therefore, it is possible to state that Faulkner uses the strategy of psychological distancing while considering or implying, although in many cases indirectly, the racial trauma. Stockett, on the contrary, chooses psychological closeness. What is more, she obviously considers the issue of proximity to traumatic experience: her white agent, the transmitter of the trauma, at first is not as close to the traumatic experience as at the end of the novel, when the narrator becomes the real witness of the scope of the trauma and its consequences. The image of a shadow in the portraiture of the mammy figure from Faulkner’s novels appears, only in a much intensified version, in The Help. The judgmental approach, which is quite obscure in The Sound and the Fury, becomes a strongly expressed and dominating one in Stockett’s novel. To conclude, the tragic effects of racial categorization are dominant in these three novels. The narrative intensifies these effects by examining the function of racial stereotypes set in the cultural contexts of closed, xenophobic Southern communities at the beginning or the middle of the twentieth century. In these small communities the social attitude seems to be strictly codified and extremely judgmental of anybody or anything that

59 60

Neal, 117. Whitehead, Trauma Fiction, 8.

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challenges it. The only outcome for rebellious individuals is perpetual separation, flight or even death. In victimizing the black, Faulkner and Stockett seem to suggest, the South loses its integrity and homogeneity. The theme of victimization of the black and the grand-scale trauma related to this is a central one in Kathryn Stockett’s novel. Another, quite significant, issue is the theme of re-inscribing traumatic experience. The Mammy, an observer from Faulkner’s texts, turns into a fighter, at the same time retaining the features of an observer in Stockett’s novel. By giving centrality to the notion of “race”, both William Faulkner and Kathryn Stockett seem to examine the inevitable human tendency to categorize, classify and question the validity of such categories. The thematic approach in The Sound and the Fury and Light in August is echoed in Stockett’s novel The Help. These considerations help to examine not only the tragic paradox of racial designation, but also help to see how such cultural constructs affect human subjectivity and determine the functioning of an entire culture. These texts also emphasize the role of the author’s proximity to trauma as well as the role of place and time of the trauma. The stories of collective traumas emphasize humanistic values and the limits of human endurance. They may also raise a question for the reader: What can be learned from the representation and testimonies of the traumatic events? Readers face fragile boundaries between empathy and identification with the victims. According to Gabriele Schwab, “trauma can never be completely silenced since its effects continue to operate unconsciously.”61 Discussion of historical and social origins of massive trauma may inspire changes in the “cosmopolitan form of memory.”62 Different interpretations of any trauma narrative (of any aesthetic form) may help to understand the effect of the collective trauma on personal and national identity, and to disclose the significance of fictionalized narratives of collective trauma for the analysis of world history.

Works Cited Primary Sources Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage Books, 1954. —. Light in August, London: Picador, 1993. Stockett, Kathryn. The Help. London: Penguin Books, 2010. 61 62

Schwab, 79. Whitehead, Memory, 150.

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Secondary Sources Alexander, Jeffrey C. Trauma. A Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. Bleikasten, Andre. “The Most Splendid Failure: The Sound and the Fury”. In Daniel J. Singal, William Faulkner. The Making of a Modernist, Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Brown, Nikki L.M. and Barry M. Stentiford. The Jim Crow Encyclopedia: Greenwood Milestones in African American History. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2008. Brown, Sterling A. “A Century of Negro Portraiture in American Literature.” Massachusetts Review 7.4 (1966): 63-96. Caruth, Cathy. “Recapturing the Past: Introduction.” In Trauma. Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth (ed.). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, 151-157. —. Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Davies, Thadious. Faulkner’s ‘Negro’: Art and the Southern Context. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Eaglestone, Robert. “Knowledge. ‘Afterwardsness’ and the Future of Trauma Theory”. In The Future of Trauma Theory. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Eds. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone. London: Routledge, 2014, 11-21. Edkins, Jenny. “Time, Personhood, Politics.” In The Future of Trauma Theory. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Eds. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone. London: Routledge, 2014, 127-139. Eyerman, Ron. “Cultural Trauma. Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity.” In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser and Piotr Sztompka. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004, 60-111. Fadiman, K., Regina. Faulkner’s ‘Light in August’: A Description and Interpretation of the Revisions. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1975. Howe, Irving. William Faulkner: A Critical Study. New York: Random House, Inc., 1962. Kartiganer, M. Donad. The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner’s Novels. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979.

