Transformative Tales: Theatre Storytelling, Ethics and Restitution

Storytelling and Ethics In recent years, there has been a huge amount of both popular and academic interest in storytelling as something that is an essential part of not only literature but also our everyday lives as well as our dreams, fantasies, aspirations, historical self-understanding and political actions. The question of the ethics of storytelling always, inevitably, lurks behind these discussions, though most frequently it remains implicit rather than explicit. This volume explores the ethical potential and risks of storytelling from an interdisciplinary perspective. It stages a dialogue between contemporary literature and visual arts across media (film, photography, performative arts) and interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives (debates in narrative studies, trauma studies, cultural memory studies, ethical criticism). The collection analyzes ethical issues involved in different strategies employed in literature and the visual arts to narrate experiences that resist telling and imagining, such as traumatic historical events. The chapters explore the multiple ways in which the contemporary arts engage with ethical issues as they work with, draw on and contribute to historical and narrative imagination. The book foregrounds the connection between remembering and imagining and explores the ambiguous role of narrative in the configuration of selves, communities and the relation to the nonhuman. While discussing the ethical aspects of storytelling, it also reflects on the relevance of artistic storytelling practices for our understanding of ethics—showing how they can function as an experimental space where good and evil, right and wrong, are in play and at stake. Making an original contribution to interdisciplinary narrative studies and narrative ethics, this book both articulates a complex understanding of how artistic storytelling practices enable critical distance from culturally dominant narrative practices and analyzes the limitations and potential pitfalls of storytelling. It argues that narrative is bound up with power in both positive and negative ways. While some storytelling practices perpetuate oppressive forms of power, others have empowering significance. Instead of idealizing or demonizing narrative, it provides analytical tools for engaging with the ethically complex ways in which the power of storytelling is used and abused. Colin Davis is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory at the University of Turku, Finland. Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com. 73 Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories Roger Whitson 74 Food and Foodways in African Narratives Community, Culture, and Heritage Jonathan Bishop Highfield 75 The Phenomenology of Autobiography Making it Real Arnaud Schmitt 76 The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism in Public Discourse, Literature, and Film Narrating Terror Michael C. Frank 77 The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture Edited by Alfred Bendixen and Olivia Carr Edenfield 78 Motherhood in Literature and Culture Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Europe Edited by Victoria Browne, Adalgisa Giorgio, Emily Jeremiah, Abigal Lee Six, and Gill Rye 79 Heritage and the Legacy of the Past in Contemporary Britain Ryan Trimm 80 Storytelling and Ethics Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative Edited by Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis Storytelling and Ethics Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative Edited by Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [CIP data] ISBN: 978-1-138-24406-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-26501-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra Contents List of Figures 1 Introduction: Intersections of Storytelling and Ethics ix 1 H anna M eretoj a and C olin Davis Part I The Ethical Potential and Limits of Narrative 2 Truth, Ethics, Fiction: Responding to Plato’s Challenge 21 23 C olin Davis 3 Is There an Ethics to Story-Telling? 37 M ieke B al 4 Forms of Ordering: Trauma, Narrative and Ethics 55 Robert E ag lestone 5 The Decline of Narrative and the Rise of the Archive 68 E rnst van A lphen 6 The Story of the “Anthropos”: Writing Humans and Other Primates 84 Danielle S ands 7 From Appropriation to Dialogic Exploration: A Non-subsumptive Model of Storytelling H anna M eretoj a 101 vi Contents Part II Narrative Temporalities: Imagining an Other Life 8 Alexander Kluge’s “Saturday in Utopia”: Making Time for Other Lives with German Critical Theory and Heliotropic Narration1 123 125 L eslie A . A delson 9 Melancholy and the Narration of Transnational Trauma in W. G. Sebald and Teju Cole 142 K aisa K aakinen 10 Memory as Imagination in Elina Hirvonen’s When I Forgot 159 R iitta Jytil ä 11 Popular Representation of East Germany: Whose History Is It? 174 M olly A ndrews 12 Realities in the Making: The Ethics of Fabulation in Observational Documentary Cinema 190 I lona H on g isto Part III Narrative Engagements with Violence and Trauma 201 13 The Empathetic Listener and the Ethics of Storytelling 203 A leida A ssmann 14 Transformative Tales: Theater Storytelling, Ethics and Restitution 219 A nna R eadin g 15 Towards an Intercultural Aesthetics: Shaping the Memory of Political Violence and Historical Trauma in Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Artwork Where is Where? M ia H annula 237 Contents vii 16 Reading Terror: Imagining Violent Acts through the Rational or Narrative Sublime 253 C assandra Falke 17 War and Storytelling After 9/11: A Photojournalist’s Perspective 267 L ouie Palu Part IV Concluding Reflections 285 18 Narrative in Dark Times 287 A ndreea D eciu R itivoi List of Contributors Index 299 305 List of Figures 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 15.5 17.1 17.2 17.3 17.4 17.5 The artwork Where is Where? addresses the inheritance of traumatic history and shows how it continues to shape both the inner, interpersonal and socio-cultural worlds of their subjects. Monsieur la Mort, Mr Death, enters the Poet’s home and asks her to give him some words. In Where is Where?, the conflictual relations between Western and Arab cultures are put into historical perspective in a way that invites an intercultural encounter. The combinations of art and documentary, fact and fiction, past and presence, local and global scale open a space to create new ways of seeing history as a dynamic intercultural field of intersecting histories. Ethics can be conceived as a grounded social relation; it is a process of examining the self and her social relation regarding historical and global events and of the very means of this observation. The shadows of a public affairs officer and Operational Security Review official seen by a gate inside Camp Delta at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Page 1 of 3 listing digital camera files deleted as part of the Operational Security Review by an official from the U.S. Department of Defense. A chair and leg restraint connected to the floor for a detainee inside an “interview room” in Camp 5 at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Members of the media photograph detainees through a fence in Camp 4 at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A suspected insurgent seen at the feet of a Canadian soldier after he was captured during three days of fighting in Zhari District, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. 238 241 243 244 249 268 269 270 273 276 x List of Figures 17.6 Young boys with wheelbarrows sit in front of shops selling produce in the Afghan border town of Spin Boldak, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. 17.7 An Afghan soldier eats grapes during a patrol in Pashmul in Zhari District, Kandahar, Afghanistan. 17.8 A Google Earth view of Zhari District in Kandahar, Afghanistan with a blurred section of the landscape obscuring areas where military activities are taking place. 17.9 The bodies of men executed and dumped on the side of the highway in Sinaloa, Mexico between two rival cartel’s fighting for territory. 17.10 Still image from 2016 video of a Gulf Cartel Execution in Mexico. 17.11 Still image from 2014 ISIS released video of American journalist Steven Sotloff. 276 277 279 280 281 281 1 Introduction Intersections of Storytelling and Ethics Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis In recent years, there has been a huge amount of both popular and academic interest in storytelling as something that is an essential part of not only literature but also our everyday lives—our dreams, fantasies, aspirations, political actions, cultural memory and historical self-understanding. It has become commonplace to describe humans as storytelling animals. The issue has been explored from innumerable perspectives, including anthropology, cognitive psychology, cultural studies, narratology, neuroscience and philosophy, and the field of narrative studies has developed in an increasingly interdisciplinary direction. The question of the ethics of storytelling always, inevitably, lurks behind these discussions, though most frequently it remains implicit rather than explicit. Even approaches that explicitly discuss the ethical stakes of literature and the arts have often been blandly affirmative, failing to confront the most complex, problematic aspects of the role of stories in our private and public lives. Plato’s infamous banishing of the poets from the ideal state in Book 10 of his Republic has rarely been embraced by later thinkers and artists, but it remains a powerful, to some extent still open challenge to our hopes for the ethical function of art. Storytelling practices may help define who we are, refine our moral sensibilities and open new possibilities of experience, action and self-invention, but at the same time, they may be the vehicle of simplifications, obfuscations or plain lies that corrupt our moral standing. Although most of us probably disagree with Plato’s conclusion, many of us share its underlying assumption that art matters because it deals with truth, justice and the good life. This volume explores the ethical potential and risks of storytelling from an interdisciplinary perspective. It stages a dialogue between contemporary literature and visual arts across media (film, photography, video art, performative arts) and different theoretical approaches many of which are interdisciplinary in themselves (debates in narrative studies, trauma studies, cultural memory studies, ethical criticism). The book analyzes ethical issues involved in different strategies that contemporary media employ to narrate experiences that resist telling and imagining, such as experiences of traumatic historical events, including war and 2 Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis political conflicts, and the intersecting histories of violence linked to the Holocaust, colonialism and migration. How do different modalities of storytelling enable diverse ways of addressing experiences of violence, trauma and political rupture? What ethical complexities do they involve? The chapters explore the multiple ways in which the contemporary arts engage with ethical issues as they work with, draw on and contribute to our historical and narrative imagination—to our existence as situated, historical beings who are constituted in culturally mediated narrative webs. The book highlights the potential of storytelling to unsettle dominant historical and political narratives by helping us to imagine alternative realities, possibilities, courses of action and orientations towards the future. Narrative, we want to argue, is bound up with power.1 This may be sometimes repressive, sometimes emancipatory. Stories reflect, affect and change who we are, how we experience the world and what we think; but, many of the chapters here suggest, it would be premature to believe that this is necessarily for the good. The power of narrative can be used or abused. It can help us become better listeners, readers and citizens, or it can mislead, disturb and corrupt. We are particularly interested in the intertwinement of narrative, memory and imagination. The chapters of this book explore the ethical dimension of the interaction between narrative practices of sense-making, cultural memory practices and the shaping of cultural imaginaries. How do culturally mediated narrative models of sense-making underpin contemporary identities and memory practices? Discussions in narrative studies and cultural memory studies have often failed lamentably to engage with one another. 2 We aim to bring them into a more intensive dialogue through reflection on how the interpretation, suppression and negotiation of the memory and experience of violence, oppression and trauma are interwoven with cultural narrative practices. One of our starting points is that narrative imagination is integral not only to our visions of the future but also to our engagement with the past and the present.3 While traditional event-focused historiography has seen history as consisting of actions that can be observed and documented, new forms of cultural history emphasize that history is also constituted by what the people of the past thought, felt, experienced and imagined and by the ways in which they narrated their experiences.4 We are interested in how contemporary artistic storytelling practices address the imbrication of remembering and imagining as they engage with past worlds from the horizon of the present. In this context, we consider it important to acknowledge that we are situated beings whose life-world is shaped by historical processes and their configuration and reconfiguration through narrative imagination. Narratology has been dominated by ahistorical, universalist conceptions of experience. 5 The storytelling practices of the arts, by contrast, often encourage understanding the specificity of someone’s experience in a particular situation, and they can thereby foster Introduction 3 awareness of the historicity of experience. They have shown themselves capable of self-reflexivity and of establishing a critical distance from culturally dominant narrative practices. Artistic storytelling practices have potential to enlarge our space of experience in the present by creating new possibilities of experience, thought and imagination: they can transform the ways in which we, through our understandings of the past, orient ourselves to the future and imagine the yet-to-be.6 While poststructuralist and postmodern theorization tended to endorse an aesthetics of the ineffable which regarded narrative as a violent form of appropriation, recent years have seen a surge of interest in the ethical potential of storytelling. In relation to the five main strands of narrative ethics that we sketch below, this book endeavors to shift the emphasis of the discussion on the ethics of representation towards thinking about the ethical potential of storytelling in terms of imaginative reconfiguration. This does not mean, however, suggesting that storytelling would always be beneficial for us, even if it is an inherent aspect of our humanity. We argue that it is important not to idealize storytelling but to acknowledge both the ethical potential and the dangers of different storytelling practices. While certain storytelling practices perpetuate oppressive forms of power, others have empowering significance. We aim to provide analytical tools for engaging with both the positive and the negative power of narrative. Ethics in Narrative Studies Although narrative studies has become increasingly interdisciplinary, there are still clear differences between the debates that dominate literary and art studies on the one hand and those that animate discussions of narrative in the social sciences. The former has been dominated by the structuralist legacy of narratology, despite the aspiration of “postclassical narratology” to expand the field of narratology and to take seriously human experientiality as central to narrativity.7 Structuralist narratology left little room for explicitly ethical reflection because its consideration of narrative had little or nothing to say about the experiencing subject. Narratologies, even in their current post-classical variations, still tend to focus on narrative structures rather than exploring the different functions that narratives have in our lives, the significance of narratives for human existence, or the entwinement of narrative with ethical agency. Narrative research in the social sciences, by contrast, frequently links analysis of narrative as a practice of making sense of experiences to reflection on the empowering aspects of storytelling.8 It would profit, however, from taking literary and arts studies perspectives more seriously in reflecting on narrative as a mode of engaging with experiences—one’s own and those of others. This book seeks to contribute to the ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue between these different 4 Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis approaches to narrative. It argues that literature and the visual arts provide important insights into the ethical significance of narrative for human existence. Our aim is to demonstrate that different artistic media (literature, film, theater, photography) and different areas of academic study (narrative studies, hermeneutics, cultural studies, memory studies, trauma studies) belong to a creative and intellectual continuum in which what is at stake is essentially the same: the value and values of our lives in a difficult, fractured world. The rise of interest in ethical issues, over the past few decades, has emerged via different routes. In the French context, the structuralist approach met fierce criticism from divergent thinkers who were later grouped together under the term “poststructuralism.” In this heterogeneous strand of thought, ethical issues were addressed particularly under the influence of the post-phenomenological thinking of Emmanuel Levinas. Reading came to be perceived as an encounter with radical alterity. Rita Felski characterizes this line of ethical criticism as “theological criticism” (2008, 4, 12) because it often mystifies the literary text as an absolute Other, fundamentally ineffable and beyond comprehension. The form in which ethics emerged in the poststructuralist context was through critique of conventional narrative form, which was perceived as oppressive and ethically problematic. From Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot to the nouveaux romanciers and the tel queliens, the French postwar generation cultivated an ethics of non-comprehension and the ineffable.9 Deconstructionist ethics is suspicious of any claim to understand the other through narrative and valorizes the power of imaginative art to transgress boundaries and norms which conventional narrative forms were considered to perpetuate. A second important development has been the revival of the neoAristotelian humanist tradition in moral philosophy (MacIntyre 1981; Nussbaum 1990), on the one hand, and in rhetorical narrative theory, on the other (Booth 1988; Phelan 1996). Of the neo-Aristotelian moral philosophers who have argued that narrative fiction is crucial for our moral agency, Martha Nussbaum has been the most influential. She emphasizes the way in which narrative fiction develops our narrative imagination, which she defines as the capacity to empathize with the experiences of others, that is, to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have. (2010, 95–96) Rhetorical narrative theory continues the tradition of humanist criticism in which literature is seen to have a didactic function. Wayne C. Booth Introduction 5 famously formulates this view by arguing that “stories are our major moral teachers” (1988, 20). Rhetorical narratology aims to provide concrete narratological tools for analyzing the narrative strategies through which the (implied) author communicates ethical values or an ethos to the (implied) reader (Phelan and Rabinowitz 2013; Korthals Altes 2014). Often, the emphasis of rhetorical approaches is on the cultivation of a common sense of the good based on shared values. In James Phelan’s (2014) definition, for example, narrative ethics is concerned with the following question: “How should one think, judge, and act—as author, narrator, character, or audience—for the greater good?” This definition seems to imply that there is an unproblematic, shared understanding of “the greater good,” or at least that such a consensus could be reached. A third direction from which ethics has emerged as central to narrative studies is constituted by cultural and social approaches to narrative. Postcolonial, feminist, queer, intersectional and ecocritical approaches, for example, have drawn attention to the ways in which hegemonic narratives marginalize experiences that do not fit white, male, heterosexual and anthropocentric normativity. These approaches are often influenced by the poststructuralist criticism of the universalist assumptions embedded in the European humanist tradition; but in comparison to textualist versions of poststructuralism, these contextualist approaches see literature as fundamentally situated in concrete worldly contexts. They often emphasize lived, embodied experience in its complexity, the narrative representation of gender, sexuality, race and class, the conditions of production and reception of literary narratives and the ways in which narratives are entangled with relations of power. In the recent years, the representational approaches of cultural studies have been challenged by Deleuzean, new materialist and post-humanist approaches that place emphasis on processual ontologies of becoming and are more interested in what storytelling produces and creates than on what narratives represent.10 Fourth, the cognitive paradigm has influenced both literary and narrative studies, and it has provided new perspectives on the ethical aspects of such phenomena as empathy, immersion and readerly engagement. Empirical cognitive research has provided some evidence for the view that fictional narratives are more effective than non-fictional narratives in enabling readers to imagine the situation of the other and to take his or her perspective (Hakemulder 2000; Djikic et al. 2009; Oatley 2011). Such studies have encouraged literary and narrative scholars to discuss the possibility that reading literary narratives might make us more empathetic.11 Particularly abundant attention, in both academic circles and the media, has been given to David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano’s (2013) study, which argues that even short-term exposure to “high” literature improves our capacity to take the perspective of others (or what cognitive scientists call our “theory of mind” capacities), but 6 Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis other researchers have been unable to verify the results (Panero et al. 2016). It is notoriously difficult to measure the short-term effects of literature, and even more difficult to measure any long-term impact it may have; and even if reading literature does improve our “perspective awareness” or “perspective sensitivity,” there is no guarantee that it leads us to ethical action.12 As the emphasis of cognitive studies tends to be on general cognitive processes (which gives it a universalist slant), some cognitively oriented researchers have also emphasized the need to pay more attention to the ethical dimension of the cognitive processes that are specific to engagement with literary narratives, as opposed to popular narratives, for example; the former are frequently ethically difficult, ambiguous, challenging or unsettling (van Lissa et al. 2016). Fifth, and finally, in recent years, there has been increasing interest in hermeneutic approaches to narrative, and the concept of narrative hermeneutics has been used to characterize an approach that understands narratives as culturally mediated interpretative practices (Brockmeier and Meretoja 2014; Meretoja 2014, 2017; Brockmeier 2015, 2016 [ed.]; Freeman 2015). Ever since Paul Ricoeur’s path-breaking work, the ethical dimension of narrative has been central to the hermeneutic study of narrative. From a hermeneutic perspective, narrative has existential-ethical significance: it is inseparable from our being in the world. Culturally mediated narrative models of sense-making shape our engagements with the world, our relationships with others and our orientations to the past, present and future. While cognitive studies have generally approached empathy as a “sharing of affect” in the sense of “I feel what you feel” (Keen 2007, 4–5) and emphasized how narratives invite empathy through narrative techniques that create a sense of similarity and familiarity, hermeneutic approaches to empathy and perspective-taking emphasize difference as the starting point for ethical understanding and narrative as a mode of engaging with the singularity of the other’s experiences in specific situations in the world (Meretoja 2015, 2017; Ritivoi 2016). Most of the theoretically oriented hermeneutic work on narrative has been conducted in philosophy and psychology (by thinkers such as Ricoeur, Charles Taylor, and Jerome Bruner), but current literary scholars who work in this area attempt to combine an exploration of the ontological significance of narrative for human existence with the need to develop a nuanced and rigorous analytical framework that is attentive to the ethical relevance of different narrative forms and functions.13 While narratological approaches frequently neglect the worldly contexts in which ethical issues are embedded, cultural studies approaches often pay insufficient attention to the specificity of narrative forms and strategies. It is our conviction that we need more reflection on different narrative modes of engagement from an ethical perspective. It is important to analyze the specific narrative strategies adopted in different media to address ethically complex issues. This book emphasizes the need to Introduction 7 bring various artistic forms and ethical projects into dialogue. The narratives analyzed in the chapters of this volume cover a broad scope, from literary and cinematic narratives to photography and terrorist recruitment narratives. We aim to show how context-sensitivity and rigorous narrative analysis are not mutually exclusive but, on the contrary, mutually dependent. Moreover, it is our conviction that intellectual work in the humanities and creative work in the arts both contribute to our faltering yet urgent ethical inquiries, despite and because of their variety and contradictions. Felski (2015) argues that the discourse of critique—in different deconstructionist and cultural studies variations—has come to dominate literary studies at the expense of other modes of engagement. We need vocabularies for articulating how literary and other artistic narratives open new possibilities of thought and experience: “Rather than looking behind the text—for its hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious motives—we might place ourselves in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible” (2015, 12). In this spirit, we ask in this volume: What do storytelling processes and practices make possible? How do they create new realities? Several of the chapters emphasize the processual and performative character of storytelling: narratives are not just about representing the world, but they also shape and create reality.14 Storytelling is a process of world-making, and practices of remembering are not only about engaging with the past but just as much about imagining and reinventing the world together with others. Through this perspective, we suggest that the dominant models of narrative as representation or communication have their limits. The representation model is too event-oriented and past-oriented in focusing on narrative as an account of what happened. The communication model, in turn, places too much emphasis on the transmission of meanings or values from the author to the reader. We approach narrative as a mode of engagement and imagination that is an event in the present, oriented simultaneously towards both the past and the future. The starting point of this book is that there are no ethically neutral narratives, and the ethical dimension of a narrative takes shape in dialogue with the reader or the viewer.15 As Jeremy Hawthorn and Jakob Lothe put it, not only is there no narrative that “is free of ethical issues” but also “no reading, viewing, or listening to a narrative that does not require some ethical sensitivity and the exercise of moral discrimination on the part of reader, viewer or listener” (2013, 6). We emphasize, however, that it is questionable whether literature and other arts communicate moral values to us from a secure position. Often what happens is more like an open exploration of competing values, and this exploration can be fundamentally dialogic or polyphonic in the Bakhtinian sense, with no one voice or position dominating the others. Many approaches to the ethical dimension of storytelling assume (often implicitly) that 8 Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis they already know what is right and wrong and they judge the analyzed narratives from a given value position (such as a position that foregrounds certain virtues or the right kind of representation of minorities). To some extent, this is unavoidable: we always have some ethical preconceptions and commitments, which inevitably affect our engagement with literature and other arts. But to learn something from the narratives with which we engage, we should orient ourselves to them with openness characterized by awareness of the limits and partiality of our own understanding. We may always be wrong, and our moral visions may be flawed. Only in encounters animated by such an awareness can our engagement with narrative become an event in the strong sense, bringing something new into being. We may learn from literature and visual arts not only new perspectives on our ethical dilemmas but even new insights into what ethics means. This, however, is by no means always the case. Literary and visual narratives do not automatically make us better people. We live in a world in which narratives are effectively used by right-wing populist and neo-Nazi movements that are on the rise both in Europe and in the US as well as by terrorist movements like ISIS and Al-Qaida. The power of storytelling is frightening in shaping the future of this planet. When the man who is currently the most powerful person in the world, the US President Donald Trump, denies climate change by simply disregarding scientific evidence and telling a story of a Chinese conspiracy, such narratives are difficult to defeat through rational argumentation. What is now sometimes characterized as the “post-truth” world is one in which narrative plays an ever-more important, ever-more conflicted role. All one can do, it seems, is tell a better story. Moreover, like it or not, in the age of globalization, we are all entangled in one another’s stories. What happens on the other side of the world affects us more than before and is more accessible to us via different media. The increased information and accessibility also emphasizes our responsibility and complicity. As Michael Rothberg (2014) puts it, we are implicated subjects. The dichotomy between victims and perpetrators is inadequate in dealing with the relationship of most people to violence, oppression and human rights violations that are happening in the world at the moment. These events implicate us: witnessing them (albeit at a distance) gives us a share in responsibility for them. We suggest that when storytelling does have ethical potential, it often works in quite indirect, non-didactic ways. For example, Nussbaum’s idea that the ethical potential of narrative fiction lies first and foremost in the way in which it cultivates our capacity for empathy does not adequately capture the full complexity and potential dangers of storytelling. Rather than providing us with firm ethical knowledge, the ethical potential of literature and visual arts lies more, we suggest, in the ways in which they unsettle our certainties and provide us with new perspectives and Introduction 9 questions. Rather than guaranteeing the accessibility of the good, stories can function as an experimental space where good and evil, right and wrong, are in play and at stake. This volume aims, then, to re-orient the debate around the ethics of storytelling towards a complex, non-moralistic understanding of the inherently ambiguous role of narrative in the configuration of experience, identity, memory and culture. The Ethical Potential and Limits of Narrative The first part of this book, “The Ethical Potential and Limits of Narrative,” explores different ways of understanding the potential, risks and limits of storytelling and provides theoretically oriented contributions to the ongoing conceptualization of narrative ethics. It argues that the way in which we assess the ethical value of a narrative is not independent of issues of truth and knowledge. If fiction were simply untrue and unreal, why is it commonly believed that it can provide valuable insights into history and that it is part of its ethical dimension to provide a true vision of the social and historical realities with which it deals? How do different kinds of narrative—fictional and non-fictional, visual and verbal—enhance or inhibit our ethical understanding? While many theorists of narrative and trauma consider narrative to be always an ethically problematic form of appropriation, chapters of Part I problematize this view and differentiate between different forms of storytelling, for example in relation to issues of telos, performativity and subsumptive and non-subsumptive forms of understanding. It explores the value of non-linear, open-ended storytelling and the limits of narrative sense-making from perspectives including those offered by the notions of the archive, trauma and the non-human. Colin Davis’s chapter “Truth, Ethics, Fiction: Responding to Plato’s Challenge” gives a historical and theoretical account of ethical issues of storytelling, beginning with the condemnation of art in Plato’s Republic. Aesthetic debate since Plato can be understood to a large measure as a continuing, never decisive attempt to defend art against the Greek philosopher by insisting on its epistemological and ethical value. In the late-twentieth-century, this defense acquired new vigor through the socalled ethical turn of poststructuralism and the development of trauma studies. Combining a Heideggerian sense that the artwork can speak to us from a position of knowing otherness with a Levinasian ethics of alterity, trauma studies provides a strong model for art as a space of ethical encounter. Other models of ethical criticism, notably Martha Nussbaum’s insistence on the potential of literature to serve ethical ends through the refinement of empathetic sensibility, reach converging conclusions by different routes. Plato’s ancient suspicions, however, prove hard to lay. They arise again, for example, in ongoing public debates about the deleterious effects of pornography or certain violent films and 10 Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis video games. The chapter proposes a model of the ethics of storytelling, not as a promise of achievable morality, but as a fraught space of inquiry, experiment and potential moral catastrophe. Mieke Bal’s chapter “Is There an Ethics to Story-Telling?” argues that storytelling, the presentation in whatever medium of a focalized series of events, has two properties that make the ethical aspect of it specific: it concerns others, and it is always, at least in part, fictional, even when, or perhaps especially when, it concerns difficult, painful or extreme situations. This chapter confronts head-on the ancient debate about the ethics of art and refuses any simple affirmative or critical position. Discussing Adorno, Bal suggests that art occupies the space between modesty (entailing an acknowledgment of art’s limitations) and the need to know; by analyzing this, we can envisage the possibility of an ethically informed political art. The chapter argues that to be ethical, images must relate to the world in which they emerge and to which they relate. It develops this argument with reference to Henri Bergson’s philosophy of the image as necessarily both material and moving. Moreover, the image is involved with a movement which is emotional and social, and thereby becomes political. With examples of contemporary artworks that—literally—work with this movement, this chapter develops a vision of political art that is not “about” politics but performs an intervention in “the political.” Robert Eaglestone’s chapter, “Forms of Ordering: Trauma, Narrative and Ethics,” explores how trauma studies has shaped recent academic work while leaving unresolved or even neglecting several important ethical questions. Does trauma studies impose a model of suffering onto experiences that may demand culturally and historically specific theorizations? Does it valorize some aesthetic practices above others, rather than attending to different narrative forms? How does trauma inflect the experience and representation of time and temporality, and how should trauma studies be related to and distinguished from memory studies? These are, perhaps, the impossible questions which face us today. Rather than offering premature answers, Eaglestone goes on to consider the implications of trauma for ethics, in particular the ethics of storytelling. Following Wittgenstein, he suggests that life may be a narrative mess. We might think that the role of stories is to transform the mess into order and completeness; but the ethical power of “jagged and incomplete” stories may be that they remind us, and help us understand without simplification, the complexity of living and suffering. Ernst van Alphen’s chapter, “The Decline of Narrative and the Rise of the Archive,” takes as its starting point Lyotard’s argument that postmodern culture is characterized by the decline of narrative. It is not narrative as such, however, that is under siege, but meta-narratives (such as the narrative of Enlightenment): we are left with a multiplicity of contending smaller narratives, which are no longer able to legitimize Introduction 11 the pursuit of knowledge, economic growth or emancipation. This chapter argues that due to the explosive dissemination of computer technology, the dominant symbolic form is becoming the archive or database, and narrative and the archive have become competing symbolic forms, each of which claims an exclusive right to make meaning about the world. The database represents the world as a list or collection of items, whereas narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory for representing the world. This chapter addresses the problematization of narrative as symbolic mode, and the rise of archival organizations, through a reading of works of visual artists like Walid Raad, Santu Mofokeng and Akram Zaatari. Danielle Sands’s chapter, “The Story of the ‘Anthropos’: Writing Humans and Other Primates” addresses different narrative strategies of engaging with the relationship between humans and other primates. In Primate Visions, Donna Haraway tracks the ways in which primatology has been informed by the narcissistic perception of primates as mirrors in which humans can see their origins. She suggests that we counter this anthropocentric narrative and its neglect of nonhuman experience through imaginative identification with other species and increased attentiveness to collaborative cross-species authorship, both in scientific discourse and in fiction. Examining fictional representations of nonhuman primates in J. M. Coetzee, Franz Kafka and Karen Joy Fowler, Sands assesses Haraway’s argument that fiction can offer a mode of storytelling that does not misrepresent or ignore nonhuman others in its desire to offer an account of the human. Hanna Meretoja’s chapter, “From Appropriation to Dialogic Exploration: A Non-Subsumptive Model of Storytelling,” asks why it is that narrative form is frequently considered to be ethically problematic. It critically examines the assumption that the act of storytelling reduces something singular to an account that appropriates it by giving it a general meaning or explanation. Meretoja shows how underlying different ethical stances towards storytelling is a crucial difference in their conception of understanding, which can be best understood in terms of the difference between subsumptive and non-subsumptive conceptions of (narrative) understanding. While poststructuralist thinkers tend to conceive of all understanding in terms of a subsumption model that links understanding to appropriation and assimilation, the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics explores the possibility of non-subsumptive understanding. The ethical potential of certain forms of storytelling, she argues, depends on such a possibility. While subsumptive narrative practices tend to reinforce cultural stereotypes and explain singular events in terms of general cultural narrative scripts, non-subsumptive narrative practices tend to question such general scripts and challenge our categories of appropriation. The chapter develops a non-subsumptive model of storytelling—and provides a differentiating continuum for the ethical 12 Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis evaluation of narrative practices—in dialogue with Jeanette Winterson’s novel Lighthousekeeping, which shows how storytelling can function in the mode of dialogic exploration. Narrative Temporalities: Imagining an Other Life The five chapters of the second part of the book explore storytelling as a form of imagining “an other life” and ways in which narratives are not merely about representing the past but events in the present and engagements with futurity. The chapters analyze the narrative use of futurity in literary and filmic narratives that manifest a transcultural traveling of storytelling practices from one cultural context to another. The chapters examine different temporal regimes, as articulated by theorists of modernity and temporality (Benjamin, Adorno, Deleuze, Assmann) and novelists and filmmakers through their artistic practice. Part II explores the ethical challenges linked to the task of narrating traumatic historical experiences in a heterogeneous present in which multiple historical narratives come to contact. It charts different ways in which the processes of remembering are intertwined with processes of imagining and reinventing the self through affective encounters. Leslie A. Adelson’s chapter, “Alexander Kluge’s ‘Saturday in Utopia’: Making Time for Other Lives with German Critical Theory and Heliotropic Narration,” engages with the work of Alexander Kluge (b. 1932), one of the most dynamic public intellectuals in Europe today. Kluge is best known for filmic experimentation and social theories of public life but has also been a prolific writer of experimental literary prose since the 1960s. His work is oriented toward hope for human survival and unalienated life in the face of catastrophic destruction associated with cruelty, war, genocide, fascism, dictatorship and capitalist exploitation of life, labor and time, and it has well-documented affinities with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, in particular with Theodor Adorno, one of the leading critics of “damaged life” under both fascist politics and the capitalist rationality of mass culture. Kluge scholars have stressed these thinkers’ shared commitment to principles of “non-identity” and “negative dialectics,” which often entails the tripartite assumption that narrative is itself hegemonic, that utopianism is always ideological and that the futurity of unalienated life is necessarily deferred. Adelson argues that this analytical paradigm cannot account for Kluge’s growing investment in storytelling as a necessary form of imagining “an other life” in the twenty-first-century. Through careful parsing of his narrative use of futurity in stylistic detail, the chapter shows how Kluge’s storytelling practice for the twenty-first-century renders the temporal utopian horizon of counterhegemonic hopes not deferred, but accessible to experience through his work on narrative form. Introduction 13 Kaisa Kaakinen’s chapter, “Melancholy and the Narration of Transnational Trauma in W. G. Sebald and Teju Cole,” discusses issues of melancholy and contemporaneity in relation to the work of the Nigerian American writer Teju Cole (b. 1975), who published his critically acclaimed second novel Open City in 2011 and has often been compared to the German writer W. G. Sebald (1944–2001). Both authors employ associative walks of solitary narrator figures as a narrative tool to bind together disparate narrative fragments, and both authors’ works study the lingering effects of historical trauma on a transnational scale. Cole also explicitly names Sebald as his “precursor.” However, this chapter demonstrates that highlighting the differences between these authors’ poetics allows us to perceive something important about conditions of writing comparatively about historical traumas in the twenty-first-century. Sebald and Cole crucially differ in the way in which their narratives relate to the temporality of the present: while Sebald’s works suppress or transcend the present and remain tied to what Aleida Assmann has called the modern temporal regime, Cole’s Open City can be seen as a search for a different temporal regime, which gives more emphasis to the present as a space of discord and difference. Thus, although both authors employ melancholic affect, which tends to level out differences, Cole’s narrative emerges as more sensitive to the demands of narrating traumatic historical experiences in a heterogeneous present in which multiple historical narratives come to contact. Riitta Jytilä’s chapter, “Memory as Imagination in Elina Hirvonen’s When I Forgot,” argues that while it is usually speculative fiction that is considered to deal with the “what if” scenarios of life, the question of the (im)possibilities of life and the role of imagination are also crucial in narratives about remembering. It analyzes how in the novels of the contemporary Finnish novelist Elina Hirvonen, the processes of remembering the traumatic and violent pasts are characterized by the vulnerability of the subject of experience and the desire to imagine life stories worth telling. When I Forgot (2005/2007) intertwines individual suffering, domestic violence and personal paranoia of mental illness with the histories of political violence from the Second World War to the invasion of Iraq and the aftermath of 9/11, and presents the process of remembering as tied to imagining alternative life stories. This chapter develops, in dialogue with Hirvonen’s work, Rosi Braidotti’s (Deleuzean-inspired) conception of memory that is not necessarily linked to “real” experience but to the imagination and reinvention of self through affective encounters. It emphasizes the affectivity of memory by focusing particularly on the promise of happiness and by exploring alternative, more speculative ways of telling memories. Molly Andrews’s chapter “Popular Representations of East Germany: Whose History is It?” explores the memory contests revolving around the contemporary reinterpretations of the history of East Germany. In 14 Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis the twenty-five-years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has developed an international market for the representation of East German history, exemplified by films such as The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), which in 2006 won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, grossing $77 million in its first year of release. And yet this history is deeply contested. Using data gathered in a longitudinal project with a small group of leading East German activists between 1992 and 2012, this chapter explores reactions to these representations of East German history, questioning whose history is being represented by whom and for whom. Through this discussion, it explores the ethics of memory in relation to the idea of telling otherwise. Ilona Hongisto’s chapter, “Realities in the Making: The Ethics of Fabulation in Observational Documentary Cinema,” challenges conventional notions of documentary storytelling by foregrounding creativity in the observational event. The chapter outlines creativity with the notion of fabulation and argues that when documentary cinema fabulates, it pushes reality to actualize. With a range of observational documentary examples, the chapter traces a transposition in the work of documentary cinema from producing authentic representations of real events to facilitating events in which the real actualizes. Here, the ethical power of storytelling can no longer be considered in terms of the representational quality of the film in question; instead, ethics concerns what is created at the moment of filming. Narrative Engagements with Violence and Trauma The five chapters of the third and last part of the book explore different modes of narrative engagement with violence and trauma—across media from literature to photojournalism, video art and recruitment narratives of the terrorist organization ISIS. They discuss fictional and non-fictional storytelling in relation to the testimonial context and contribute to rethinking major theoretical concepts that articulate the ethical potential of storytelling such as empathy, restitution, assemblage and sublimity. The staging of storytelling has become increasingly prominent in selfaware contemporary fiction, but non-fictional genres such as journalism or recruitment narratives rarely draw attention to their own processes of (visual and textual) narration. The chapters emphasize the performativity and processuality of storytelling as it is linked to different mediated economies of memory. Aleida Assmann’s chapter, “The Empathetic Listener and the Ethics of Storytelling,” focuses on the career of a new literary figure that has emerged in recent decades: the empathetic listener. Anchored in the testimonial context, the empathetic listener is a secondary witness who has the maieutic function of enabling and confirming the testimony of a primary witness. This chapter examines the work of Primo Levi and Introduction 15 W. G. Sebald, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus and a wide range of theoretical material, to analyze the shift from the testimonial context into works of art and the reconstruction of the figure of the empathetic listener as a literary persona creating new artistic possibilities for the staging of storytelling. At a time when the future of Holocaust memory is increasingly the responsibility of secondary witnesses, Assmann argues that the empathetic listener can be seen as the hallmark of a new ethics of literary storytelling. Anna Reading’s chapter “Transformative Tales: Theater, Storytelling, Ethics and Restitution” approaches the ethical issues of storytelling from the perspective of restitution. We usually think of restitution in terms of financial payment or the return of property. But this chapter suggests that the art of storytelling in various forms, especially after atrocity or violence, is important to post-conflict restitutional processes. This is because restitution is not simply an economic contract, nor is it a one-off discrete event: rather it is better understood as an assemblage. The restoration of that which is diminished or taken from us through violence, conflict and atrocity is ongoing: it is a daily struggle that requires communities to retell and mobilize stories of human agency, trust and connection. Empirically, the chapter draws on Reading’s work as a playwright, in which she has sought over many years to tell stories which are difficult or taboo. Theoretically, it explores how restitution needs to be understood not in terms of singular moments or acts, but in terms of storytelling that creates memory assemblages which are part of the labor of restitution. The chapter argues that such telling of tales is an ethical art that involves a restitutional assemblage mobilized across various times and temporalities, through different artistic registers and domains. Mia Hannula’s chapter, “Towards an Intercultural Aesthetics: Shaping the Memory of Political Violence and Historical Trauma in Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Artwork Where is Where?” examines how traumatic colonial violence and its aftermath in the contemporary world can be addressed through memory acts enabled by art. In Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Where is Where?, the conflictual relations between Western and Arab cultures are put into historical perspective in a way that invites an intercultural encounter. In the close analysis of Where is Where?, Hannula explores the aesthetic resources of audio-visual narration in the pursuit of linkages between histories that intertwine with and determine each other. The epistemological approach in this study involves developing a method of addressing violent, traumatic events that pose challenges for knowledge; this approach also raises fundamental questions about the ethics of creating and responding to art. On the basis of her analysis of Ahtila’s artwork, Hannula argues that the ethical power of art lies in its critical, transformational potential. Cassandra Falke’s chapter, “Reading Terror: Imagining Violent Acts through the Rational or Narrative Sublime,” uses the Kantian conception 16 Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis of sublimity as a framework for considering narratives about violence. Discussing terrorist recruiting narratives and journalistic portrayals of terrorist acts alongside work by Günter Grass, Joseph Conrad and Lord Byron, it explores the possibility that some narrative forms might be, in themselves, more ethical than others in their handling of violent excess. To clarify the differences in the ways these texts approach the problem of violent excess, Falke proposes a distinction between rational sublimity, which ends with a metacognitive reconciliation to the excess of a sublime experience, and narrative sublimity, which resists rational reconciliation and posits the communicative act of narrative itself as the only ethically conscionable metacognitive act. The final chapter of this section gives an exceptional insight into the ethical issues confronted by a photojournalist and filmmaker working in some of the world’s most challenging and dangerous areas. Louie Palu has put his life at risk to cover the war in Afghanistan and stretched the limits of official censorship to take photographs at the US detention center in Guantanamo Bay. His chapter “War and Storytelling After 9/11: A Photojournalist’s Perspective” draws on his long-term reflection on the creation, use, control and censoring of photographs in the news. It explores message shaping by governments and the media using images, how the public consumes photographs, and how their perceptions are influenced by visuals in the post-9/11 age of terror. The chapter argues that photojournalism has become as much about what we do not see as what we do see. It revolves around Palu’s recent photographic work on war, violence and history in relation to the contemporary media landscape. A selection of Palu’s photographs illustrates the tense collaboration between art, ethical and political commitment, and state control. The book concludes with Andreea Ritivoi’s reflection on the chapters of the book and on the significance of the book. Ritivoi analyzes the key issues which recur throughout the volume: the ethical—but by no means unambiguous—value of the arts; narrative intelligibility and access to different forms of storytelling; how narratives shape our understanding of time and our existence as temporal, situated subjects; and how violence and trauma pose ethical problems for different forms of storytelling. Ritivoi’s discussion is also an important statement about the difficulty, urgency and hazards of telling and attending to the stories of others, with as much receptive, welcoming openness as we can achieve. The book originates in the “Ethics of Storytelling and the Experience of History in Contemporary Arts” research project, directed by Hanna Meretoja at the University of Turku, Finland, and funded by the Emil Aaltonen Foundation in 2013–2016. Most of the contributors to this volume participated in the research project and in the international conference “Ethics of Storytelling: Historical Imagination in Contemporary Literature, Media and Visual Arts,” which the project organized in June 2015.16 This book proposes to contribute to a more intense dialogue in Introduction 17 narrative studies across disciplinary boundaries. We aim to draw together several strands of the debate on storytelling and ethics, strands that tend to remain separate but which throw important light on one another, such as the debate on the capacity of narrative fiction to make us more empathetic, the discussion on the relation between literary and visual narration and the debates related to the ethical, cognitive, affective, post-humanist and narrative turns in the humanities and social sciences. In dialogue with contemporary literature and visual arts, we aim to provide a framework for analyzing both the ethical gains and potential pitfalls of our engagement with the fallible but indispensable, human, all-too-human practice of storytelling. Notes 1 For a study of the power of narrative from the perspective of the concrete political impact of narrative fiction, see Hanne (1996). Storytelling and Ethics approaches the power of narrative from divergent perspectives that are not limited to narrative fiction or to the question of political impact. 2 Examples of recent work that crosses the divide between narrative studies and cultural memory studies include Lothe, Suleiman, and Phelan (2012), Rothberg (2012) and several contributions in Schiff, McKim, and Patron (ed. 2017). 3 On the concept of narrative imagination, see Brockmeier (2009, 2015), Andrews (2014), and Meretoja (2017). 4 See Wyschogrod (1998), Corbin (2001), and Salmi (2011). 5 Fludernik, for example, sees “experiencing” as a universal cognitive frame (1996) and argues that “novels and fiction films tend to foreground the universally human in past experience” (2010, 48). 6 For a fuller discussion of the ethics of storytelling in relation to its capacity to expand our sense of the possible, see Meretoja (2017). 7 The link between narrativity and experientiality has been influentially emphasized by Fludernik’s (1996) cognitive narratology. See also Herman (2009). 8 As Andrews, Squire, and Tamboukou (2013, 4) put it, several strands of narrative research in the social sciences “treat narratives as modes of resistance” to structures of power. 9 On how the interlaced (largely antinarrative) ethics and aesthetics of the French postwar generation was a response to the trauma of the Second World War, the Holocaust and the Occupation, see Davis (2017) and Meretoja (2014). 10 See, e.g., Deleuze (1985) and Bogue (2010). 11 For discussion, see, e.g., Keen (2007) and Koopman and Hakemulder (2015). 12 On the notions of perspective awareness and perspective sensitivity, see Meretoja (2017). She argues that such awareness may be a necessary but not sufficient condition of ethical action. 13 See, e.g., the contributions by literary scholars to the special issue Narrative Hermeneutics (Brockmeier 2016); Meretoja (2017) tries to develop such a conceptual-analytical framework for narrative hermeneutics, particularly from the perspective of an ethics of storytelling; Korthals Altes (2014), which focuses on the concept of ethos, also has an affinity with the hermeneutic project. 18 Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis 14 On the performative model of narrative, see Meretoja (2016). 15 See Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of how narrative “is never ethically neutral” (1992, 140). 16 We would like to express our warmest gratitude not only to Emil Aaltonen Foundation for making the project, the conference and this book possible, but also to all the participants of the conference who made it such a special occasion and whose input helped us clarify our aims, approach and focus. We would also like to acknowledge the exceptional care and expertise which Eevastiina Kinnunen brought to the preparation of this volume. References Andrews, Molly. 2014. Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Andrews, Molly, Corinne Squire, and Maria Tamboukou. 2013. “Introduction.” In Doing Narrative Research, edited by Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire, and Maria Tamboukou, 1–26. London: Sage. Bogue, Ronald. 2010. Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Booth, Wayne C. 1988. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brockmeier, Jens. 2009. “Reaching for Meaning: Human Agency and the Narrative Imagination.” Theory & Psychology 19 (2): 213–33. Brockmeier, Jens. 2015. Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brockmeier, Jens, ed. 2016. Special Issue: Narrative Hermeneutics. Storyworlds 8 (1). Brockmeier, Jens, and Hanna Meretoja. 2014. “Understanding Narrative Hermeneutics.” Storyworlds 7 (2): 1–27. Corbin, Alain. 2001. The Life of an Unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clog Maker in Nineteenth-Century France. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press. Davis, Colin. 2017. Traces of War: Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Twentieth-Century French Writing. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1985. Cinéma 2: L’image-temps. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Djikic, Maja, Keith Oatley, Sara Zoeterman, and Jordan B. Peterson. 2009. “On Being Moved by Art: How Reading Fiction Transforms the Self.” Creativity Research Journal 21 (1): 24–29. Felski, Rita. 2008. The Uses of Literature. Malden, MA: Blackwell-Wiley. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge. Fludernik, Monika. 2010. “Experience, Experientiality and Historical Narrative: A View from Narratology.” In Erfahrung und Geschichte. Historische Sinnbildung im Pränarrativen, edited by Thiemo Breyer and Daniel Creutz, 40–72. Berlin: De Gruyter. Freeman, Mark. 2015. “Narrative Hermeneutics.” In The Wiley Handbook of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, edited by Jack Martin, Jeff Sugarman, and Kathleen L. Slaney, 234–47. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Hakemulder, Jèmeljan. 2000. The Moral Laboratory: Experiments Examining the Effects of Reading Literature on Social Perception and Moral Self-concept. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Introduction 19 Hanne, Michael. 1996. The Power of the Story: Fiction and Political Change. Providence: Berghahn. Hawthorn, Jeremy, and Jakob Lothe. 2013. “Introduction: The Ethical (Re) Turn.” In Narrative Ethics, edited by Jakob Lothe and Jeremy Hawthorn, 1–10. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Herman, David. 2009. Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell. Keen, Suzanne. 2007. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kidd, David Comer, and Emanuele Castano. 2013. “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind.” Science 342 (6156): 377–80. Koopman, Eva Maria, and Frank Hakemulder. 2015. “Effects of Literature on Empathy and Self-Reflection: A Theoretical-Empirical Framework.” Journal of Literary Theory 9 (11): 79–111. Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. 2014. Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Lothe, Jakob, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and James Phelan, eds. 2012. After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Meretoja, Hanna. 2014. The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Meretoja, Hanna. 2015. “A Sense of History—A Sense of the Possible: Nussbaum and Hermeneutics on the Ethical Potential of Literature.” In Values of Literature, edited by Hanna Meretoja, Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, and Kristina Malmio, 25–46. Leiden: Rodopi Brill. Meretoja, Hanna. 2016. “For Interpretation.” Storyworlds 8 (1): 97–117. Meretoja, Hanna. 2017. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 1990. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 2010. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Oatley, Keith. 2011. Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. Oxford: Wiley–Blackwell. Panero, Maria Eugenia, Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Jessica Black, Thalia R. Goldstein, Jennifer L. Barnes, Hiram Brownell, and Ellen Winner. 2016. “Does Reading a Single Passage of Literary Fiction Really Improve Theory of Mind? An Attempt at Replication.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 111 (5): e46–e54. Phelan, James. 1996. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Phelan, James. 2014. “Narrative Ethics.” In The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn et al. Hamburg: Hamburg University. URL = http:// www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narrative-ethics [view date: 20 May 2017]. Phelan, James, and Peter J. Rabinowitz. 2013. “Twain, Huck, Jim, and Us: The Ethics of Progression in Huckleberry Finn.” In Narrative Ethics, edited by Jakob Lothe and Jeremy Hawthorn, 153–66. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 20 Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis Ricoeur, Paul. 1992 [1990]. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Ritivoi, Andreea. 2016. “Reading Stories, Reading (Others’) Lives: Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and Narrative Understanding.” Storyworlds 8 (1): 51–76. Rothberg, Michael. 2012. “Progress, Progression, Procession: William Kentridge and the Narratology of Transitional Justice.” Narrative 20 (1): 1–24. Rothberg. Michael. 2014. “Trauma Theory, Implicated Subjects, and the Question of Israel/Palestine.” Profession. https://profession.commons.mla.org/2014/ 05/02/trauma-theory-implicated-subjects-and-the-question-of-israelpalestine/. Salmi, Hannu. 2011. “Cultural History, the Possible, and the Principle of Plenitude.” History and Theory 50: 171–87. Schiff, Brian, A. Elizabeth McKim, and Sylvie Patron (ed.). 2017. Life and Narrative: The Risks and Responsibilities of Storying Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. van Lissa, Caspar J., Marco Caracciolo, Thom van Duuren, and Bram van Leuveren. 2016. “Difficult Empathy: The Effect of Narrative Perspective on Readers’ Engagement with a First-Person Narrator.” DIEGESIS. Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research 5 (1): 43–63. Wyschogrod, Edith. 1998. An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology and the Nameless Others. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Part I The Ethical Potential and Limits of Narrative 2 Truth, Ethics, Fiction Responding to Plato’s Challenge Colin Davis Stories and Lies Walter Benjamin’s famous article “The Storyteller” is most often cited for its description of a decline in storytelling which accompanies the rise of the novel and reaches crisis point in the aftermath of the First World War.1 Those who returned from the battlefield had grown silent because they were, as Benjamin puts it, “poorer in communicable experience” (2006, 362). Their stories could no longer be recounted and shared. Benjamin’s analysis notwithstanding, storytelling has certainly survived and even prospered. Humans remain storytelling animals in the digital age, and video games may be no less valid and valuable as narrative media than oral tale-telling once was. So, Benjamin was certainly wrong in the suggestion that storytelling is in decline. But perhaps more seductive and lastingly interesting in Benjamin’s essay is his description of the underlying role of storytelling. He tells us that “the securest among our possessions” is “the ability to exchange experiences” (2006, 362). Stories convey experience and wisdom; they bind communities to their history and keep them together in the present; and they guide us in our endeavors to achieve understanding, choice and morality. As Benjamin concludes, “The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself” (2006, 378). Benjamin’s pessimism about the decline in storytelling may be misconceived, and it also entails what might be an equally misguided positive evaluation of the role of stories in allegedly formerly-existing secure moral communities. This view places him in conflict with one of the oldest, most challenging assessments of the moral standing of the arts, found in Book 10 of Plato’s Republic. Two and a half thousand-years ago, Plato issued a challenge to the arts in general, and literature in particular, with which those of us who care for them are still attempting to contend. In his Republic, he—or his mouthpiece Socrates—launches a blistering attack on art and proposes that artists and poets should be banished from the ideal state. He unleashes several arguments against the arts: the imitative arts create appearances rather than giving a vision of reality; poetry appeals to the lower parts of the human soul, to emotion 24 Colin Davis rather than to reason; and it harms the good because it encourages the passions rather than teaching us how to control them. The overall evaluation is damning. Artists are dangerous charlatans. They inhabit and promote a world of images and copies and simulacra. They don’t know anything about the real world; they just act as if they do. And for Plato, it is important to remember that knowing about the real world means knowing about the world of ideas, the world of truth, not about our tawdry world of copies and lies. Although Socrates admits to liking Homer, he condemns him along with all other poets: when the poet talks about shoemaking, he does not really know how to make shoes; when he talks about horsemanship he does not really know about how to ride a horse; when he talks about generalship, he does not really know how to lead an army. Tragic drama fares no better. It weakens us by appealing to the emotions rather than the intellect; it distracts us from our proper mission, which is to prepare ourselves for the world of truth. In short, the assault on art is both epistemological and ethical: artists and poets create the impression of knowledge, but in fact, they know nothing. They are fraudsters. Art deceives us by purporting to know about the world we live in when in fact, it conveys no useful, useable knowledge. In consequence, the poet, according to Socrates, should be accompanied to the city gates, courteously but firmly, and sent away. Plato’s position is not quite as uncompromising as this quick summary might suggest. Even in Book 10 of the Republic, there are some equivocations. Socrates concludes his discussion by inviting further debate as if he hoped to meet fresh arguments which would make him revise his swingeing condemnation. Elsewhere Plato would appear to be more favorable to the arts. In Book 3 of the Republic, Socrates says that some stories are acceptable, for children, on the condition that they contain improving moral messages. But for those of us concerned with the ethics of literature, this is a very disappointing position: are we really to decide that literature is ethical if, and only if, it instructs children about how they should behave? This is not quite Plato’s final, definitive word on the topic. Rather, it stands as a challenge and a provocation, perhaps to himself as much as to us. In our post-Kantian modernity, which separates aesthetics from the domains of knowledge and ethics, we might instinctively reject Plato’s arguments; but formulating decisive arguments against them is not so easy. Moreover, however much we might wish to repudiate it in theoretical, academic terms, Plato’s sense that art tells lies about the world is often echoed in modern critical assessments of particular works. Films such as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List or Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen (The Life of Others) met with strong criticism for giving partial or misleading impressions about the Holocaust and Communist East Germany respectively; 2 and Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Bruchstücke (Fragments) was Truth, Ethics, Fiction 25 first widely praised then universally condemned and withdrawn from sale when it was revealed that the author’s purported memories of the Holocaust were false. In short, even if theoretically speaking we know that it is naïve to expect art to give a literal portrayal of the truth, as individual subjects we can reject it fiercely when we judge that it falsifies material we know or care about. This isn’t precisely Plato’s point, but it is not unrelated either. In some respects, and on some occasions, we may be more Platonic in our response to art than we acknowledge. If Western philosophy can be described—as it was by Alfred North Whitehead—as a series of footnotes to Plato (Whitehead 1978, 39), 3 aesthetics in particular might be characterized as the endeavor to contend with and refute Plato’s condemnation of art in the Republic. The competing Aristotelian tradition, for example, defends art as a preeminent medium of moral learning. But the questions raised and the doubts sewn by Plato will not quite go away and they have continued to re-surface in sometimes surprising contexts. One of these, in the middle of the twentieth-century, is in the work of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas was a French philosopher of Jewish Lithuanian background who became one of the most important figures in the revival of ethics as a central concern of Continental philosophy in the late-twentieth-century. His books Totalité et Infini (Totality and Infinity) and Autrement qu’être (Otherwise than Being) have a claim to be the most important works of ethics published in French in the twentieth-century, and they have been hugely influential across disciplines and throughout the intellectual world. Put briefly, the core of Levinas’s ethics is not an attempt to establish norms, or rules, or moral codes, or utilitarian calculations about consequences, or some sense of virtue; rather, at its heart is the encounter between self and Other. The Other, most commonly capitalized, is that which is not us, something incomprehensibly different, something which lies outside everything we know and understand, and which therefore radically challenges our security and sovereignty in the world. The question is how we respond to this challenge. Do we seek to destroy the Other, do we try to eliminate it from our world, because it doesn’t fit? Or do we try to welcome it, to learn from it, to let it persist in its otherness? In a nutshell, for Levinas, this question is at the core of ethics. Levinas has become a central, almost obligatory reference point in what is sometimes called the “ethical turn” of poststructuralism and literary criticism. His thought offers rich resources for those of us concerned with the ethical status of narrative, insofar as reading might be understood as a form of encounter with otherness. However, a stumbling block here is that Levinas himself took a very different view of the matter, or at least he did in an article published in 1948 entitled “La Réalité et son ombre” (Reality and its shadow).4 That article is an attack on art which echoes Plato’s discussion in Book 10 of the Republic. Levinas espouses the view that art creates a realm of illusion and deceit. 26 Colin Davis It falsifies the world; it is ignorant, irresponsible and immoral. It inhabits a shadow world which bewitches and confuses. This attack on art explicitly includes an indictment of narrative fiction. Levinas describes, for example, how characters in novels become “beings who are locked up, prisoners” (1994, 140). They are seen from the outside, denied freedom, bound to the endless repetition of the same gestures. In a clear allusion to Plato, Levinas insists that “The poet banishes himself [s’exile lui-même] from the city” (1994, 146). Levinas shares Plato’s unease with literature (see Buckingham 2013, 113–20). In Levinas’s account, there is no need for the poet to be sent away from the city, as in Plato’s Republic. If he or she has any moral conscience or sense of civic responsibility, he or she will leave of his or her accord. He suggests, the immediate post-war period is not a moment to indulge in immoral artistic pleasures: there is, he says, “something wicked and egoistical and cowardly in artistic pleasure. There are periods when one can be ashamed of it, like when you feast in times of plague” (1994, 146). The problem for literary critics interested in Levinas is that, in this account, the artwork does not provide the occasion for a (good) encounter with alterity. Several strategies have been adopted to argue that, in one way or another, Levinas did not mean what he says here. Critics have conceded that Levinas may have attacked art in the 1948 article, but they contend that other parts of his work do not endorse that attack. His later philosophical texts are full of literary references, suggesting his hostility to art was not as extreme as he presents it in “La Réalité et son ombre.” He even suggests at one point that the whole of philosophy may be contained in the works of Shakespeare (1979, 60). Moreover, since his death in 1995, the situation has been further complicated by the discovery that he was actively trying to write a novel at the time when he published his scathing attack on art in “La Réalité et son ombre” (see Davis 2015). Moreover, some of his essays, for example on Proust, Agnon, Celan or Jabès, are much more sympathetic to art and its ethical potential (see Levinas 1976). One way or another, a Levinasian art criticism may be made possible by following the spirit of his work rather than the letter of “La Réalité et son ombre.” No one (so far as I know) agrees with or is persuaded by Levinas’s argument in “La Réalité et son ombre” (which is far from clear in any case). So why do we remain concerned by it? If Levinas had sunk into honorable obscurity after 1948, we would certainly not be bothering with the essay now. But because he became such a major figure in postwar ethics, his condemnation of art stands as a conundrum worth confronting, particularly when many of us are involved in trying to formulate what ethical criticism (and especially Levinasian ethical criticism) might entail. If one of the most prominent ethical thinkers of recent times argued in print that art was dangerous, we need to do him the credit of taking him seriously even if we cannot finally accept his argument.5 Truth, Ethics, Fiction 27 The Defence of Art As I have said, Levinas is—almost despite himself—one of the key reference points in recent attempts to define an ethics of literature and criticism. The modern form of the defense of art has entailed a re-evaluation of the status of the storyteller and the story. Plato’s poet was a charlatan and a deceiver; and for the Levinas of “La Réalité et son ombre,” only the sober critic could be relied upon to rein back the dangerous, immoral waywardness of the artwork. Benjamin’s storyteller, by contrast, was a repository of immemorial wisdom and a medium for the construction of communities. Benjamin can be understood as part of a long lineage of aesthetic thinkers, including Aristoteleans, neo-Platonists and the Romantics, who sought to defend art against the Platonic assault. A crucial step further in this defense is taken when agency and knowledge are attributed to the artwork rather than the artist, the story rather than the storyteller; and a vital moment in this attribution, at least in its modern configuration, is played by Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” even if Heidegger himself showed little interest in narrative literature per se. Plato’s and Levinas’s misgivings about art concern both knowledge and ethics: the artist falsely purports to know about the world and by so doing immorally misleads and corrupts. Plato uses the example of shoe-making to show that Homer didn’t know what he was talking about; Homer was no cobbler. Heidegger implicitly sets himself against the Platonic tradition in “The Origin of the Work of Art” by discussing a painting of peasant shoes by Van Gogh. Against Plato, Heidegger finds in the prestigious artwork the capacity to disclose the truth. “The artwork lets us know what shoes are in truth,” he writes (1971, 35). This is certainly not because the artist as a biographical subject—here a certain Vincent van Gogh—might have been reliably consultable on matters of footwear. For Heidegger, art is the origin of its own authority; artists are products of their works rather than their originators or the source of their significance. Heidegger explicitly states that it is the painting, not the painter which speaks, and which transports the attentive viewer into a new realm: “This painting spoke. In the vicinity of the work we were suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be” (1971, 35). The importance of this is paramount. The work of art speaks, it has something to say, something of which we had no foreknowledge. Heidegger is adamant that this is quite different from finding in or imposing on the artwork what we knew or could know by other means. At this point, and without any familiarity with Levinas’s ethics of alterity (which had not yet been formulated), Heidegger comes closer to a Levinasian aesthetic than Levinas managed. The work of art—the picture or the story—has something to say to us. Heidegger’s position is the opposite of Platonic or Levinasian distrust of the work of art. It entails, rather, an act of belief: the assurance that, if heeded with 28 Colin Davis attention and respect, art has an unparalleled power of disclosure. Our responsibility is to attempt to attend to its enigmatic utterance, in the endeavor to hear what it is that the work of art knows. Heidegger does not call this ethics, but I would want to suggest that it has the potential to be precisely that. If art speaks, if stories and photographs speak, they speak ethically, about the things, creatures and values that matter to us. This position was developed more fully in the latter part of the twentieth-century by the renewed focus on ethical criticism in general and the so-called ethical turn in poststructuralism in particular. As early as 1963 Derrida had published a long, still-influential essay on Levinas entitled “Violence et métaphysique: Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas” (Violence and Metaphysics: Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas, reprinted in Derrida 1967). But the thinkers and critical practices associated with him and other French philosophers of the period were often accused—sometimes in uninformed and simplistic terms, it must be said—of being ethically relativistic or even nihilistic, of denying the possibility of any moral norms or progressive political practice. Opponents readily leaped upon the revelation that Yale deconstructionist Paul de Man had written numerous articles, some with anti-Semitic implications, for a collaborationist newspaper in occupied Belgium during the Second World War. Jeffrey Mehlman summed up the situation in unforgiving terms, even if he later insisted that his comment had been misrepresented when he suggested that there were “grounds for viewing the whole of deconstruction as a vast amnesty project for the politics of collaboration during World War II” (2010, 78).6 The branch of inquiry known as trauma studies has been understood as poststructuralism’s response to such allegations. Its earliest and most influential champions, Shoshana Felman and Cathy Caruth, were biographically and intellectually associated with poststructuralist criticism. A major stake of trauma studies has been to show that a poststructuralist interest in slippage, aporia, deadlock, dissemination and the elusiveness of meaning is not tantamount to a wholesale denial of history, referentiality, real human pain at individual and collective levels, and moral responsibility. In Unclaimed Experience, Caruth writes that through the notion of trauma “we can understand that a rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not” (1996, 11). History, reference and understanding, are re-conceptualized but not in any sense eliminated. Crucially, this also entails the complex imbrication of the other’s story with my own, so that telling and listening come together to create new subjectivities and communities. History, in Caruth’s words, “is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (1996, 24). And the imbrication of my story with that of others brings with it responsibility or “response-ability” as Felman puts it (1992, 200). My response to the Truth, Ethics, Fiction 29 other’s story, my role in constituting it and its role in constituting me, inevitably tie me to the other through an ethical bond which is unbreakable because it constitutes the very core of my being. It is important to the ethics of this approach that the positions of storyteller, story and listener are fluid and permeable, constantly subject to transactional adjustments as each adapts to find a place with and within the other in a relationship of mutual interdependence. Without the listener, there is no story or storyteller; and in this version the ethics of storytelling is inseparable, even indistinguishable, from the ethics of reading. Of course, the broad term “ethical criticism” covers a larger area than trauma studies, and by no means, all those associated with it would wish to be linked with poststructuralism and deconstruction. To give one distinguished example, Martha Nussbaum says of deconstruction that it was “largely hostile to the idea of bringing a broad range of human concerns into connection with literary analysis” (1990, 21). Reading Derrida leaves her wanting “writing about literature that talks of human lives and choices as if they matter to us all” (1990, 171). In short, Derrida and the critics who drew on his work followed practices which failed to face up to the human, ethical dimension of literature. Nevertheless, there is a convergence between Nussbaum’s humanist ethical criticism and work within trauma studies which are favorable to poststructuralism. Some literary texts are indispensable to ethical inquiry because they are, Nussbaum writes, “sources of insight without which the inquiry cannot be complete” (1990, 23–24). In her Aristotelian perspective, the stories which matter to us have something to tell us, something to teach us, about our being in the world and our ethical engagements with others. They are, though, “not by any means sufficient” (1990, 23); they need to be analyzed, explained, interpreted, in short, they need to be read intelligently, for their ethical teaching to be audible. There is also, as Meretoja has argued, a striking normativity about Nussbaum’s position: the right kind of books will make us the right kind of people (see Meretoja 2017). Although in many respects this is at a far remove from poststructuralism and trauma studies, there is still common ground. The ethical event of literature occurs through the collusion of storyteller, story and listener, during which none entirely remain as they were before. Versions of this position often recur in ethical criticism, in sophisticated formulations. In The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human Jonathan Gottschall summarizes the view exuberantly. As his title asserts, being human means telling stories. What Gottschall calls “story” is both inextricable from our lives and, in the main, a force for the good: Story, in other words, continues to fulfill its ancient function of binding society by reinforcing a set of common values and strengthening 30 Colin Davis the ties of common culture. Story enculturates the youth. It defines the people. It tells us what is laudable and what is contemptible. It subtly and constantly encourages us to be decent instead of decadent. Story is the grease and glue of society: by encouraging us to behave well, story reduces social friction while uniting people around common values. Story homogenizes us; it makes us one. (2012, 137–38) This is, I suspect, a view which many of us who are committed to teaching and studying literature would like to share even if we would not put it in quite these terms. It entails an assessment which appears to be at the furthest possible remove from Plato’s banishment of poets and storytellers. In Gottschall’s words, “Plato was wrong, and so were his panicked descendants. Fiction is, on the whole, intensely moralistic” (2012, 130). However, if this directly contradicts the Plato of Book 10 of the Republic, it is not entirely alien to the Plato of Book 3. There, Socrates argues that poets should be compelled to describe good character and forbidden from representing “the evil disposition, the licentious, the illiberal, the graceless” (1961, 646). Stories may, after all, be allowed in the ideal state insofar as they instruct the young. This is not so very different from Gottschall’s insistence that story “enculturates the youth.” And if Plato’s version entails censorship and compulsion, the desired result turns out to be strikingly similar to what Gottschall believes happens in stories without the need for external supervision. In stories, we might sometimes find ourselves “rooting perversely for dark heroes”; but we do not need to worry because “we aren’t asked to approve of their cruel and selfish behavior, and storytellers almost never allow them to live happily ever after” (2012, 130). Even fiction which sets out to shock and to subvert turns out to be moral in the final analysis: But most of this fiction is still moral fiction: it puts us in the position of approving of decent, prosocial behavior and disapproving of the greed of antagonists … fiction is, in its essence, deeply moral. Beneath all of its brilliance fiction tends to preach, and its sermons are usually fairly conventional. (2012, 132) So, there we have it. In a nutshell, stories make us better people, by enculturating our children, underpinning moral communities, refining our ability to empathize, or sharpening our respect for otherness. Gottschall’s formulations of these views provocatively simplify the careful work in the ethics of narrative by scholars such as Nussbaum, Wayne Booth, Adriana Caverero or Alasdair MacIntyre. In so doing, he perhaps succeeds in reflecting back to us part of the underlying, rarely expressed, doxa of modern ethical criticism. Truth, Ethics, Fiction 31 Literature as Corruption The question remains: is this how the circuit of storytelling operates, or merely how we hope it should? Modern forms of storytelling include film, video games and digital media; and grave concerns have been expressed about the potentially dangerous effects of these if left unregulated. In the main, we take it for granted that children need to be protected against the most extreme images; and in some cases, exposure to disturbing material has been suggested to be a contributing factor in anti-social behavior. The film director Stanley Kubrick asked for his film A Clockwork Orange to be withdrawn from British distribution because it was cited in cases of copycat violence, and the debate about such issues has intensified in recent years. In literature, the controversy around Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) demonstrates that misgivings about the potentially deleterious effects of certain works have not gone away. Littell’s first-person narrator is an unrepentant Nazi war criminal who tells, at great length, of his wartime experiences. The novel was quickly recognized as a major literary achievement, winning France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. It is undoubtedly one of the most important, serious and controversial novels of recent times. Some readers, though, found the book upsetting and disturbing, suspecting it of encouraging sympathy for its Nazi narrator and being implicitly pro-Nazi. The book has been described as a trap or virus, potentially infecting its victim-readers with its aberrant ideology (for evidence and discussion, see Hutton 2010, 3–5). Nussbaum’s carefully selected works might refine our capacity for empathy and help us develop as moral subjects, but at least for some readers novels such as Les Bienveillantes risk dragging us back down into the mud. Simone de Beauvoir discussed the dangers of art in the 1950s in her essay “Faut-il brûler Sade?” (Should we burn Sade?). The Marquis de Sade, she observes, does not wish us well in his writings: “he wants my misfortune, my subjection and my death” (1955, 79). By exploring the dangerously fascinating domains of crime and cruelty, by embracing Evil, he exposes his readers to something which might corrode their moral sensibility. Would we be better off, then, simply burning his texts? Beauvoir argues against this conclusion, describing Sade as being a moralist of sorts. The very incommunicable singularity of his situation tells us something about what it means to be human, and his works have testimonial value despite their darkest ambitions: “The supreme value of his testimony is that it disturbs us. He forces us to question the essential problem which haunts our age in different forms: the true relation of man to man” (1955, 82). Jean-Paul Sartre makes a similar argument regarding the writer Jean Genet. Like Sade, Genet sets his work up in opposition to conventional morality and openly intends to offend and repel through his celebration of Evil. What value, then, can be found in 32 Colin Davis this unpromising environment? Just as Beauvoir finds ethical support in Sade’s work insofar as it disturbs us, Sartre sees a substantial gain in Genet’s ability to compromise and corrupt his readers, making us enter into his transgressive delirium. He realizes one of the possibilities of our being and of humankind in general. He is part of our human reality: “he is our truth as we are his; our virtues and his crimes are interchangeable” (1952, 650). As Sartre puts it in the final sentence of his monumental study, “Today we need to confront the subject, the guilty one, that monstrous and miserable beast that we risk becoming at every moment; Genet holds a mirror up to us: we must look at ourselves in it” (1952, 662). In this light, Littell’s Les Bienveillantes could also be defended against its most severe critics.7 However repulsive he may be, his narrator Maximilien Aue represents an aspect of humanity, and we are better off accepting the contradictions of what it is to be human than to resist or deny them. This is, in Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s arguments, more honest, more authentic, and ultimately more ethical, than dismissing Evil from the constitution of the human by designating it as exceptional and singular. The serial killer tells us as much about ourselves as the saint. The argument, though, is clearly a difficult one. It cleverly finds ethical use in works which set out to have none. Sartre is fully aware that Genet would not thank him, and he lucidly concedes that in the end he has chosen to stick to his own values rather than fully embracing Genet’s when he endeavors to learn from his subject’s works: “at least I will be faithful to myself” (1952, 646). Sartre is aware that his reading is a betrayal of Genet, perhaps also a necessary falsification which allows him to find universality and communication in works which are resolutely singular and opaque, and to find ethical value in the celebration of Evil. This strain of criticism is anti-Platonic insofar as it defends literature against the charge of being immoral, but it nevertheless retains a link to the Platonic legacy when it finds justification in literature by giving it a moral purpose. Plato allowed stories if they educated children; Beauvoir and Sartre defend the value of literature insofar as it gives adults a lesson in the contradictions of being human. At the same time, a disruptive question hovers over their detailed arguments: what if, despite our most ingenious arguments and resistances, some texts are abhorrent and corrupting, without appeal? The Ethical and the Good This chapter is obviously not going to resolve these issues once and for all. If Plato couldn’t do it, then neither can I. To bring this discussion to a provisional close, I want to introduce an important distinction: that is, between the ethical and the good. These words are sometimes loosely used as if they are interchangeable. To say that someone’s actions are unethical commonly means that I do not approve of them. But just as ethics and morality are sometimes distinguished (even if there is no settled Truth, Ethics, Fiction 33 consensus about how to define the distinction), then so may be ethical and the good. I do not claim that this distinction is based in widespread usage. Neither ethics nor the good are terms with simple, stable uses and meanings. The use of good as synonymous with morally good is only one of its senses: “he is a good man” may mean that he is morally good, but “he is a good footballer” says only that he is more proficient than most at the game of football; and “a good poison” may be very effective in producing fatalities, but anything other than morally good.8 Ethics also has a range of uses, sometimes being little different from morals, sometimes edging into the more abstract domain of meta-ethics, though as Bernard Williams observed, the distinction between ethics and meta-ethics is less convincing and significant than it was for a period (Williams 1993, 73).9 I use ethics here as a field of study, a set of problems concerning right and wrong, good and bad, rather than the prospect of their solution; and ethical is that which contributes to that field, however disruptively and distressingly. In this sense, the ethical may be no more morally good than the all-too-effective good poison. It was suggested earlier in this chapter that the Heideggerian gain in aesthetics is the conviction that art speaks, and that this could also be extended to say that art speaks ethically. It must be made explicit, though, that this is not to say that art speaks solely of the good, or that it will make us better people and citizens. Ethics is a place where the contest over values takes place, not where it is resolved; and stories are one of the preeminent sites where ethics plays out its dangerous game. In the nineteenth-century, Soren Kierkegaard’s discussion of the story of Abraham and Isaac in Fear and Trembling shows how it is one of the greatest ethical narratives. As he prepares to sacrifice Isaac at his God’s command, Abraham is torn between his duty to his son and his duty to God. Abraham’s leap of faith entails the belief, supported by no ultimate guarantee, that in killing his own son his actions are ethical, even if they are in no obvious sense good, and even if he can have no understanding of why he has been commanded to act as he does. Kierkegaard’s narrator describes himself as “virtually annihilated” and “constantly repulsed” by thinking about Abraham (1985, 62). Hegel is easier to understand than Abraham, we are told. Here, the ethical is a terrible mystery, capable of leading a good man to commit the most appalling crimes. To be an ethical subject, Abraham must flout normal morality; his actions place him beyond speech and comprehension, embodying what Derrida calls “all those secrets without secret,” of which literature is the principal site (1999, 206). The best example of the distinction between the ethical and the good that I have come across in recent writing is the figure of Anton Chigurh, the pathological killer in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.10 Chigurh can be regarded as a descendant of Meursault in Albert Camus’s novel L’Etranger (The Outsider). Meursault kills another man almost by accident, but shows no remorse; Chigurh, by contrast, is a killer by both taste and profession, and he takes Meursault’s remorselessness to 34 Colin Davis an extreme level. This is not to say, though, that he has no values. On the contrary, as one of his future victims comments, “He’s a peculiar man. You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that.” (McCarthy 2005, 153) He is a ruthless, paid killer, but he is not—if one can put it like this—a crook or an outand-out capitalist, bent on making as much money as he can. He returns money taken from a drugs baron when he offers his services to him, insisting on his probity: “Well. I’d say that the purpose of my visit is simply to establish my bonafides. As someone who is an expert in a difficult field. As someone who is completely reliable and completely honest. Something like that” (2005, 251–52). And when he goes to kill the widow of another of his victims, he stresses that he is acting as he does in order to keep his word. He told her husband that he would kill her, and for him, a promise is a promise: “But my word is not dead. Nothing can change that” (2005, 255). In short, Chigurh is a supremely ethical figure, almost admirable in his integrity: he is honest, reliable, uncomplaining, not greedy, and he keeps his word in all circumstances. He epitomizes many of the values which, in most contexts, would count as eminently positive. He may be a serial killer, but he is by no means an outsider to the society in which he operates. In fact, he shares our values and gives them back to us in a sickening form. He embodies a searing, brilliant reflection on the proximity of some of our dearest principles to murderous insanity. In other words, while Chigurh is certainly not good, he is supremely ethical. The point I draw from this is that, rather than underpinning the good in a happy theoretical and practical marriage, the ethical can be understood as an enigma and an open challenge. In this light, ethics is a domain where we play out the dramas of right and wrong, good and bad, without any guarantee that what we understand or hope to be the good and the right will win out. The stories we tell and to which we listen might make us better people, or they might diminish us. We cannot know these things in advance. Moreover, as Les Bienveillantes and innumerable other examples surely illustrate, our experience of stories is routinely, perhaps constitutively, problematic and disturbing. Here are some examples: • • • • If you have ever wanted the villain of a book or film to escape the law, something ethical has happened; but it is not necessarily good. If you have ever been moved to tears in ways you couldn’t quite express by a book, a film or a photograph, something ethical has happened; but it is not necessarily good. If you have ever been aroused by something you read or saw, something ethical has happened; but it is not necessarily good. If you have ever empathized with or felt sorry for the perpetrator of terrible acts in art or in life, then something ethical has happened; but it is not necessarily good. Truth, Ethics, Fiction 35 The point and the difficulty here is not, too rapidly, to transform these disturbing experiences into something from which we can draw instruction and comfort. That would be, precisely, not to listen to how art speaks to us ethically. Art matters, but not because it is always morally improving. And by the same token, ethics in general and the ethics of storytelling are not, I am sorry to say, the promise to make of us better citizens in a better world. Notes 1 This chapter offers an overview of some of the ethical issues raised by storytelling and the arts, together with some concluding suggestions based on the distinction between the ethical and the good. A more comprehensive account and theory of the ethics of storytelling, based on hermeneutics and the notion of the possible, is to be found in Meretoja (2017). 2 On Das Leben der Anderen, see Chapter 11. 3 Michel Foucault refined this comment, describing philosophy as the history of rejections of Plato; see Žižek (2014, 78). 4 The article is re-printed in Levinas’s collection Les Imprévus de l’histoire (1994). Translations from French material in this chapter are my own. 5 The problems involved in enlisting Levinas for the study of art in general and storytelling in particular are encapsulated in Will Buckingham’s Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-storytelling (2013). Buckingham describes himself as deeply influenced by Levinas’s work. He is fully aware of Levinas’s attack on art, and concludes that we need to “open out Levinas’s thinking to a broader range of stories” if we are to preserve what is valuable in it, and that to be indebted to Levinas also entails finding ways of thinking and talking “otherwise than Levinas” (2013, 158). 6 Mehlman reports that his comments to Newsweek were edited so that key words were cut, turning a balanced, speculative suggestion into an apparently unnuanced condemnation (2010, 78). 7 I should stress here that such critics take the book as endorsing Aue’s views, an interpretation which many readers—including myself—do not accept. Allowing a Nazi to narrate his own story is not the same as endorsing it. See Hutton (2010, 5): “Ethical condemnations of the text on the grounds that it is pro-Nazi arise, it seems likely, from a critical (in both senses of the word) misapprehension of the status of Littell’s first-person narrator.” On ethical aspects of the novel, see also Meretoja (2016). 8 For discussion of good, see Ross (2002, especially 65–74) and Williams (1972, 38–47). 9 On different senses of ethics, see Singer (1994, 4–5). 10 I am grateful for the insights in this paragraph to an illuminating discussion with Laura Mooney and Shane Weller. Mooney discusses the character of Chigurh in her excellent PhD thesis, “Listening to Silence, Reading the Unwritten: Articulating the Voice of the Racial Other in White Male Discourse,” University of Kent (2015). References Beauvoir, Simone de. 1955. Faut-il brûler Sade? Paris: Gallimard. Benjamin, Walter. 2006. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” In The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900–2000, edited by Dorothy J. Hale, 361–78. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 36 Colin Davis Buckingham, Will. 2013. Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-storytelling. London: Bloomsbury. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Davis, Colin. 2015. “Levinas the Novelist.” French Studies 69 (3): 333–44. Derrida, Jacques. 1967. L’Ecriture et la difference. Paris: Seuil. Derrida, Jacques. 1999. Donner la mort. Paris: Galilée. Felman, Shoshana. 1992. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Co-written with Dori Laub. New York and London: Routledge. Gottschall, Jonathan. 2012. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Boston and New York: Mariner Books. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter, 15–86. New York: HarperCollins. Hutton, Margaret-Anne. 2010. “Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes: Ethics, Aesthetics and the Subject of Judgement.” Modern and Contemporary France 181: 1–15. Kierkegaard, Soren. 1985. Fear and Trembling. Translated by Alastair Hannay. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1976. Noms propres. Montpellier: Fata Morgana. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1979. Le Temps et l’autre. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1994. Les Imprévus de l’histoire. Montpellier: Fata Morgana. McCarthy, Cormac. 2005. No Country for Old Men. London: Picador. Mehlman, Jeffrey. 2010. Adventures in the French Trade: Fragments toward a Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Meretoja, Hanna. 2016. “Fiction, History and the Possible: Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes.” Orbis litterarum 71 (5): 371–404. Meretoja, Hanna. 2017. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mooney, Laura. 2015. “Listening to Silence, Reading the Unwritten: Articulating the Voice of the Racial Other in White Male Discourse.” PhD thesis, University of Kent. Nussbaum, Martha. 1990. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. London and New York: Oxford University Press. Plato. 1961. Republic. Translated by Paul Shorey. In Plato: The Complete Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ross, David. 2002. The Right and the Good. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1952. Saint Genet, comédien et martyr. Paris: Gallimard. Singer, Peter. 1994. “Introduction.” In Ethics, edited by Peter Singer, 3–13. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1978. Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press. Williams, Bernard. 1972. Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Bernard. 1993. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana. Žižek, Slavoj. 2014. Event: Philosophy in Transit. London: Penguin Books. 