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Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture. The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Kazin, Alfred. “The Stillness of Light in August. In Warren, R. P (ed.), Faulkner. A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N. J: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1966. Laub, Dori. “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening.” In Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. New York: Routledge, 1992, 57-74. Neal, Arthur G. National Trauma and Collective Memory. Extraordinary Events in the American Experience. 2nd ed. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2005. Nora, Pierre. Présent, nation, mémoire. Lonrai: Éditions Gallimard, 2011. Roberts, Gene and Hank Klibanoff. The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2006. Schwab, Gabriele. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Singal, Daniel J. William Faulkner. The Making of a Modernist. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Smelser, Neil J. “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma.” In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser and Piotr Sztompka. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004, 31-59. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Rhinehart &Co, 1954. van der Kolk, Bessel A. and Onno van der Hart. “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma.” In Trauma. Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth (ed.). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, 158-182. Versluys, Kristiaan. Out of the Blue. September 11 and the Novel. New York: Volumbia University Press, 2009. Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002. Wallace-Sanders, Kimberley. Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008 Warren, R. P., ed. Faulkner. A Collection of Critical Essays. New Jersey: Englewood Cliffs, 1966.

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Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. —. Memory. London: Routledge, 2009.

CONTRIBUTORS

Lena Ahlin is a Senior Lecturer in English at Kristianstad University, Sweden, where she teaches literature and writing. Current research interests include issues of transracial/transracial adoption in AsianAmerican life narratives, and the study of fictional representations of the Japanese American internment after Pearl Harbor, which focuses on the interconnectedness of remembrance, forgetting, silence and race. Recent publications include “’All we wanted to do, now that we were back in the world, was forget’: On Remembrance and Forgetting in Julie Otsuka’s novels” (American Studies in Scandinavia, 47:2, 2015) and “Writing and Identity in Jane Jeong Trenka’s Life Narratives” (International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture: Transnational, Transracial and Transcultural Narratives, Palgrave MacMillan, 2017. Forthcoming). Another field of interest is academic writing and together with Maria Freij, she has published a number of articles on feedback and assessment. Linara Bartkuvienơ teaches English literature at the University of Vilnius, Lithuania. Her current research interests include the theme on madness in literature, and the importance of place in fiction. She is also the author of the monograph (In)visible Presences: The Epistemological Aspect of Virginia Woolf’s Aesthetics (2017). Jan Borm is Full Professor in British Literature at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines in France. He has published extensively on travel literature in English, French and German. He is the author of the portrait Jean Malaurie, un homme singulier (Paris: editions du Chêne, 2005), and co-editor of Bruce Chatwin’s posthumous collection Anatomy of Restlessness (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996). He has also coedited eight collective volumes, including Foreign Correspondence, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. Dorisa Costello is a lecturer at Vilnius University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Chicago, where she won the Paul Carroll Award for creative writing. Her fiction work has appeared in The Postcard Press and Gambling the Aisle, among others. Her academic interests include British Victorianism, the Gothic, women writers, and speculative

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fiction. Her forthcoming book project combines many of these themes and investigates the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in vampire literature. She’s a fan of things that go bump in the night. Maria Freij (PhD in English, Creative Writing, M. App. Ling.) is a Senior Lecturer in English at Kristianstad University, Sweden. Currently, her post is devoted to service as Head of Humanities, but teaching interests lie primarily in poetry, literature, and grammar. Research interests include representations of selves and identities through the imagery of childhood landscapes, primarily in the poetry of Lars Gustafsson; metanostalgic treatment of place and past, especially in the works of expatriate writers; academic writing with a focus on feedback and assessment (with Lena Ahlin); and translation in theory and practice. Publications include the translation of Boris Vian’s Je Voudrais pas Crever and an accompanying chapter in If I say If—The Poems and Short Stories of Boris Vian (Adelaide University Press 2014, ed. Rolls et al.); her translations into English of Swedish poems by Tomas Tranströmer, Lars Gustafsson, Tua Forsström, and Eva Ström appear in the Redroom Company/Lyrikline Project (www.lyrikline.org), and translations of poems by Lars Gustafsson in Mascara Literary Review. Her poetry appears in journals including Meanjin, Blue Dog: Australian Poetry, Southerly, Two Thirds North, Softblow, Overland Magazine, and The Henry Kendall Poetry Award 2012 Anthology. Her book of poems is forthcoming (Puncher & Wattmann). Elizabeth Kella is an Associate Professor of English at Södertörn University in Sweden. Her research focus is on post-WWII North American literature. She is author of Beloved Communities: Solidarity and Difference in Fiction by Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison, and Joy Kogawa (2000) and co-author of Making Home: Orphanhood, Kinship, and Cultural Memory in Contemporary American Novels (2014). Her current research on women writers of the Polish diaspora is part of a project financed by the Baltic Sea Foundation “Remembering Poland and Eastern Europe: Nostalgia, Memory, and Affect in Diasporic Women’s Writing.” Teodor Mateoc is a Professor of English and American literature in the Department of English language and literature at the Faculty of Letters, University of Oradea, Romania. He holds a Ph.D in American Literature from ‘Babes-Bolyai’ University in Cluj-Napoca (2004). Currently, he is teaching two courses at the undergraduate level: British Modernism and a survey course in American Literature (to the 20th century), together with

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another two at the graduate level: British Literature and Modernism and Paradigms of American Identity. Teodor Mateoc has published extensively in the field of English and American Literature or Cultural Studies and participated in various academic exchanges in such countries as Scotland, France, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Lithuania, Poland, Turkey. He has authored four books: Encounters with Blackness (2005); Of Books and Pen. Essays in American Literature (2005; Modernist British Fiction (2008), An Introduction to American Literature: the First Two Hundred Years (2016) and co-authored a fifth: American Regionalism. An Anthology (2006). His main research interests include: literary and cultural theory, issues of identity and race in American (Southern) fiction, literary modernism. Teodor Mateoc is a member of RAAS (Romanian Association of American Studies), ESSE (European Society for the Study of English) and other various national associations. Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne, working on the geological imaginary— mainly slowness and deep time—in contemporary art. Her research, funded by the Onassis foundation, focuses on artistic practices that attempt to visualize geologic time and art works that respond to the aftermath of ecological crises. She writes for art publications and has been curator of exhibitions in France and Greece. Finally, she has presented her research at Goldsmiths University, London and at the University of Leiden, amongst others. Irena Ragaišienơ is an Associate Professor at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. She teaches at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literature and Translation Studies. Her publications include texts in gender studies, autobiography studies and literary translation. Thierry Robin has been a lecturer at the European University of Brittany, Brest, UBO, since 2005. He is currently a member of the research team HCTI EA4249 as well as a researcher associated with the CRBC –the Center for Celtic and Breton Research (CRBC, EA 4451 / UMS 3554), both based in Brest. His research focuses on contemporary Irish literature and the connections between ideology, epistemology and the concepts defining discourses on reality. He has written numerous articles about Irish writers ranging from Oscar Wilde, Flann O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, Dermot Healy, Anne Enright to John Banville aka Benjamin Black. He has also published a book devoted to the study of Flann O’Brien’s novels, entitled Flann O’Brien, Un voyageur au bout du langage (Rennes, 2008)