3 Is There an Ethics to Story-Telling?1 Mieke Bal Ethical Art Ethics, or the development of, awareness of and compliance with general norms of what is right or wrong, is with each of us all through our days, in everything we do. It intervenes in all decisions. But story-telling, the presentation in whatever medium of a focalized series of events, has two properties that make the ethical aspect of it more specific. It concerns others, and it is always, at least in part, fictional, even when, or perhaps especially when, it concerns difficult, painful or extreme situations. It has these two features in common with most figurative art—the field I have been working on lately. In this essay, I aim to bring together an old ethical question, first with the status of art as moving and second with story-telling as focalized. In the end, these two views join forces, or even melt together. The ethics of representation has been largely determined by debates on the ethics of art and literature in the face of extreme circumstances. These have invariably taken two opposed positions as their starting-point—in short: yes or no. The first, decennia-old, comes from Adorno’s famous warning. As we know since his 1949 indictment of making and enjoying poetry “after Auschwitz,” what I call modesty is a crucial issue in our relationship to representation. This statement has often served to provide a simplistic view that can only lead to iconophobia. To counter that quick fix, allow me to present the Adorno quote from his philosophical prose in the form of poetry. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. (2003, 162) Instead of over-citing without engaging, the status of this fragment as poetry helps to “denaturalize” its usual exploitation for a simplistic if 38 Mieke Bal meaningful ethical guideline—to take it out of its routine self-evidence. The “verses” are bound by enjambment, the artful breaking up of words that normally belong together; here prepositions and their complements—with, of, and to. I propose to stop for a moment after these prepositions. This allows us not immediately to fill in the next line and think about alternatives. Poetry is a form of discourse one can learn by heart as well as complicate and read aloud in musical cadence and tone. Reading poetry is usually slower and more detailed than reading narratives such as novels, with equal attention to every word. Poetry has this in common with other forms of art, such as visual art and films, if only we would take it as a guideline. I posit an equivalence between poetry and other art forms in view of this mode of reading. In the context of Adorno’s statement, it also entails the need to consider its sequel, where the philosopher gives the reason for this severe indictment: he refuses to make sense of what doesn’t make sense. Such sense-making is wrong because it would be honoring violence with semiotic access; and to take pleasure, in other words, in making a potentially pornographic use of the suffering of others. 2 The original context of the passage is a devastating critique of what we now call cultural studies. It comes at the end of Adorno’s essay “Cultural Criticism and Society,” the first essay in the volume Prisms (published in English in 1983). I speculate that this context is the reason for the sloppy citations that so abound in the academic milieu of cultural studies—a form of repression. When I first tried to locate the passage to find the context it took me a lot of time and effort; most critics who quoted it left the citation vague. It shames us and therefore it must be erased from memory. I think, in contrast, that this shame ought to incite us to do better, more significantly critical work, rather than repress what we fail to do. In a different, later text the philosopher wrote: After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate. (2004, 361; emphasis added) The violence in the word “squeezing” stipulates that semiotic behavior can be as violent as actual violence. The verb intimates that language is material. This is so because it is performative: it has consequences in that its utterances affect the addressee. The verb “to squeeze” recurs when Adorno explains that his refusal to condone such renderings is its potential pornographic use: “The so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those who were beaten down with rifle butts contains, Is There an Ethics to Story-Telling? 39 however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it” (2003, 252; emphasis added). It is this pleasure, the sheer possibility of it, that Adorno calls “barbaric.”3 However, the flipside of Adorno’s compelling call for modesty is a forbidding taboo that makes the violence invisible. It is against this taboo that French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman spoke out in his short but influential treatise, which is a plea for attention to even the vaguest Auschwitz photographs: “in order to know, we must imagine” (2008, 4), as his opening sentence has it. And to relate to others, we do need to know, and when full knowledge is impossible, we still must try to approximate, encircle, or feel it. That is what it means to imagine. That is why the imagination is so important. This, in turn, is why art is important; offering the visual imagination something it images.4 Taking the element “image” of the imagination, turning it into an active verb that allows an intermediate position between the subject and object of representation and thus bringing it to the viewer, both body and mind, is the material practice through which art matters. The readers, viewers, visitors to exhibitions and other addressees of artworks, are in a position equivalent to the linguistic form, in Greek, of the “middle voice.” This verb form is neither active nor passive but comes close to reflexive—which, in turn, is close to reflective. The form opens the empty middle between the comfortable but false positions of either victim or perpetrator and makes room for an awareness of complicity and reflection on where to go from there: beyond yes or no. Indeed, this is not only a reasonable position but also one that gives art a vocation. Art can contribute to facilitating such exercise of the imagination in a way that binds the intellect to the affects, so that understanding implies both and the two domains can no longer be separated. Adorno, in fact, had already written as much, in the same essay where he retracts his earlier prohibition: Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. (2004, 362; emphasis added) Also, it is not only in the extreme circumstances of concentration camps—although we keep learning that extremities are still pervasive today, in war zones and other disaster areas—but also in the intercultural contact zones of the contemporary culture of mobility that we need to be both modest and imaginative, to know, and to know our place. These issues have been on my mind a lot throughout my working life, both in scholarship and in filmmaking. Still today, the question of an ethically informed political art sits right in the middle of these two positions of the need for modesty and the need 40 Mieke Bal to (imagine in order to) know; not between, but immersed and mired in both. For, as I have argued in dialogue with the work of different artists, this is not the binary opposition it is usually taken to be; the middle is not empty. It is a very busy space. Modesty, and the need to speak and hear, show and see: both positions move, struggle and tangle in that middle. As the cultural critic, Andreas Huyssen phrased it as a question in his catalog essay for Indian artist Nalini Malani’s most recent shadow play, against the background of Adorno’s position: How can human pain and social suffering, past and present, be rendered visually in such a way that its representation nurtures and illuminates life, rather than indulging in aesthetic stylization, voyeuristic titillation, or succumbing to fatalism in the face of mythic cycles of violence? (2012, 52) To make that argument, Salcedo’s sculptures, Ahtila’s video installations, Janssens’ abstractions and Malani’s shadow plays, to name four keenly political artists who deploy different media and genres, can be our guides.5 Working on and in the empty middle between modesty and the need to know is what this chapter proposes. I attempt to break the binary through a reflection on the entwinement of memory and vision and use the here-and-now—of reader, viewer, or artist—to give that reflection a space. In addition to suffering, both poverty and sexual display are areas of life where modesty becomes a forceful problematic. The artists who heed this paradoxical double caution all find new ways of making art on this ethical basis. For example, Malani, already mentioned, devoted drawings in artist books to Lohar Chawl, an area of Bombay where the artist lived and had a studio between 1977 and 2003. This neighborhood was bristling with street life; filled with wholesale markets, including the ironsmiths after which the area was named. People living on the street, sleeping under handcarts while waiting for the next load, are part of the cityscape.6 How to deal with this environment when you work in the middle of it? Malani’s Hieroglyphs of Lohar Chawl from 1991 is a series of artist books with drawings of people in the artist’s immediate surroundings. These drawings are retrospective in a technical-artistic sense. Out of modesty and to avoid the kind of gazes usually cast upon such areas, the artist drew them later, from memory. Thus, this work is bound to the present-past relationship. It brings to the forefront the tangle of memory and visibility and the conditions for the right and imperative to see—the key issue in the ethics of representation as outlined above. It also has a specific and relevant temporality, for it creates the capacity to re-make images that never existed before. This paradoxical Is There an Ethics to Story-Telling? 41 temporality is key to Malani’s work but broader still, it can be considered as the way the imagination works. It stipulates that vision is always-already steeped in memory, and that, conversely, memory relies on images to do its work. Even when first seen, the figure is bound to other figures. But Malani’s endeavor was to make visible what had been erased from vision by the superficial, say, curious class or tourist gaze. This gaze is consumerist and exploitative, colonizing and paradoxically, it ignores its objects’ status as subjects. Drawing from memory instead of sketching from live models address this issue. Avoiding what Adorno indicts, yet heeding Didi-Huberman’s plea for making visible the invisible, she brought the area and its inhabitants to visibility from within her position of modesty. Training to draw from memory produces a great skill. But more importantly, it stipulates that vision is always-already steeped in memory, and that, conversely, memory relies on images to do its work. Even when first seen, the figure is bound to other figures. The residents of Lohar Chawl were/are people who fall into the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s category of “subalterns” who cannot speak—with “can” being determined by the power of others. Spivak’s essay indicts a cultural, semiotic violence that gags people in certain social positions, making them unable to speak. Physically, they may speak, but they will not be heard. This undercuts the very notion of speaking as communicative, which should entail an exchange between first and second person. They are also invisible, simply because “we” refuse to look them in the eye. They are present, in the middle of the social buzz, but they remain unseen. Drawing the residents of her neighborhood from memory, then, is also a way of heeding the warnings in both Adorno’s and Didi-Huberman’s positions, at the same time. This is how the artist seeks a visual solution to a persistent philosophical dilemma; this is how visual philosophy happens.7 Materiality participates in this endeavor. Under the modesty of means of which the area disposed economically, Malani had thirty sets of photocopies made of her initial memory-drawings in the local copy shop. These she bound into thirty books and developed each sheet in these books further. The result is an integration of cheap reproduction technology and unique art that pays homage to the people so frequently denied visibility while challenging our unreflective assumptions about our right to see, as well as a prudish puritanism that maintains the invisibility of subaltern subjects. This integration can be standing, materially as well as intellectually, in the middle ground between “high art” and “popular culture”—another opposition the artist contests.8 How does the fact that the drawings were made from memory have a political impact? The act occurs in the middle of Adorno’s first position and his later one, visually nuanced by Didi-Huberman’s practice of probing vague, barely legible photographs. First, it complies with 42 Mieke Bal Adorno’s insistence on modesty. We can easily imagine how awfully indiscreet an artist would feel, witnessing the extreme poverty and hardship of her neighbors and then using that view to make art. This would amount to using people we refuse to look into the eye to make images of them; deriving vision from the refusal to look. This is the usual behavior of tourists, who hide behind their cameras and iPhones. Drawing them from memory, that is, retrospectively, after the fact of seeing, in contrast, avoids such visual callousness. This procedure also compels Malani to exercise and rehearse a painstakingly difficult craft. The effort is part of the political meaning. For she must make an effort in solidarity with the workers she has seen and whose images stayed imprinted on her memory. In line with this, the balance between the two positions must be sought, not in some intermediate position of compromise, but in a rethinking of the feature of art that can help us to consider the ethical issue from a new angle. To put it simply: art moves and that movement inherent in images is where we can both learn to “imagine” and to avoid even the slightest voyeurism and explaining-away of the suffering of others. The qualifier “moving” is my guide for probing the objections of Adorno with the encouragement of Didi-Huberman. Mobility is one of the meanings of “moving” and mobility, in turn, is the hallmark of globalization. In this inquiry with a focus on movement, migrants are the exemplary subjects instead of the exceptional ones. I will probe some of the meanings of the qualifier “moving” a bit further and keep in view the one that is indispensable for an input which comes specifically from the humanities: the aesthetical and affective sense of moving as relating. Story-telling is moving by definition, in many ways. And this moving quality enables a less boundary-driven, more fluid approach to the ethics of story-telling. Art Moves At stake is the relationship between the still and the moving image. Both in painting and in cinema this relationship is reflected (upon) in the form of self-reflection; artists in each medium borrow from the other to enhance their own medium’s capacities. Painting and cinema each produce images, different ones in many respects. They also share something fundamental that is a property of images as objects of perception. Here I turn to French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941), who has had a lasting impact, not only on philosophy but on cultural thought and analysis more in general. Bergson’s legacy has become of prime importance to cinema studies, and conversely, cinema has anachronistically become a model for other visual and audiovisual cultural expressions. Bergson had a profound influence on Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), who was to become an important cultural philosopher of our time, in particular with his vision of cinema. In his publications, among which the famous Cinema books, Deleuze re-activated Bergson’s work.9 Is There an Ethics to Story-Telling? 43 Bergson’s book Matter and Memory from 1896 starts with a thesis about perception. Bergson claims that perception is not a construction, as we have considered it in the post-realism era, but a selection. The subject makes that selection from among all the perceptible things in the world around her, in view of her own interests. Perception, in Bergson’s view, is an act of the body and for the body as it is positioned amid things to select from. This is why texture, color and dimensions matter as much as figures, space and perspective. It also brings the viewer into the orbit of what art is and thus questions the idea of art’s autonomy. Perception is an act of the present. But this might entail a naïve presentism—a narrowing of time to the brief moment of now, a temporal selfie—if it wasn’t for the participation of memory. Occurring in the present, perception is bound to memory. Without memory, the portion of the visible world we see would not make enough sense to be selected. Since it is the subject’s interest that motivates the selection that perception is, a perception image that is not infused with memory images would make no sense. Nor would it have a sensuousphysical impact, since we perceive with as well as for the body. Therefore, the body also remembers. At the end of his book, Bergson writes how memory participates in perception. That participation accounts for the subjective nature of perception, even if the things we perceive exist outside our consciousness. He writes: In concrete perception memory intervenes, and the subjectivity of sensible qualities is due precisely to the fact that our consciousness, which begins by being only memory, prolongs a plurality of moments into each other, contracting them into a single intuition. (1991, 218–19; emphasis added) This also explains why Bergson insisted so strongly on duration. As Deleuze wrote in Bergsonism, “Bergsonian duration is … defined less by succession than by coexistence” (1988, 60). Timespace is perhaps most typically visible in video installation. There, the simultaneous presence of—and hence the simultaneous movement on—multiple screens embody the coexistence of duration and different moments. It is a visible instance of Bergson’s plurality of moments contracted into “a single intuition.” In this sense, video installation is the most extreme manifestation of the cinematic, as Pepita Hesselberth has argued (2014). This coexistence of different moments (of these memories) has a spatial aspect to it. It is a timespace. And this timespace is given shape in art. We see the articulation of space and time together through movement. They are both only understandable and functional in relation to the subject of perceiving. The effect of visual art, the fact that artworks affect us, is the consequence of the heterogeneity and, at the same time, the subjectivity of timespace. To appreciate the continued presence of the 44 Mieke Bal “middle-voice” involvement of the viewer in our relationship to space, the concept of “psychic space” is helpful. Psychic space is based on the real, existential connection between the subject and the space around her. Hence, we must understand the place of the index in the concept of psychic space. The index is a sign that is physically or causally connected to its meaning. A linguistic deixis is a specific form of indexicality. Not only is it primarily linguistic—albeit not exclusively—but it also has as specificity that it is bound to the subject, as his or her extension in Bergson’s sense. Psychic space is material, and the primary thrust of political art lies in that materiality. For the concept of psychic space, I am inspired by the view of cultural theorist Kaja Silverman. In her theory of the formation of subjectivity and the place of the body therein, Silverman argues that one’s apprehension of self is keyed both to a visual image or constellation of visual images, and to certain bodily feelings, whose determinant is less physiological than social. (1996, 14; emphasis added) This statement explains how the relationship between the subject as individual and the culturally normative images we interact with on an everyday basis in the social and political domain is bodily without being “innate” or anatomically determined. Thus, this relationship is both materially solid and subject to change. If the subject can change and if that change can happen in the social domain, then art can contribute to such change. Political artworks perform an insistent interrogation of the indexical relationship between image and viewer on the basis of cultural memories and myths mixed with contemporary realities. They frequently allude to elements of this mixture. These plays and the shadows that define them work with the possibility of bodily interaction “from within” subjectivity with the outside culture, and thus address psychic space as material. In Silverman’s statement above the issue is feeling: how the subject feels his or her position in space. This was also the verb Bergson chose to describe space and its “extensivity.” What we call “feeling” is the threshold of body and subjectivity in interaction with the outside world. To account for this feeling Bergson insists on the materiality of memory. This is expressed in the title of his best-known book, Matière et mémoire (Matter and Memory). The external images are “attached” to the subject’s existence, which is experienced as bodily, locked together; the subject is locked into the external world. In the musical sense of the word “key,” the external images and the body are adapted, harmonized; one is set into the tonality of the other. But the word “to key to” can also be understood through the notion of code, the key to or ground of understanding, comprehending, communicating between individual Is There an Ethics to Story-Telling? 45 subjects and a culture. Silverman uses the felicitous term “postural function” to refer to this position of the “keyed” subject. The shadow can be taken as an allegory of this postural function’s outward movement. To grasp the consequences of this view of space as image, and vice versa, our experience of space is best summed up as deictic. This means that the subject can only see the images-in-space in relation to her own self, body and mind together. In this view, the image is moving by definition, whether still or moving. In developing the thesis that perception is not a construction but a selection the subject makes, Bergson’s “essay on the relationship between body and mind” (as the subtitle of Matter and Memory significantly calls it) presents as the criterion for selection that the object perceived should be “useful” in view of the subject’s own interests. This simple idea has transformed contemporary thinking on representation, which for a long time was bound to an opposition between mimesis (seen as imitation) and construction (1991, 20). Perception, in Bergson’s radically different view, is an act of the body and for the body. Embodied perception activates the seeing subject to feel, participate and share. In Malani’s work, as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai phrases it, the “pivot for exploring the global in the local is the nation, as a site of memory, violence and affect.” He continues with an attempt to describe the kinds of images of violence and proposes: “These episodes of violence are always acts of repetition and at the same time acts of innovation” (Appadurai 2012, 6–7). Such acts that appeal to recognition, as well as the surprise of innovation, are therefore Bergsonian acts; acts of the body and for the body. There lies their potential political effect. How does this work? A perception image that is not infused with memory images would not even be visible. Conversely, perceiving the residents of Lohar Chawl with, or within, the memory of poverty and hardship their lives are embedded in makes drawing them from memory a compelling way of foregrounding the long history of poverty they share, up until and including the present. There, they can become part of the seeing subject’s bodily existence. In what Bergson wrote at the end of this book, “contracting them into a single intuition” (1991, 218–19), he expressed the bond between themthen and us-now. It also explains why Bergson insisted on the indivisibility of duration in our experience of time, but also that time cannot be linear. For this Bergsonian reason, politically relevant art requires durational looking. Difficulty, privilege: the awareness of that combination and the delicacy of the act of looking compel respect for duration. As Bergson’s choice of the word “contracting” intimates, this coexistence of different moments (or memories) also has a spatial aspect to it. This timespace is given shape in the genre of video installation in the simultaneous presence of—and, hence, the simultaneous movement on—multiple screens. 46 Mieke Bal The experience of space itself is bound up with multi-temporality. According to Bergson space is not geometrical, as Renaissance perspective triumphantly but erroneously suggests. Instead, in the interaction between mind and body to which Bergson devoted his most widely read book, our sense of space develops as a feeling with us in the middle of it. Thus, we unlearn the false security of the colonizing gaze that surveys the field of vision as an experience of looking that ignores the viewer’s body. The tradition of linear perspective and its scientific underpinning has naturalized that security. In this respect, perspective is complicit with the naturalization of the colonizing gaze. Perception, like memory, involves both the materiality of objects and of the human body. Bergson considers the body a material entity, and he consequently sees perception as a material practice. And given his insistence on the inseparability of time and space, the image is in movement, by definition. It is material not because of the support—canvas, paper, screens—we associate with images, but because the bodily action of mobilizing the image is material. Hence, all images, including “still” ones, move. This moving quality is no more limited to figurative images than to any medium. Even radically abstract and emphatically still paintings move. This leaves the question of the political effect of images, their potential to move us to action. To get there, we must involve one more movement in Bergson’s view. In 1907, he coined the term “creative evolution” (1983). He used it to describe the type of movement that is both emotional and social and thereby becomes political. It occurs when understanding and action are imbricated. This fourth Bergsonian movement, which produces a readiness to act, lies at the heart of the political potential of the image, provided it works together with the other three. If we consider the art form a concrete instance of the multiply-moving image, then video installations can create the literal embodiment of this potential in a fictional space that—with the help of the viewer—can become a political, democratic space. The cinematic helps to articulate the movement of images; painting helps to mobilize its own dependency on a support, and literature sets language up against itself through incongruous word choices and “wrong” grammar. Just so, video installation can help grasp how art in general, including still images such as paintings, can be eminently operative for political effect through its fundamentally moving quality. This multiply moving quality brings images and (other) narratives closer together. Remains (of) Narrative Theory The theme of this volume is the ethics, specifically of story-telling. To explain the ongoing relevance of key-concepts from the narratology I value, I must revert to the narrative theory I have proposed in the 1970s, Is There an Ethics to Story-Telling? 47 and which keeps being referenced rather than understood and deployed for meaningful analysis. The central thesis of the theory of narrative is the usefulness of a provisional, analytical division in three layers: text, story and fabula. This division in three is now so commonplace that it seems a truism to justify it. However, for me, it is primarily an attempt to overcome the binary connotations of the older, even more usual division in two—text and fabula, or story and plot. This older division is bound to a separation of form and content. In addition to the explanation of the need for the three-partite division in Narratology, I consider that separation untenable because form shapes content and vice versa. I begin with an example of a narrative that seems to “thematize” the distinction I am making only for analytical purposes. The popularly acclaimed Bengali writer Jhumpa Lahiri recently republished her earlier novel The Namesake (2003). It is part of the growing number of novels of migration, the key movement of our time. It recounts the difficulties of characters that are, either by their own volition or through their parents’ earlier decisions, thrown into a world that is culturally foreign to them. The text is written in clear, almost plain prose. Language and its uses is one of the topics that come up with regularity. I will give an example of each of the three layers of the narrative.10 On the level of the text, the following examples clarify how the text inflects the story and the fabula. The novel’s title suggests we begin with the name. Names: it couldn’t be more textual. The main character of The Namesake, called Gogol for reasons he understands only much later, hates his name and in adulthood changes it to Nikhil. This name has the double advantage of sounding more “Indian” and of being easily Americanized to “Nick.” It provides more clarity, then, on both sides of the cultural divide that shapes his life. This is a textual element. However, when fully “Nikhiled” the narrator keeps calling the character Gogol, including when the voice phrases the man’s perception. This puzzled me. It enticed me to read against the grain. Paying attention to perception, what I call “focalization” has always been my primary tool for such reading. Every single time I read the name in these passages, I felt slightly bothered. Calling the young man “Gogol” against his will seemed the act of a bossy narrator. Moreover, had the author been sensitive to the importance of perception in the story, I thought, she would either have matched the character’s decision and used the chosen name, or somehow differentiated between the two in ways readers could work with to make sense of the confusion of his identity that is obviously at the root of this name-game. Until, on page 241, the two names cross swords. At a party, the following exchange occurs: “Hey there,” Gogol says. “Need any help?” “Nikhil. Welcome.” Donald hands over the parsley. “Be my guest.” (Lahiri 2003, 241) 48 Mieke Bal Note that this short dialogue is an embedded text. The common English phrase “be my guest,” meaning “do as you like” suddenly gets a slightly ironic inflection in which the notion of “guest” is taken literally for just a moment. Gogol does not belong. Not at the party, given by friends of his wife, nor in its very American YUP culture. The passage has no character that perceives the events. It is narrated in an objectifying tone. From then on, it dawned on me that the persistence of the name Gogol, in all its Russianness, stands for the persistently Indian misdirected longing of the character. Born in the US, he is unable to put down roots in either place, that of his parents and his own. So, due to that rootlessness, the Russian name turns out appropriate after all. The main character’s mother, Ashima, is the one who is married off from India to an Indian-born man working in the US. Two key moments in her life set her in an intercultural, interlingual plight. The first is giving birth to her son (later to be called Gogol). When the doctor tells her the delivery is going to take a lot more time, she doesn’t understand the key word and asks: “What does it mean, dilated?” (Lahiri 2003, 3). Clearly, the point is that we see that word anew as strange, somewhat threatening and in need of explanation; the text is not so plain, after all. Then the text describes the gestures the doctor uses to communicate and we are immersed in the story, where “text” is under scrutiny. All we get is Ashima’s vision-based understanding: “explaining the unimaginable thing her body must do in order for the baby to pass” (3). This is a clearcut instance of a character perceiving. Ashima sees the gesture the doctor makes—an event in the fabula—and she interprets as “unimaginable.” Much later, when Gogol is an adult, hence, at least after twenty-years of living and working in the US, Ashima is being told that her husband “has expired.” Again, she doesn’t get it, but this time, the lack of understanding is thickened: Expired. A word used for library cards, for magazine subscriptions. A word which, for several seconds, has no effect whatsoever on Ashima. “No, no, it must be a mistake,” Ashima says calmly, shaking her head, a small laugh escaping from her throat. “My husband is not there for an emergency. Only for a stomachache.” (Lahiri 2003, 168–69) While the first lack of understanding might still be due to her relatively recent arrival, the second one retrospectively “explains” the first. In both cases, a form of denial is added to surprise, and to the awkwardness of talking about such intimately bodily things to a man (for the birth) and through a telephone (for the death). Embarrassment, connected to cultural and sexual difference together, is at issue, rather than linguistic ignorance. The two come together when Ashima, reflecting on words, ponders: Is There an Ethics to Story-Telling? 49 “For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy—a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts” (Lahiri 2003, 49). The metaphor is doing the telling, more than the very American phrase “feeling out of sorts.” It is in the equation foreignness—pregnancy that Ashima’s perception is expressed. This, it turns out, is elaborated throughout the novel, especially in the form of memories. The text tells the memories. The memories, as aspects of the story, convey events from the characters’ past, heavily inflected by the characters’ perception, imagination, in short, “focalization.” These are “multitemporal” as well as “multidirectional” memories. Juxtaposing memories of the past, future memories, and acts of memory in the present, the narrator crosses the fine line between memory and the imagination (Lahiri 2003, 62–63), all this negotiated through memories of wishes that remain unfulfilled (127). The key memory is of a trip Gogol made with his father, to the end of a stretch of coast. The sentence that ends the chapter is an injunction by the father, who tells his son: “Try to remember it always”; “Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go” (187). Now that we have understood the way focalization functions to cross the bridge and overcome the gaps migration has dug, including between father and son, the entire novel, it seems, unfolds to heed the injunction. Keeping the attention on memory as a specific form of focalization, through systematic attention to focalization we can grasp how multitemporality and multidirectionality join forces in complicating the sense of history as a series of events. Memory militates against a binary view of narrative as a text telling a story, or a story telling a plot. Let me, for the sake of this example, propose we consider the fabula a kind of history—but then, due to the story level, frequently imagined rather than necessarily having occurred in the past. The string of events we call history now becomes a constellation from which rays go out in all directions. Futurality itself, then, is multidirectional, encompassing the past as well as the times of others. If subjectivity is porous, however, then memory and history are inseparable. To realize this intertwinement of memory (story level) and history (fabula level), it is important to first distinguish them. Only then become their interrelation and the misunderstandings it produces, clear to us. In film, a three-level structure is equally important, even though concepts can never simply be transferred from one medium to another without thinking through how they sit with the medium. My example again concerns history. In Ida, a 2014 Polish film by Pawel Pawlikowski, the distinction between the three levels seems even a driving force. Knowing, not knowing, and discovering through perception is a key subtheme of the film. Its beauty won it many awards and some controversy. The issue of the controversy is whether the film’s beauty counters the affective impact of the sad historical theme. 50 Mieke Bal The film text is made in black and white and 3:4, thus inserting itself in the cinematic aesthetic of the 1960s, when the events happen. It is composed of images shot without camera movement, thus alluding to the very first bits of film in the late-nineteenth-century, as well as declaring its allegiance with still images. Many images are shot outside with the figures looking vertically forlorn in a low portion of a high landscape where the sky is always present. In view of the controversy mentioned, then, we can discuss the question if the resulting beauty is an anaesthetization of history—as opponents would claim—or, on the contrary, a subtraction of the medium of film from its later aesthetic excess, as I tend to argue. This is where the two examples join forces. The Namesake deploys plain prose, avoiding pathos, to highlight textual conflict between linguistic-cultural situations. Memory is central in these tensions. In a comparable mode, and in relation to history, the film text of Ida feels like a refusal of everything cinema can do to make a strong impression on its viewers. The film narration uses none of the current cinema tricks that boast the medium’s sheer-unlimited capabilities. The unspectacular landscapes clearly show an avoidance of sublimity. The static nature of the camera work (by Lukasz Zal) suggests the idea that the characters are in history, trapped by it rather than having their own agency in it. They are not directing but undergoing history—their own moment in history and that which came before. In this film, story-telling is minimalist, bare even. This is, however, not the same as neutral, indifferent, or objective. Refusal, avoidance, and rejection are, just as much, features of the narrative text as the positive features we usually attend to. This film text feels like a refusal of everything cinema can do. The static nature of the camera work, the long takes, the scarcity of changes of framing, light, and weather conditions suggests the idea that the characters are immersed in history, not directing but undergoing it. And so is the film text itself. So far, my comments bear on the text. Of the many aspects of the story, this text tells us that are equally based on the principle of omission, reduction, and a sparse use of cinematic means, I mention only a very few examples. First, when the main character’s aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) first meets Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska), she recognizes her immediately. But she is not very hospitable and soon dismisses her. Between the moments she lets her go, then a bit later, picks her up again in a café, no significant time lapse, nor a change in her look or behavior helps us understand the change from dismissing to picking her up again. As a character, she seems very different. The spaces of the two meetings may implicitly explain something: first the woman’s home, then a public place. The situation of perception also differs. In the first, Ida rings the aunt’s doorbell, and the aunt opens the door, recognizes her and shows her in. In the second it is the aunt who peeps through the café window, Is There an Ethics to Story-Telling? 51 sees Ida sitting somewhat dejected, and enters the café to resume her relationship with the novice. Second, there is a significant embedded instance of perception and omission. When the aunt shows Ida a photo of her with her parents, there is also a little boy in the picture. Ida asks if she had had a brother. No, says the aunt, you were an only child. No explanation of the identity of the little boy is given. Note that this confrontation of ignorance and knowledge constitutes an event that brings together an image—again, an embedded text—and perception. Later, the aunt tells Ida she had entrusted her own little son to Ida’s mother for safekeeping. She never saw him again. It is left to the viewer to contribute to the story by remembering the photo and making the link between these two moments. Third, towards the end, the aunt is in her large apartment, framed as primarily that: a large space. The aunt quietly walks around in it and equally, quietly goes to the window, opens it and steps out. Due to the undramatic image sequence and the absence of dramatic sound, that this is a suicide is not clear at the moment. Only later, when Ida attends her aunt’s funeral, do we retrospectively understand the silent act. Among the effects of this de-dramatization of the suicide is making us viewers confront the question of the tension between modesty and witnessing. By declining to show the act as a suicide, the story raises an issue that is characteristic of the story level. For it is on the story level that perception is opened for reflection, for the characters as well as for readers and viewers. Isn’t there a potential voyeurism in attending the ultimate decision of someone who has lost everything? That avoiding voyeurism is a consistent aspect of this film also shows in the images—barely readable, confusing close-ups—of the moment after the funeral that Ida spends the night with a musician she had met earlier and who offers her a life of love and togetherness. The scene of lovemaking is not visible. In reviews, the fabula is the first thing mentioned, but in my narratological framework it comes last. What strikes most is the omission of many explanatory elements that would constitute the causally related events. A standard summary of the fabula goes like this. Ostensibly set in 1962 in Poland, catholic-raised war orphan Anna, destined to become a nun, uses her final days before confirmation to visit her only living relative, her aunt, Wanda. This woman doesn’t give her much, other than revealing that she is Jewish and that her real name is Ida, not Anna. After showing a photograph of her and her parents, the aunt dismisses her with the words: “Family reunion is over.” When Anna/Ida sits in a café waiting for the bus to return to the convent, the aunt looks through the window and seems struck by her resemblance to her mother, which sets in motion a retrospective fondness she transfers from mother (her sister) to daughter. They start all over and together they begin the search for Ida’s parents’ grave. After finding the bones in a forest, they bury them in a proper cemetery. Wanda then kills herself. 52 Mieke Bal After her burial, Ida does not accept the proposal of her one-night lover to accompany him, and instead, we see her walk with her suitcase on a straight, empty country road, alone. Where she is going is not made explicit. Most likely we tend to fill in: back to the convent; but this is only an assumption, compelled by the desire for an ending we as viewers tend to bring to our reading. Nothing indicates where she goes, only towards the picture plane, towards us viewers. This ambiguous ending in aloneness moving towards our time and company is only one of many fabula elements that are not fleshed out. These two narratives are both deeply involved with history and using fiction to shape that involvement. My brief presentation of a few instances where they not only present the three levels I have separated for the sake of analysis, but even focus on, or thematize the distinction between them, is my way of arguing for the relevance of this distinction, whether a narrative is fictional, or historical, or not. I argue that such an analysis is not formalistic in the pejorative sense this term has been given with the onset of social criticism; on the contrary, it supports an awareness of the responsibility of readers for the meanings they produce, even if thinking they just “get” these from the text. I want to keep present the procedures of and responsibility for meaning in the face of philosophies of language which insist on the diverse provenance (Bakhtin) and ambiguous meanings (Derrida) of any utterance. Far from rejecting such philosophies, I find them useful to avoid overas well as under-estimating the freedom of agency. I contend that the analytical distinctions and concepts presented in this succinct narratology help us to account for subjectivity in reading, for the cultural processes that bring such subjectivity in an intersubjective framework, and for ambiguity as a forceful, productive element therein. In a culture that functions within such complex forms of meaning making, it is even more important to take and assign responsibility for the choices we make. Cognitive and reception-oriented theories of language and narrative have persuasively argued that it is the reader who makes the meaning. But in doing so, the reader is in dialogue with the text. It is only once we know how a text is structured that the reader’s share and responsibility for acting within those constraints can be assessed. Notes 1 This essay is a combination of a revised version of my earlier lecture in Turku and bits and pieces from other writings. I was able to write it thanks to a Holly Fellowship at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The few paragraphs that follow were adapted from my recent book on the shadow plays of Nalini Malani (Bal 2016). 2 In 1997 Judith Butler put forward again and elaborated through speech-act theory the idea that language can be violent. 3 On the notion of “barbaric,” in critical, ambivalent and occasionally positive contexts, see Boletsi (2013). Is There an Ethics to Story-Telling? 53 4 The imagination was put forward in the framework of ethics by seventeenthcentury philosopher Baruch Spinoza. See the very accessible and relevant introduction to Spinoza and his relevance for today by Gatens and Lloyd (1999). 5 I am alluding here to my earlier work on four artists making such ethically informed political art (Bal 2010, 2013a,b, 2016). 6 This example comes from the Introduction to my 2016 book on Malani. 7 Spivak’s famous essay is now most readily accessible and framed by commentaries in Morris (2010). 8 The invisibility of subaltern people can sometimes be a source of their agency. See Peeren (2014) for this argument. 9 See Deleuze on Bergson (1988); on cinema 1986, 1989. For an accessible introduction to Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema, see Marrati (2008). Part of this account of Bergson’s ideas comes from the introduction to my book on video installation (2013). 10 This example is part of a chapter in a collective volume on postcolonial narratology, edited by Dwivedi, Nielsen and Walsh (in preparation). References Adorno, Theodor W. 1983. Prisms. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson and Samuel Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 2003. Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Rodney Livingstone and Others. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 2004. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge. Appadurai, Arjun. 2012. “Introduction.” In Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood (with a DVD documentary by Payal Kapadia), edited by dOCUMENTA (13). Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Bal, Mieke. 2010. Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bal, Mieke. 2013a. Thinking in Film: The Politics of Video Installation According to Eija-Liisa Ahtila. London: Bloomsbury. Bal, Mieke. 2013b. Endless Andness: The Politics of Abstraction According to Ann Veronica Janssens. London: Bloomsbury. Bal, Mieke. 2016. In Medias Res: Inside Nalini Malani’s Shadow Plays. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Bergson, Henri. 1983 [1907]. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Landham, MD: University Press of America. Bergson, Henri. 1991 [1896]. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone Books. Boletsi, Maria. 2013. Barbarism and Its Discontents. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988 [1966]. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books. 54 Mieke Bal Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2008. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Translated by Shane B. Lillis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dwivedi, Divya, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Richard Walsh, eds. Narrative Theory and Ideology: Reading New Literatures (in preparation.) Gatens, Moira, and Genevieve Lloyd. 1999. Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present. London and New York: Routledge. Hesselberth, Pepita. 2014. Cinematic Chronotopes: Here, Now, Me. London: Bloomsbury. Huyssen, Andreas. 2012. “The Shadow Play as Medium of Memory.” In Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood (with a DVD documentary by Payal Kapadia), edited by dOCUMENTA (13), 46–59. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Lahiri, Jhumpa. 2012 [2003]. The Namesake. London: Fourth Estate. Marrati, Paola. 2008. Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy. Translated by Alisa Hartz. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Morris, Rosalind C., ed. 2010. Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea. New York: Columbia University Press. Peeren, Esther. 2014. The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility. London: Palgrave. Silverman, Kaja. 1996. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge. 4 Forms of Ordering Trauma, Narrative and Ethics Robert Eaglestone The rise of the interwoven fields of memory and trauma studies have shaped much recent work in the academy (useful “bookend” accounts are Klein 2000; Bond, Craps, and Vermeulen 2017). Yet, as always with dynamic intellectual movements, their growth leaves several complex questions and issues. The aim of this chapter is to explore some of these questions—I introduce a series of arguments about contemporary trauma theory—and then turn to what I take to be the fundamental question which concerns the interrelationship between trauma, narrative and ethics. Central to this is the idea of narrative ordering: my interest is not so much in the mechanics of ordering but rather in its meaning. Questions to Trauma Studies Scholars and activists are already familiar with the debates over issues of “who can speak?,” “who can write?,” issues of appropriation and so on: indeed, this is perhaps one of the most common forms of “memory friction” in the field. However, recent scholarship has raised some new questions and issues. Some of these arise, in the way questions do, from the developing nature of the field as it unfolds from its points of origin. Perhaps most important questions are those raised by Michael Rothberg, Colin Davis, Bryan Cheyette and Stef Craps and others who show how issues of memory, empire, race and genocide have always been interwoven (Gilroy 2000; Silverman 2008, 2013; Rothberg 2009; Cheyette 2013; Craps 2013; Sanyal 2015). Stef Craps points out that in Caruth’s famous discussion of trauma, she suggests that “trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures” (Caruth 1995, 11). This point is echoed and developed in Judith Butler’s Precarious Life where she argues that an “insight that injury affords is that there are others out there on whom my life depends… This fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition that I can will away” and while, in that work, she admits that she does not know how to “theorise that interdependency,” it is clear that it undermines ideas that stem from “radical forms of self-sufficiency and unbridled sovereignty” (Butler 2006, xii–xiii). This idea, too, is found 56 Robert Eaglestone earlier, in Arendt, in the sense that the human condition is rooted in plurality and we find ourselves in a “web of relationships” (Arendt 1998, 181). Indeed, this idea of our interweaving or linkage stemming from weakness is a thread that runs through ethical and political thought, both in reaction to personal and communal interaction. And so it is with great force that Craps makes the point, in Postcolonial Witnessing (2013) and elsewhere, that while this founding text of trauma studies— and much that follows in its wake—does explore the interpersonal, it largely fails to live up to this promise of cross- or inter-cultural ethical engagement. Craps argues that much in trauma theory marginalizes or ignores “traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority cultures” (Craps 2014, 46). That is, accounts in trauma theory focus on historical events in the West centrally the Holocaust, and pass over other historical traumatic events: slavery, colonial genocide and so on. Second, he argues that the “psychiatric universalism” of trauma theory—the assumption that trauma works in the same way in different cultures—takes “for granted the universal validity of definitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of the history of Western modernity” (46, 48). He cites the work of Derek Summerfield who criticizes attempts at psychological assistance in international conflict situations: Psychiatric universalism … risks being imperialistic, reminding us of the colonial era when what was presented to indigenous peoples was that there were different types of knowledge, and theirs was second-rate. (Summerfield 2004, 238; quoted in Craps 2014, 48) Craps also turns to Ethan Watters work, in his book Crazy like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (2010), where Watters reports on the Western trauma counselors who arrived in Sri Lanka following the 2004 tsunami. In their rush to help the victims, they simply exported an American model of trauma, mental illness and mourning and so “inadvertently trampled local expressions of grief, suffering, and healing, thereby actually causing the community more distress” (Craps 2014, 49). This marginalization and “psychiatric universalism” together mean that it is hard for Western scholars even to see trauma in some cases, especially when it occurs as what Rob Nixon terms “slow violence,” “calamities that patiently dispense their devastation while remaining outside our flickering attention spans—and outside the purview of a spectacle-driven corporate media” (Nixon 2013, 6). Craps argues that as “a result of all of this, rather than promoting cross-cultural solidarity, trauma theory risks assisting in the perpetuation of the very beliefs, practices, and structures that maintain existing injustices and inequalities” (Craps 2014, 49). A second issue lies in what Craps, Luckhurst and others, see as the valorization of a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation in trauma studies Forms of Ordering 57 which suggest that “traumatic experiences can only be adequately represented through the use of experimental modernist, textual strategies” (Craps 2013, 39). Craps and others argue (correctly in my view) that there are many texts—less demanding or avant-garde—about trauma that do not, as it were, “perform” trauma. These too need examination in the light of trauma theory. More than this, there is the impact of trauma as both the origin and disruption not only of memorial work or fiction but of discipline-specific knowledge in other fields too: the impact of trauma and the theory that studies it respects no academic boundaries and shapes not only affect but also knowledge as it is more formally recognized. A third issue, and one deserving of much more space, is the issue of time and temporality itself. Trauma has an impact on the experience of time and temporality, and its structure as “afterwardsness.” And in trauma theory, much weight has been given to the ways in which texts represent both chronology and temporality: by fracture, by repetition and by breaking. The impact of trauma on individual’s sense of temporality has been discussed and here again, modernist forms of western writing and thinking have dominated the field. However, the wider implications of this cultural engagement are currently being explored both in works of fiction and works of—for lack of a better name—theory. In fiction, Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, concerns precisely personal, communal and ecological trauma in the past and present and—as its title suggests—is profoundly involved with these questions: “time beings” (a “time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be” [Ozeki 2013, 3]). The novel, like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), has a series of layers. The “outer shell” narrator of the novel is Ruth, who exists in one chronology, in the fictive present; inside this is the narrative of Nao (a homophone for ‘now’) whose diary Ruth discovers; inside this in turn are the letters of her great-uncle, a wartime pilot, and stories about her great-grandmother, a zen nun. These offer different views on the nature of time, as cyclical (a motif returned to often, with the Pacific gyre a case in point) or as finite or interwoven with recent speculation from high-end physics. However, and without exploring in detail the central thematic of the book (that is: time), this global novel is suggesting a form of the “interconnectedness of all things” through a Zen understanding of temporality (and I lack the expertise to judge how correct the novel is in this). Within this, the sort of chronological rupture of temporality, so central to traditional accounts of trauma and trauma fiction, are “gathered up” into a more holistic account of both “the moment” and the whole of human and indeed global life. The novel is not entirely blind to the challenges and complexities of this Zen approach—objections are voiced both by Ruth and Nao: however, this becomes not the resolution 58 Robert Eaglestone of the various traumata but the horizon of their understanding. Similarly, in that it too offers a different conception of time and temporality, Kazuo Ishiguro’s recent The Buried Giant (2015) turns to fable and to almost ahistorical accounts, fusing Arthurian knights with the violent Saxon-Dane wars which shaped the history of England. This novel is clearly asking complex questions about memory, genocide, and politics, but chooses to set these into an allegorical, fabulous past which, again, offers alternative conceptions of time. These brief readings are not aimed at explicating the novels or a position, but, following Craps, to show the significance of alternatives. Challenges to conventional ideas of temporality arise in more theoretical accounts. In his ground-breaking account, History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence, Berber Bevernage offers a linked historical and philosophical analysis of state violence and draws attention to two temporalities: that of history (which “works with what has happened and now is irretrievably gone”) and that of jurisdiction (“which assumes a reversible time in which the crime is, as it were, still wholly present and able to be reversed, annulled or compensated by the correct sentence and punishments”) (Bevernage 2012, 2). For Bevernage (and Derrida, on whom he draws), these two different times find themselves entangled in complex ways and yet lived at the same time and so inscribe forms of trauma on the way in which we conceptualize the relationship between the past and justice. These reflections beg a fourth, more institutional, question: what, if any, are the distinctions between memory studies and trauma studies, and then again between wider and more conventional forms of literary study? And—because questions that seem to be about disciplinary boundaries are often only “internal” concerns about “external” matters—this leads back to a final problem, or issue. If we accept the argument that trauma theory comes, to some degree, from deconstruction, both as a playing out of deconstruction’s ethical concerns and as a response to attacks on deconstruction for seeming too far from the world, then how has, or how will, the streams of thought that are trauma theory and memory studies return to a wider sea of critical thought? Indeed, historians like Wulf Kansteiner have attacked trauma theory as a “popular culture metaphor” in which the “traumatic and the non-traumatic, the exceptional and the every day, and even… the essential difference between the victims and perpetrators” have become obfuscated and the “historical precision and moral specificity” of the concept has been obliterated (Kansteiner 2004, 194). If it is right that trauma can link cultures, as Caruth suggests, and that our fundamental interdependency “offers a chance to start to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized, in which an inevitable interdependency become acknowledged as the basis for global political community” (Butler 2006, xii–iii), how might this appear? Stef Craps concludes his work by suggesting that Forms of Ordering 59 trauma theory needs to remain “faithful to the ethical foundations of the field” (Craps 2013, 127) but it is not clear what this might be. The Ethical Foundations of the Field? In the second part of this chapter, I want to focus on the last of these issues and to draw out some of the implications for ethics of storytelling, and the implications of trauma for ethics. This turns out, I think, to have something complex to do with literature, and to do with trauma. These suggestions are in line with other work on narrative, but attempt to focus on the specific ethical commitments. Many critics and philosophers argue that we cannot understand our life except in narratives or as narratives, and the stories with which we find ourselves surrounded are the models for these understandings of our lives. In learning stories, one learns not simply “what happens,” the content of the story, and facts (what to call an Archbishop) but, more importantly, what a story itself is. In learning stories, one learns how to read them, how to compare them, how they work: not just about Little Red Riding Hood or Natasha Rostov but about beginnings, middles and endings. One learns narrative order and narrative ordering. This is part of what stories know (see De Bolla 2001; Wood 2009). The word ‘order’ is a contender for one of the complex words of the sort William Empson explores in his great book, The Structure of Complex Words. Not only is order multiple in meaning (to classify, to direct, to rank things, to regulate or manage) but its subject and object are strongly implied and are, as it were, positioned: we order people, we order things, we can order ourselves or put ourselves in order. ‘Order’ also implies much more: ordering people about requires a system of rank or command, a submission—or not—to this structure. Ordering things, say, classifying barnacles as Darwin did, implies a classificatory system, a sense of reason and structure, a world in which such ordering is meaningful and useful. Its etymology is unclear, but probably comes via Anglo-Norman and Old French from the Latin Ordinare, “perhaps cognate” the Oxford English Dictionary says, with Ordo, “to lay the warp before weaving, to initiate (an enterprise), on the assumption that the weaving sense was primary, and that ordo originally denoted ‘a thread on the loom’.” This sense of ‘order’ chimes beautifully with Wittgenstein’s famous metaphor of language as a net from the Tractatus. Wittgenstein is discussing the ways in which knowledge makes sense of the world. He imagines a picture on a flat white surface made up of black dots. To describe this picture, we cast a net with a fine mesh over it, and then can say of each square of the net, whether it is black or white. Different shapes of mesh lead to different descriptions of the picture: the “different nets,” he says, “correspond to different systems for describing the world” (Wittgenstein 1974, 6.341). But, he says, the “possibility of 60 Robert Eaglestone describing a picture like the one mentioned above with a net of a given form tells us nothing about the picture” except that “it can be described completely by a particular net with a particular size of mesh” (6.342): we “are also told something about the world” (6.342), he adds, by the fact that it can be described by more than one sort of net. A net, then, is a description of a way of ordering the world: a different sort of net, a different mesh, creates a different order. The net tells us very little about the picture except that it can be characterized by a net, that it can be ordered, and that there are different systems of ordering. One of the very earliest and most influential accounts of this inextricable interweaving, or the net of language, between our experience and our life, is in Herodotus. The Greek Solon talks to Croesus: “[W]hoever has the greatest number of good things I have mentioned, and keeps them to the end, and dies a peaceful death, that man, Croesus, deserves to be called happy” (Herodotus 1996, 16). King Croesus, of course, rejects this, and then, during his life, discovers its truth in his enslavement to Cyrus. This thought—glossed as “call no man happy until he is dead”— in turn, is picked up by Aristotle, in the Ethics, who goes on to describe the happy man as one who realises in action a goodness that is complete and that is adequately furnished with external goods, and that not for some limited period but throughout a well-rounded life spent in that way. And perhaps we must add to our definition “one who shall live in this way and whose death shall be consistent with his life”. For the future is dark to us, and happiness we maintain to be an “end” and in every way final and complete. (Aristotle 1953, 48) What these origins suggest, and what contemporary thinkers such as Martha Nussabaum and Alasdair MacIntyre, who claim Aristotle as an influence, argue, is that there is some intrinsic link between ethics and the stories we tell of our lives or that are told about our lives (and, to narrate one’s life, or to have it narrated, is to narrate, in, as it were, concentric circles outward, the history of one’s own time). Indeed, in this famous passage from his book After Virtue, MacIntyre ties together ethics and narrative even more explicitly: I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters— roles into which we have been drafted—and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be constructed. It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, Forms of Ordering 61 good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mis-learn both what a child is and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words. Hence there is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources. (MacIntyre 1985, 216) The point here is not only that stories shape us and educate us in the virtues but also that we “project” ourselves into our envisaged stories and so, as it were, let the stories shape our behavior and the kind of people we are. These stories are personal but also communal, and they provide ways by which people identify themselves in or with wider groups. It relies on some profound sense of identification. More than this, what these developing accounts have in common, in their trust in narrative, is a sense of completeness: not just what Frank Kermode (1967) called “the sense of an ending,” entelechy, but also a sense of roundedness. That is, not only do these accounts tell us that our lives are shaped by stories, but also about “how” that shaping occurs: in its completeness. In utter contrast to this is a remark of Wittgenstein’s, from Culture and Value, which, it seems to me, questions this whole movement of thought. When people have died we see their life in a conciliatory light. His life looks well-rounded through a haze. For him it was not well rounded however, but jagged & incomplete. For him there was no conciliation; his life is naked and wretched. (Wittgenstein 1998, 53e) For Wittgenstein, there is the sense that a story of a life, told, as it were, from the outside and seen “in a conciliatory light,” bringing all the aspects of a life together, fails to express adequately that life. There is a mismatch between narrative and life. Juxtaposed to Herodotus’s Solon, this remark also contrasts conciliatory narratives we tell or are told about us and the jagged, incomplete, naked and wretched way our lives seem to us. This is not saying that people are without stories (MacIntyre’s totally “unscripted, anxious stutterers,” or those, perhaps, in the grip of a schizophrenic breakdown) but that the stories we inhabit are “jagged” and “incomplete.” To the “properly ordered” sense of narrative and form of life offered by Aristotle and MacIntyre, Wittgenstein offers a 62 Robert Eaglestone disordered, uneven form of life. One might say that these two represented an external objective view of a person as opposed to an internal view: but this is to miss the force of the position of Aristotle (and others) who precisely want us to internalize stories to identify and project ourselves into the world, and Wittgenstein’s warning about the ways in which hazy “conciliatory light” blinds us to seeing people’s internal views of themselves. And it is this contrast between “call no man happy until he is dead” and completeness on one side and “jagged & incomplete … naked and wretched” on the other that lies at the heart of how we read and understand the relationship between literature and experience today. Indeed, without becoming too schematic, I want to suggest that we could imagine two points on a scale, between “ordered” and “complete” to “disordered” and “jagged.” These terms are not, I want to add, final descriptions of a work, but, perhaps signposts to help us think about them and their consequences. This is too large a claim to be backed up in full here—but I want to give two brief examples of what I mean. (Others offer parallel and more detailed accounts to this approach: see, for example, Alber et al. 2010; Meretoja 2014.) I want to look at the movement from “complete” to “jagged” in one paradigmatic postmodern writer, Salman Rushdie. His first, and most fêted novel, Midnight’s Children, celebrates disorder but is in fact—through the narrator, through the arc of the plot—a very ordered celebration of this. The pickles and spices the novel uses as a metaphor for Indian life (and for life in general: Rushdie is a closet existentialist) are processed into pots and jars and contained within their difference. Two novels later, in The Satanic Verses, things are more complex: on the one hand, Otto Cone, a font of wisdom, a Holocaust survivor and later, a Primo Levi-like suicide, believes that the “world is incompatible … Ghosts, Nazis, saints, all alive at the same time”: if these lives “that have no business mingling with one another … meet … It’s uranium and plutonium, each makes the other decompose, boom” (Rushdie 1988, 295, 314). And this is what happens in the strands of plot. Order of a sort is created by the final return to India and “Indian-ness” of Saladin. This is an oddly conservative ending and ordering to the novel which its author claims, “celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling … [and] rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure” (Rushdie 1992, 394). And Rushdie’s more recent work seems to reject ordering all together. His novel most influenced by 9/11, Shalimar the Clown, literally fails to end—though endings are not always a measure of order, of course— with the action held in a frozen moment of suspension between two characters, between east and west. More, the novel constantly gestures towards the jagged and wretched. A prophetic character that “what’s coming is so terrible that no prophet will have the words to foretell it” (Rushdie 2005, 247). And when it comes, it is clear that “stories were Forms of Ordering 63 stories and real life was real life, naked, ugly and finally impossible to cosmeticise in the greasepaint of a tale” (204). The terrible destruction of the village of Pachigam is summed up three times. While it “still exists” on official maps, this is the only memorial: what happened that day … need not be set down here in full detail, because brutality is brutality and excess is excess and that’s all there is to it. There are things that must be looked at indirectly because they would blind you if you looked them in the face, like the fire of the sun. So to repeat: there was no Pachigam any more. Pachigam was destroyed. Imagine it for yourself. Second attempt: the village of Pachigam still existed on maps of Kashmir, but that day it ceased to exist anywhere else, except in memory. Third and final attempt: the beautiful village of Pachigam still exists. (309) The very rhetoric of attempts, and the final collapse of Pachigam into an existence that is solely textual, marked only in a map and in a guidebook, reveals simply the inability of the text to enunciate the terror. This inability of the text to resolve or clarify or finalize events is echoed in the lack of closure in the novel. Even though Rushdie bases his work on historical contexts, his novels are still fiction. But criticism has now turned to works we call testimonies, deeply concerned with the reality of traumatic experiences in which it is possible to see the relationship between stories as “completed” and “jagged,” between “orderly” and “disorderly.” These traumatic texts, or testimonies, are disorderly. They have odd genre characteristics: they are often full of moments of historical exposition, or even historical documents, that would be laughable in a novel (what in science fiction is called “infodumping”; “here we are, on Moon Base Alpha, which as you know was constructed in 2095 by …”). The narratives are framed by accounts of how they came to be told or essays about the very telling of them, and sometimes they include requests to remember the dead. These testimonial texts have odd chronologies, with the terrible events juxtaposed by the future or by the past. And they lack closure. In contrast to a Hollywood cod-psychoanalysis sort of idea that “telling the story” will resolve the personal crisis, in fact, testimony texts reveal quite the opposite, that the trauma is constantly there: the last chapter of Primo Levi’s book The Truce is called “The Awakening.” He dreams he is in the camp, the Lager once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager … a wellknown voice resounds: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, ‘Wstawàch’. (Levi 1979, 279–80) 64 Robert Eaglestone “The Awakening” is not an awakening from a terrible “dream” of the camps back into normal life, but the awakening into a tormented post-Holocaust existence in which the camps do not interrupt “normal life” but, rather, “normal life” interrupts the unceasing experience of the camps. This sort of awakening, this sort of incompleteness, is not unique to Levi, either. But the oddest and perhaps most troubling thing about these books is that while they are fascinating, they are not pleasurable to read. In part, this is because they reject one of the pleasures of reading, “identification,” in which, in some simple-to-experience but fiendishly hard to analyze or explain way, we identify with the protagonists of a text. The study of English warns against identification, because it often gets in the way of thinking about the work—we are not allowed to say that we feel like we are Bella from the Twilight Saga, or Pierre Bezukov from War and Peace—but it is central to literature. However, in these testimony texts, we are at one and the same time encouraged to, as it were, see through the eyes of Primo Levi, yet forbidden to identify with him: we simply cannot imagine what shivering and starving at Auschwitz was like, and attempts to do so are facile and, Levi implies in his great essay “The Grey Zone,” immoral. But I think that this question of identification, which looks like an interesting literary conundrum, has a profound ethical significance connected to precisely the issues I have been discussing. Identification, with a character in a novel or with a group story, is a grasping, a “netting,” of how we are in the world. It forms something like a “total” and complete story: “as an Englishman, I …,” “as a South Londoner, I ….” Commentators often talk as if the “modern world” is to blame for the incompleteness of narratives, for the sense that our stories, especially our collective stories, are no longer clear or widely shared. And it is certainly true that there has been a movement from a world dominated by group and national stories, which bring with them their own sense of completeness, chronology and identity, through to a globalized world where different national, cultural and religious stories jostle for attention, jostle to be the net cast over our experience. Thinkers like MacIntyre and Nussbaum are regarded as being on the right and the risk of depriving “children of [their] stories” leads people to want to reaffirm, say, “our Island story” or more traditional ways of narrating ourselves. That is, people either want to retreat to older, seemingly more secure stories, or, seek unreasonably to abandon stories altogether. Instead, I want to suggest that this problem of “identification” in traumatic narratives suggests that the “jagged” and “wretched” stories are exactly the sort of stories to which we should pay attention. This is not simply because of the ways in which our eyes have been opened to the terrible sufferings of the last century, to the awareness, for example, that genocide is not a rare occurrence and that the creation of nations and their wealth and perforce the creation of national stories have gone hand in hand with appalling atrocities. Rather, it is to find precisely Forms of Ordering 65 in the “jaggedness” something deeply significant. These sorts of texts make us think about the precariousness of life, mourning, wounding, grieving—about “jaggedness” and fragility. Much of Caruth’s work is inspired through Jacques Derrida by the work of French-Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. At the heart of Levinas’s thought is a moment of encounter, a moment of, if you like, looking at another person. He says in many places that, for example, one encounters the eyes of the other before one sees the color of the other’s eyes (see Levinas 2001, 144–45 for one example). What he means is that the face of another person is more than just an object, or a thing that could be classified— green eyes, blue eyes, gray eyes—but something that comes first, that interrupts our normal and unthinking way of classifying people. This idea is misunderstood in two ways: some people take Levinas to mean that “we should be nice to people” and go on from there. Of course, we should, but we do not need pages of obscure philosophy to tell us this. Others argue that this moment of “encounter” can never be described, never be put into a story: it remains a strange moment, an almost mystical vision. However, as I have suggested, I am not sure that any moment can be “outside” how we order the world. Instead, though, I want to suggest that we can think of this moment of facing as being about remembering the “jaggedness” of stories and refusing their completeness or conciliation. The face—Levinas often refers to the naked face—reminds us that how we order the world is not the world but a net cast over it, because in its look it constantly disrupts the order we try to put on the world. Between the ordering of our world and the world, there is a mismatch and looking “well-rounded” is a hazy illusion. And the face reminds us of this. We are all shaped by stories, and the usual way of seeing these stories offers them as models of completeness and order, both personally and as ways of being with larger social groups. There are many ways of questioning this sense of completeness which offer a different vision of how stories participate in our lives: one of these lies in Wittgenstein’s remark about the “jagged and incomplete” and “naked and wretched” nature of our stories about ourselves. Rather than condemning or pitying stories that are “jagged and incomplete,” it is precisely these stories which challenge “forms of self-sufficiency and unbridled sovereignty” (Butler 2006, xii–xiii) in their completeness. Craps and others are right to interrogate trauma studies and make it reflect on its ethical foundation: this ethical foundation is not firm ground but the rubble of history on which we stand. References Alber, Jan, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson. 2010. “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models.” Narrative 18 (2): 113–36. Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 66 Robert Eaglestone Aristotle. 1953. The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by James Alexander Kerr Thomson. London: Penguin Books. Bevernage, Berber. 2012. History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence. London: Routledge. Bond, Lucy, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen, eds. 2017. Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies. New York: Berghahn. Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Caruth, Cathy. 1995. “Trauma and Experience: Introduction.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 3–11. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Cheyette, Bryan. 2013. Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History. London: Yale University Press. Craps, Stef. 2013. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. London: Palgrave. Craps, Stef. 2014. “Beyond Eurocentrism: Trauma Theory in the Global Age.” In The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, edited by Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone, 45–62. London: Routledge. De Bolla, Peter. 2001. Art Matters. London: Harvard University Press. Gilroy, Paul. 2000. Between Camps. London: Allen Lane. Herodotus. 1996. The Histories. Translated by Aubrey de Selincourt. London: Penguin Books. Ishiguro, Kazuo. 2015. The Buried Giant. London: Faber & Faber. Kansteiner, Wulf. 2004. “Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor.” Rethinking History 8: 193–221. Kermode, Frank. 1967. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Klein, Kerwin Lee. 2000. “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse.” Representations 69: 127–50. Levi, Primo. 1979. If This Is a Man and the Truce. Translated by Stuart Woolf. London: Abacus. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2001. Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Edited by Jill Robbins. Stanford: Stanford University Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1985. After Virtue. 2nd edition. London: Duckworth. Meretoja, Hanna. 2014. The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mitchell, David. 2004. Cloud Atlas. London: Scepter. Nixon, Rob. 2013. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com. Ozeki, Ruth. 2013. A Tale for the Time Being. Edinburgh: Canongate Books. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonisation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rushdie, Salman. 1988. The Satanic Verses. London: Viking. Rushdie, Salman. 1992. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism: 1981–1991. New York: Penguin Books. Forms of Ordering 67 Rushdie, Salman. 2005. Shalimar the Clown. London: Jonathan Cape. Sanyal, Debarati. 2015. Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance. New York: Fordham University Press. Silverman, Max. 2008. “Interconnected Histories: Holocaust and Empire in the Cultural Imaginary.” French Studies 72 (4): 417–28. Silverman, Max. 2013. Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film. London: Berghahn. Summerfield, Derek. 2004. “Cross-Cultural Perspectives of the Medicalization of Human Suffering.” In Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Issues and Controversies, edited by Gerald M. Rosen, 233–45. Chichester: Wiley. Watters, Ethan. 2010. Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the Western Mind. New York: Robinson. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1974. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. Guinness. London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1998. Culture and Value. Edited by G. H. Von Wright. Translated by Peter Winch. Oxford: Blackwell. Wood, Michael. 2009. Literature and the Taste of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 5 The Decline of Narrative and the Rise of the Archive Ernst van Alphen The role of narrative in Western cultures has been, and still is, fundamental. During thousands of years mythical and religious stories have provided frameworks that enabled human subjects to understand their lives and to direct those lives. Narrative be an existential response to the world and to the experience of that world. This response is based on the temporal dimension of life; it assumes continuity between events, most of them in the past or the present, but usually future oriented. Although future events still must happen, narrative frameworks often provide clear-cut expectations of them. It is from the perspective of a closure that will take place in the future that past and present events are understood and represented. Narratives that end with a life beyond the life we are living, but also apocalyptic narratives are prime examples of how narrativity has been and still is a necessary mode of signification for making human existence livable (see Kermode 2000). When, with the rise of modernity, mythical and religious stories lost their credibility, it has not at all eroded the crucial role of narrativity. Mythical and religious stories were replaced by, or translated into, stories that reflected more modern political, moral, or scientific points of view. Narratives of liberation, emancipation or progression (or their apocalyptic opposites) became the new versions of old stories. Different as they were in their worldview, their functioning as narrative frameworks providing sense to the world and to human existence remained the same. In this chapter I argue that narrative has not only provided frameworks to human subjects to understand their lives and to direct those lives, narrative has also functioned as the medium of identity, as the symbolic mode that substantiates identity. In the wake of Paul Ricoeur, I will call this notion of identity ‘narrative identity’.1 But before discussing the idea of narrative identity I will begin with an account of identity that is almost its opposite, and what I will call ‘archival identity’. This detour is necessary because I will contend that narrative identity is at the moment under siege, whereas the role of archival identity is increasing. I will address this increasing importance of archival identity in the second part of my chapter by discussing artworks of South African artist Santu Mofokeng and Lebanese artist Walid Raad. The Decline of Narrative and the Rise of the Archive 69 Identity without the Person In his essay “Identity without the Person” Giorgio Agamben notes a fundamental transformation in the concept of identity in the second half of the nineteenth-century. He argues that from this point identity has no longer anything to do with recognition and the person’s social prestige. Identity is from then on based on another kind of recognition, namely that of the recidivist criminal recognized by the police officer. The police officer can identify criminals by using techniques that had undergone a radical development in the nineteenth-century. It is by using files and databases that police officers can determine the identity of a criminal. To exemplify this fundamental transformation Agamben describes the system of criminal identification developed by Alphonse Bertillon, an obscure bureaucrat in the police department of Paris. Towards the end of the 1870s he develops a method for identifying criminals that is based on anthropometric measurements and mug shots: Whoever happened to be detained or arrested for whatever reason would immediately be subjected to a series of measurements of the skull, arms, fingers, toes, ears, and face. Once the suspect had been photographed both in profile and frontally, the two photos would be attached to the “Bertillon card”, which contained all the useful identification data, according to the system that its inventor had christened portrait parlé. (Agamben 2013, 48) The success of Bertillon’s archival classification system is proven by the fact that worldwide similar systems were developed. In the UK Francis Galton developed a fingerprinting classification system, which enabled the identification of recidivist criminals without the possibility of error. He claimed that the statistical survey of fingerprinting was particularly suited to natives from the colonies. Whereas their physical characteristics tended to be confusing and appeared indistinguishable to the European eye, identifying their fingerprints was a solution for this problem. Agamben draws ominous conclusions from this transformation in establishing the identity of a person. For the first time in the history of humanity, identity was no longer a function of the social “persona” and its recognition by others but rather a function of biological data, which could bear no relation to it: What now defines my identity and recognizability are the senseless arabesques that my linked-up thumb leaves on a card in some police station. This is something with which I have absolutely nothing to do, something with which and by which I cannot in any way identify myself or take distance from: naked life, a pure biological datum. (Agamben 2013, 50) 70 Ernst van Alphen His somber, ominous conclusion is the result of contrasting the second half of the nineteenth-century with classical Roman times, a period which is strongly idealized by Agamben. The notion of identity which was dominant then is supposed to be the result of the “desire to be recognized by others”. This desire is inseparable from being human, for it is only through recognition by others that man can constitute himself as a person (46). More concretely this means that in Rome every individual was identified by a name that expressed his belonging to a gens, that is, to a lineage. This lineage was defined by the ancestor’s mask of wax that every patrician family kept in the atrium of the home. Persona came to signify the juridical capacity and political dignity of the free man, that is, not of every individual in the Roman world. A slave, inasmuch as he or she had neither ancestors, nor a mask, nor a name, could not have a “persona”. So, a slave had no juridical capacity. Agamben contrasts the Roman notion of identity to the one which came about in the late-nineteenth-century by the idea that recognition by others, playing a role in Roman times, has no function anymore since the nineteenth-century. Although familial lineage had to be recognized by others, that is by identification of the ancestor’s mask, and was not considered as just a biological given, this notion of identity has a lot in common with the more recent nineteenth-century one. In principal, both notions of identity consider identity as something you are born with. You are born as a free man, because of the family you are part of (not seen as biological DNA but as a social structure within which you are born); or, alternatively, biological, physical features determine your criminal or other kind of identity. By contrasting the Roman persona to the late-nineteenth-century notion of identity Agamben leaves out a crucial part of history. He can do that because although he takes Roman identity as an example, he deals with the desire, or necessity, to be recognized by others in order to constitute oneself as a person as a universal phenomenon; the biological identity that came about in the late-nineteenth-century seems to be a historical intrusion and deviation in a universal structure, at least for Agamben. The historical period that remains undiscussed in Agamben’s account is, however, the period in which the self gets a temporal dimension and identity becomes a narrative issue. When since the Renaissance the bourgeoisie becomes the upcoming social and political class, social mobility transforms the notion of self that has been prevalent so far. The French Revolution is the symbolic summit in this socio-political development. It is also the period in which the literary genre of the novel becomes the most important genre. The rise of the novel is at the same time the rise of a narrative notion of identity. The question “What am I?”, for example; a free man, a slave, a nobleman, a lower-class farmer, is being reformulated and becomes “Who am I?” This formula questions the immutable status of selfhood and, in the case of the novel, of character. Character The Decline of Narrative and the Rise of the Archive 71 becomes a set of acquired dispositions. This also explains the ambiguity of the term “character”, not only referring to a human being, the subject that plays a role in the narrative, but also to the selfhood or personality in which the mediations performed by plot result. This ambiguity enables paradoxical constructions of “the character of a character”. The answer to the quest for narrative identity looks for sameness in what is by definition diverse, variable, discontinuous, or unstable. This “sameness” is not essentialist, but is defined by temporality, ‘processuality’ and change and results in a notion of identity which considers the self as a process of becoming. In the novel characters are themselves a kind of plot, because there is usually a correlation between action and character. Narrative is the path of a character, or better of the character of the character. Although a search for permanence in time is attached to the notion of identity, narrative identity allows for permanence or sameness as the result of a process or development. Whereas in narrative genres like fairytales characters operate in the function of plot, in the novel the plot is in the service of character. In that respect, the novel of apprenticeship or Bildungsroman is the literary genre in which narrative identity is not only enacted but also thematized. The German notion of Bildung articulates extremely well the nature of narrative identity. However, although narrative identity became increasingly important during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the late-nineteenth-century shows the first symptoms of its decline. This decline seems to have accelerated at the end of the next century. Let me elaborate some arguments that indicate the problematization of narrative as the most important symbolic mode, and as a result of narrative, identity as well. Postmodern French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard has argued that the contemporary culture defined by the postmodern condition is characterized by the decline of grand narratives (Lyotard 1984). It is, however, not narrative as such, or in general, that is under siege. Postmodernity manifests itself through skepticism toward what he calls meta-narratives. In fact, the mythical, religious, political and scientific narratives to which I just referred are nothing other than such meta-narratives. Meta-narratives are conclusive stories that strive to signify the whole world in one single account. Lyotard’s examples of such meta-narratives are the Enlightenment narratives in which knowledge is no goal in itself, but serves human subjects in their pursuit of progress in the moral, political and economic sense. The validity of knowledge functions within an epic story about emancipation and fulfillment; it is a means to a narrative end. Postmodernism is then defined as a radical incredulity toward such meta-narratives. According to Lyotard the place of narrative within contemporary culture is a modest one. What is left is a multiplicity of contending smaller narratives. Not one of these is superior and has the status of 72 Ernst van Alphen being conclusive or overarching (meta-). Narratives are no longer able to legitimize the pursuit of knowledge, economic growth, or social and moral emancipation. They only work as expressions of a point of view and of specific interests; those points of view can only become paramount by being convincing or not. To be more precise, they work rhetorically; not based on their truth value, but performatively. Lyotard’s account of the transformation of the condition of modernity into postmodernity does not pay much attention to what has led to this transformation. He elaborates its results and implications. He explicates only one cause, namely the rise of a computerized society. The explosive dissemination of computer technology has replaced narrative as the dominant symbolic form by the database. Lyotard is not the only one who stages narrative and the database as competitive symbolic forms and who argues for the diminishing importance of narrative in favor of the database. In his work about new media, Lev Manovich also argues that narrative as a key form of cultural expression of the modern age has been replaced in the postmodern age by the database (Manovich 2001). Narrative, as well as the database, are competing for the same territory in human culture; as symbolic, cultural forms they each claim an exclusive right to make meaning about the world. Manovich sees narrative and the database as two competing imaginations, two basic creative impulses, or two existential responses to the world. They differ in how they do this. The database represents the world as a list or collection of items, whereas narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory for representing the world (225). The kind of imagination proposed by the database appears to be spatial, whereas narrative organizes experience first on a temporal basis. They both give efficient access to information, albeit in very different ways. But in our computer age, it is the database that becomes the predominant center of creative processes that are deployed to make sense of human experience, cultural memory and the world in general. Of course, the database is a rather technical notion and in that sense hard to compare with narrative, which is a symbolic form that can be recognized in all modes of making sense of experience, memory, and identity. But Manovich’s claim is that the computer-based form of the database has migrated back into culture at large, both literally and conceptually (2001, 214). The database has become a new metaphor that we use to conceptualize lists and collections of whatever kind; collections of documents, of objects, of individual as well as collective memory. Not only the computer database but also the 3-D computer-based virtual spaces “have become true cultural forms—general ways used by the culture to represent human experience, the world, and human existence in this world” (215). To further understand how the rise of computerized society has redistributed the role of narrative and of the database as competing creative The Decline of Narrative and the Rise of the Archive 73 impulses, Manovich brings in the semiotic notions of syntagm and paradigm. Originally introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure to describe the structure of natural languages, and applied by Roland Barthes to describe sign systems like fashion or food, the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic are two structural dimensions of all sign systems. A syntagm consists of a combination of signs. To use the example of natural language, an utterance is produced by combining or stringing together one word after another, in a linear sequence. The paradigmatic dimension is the result of selecting; a language user selects each new element from a group of related elements with the same meaning or function. He or she selects a noun from the group, set, or collection of nouns, or a expression from the set of expressions which are synonyms of that expression. De Saussure describes the paradigmatic dimension as associations that are made “in theory”. This means that the elements that belong to a paradigm are related to each other in absentia. Elements that belong to the syntagmatic dimension are related to each other in praesentia; they are articulated into a sentence or into an outfit. Manovich adds to this difference between paradigm and syntagm that paradigm is implicit and imagined, whereas syntagm is explicit (2001, 230). These characteristics of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions can also be recognized in novels and in cinema: Literary and cinematic narratives work in the same way. Particular words, sentences, shots, and scenes that make up a narrative have a material existence; other elements that form the imaginary world of an author or a particular literary or cinematic style, and that could have appeared instead, exist only virtually. (231) Manovich’s claim about new media is that they reverse this relationship between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic. “Database (the paradigm) is given material existence, while narrative (the syntagm) is dematerialized. Paradigm is privileged, syntagm is downplayed. Paradigm is real; syntagm, virtual” (231). He illustrates this privileging of paradigm over syntagm by describing what typical interfaces do: For instance, a screen may contain a few icons; clicking on each icon leads the user to a different screen. On the level of an individual screen, these choices form a paradigm of their own that is explicitly presented to the user. On the level of the whole object, the user is made aware that she is following one possible trajectory among many others. In other words, she is selecting one trajectory from the paradigm of all trajectories that are defined. (2011, 231) 74 Ernst van Alphen Interactive interfaces present the complete paradigm to the user by an explicit menu of all available choices. This does not imply that the syntagmatic dimension is canceled out. Although the user of a computer is making choices or selections at each new screen, the result is a syntagmatic, linear sequence of screens that have been followed. But it is important that the paradigm is more present than the syntagm which is less visible and present and embedded within an overall paradigmatic structure. And outside of the special realm of structuralist thought, we have another term for paradigm. It is called archive. The structuralist discourse exemplifies yet another dimension of the fundamental changes brought about by the rise of computerized society. But, as already argued, these changes are not limited to computer technology. Ultimately, it concerns a change in creative processes and symbolic modes that are deployed for making sense of life, memory and identity. It is the paradigmatic dimension of the database, in other words of the archive, that becomes the predominant center of those processes. Because of this cultural change, the symbolic form of (syntagmatic) narrativity, has a more modest role to play. It is no longer the encompassing framework in which all kind of information is embedded, but the other way around. It is in the encompassing framework of archival organizations that (small) narratives are embedded. Archives are no longer considered to be passive guardians of an inherited legacy but instead, they are seen now as active agents that shape memory, and identity in very specific ways. But what are the repercussions of this rise of the archive as the most important symbolic mode for notions of identity? More specifically, what exactly does it mean that archival organizations are active agents that not only shape social and cultural memory, but also personal identity? The archive is far from a neutral guardian. Although the archive is in many cases a place where facts can be found, or, in the words of Jeffrey Wallen, “a place where secrets are revealed or where one can now find truths that had been hidden”, the archive is also a place that “actively shapes and produces the identities of those it registers” (2009, 268–69). The archive is responsible for significations that differ fundamentally from meaning produced by narratives. Wallen describes how contacts with archiving mechanisms shape our identities: Who we are is always also now produced by archival machines that register, observe, and record our passage through the apparatuses of society … The driver’s license, the school report card, the credit card receipt, the medical report are the artifacts we receive from our interactions with the gigantic bureaucracies of the state, the The Decline of Narrative and the Rise of the Archive 75 school, the financial system, and the medical-insurance complex. Our identities are also woven for us, and the archive is the loom. (269) A strong example of the shaping power of archival organization is Wallen’s case study of the Stasi archives in former East Germany. Although it stems from a totalitarian society that is utterly bureaucratic in obsessive ways, the point is that the way the Stasi did the archiving, the way it performed as an active agent in creating the identities of those who they register, is not fundamentally different from what any archival organization does: In almost all instances the Stasi manage to create something akin to the ‘biographical illusion’ through its techniques of surveillance and its arsenal of policing measures. Thus, in many cases, the Stasi’s tales of dissidence converged with the lived experiences of the critical writers the Stasi pursued. Many of the individuals the Stasi branched as hostile or dissident were forced, sooner or later, to act out their Stasi-engineered destinies … Invariably the two ‘stories’ merged—that of the Stasi and the individual’s own life story—and these individuals were forced to live out the fiction that the state apparatus and the Stasi had fabricated about them. (Lewis 2003, 387; quoted in Wallen 2009, 269) The moment that an individual finds out about the fictional record the Stasi has archived of her or him, he or she will begin to think critically and antagonistically about the East-German state apparatus. By doing this they begin to behave accordingly to the accusations the Stasi made against her or him. Ultimately, this results in an internalization of an archival portrait that others have constructed. This true portrayal was not found in the archive but produced by the archive. Although this example is extreme in the sense that it comes from an archival practice in a totalitarian society, it demonstrates well how the archive is not just a neutral guardian but also an active agent. Substantiating Individual Identity by Means of the Archive In order to understand better how archival organizations, shape personal identities I will say a few words about Michel Foucault’s work on the modern archive. When Foucault writes about episteme (the order of things), he is not referring to archival organizations in the literal sense. An episteme is a more fundamental form of order than an archival organization. But archives are examples of “techniques” or “practices” in which the operations of an episteme can be recognized easily. The 76 Ernst van Alphen episteme governs the principles according to which archival organizations are structured in such a way that archives can be emblematic examples of the nature of an episteme. But because of the increasing importance of the archive in the Modern age, Foucault has also written extensively on the role of archives in that period. For, what changed radically then is the so-called “threshold of description”, the minimum of importance a piece of information must have to be worthy of archiving. This threshold was lowered dramatically to include common people. In the words of Foucault: For a long time, ordinary individuality—the everyday individuality of everybody—remained below the threshold of description. To be looked at, observed, described in detail, followed from day to day by an uninterrupted writing was a privilege. … The disciplinary methods reserved this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination. [What is archived] is no longer a monument for future memory, but a document for possible use. And this new describability is all the more marked in that the disciplinary framework is a strict one; the child, the patient, the madman, the prisoner, were to become … the object of individual descriptions and biographical accounts. (Foucault 1979, 191–92) Foucault argues that a variety of new ways of examining and describing individuals was developed. The question which then emerges is in which sense this accumulation and processing of the new data differed from the knowledge production of earlier centuries. Scientists from earlier centuries also had were obsessed with classifying objects and archiving the results of these classifications. 