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and coedited a collection of essays bearing on political ideology, Political Ideology in Ireland from the Enlightenment to the Present, (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). Lately, after analyzing the revival of the genre of satire through the Irish TV show entitled The Savage Eye (RTE2, 20092014), he has set out upon a close scrutiny of Irish crime fiction as a genre revealing of both what is known as Zeitgeist and political, social and ideological processes under way in Ireland and elsewhere in the West and deeply transforming Western civilization. He is currently working on a book dealing with these themes. Regina Rudaitytơ is Full Professor of English Literature at Vilnius University, Lithuania. She holds an MA in English from Vilnius University and an MA in the Novel from the University of East Anglia, UK. She received her Ph.D. in American Literature from Moscow M. Lomonosov University. She is a national representative on the ESSE board. She has published widely on contemporary British fiction, women’s writing and literary translation and is the author of The Metamorphosis of Character in Postmodern Fiction (2000), and An Outline of Contemporary British Fiction (2006). She edited the volumes Postmodernism and After. Visions and Revisions (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) and Literature in Society (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). She is editor-in-chief of the scholarly literary journal “Literatnjra” (Vilnius University Press). Dr. Andrea Rummel is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the English Department of JLU Giessen, Germany. Her publications mainly focus on British Modernism and British Romantic literature: apart from various essays in collections and journals, she is the author of Femmes Fatales in English Romanticism. Dr. Almantas Samalaviþius is an architectural historian and urban researcher as well as a literary scholar. He is Professor in the School of Architecture at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University where he teaches architectural criticism, aesthetics of architecture, city culture theory and urban studies in MA programs and supervises doctoral dissertations. Simultaneously he is a professor at the Department of English Philology, Vilnius University and teaches seminars on postcolonialism and literature, media studies and the text as well as cultural studies in MA program. He is the author of some 12 scholarly books as well as editor of 11 collections of essays and academic articles and anthologies published in Lithuania, UK and the USA. He has been a visiting professor and visiting scholar at a

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number of universities in the USA, Finland, Spain, Italy and South Korea and gave some 70 invited talks and papers at international scholarly conferences and seminars. He is the editor-in-chief of international scholarly publications: the Journal of Architecture and Urbanism (Taylor and Francis/Routledge) and Chicago-based Lituanus: the Lithuanian Quarterly. He has previously served two terms as president of Lithuanian PEN and continues to serve on its board. For a number of years he has been an expert in the Lithuanian National Center for the Assessment of the Quality of Studies and Lithuanian Research Council. His books, essays and articles have been translated into some 14 languages and were awarded 8 prizes in his home country. Eric Sandberg is an Assistant Professor at City University of Hong Kong, where he teaches literature. He also holds a docentship at the University of Oulu, Finland. He completed his PhD in 2010 at the University of Edinburgh, and since then has taught at universities in Turkey, Japan, Finland, and Hong Kong. His research interests range from Modernism to the twenty-first century novel. His monograph Virginia Woolf: Experiments in Character was published in 2014, and he co-edited Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige (2017). His articles and reviews have appeared in a number of collections and journals, including English Studies, Neohelicon, and The Cambridge Quarterly. He is the lead researcher on an on-going international project exploring the role of nostalgia in contemporary culture funded by the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Marzena Sokoáowska-ParyĪ is an Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland, where she teaches courses on contemporary British and Commonwealth literature, with specific emphasis on war fiction and film in relation to history, memory and national identity. She is the author of Reimagining the War Memorial, Reinterpreting the Great War: The Formats of British Commemorative Fiction (2012) and The Myth of War in British and Polish Poetry, 19391945 (2002). The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film, coedited with Martin Löschnigg, appeared in 2014, re- published in paperback in 2016. Her articles have appeared in edited volumes History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Mnemosyne and Mars: Artistic and Cultural Representations of Twentieth-century Europe at War, Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield, North America, Europe