2 Foucault’s answer is that while it is true that plants, animals, and even human beings had been the subject of study before the examination regime was in place, they entered a field of knowledge as general categories, as a species for example, and not as singular individuals. What was innovative about the new archives was precisely that they objectified individuals not as members of a pre-existing category, but in all their uniqueness and singularity. Far from being archivable in terms of their shared properties, human beings became linked to all the unique series of events (medical, military, educational, penal events) which made them who they are as historical individuals—a history which could now take the form of a file while the individual became a case. (DeLanda 2003, 11) In other words, whereas in the old archives individuals were used to build or substantiate categories, in the new archive, categories are being The Decline of Narrative and the Rise of the Archive 77 used to build or substantiate the individual. This leads to a situation in which human bodies, events and archives interact, and it is this interaction which brings about individual identity. This identity is then not seen as a subjective interiority but as an objective exteriority. All the facts about people accumulated in the files and dossiers of databases and archives, extracted from us via a variety of examinations, provide people with an identity. This identity is not a matter of interiorized representation, like an ideology, but of an external body of archives within which we are caught and that compulsorily fabricate an objective identity for us. This “archival identity” may perhaps have little to do with our sense of identity, but this may not be the case for an insurance company, for example, for whom archived medical facts are the key to our identity, whether we like it or not (12). One of the radical implications of this modern archive is that anyone who is not in the records does not really exist. This is, for example, at stake now with the thousands of migrants, who try to arrive in Europe, but then it turns out they have no passport. Migrants without a passport have no identity, cannot be considered as migrant, and are sent back to the country they came from, which will also not allow them into the country because they cannot prove what their nationality is. This drastic consequence is understandable when we realize that archival administrators do not observe, describe and classify reality, migrants in this case, but the other way around; they shape people and events into entities that fit the categorizations and that are recordable. This kind of reification entails that there are virtually no other identities than those that are contained in records and archives.3 It also implies that exclusions from the archive are inherent to any archival organization. Those exclusions concern memories, documents, practices of knowledge production that are overlooked, not taken seriously, considered as unimportant or without any value. This explains why memories and knowledge ‘outside the archive’, are also part of the archive, in the sense of produced by archival rules of exclusion. Consequently, an archival organization has an inside as well as an outside. Reanimation4 Although memory manifests itself in the form of narrative as well as through archival organizations, it is striking that many, and I would like to say the most significant, contemporary artists use the medium of the archive to address the issue of memory and identity. I will discuss two of these artists, Santu Mofokeng and Walid Raad. The works of Santu Mofokeng and Walid Raad are examples of artistic archival practices that pertain to a larger category of memory practices, meant to reanimate excised histories. Many contemporary art practices foreground these exclusions from the archive by presenting them “as yet” another archive. 78 Ernst van Alphen Artists highlight this residue of the archive by collecting images that were until then not considered to be “archivable”, that is, of any value or importance. These images excluded from the archive are still there but cannot be looked at because according to the accepted discursive rules they do not show or articulate anything worth knowing. An example of such an artistic practice transforming exclusions from the archive into an archive is the Black Photo Album by South African photographer Santu Mofokeng. The Black Photo Album is the result of an investigation of images that were commissioned by black working and middle-class families in South Africa in the period between 1890 and 1950. It was during this period that South-Africa developed and implemented a racist political system. During this period, it was still common practice to depict African people in the same visual language as animals, as part of the fauna in their own natural habitat. In the ideologies of authoritative knowledge, they were considered as “natives” and the official, “archivable” images had to confirm such a notion of African people. The photographs commissioned by black people and representing them as bourgeois families did not fit this ideology and were excluded from the archives of official knowledge. These images remain scattered in the private domain and are largely invisible. In the words of Santu Mofokeng: They have been left behind by dead relatives, where they sometimes hang on obscure parlor walls in the townships. In some families, they are coveted as treasures, displacing totems in discursive narratives about identity, lineage and personality. And because, to some people, photographs contain the “shadow” of the subject, they are carefully guarded from the ill-will of witches and enemies. In other families, they are being destroyed as rubbish during spring-cleans because of interruptions in continuity or disaffection with the encapsulated meanings and history of the images. Most often they lie hidden to rot through neglect in kists, cupboards, cardboard boxes and plastic bags. (2011, 230) Mofokeng’s Black Photo Album reverses the exclusion of these images from the authoritative public domain. He collects these images and the stories about the subjects of the photographs. Within the context of the gallery and the museum, he presents them in a new format in combination with the stories. By doing this the neglected memories and images are inserted into the public domain and form the archive from which until now they had been excluded. This reanimation of the invisible exclusions from the archive implies much more than bringing to life almost forgotten memories. By making these images into archival objects the ideology that subjected African people to the lower orders in the ‘family of men’, is rewritten. The Decline of Narrative and the Rise of the Archive 79 Another example of an artistic practice compensating earlier exclusions is the work of Lebanese artist Walid Raad and his fictional collaborators of the Atlas Group. These collaborators donated work to the Archive of the Atlas Group. To give an example, Missing Lebanese Wars, consisting of plates and a notebook, was deposited in The Atlas Group Archive by a well-known (but fictional) Lebanese historian, named Dr. Fadl Fakhouri. Other fictive legatees of the archive are Asma Taffan (Let’s be Honest, the weather helped, 1992) and Habib Fathallah (I Might Die Before I Get a Rifle, 1993). Walid Raad himself also donated work to the archive (We Decided to Let Them Say, “We are Convinced”, Twice). The project of the Atlas Group unfolded between 1989 and 2004. In the 2004 Raad decided to end this “collaborative” project. In 2006, a retrospective exhibition was organized that showed the complete Atlas Group Archive in one single place, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.5 By means of the works in The Atlas Group Archive, Raad questions the mediation and archiving of information. The artistic, fictional archive enables the exploration of new epistemic and cognitive models. This new knowledge challenges the kind of knowledge that is disseminated by the dominant mass media and by Western discourses about terrorism, colonialism and orientalism. The presentation of artistic works as belonging to an archive directs the attention to the cognitive conflicts and problems thematized by these works. Walid Raad explains why the archive, as a place, is the necessary framework for his cognitive project: I like to think that I always work from facts. But I always proceed from the understanding that there are different kinds of facts; some facts are historical, some are sociological, some are emotional, some are economic, and some are aesthetic. And some of these facts can sometimes only be experienced in a place we call fiction. I tend to think in terms of different kinds of facts and the places that permit their emergence. (Quoted in Knape 2011, 99) Besides fiction, the other place in the work of Walid Raad that permits these facts to emerge and become visible and knowable is the archive. And in Raad’s case, fiction and the archive are intimately related; his archives are fictional. The documents and images presented by the Atlas Group are not inherently fake or fictional. The texts and photographs were not manipulated. But it is their montage and assembling into a narrative or specific historical situation that propels them into fiction. The montage of image and text, or of different images is a specific mode of producing knowledge. The texts and images are never presented at face value, but they always “trouble each other”. (Chouteau-Matikian 2011, 104) A good example of this use of montage is the Notebook Volume 38: Already Been in a 80 Ernst van Alphen Lake of Fire donated to the Atlas Group Archive by the already mentioned Dr. Fadl Fakhouri. This file contains 145 photographic images of cars. These cars are of the same brand, model and color, as those used in car-bomb attacks during the Lebanese wars of 1975 to 1991. Notes and annotations made by Fakhouri are attached to the images (illus.). They specify information such as the number of casualties, the location and time of the explosion and the type of explosives used. The documentary information is all real and true. What is fictional, however, is the bringing together of these different elements in the notebook of the imaginary character of Dr. F. Fakhouri. And of course, the notebook is an archival genre. By using the notebook as the framework where factual images and notes are presented, a cognitive status is assigned to them. It is thanks to this archival genre that the images and notes are no longer disparate elements without any cognitive value. They become knowable and visible objects through the newly acquired status as archivable objects. The fictional archive of the Atlas Group present, in the words of Chouteau-Matikian, “latency, lapse, and speculation as vectors for historical truth equal to those of verification, authenticity and proof” (105). But in the case of Notebook Volume 38: Already been in a lake of fire, (Illus) the goal of this artistic project is not conveying knowledge about the kind of cars that were used in car-bomb attacks during the Lebanese wars. What is much more important are the layers of transmission due to which this kind of knowledge was lost; and subsequently, the archival framework thanks to which this knowledge can be retrieved. What is important is that the documents in the Atlas Group Archive, whether they are photographs, texts or videos, are never authentic or original, but always digital reproductions. They are always scanned, increased but often also decreased in size, and multiplied. The point is that “their original state is lost in the layers of transmissions, exhibitions and repetitions, and metaphorically in the rumors of history”. (Chouteau-Matikian 2011, 105) After the cognitive impulse has been installed by means of these inauthentic reproductions, what should be verified is not the materiality of these artefacts but the structures through which knowledge is lost or transmitted. Santu Mofokeng, as well as Walid Raad, use an archival framework to retrieve identities and historical knowledge that had been excluded from the official, institutional archives. They do not use a narrative framework to transmit the memories of identities of the past and historical events. They use an archival framework, because the medium of transmission due to which these identities and this historical knowledge were lost, was the archive, not narrative. The representation of narrative identity seems to be no longer the only productive way to make these excluded identities exist. It is now the symbolic mode of the archive which has become more effective to provide identity to people, to histories, which have been inexistent, invisible, unacknowledged. To use Walid Raad’s The Decline of Narrative and the Rise of the Archive 81 words, “The layer of transmission due to which this kind of knowledge was lost” was transmission by means of the archive. The most effective way of countering exclusion from the archive, is the archive itself, using an archival organization to include what has been excluded so far. The works of Raad and Mofokeng are prime examples of the more modest role of narrative form. Their works are still ‘telling’; they still rely on narrative for the constitution of identity, but narrative is no longer the encompassing framework in which all kind of information is embedded. In their work, it is the encompassing framework of the archive in which (small) narratives are embedded. The remaining question, central to this book, now is; what is the ethical difference of this very specific narrative form; a form which consists of narrative embedded within an archival organization? To answer this question, we should first assess the ontological difference, between narrative identity and what I have called archival identity. Archival identity is what archives impose on us. Narrative identity is the result of our lived sense of self. It is defined by temporality and change and results in a notion of identity which considers the self as a process of becoming. When narrative becomes embedded within an archival framework, or when narrative is produced by an archival organization, there seems to be a tension between two notions of identity which are almost binary opposites of each other. This tension cannot easily be resolved; all I can do is to use the perspective offered by ethics to further understand this tension. Then it will become clear that this tension is not a narrative tension or an archival tension, but an ethical one produced by the embeddedness of narrative within the archive. But what is ethics? Jill Bennett distinguishes ethics from morality in the following way: An ethics is enabled and invigorated by the capacity for transformation; that is, precisely by not assuming that there is a given outside to thinking. A morality on the other hand, operates within the bounds of a given set of conventions, within which social and political problems must be resolved. (2005, 15) The given set of conventions based on which a morality operates consists in the case of archival organizations of given sets of categories. This implies that the archival framework is a confining one. It determines the parameters within which small narratives can be told. The capacity for transformation which narrative and ethics have in common is restricted by the “bounds of a given set of conventions”. Santu Mofokeng’s work demonstrates the confining effect of the archive extremely well. The life stories suggested and partly told by the collected photographs are all embedded by the colonial archive, 82 Ernst van Alphen according to which the portrayed persons are first black. There is nothing to transform about this archival identity. Their class identity is clearly a narrative one; they have climbed the ladder of class difference and now belong to the bourgeois. However, their selves as processes of becoming are embedded within an identity which is imposed on them; their being black. Notes 1 He developed this idea of narrative identity in his book Oneself as Another (1990). He started developing his theory of narrative identity already at the end of Time and Narrative 3. 2 For clear descriptions of the history of archival science, see Fernanda Ribeiro (2001) and Rumschöttel (2001). 3 In archives interfaces function as the critical nodes through which archivists enable and constrain the interpretation of the past. The interface is a site where power in the Foucauldian sense is negotiated and exercised. It is power exercised over documents and their representation, over the access to them en over the uses of archives. See over archival interfaces Hedstrom (2002). 4 This discussion of Walid Raad and Santu Mofoken is based on the last chapter of my book Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media (2014). 5 The complete contents of the archive are published in the following book: The Atlas Group (1989–2004): A Project by Walid Raad (2006). References Agamben, Giorgio. 2013. “Identity without the Person”. In Nudities, translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, 46–54. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Alphen, Ernst van. 2014. Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media. London: Reaktion Books. Bennett, Jill. 2005. Emphatic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chouteau-Matikian, Hélène. 2011. “War, There, Over There”. In Walid Raad: I Might Die before I Get a Rifle, edited by Gunilla Knape, 101–09. Göttingen: Steidl. DeLanda, Manuel. 2003. “The Archive before and after Foucault”. In Information is Alive, edited by Joke Brouwer, Arjen Mulder, and Susan Charlton, 8–13. Rotterdam: V2_/NAi Publishers. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon. Hedstrom, Margaret. 2002. “Archives, Memory, and Interfaces with the Past”. Archival Science 2: 21–43. Kermode, Frank. 2000. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knape, Gunilla, ed. 2011. Walid Raad: I Might Die before I Get a Rifle. Göttingen: Steidl.Lewis, Alison. 2003. “Reading and Writing the Stasi File: The Decline of Narrative and the Rise of the Archive 83 On the Uses and Abuses of the File as (Auto) Biography”. German Life and Letters 56 (4): 377–97. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mofokeng, Santu. 2011. “The Black Photo Album/Look at Me: 1890–1900s”. In Chasing Shadows, edited by Corinne Diserens, 230–31. Munich: Prestel Publishing. Nakas, Kassandra, and Britta Schmitz, eds. 2006. The Atlas Group (1989–2004): A Project by Walid Raad. Cologne: Buchhandlung Walther König. Ribeiro, Fernanda. 2001. “Archival Science and Changes in the Paradigm”. Archival Science 1: 295–310. Ricoeur, Paul. 1988. Time and Narrative 3. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1990. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rumschöttel, Hermann. 2001. “The Development of Archival Science as a Scholarly Discipline”. Archival Science 1: 143–55. Wallen, Jeffrey. 2009. “Narrative Tensions: The Archive and the Eyewitness”. Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 7 (2): 261–79. 6 The Story of the “Anthropos” Writing Humans and Other Primates Danielle Sands But who, we? —Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man” (1972, 136) In Molecular Red, his search for suitable philosophical tools to respond to the Anthropocene, McKenzie Wark declares that “it’s time for other stories” (2015, 117).1 Wark echoes the widely-held belief that a conceptual destabilization issues from the identification of the Anthropocene, manifesting itself, as Timothy Clark writes, “in innumerable possible hairline cracks in the familiar life-world” (2015, 9) and that such a destabilization is experienced as a disintegration of narratives—the record of a known past and a relatively predictable future—which elucidate the human condition. In its passive construction, Wark’s prescription pointedly resists the identification of an Anthropocene subject or subjects for whom and by whom these stories might be created. As Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook explain, the Anthropocene subject is constructed retroactively; “there is no ‘we,’ no ‘Anthropos’ until, in a final moment of inscribed and marked destruction, a species event appears by way of a specific geological framing” (Cohen and Colebrook 2016, 9). This retrospective emergence of the Anthropocene subject appears to jeopardize the possibility of exactly the kind of coherent action required to temper the anthropogenic destruction which is now perceptible and quantifiable, if not fully comprehensible. Initially, it appears that the Anthropocene condition, an unprecedented realization of human narcissism, is unique in its impact on the dominant narratives of the human. The conceptual model of the Anthropocene—the human as the destroyer who may yet redeem itself—appears to supersede and override earlier models, “erasing the fiction of Cartesian ‘man’” by its appeal to both the sensory immediacy and scientific verifiability of its claims (Cohen and Colebrook 2016, 7). Despite auguring environmental catastrophe, the Anthropocene narrative reassuringly re-unifies the human in an intellectual era largely defined by its attentiveness to human difference. This accounts for the tone of much contemporary environmental writing, which sees no contradiction in affirming the The Story of the “Anthropos” 85 existence of a unified human community to be marshalled in service of a common cause; “this is our moment”, Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinke write, “[i]t is the moment to face the root of the terrible trouble we have unleashed for the biosphere and for ourselves” (2010, 330). Yet rather than establishing or reinforcing the species identity of the human, the Anthropocene splinters humanity according to differing degrees of responsibility for environmental destruction. Cohen and Colebrook ask: “Why would ‘we’ want to sully the entirety of humanity by placing it as the author or agent of this late-modern event?” (2016, 7). To do so, to accept the “Anthropos” as an unexamined category, is to overlook the relationship between anthropogenic destruction and capitalism, and to revert to a model of “universal ‘human’” whose universalism was always fictitious (Cohen and Colebrook 2016, 91). Furthermore, rather than reinforcing the identity of the human, the Anthropocene exposes its contingency and precarity; it is with shock, not mastery and understanding, that the human encounters the extent and nature of its impact. Rather, the Anthropocene marks “severe discontinuities” (Haraway 2015, 160), even a “total disconnect” (Latour 2011, 2), between humans and the natural world, and accordingly, within the “human” itself, as it fails to fully comprehend its own legacy. Because of this apparent disconnect, Cohen and Colebrook pursue the Anthropocene subject, contending that it emerges from a misidentification between the human and its effects, and presupposes an exemplary pre-lapsarian subject. “[T]he very figure of a humanity-oriented towards a history of flourishing, self-realization, universal scope and a proper future”, they argue, “relies upon an accidental and temporary corruption” (2016, 17). Balancing chastisement and redemption in a way which facilitates an impassioned call to arms, the Anthropocene provides an ideal context for the reinvention of the “human”, with the “Anthropos” generated by a process of “guilt and diagnosis” (Colebrook 2016, 86). Rather than illustrating the unique effect of the Anthropocene on conceptions of human identity, as described by Cohen and Colebrook, this process—consisting of guilt and repentance—feels distinctly theological, reinstating God as the guarantor of human superiority. For this reason, it is no surprise, that “the end of man” that we witness in the Anthropocene, has generated an entire industry of recuperative “new dawns” (Colebrook 2016, 86). Colebrook’s reference to Jacques Derrida’s 1972 essay “The Ends of Man” invites us to locate the invention of the “Anthropos”, with all its “metaphysical heritage” (Derrida 1972, 115), in a philosophical history whose eschato-teleological conception of the human is no stranger to the apocalypticism of the Anthropocene. The end, or termination, of man, announced almost routinely in this history, is inseparable from the end (telos) of man. As Colebrook later demonstrates in the context of the Anthropocene, it is only at a point where the—literal or figurative— death of man is promised, that man’s telos emerges. Derrida writes: 86 Danielle Sands Man is that which is in relation to his end, in the fundamentally equivocal sense of the word. Since always. The transcendental end can appear to itself and be unfolded only on the condition of mortality, of a relation to finitude as the origin of ideality. The name of man has always been inscribed in metaphysics between these two ends. It has meaning only in this eschato-teleological situation. (1972, 123) The “ends of man” are modified and multiplied in the Anthropocene, informed both by a messiah complex which asserts that only we can correct the damage we have created, and by the contradiction between the power and longevity suggested by our geological influence and the looming possibility of our own extinction. Whilst we are unable to decisively escape the “metaphysical heritage” of the figure of man, Derrida suggests that we may not be doomed to repeat it indefinitely. Rather, he advises that we might “weave and interlace” (1972, 135) two strategies of deconstructive resistance, both remaining within and decisively breaking with familiar “terrain” (135), aiming at the production of “several texts at once” (135). Despite its potential to symbolize “what is outside narrative” (Colebrook 2016, 110) or to bring forth a “radical trembling … from the outside” (Derrida 1972, 134), the Anthropocene, Colebrook demonstrates, has been used to reinstate the “metaphysical heritage” of the figure of Man, to reinvigorate the most reactionary and anti-theoretical conceptual frameworks. 2 In this chapter, I shall consider the relationship between the story of the “Anthropos” and twentieth- and twenty-first-century representations of nonhuman primates. Examining Donna Haraway’s critique of primatological practices and narratives, I shall explore the ways in which an account of human identity generated in response to nonhuman primates substitutes for an “Anthropos” which is always in flight or non-identical. In response to Haraway’s appeal for a less anthropocentric storytelling with “many tellers and hearers” (1989, 8) and Colebrook’s contention that the figure of Man is “an effect of a failure to read” (Colebrook 2016, 93), I shall examine Karen Joy Fowler’s fictional account of primate relations, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, asking whether different modes of primatological reading and writing might generate alternatives to the figure of Man which are better able to acknowledge and fulfil our ethical responsibilities to nonhuman life. 3 Primatology and the ‘Metaphysical Heritage’ of Man In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton tracks the inevitable failure of attempts to locate and ground human identity and the anxieties this failure generates. “Wherever I look for myself”, he explains, “I only encounter a potentially infinite series of alterities; my body, my arm, my The Story of the “Anthropos” 87 ideas, place of birth, parents, history, society…the ultimate paradox is that wherever we look for the self, we won’t find it” (2007, 176). We have witnessed the transformation of this anxiety in the Anthropocene; the human experiences both guilt and relief at uncovering sufficient tangible evidence of its impact to ground a distinct species identity. Whilst the identification of the Anthropocene marks a stage in this process, the unease surrounding anthropogenic environmental destruction characterizes a longer period and manifests itself both generally, in cultural perceptions, and in the development of specific disciplines. Donna Haraway’s 1989 Primate Visions, for example, scrutinizes the complex entangling of human self-perception and primatological history, recounting the ways in which the story of the “Anthropos” is strengthened by perceptions of other primates. Haraway frames the history of primatology as a cluster of subjective stories of the “Anthropos” whose fictionality is obscured and disavowed by their employment of a scientific methodology which is illegitimately ring-fenced in a kind of scientific “wilderness preservation” (1989, 125). She suggests that we should supplement such disingenuous storytelling with a decentered storytelling which accounts for nonhuman agency. Her primatological history examines the ways in which we have posited nonhuman primates as “natural objects that can show people their origin” (1991, 11), and as a way for humans— rendered anxious by anthropogenic environmental devastation—to heal their separation from the earth. Prior to the designation Anthropocene, “apes”, Haraway claims, “modeled a solution to a deep cultural anxiety sharpened by the real possibility in the late-twentieth-century of western people’s destruction of the earth” (1989, 132) by offering the hope of a renaturalization of man. The classification of different life forms has long occupied humans, perceived as an extension to Adam’s divinely-endorsed naming of the animals in the first book of Genesis. The primatological end of the classificatory process is, of course, the most significant for the delineation of human identity. Primates as “troubling doubles” (Haraway 1989, 11) reflect a past with which we have lost touch and provide the raw materials through which we can envisage alternative futures. For Haraway, the anthropocentrism of primatology is barely concealed. Lauded primatologist Robert Yerkes assumed that culture was unique to humans and assessed primate mental faculties according to their similarity to human abilities. Mid-twentieth-century primatology looked to ease cultural anxieties by naturalizing the prevailing narratives of gender, sexuality, family and social order, coding, classifying and bio-politicizing nonhuman primate bodies, their “naturalness” a political tool. Later, 1970s primatology reflected the gendered language and ideology of the “space race”, reframing evolution as a hero quest in which early man braved the challenges of the natural world to conquer his environment and reveal his inherent superiority. Repurposing the work of Edward Said, Haraway 88 Danielle Sands argues that Western primatology is a kind of “simian orientalism” (10), which is grounded in “the construction of the self from the raw material of the other, the appropriation of nature in the production of culture, the ripening of the human from the soil of the animal” (11). Haraway reinforces this position in When Species Meet, indicting humanism on the grounds that in its “entrails” (2008, 18) it assumes the existence of a rational human subject whose identity is determined by its superiority over its “others”. The story of the human which emerges through primatology is a story of violence and exclusion. However, Haraway is motivated by the possibility that the curiosity at the heart of primatology might be channeled into the production of different stories, that it might be possible to shift the webs of intertextuality and to facilitate perhaps new possibilities for the meanings of difference, reproduction, and survival for specifically located members of the primate order—on both sides of the bio-political and cultural divide between human and animal. (1989, 377) Primate Visions is a re-telling of primatological history in which the outcomes are not already pre-determined by a fixed model of the “Anthropos”, and which replaces projection with negotiation between shifting anthropomorphisms and zoomorphisms, between the “situated knowledges” (Haraway 1991, 188) of embodied life. “Situated knowledges” offer a negotiation between the disingenuous objectivity of science and relativism. They depend on the notion that nature is both something we discover and something which is “constituted historically” (106) and that the objective perspective which science promises is a myth; rather “[e]mbodiment is significant prosthesis; objectivity cannot be about fixed vision when what counts as an object is precisely what world history turns out to be about” (195). One consequence of the notion of “situated knowledges” is a disruption of the subject/object binary; they require that we see the object as “an actor and agent” (198), not a harvestable resource. Haraway’s work exposes humanity as inescapably reliant on prostheses, the figure of Man as necessarily self-insufficient. Her notion of the cyborg, first advanced in “The Cyborg Manifesto”, challenges the distinction between free, rational, human beings and the “animal-machine” (Derrida 2008, 39)—the Cartesian notion that animal behavior is mechanistically determined—that has long informed Western philosophy. Haraway’s cyborg undermines the separation “between automation and autonomy” (1989, 139) which underpins the notion of the human as an autonomous agent. Haraway argues that “we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not The Story of the “Anthropos” 89 to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos” (2016, 52). Not being Man entails a collective practice of envisioning and enacting “imaginable epochs to come” (Haraway 2015, 160) and promises to reduce the subjugation of human and nonhuman life. Such epochs would be facilitated by “primate vision” (1991, 195), Haraway’s shorthand for the prosthetic technologies and representative processes which constitute our perception of reality. “Primate vision”, aligned with the “partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity” of the cyborg (Haraway 2016, 9), jams the metaphysical machinery of Man, exposing humanity as a mere participant in the multi-agential networks of the natural world, constituted by prostheses, and without a pre-determined identity or end. Humans are, Haraway writes, forced to confront the fact that “‘we’ are permanently mortal, that is, not in ‘final’ control” (1991, 201). This displacement of Man undermines the elevated figure of the human storyteller who names, taxonomizes, and immaterializes his material surroundings. However, Haraway insists on the potential for fiction— unbounded by fact, and free to perform, invent and recreate—to negotiate human-nonhuman relations in ways which science, restricted by the myth of its own neutrality and compelled to conceal its performativity, cannot. As Joseph Schneider notes, “fact hides or ‘masks the generative deed or performance,’ whereas fiction, so to speak, wears that performance on its sleeve” (2005, 38). Such a practice of storytelling must, however, be a cross-species undertaking, a space in which the identities of humans and nonhumans are co-constituted. Stories “must listen to the practices of interpretation of the primate order in which the primates themselves— monkeys, apes, and people—all have some kind of ‘authorship’” (Haraway 1989, 8). Stories here are not page-bound distractions but facilitate different ways of life. Fiction suggests an active form of being (unlike facts, which are perceived as inert and unchangeable) which permits us access to other ways of being; in it, we hear “vision, inspiration, insight, genius”, as well as “the act of fashioning, forming, or inventing” (3). According to Haraway, narrative and material co-constitution and co-existence are not clearly separable; rather “[s]pecies is about the corporeal join of the material and the semiotic” (2003, 15). As readers and writers, we are responsible for rewriting anthropocentric histories and constructing alternative cross-species futures, not authored by Man under the misapprehension that language and aesthetic production separate humans from the natural world, but fully alert to the fleshiness of the word (100). Primatological Fiction: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves In Primate Visions, Haraway aims to disturb the association between language and human mastery by demonstrating that tests of nonhuman primates’ linguistic capacities are scientifically flawed and by advancing 90 Danielle Sands the construction of cross-species fictions. This aim is complemented by Derrida’s notion of the “animality of writing” (2008, 52), a provocative reminder that writing—dispersed, disruptive, and inhuman—challenges rather than reinforces the sovereignty of Man. If Man is the paradigm of propriety, sameness and self-identity, writing is improper and untamed. In Karen Joy Fowler’s novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013b), it is the “animality of writing”, its creative, non-instrumental value, rather than its communicative use, which is explored and endorsed.4 The functional value of language, protagonist Rosemary notes, is limiting; language “does this to our memories”, she discloses, “simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies” (Fowler 2013b, 48). It is an “imprecise vehicle” (85). That language has creative potential, both for cross-species play and in defying sedimented conceptual structures, is revealed by the “idioglossia” (100) constructed by Rosemary and Fern, the chimpanzee raised as her sister. When Fern is removed from the family, a dismayed Rosemary realizes, “all of my verbosity had been valuable only in the context of my sister. When she left the scene, no one cared anymore about my creative grammars, my compound lexemes, my nimble gymnastic conjugations” (108). Fowler’s novel, a fictional rewriting of the 1970s practice of raising infant chimpanzees within human families to assess animal language acquisition, advances a critique of primatology—as cruel, unreflective and reinforcing an inaccurate account of the human—alongside an alternative history of its victims which might be used to ground a different future. Fowler contends with the challenge of rewriting, or at least pluralizing, an anthropocentric history without reducing nonhuman animals to literary tropes, ventriloquizing them, or reproducing the kind of “simian Orientalism” which Haraway identifies. If she succeeds, it is by sustaining ambiguity, generating multiple meanings of the text by resisting a definitive answer to the question; is We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves about humans or chimpanzees? For the critics, however, there is no ambiguity. Just as decades of critical readings of the inspiration behind Fowler’s novel, Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy”, attempted to stabilize this unruly and disturbing text by confining it to allegory, Fowler’s critics tend to impose humanistic readings on her novel.5 In the critics’ conservative hands, the text, whose very title, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, challenges the “metaphysical heritage” of Man as sovereign and self-identical, becomes unmistakable as a novel about human life; “a provocative take on family love” (Jensen 2014, 99) and “a story of Everyfamily” (Kingsolver 2013).These reductive readings disregard Fowler’s resistance to clarifying or restricting the focus of the novel. Like the “Fern/Rosemary Rosemary/Fern study” (Fowler 2013b, 98) itself, in which Rosemary suspects that she too is an object of study, Fowler renders the tragically separated siblings biologically, conceptually and ethically inseparable. One cannot understand The Story of the “Anthropos” 91 human-chimp Fern aside from chimp-human Rosemary, and synecdochically, one cannot understand nonhuman primates without human primates. Fowler reflexively reproduces primatological methodology, which conceals its primary purpose—the understanding and development of a narrative of the human—beneath its secondary purpose—the study of nonhuman primates—by demonstrating that the two goals are inextricably linked. Indicting the myopia of scientific practice, Fowler tartly observes that “the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied” (2013b, 99). Whilst the critics frame Fowler’s novel as a fictional exploration of familial ties and human capabilities, when the human is the primary focus it is subjected to a cold, critical gaze, both in terms of its cognitive limitations—“[r]esearch at Kyoto University has demonstrated the superiority of chimps to humans at certain short-term memory tasks” (301)—and its cruelty—“[s]ome scientist had observed all that, had actually watched a chimp raped 170 times and kept count. Good scientist. Not me” (275–76). Like the audience facing Red Peter in Kafka’s story, unnerved when their ostensible object of study brands humanity his “specimen”, (Norris 1980, 1246), as Fowler’s readers we are disturbed to find that it is human, not nonhuman behavior, which is subjected to unsentimental interrogation. Both Kafka’s audience and Fowler’s readers, exposed both to the myth of human beneficence and the artifice of human behavior—the act of aping as constitutively human—are forced to see the human as “beside itself”. Fowler explains of her novel’s title: “Though she [Rosemary] has lived an extreme version of being beside herself, still, it affects us all. … The line between us and not-us is a blurry one; that’s what the title is trying to say” (Fowler 2013a, 63–64). And she voices a philosophical position espoused from Kant to Haraway, but seemingly ignored by primatology: “This is partly because we are incapable of seeing anything that isn’t transformed into us by the mere act of seeing it” (64). Here we are invited to consider the double-bind in which Fowler’s text is caught; it is ethically responsible for bearing witness to nonhuman life, but in speaking for the “other”, it cannot always avoid intrusion or misrepresentation. The separation of Fern and Rosemary is presented as an act of brutality (precipitated by human arrogance and stupidity) from which neither recovers. The coupling of their stories, in the—inevitably elliptical— text that Rosemary feels compelled to write is presented as an act of witnessing, a story “for Fern too, Fern again, always Fern” (Fowler 2013b, 304), which painstakingly attempts not to intrude, overstep, or imperialize, by speaking on behalf of Fern. Accordingly, the novel is constructed around the specularity of the pair; in Haraway’s parlance, they are co-constituted, not least because they began to mold each other before they had “gotten to be themselves” (Fowler 2013b, 107). In their infancy, neuroplasticity ensures that their neural development is mirrored (101), and, later, they experience similar social and sexual 92 Danielle Sands estrangement because of their upbringing—Rosemary cannot leave behind her “chimp nature” (221) and Fern is convinced of her own humanity. Fern’s loss is experienced by Rosemary viscerally, “a hunger on the surface of my [her] skin” (107). Historically, the mirror has served as a marker of human difference and superiority; Jacques Lacan’s “mirror stage” marks an important step in the establishment of subjectivity; the mirror self-recognition test, developed in 1970, assesses the extent to which nonhuman animals conform to human expectations of intelligence and awareness. In addition, as Cynthia Willett describes: Theories that rely upon mirror metaphors, as in the measurement of self-awareness through the mirror recognition test and theorizing empathy through mirror neurons or abstract sameness, inadvertently reinforce atomistic models of the self as bound and separate rather than attuned to, and immersed with, others in a biosocial web with its larger energy flows. (2014, 6) It is exactly this atomization and isolation, perceiving selves as objects of study, which causes Fern and Rosemary irreversible emotional damage. Fowler, however, is not content to dispense with mirror imagery altogether; rather she looks to supplant the kind of one-sided mirroring in which one term is fixed and instrumentalized, the “animal mirror” (Haraway 1991, 21) of primatological history, with a type of mutual mirroring, in which both sides, “Fern/Rosemary Rosemary/Fern”, reflect, adapt, and learn from each other. The misguided attempt by their grandmother to console Rosemary—“You just remember you were the one made in God’s image” (Fowler 2013b, 67)—is rendered absurd; Fern and Rosemary are molded in each other’s image, leaving neither space for God nor a distinguishable divine imprint on Rosemary. In fact, the intrusion of the nonhuman in the development of human subjectivity does not confirm human superiority—the “good discontinuities” (Nussbaum 2012, 142) which we are keen to identify between ourselves and other animals—but human limitations. Rosemary is the “monkey-girl” (Fowler 2013b, 128) with “boundary issues” (30), whereas Fern has superior vocal ability and a more agreeable temperament. Fowler’s account of mirroring allows both for species difference and for cross-species co-constitution. The most noticeable effect of species difference is that it dictates the limits of commodification. This is recognized even by the infant Rosemary who observes: “There was something NotSame about Fern and me … Fern could be bought and sold” (213). That the figure of Man is a fiction, a “failure to read”, or a formalization of a misrecognition, and that this results in an isolated species fantasizing about its renaturalization, is insistently reiterated by Fowler’s novel. The destabilization of the category of the human is exemplified by Rosemary’s own “mirror stage”; “My own face in the mirror”, she The Story of the “Anthropos” 93 describes, “a badly lit mug shot, egg-white and staring. I reject it entirely” (Fowler 2013b, 169). A disjunction between the experience of fragmentation and the totality of the perceived image is constitutive of the “mirror stage”; the Imaginary, which constitutes me as a subject, is “the notion of the Symbolic as having a relation to the real” (Colebrook 2016, 107–08), Colebrook writes. Here, Rosemary resists identification; without Fern, she is an “egg”, unborn, incomplete. This scene contrasts with the ending of the novel, also a mirror scene, but one in which both Rosemary and Fern are present, each of them leaning their head on the glass barrier which divides them. Rosemary explains, “I didn’t know what she was thinking or feeling. Her body had become unfamiliar to me. And yet, at the very same time, I recognized everything about her. My sister, Fern. In the whole wide world, my only red poker chip. As if I were looking in a mirror” (Fowler 2013b, 307). In this scene, Rosemary attains the recognition earlier denied, with her disjointed self-experience reflected by Fern, whom she sees “only in teary, floating pieces” (308). This, however, can only be a temporary closure of the distance between them, a momentary suspension of their alienation. Haraway contends that “[r]esponse cannot emerge within relationships of self-similarity” (2008, 71), that responsible behavior is not facilitated by specular logics. Fowler’s novel is more ambivalent about specularity; whilst it is a symptom of the instability of human identity which often leads to cross-species irresponsibility, it can also be employed imaginatively enabling us to experience the “semiotic materiality” (Haraway 2008, 72) that we share with other beings. This is illustrated by Rosemary’s conception of “a sort of reverse mirror test” which would “identify those species smart enough to see themselves when they look at someone else. Bonus points for how far out the chain you can go. Double bonus for those who get all the way to insects” (Fowler 2013b, 201–202). This suggestion that such anthropomorphism is a triumph of empathy and imagination is advanced throughout the novel, with Lowell critiquing his father’s resistance to anthropomorphism. “Dad was always saying that we were all animals”, he reveals, “but when he dealt with Fern, he didn’t start from that place of congruence. His methods put the whole burden of proof onto her. … It would have been more scientifically rigorous to start with an assumption of similarity” (202). Lowell’s identification of the “distorting parameters” (Waller 2012, 87) of animal experiments and endorsement of a selective anthropomorphism is consistent with recent research in primatology and ethology. Whilst anthropomorphism has historically been “applied as a term of reproach, both intellectual and moral” (Daston and Mitman 2005, 2), its associations with anthropocentrism, sentimentality and intellectual sloppiness are now being challenged. Ethologists Marc Bekoff and Frans de Waal, for example, maintain that it is possible to be “carefully anthropomorphic” (Bekoff 2002, 49), and that the differences between chimpanzee personalities “can only be portrayed accurately by using the same adjectives as 94 Danielle Sands we use for our fellow humans” (de Waal 2007, 41). A degree of careful, or critical anthropomorphism, they contend, is preferable to “anthropodenial”, for Martha Nussbaum, “not simply a pernicious intellectual position”, but also, “a large cause of moral deformity” (2012, 140). To accept and encourage anthropomorphism, science must acknowledge the roles of approximation and storytelling within its practices, rather than performing or feigning a cold neutrality. Haraway suggests that reading scientific practice through the lens of science fiction and vice versa might be one way of achieving this (1989, 368–82). Fowler’s novel employs anthropomorphism judiciously, safeguarding against Tom Tyler’s concern that “[t]he designation of any quality or attribute as distinctively human, a designation required by the concept of anthropomorphism, is unwarranted” (2009, 21), by emphasizing Fern’s mastery of qualities usually perceived as human, her skills a “mountain” in comparison to Rosemary’s “molehill” (Fowler 2013b, 82). Appropriately, given the literal co-constitution of the siblings, the anthropomorphization of Fern is accompanied by an animalization of “monkey girl” Rosemary. Like Haraway, Fowler’s anthropomorphism does not conflate the human with the “Anthropos”, with a pre-existing essence and end. The human is not a fixed point in Fowler’s novel, a scale against which we can measure nonhuman difference. Rather, the novel demonstrates that anthropomorphism is a clumsy but useful tool for understanding kinship and difference when we have exploded the myth of scientific neutrality. Margot Norris writes that Kafka’s fictions do not close the gap between human and animal, but defy their own limits by conjuring a sense of “the animal unknown” (Norris 1985, 18), an approximation of that which we cannot and should not domesticate. Whilst anthropomorphism derives from a genuine curiosity and desire to understand other living beings, it also seems to issue from a desire to expunge our own strangeness or “animal unknown” by projecting it outside ourselves and by abusing the beings onto which we project. The human becomes, like Red Peter, unable to express its own animal nature for fear of cracking the façade, rather embodying the “ethos of disavowal” (Elmarsafy 1995, 166) which characterizes the human. The lesson of Fowler’s novel is not that we can get beyond the strangeness of other animals but rather that we are also strange; that this odd mixture of distance and kinship which characterizes human relationships with nonhumans parallels the relationships they have with themselves. “Chimped-Up” Writing: What Is Cross-Species Authorship? In J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, protagonist Elizabeth Costello assesses two modes of addressing nonhuman animal life; the philosophical and the poetic. The first, exemplified by philosopher Tom Regan’s claim The Story of the “Anthropos” 95 that we can only advance the cause of nonhuman animals “by making a concerted effort not to indulge our emotions or parade our sentiments” (1983, xii), endeavors to be “cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical” (Coetzee 1997, 120). Whilst it accords value to the Great Apes and to certain other mammals, this approach remains yoked to an anthropocentric scale in which nonhuman animals are valued only for the qualities they share with humans, thus, ultimately reinforcing the story of Man in which “man is godlike, animals thinglike” (121). To thinking, Costello opposes “fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being” (131), a cross-species experience defined not by deficiency but plenitude, and expressed better by the poets than the philosophers, the latter largely unwilling to countenance that reason might be “neither the being of the universe nor the being of God” but merely “the being of a certain spectrum of human thinking” (121). To deviate from the figure of Man is to reject reason as that which controls or integrates human subjectivity, which rather, as Schneider highlights, incorporates “quite disparate, shifting, and often contradictory parts” (2005, 160). The alternative, for Costello, is “the sympathetic imagination” (Coetzee 1997, 133) which enables us to imaginatively identify with other beings, perhaps, she suggests, without limit. That we are in possession of a “sympathetic imagination” clearly testifies to the malleability and dynamism of the human subject, rather than the self-identity of Man. The sympathetic imagination is an aesthetic faculty with ethical implications; evil is nothing other than a failure of empathy, “that the killers”, in the case of the Holocaust, “refused to think themselves into the place of their victims” (132). On the shared nature of being—accessible to imaginative, rather than rational, faculties—Costello and Fowler are aligned. Living animals and living humans are both “full of being” (131), with chimpanzees teaching their human companions “that in the phrase human being, the word being is much more important than the word human” (Fowler 2013b, 158). What is not clear, however, is how this kinship, the “heavily affective sensation”, shared by human and nonhuman primates, “of being alive to the world” (Coetzee 1997, 131), might be employed to derail the figure of Man and suggest alternative cross-species stories. For Fowler, familiar forms must be rejected; her invocation of the fairy tale “[o]nce upon a time” (2013b, 58) is swiftly curtailed, this didactic mode framing animal being as something to be corrected. Rosemary starts decisively “in the middle” (2) of the story, resisting the conventions of linear storytelling which presuppose the mastery of the human storyteller, a representative of stable and pre-determined Man. Even language, the “imprecise vehicle” employed by Rosemary to express Fern’s suffering, is regarded with suspicion. Alert to the discrepancy between “the happening and the telling” (48), as well as to the ethical dangers of using individuals—herself, Fern, Lowell—to mount a broader critique 96 Danielle Sands of primatological practice, Rosemary persists, propelled by familial solidarity. “What this family needs now is a great talker” (304), she asserts. In her “chimped-up” (79) family, however, her loyalties are inevitably divided between her father, ultimately responsible for Fern’s predicament, and Fern herself. Whilst Rosemary attends meticulously to Fern’s story, she also bears witness to some of the real chimpanzees placed in Fern’s position by including a short excursus in which each is named and described. In this instance, the fictional is complemented by facts, with the aim of highlighting the failure of the human in its responsibilities towards nonhuman life. That the figure of Man is constructed by violent exclusion, by a “simian Orientalism” which is explicitly gendered, is unmistakable in Fowler’s novel. At the heart of Rosemary’s—misplaced—guilt towards her sister is the belief that Fern was failed, not by their father, but by the women who should have supported her, “my mother, the female grad students, me—none of us had helped. Instead, we had exiled her to a place completely devoid of female solidarity” (Fowler 2013b, 166). Unable to perceive the complicity between patriarchy and primatology, that “misogyny is built into the objects of everyday life in laboratory practice” (Haraway 1989, 238) and “[a]nthropodenial is thus linked with an aggressive and potentially violent misogyny” (Nussbaum 2012, 161), Rosemary acquits the real culprits, recognizing only her own complicity. At times, her writing feels like an act of penance, albeit one with no promise of redemption. To compensate for the instrumentalization of Fern, Rosemary instrumentalizes herself, becoming, through her writing, a tool “for remembrance” (Fowler 2013b, 11), bearing witness to Fern’s mistreatment. That there might also be therapeutic gains for Rosemary, her writing a clear staging of the analytic process which facilitates the re-emergence, of repressed experiences and emotions, is never explicitly acknowledged. Having witnessed the extreme subjugation of nonhuman needs in service of human curiosity, she is unable to acknowledge that the telling of Fern’s story—a compensatory act—might be of benefit to her too. Fowler, however, does not unequivocally endorse the purism espoused by Rosemary and Lowell, the latter entirely disavowing his humanity. Rosemary describes, “They, my brother said, whenever he talked about humans. Never us. Never we” (Fowler 2013b, 232), earlier having disclosed that “[h]is mental condition is not good” (305). Rosemary and Lowell’s upbringing results in their flight to the peripheries of human community; both are constitutionally unsuited for human interaction and appalled by the human violence they have witnessed. Rosemary is unwilling to even acknowledge that it is her human qualities, the language with which she wonders why we “bother” (85), which enables her to publically vouch for Fern. As readers, however, we might ask of Rosemary and Lowell, as Elinor Marx asks of Elizabeth Costello, “Are The Story of the “Anthropos” 97 you not expecting too much of humankind when you ask us to live without species exploitation, without cruelty?” (Coetzee 1997, 152) It is telling that Fowler chooses to focus on Rosemary more than Rosemary herself would permit; Fowler’s is a cluster of cross-species stories, not an act of confession. Co-constitution and co-existence, whilst not necessitating the extremes of cruelty exhibited in the novel, are messy and cannot always escape what Haraway calls “relations of use” (2008, 76). Even Rosemary, for example, projects her own vision onto Fern’s paintings, and uses Fern as a way of conceptualizing herself. To behave responsibly when ethical purism is impossible, Haraway contends, is to acknowledge “copresence in relations of use and therefore to remember that no balance sheet of benefit and cost will suffice” (76). To behave responsibly, therefore, we must both acknowledge and resist our tendencies to instrumentalize nonhuman life and to use it to shore up human identity. Acknowledging these tendencies requires resisting the appeal of a penitent “Anthropos” who, confirmed in its identity, by the damage it has caused, promises to correct and atone. Such a vision denies both the human compulsion to instrumentalize its surroundings and the possibility of nonhuman agency. The distinction between stories which reinforce the “Anthropos” in this recuperative mode and those which recognize and facilitate nonhuman agency is captured by Haraway’s distinction between “a politics of articulation” and “a politics of representation” (Schneider 2005, 160). The latter, in which nonhuman life is represented without being invited to participate, is a preliminary step in the recognition of nonhuman interests, however, its sphere of engagement remains singularly human. This is a danger for poetic accounts of nonhuman life, which run the risk of operating “within an entirely human economy in which the animal has no share” (Coetzee 1997, 148). Nonhuman tropes, whilst inviting us to escape “inherited boxes” (Haraway 2003, 32), also risk substituting for the articulation of nonhuman life. Fowler’s novel shuttles between representation and articulation, with Rosemary endeavoring to limit her mediation of Fern’s “authorship” (Haraway 1989, 8), and deflate the myth of the deified human author. Writing of Albert Camus’s polemic against the guillotine, motivated by the childhood trauma of witnessing the slaughter of a chicken, Coetzee’s Costello asks, “Who is to say, then, that the hen did not speak?” (1997, 160). Fowler, too, asks us to be more attentive to nonhuman authorship, particularly to the “stealthily influential” (Fowler 2013b, 299) Fern, who we might credit for Rosemary’s writing. Fowler contends that aesthetic production is not unique to humans, describing in detail the paintings that Fern produces, supporting evidence for philosopher Elizabeth Grosz’s contention that “art isn’t primarily or solely conceptual, that what it represents is the most animal part of us rather than the most human part of us” (Grosz 2005). 