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and the Cultural Memory of the First World War, Re-Imagining the First World War: New Perspectives in Anglophone Literature and Culture, The Great War: From Memory to History, The Long Aftermath: Historical and Cultural Legacies of Europe at War 1936-1945, as well as journals, including the Journal of War and Culture Studies and WLA: War, Literature and the Arts. Her most recent project is the co-edited volume The Enemy in Contemporary Film. She is also an associate editor for Anglica: An International Journal for English Studies. Rnjta Šlapkauskaitơ is a literary scholar and lecturer based at Vilnius University, Lithuania. She teaches a number of courses, including literary theory, Literature and the Visual Arts, the Canadian Short Story, and Multiculturalism in Literature. Her research interests include neo-Victorian fiction, memory and material visuality, and the significance of material culture. Among her recent publications are “Et in Arcadia Ego: Memory, Mystery, and Mourning in J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country” in ReImagining the First World War: New Perspectives in Anglophone Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015; “Intermedial Translation: The Gyrating Gaze in David Dabydeen’s Turner” in European Journal of English Studies, Volume 18, Issue 3, 2014; “‘An Oscilloscopic Machine’: the Lens, the Image and the Canvas in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family. Otherness: Essays and Studies, 3.1, 2012. Dr. Olena Tykhomyrova is an Associate Professor at Kyiv National Linguistic University, Ukraine. In 2003 she defended her PhD dissertation on the works of J.R.R.Tolkien and has studied fantasy fiction ever since. She has published a number of academic articles on Tolkien, Pratchett, Rowling, Martin, De Lint and other fantasy authors. She is also interested in cognitive linguistics, as well as multimodal and metaphor studies. She teaches English to Master students at the Department of English Philology and Philosophy of the Language. Deimantas Valanþinjnas is a lecturer of film and cultural studies at the Department of English Philology and Centre of Oriental Studies of Vilnius University. His research areas include postcolonial literature and film, Asian popular culture and identity studies. He was a guest editor of the special issue ‘From Highbrow to Lowbrow: Studies of Indian B-grade Cinema and Beyond’ (2014) of the academic journal Acta Orientalia Vilnensia (2014).

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Renata Zsamba is an assistant lecturer at the Institute of British and American Studies at Eszterházy Károly University, Eger, Hungary. She does research in British detective fiction of the Golden Age as well as in American feminist crime fiction and socialist crime fiction of Hungary. She has published articles in Korunk, “Socialist Crime with Capitalist Décor: Linda and the 80s” (2013), in Eger Journal of English Studies, “Evil Rides on the Bus – Space and Female Identities in Margery Allingham’s and Josephine Tey’s Crime Fiction” (2013), in Space, Gender and the Gaze, an edited volume by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, “Haunted in the Suburbs: Forms of Representing Evil in Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Documents in the Case” (2017) and has contributed with an entry about Margery Allingham’s Campion in Sleuths, Private Eyes, and Policemen: An International Compendium of the 100 Greatest Literary Detectives (2017). She is currently writing a PhD dissertation on gender, nostalgia and the memory crisis of the British middle class in the works of Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers and Josephine Tey. Ingrida Eglơ Žindžiuvienơ is a Professor of English and Literature in the Department of Foreign Languages, Literature and Translation Studies at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. She holds an MA degree in English Philology (1983), an MA degree in American Literature (1996) and a PhD in Social Sciences. In 2008, she became an associate professor at the Department of English Philology, Vytautas Magnus University. In 2012, she was granted the professorship at the same department. She teaches contemporary British and American Literature, Theory of Drama, and other courses. Ingrida Eglơ Žindžiuvienơ has published articles on contemporary British and American literature, comparative literary studies, American Studies, and TEFL, and has participated in conferences worldwide. With lectures on contemporary British and American literature she has visited universities in Estonia, Finland, Great Britain, Italy, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Turkey, the USA and other countries. Ingrida Eglơ Žindžiuvienơ is the co-author of the following books: English at a Glance (2002), Modern North American Women Writers (2005), Doing Research on ELT (2013) and others. She is currently working on two projects: a study on contemporary American authors and research into literary representation of collective trauma. Since 2010, she has published a number of articles on collective trauma and memory studies: some of the articles analyse the post-soviet/postcolonial trauma and the effect of it on national identity. Her main research interests include comparative studies of literature, literary theory and cultural studies. Ingrida Eglơ Žindžiuvienơ is a member of MLA, ESSE (The

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European Society for the Study of English), IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language), TESOL and other associations.