98 Danielle Sands Instead of a recuperation of the “Anthropos”, enlightened and revivified, by the damage it has caused, Fowler exposes humanity as disunified, non-identical, “beside itself”. This is a source of unease and discomfort, but also an opportunity for transformation, cross-species engagement and a broadening of the ethical sphere. Shelley’s celebrated indictment of human narcissism, “Ozymandias”, itself impeded by its restriction to a singularly “human economy”, is comically transformed by its re-situation in a genuinely cross-species context, recited when Lowell’s snow-ant is accidentally destroyed by chimpanzee Fern. On reuniting with Fern after a twenty-two-year separation, Rosemary writes that “no words are sufficient” (Fowler 2013b, 307). Rosemary’s fear is that words reduce the plural to the singular, shrink being into stasis, and impose mastery on those who articulate differently. Fowler’s novel continuously resists such reduction, sustaining numerous stories and endorsing a language not of mastery or instrumentality, but of ambiguity and animality; this is articulated by the infant Rosemary, whom we see speaking, with all her chimp-human verbosity, in “extravagant abundance” and with “inexhaustible flow”. “The point of the movie isn’t the words themselves”, (2), but that Rosemary’s loquacity is nonsensical without Fern. Without Fern, she is partial and incomplete. Comparing herself to Kafka’s Red Peter, Coetzee’s Costello presents herself, not as “an animal exhibiting yet not exhibiting, to a gathering of scholars, a wound, which I cover up under my clothes but touch on in every word I speak” (Coetzee 1997, 124). In both Coetzee’s and Fowler’s texts, the human is not synonymous with Man but is partial, wounded, prosthetic. Fowler’s novel articulates the human wound; touches it, shares it, writes it in plural. It urges us both to acknowledge and to resist acceding to the desire to close this wound. It is this wound of embodied being which both makes us human, “beside ourselves”, and enables our empathetic interaction with other embodied beings. Notes 1 The term Anthropocene has been adopted enthusiastically, if not uncritically, within the Humanities as a way to conceptualise, even quantify, anthropogenic environmental destruction. It is worth noting, however, that although, in August 2016, the Working Group on the Anthropocene recommended the adoption of the term as a geological designation, the term has not yet been formally approved and there remains some resistance to its use from within the natural sciences. 2 Where theory is understood as “an acceptance of a distinction between a strong sense of the inhuman (that which exists beyond, beyond all givenness and imaging, and beyond all relations) and an unfounded imperative that we must therefore give ourselves a law” (Colebrook 2014, 31). 3 Whilst Cohen and Colebrook use the term “Anthropos” specifically to refer to the subject which is generated by, or at least perceived in light of, the Anthropocene, I shall be using the terms Man and “Anthropos” interchangeably to illustrate that this Anthropocene subject does not break with, but reinforces, the “metaphysical heritage” of the figure of Man. The Story of the “Anthropos” 99 4 The novel follows adult protagonist Rosemary as she tries to come to terms with a childhood in which she was raised alongside a human sibling, Lowell, and a chimpanzee, Fern. It tracks Rosemary’s guilt following Fern’s removal from the family, her estrangement from animal activist Lowell, and her own inability to fully integrate into human society. Delaying the revelation that Fern is a chimpanzee, not a human sister, the novel invites us to consider the ethical consequences of primatological studies in light of our own kinship with nonhuman primates. 5 See, for example, Naama Harel’s litany of allegorical readings of “A Report to an Academy”: “an allegory to the assimilation of Jewish Europe, European colonialism in Africa, conformism, a common person who cannot find spirituality, the loss of innocence, the condition and values of humanity, education as a form of brainwashing, or art as inferior imitation” (Harel 2010, 54). References Bekoff, Marc. 2002. Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, Timothy. 2015. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury. Coetzee, J. M. 1997. The Lives of Animals. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, October 15–16. Princeton University. http://tannerlectures.utah. edu/_documents/a-to-z/c/Coetzee99.pdf. Cohen, Tom, and Claire Colebrook. 2016. “Preface”. In The Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols, edited by Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller, 7–19. London: Open Humanities Press. Colebrook, Claire. 2014. Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1. London: Open Humanities Press. Colebrook, Claire. 2016. “What Is the Anthropo-Political?” In The Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols, edited by Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller, 81–125. London: Open Humanities Press. Crist, Eileen, and H. Bruce Rinke. 2010. “One Grand Organic Whole”. In Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis, edited by Eileen Crist and H. Buce Rinke, 3–20. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Daston, Lorraine, and Gregg Mitman. 2005. “The How and Why of Thinking with Animals”. In Thinking with Animals, edited by Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, 1–14. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1972. “The Ends of Man”. In Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, 111–36. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by MarieLouise Mallet. Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press. de Waal, Frans. 2007 [1982]. Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Elmarsafy, Ziad. 1995. “Aping the Ape: Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy’”. Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 2: 159–70. Fowler, Karen Joy. 2013a. The Science of Herself. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Fowler, Karen Joy. 2013b. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. London: Serpent’s Tail. 100 Danielle Sands Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. “The Creative Impulse”. www.abc.net.au/rn/legacy/ programs/sunmorn/stories/s1435592.htm. Haraway, Donna. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science. London: Verso. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, Donna. 2015. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Cthulucene: Making Kin”. Environmental Humanities 6: 159–65. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harel, Naama. 2010. “Deallegorizing Kafka’s Ape: Two Animalistic Contexts”. In Kafka’s Creatures: Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings, edited by Marc Lucht and Donna Yarri, 53–66. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Jensen, Liz. 2014. “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Review—‘A Provocative Take on Family Love’”. The Guardian, March 20. www.theguardian. com/books/2014/mar/20/completely-beside-ourselves-family-love-review. Kingsolver, Barbara. 2013. “The Other Sister: Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves”. New York Times, June 6. www.nytimes. com/2013/06/09/books/review/karen-joy-fowlers-we-are-all-completelybeside-ourselves.html. Latour, Bruno. 2011. “Waiting for Gaia. Composing the common world through arts and politics”. A lecture at the French Institute, November 2011, London. www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/124-GAIA-LONDON-SPEAP_0.pdf. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Norris, Margot. 1980. “Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka and the Problem of Mimesis”. MLN 95 (5): 1232–53. Norris, Margot. 1985. Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2012. “Compassion: Human and Animal”. In Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory, edited by Marianne DeKoven and Michal Lundblad, 139–72. New York: Columbia University Press. Regan, Tom. 1983. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Schneider, Joseph. 2005. Donna Haraway: Live Theory. London: Continuum. Tyler, Tom. 2009. “If Horses Had Hands…” In Animal Encounters, edited by Tom Tyler and Manuela Rossini, 13–26. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Waller, Sara. 2012. “Science of the Monkey Mind: Primate Penchants and Human Pursuits”. In Experiencing Animal Minds: An Anthology of Animal-Human Encounters, edited by Julie Ann Smith and Robert W. Mitchell, 78–94. New York: Columbia University Press. Wark, McKenzie. 2015. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. London: Verso. Willett, Cynthia. 2014. Interspecies Ethics. New York: Columbia University Press. 7 From Appropriation to Dialogic Exploration A Non-subsumptive Model of Storytelling Hanna Meretoja Ours may be an age of storytelling, but it is also an age in which narrative has been fiercely criticized. Already in the 1920s, Virginia Woolf famously argued that in the name of “likeness to life” literature should have “no plot, no comedy, no tragedy”: “Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged” (1925, 188–89). It was first and foremost in response to the Second World War and the Holocaust, however, that narrative came to appear as ethically problematic. Essential to what Nathalie Sarraute (1956) called the age of suspicion, in postwar France, was the conviction that after Auschwitz it was no longer possible to tell stories. Narratives appeared to postwar thinkers to be an ethically problematic mode of appropriation, a matter of violently imposing order on history and experience that are inherently non-narrative. The most influential strand of ethical thinking in twentieth-century continental thought, which derives from Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity and its various poststructuralist variations, is resolutely antinarrative. Many contemporary Anglo-American philosophers—from Crispin Sartwell (2000) to Galen Strawson (2004)—follow suit by attacking narrative because fixed narratives falsify or destroy the openness to the singularity and freshness of each moment. This chapter asks why it is that narrative form is frequently considered to be ethically problematic and argues that underlying different ethical takes on storytelling are drastically different conceptions of understanding, which can be best understood in terms of the difference between subsumptive and non-subsumptive conceptions of (narrative) understanding. While poststructuralist thinkers and other proponents of antinarrativism tend to conceive of all understanding in terms of the subsumption model that links understanding to appropriation and assimilation, philosophical hermeneutics explores the possibility of non-subsumptive understanding. After outlining these two approaches to understanding, I sketch a non-subsumptive model of narrative understanding. In the final part of the chapter, I will discuss the non-subsumptive model in dialogue with Jeanette Winterson’s novel Lighthousekeeping (2004). 102 Hanna Meretoja Two Conceptions of Understanding That narrative is a mode of sense-making has become a widely shared premise of contemporary narrative studies. Opponents and proponents of narrative have little disagreement on this issue, and even etymology points to the link between narrating and knowing: narrare, the Latin for narrating, derives from gnarus, which means “having knowledge of a thing”. Narrative is generally seen as a mode of understanding in which events or experiences are related to something familiar that renders them intelligible by giving them a meaningful context. The philosopher J. David Velleman argues that the explanatory force of narrative is based on how it encourages the audience to assimilate the narrated events to “familiar patterns of how things feel” (2003, 19). Others place the emphasis on the cognitive process of explaining experiences or events by assimilating them to cognitive scripts or schemas.1 It is precisely the assimilatory dimension of narrative understanding that makes it ethically suspect, in the eyes of many. When critics argue against narrative as an assimilatory mode of understanding, they generally take it for granted that all understanding necessarily involves ethically problematic conceptual appropriation. They thereby implicitly rely on the subsumption model of understanding, which has dominated Western philosophy. In the Cartesian tradition, for example, understanding is conceptualized as a capacity for forming clear and distinct ideas, and experience is expected to conform to the innate ideas of the mind that regulate understanding. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1998/1781, Kritik der reinen Vernunft), in turn, envisages understanding as a process of organizing sense-perceptions according to general, atemporal categories. A wide range of theories similarly conceptualize understanding as a process of subsuming something singular (the object of understanding) under a general concept, law or model. For centuries, philosophers took the subsumption model for granted (in one version or another), and in the mainstream analytic tradition, it still appears to be accepted as unproblematic. For example, Velleman (2003) sees no problem in the assimilatory logic of narrative when he argues that the explanatory force of narrative is based on how it allows us to assimilate the narrated events to familiar affective patterns. In the continental tradition, however, Friedrich Nietzsche launched a powerful critique of knowledge by arguing that knowledge as assimilation and appropriation is ethically problematic and inherently violent. He linked the violence of knowledge to that of concepts by drawing attention to how thought typically masks the singularity of things by subsuming them under a single concept: “Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is non-equivalent” (2001, 145). He used the leaves of a tree as an example: each one of them is different, From Appropriation to Dialogic Exploration 103 but “the concept ‘leaf’” homogenizes them and makes us forget the differences between them (145). The act of knowing that a leaf is a leaf is to subsume a singular leaf under a general category. This Nietzschean criticism of understanding shapes the twentieth-century continental tradition in innumerable ways, including Levinas’s ethical criticism of understanding, which he sees in terms of violent appropriation: In the word ‘comprehension’ we understand the fact of taking [prendre] and of comprehending [comprendre], that is, the fact of englobing, of appropriating. There are these elements in all knowledge [savoir], all familiarity [connaissance], all comprehension; there is always the fact of making something one’s own. (Levinas 1988, 170) This conception of understanding also underlies the poststructuralist view that the very attempt to understand is ethically suspicious. Jacques Derrida, for example, links—like Nietzsche—the violence of understanding to that of language: he writes about “the originary violence of language” (or “arche-violence”) with reference to how language is based on classifying, naming and inscribing “the unique within the system” (1997, 112). He relies on the subsumption model when he suggests that language eliminates our singularity and thereby also our freedom and responsibility: “By suspending my absolute singularity in speaking, I renounce at the same time my liberty and my responsibility. Once I speak I am never and no longer myself, alone and unique” (1995, 60). Derrida gestures towards a utopian dream of liberation from the violent chains of language, but at the same time he is acutely aware of its impossibility. 2 The poststructuralist tradition of thought has been instrumental in sensitizing us to the ways in which knowledge is linked to mechanisms of power, and it articulates the ethical potential of the encounter with the unintelligible as an experience that can foster openness to the unknown.3 However, its way of presenting all understanding and knowledge as ethically problematic is not without its own problems. One of its major problems, I argue, is that it takes for granted the subsumption model. I would like to suggest that, instead of assuming that all understanding is necessarily violent, we should explore wherein resides the possibility of non-violent understanding. In the continental tradition, philosophical hermeneutics provides an alternative to the subsumption model.4 The non-subsumptive model of understanding starts from the premise that understanding is a fundamentally temporal process, which follows the structure of the hermeneutic circle: when we encounter something new in the world we draw on our preunderstanding, that is, a horizon of understanding shaped by our earlier experiences; but instead of simply subsuming the unfamiliar under the familiar, the new experience can shape, modify and transform 104 Hanna Meretoja our pre-conceptions. We always understand “something as something” (Husserl 1982, 33; Gadamer 1997, 90–92), and our concepts mediate this “as-structure,” but new experiences also leave a mark on our concepts. Language is not a fixed, atemporal system, and concepts are in a constant state of transformation whenever language is used: [I]t is obvious that speaking cannot be thought of as the combination of these acts of subsumption, through which something particular is subordinated to a general concept. A person who speaks—who, that is to say, uses the general meanings of words—is so oriented toward the particularity of what he is perceiving that everything he says acquires a share in the particularity of the circumstances he is considering. But that means, on the other hand, that the general concept meant by the word is enriched by any given perception of a thing, so that what emerges is a new, more specific word formation which does more justice to the particularity of that act of perception. (Gadamer 1997, 428–29) Gadamer describes this as the “constant process of concept formation” (429) and emphasizes that “everywhere that communication happens, language not only is used but is shaped as well” (2001, 4). The temporality of the use of language and of processes of understanding entails that they are always already infused with the unfamiliar, strange and other; concepts and our conceptions are not closed, fixed vehicles of appropriation but in a process of becoming. Fundamental to this hermeneutic conception is the performative dimension of language: rather than merely representing what has happened, language creates and shapes reality. This view allows us to see how understanding, mediated by language, neither necessarily perpetuates dominant sense-making practices nor is inevitably oppressive; instead, it can also open new possibilities, experiences and realities. However, even if language never stays the same through time, it is obvious that there are ethically crucial differences in the extent to and ways in which concepts are transformed in the process of understanding. In fact, understanding in the strong hermeneutic sense is successful only when it goes beyond merely subsuming new experiences to what is already known. In such understanding that is non-subsumptive in a strong sense concepts are transformed so that they do justice to whatever is being understood; understanding then “proves to be an event” (Gadamer 1997, 309) that involves an element of uncontrollability and unexpectedness. Gadamer calls this the negativity of understanding: we properly understand only when we realize that things are not what we thought they were (353–61). Because of this structure of negativity, the hermeneutic model is radically opposed to the subsumption model of understanding. Instead of subsuming the singular under general concepts, in genuine understanding the singular has power to transform the general. From Appropriation to Dialogic Exploration 105 Hence, I suggest that it is useful to distinguish, within the nonsubsumptive model, between the structural dimension of non-subsumption in all language-usage and a more radical sense of non-subsumption, in which understanding is animated by a specific non-subsumptive ethos, linked to openness to that which is other. Encountering otherness—that which disturbs preconceptions because it does not fit with them—is what challenges our preunderstanding and provokes us to change our views. That is why Gadamer suggests that genuine understanding—and learning—occurs only through receptivity to something so unassimilable that it requires us to transform our preconceptions. He does not adequately acknowledge, however, that often—in the absence of the non-subsumptive ethos—the opposite happens: lack of openness to the challenge presented by the other tends to lead to violent appropriation. Nevertheless, the non-subsumptive model of understanding makes it possible to acknowledge that even if language and understanding are often violent, they are not necessarily, inevitably violent; instead of being structurally violent, they can be used for both violent and non-violent— subsumptive and non-subsumptive—purposes. The non-subsumptive model provides a theoretical framework for thinking about the possibility of non-violent understanding and for articulating the ethical significance of the non-subsumptive ethos. It alerts us to the continuum from violent, appropriative, subsumptive sense-making practices to ones that are affirmatively non-subsumptive and dialogical by being open to the unassimilable otherness of the encountered experiences or persons. A Non-subsumptive Model of Storytelling The subsumptive and non-subsumptive conceptions of understanding have important implications for how one envisages storytelling as a form of understanding. The critics of narrative usually subscribe to the subsumption model, according to which the act of storytelling reduces or assimilates an irrevocably singular event into an account that appropriates it by giving it a general meaning or explanation. They thereby see it as a way of assimilating new experiences into a pre-given mold. Levinas, for example, considers narrative to be a violent mode of appropriation in which singular experiences, events or persons are subsumed into a coherent system of representation: narrative represents them as “fixed, assembled in a tale”, as part of a chronological-causal chain that reverts “freedom into necessity” and fails to acknowledge that otherness is “unnarratable”, “indescribable in the literal sense of the term, unconvertible into a history” (1991, 42, 166; 1998, 138–39).5 Similarly, Strawson relies on the subsumption model in assuming that narrative limits what we can experience and even more: that narrative self-experience entails the disposition to subsume one’s life under “the form of some recognized narrative genre” (2004, 442). I would like to suggest that contemporary 106 Hanna Meretoja narrative studies should pay more attention, first, to the unquestioned subscription of mainstream narrative theories to the subsumption model and, second, to the alternative to this model. Narrative hermeneutics rejects the subsumption model and provides a theoretical grounding for an ethics of storytelling that articulates how narrative understanding in itself is neither good nor evil.6 Storytelling is a temporal process that has the potential to transform our conceptual frameworks, even if this potential often remains unrealized. The point is, however, that not all narratives aim to produce totalizing explanations or end up reinforcing violent practices of appropriation. Storytelling can function as a vehicle of genuine understanding when it does not enact the comfortable subsumption of new experiences into what we already know. The hermeneutic conception of the temporal and interpretative nature of communication implies that communication is not just about applying general meaning-systems but a process that can involve learning, changing and understanding something completely new that challenges our previous conceptions and identities. I argue that the potential of storytelling to function as an ethical mode of understanding is based on the possibility of non-subsumptive understanding. This link is rarely articulated, but it can be seen to underlie, for example, Hannah Arendt’s view that storytelling makes it possible to acknowledge the lives of others in their uniqueness without trying to appropriate them through abstract conceptual schemes. She famously links the uniqueness of identity to narrative: “Who somebody is or was we can know only by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero—his biography, in other words” (Arendt 1998, 186). In her account, we are unique first and foremost in our capacity to initiate new processes in the world—to give birth to the unpredictable—and we reveal our uniqueness to others through action and speech; while conceptual representations and definitions tend to reduce the unique “who” to a “what”, she suggests that a narrative in which the “who”—the temporal, individual subject—is presented as acting in the world in concrete, complex situations can give expression to the unexchangeable “who” revealed in that action (180–81). The subject thereby appears in the process of becoming rather than as appropriated in atemporal, conceptual, abstract terms: “storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it” (1968, 105). Walter Benjamin (1977) argued from a similar perspective that storytelling is about exchanging experiences, and Adriana Cavarero (2000, 36–45) asserts that the desire for stories is a desire to be narrated—to hear one’s own story told by someone else—linked to the desire for an identity. Cavarero emphasizes that we could not know the beginning of our own story were it not for the stories told by others: no one can remember their own birth or first years. Life-stories take shape relationally—in dialogic relation to others. We do not know who this unique self is, and From Appropriation to Dialogic Exploration 107 in searching for an answer to the question of the who we cannot rely on mere autobiographical narration; we are dependent on stories told by others (Cavarero 2000, 36–45). Both Arendt and Cavarero believe that narratives dignify the uniqueness of the individual. I do not disagree with the Arendtian view that narratives can have ethical potential in presenting subjects of action in the temporal process of acting and becoming, and in giving more reality, as it were, to lives that would otherwise vanish into oblivion as well as to lives that have been ill-understood or silenced. However, I also consider it important to acknowledge that narratives often have the opposite effect; they can be violent, oppressive and manipulative means of appropriation, and they can legitimate structures of violence through strategies of naturalization. I suggest that in ethically evaluating narratives, it is helpful to distinguish, on a differentiating continuum, between subsumptive narrative practices that function appropriatively and reinforce cultural stereotypes by subsuming singular experiences under culturally dominant narrative scripts and non-subsumptive narrative practices that challenge such categories of appropriation and follow the logic of dialogue and exploration. Subsumptive narrative practices can never be subsumptive in an absolute sense because they take place in time and always include the possibility that the act of subsumption leaves a mark on the categories (e.g. narrative models or scripts) that are used subsumptively. Nevertheless, there is an ethically decisive difference between narratives that aim at subsumptive appropriation and ones that are oriented towards non-subsumptive dialogic understanding. This distinction is not meant as a binary but as a heuristic tool that helps us place specific cases of storytelling on the continuum. Narrative practices function subsumptively when they reinforce problematic stereotypical sense-making practices. Such practices tend to hinder our ability to encounter other people in their uniqueness and perpetuate the tendency to see individuals as representatives of the groups to which they belong according to gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, class and so on. Non-subsumptive narrative practices, in contrast, problematize simplistic categorization of experiences, persons and relationships, as well as control-oriented appropriation of what is unfamiliar, foreign and other. They can function as counter-narratives that consciously challenge stereotype-reinforcing hegemonic narrative practices and provide us with tools to see the singularity of individual lives beyond generalizing narratives. While the former frequently use naturalizing strategies to mask their own nature as interpretations and to take on an authoritative tone, the latter are more likely to include a self-reflexive dimension that involves open reflection on their own limits and fosters an ethos of openness to the unknown. At their most powerful, narrative practices animated by a non-subsumptive ethos prompt us to look beyond our preconceptions, to be open to what we cannot 108 Hanna Meretoja control, to learn from what is new to us, and to engage with it with wonder, empathy and curiosity. They place the emphasis on the dialogic, temporal process of an open-ended exploration rather than on achieved, comprehensive knowledge. They are narratives that lay bare their own constructedness, processuality and the movement of telling rather than the told. Recent social analysts have suggested that we live in a post-truth world, where politics is driven more by emotion and rhetoric than by rational argumentation.7 The British EU Referendum and the 2016 US presidential election have provided us with abundant examples of the power of storytelling—and particularly of its destructive potential. The political campaigns that led to “Brexit” and Donald Trump’s election were largely based on producing and reinforcing aggressive subsumptive narratives. Such narratives typically present themselves as the unconditional truth, not as narrative interpretations. They build narrative identities that aspire to be exhaustive, unambiguous and unproblematic, based on a clear sense of the difference between “us” and “them”. Trump’s speeches abound in examples of subsumptive narratives that invoke the dichotomy between “us” and “others”. They present the Americans as a unified group that is threatened by immigrants and everything “foreign”: “We need a system that serves our needs, not the needs of others. Remember, under a Trump administration it’s called America first” (Bump 2016). In his Manichean world-view, not closing the borders from foreigners will lead to complete chaos: “The result will be millions more illegal immigrants; thousands of more violent, horrible crimes; and total chaos and lawlessness. That’s what’s going to happen, as sure as you’re standing there” (Bump 2016). This world-view emphasizes the importance of control, safety and security—from a perspective that takes American middle-class white male privilege for granted and explicitly sets out to fight for it against diversity, equality and minority rights. The intersubjective world is shaped by competing narratives, and these narratives are not ethically or politically neutral. The “narrative in-betweens” that hold people together also divide people.8 The dominant narrative in-betweens are frequently based on creating a sense of “us” by excluding those perceived as “others”. As Richard Rorty argues, “the force of ‘us’ is, typically, contrastive in the sense that it contrasts with a ‘they’ which is also made up of human beings—the wrong sort of human beings” (1989, 190). The force of us was evident in the rise of Nazism in the Weimar Republic of the 1930s, and it is evident now that far-right extremism, nationalism and populism are on the rise in Europe and the US, as narratives that work against inclusion and diversity are increasing their power and dominance. Rorty believes that “moral progress” ultimately From Appropriation to Dialogic Exploration 109 depends on our ability to expand “our sense of ‘us’ as far as we can” (196), towards “greater human solidarity”; it is “the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of ‘us’” (192). In the current world situation, it is imperative to find ways of expanding people’s sense of “us” by fostering their capacity to acknowledge commonality across and through differences. Our shared vulnerability and destructibility suggest possible ways of doing this, as Judith Butler (2004, 2009), for example, has argued. At the same time, however, we need hermeneutic attentiveness to the way in which ethical understanding begins with acknowledging difference. As Andreea Ritivoi (2016, 63) puts it, contra Rorty, “it is important to resist positing similarity between ourselves and others if we are to maintain the possibility of understanding them”; on the basis of a hermeneutic “dialectic of general and particular, new and familiar, difference and sameness defines the parameters for empathy as the product of a situated understanding” that narrative can make possible (61). Narratives, however, are far from ethically equal in the ways in which they enact the dialectic of general and particular, and we currently sorely need ones that succeed in doing it in ethically sustainable ways. The need for a new global movement against the rise of right-wing populism is currently being voiced in the international community across religions, nations and political parties. Many agree that a new democratic left needs to build itself around the idea of inclusion and diversity. One of the writers who has articulated the need for a new counter-narrative, in response to the British EU referendum result, is the British author Jeanette Winterson. She writes about “the power of the stories we tell”, suggests that Labour as a word and story has become outdated and argues for the need for new, better stories that would unite forces of solidarity in these dark times: Everything starts as a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Every political movement begins as a counter-narrative to an existing narrative. … To change the way we are telling the story of our country, the story of our world, does need more than facts. (Winterson 2016) I agree that we need new stories to transform the narrative in-between that used to bind together the forces that fight for solidarity across differences. We also need more acute awareness of storytelling as a process that always takes shape from a particular perspective and engages with the world in various ways—such as appropriatively or in the mode of a non-subsumptive, explorative dialogue. In the last part of this chapter, I will analyze Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping as an example and exploration of non-subsumptive storytelling. 110 Hanna Meretoja Dialogic Storytelling in Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping (2004) is a novel about storytelling. It can be characterized by the term metanarrativity: it self-reflexively reflects on the significance of storytelling for human existence and identity.9 Through its key metaphor of the lighthouse, it explores how to live—and how to orient oneself—in a world that is like a constantly changing dark, chaotic sea, and it suggests that stories shared with others can create flash-like moments through which people search for meaning. The novel shows how narratives can be both ethically valuable and questionable, and it presents as ethically crucial the distinction between subsumptive “grand narratives” that aim at appropriation and non-subsumptive storytelling that functions in the mode of dialogic exploration. Lighthousekeeping not only thematizes narrative sense-making but also embodies a certain conception of storytelling through its narrative form. The novel has a fragmentary shape: it consists in interlacing story fragments that function like flashes of light that travel across time. They momentarily bring together different times, but instead of forming a coherent narrative, they produce a discontinuous interplay of light and dark. The novel is set in Salts, a Scottish “sea-flung, rock-bitten, sandedged shell of a town” that harbors a lighthouse (Winterson 2004, 5). The protagonist is an orphan called Silver, looked after by Pew, a blind lighthouse-keeper, for whom keeping the light is inseparable from storytelling: I must teach you how to keep the light. Do you know what that means?’ I didn’t. ‘The stories. That’s what you must learn. The ones I know and the ones I don’t know.’ How can I learn the one’s you don’t know? ‘Tell them yourself.’ (40) The novel is structured around the idea that our lives are shaped by stories that we have inherited, experienced or invented and that we pass on in our own versions. It entwines intertextuality—the idea that literature arises from literature—and internarrativity—the idea that stories, including life-stories, take shape in a dialogic relation to other stories. Instead of presenting stories as fixed and concluded, it foregrounds the process of storytelling, which underlies their open-ended, tentative and non-subsumptive nature. The novel abounds in stories that Pew tells Silver and Silver goes on to tell her lover, a woman she meets in Athens. The most important of these is Babel Dark’s story. In 1828, Josiah Dark built a lighthouse in Salts and his son Babel was born. Years later, in Bristol, Babel Dark From Appropriation to Dialogic Exploration 111 falls in love with Molly, who later becomes pregnant by him, but after seeing Molly in the company of another man (who later turns out to be Molly’s brother) he is riven with jealousy and assaults her; unable to face the uncertainty, he decides to leave everything and starts a new life. He moves to Salts as a pastor and marries a woman whom he does not love. Later he meets Molly again, realizes that he still loves her and begins to live a double life, spending two months a year in Bristol with Molly as Babel Lux and the rest of the year in Salts as Babel Dark. While the novel as a whole can be read as a rewriting of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), Dark’s story evokes Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), but it unsettles the subtext’s black-andwhite constellation. The irreproachable, respectable life of Babel Dark is joyless and loveless; as Lux he comes back to life. He tries to explain this to Stevenson, who is also a character in the novel, related to Dark “through the restless longing” and whose story of Jekyll and Hyde is inspired by Dark (Winterson 2004, 26): “Stevenson had not believed him when Dark told him that all the good in his life had lived in Bristol with Molly. Only Lux was kind and human and whole. Dark was a hypocrite, an adulterer and a liar” (187). Silver uses Dark’s story as a mirror, to reflect on her own life, and realizes that “it is necessary to find all the lives in between” (161). The whole novel is structured around the tension between grand narratives and the telling of story fragments—or between narrative appropriation and storytelling as a process of search, exploration and dialogue. Christianity and evolution theory represent grand narratives that have been integral to Western historical imagination; they set out to provide an overall, subsumptive explanation of life and history. The novel depicts how Darwinism—by approaching life as “always becoming” (150)—challenges the stability, security and anthropocentrism of the Christian world-view and puts the world in flux: “Darwin overturned a stable-state system of creation and completion. His new world was flux, change, trial and error, maverick shifts, chance, fateful experiments, and lottery odds against success” (170). Dark, however, clings obsessively to the old order: He had always believed in a stable-state system, made by God, and left alone afterwards. That things might be endlessly moving and shifting was not his wish. He didn’t want a broken world. He wanted something splendid and glorious and constant. (119–20) The novel articulates the destructiveness of his inability to live with the flux, ambiguity and uncertainty that are integral to human life in its fragility. 112 Hanna Meretoja Although Darwinism puts the world in flux, the novel also shows how it functions subsumptively and aspires to provide an exhaustive explanation. Both Christianity and Darwinism purport to tell the whole story, but while the former fails to explain the change and contradictions that are integral to life, the latter cannot account for love: “Love is not part of natural selection. … In the fossil record of our existence, there is no trace of love. You cannot find it held in the earth’s crust, waiting to be discovered” (170). The counterpole of these grand narratives are the late modern small stories that do not aim at narrative appropriation. The key metaphor of the novel, the lighthouse, characterizes the evanescence of these story fragments: they function like flashes of light that afford us moments of insight but no overall sense of mastery. They are compared to a light that shines across the sea to provide a momentary structure to the darkness: Later … he told anyone who wanted to listen what he had told himself on those sea-soaked days and nights. Others joined in, and it was soon discovered that every light had a story—no, every light was a story, and the flashes themselves were the stories going out over the waves, as markers and guides and comfort and warning. (41) The imagery of sea and light that pervades Lighthousekeeping links the novel to the Woolfian tradition and its conception of reality as something fluid and chaotic that evades attempts at narrative mastery.10 In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), for example, the sea manifests the chaotic, fluid formlessness of reality, and the light across the water conveys the way in which humans can momentarily see reality as meaningful, in an epiphany that then fades back to darkness. The narrative structure of the novel manifests the disintegration of the coherent, unified narrative form of realist novels, but the question of significant form has not lost its pertinence, as exemplified by the search of one of its characters, the artist Lily Briscoe, for a significant form for her painting.11 Lighthousekeeping deals with the human need to find a direction for one’s life in a constantly shifting world and relates the search for identity to a sea voyage. Silver feels that she is lost as if on a wide-open sea without a “string of guiding lights” and with “no place to anchor” (Winterson 2004, 21). The experience of being lost is linked to that of not conforming to the norms provided by culturally dominant narratives; she is a poor, uneducated orphan, later labeled as a thief and a psychotic, and her love evades the heteronormative matrix. She asserts that humanity “notes every curve from the norm with fear or punishment” (5) and observes that people are frightened of Pew, too, “because he isn’t like them” (15). But instead of building her sense of herself around her failure From Appropriation to Dialogic Exploration 113 to conform to sexual and other societal norms, her approach to life is affirmative. Telling about the sea voyage of her life to her lover, Silver suggests that the experience of being lost turned out to be a new beginning: “I had no idea where to look, or what I was looking for, but I know now that all the important journeys start that way” (33). When we travel towards a set destination, we already know beforehand what we will find, whereas not knowing what we are searching for can lead us to unexpected discoveries. The search for something unexpected that she could recognize as her own defines Silver’s world-making: “‘You’re not like other children,’ said my mother. ‘And if you can’t survive in this world, you had better make a world of your own’” (5). Silver’s world-building is one that learns to accept existence as a process of constant becoming. While the lighthouse is stable, the sea represents the ever-shifting flux of the real: “the sea is fluid and volatile” (17). People are different in how they relate to the flux: do they deny it, struggle against it or accept it and learn to live with it? Babel Dark is driven by the need for a stable foundation for his life, but by fighting against change he “made himself feel seasick, listing violently from one side to another, knowing that the fight in him was all about keeping control” (120). He searches for “solid reliability” from the unchangeable essence of God, but he is tormented by doubts and feels that in the end, “God or no God, there seemed to be nothing to hold onto” (120). Dark meets a wretched fate precisely because he is unable to accept the fundamental uncertainty that is an inalienable dimension of human existence. It leads him to a life in which he cannot recognize himself. In one notebook, he writes “a mild and scholarly account of a clergyman’s life in Scotland” and in another, “a wild and torn folder of scattered pages, disordered, unnumbered”, he “wrote his life”: “It was not a life that anyone around him would have recognized. As time passed, he no longer recognized himself” (58–59). Although Dark wrote his life, he “refused to live” (57); eventually he feels like a “stranger in his own life” (65) and ends up wanting to “walk slowly out to sea and never come back” (121). Obsessive control and the need for stability ruin Dark. Silver learns from this: “It’s better if I accept that I can’t control any of the things that matter. My life is a trail of shipwrecks and set-sails. There are no arrivals, no destinations” (127). She grows to accept that the experiences of meaning and direction come as elusive moments of insight, not in the form of a coherent, comprehensive—subsumptive—narrative: [T]he stories I want to tell you will light up part of my life, and leave the rest in darkness. You don’t need to know everything. There is no everything… The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. (134) 114 Hanna Meretoja “Tell Me a Story” Subsumptive narratives frequently aim at teleological explanation by presenting an inevitable sequence of events that leads to an equally inevitable end; the story of Darwinism ends in the evolution of higher, superior forms of life, Christian narrative in the salvation of the good Christians, the Marxist one in the socialist utopia, and the Trumpian narrative in “making America great again”, entailing the destruction of “anti-American” elements of society. Non-subsumptive narratives, in contrast, are open-ended, exploratory and provide no exhaustive explanations; instead of a sense of inevitability, they emphasize the openness of each moment of action—a sense of how the story can evolve in a different direction depending on how the subjects involved act in the situation—and of the act of narration, which can always transform the story into a different one. The intersecting dialogues of the novel emphasize that there is no absolute ending: Tell me a story, Pew. What kind of story, child? A story with a happy ending. There’s no such thing in all the world. As a happy ending? As an ending. (49) Stories generate new stories and are recycled from one generation to the next in different variations: These stories went from man to man, generation to generation, hooped the sea-bound world and sailed back again, different decked maybe, but the same story. And when the lightkeeper had told his story, the sailors would tell their own, from other lights. (39) Lighthousekeeping emphasizes the open-ended and processual nature of storytelling by foregrounding the re-telling of stories from ever new beginnings: “The story begins now—or perhaps it begins in 1802 when a terrible shipwreck lobbed men like shuttlecocks into the sea” (11–12). Stories never end because they are “always beginning again” (93), and more important than a sense of an ending (Kermode 1967) is a sense of a beginning, the significance of which is thematized throughout the novel: Why can’t you just tell me the story without starting with another story? From Appropriation to Dialogic Exploration 115 Because there’s no story that’s the start of itself, any more than a child comes into the world without parents. (26–27) Tell me a story, Pew. What story, child? One that begins again. That’s the story of life. (109) Arendt emphasizes the importance of new beginnings as the foundation of ethical and political agency. Integral to the human condition is the ability to initiate something new and unpredictable in the world: To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin … to set something into motion (which is the original meaning of the Latin agere) … It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. (1998, 177–78) According to Arendt, we are beings who express our “unique distinctness” and “insert ourselves into the human world” through speech and action (176). She uses the notion of natality to characterize the way in which each birth brings to the world a beginning, a new person with the capacity to start a “new process which eventually emerges as the unique life story of the newcomer, affecting uniquely the life stories of all those with whom he comes into contact” (184). She reminds us that human beings, “though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin” (246). Lighthousekeeping emphasizes that as agents we are fundamentally dependent on one another. It presents exchanging stories as a dialogic process of exploration—a search for identity, connection, orientation. In a Benjaminian and Arendtian spirit, the novel suggests that storytelling is what ties people together and makes experiences bearable. The motor of narration is a powerful desire for stories, encapsulated in the recurrent petition that structures the story fragments: “tell me a story”. The ritual of asking for a story—Silver asks Pew several times to tell her one, and her lover asks her to tell her a story—is integral to the dialogic dynamic of the novel. We are able to tell our own stories on the basis of the stories we receive from others: “‘if you tell yourself like a story, it doesn’t seem so bad.’ ‘Tell me a story and I won’t be lonely’” (Winterson 2004, 27). The novel suggests that we need stories to make sense of where we are coming from and where we are going; stories provide us with “imaginative variations” of the self (Ricoeur 1986, 131) in relation to which we can explore who we are and who we could be. In the novel, 116 Hanna Meretoja the stories—including life-stories—are always discontinuous and plural: “‘Do you feel you have more than one life perhaps?’ ‘Of course I do. It was impossible to tell one single story’” (Winterson 2004, 160). The novel foregrounds the temporal process of the search for identity and the performativity of the shaping of identity through the process of telling. Identity is not something pre-given that one could find or a task that one could complete. Narrative identity should be thought of as a verb-like process, an activity, rather than as a noun (something fixed and nameable). The temporality of storytelling is ethically crucial: both our understanding of who the characters are and their own self-understanding become possible only through the temporal process of narrative engagement. The narrative dynamic of the novel—its emphasis on processuality, open-endedness and the way in which meanings takes shape in dialogic encounters—invites the reader to participate in the dialogic, non-subsumptive process of storytelling. Our stories are always part of a larger narrative fabric that reaches across time: “These were my stories—flashes across time” (232). Insofar as Lighthousekeeping functions as a rewriting of Treasure Island, the treasure that Silver searches for is less concrete and unstable than in Stevenson’s novel. In fact, the treasure, in Winterson’s novel, seems to be first and foremost those moments when we discover a connection to another person and know for a moment why we have come to where we are now: “These moments that are talismans and treasure. Cumulative deposits—our fossil record—and the beginnings of what happens next” (212). Silver discovers that the ultimate treasure is love, the greatest force of life, which entails exposing oneself to what one cannot control—and is, ultimately, the only thing that matters: I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love—all love—love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a café. … But love it is that wins the day. On this burning road, fenced with barbed wire to keep the goats from straying, I find for a minute what I came here for, which is a sure sign that I will lose it again instantly. (200–01) The experience of the meaning of life can only be momentary, like a flash of light across the dark sea, but its evanescence makes it no less meaningful. In the end, all we have is this moment, and the possibility to share it with others: “Don’t wait. Don’t tell the story later. Life is so short. This stretch of sea and sand, this walk on the shore, before the tide covers everything we have done” (232). The value of learning to let go of the ideal of control is linked, in the novel, to the insight that our stories are always intertwined, so that ultimately From Appropriation to Dialogic Exploration 117 nothing is completely our own: “All of us are bound together, tidal, moondrawn, past, present and future in the break of a wave. … There it is, the light across the water. Your story. Mine. His” (134–35). Accepting one’s dependency is interlaced with the insight that we are each other’s beacons and coordinates, anchors and strongholds, like Molly to Babel and Silver to her loved one. Dependency on others makes us vulnerable—or shipwrecked—but accepting it is the condition of possibility for being able to share with others the “span of water I call my life” (134). The Ethos of Dialogic Exploration This chapter has explored a non-subsumptive narrative logic, arguing that it is crucial to the ethical potential of storytelling. While subsumptive narrative practices tend to reinforce an ethos of dogmatism and cultural stereotypes in explaining singular events in terms of general narrative scripts, non-subsumptive narrative practices question such general scripts and challenge our categories of appropriation. The non-subsumptive model of (narrative) understanding provides a theoretical grounding for analyzing the possibility and ethical potential of non-violent narrative practices, and it allows us to evaluate different cultural practices on a differentiating continuum from subsumptive to non-subsumptive ones. Whether subsumptive or non-subsumptive, storytelling has a performative dimension: it is not just about representing the world but also about constructing intersubjective reality. Only non-subsumptive narratives, however, are usually aware of—and self-reflexively display—their own performative dimension. Such self-awareness is particularly prominent in literary fiction, which in many of its finest achievements—such as Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping—promotes sensitivity to storytelling as an interpretative, explorative process that always emerges from a particular perspective and in dialogue with other narratives. In these dark times, it has become increasingly evident that democracy depends—as Arendt (1968, 1998) already emphasized—on the recognition of the diversity and plurality of unique beings. While in Lighthousekeeping dialogic storytelling is a process of building an intersubjective narrative in-between for those who exchange stories within the fictive world, the novel as a whole contributes to the narrative in-between of the readers. It fosters awareness of the roles that stories play in our lives, of how they can always be told from different perspectives and of the importance of learning to live without obsessive fixation on control and certainty. It is unlikely that those who would most need such awareness— including white supremacists, jihadists and others whose lives are structured by dogmatic black-and-white narratives aimed against diversity and inclusion—would read Lighthousekeeping. But the novel encourages us to take an affirmative approach, like Silver, and it reminds us that in these dark times tending the light is ever more important. 118 Hanna Meretoja Storytelling is a mode of engagement, and we need to be attentive to the divergent forms it takes in different situations; the ethos of narrative appropriation is strikingly different from the ethos of dialogic exploration. The former pretends to know the answers, the latter animates the effort to explore questions that matter most by acknowledging that no universal answers are available and that we can only learn from one another. Literature may not save the world, but it can promote our perspective awareness and make its own small contributions to expanding the sphere of the “we”. It can sensitize us to the open-endedness of narratives and to our fundamental dependency on one another’s stories—to our condition as internarrative beings. When it comes to the question of how to realize the ethical potential of storytelling, however, there are no guarantees. Literature can make no promises. Ultimately, narratives only function non-subsumptively when we are willing and able to engage with them non-subsumptively— exposing ourselves to what may challenge our beliefs and sensibilities. Notes 1 An influential classic of the script theory is Schank and Abelson (1977). 2 For Derrida (1978), Levinas is guilty of empiricism in not taking seriously enough the ways in which language shapes experience and, in consequence, how it excludes the possibility of immediate experience; the aporia of ethics is that encountering the other non-violently would require that one “does not pass through the neutral element of the universal” (96) but, instead, encounters the other without the violence of concepts, which, in turn, seems impossible. 3 See e.g. Lyotard (1991, 74); for a broader discussion of this postwar tendency, see Meretoja (2014, 13–17, 86–118). 4 A starting-point for the non-subsumptive model can be traced further back, to Kant’s (2002/1790, 74–276) theory of “reflecting judgments”, in his aesthetics, in which he acknowledges that not all judgments follow the logic of subsuming the object under a known universal, as he had suggested in The Critique of Pure Reason. Due its more radical way of acknowledging the temporality and historicity of understanding, however, philosophical hermeneutics provides a more productive foundation for a non-subsumptive model of understanding. 5 For a discussion of Levinas’s ambivalent relationship to narrative fiction, see Davis (2015). 6 I develop this view more fully in Meretoja (2017). On narrative hermeneutics, see also Brockmeier and Meretoja (2014) and Meretoja (2014, 2016). 7 The Oxford Dictionaries chose “post-truth” as the “word of the year” in 2016, defining it as follows: “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/wordof-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016). The term is controversial, for example because, first, narratives, rhetoric and affect have always been important in politics and, second, truth still matters, which is why Trump’s lies cause so much outrage across the globe. 8 I develop the concept of “narrative in-between” in Meretoja (2017), in dialogue with Hannah Arendt’s “in-between”, which she defines as a “common From Appropriation to Dialogic Exploration 119 world”, which “lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together” (Arendt 1998, 182, see also 50–58). 9 On metanarrativity, see Meretoja (2014, 2–3, 226–29). 10 Mine Özyurt Kılıç (2009, xv) links Winterson’s waters to the problematics of time in her novels, but I see them as manifesting more broadly her vision of the fluid, flux-like nature of reality. A similar vision characterizes Woolf’s oeuvre, such as The Waves (1931), in which the narrative fragments follow a wave-like rhythm and convey a sense of how it “seems as if the whole world were flowing” (20). In her diary, Woolf writes about the idea of a “continuous stream, not solely of human though, but of the ship, the night etc., all flowing together” (1982, 107). Winterson sees herself as an “heir of Woolf” and emphasizes the significance of the modernist tradition for her work. On Winterson’s relationship to modernism and postmodernism, see Andemahr (2009, 16–21) and Front (2009). 11 Winterson makes the intertextual reference explicit: “To the lighthouse” (Winterson 2004, 19). References Andemahr, Sonya. 2009. Jeanette Winterson. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Arendt, Hannah. 1968. Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. Arendt, Hannah. 1998 [1958]. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1977 [1936]. “Der Erzähler”. 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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kermode, Frank. 1967. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1988. “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas”. [Interview by Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes, and Alison Ainley] Translated by Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright. In The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, edited by Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, 168–80. London: Routledge. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998 [1948]. “Reality and Its Shadow”. In The Levinas Reader, edited by Séan Hand, 130–43. Oxford: Blackwell. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1991 [1988]. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Cambridge: Polity Press. Meretoja, Hanna. 2014. The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Meretoja, Hanna. 2016. “For Interpretation”. Storyworlds 8 (1): 97–117. Meretoja, Hanna. 2017. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2001. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Translated by Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Özyurt Kılıç, Mine. 2009. “Introduction”. In Winterson Narrating Time and Space, edited by Margaret Sönmez and Mine Özyurt Kılıç, ix–xxx. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Ricoeur, Paul. 1986. Du texte à l’action. Paris: Seuil. Ritivoi, Andreea. 2016. “Reading Stories, Reading (Others’) Lives: Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and Narrative Understanding”. Storyworlds 8 (1): 51–76. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sarraute, Nathalie. 1956. L’Ere du soupçon. Essais sur le roman. Paris: Gallimard. Sartwell, Crispin. 2000. End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History. Albany: SUNY Press. Schank, Roger C., and Robert P. Abelson. 1977. Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Hillsdale: Erlbaum. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1883. Treasure Island. London: Cassell and Company. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1886. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. London: Longmans, Green & Co. From Appropriation to Dialogic Exploration 121 Strawson, Galen. 2004. “Against Narrativity”. Ratio 17 (4): 428–52. Velleman, David J. 2003. “Narrative Explanation”. Philosophical Review 112 (1): 1–25. Winterson, Jeanette. 2004. Lighthousekeeping. London: Fourth Estate. Winterson, Jeanette. 2016. “We Need to Build a New Left: Labour Means Nothing Today”. Guardian, June 24. www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/24/weneed-to-build-a-new-left-labour-means-nothing-jeanette-winterson. Woolf, Virginia. 1925. The Common Reader. London: Hogarth Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1927. To the Lighthouse. London: Hogarth Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1931. The Waves. London: Hogarth Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1982. A Writer’s Diary. Edited by Leonard Woolf. New York: Harcourt, Inc. Part II Narrative Temporalities Imagining an Other Life 8 Alexander Kluge’s “Saturday in Utopia” Making Time for Other Lives with German Critical Theory and Heliotropic Narration1 Leslie A. Adelson Ethical Possibility and Heliotropic Narration Born in 1932, Alexander Kluge was best known in the twentieth-century for probing contributions to New German Cinema (in Yesterday Girl and Germany in Autumn, for example), and for broadcasting innovations in German television. Co-author of important works of social theory in a quirky Marxist vein (Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s Public Sphere and Experience and History and Obstinacy are now available in English), Kluge also began writing experimental literary prose in the 1960s. His writing practice has expanded a thousandfold since 2000, and his newer stories have begun to appear in English translation as well (in The Devil’s Blind Spot and Cinema Stories, for example). Kluge’s entire oeuvre is oriented toward an ethical commitment to human survival and unalienated life, in the face of catastrophic destruction associated with cruelty, war, genocide, fascism, dictatorship, and capitalist exploitation of life, labor, and time. This polymath has well-documented affinities with the German tradition of critical theory called the Frankfurt School. This especially concerns Kluge’s relationship to Theodor Adorno, one of the leading proponents of the Frankfurt School’s critique of “damaged life” under both fascist politics and the capitalist rationality of mass culture (Adorno 2005). Adorno is a legacy that Kluge avidly claims, even asserting in his acceptance speech for Frankfurt’s Adorno Prize in 2009 that he follows Adorno “faithfully” (Kluge 2012, 69). Most scholars who focus on the artist’s conceptual relationship to Adorno stress these thinkers’ shared principles of “non-identity” and “negative dialectics” as that which makes resistance to hegemonic narrative and alienated life possible. When scholars turn to what Kluge calls his “counter-histories” in any medium, they often assume that narrative is itself hegemonic and that the futurity of unalienated life is necessarily deferred. The ethics of storytelling by such accounts pivots on a joint refusal of storytelling and futurity. Actual future-making is implicitly refused to the degree that the possibility of ethical choice is situated on a deferred temporal horizon 126 Leslie A. Adelson of possibility itself. As conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck explains more generally, modern European thought conceives of futurity (as a temporal structure) as inaccessible to experience (Koselleck 2004, 261). Amir Eshel makes an important intervention in Kluge scholarship and comparative literature by defining literary “futurity” in cross-cultural terms with an emphasis on narrative itself (Eshel 2013). Yet Eshel continues to ground his concept of futurity in the structural openness or undecidability of modern possibility. For him, rewriting “history’s book of calamities” for the future sake of “one’s own life” too (185) hinges, for writers like W.G. Sebald, Kluge, and others, on “keep[ing] open the possibility of choice, the prospect of a less inhuman reality” (228). I argue that even this cannot fully account for Kluge’s growing investment in storytelling as a form of imagining more ethical choices and “an other life” in the twenty-first century (Kluge 2006). This is because Kluge’s storytelling actively works on futurity as narrative form, one through which the temporal dimension of non-hegemonic futures begins to be accessible to experience rather than permanently deferred (Adelson 2014). Rather than taking as given the modern habit of thought that renders futurity inaccessible to experience, I investigate other uses of futurity that Kluge’s ethical experiments in storytelling serve. 2 This approach differs from Eshel’s in that I stress Kluge’s use of futurity in narrative form rather than the generic openness of possibility as a condition of ethical choice. Put differently, this essay uses one of Kluge’s twenty-first-century experiments in narrative writing to ask after the structure of futurity that underwrites his intensified practice of ethical storytelling. Beyond the mere indexing of future possibility, Kluge’s experiments in time also turn, in their narrative orientation to the utopian dimensions of critical theory, on the conversion of catastrophic time into what we might call, with phrasing borrowed from Adorno, a “future without life’s miseries” (Adorno 1973, 398). This in no way guarantees more ethical futures in substance, but it helps create the experiential liveness of future time in the now of reading. When Kluge’s storytelling renders the temporal horizon of counterhegemonic hopes accessible to experience through work on narrative form, he challenges the modern concept of futurity as structurally inaccessible to experience. Kluge’s “Saturday in Utopia” (Kluge 2003, 444–48) also draws on the heliotropic narration to be found in Adorno’s “Heliotrope” entry from the mid-1940s in Minima Moralia (2005, 177–78). In Adorno’s hands, such narration bespeaks perspectival orientation to a non-empirical horizon of “transformed existence” (177). As Robyn Marasco notes (2010, 656), the associative title of Adorno’s domestic miniature alludes to Walter Benjamin’s fourth thesis on the concept of history, in which Benjamin invokes a “secret heliotropism” of historical transformation. “As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint Alexander Kluge’s “Saturday in Utopia” 127 of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations” (Benjamin 1968, 255). 3 Yet Kluge’s narrative futurity goes well beyond his heliotropic muses because his use of futurity breaks in subtle ways with the modern precept of the future as temporally unavailable to experience. Narrative Futurity and Kluge’s Experiments in the Dimension of Time The German title of Kluge’s prose miniature “Samstag in Utopia” involves translational features lost in the English, “Saturday in Utopia”.4 There are two reasons for this that both bespeak gaps in time. These gaps cleave and suture time as a socio-historical dimension. First, Kluge’s use of the Latinized Greek word “Utopia” rather than the naturalized modern German “Utopie”, which figures in important ways in the final sentence of this miniature, recalls Sir Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516. Kluge’s title simultaneously conjures More’s spatialized paradigm for imagining societal perfection and the later “temporalization of utopia”, which Koselleck considers one hallmark of modern thought (2002). Second, Samstag is one of two possible German names for the day of the week known in English as Saturday, which alludes to both a planet and the Roman god Saturn. The German alternative to Samstag is Sonnabend, which literally means “sun’s eve” or the evening that will lead up to Sunday. The notably ‘other’ way of speaking time that goes unnamed but not unarticulated in Kluge’s storytelling about “an other life” thus hints at anticipatory and heliotropic orientations in the title alone. In etymological terms, Samstag is “the only day of the week” for which no god’s name is invoked in any Germanic language (Seebold 2002, 784). Any heliotropic appeal to metaphysical dimensions here, therefore, signals Kluge’s engagement with Adorno’s stance on “metaphysical experience” (Adorno 1973, 372) and “counterfactual hope” (Wesche 2012), oscillating between this-worldly catastrophe and offworldly horizons of human happiness and utopian longing. The tiny word “in” linking a day of the week with no transcendental aspiration, on the one hand, and a spatialized tradition for imagining societal perfection, on the other, points to the interior setting of Kluge’s miniature. The setting takes us not only into a “private apartment” where a married couple resides but also into a “guest room” within that is reserved for the husband’s erotic assignations with his beautiful young mistress, a “model” from Munich (Kluge 2003, 445). When she embraces him upon arrival, the scene is figured in spatialized and privatized terms of a utopian ideal projected deictically onto a narrative present: “Here, in the nowhere space, in the hallway between door and little guest room, in the extraterritorial arena of personal happiness” (445). The narrative 128 Leslie A. Adelson voice overlays empirical description and utopian imaginary in ways that the temporal configuration of narrative perspective will belie. Utopian relations are also complicated by a third character in the mix, the philandering husband’s wife “G”. (Kluge 2003, 445), who prepares the spare room and then goes off to nap elsewhere in the apartment, while the lovers do their thing in the guest room as “a space outside reality” (445). If this is utopia, G.’s actions and the miniature’s use of narrative voice lend this mixed-use apartment many temporal twists and turns in the utopian dimension. When we read that G. is a “realist” from a family of leather manufacturers whose facility “used to produce gloves” (448), that her husband in 1967 is a philosopher known professionally for his commitment to negation and refusal (444), and that the miniature’s epigraph is a marked citation from Minima Moralia, we might conclude that “Saturday in Utopia” is simply about the empirical historical constellation of Adorno, his wife Gretel Karplus Adorno, and one of the philosopher’s many known mistresses. While there is some biographical motivation for the miniature’s portrayal, 5 “Saturday in Utopia” can be read as a storytelling experiment with narrative uses of futurity as experiential portals in time. How does Kluge’s text labor productively on temporal aspects of the utopian dimension in the this-worldly and off-worldly terms of this claustrophobic apartment, and what crucial uses of narrative voice and unnatural perspective does Kluge enliven here? If Kluge’s literary miniatures signal an intensified quest for “ways out” of historically real catastrophe, it is striking to read in “Saturday in Utopia” that G. takes herself “out of the way” of the two lovers for whom she has prepared a trysting room. What narrative role does G. play here? My interpretation hinges on this question. Does G. as a figure of narration belong to the utopian dimension or not? Whatever biographical truths attach to this text, the close reading that follows entertains the four figures that Kluge gives us in “Saturday in Utopia”—the philosopher resembling Theodor Adorno, the philosopher’s wife resembling Gretel Adorno, the philosopher’s mistress resembling one of Adorno’s lovers from the 1960s, and the narrative instance resembling no one we quite know yet—as working fictional models that help activate futurity through narrative form. “Saturday in Utopia” features a narrative instance implicitly addressing readers in third-person voice. For Kluge, this voice is largely disembodied, though the narrator has a lot of information to impart and seems to have read his or her Adorno. This voice begins by describing the philosopher of refusal in ways that recall negative dialectical motifs of childhood and adulthood from Adorno’s Minima Moralia and oscillate between character focalization through the philosopher, on the one hand, and interested if critical judgment of the philosopher, on the other. “[W]ithout any qualms”, this professional philosopher had “refused Alexander Kluge’s “Saturday in Utopia” 129 since childhood to become an adult” (Kluge 2003, 444). As the narrative voice explains: “In this sense, he was neither a child (because no one can remain a child by force of will), nor had he become an adult”. A judgment follows: “A thinker with weak sides in his living habits since in his program there was little room for direct experience” (444–45). This narrative voice is knowledgeable but not neutral, and the narrator’s aside asserts a reality principle at odds with Adorno’s dialectical approach to childhood desire. Kluge’s text begins with a direct citation from Minima Moralia. This marked excerpt does not come from “Heliotrope” or any other “damaged life” miniature with a focus on childhood though, but from a miniature turning on adult sexuality, romance, and commerce. Titled “Ne cherchez plus mon coeur” [look for my heart no longer], a line from Baudelaire, Adorno’s text opens onto “the negative anthropology of mass society” (2005, 167). As Adorno puts it: “The exchange relationship that love partially withstood throughout the bourgeois age has completely absorbed it” (167). The radiant horizon of a wondering child in “Heliotrope” seems long gone when Adorno draws on his exile experience to capture this social aporia in cosmic and sexual allusions conjoined. The quality of every one of the countless automobiles which return to New York on Sunday evenings corresponds exactly to the attractiveness of the girl sitting in it.—The objective dissolution of society is subjectively manifested in the weakening of the erotic urge, no longer able to bind together self-preserving monads, just as if mankind were imitating the physicists’ theory of the exploding universe. The frigid aloofness of the loved one, by now an acknowledged institution of mass culture, is answered by the ‘insatiable desire’ of the lover. (2005, 168) The only excerpt from Adorno’s miniature cited in the epigraph to “Saturday in Utopia” however is one contrasting the women Adorno ascribed to mass culture with those willing to give themselves to Casanova. When Casanova called a woman unprejudiced, he meant that no religious convention prevented her from giving herself; today the unprejudiced woman is the one who no longer believes in love, who will not be hoodwinked into investing more than she can expect in return. (168) Ultimately “Ne cherchez plus mon coeur” decries the de-eroticization of “de-inhibited sex” and the social erasure of “ecstasy” as having no utopian value at all (169). 130 Leslie A. Adelson We might expect the philosopher in “Saturday in Utopia” to represent the insatiability of desire, a longing for longing itself. As Eva Geulen reminds us, in his philosophical approach to writing about sexual intimacy in Minima Moralia as a collection devoted to failure, “Adorno desires desire” without coming to rest in erotic objects of “fulfillment” (Geulen 2006, 111). The Adorno-like character we encounter in Kluge’s miniature is cast in a different mold, for this embodied figure—a “child’s soul with capable hand” (Kluge 2003, 446)—seems keenly interested in empirical fulfillment when he sits down, “full of hope” (445), with his mistress on the guest room bed. Through narrative focalization, readers perceive the competition the wayward husband feels, even in the “isolation” of the private apartment keeping the outside world at bay, with other “men’s eyes” desiring “the young idol” in his arms (445). This pseudo-Adorno seems doomed to failure too, though not in the critically generative ways that Geulen ascribes to Minima Moralia. How then in narrative terms do critical horizons of futurity become accessible to experience here? Kluge gives us an Adorno at once recognizable as the philosopher of negative dialectics and yet enthralled with empirical desire. To answer the question of how Kluge’s storytelling renders horizons of futurity accessible to experience, we must enlist the aid of two other partisans hard at work at the unnatural limits of narrative experimentation in the confined space of the apartment. One is the third-person voice of narration, which plays a range of roles, and the other is the realist figure of G., who hardly has a word to say and plays the most important role of all. We turn first to the third-person voice of narration, which introduces itself in naturalized conventions of focalization, description, and something akin to objective commentary if not omniscient perspective. This narrative voice also engages in speculation involving both counterfactual temporality and descriptive specification. With an eye to the sparsely appointed guest room where “no books” and “no useable tools” are stored, we read: “If the window were barred, this could be a prison cell” (Kluge 2003, 444). One of the most significant functions of the narrative voice in the first segment of the miniature, however, is that of interlocution. To recall Brian Richardson’s narratological definition of the interlocutor as one understudied strategy of experimental narration, “[t]he interlocutor is a disembodied voice that poses questions which the narrative goes on to answer” (Richardson 2006, 79). An “unnatural” interlocutor is deemed experimental because it highlights “the protean nature of both questioner and respondent” and marks a functional oscillation between narrator and narratee (82, 85). The third-person narrator of “Saturday in Utopia” speaks as an interlocutor in this sense when the narrative voice takes on a pedagogical tone and appears to mimic Adorno in a virtual encounter between Adorno’s “Heliotrope” and Kluge’s own text. Here Kluge’s narrative voice of interlocution speaks to readers in Adorno-ese: Alexander Kluge’s “Saturday in Utopia” 131 How on earth can one enjoy a happiness that is not at all possible for children, a happiness that requires the use of adult genitalia? Happiness is the fulfillment of a child’s wish. It is possible because the differentiation between child and adult does not exist at all in bodies and soul. This boundary is unreal, not the sentence about a child’s wish. This is how, just as the real does not exist. That is the secret of all philosophers. (Kluge 2003, 445) Other functions will accrue to the narrative voice in “Saturday in Utopia”, as we shall see, but at this point the third-person interlocutor disturbs any surety about levels of diegesis, while its own voice seems to have been infiltrated by the character the narrator has just described. This goes beyond focalization, since neither the historical Adorno nor his textual double would ascribe his critical insights into the unreal nature of the real to “all philosophers”. Another possible though an unlikely instance of narrative interlocution can be found in a brief dialogic exchange—the only direct dialogic exchange in this miniature—shortly after the philosopher’s paramour has arrived. “Some water?” someone asks, to which another unspecified voice replies: “How so?” (Kluge 2003, 445). While we might imagine either the host offering his guest water after her train ride or the guest requesting the same, the reply that comes in the form of another question makes no apparent sense, given the ways these two characters are sketched overall (he as polite and attentive and she as petty and self-absorbed with no real passion for her lover). Even if we were to leap across the breach to imagine the narrator taking a direct part in this exchange—the most reasonable explanation being that the narrative instance itself requests a glass of water, only to be rebuffed by the lovers— the miniature offers no textual evidence to support or challenge such a reading. At most, we can say that this minimally embodied dialogue, consisting of only two questions, violates the common-sense understanding of the “cooperative principle” (Grice 1989) of sociolinguistic dialogue. Since the domestic scene of a leisurely Saturday in utopia at first blush seems to rely on quite a bit of figural cooperation, we might now look elsewhere for traces of disturbance in the cooperative field.6 Perspectival Oscillation and the Utopian Dimension Kluge’s story collection devoted to “the gap the devil leaves us” situates the Saturday miniature in Chapter 7, which consists of “foundational stories” with the overarching title “Mit Haut und Haaren” [with skin and hairs] (2003, 437–506). This is a common expression of embodiment meaning, in a figurative sense, “unconditionally” or “completely”, that is to say, with one’s whole being. Another miniature in this chapter, 132 Leslie A. Adelson which revolves around the “minimum”, the “maximum”, and “the whole” [das Ganze] in sexual relations, and which also bears the title “Mit Haut und Haaren” (449–51), follows “Saturday in Utopia”. We might be tempted to conclude that the wife resembling Gretel Adorno loves her husband unconditionally and accedes to his romantic affairs without remainder, and that she does so with her entire being. The narrative voice at first renders this figure present in a way that facilitates such a reading by aligning G. with utter pragmatism and self-sacrificial affection. G. also serves as a temporal marker. The narrative shift to an experiential present tense occurs only once G. has been introduced. We read in declarative terms indicating practiced repetition: “It is Saturday. She lays wool blankets, purple in color, made from Canadian wool, onto the wooden cot that serves in the guest room as a bed. She puts out water, and hand towels” (Kluge 2003, 445). G. appears to represent pure acquiescence to the empirical realm. Later the narrator links her actions and her afternoon nap to love: “She got herself out of the way, that’s what love is capable of” (445). This is striking since—if the hallway leading to the little guest room is where utopia lies—love appears to be sleeping behind another door. For most of the opening segment, however, the narrative instance focuses its perspective on the philosopher and his breathy mistress—“excited by the traveling wind of her own lively person” (445). As this first segment approaches its own terminus, attention is drawn to a “certain closeness” (445) between the trysting pair and the anticipatory temporality they share: “A long afternoon lies ahead of them both” (446). The experimental narrative instance in this first segment straddles naturalized conventions and unnatural voices of storytelling perspective. A significant shift in voice and perspective occurs just after the final period in this segment, and this shift comes in the form of a numbered footnote, the only one in the miniature and one in which the narrative voice once again proves non-identical with itself and—for the first time—makes us see G. in a different light. Kluge does tricky things with numbers, and one odd thing about the only footnote in “Saturday in Utopia” is that it appears as number 2. There is a footnote numbered 1 on the same page on which “Saturday” begins, but this footnote is an interloper from a different miniature. Numbers and equations will figure in our analysis again when we get to the four numbered narrative supplements that also belong to “Saturday in Utopia” as a mutating story of sexual commerce, romantic exchange, and utopian longing. Here we turn to footnote 2, which uses numbers to highlight G., the empirical epitome of pragmatic resignation, in agentive relation to cosmic dimensions. Kluge effects this first with rhetorical tone and then with destabilized perspective. The note opens with a sentence in which the third-person voice appears in familiar, descriptive guise: “The philosopher’s wife is responsible for furnishing the apartment” (Kluge 2003, 446). The next sentences are entirely different in Alexander Kluge’s “Saturday in Utopia” 133 tone when the narrative voice emerges as a bureaucratic bean-counter on the subject of love. “There are 186 various aggregate conditions of love. The one someone needs when he receives his mistress is not receptive to practical ideas” (446). This rhetorical register aligns the narrative voice with the language of reification and confirms G.’s apparent function as overseeing rationalized practicality when her lovesick husband is otherwise engaged. The next sentence in the note alters this by opening a temporal door to another perspective. “This program”, we read, “let us call it 184a, shares a sisterly bond with unearthly love” (Kluge 2003, 446). Several things are important here. Shifting to the first-person plural, the bureaucratically inclined narrator draws readers into the perspective of rationalized labor and bureaucratic administration. This perspective is hardly utopian at all. The narrator’s use of the word “program” additionally echoes the earlier description of the philosopher as having little place for direct experience “in his program”. This would align the philosopher himself with the instrumental rationality of “administered society”, as the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School famously put it. The resonant use of “program” here might also make us think that program number 184a marks the philosopher’s impractical desire for love that’s out of this world. I suggest a different reading. Even though the third- and first-person voices of collective narration speak the language of bureaucracy—a language that Adorno associated with “permanent catastrophe” (Adorno 2005, 192)—nothing prevents us from reading the referential ambiguity of “program”, as used in the footnote, in relation to the philosopher’s wife instead of her besotted husband. In this alternative reading, what the narrative voice classifies as a “program” lies in G.’s everyday practicality, which readers can now also recognize as related to “unearthly love” and G.’s own non-identical self (hence the “sisterly” bond). This philosopher’s wife is no one-dimensional woman, and G.’s narrative status as an agent of disruption is indirectly confirmed by the narrative observer, even though this observational voice addresses us in the register of bureaucratic classification: “This [program] explains why the bed appears unrealistically narrow for two persons and inappropriate for a certain comfort in sex life. The wife chose it this way” (Kluge 2003, 446). In narrative terms, this bespeaks anti-realist disruption rather than realist revenge. More than the Adorno-like philosopher, and far more than the model resembling one of Adorno’s many mistresses, “Saturday” gives us G. as a storytelling cipher of both this-worldly and off-worldly relations. Footnote 2 in this Kluge text steps out of the flow of narrative time and uses narrative perspective to reveal the secret heart beating counterfactually at the text’s temporal core. This is no mere index of possibility, and G.’s temporal orientation to cosmic horizons and utopian longing is not one of waiting. Her figural orientation to an “other” time that is not merely 134 Leslie A. Adelson past or wholly present is radically rooted in the lived and endangered hours of her everyday, even on a peaceful Saturday at home. Can we say that G. functions not only as a figure of narration but also as a voice of narration here? In note 2 the narrative voice still treats her as an object of narration, and while this voice claims enough knowledge about G.’s consciousness to “explain” her actions, this knowledge is not narratively focalized through her. The figure of G. arouses our curiosity even as her actions are supposedly explained, and something about her, as a figure of narration, remains temporally just beyond our perceptual ken. Does she ever manifest as a voice of narration? To answer this question, which no narrative shapeshifter poses in “Saturday in Utopia”, we turn to Supplement 4, which ends with an equation. Relational Exchange and Experiential Possibility The first segment of “Saturday” is followed by four numbered supplements, each of which is assigned a subtitle: “Lethargy” for the first, “Relation of Exchange” for the second, “Shouldn’t he have given her something?” for the third, and in quotation marks, “Indifference destroys everything” for the fourth. The temporal order of this sequence is chronological, with the first two situated on the Saturday in question, with varying degrees of narrative distance from the arrival scene described. The third supplement takes place “months later”, after the philosopher’s girlfriend has dumped him, and the fourth entails a narrative summation with a focus on G., once a “lover, demoted decades ago, and now a wife” (Kluge 2003, 448). Despite the directional order of this chronological sequence, each of the supplements highlights a differential relation to time. Each of the four supplements also invokes economies of value and exchange in love, sex, and capitalism. Kluge’s associative interpellations of Adorno and Marx in “Saturday” underwrite this miniature’s experimental labor on the narrative value of futurity. The philosopher and his mistress spend a lot of time contemplating the value of their time together and their futures in the first three supplements. Supplement 1 presents the young lover as having “an excited temperament” on the train and being “a lethargic person” in the guest room, where she is “not unhappy” with her “extended” passivity and her role as “sheer bringer of happiness”. “After a time she gets hungry”, and we read: “She expects to receive a gift at a later point in time” (Kluge 2003, 446). Labeled “Relation of Exchange”, Supplement 2 takes place later “on this Saturday”, and the narrative voice lets us know through character focalization commingled with Marxist rhetoric that the young woman is mostly “satisfied with the exchange”, content with the “exchange value” of her beauty and the “use value” she delivers when she visits (446). Alexander Kluge’s “Saturday in Utopia” 135 The narrative account of the philosopher’s perspective as he lies “on top of her” is focalized through a different register, as he—as if beside himself in pillow talk with her—speculates on cosmic dimensions instead: “Perhaps … there is no reciprocity in love, no exchange; crystals look at each other in silence. Heavenly bodies slide past each other in separate orbits; they know each other not” (Kluge 2003, 447). Whether he is right or not has no consequence for her momentary satisfaction, and in the guest room, she is “indifferent” [gleichgültig] to her lover’s philosophical fame. Pliant, peevish, and calculating at the same time, she thinks what their shared futures might hold: “At his funeral, she would appreciate it if she were mentioned in his eulogy. That lay far ahead” (447). By Supplement 3 man and mistress have parted ways in anger and she is now brooding over their “UNEQUAL EXCHANGE”. “Shouldn’t he have given her something” beyond his actual gifts, she wonders, such as a career, a marriage, an inheritance, or even “UNBRIDLED HAPPINESS” (447)? Having “stolen her youth”, the aging philosopher hadn’t proved useful “to her futures” at all (447). Her displeasure now also applies to G., who had never greeted her. The ex-mistress, “months later”, begins to hate her “belatedly” (447–48). The wife’s “indifference” [Gleichgültigkeit], she fumes, had “devalued” the younger woman’s stay in utopia (446, 448). Lest we conclude too quickly that the jilted philosopher looks pretty good by contrast with this picture of pettiness—his desire unbroken, his efforts to regain his lover’s affection infused “with unquenchable longing” (Kluge 2003, 447)—Adorno reminds us in a voice from “damaged life” in the 1940s that unattainable woman and insatiable male are stock characters in a capitalist script that mass culture has written (see the passage cited above from Minima Moralia, 168). Supplement 4 then brings heightened and new narrative attention to the figure previously known as G. Social Indifference and Differential Time G. appears in Supplement 4 anachronistically as “a mistress from 1941”, whom her distressed husband was unable to “translate into the year 1967” (Kluge 2003, 448). The prominence of the word “indifference” in the supplement’s subtitle and the epigraph “Love blinds” put a spotlight on G. as well, even as the subtitle’s linkage of “indifference” and ubiquitous destruction—“Indifference destroys everything”— simultaneously ties the philosophical figure of Adorno to this supplement too. Yet this supplement cultivates attention to G. in particular. This is where the text lends her more biographical detail and where the narrative voice insists that this figure merits intensified curiosity. Insistence and intensification come in the form of interlocution, the voice of experimentation that pushes the narratological limits of 136 Leslie A. Adelson counterfactual capabilities and functional oscillation in Kluge’s heliotropic prose. Here the voice of interlocution extends its own durational temporality by opening with four questions about G. as an object of interfigural awareness and then attempting to answer these questions in a long paragraph in which more questions and answers follow. Were the two in the neutrally appointed little chamber blinded? Did the learned lover and the woman who had traveled here to see him feel at all what went on in the wife, who had spent these hours in retreat? Did they try to understand it? What should they have understood? (Kluge 2003, 448) Blurring narratological boundaries between third-person narration and any intended audience of a communicative transmission, this unnatural voice of interlocution seems to be having a lively conversation with its disembodied self and inviting us to align our perspectives on social exchange with both sides of this narrative split. This appears to transpire in a realist register, which the voice of interlocution ascribes to G. Yet the voice of interlocution is paradoxically the only voice in the miniature to cultivate this register. G. never speaks at all. Or does she? The interlocutor in this final paragraph at times seems to focalize perception through G., as when we read that G. saw her “competitor” off when the other woman departed, and the interlocutor intervenes to ask and immediately answer, “But competition how so? The image was not thought through” (Kluge 2003, 448). But whose perception is faulty here? The wife’s or the interlocutor’s? The interlocutor clearly focalizes perceptions in the story-world through G. when the narrative voice tells us the realist “honestly loved the strange, somewhat child-like scholar, imagined under the condition of her own death” (448). Two things are worth noting about this indication of heightened focalization through G. First, in tandem with the text’s earlier reference to the philosopher’s death on his mistress’s anticipatory horizon, this focalized futural reference to G. imagining her own death resounds like an unrealistic incantation of Martin Heidegger, Adorno’s philosophical nemesis, in the interior space of the “private” residence. For Heidegger, “Being-towards-death” is a generic condition of the ontology of human existence. “Anticipation [of mortality] makes Dasein authentically futural”, he writes in Being and Time (2008), “and in such a way that the anticipation itself is possible only in so far as it is futural in its Being in general” (373). For Adorno however, death marked no ontological condition but a socio-historical threshold, and there can be “no utopia” without consideration of this “threshold of death” (Adorno, Bloch, and Krüger 1988, 10). Second, the voice of interlocution explicitly raises a question of utopian temporality in conjunction with G.’s realism. “What after all was she Alexander Kluge’s “Saturday in Utopia” 137 missing that would have been hers if the traveling mistress were out of the picture? Would she have had a share in the energies of the utopian Saturday hours? Under realist conditions?” (Kluge 2003, 448). Here the experimental voice of interlocution strikes another realistic chord, only to align with a characteristically Klugean “anti-realist” realist perspective with the next caveat: “Even if reality is invalid” (448). In the last stretch of Supplement 4, the interlocutor both sympathizes with G. and pushes her affective orientation and narrative position into increasingly realistic terrain. The slippage is subtle and deadly. That love confirms this rule [i.e. the rule that reality is invalid] is demonstrated in the fact that she [G.] arranged the pavilion for the two contracting agents, whom she took care of and tolerated, without luxury, without accommodations, without fantasy. (448) The interlocutor’s curious sympathetic perspective proves deadly because it confines G. to a space of resigned empirical realism without remainder. The experimental interlocutor at this point ceases to oscillate between narrative trajectories, opting to close rather than widen the gap of experiential possibility. Fortunately the text does not give this interlocutor the last word. This is the reading I will now pursue. Ethical Stakes and Catastrophic Histories Ethical stakes are high when the empirical limits of existing reality cease to oscillate, for that would leave us only “things in being” or that which merely exists, as Adorno put it when condemning European metaphysics for complicity in catastrophe (1973, 407). The sentence marked as a citation in the supplement’s subtitle is a modified quotation and translation from words addressed to a government-sponsored conference on “Holocaust Era Assets” in the Czech Republic in 2009 by Noach Flug. President of the International Auschwitz Committee and survivor of several concentration camps, Flug addressed present and future audiences in the voices of historical memory and living grief: “I speak on behalf of the survivors of the German concentration camps and ghettos. We remember our murdered families and the million [sic] of victims who remain in the places of the ashes. They are with us always; we will never forget them” (Flug 2009, 268–69). Flug invokes written testimony of aging survivors as a document delivered to government leaders in 2009 but “directed towards the future”, and the curiosity of the young as representing “hope” that this catastrophic “knowledge will live on into the future” (269). Flug’s appeal for future historical memory, twenty-first-century governmental reparations, and constant social vigilance against persecution of difference is underwritten by his 138 Leslie A. Adelson penultimate statement: “Indifference destroyed everything and everyone; we have experienced it” (270). The genocide of the Holocaust plays no overt narrative role in “Saturday”, though it does figure in Adorno’s understanding of “permanent catastrophe”. Converting the simple past of Flug’s “destroyed” into the ubiquitous present of “destroys” in his supplemental subtitle, Kluge’s translation foregrounds two vectors of relationality. The German word for indifference—Gleichgültigkeit—denotes the abstract quality of being equally valid; the word thus extends the miniature’s motif of oppressive equivalence without remainder and indicts, as Adorno would, the social risks and historical threats of categorical abstraction. At the same time—and here it is important to note the obvious—the German words that Kluge uses in the title and subtitle of Supplement 4 for indifference, destruction, and even supplement are German. They partake of particular histories of language, society, life, death, and horizons of thought. This will be important to recall at the end, where Kluge in a surprising twist reverts to the sign of equivalence but does so in a way that allows both us and G.—in a temporal sense— to begin again. Supplement 4 and “Saturday” come to an apparent end with two declarations: “Love has no place. Utopia=no place” (Kluge 2003, 448). Which narrative voice speaks here, and what perspective prevails? The logical assumption would be that the voice of interlocution extends into this terminus, in uncritical realist mode, since the voice of interlocution otherwise fills the entire supplement, proving unfaithful to its experimental narrative function only when it resolves G.’s figural status near the end on empirical grounds alone. This reading would be unsatisfying because it would adhere to the reality principle that the experimental interlocutor in bureaucratic guise effectively undoes in footnote 2. This is the footnote in which G.’s figural relationship to a cosmic horizon of “unearthly” relationality comes into view. A realistically resigned reading of the conclusion would mainly fail to satisfy though because it would be nonsensical in a non-experimental and boring way, and Kluge’s writing is nothing if not experimental in its temporal core. If the otherwise oscillating narrative voice is ultimately overwhelmed by its own empirical claims, the final lines would yield only what we already know on an empirical plane—there is “no place” for the wife’s love in her own marriage and the Greek word meaning utopia literally means “no place”—or else what makes no descriptive sense (since the wife does have a place to sleep in the apartment). The life would go out of the miniature in such indifferent analysis, but it comes back in if we attune our perspective to G. manifesting here for the first time as a narrative voice and not merely as a narrated figure. Coming from her emergent perspective, “love has no place” violates the spatial and temporal constraints—the temporal deferral and spatial displacement—of utopian traditions alike. The alternative futurity of Alexander Kluge’s “Saturday in Utopia” 139 her conversion to a non-empirical “other life” is made accessible to present experience, not through the grammatical use of the present tense but through G.’s twofold narrative transformation into third-person voice and “unearthly” perspective. The grammatical subject of the supplement’s final declaration of equivalence in an ostensibly realist key is not in fact “utopia” but a German word related to and resembling it spelled “Utopie”. The little letter “e” encourages us as readers to begin again, all empirical history of destruction to the contrary, since the miniature’s ending marks socio-historical difference, not in chartable space but in the utopian dimension of an experiential futurity that is not indifferent to the destruction of everything. The retroactive narrative tension that arises, through reading this text, between “Utopie” as a non-equivalent cipher of differential time, on the one hand, and the Latinized, Greek, and generic invocation of “Utopia” in the miniature’s title, on the other, refers us to G. as more than a mere figure of utopian redemption. The narrative voice that “Saturday in Utopia” labors to give her opens a more capacious, experiential, temporal perspective on critical perspective itself. Kluge’s intensified investment in storytelling in this sense exceeds the constraints of Adorno’s heliotropic narrative experiments with counterfactual hope in “damaged life”. Kluge’s ethical storytelling literally rewrites the future rather than the history of critical theory when he presents G. as a figure and voice of utopian orientation who does much more than take ‘minutes’ of dialectical exchange. Ethical possibility becomes temporally accessible to experience in Kluge’s narrative experiments with time. Notes 1 An expanded version of this chapter originally appeared in Leslie A. Adelson, Cosmic Miniatures and the Future Sense: Alexander Kluge’s 21st-Century Literary Experiments in German Culture and Narrative Form, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017, pp. 125–144. 2 For the importance of considering “how to use the future”, see Campe (2009). 3 For Derrida, the heliotrope (in relation to suns and flowers) becomes the “figure of that which doubles and endangers philosophy” (1982, 271). 4 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this chapter are mine. This especially concerns “Saturday in Utopia”, which is not included in Chalmers and Hulse’s published translation of parts of Kluge’s collection Die Lücke, die der Teufel läßt as The Devil’s Blind Spot (Kluge 2004). My book on Kluge’s cosmic miniatures includes an expanded version of the present remarks, and explains in more detail how Kluge borrows and deviates from Adorno and Benjamin (Adelson 2017). This monograph also explains how Kluge’s approach to futurity differs from what some German narratologists call “future narratives” (Bode and Dietrich 2013). 5 See Müller-Doohm (2005, 52–63), Hartwig (2012), Adolf (2007), and Martin Jay’s (2012) comment that we still know too little about Gretel Adorno, the life partner and thinking interlocutor who took detailed minutes of so many Frankfurt School conversations. Jay also draws on von Boeckmann’s work 140 Leslie A. Adelson (2004, 2007) on Gretel Adorno’s contributions to the Frankfurt School. Adolf treats Kluge’s “Saturday in Utopia” as if it were a historical document, while acknowledging the text has been fictionalized (2007, 311, 322, 326). 6 See also Alexis Radisoglou, whose 2015 dissertation on destructive effects of globalization and Kluge’s fictions of planetarity aims “to move Kluge more closely in the vicinity of thinkers for whom the re-appropriation of the political impulse proper is predicated on a strongly anti-consensual model of the political” (17). References Adelson, Leslie A. 2014. “Horizons of Hope: Alexander Kluge’s Cosmic Miniatures and Walter Benjamin”. In Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 13, edited by Paul Michael Lützeler, Erin McGlothlin, and Jennifer Kapczynski, 203–25. Tübingen: Staffenburg Verlag. Adelson, Leslie A. 2017. Cosmic Miniatures and the Future Sense: Alexander Kluge’s 21st-Century Literary Experiments in German Culture and Narrative Form. Berlin: De Gruyter. Adolf, Heinrich. 2007. “Adornos verkaufte Braut—Rekonstruktion einer Beziehung, Die vergessene Geliebte”. In Adorno-Portraits: Erinnerungen von Zeitgenossen, edited by Stefan Müller-Doohm, 309–34. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Seabury. Adorno, Theodor W. 2005. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. London: Verso. Adorno, Theodor W., Ernst Bloch, and Horst Krüger. 1988. “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing”. In The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, edited by Ernst Bloch, translated by Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, 1–17. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. In Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, 253–64. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Bode, Christoph, and Rainer Dietrich. 2013. Future Narratives: Theory, Poetics, and Media-Historical Moment. Berlin: De Gruyter. Campe, Rüdiger. 2009. “How to Use the Future: The Old European and the Modern Form of Life”. In Prognosen über Bewegungen, edited by Gabriele Brandstetter, Sibylle Peters, and Kai van Eikels, 107–20. Berlin: B-Books. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy”. In Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, 207–71. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Eshel, Amir. 2013. Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Flug, Noach. 2009. Untitled address. In Holocaust Era Assets: Conference Proceedings, Prague, June 26–30, 2009, edited by Jiří Schneider, Jakub Klepal, and Irena Kalhousová, 268–70. Prague: Forum 2000 Foundation. www. holocausteraassets.eu. Geulen, Eva. 2006. “‘No Happiness without Fetishism’: Minima Moralia as Ars Amandi”. In Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno, edited by Renée Heberle, 97–112. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. Alexander Kluge’s “Saturday in Utopia” 141 Grice, Paul. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hartwig, Ina. 2012. “Arlette und ihr Adorno: Die Geliebte und der Philosoph: Eine alte Geschichte, neu erzählt”. Zeit Online 41. Heidegger, Martin. 2008. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought. Jay, Martin. 2012. “Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer: Towards a New Manifesto”. Book review. Philosophical Reviews: An Electronic Journal. University of Notre Dame. http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/29021-towards-a-new-manifesto/. Kluge, Alexander. 2003. Die Lücke, die der Teufel läßt: Im Umfeld des neuen Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kluge, Alexander. 2004. The Devil’s Blind Spot: Tales from the New Century. Translated by Martin Chalmers and Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions. Kluge, Alexander. 2006. Tür an Tür mit einem anderen Leben: 350 neue Geschichten. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kluge, Alexander. 2007. Cinema Stories. Translated by Martin Brady and Helen Hughes. New York: New Directions. Kluge, Alexander. 2012. “Die Aktualität Adornos”. In Personen und Reden, 67–75. Berlin: Wagenbach. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2002. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Translated by Todd Samuel Presner and Others. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2004. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press. Marasco, Robyn. 2010. “‘I Would Rather Wait for You than Believe That You Are Not Coming at All’: Revolutionary Love in a Post-revolutionary Time”. Philosophy and Social Criticism 36 (6): 643–62. Müller-Doohm, Stefan. 2005. Adorno: A Biography. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity. Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge. 2014. History and Obstinacy. Edited by Devin Fore. Tranlated by Richard Langston et al. New York: Zone Books. Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge. 2016. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Translated by Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff. London: Verso. Radisoglou, Alexis. 2015. “Keeping Time in Place: Modernism, Political Aesthetics, and the Transformation of Chronotopes in Late Modernity”. PhD diss. (unpublished), Columbia University. Richardson, Brian. 2006. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Seebold, Elmar, ed. 2002. Kluge: Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. 24th revised edition. Berlin: De Gruyter. Von Boeckmann, Staci. 2004. “The Life and Work of Gretel Karplus/Adorno: Her Contributions to Frankfurt School Theory”. PhD diss. (unpublished), University of Oklahoma. Von Boeckmann, Staci. 2007. “Trachodon und Teddie: Über Gretel Adorno”. In Adorno-Portraits: Erinnerungen von Zeitgenossen, edited by Stefan MüllerDoohm, 335–52. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Wesche, Tilo. 2012. “Moral und Glück: Hoffnung bei Kant und Adorno”. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 60 (1): 49–71. 9 Melancholy and the Narration of Transnational Trauma in W. G. Sebald and Teju Cole Kaisa Kaakinen Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole (b. 1975), who published his critically acclaimed novel Open City in 2011, has often been compared to the German émigré writer W. G. Sebald (1944–2001). One may indeed find certain similarities in these two authors’ prose: both authors employ associative walks of solitary narrator figures as a narrative tool to bind together disparate narrative fragments, and both authors’ works study the lingering effects of histories of violence on a transnational scale. In an essay published in the New Yorker in 2012, Teju Cole also explicitly named Sebald as his “precursor”—“The teacher I never knew, the friend I met only posthumously” (Cole 2012). Nonetheless, on a closer examination, the relationship between Cole’s literary work and that of Sebald reveals itself as more complex than Cole’s gestures of identification in the New Yorker essay would seem to suggest. In the following analysis, I would like to highlight the differences between these authors’ poetic projects because this allows us to perceive crucial challenges related to writing comparatively about historical traumas in the twenty-first century. On a closer examination, these authors’ poetic projects of transnational historical narration differ in an important respect: the way their narratives conceive the present, in which the narration and linking together of traumatic histories occurs. Through the case of Cole’s recent novel and its linkage to Sebald, I argue that when discussing ethics of storytelling today, it is vital to relate questions of ethics to questions of cultural comparison. By investigating how we might assess the ethical status of literature that links together historical experiences across temporal and geographic distances, I point to specific challenges posed to literary storytelling and its analysis by the coming into contact of heterogeneous historical imaginaries in today’s increasingly interconnected world. Palimpsestic Present Sebald’s works, written at the end of the twentieth century by this German-born author who emigrated to Britain, have most often been discussed in relation to the demands of post-Holocaust writing—as an Melancholy and the Narration of Transnational Trauma 143 aesthetically and ethically complex work of a non-Jewish German writer, who belongs to the so-called second generation that did not directly experience the Second World War. However, the comparison to Cole accentuates the need to consider the significance of the fact that Sebald’s texts are not embedded only in the German historical and cultural context but also have a transnational dimension. This concerns especially Sebald’s interest towards the history of imperialism, which he alludes to repeatedly in the beginning of the novel Austerlitz (2001) and writes more extensively about in the essay-travelogue Die Ringe des Saturn (1997; The Rings of Saturn, 2002). In Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, a nameless narrator transmits the story of the protagonist Jacques Austerlitz, who is a child survivor of the Holocaust having been in one of the kindertransports from Prague to Britain. Austerlitz’s story is narrated in a nonlinear manner, which can be seen to reflect both the temporality of Austerlitz’s traumatic experience and the activity of researching and transmitting this story and the implication of the narrator—a non-Jewish German emigrant—in this history. In The Rings of Saturn, an anonymous narrator figure ambulates through the County of Suffolk, depicted as an empty, almost post-apocalyptic landscape full of traces of its imperial past. This geographic setting is used as a point of departure for an intricately structured narrative on the history of modernity, imperialism, capitalism and their destructive effects on the oppressed, be they humans or animals. When one begins to read Cole’s novel Open City, it is not difficult to observe a certain similarity between its tone or mood and that of Sebald’s works. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn—the Sebald book that alludes most directly to melancholy—begins as the narrator sets out on his walks through Suffolk, “in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work” (Sebald 2002, 3). The narrator links this reference to his own mood to a larger sense of history as a history of suffering, as he recounts feeling preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place. (3) In the novel Austerlitz, the narrator notes how the protagonist Jacques Austerlitz “spoke at length about the marks of pain which, as he said he well knew, trace countless fine lines through history” (Sebald 2011, 14). Sebald’s narratives imply that the melancholic gaze on history is attuned to tracing and making visible of these “fine lines”, a suggested undercurrent of history that seems to hold the disparate story fragments together. 144 Kaisa Kaakinen Cole’s Open City also begins as the narrator sets off for “aimless wandering”, in this case on the streets of New York. As in Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, in Cole’s novel, too, the walks are presented as the narrator’s way to escape a given mood, the “monotony” of his solitary evenings after busy workdays, and the narrative gestures towards a collective level through a remark on “unacknowledged traumas” as a shared human condition: The sight of large masses of people hurrying down into underground chambers was perpetually strange to me, and I felt that all of the human race were rushing, pushed by a counterinstinctive death drive, into movable catacombs. Aboveground I was with thousands of others in their solitude, but in the subway, standing close to strangers, jostling them and being jostled by them for space and breathing room, all of us reenacting unacknowledged traumas, the solitude intensified. (Cole 2011, 7) But unlike in Sebald, in Cole’s Open City the ambulatory narrator figure has a name, Julius. A resident psychiatrist at a hospital in New York, Julius has grown up in Nigeria with his Nigerian father and German mother and moved to the US to attend college. Through Julius’s perambulations, the narrative of Open City traces the cityscape of New York for stories about the past of the sites, and often these stories have to do with historical injustices such as the colonization of Native American lands by the Dutch settlers, or the history of slavery in the US. The linkage to Sebald becomes more evident when Julius visits Belgium and references the history of Belgian colonialism, which is touched upon in Sebald’s novels Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn. It becomes even stronger when we learn that Julius has a German grandmother, who experienced the bombings of German cities (the topic of Sebald’s much-discussed lectures on the air war on Germany) and was apparently (or so Julius conjectures) raped by the soldiers of the Red Army at the end of the Second World War. Open City creates multiple unspecified juxtapositions between Julius’s memories about his childhood in Nigeria, the history of his German mother and grandmother, the post-9/11 New York, and the tensions related to race and migration in contemporary Brussels. The linkage to Europe and its history of war—and indirectly to Sebald, whose works are intensely concerned with the Holocaust and Western European imperialism—opens a space of inquiry to the complex transnational histories of violence resonating in the early twenty-first-century New York and Brussels, in which people from various backgrounds reside side by side. Through Julius’s visit at the site of the World Trade Center towers collapsed in the attacks of September 11, 2001, the narrative of Open City underlines Melancholy and the Narration of Transnational Trauma 145 the difference between a forward-rushing temporal consciousness— often linked to representations of New York as the city of modernity and the future, as Cole himself has noted1—and Julius’s reflective gaze that perceives multiple temporal layers of the city. Walking on an overpass along the site, Julius observes how he is the only one who looks at the empty gap in the cityscape. He then goes on to reflect on the streets and communities that had to make way for the WTC buildings in the 1960s and further on the “Lenape paths” that possibly “lay buried beneath the rubble” (Cole 2011, 59). Both Sebald’s works and Cole’s Open City excel in presenting places, buildings and cityscapes as palimpsestic, as sites that have been “written, erased, rewritten” through centuries (Cole 2011, 59). Both authors’ poetic projects complicate a notion of the present as a simple transition between past and future. 2 But what makes the comparison between Cole and Sebald interesting in this context is that it makes it apparent that the notion of a palimpsestic present, in which different historical experiences come into contact— evoked so often both in art and in criticism since the rise of the memory and trauma paradigm in the late twentieth century—does not in itself carry a clear ethical or political significance but can be put into different uses in specific artworks and by different historically situated readers. While both authors’ texts create a poetics of suggestive but undefined historical linkages across time and space, Sebald and Cole’s texts imply a different mode of reading these linkages. Melancholic Identification in Sebald This difference can be demonstrated by looking more carefully at the narrative voices in these two authors’ texts, as well as the modes of reading history suggested by them. Sebald’s mode of linking separate narratives of historical trauma together is always mediated by an anonymous narrator figure, who is not a figure in a full psychological sense, although we do learn that he is a German emigrant to Britain. When discussing the ethical status of Sebald’s poetic project, scholars have often focused on the respectful relationship of this listening and mediating narrator to the stories of others—on Sebald’s aesthetics of indirection and metonymy, which emphasize the singularity and inaccessibility of the individual stories.3 Sebald himself explained in an interview that since writing about genocide was “practically impossible”, it was necessary to make the difficult search for an adequate post-genocidal poetic mode visible in the narration (see Silverblatt 2007, 80). For instance, Sebald foregrounds the mediation of experience in narrative through creating chains of several individual voices and speakers (as in the formula “said Austerlitz said Vera” repeated in Austerlitz). His approach to post-genocidal narration suggests that the knowledge of the limits in approaching others’ experience is a basis for an ethical relation. 146 Kaisa Kaakinen But when considering Sebald’s writings as transnational narratives of trauma, it is also important to analyze how Sebald’s poetic strategies contribute to the comparative dimension of Sebald’s texts. The comparative effects of the poetics of indirection can be illustrated with the beginning of Austerlitz, in which the narrative foreshadows the story of Jacques Austerlitz and his parents’ death in concentration camps through descriptions of oppressive monumental buildings of the imperial era in Antwerp and Brussels. While these passages are used as a premonition of Austerlitz’s individual story linked to the Holocaust, gradually unraveled as the novel progresses, the architectural sites and descriptions also create a suggestive but undefined linkage between this history and the history of Western European imperialism. Sebald’s ample use of such unspecified or “weak” analogies and juxtapositions, in which the status of the historical linkage is left unclear, can be productive in that it can mobilize readers to link together historical experiences and contexts that do not seem to belong together in an obvious way. The poetics of weak analogies can be read as a response to the difficulty of comparing historical experiences of trauma directly with each other and to the simultaneous need to point to the entangled nature of transnational histories such as that of imperialism and totalitarianism. One may even say that Teju Cole responds to this potential of Sebald’s texts to generate new forms of historical relation as he links his story of contemporary New York to Sebald’s narratives focused on European contexts.4 However, the emphasis on the melancholic gaze on history in Sebald’s texts seems to privilege a certain principle of transhistorical generalization that is in tension with the potential of the analogical mode to produce new narratives of historical relatedness. 5 I understand melancholy in this context as a mode of narrating history that goes beyond the issue of melancholic tone or mood: as a temporal stance, in which the details observed in the present are approached in relation to an unchanging condition of repetitive history, and as a mode of relation predicated upon a certain assumption of similarity.6 The melancholic mode of narration in Sebald evokes an absent or suspended frame or totality in which all the details of the narrative connect on some higher level of abstraction. Sebald’s narrators perform a mode of reading that can be characterized as melancholic identification, as they immerse themselves only in the stories of those individuals who share a similar state of mind with them.7 This creates a peculiar sense of suspended correspondence between the stories told in this mode. In terms of the ethics of storytelling, this aspect of Sebald has divided scholars discussing Sebald as a writer of trauma fiction. Some have seen in Sebald’s texts a masterful poetic effort to approach the Other—the people whose stories are told in the texts—as “radically Other” (see Santner 2006), whereas others have criticized the melancholic mode for having a tendency to generalize and allegorize all instances of historical suffering into the sense of history itself Melancholy and the Narration of Transnational Trauma 147 (or the “human condition”) as traumatic (see Whitehead 2004, 136).8 While there is a tension between the generalizing, transhistorical evocation created by the melancholic mode and the potential of the undetermined historical analogies to prompt creation of historical linkages on a more historically specific level, beyond the discursive frame implied by Sebald’s texts themselves, one may say that the narratives do privilege the reading mode of immersing into like-minded individuals, who share a transhistorical wounded condition. Sebald’s texts can be argued to produce modes of reading that approach a singular instance of suffering as a sign of a transhistorical condition of an always already traumatic history. My claim is that the implied ethics of melancholic identification in Sebald comes to its limits when we begin to read this narrative mode in the context of the specific demands of transnational narration of trauma—narration of historical experiences beyond a narrative frame based on a unit such as the nation, or a larger entity like Europe, conceived as relatively homogeneous. While Sebald’s narratives do have a transnational dimension in terms of their historical and cultural references and geographic scope, they operate in a narrative mode that does not allow for the problematic of heterogeneous historical imaginaries to enter the texts’ narrative universe. When reading Cole and Sebald side by side, it becomes clear that the limits of Sebald’s narratives as transnational narratives of trauma in the era of globalization do not simply concern the content treated in Sebald’s texts (their focus on European frames of historical narration) but also the narrative mode employed in them. The Broad Present and a Heterogeneous Contemporaneity The difference between Sebald’s and Cole’s poetics of historical narration becomes more evident if we look at recent approaches to the “present” and the “contemporary” as analytical constructs and then ask how these perspectives might illuminate the temporal underpinnings of Sebald’s and Cole’s poetic projects. The heightened concern of Sebald and Cole’s narratives with the presence of the past in the present seems to fit Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht’s definition of a new, post-historicist temporal consciousness that Gumbrecht sees as emerging since the late twentieth century. In this temporal regime, the present has “broadened”; the past no longer flows into the security of pastness but lingers on in the present, and the future is uncertain, no longer a horizon of hopes toward which the present is traveling. The present is no longer a mere transition, as in the modern linear temporality that looked towards a future goal, but the past overflows the present. Gumbrecht even states that this is a “present whose relationship to the future turns belief in progress and the 148 Kaisa Kaakinen ambitious projects it entails into a stagnant mood of something deeper than depression” (Gumbrecht 2014, 32). Thus, Gumbrecht characterizes the general mood pervading (Western) societies at the beginning of the twenty-first century with the word “depression”, and he links this mood to globalization as part of a new, “yet unnamed chronotope within which globalized life in the early twenty-first century occurs” (Gumbrecht 2014, 73). However, this cultural analysis ignores a crucial characteristic of the twenty-first-century experience of time: that the “broadening” of the present also has the dimension of coming together of multiple and heterogeneous historical imaginaries in the increasingly global present. When Sebald’s and Cole’s literary works are analyzed against this background, their form of transnational narration of traumatic historical experiences begins to look like a different reaction to the condition that François Hartog calls “presentism”: a “sense of a permanent, elusive, and almost immobile present” that is “by no means uniform or clear-cut”, and that is “experienced very differently depending on one’s position in society” (Hartog 2015, xviii, 17–18). If the non-uniform experience of the present is linked to the concern of transnational narration of history raised by both Sebald’s and Cole’s poetic projects, it becomes clear that it is hardly sufficient to assume, as Gumbrecht tends to do, that “historical consciousness” has been lost along with the modern temporal consciousness (see Gumbrecht 2014, 73). Aleida Assmann criticizes Gumbrecht’s “overly melancholic” reaction to the loss of the progress paradigm of modernization from the point of view of cultural memory studies; she points out that seeing the past and the future as disconnected opposites would remain caught in the progress paradigm of modernization, whereas remembering should be thought as a future-oriented activity (Assmann 2013, 253–256; 317–18). What I, in turn, specifically want to draw attention to in this context is the fact that speaking of a loss of historical consciousness evades the challenge to adjust cultural analysis and historical narration to this contemporary condition of a co-presence of multiple historical narratives and orientations in the present. While the modern temporal regime could conceive the present as a simple transition between past and future and along a single posited historical narrative, an awareness of the heterogeneity of historical imaginaries and material realities in the present calls for approaching the present as a site of potential contact and conflict between different historical experiences and orientations. The implied ethics of reading in Sebald’s texts lends itself better to discussions in terms of the ethics of alterity—an ethic that thematizes a shared wound that is at the same time conceived as radically unapproachable— than it does for approaches emphasizing historical difference, specificity and social positionality. Sebald’s melancholic mode begins to look more problematic if we have an expectation that an ethics of storytelling should Melancholy and the Narration of Transnational Trauma 149 also be sensitive to historical difference, to uneven power relations linked to historical events and experiences as well as to their narration. The melancholic temporality suggests a mode of historical comparison at odds with an acknowledgment of how different forms and instances of traumatization are embedded in very particular historical processes. As recent approaches to trauma studies have highlighted, comparative approaches to trauma pose new demands of differentiation and specificity. For instance, a perspective sensitive to historical difference is important if we seek to become conscious of ongoing forms of traumatization such as racism, sexism and economic inequality.9 In the specific case of Sebald, the gesture of transhistorical generalization implied by the melancholic mode can be seen to obscure the particularity of the narrator’s subject position and the way in which the narratives privilege experiences of those individuals with whom the narrator can identify. For instance, if we begin to read Sebald’s narratives in a mode of difference and social positionality, it soon becomes obvious that the narrators tend to identify with men, especially with male writers like Joseph Conrad, Jean Améry or Michael Hamburger. But what is more, because the mode of melancholic identification (which emphasizes the possibility of identification between the narrator and the stories mediated by him) controls the narrative perspective so thoroughly, the female characters in Sebald’s narratives seem to occupy a different position in the narrative hierarchy of the texts. This can be illustrated by a passage in which the narrator tells about his female colleague Janine Dakyns, whom the narrator at first seems to portray as any other melancholic character in the book: In the end Janine was reduced to working from an easychair drawn more or less into the middle of her room where, if one passed her door, which was always ajar, she could be seen bent almost double scribbling on a pad on her knees or sometimes just lost in thought. Once when I remarked that sitting there amidst her pages she resembled the angel in Dürer’s Melancholia, steadfast among the instruments of destruction, her response was that the apparent chaos surrounding her represented in reality a perfect kind of order, or an order which at least tended towards perfection. (Sebald 2002, 9)10 However, what is striking here is that Janine becomes an allegory of melancholy and an object of the narrator’s melancholic consciousness, rather than a character who herself possesses a melancholic consciousness. The tendency to allegorize the female characters can be observed in further passages of The Rings of Saturn, as the narrator hears the voices of two female nurses as those of “sirens and angels” (28–29/18), and as a character named Catharina Ashbury is compared to a saint (251/211) 150 Kaisa Kaakinen and is late shown performing as Saint Catherine of Siena in a theatrical play (264/221). I draw attention to this tendency to “sublate” the feminine characters into allegories in order to show how the generalizing impulse of the melancholic mode in Sebald depends on a very particular lens on historical experience. Moreover, the particularity of this perspective with respect to socially differentiated positionality remains an unthought in the novel’s narrative universe, disguised by the narrator’s decontextualized gestures of reticent empathy. Sebald’s melancholic mode is at odds with a focus on historical difference because it operates with a temporality that cannot accommodate the present at all if the present is conceived as a site in which different experiences may come into contact and conflict. There is a passage in The Rings of Saturn that illustrates well the way in which Sebald’s narrators tend to distance themselves from the present in which they do the narrating—how the present as a realm of difference and heterogeneity is bracketed in Sebald’s narratives. In Chapter 4 of the book, Sebald’s narrator tells about his visit to The Hague (a city that can be associated by readers to the site of the International Criminal Court) and about a sudden encounter on the street (Sebald 1997, 99–102). First, a man with a dark beard passes the narrator by and touches him with his elbow as he is walking toward a mosque. Then, the narrator is almost run over by a dark-skinned man chased by his “countryman” who holds a knife in his hand. There are few other passages in the book that concern the contemporary setting of the narrator’s walks as something other than a vacant landscape, and few episodes in which the narrator’s tendency to take the position of an observer is interrupted by the bodily touch of another individual. One can read the passage as a staging of how the narrator becomes aware of his implication in the legacy of imperialism. However, the passage also shows how the narrator’s tendency to distance himself from the present clashes with the material presence of the contemporary, multicultural city. While the detailed description of the cityscape evokes this presence, the narrator tries to create a distance to it by characterizing the place as “extraterritorial”. It is as if the characters, who suddenly intrude on the narrator’s solitary path, would threaten the narrator’s tendency towards melancholic detachment that reads the present in terms of an already formed transhistorical frame. One could even read this passage in The Rings of Saturn as a suggestive moment in which Sebald’s poetic project points to its own limits—limits that in turn appear as the central concern of Cole’s Open City. Narrating a Heterogeneous Present Although the poetics of Open City has affinities to Sebald’s poetics of melancholy, it suggests a different mode of relating historical experiences and narratives. While also Cole’s narrator can be described as a Melancholy and the Narration of Transnational Trauma 151 melancholic, it is much harder for him than for Sebald’s narrators to avoid contact with other frames of reference in the present, in which the narratives of memory and history are constructed. Open City does not transcend the present in search of traces of the past but engages in constructing a poetics for conceiving the present as a site in which different historically conditioned frames of experience come into a disjunctive contact. In the remainder of this chapter, I would like to draw attention to two aspects of the novel’s poetic strategies that contribute to this aim: how it uses an unreliable narrator, and how its poetic strategies encourage a particularizing mode of reading its ample linkages and correspondences. What distinguishes Cole’s narrator from that of Sebald is that there is a more marked difference between the narrator’s detached melancholic perspective and that of the so-called implied author staging this perspective in different specific situations. Claudia Breger calls the narration of Open City “nonsovereign” but “ethically engaged”; Julius is a narrative voice that lacks sovereign authority and “enables a dialogue with the reader that productively continues the discussion” on histories of violence and uneven powerscapes of globalization set up by the narrative (Breger 2015, 117). In consequence of the difference in narrative voice between Sebald and Cole, the ethical status of Julius’s gaze of a detached observer is posed in the novel as a more open question. The beginning of the novel introduces Julius’s perspective as able to transcend boundaries—as a solitary eye tracking bird migrations from his Manhattan apartment, and as a highly-cultured ear attuned to distant voices of European or Canadian radio announcers and to classical music played by them (Cole 2011, 4). At times Julius’s aloofness may be associated with a cosmopolitan outlook able to imagine relationships beyond those of filiation. Julius presents his friend, professor Saito, a Japanese-American scholar of early English literature, as a “grandfatherly figure entirely unlike either of my own grandfathers”, and he notes how he felt he had “more in common with him than with the people who happened to be related to” him (10). On other occasions, Julius’s tendency to stay away from particular group attachments, clashes with other people’s expectations of solidarity. He gets irritated by African-American men’s gesture of calling him a “brother”, although when he again stands alone at the shore, looking towards Ellis Island, he is able to acknowledge the historical background for the greeting (“Blacks, ‘we blacks,’ had known rougher ports of entry: this, I could admit to myself now that my mood was less impatient, was what the cabdriver had meant”, 55). Julius’ detachment can at times be read as insensitive or even callous, ahead of itself in self-reflexive analysis but lacking in empathy, as when Julius goes to a detention center, where illegal immigrants are held for months waiting for trial, and listens to the story of a man who has fled from war-torn Liberia. Although Julius 152 Kaisa Kaakinen promises to come back to visit him again, he never does. Instead of being affected by the act of receiving someone else’s story, he mocks the idea of himself as a sympathetic listener, a “compassionate African who paid attention to the details of someone else’s life and struggle” (70). Julius even suggests that he instrumentalizes the Liberian man’s story, as he notes that his girlfriend Nadège might have fallen in love with the idea of Julius as a listener. As the narrative stages, Julius’ aloof stance in various situations, the melancholic gaze appears in an ambivalent light; it is a narrative strategy that is used to study its own limits. Furthermore, the narrative draws attention to blind spots in Julius’s perspective on his own actions, first only implicitly. Julius goes on a long holiday to Brussels, during which his patient V., a scholar of Native American history suffering from severe depression, tries to reach him in vain. Later we are told that V. has committed suicide. Only minor remarks of the narrator shed light on what has happened outside his own narrative perspective, and Julius himself seems not to pose the question of his own role in the events. But there is also a highly conspicuous moment, in which the narrative breaks with Julius’s position of a detached listener and observer. At the end of the novel, a woman called Moji, known to the narrator from his adolescent years in Nigeria, reveals that Julius raped her at a party and that the event has had a profoundly traumatizing effect on her (Cole 2011, 244–45). The passage highlights the novel’s attempt to point to vast gaps between experiences, even when they concern the same event. Julius seems unable to remember the event and even to acknowledge it in the narrative. The chronology of the story breaks down for a moment as if Julius the narrator first tried to resume his former dispassionate manner, before going back and delivering the discussion with Moji to readers. The distant and melancholic tone of the narrator begins to look like a symptom of avoidance and disavowal. First-time readers of Cole’s novel are forced to revise what they have read so far and to incorporate the subject position of a possible perpetrator into their reading of the narrative perspective. Both Sebald and Cole seem to use the melancholic mode as a narrative tool to bind together experiences across contexts that do not belong to an established and unifying affective narrative space such as that of the nation. Both narratives encourage drawing linkages across vast temporal and geographic distances, between contexts often discussed separately. However, in the case of Open City, the melancholic affective space, which tends to level out differences, breaks down in the end, when the narrator can no longer be seen as a mere observer. This highly self-reflexive narration promotes a mode of reading that directs readers back to the level of historical difference and specificity, instead of gesturing toward a transhistorical significance of the aesthetic correspondences. A passage in the second part of the novel illustrates well how the novel suggests a concern with the limits of an aesthetics based on crafting Melancholy and the Narration of Transnational Trauma 153 correspondences that evoke a meaningful whole. When visiting a church in Brussels, the narrator listens to music and observes a curious dissonance in it (Cole 2011, 137–40). He begins to wonder about the composition that operates with such a bold diabolus in musica—only to find that this dissonance is created by a vacuum cleaner operated by an African woman who is cleaning the church. He first compares the woman to Vermeer paintings—a gesture reminiscent of Sebald’s aesthetics of correspondences. But then he also realizes that while some weeks ago he would have assumed the woman to be Congolese—because of the colonial history of Belgium—he now wonders if she might come from Cameroon or even Rwanda. The narrator’s attempt to craft a meaningful whole out of the sounds he hears dissolves into the separate spheres of the musical composition and the vacuum cleaner as well as to the narrator’s musings about the multiple possible origins of the woman. Thus, while employing Julius’ melancholic gaze as the central perspective, Cole’s narration makes it much more difficult than that of Sebald for readers to take a comfortable position in it. Although the novel’s employment of an aesthetics of melancholy—its steady, aesthetically pleasing flow of language and poetics of correspondences—might be one of the reasons behind its international success, its self-reflexive questioning of melancholy as a response to transnational histories of violence cautions the temptation to see a definite linkage between a melancholic aesthetics of correspondences and a cosmopolitan ethics of transnational storytelling.11 Pieter Vermeulen points out that a program of cosmopolitanism can hardly be given in the mode of aesthetic discourse: “empathy and intercultural understanding alone cannot achieve the changes to which cosmopolitanism is committed, and … they can only point readers to the world outside—to a global landscape riven by injustice and inequality” (Vermeulen 2013, 42). Open City engages in a more minimal ethics of storytelling that explores the possibility of literary storytelling to make this condition of heterogeneous, disjunctive contemporaneity—the fact that individuals operate in not only different but also uneven spaces of possibility—something that can be experienced through narrative.12 The novel’s concern with disjunctive spaces of experience can be illustrated with the way in which the narrative connects two significant meetings Julius has on his holiday in Brussels. During his trip, he hears the life stories of two very different individuals connected to the same place. In a call shop, he meets a man called Farouq, an immigrant from Morocco working in the shop, a former student of literature and a current student of translation. Julius has lengthy discussions with Farouq about literature, terrorism, multiculturalism and Farouq’s conception of “difference”—that “people can live together but still keep their values intact” (Cole 2011, 112). Unlike in the case of the man from Liberia at the detention center, Julius seems affected by Farouq, disturbed by how Farouq’s reluctance to condemn the 9/11 attacks completely, might 154 Kaisa Kaakinen signal his having drifted too close to accept violence, but intrigued by his experiences and outlook, remarking how the learned words he uses have “far deeper resonance than … [they] would have in any academic situation” (105). But when Julius tries to transmit Farouq’s immigrant experience in Belgium to a woman he has first met on the plane, a Belgian-born surgeon Dr. Annette Maillotte now working in the US, she dismisses Farouq at the outset, claiming to know “the type”: Our society has made itself open for such people, but when they come in, all you hear is complaints. Why would you move somewhere only to prove how different you are? And why would a society like that want to welcome you? But if you live as long as I do, you will see that there is an endless variety of difficulties in the world. It’s difficult for everybody. I nodded. But it would have been different, I said, if only you’d heard him tell it. He’s not a complainer, and I don’t think he’s full of resentment, not really. I think the hurt is genuine. Well, I’m sure it is, she said, but if you’re too loyal to your suffering, you forget that others suffer, too. There’s a reason, she said, I had to leave Belgium and try to make my life in another country. I don’t complain and, to be honest, I really have little patience for people who do. You’re not a complainer, are you? (143) For some readers of Open City, Dr. Maillotte’s words may come as a small shock, as Julius has granted Farouq a lot of narrative space, and readers have, so to speak, “heard him tell” the story. In contrast, Dr. Maillotte exercises a form of discursive power by defining any word Farouq might utter as a “complaint”. Instead of engaging with the particularities of Farouq’s experience, she transposes the discussion to the general level, in which one can make no distinctions between her own suffering and that of Farouq—two people who have a drastically different social and economic position in Belgium. While Julius’s own engagement with Farouq’s story can be seen to grant a limited value to the sharing of experience, Julius cannot bridge the gap between Dr. Maillotte and Farouq. Julius becomes here a narrative medium for drawing the contours of this failure of understanding and posing an implicit question on the reasons behind it. My reading of Sebald’s poetics in this chapter focuses on the implied mode of melancholic identification and its limits as a generalized ethics of transnational storytelling. I have also noted that this does not exhaust the possible effects of Sebald’s texts as transnational narratives of trauma, because their undefined historical analogies may also produce modes of reading that do not follow the transhistorical suggestion of Sebald’s texts. But one may say that Sebald’s poetics of melancholy is marked by a stronger emphasis on similarity and the transhistorical Melancholy and the Narration of Transnational Trauma 155 evoked through aesthetic correspondences, whereas Cole focuses more attention on difference and discord, and this might have to do with the urgency with which the problem of relating radically different historical narratives and experiences poses itself to Cole. While Sebald’s books also trace wide transnational connections linked to the history of imperialism, Sebald wrote in a narrower frame of German and Western European historical discourses. The melancholic identification in Sebald begins to look like a temporal mode that has broken with the modern temporal regime and its belief in progress but remains structurally tied to it, a mode of avoiding the task of adopting a new sense of time able to conceive the present as both global and disjunctive. In contrast, Cole’s novel outlines the condition of people sharing the same present while being situated in vastly different material and narrative conditions of experience. Thus, Cole does not simply broaden Sebald’s geographic focus but changes the temporal regime used to narrate traumatic historical experiences. The comparison between the functions of melancholy in Sebald and Cole shows that inquiries into the ethical dimension of transnational literary narratives should not theorize on ethics of storytelling only on a general level but should ask how modes of storytelling function in concrete contexts of production and reception understood as uneven powerscapes. This analysis requires a discerning eye both on the properties of literary and artistic media, their modes of socially differentiated address and cultural comparison, and on the disjunctive, asymmetric modes of contact between historical imaginaries and orientations in increasingly transnational contexts of reception. Notes 1 See Cole’s interview in Zeit Online (Cole 2013). 2 As Aleida Assmann observes in her recent book on the modern temporal consciousness and its waning in the late twentieth-century, the idea of the present as a transition was part of a temporal regime of modernization, which structured the Western temporal consciousness for many centuries until it gradually lost its unquestioned status. In this temporal consciousness time was conceived as flowing securely along a path from the past to the future, and this notion of time was (and occasionally still is) often equated with an objective understanding of time not influenced by historically changing frames of human experience. (Assmann 2013). Max Silverman provides a comprehensive discussion of palimpsest as a figure of transcultural memory in his book Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (2013). While Silverman stresses that all memory is palimpsestic (superimposes traces of different times and places whether it is linked to personal experience or mediated through generations in the mode of postmemory), I want to draw attention to how palimpsestic figures in literary texts raise questions about the differentiation of reading positions, as readers fill in gaps according to their own historical imaginaries and orientations. 156 Kaisa Kaakinen 3 Martin Swales, for instance, connects the melancholic tone to the use of metonymy and the way the individual lives and traumas are represented in a respectful manner: “Sebald offers us the metonymy of melancholy—the adjacent, contiguous things of the pained condition, rather than the condition itself. He gives us the rings caused by the destruction and deprivation, rather than the haemorraging centre”. (Swales 2003, 86.) For an analysis of the figure of an empathetic listener in Sebald, see Aleida Assmann’s chapter in the current volume. 4 For readings of Sebald that highlight the potential of his texts to encourage linkages between multiple historical narratives across several national and cultural contexts, see Rothberg (2013) and Walkowitz (2006). 5 For a more detailed discussion of the tension between the poetics of weak analogy and the melancholic frame in Sebald and of the effects this tension produces when confronted with the contemporary readership that has a heterogeneous historical imaginary, see the chapter on Sebald in my book Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary. Reading Conrad, Weiss, Sebald (2017). 6 My approach to melancholy is indebted to historian and critical theorist Dominick LaCapra’s critique of melancholy as a problematic response to historical trauma that may lead to an avoidance of dealing directly with politically significant differences between subject positions (see LaCapra 1994, 209–210). 7 For other readings of Sebald that explore this aspect of Sebald’s texts, see Whitehead (2004) and Pflaumbaum (2014). 8 Whitehead draws here on an influential distinction between historical and structural trauma proposed by Dominick LaCapra, who has criticized a tendency in parts of trauma theory to conflate a posited absence of metaphysical foundations, formulated in poststructuralism and deconstruction, with the analysis of loss in the context of historical trauma. LaCapra’s critique draws attention to how blurring the distinction between the structural, metaphysical absence and the historical loss makes everyone seem equally a victim, renders all traumatic experiences fundamentally similar and undermines the possibility of individual agency: “One may well argue that the Holocaust represents losses of such magnitude that, while not absolutely unique, it may serve to raise the question of absence, for example, with respect to divinity. Still, despite the extremely strong temptation, one may question the tendency to reduce, or confusingly transfer the qualities of, one dimension of trauma to the other—to generalize structural trauma so that it absorbs or subordinates the significance of historical trauma, thereby rendering all references to the latter merely illustrative, homogeneous” (LaCapra 2001, 82). In the context of Sebald studies, the problem of identification has also been discussed in relation to Sebald’s own subject position as a second-generation non-Jewish German (see Cosgrove 2006). 9 The melancholic mode not only risks conflating structural and historical trauma but also makes it impossible to distinguish between the structural trauma of the human condition and the historical trauma of structural inequality. Stef Craps has argued that the ongoing forms of traumatization do not fit the distinction between historical and structural trauma, because they are often caused by continuous or insidious forms of oppression instead of a shattering event (Craps 2013, 4–6, 32–33). For a critique of using the concept of melancholy as an analytical tool in the context of postcolonial trauma studies, see Kabir (2014). 10 “Janines letzter Arbeitsplatz ist ein mehr oder weniger in die Mitte ihres Büros gerückter Sessel gewesen, auf dem man sie, wenn man an ihrer stets Melancholy and the Narration of Transnational Trauma 157 offenen Tür vorbeikam, sitzen sah, entweder vornübergebeugt kritzelnd auf einer Schreibunterlage, die sie auf den Knien hielt, oder zurückgelehnt und in Gedanken verloren. Als ich gelegentlich zu ihr sagte, sie gleiche, zwischen ihren Papieren, dem bewegungslos unter den Werkzeugen der Zerstörung verharrenden Engel der Dürerschen Melancholie, da antwortete sie mir, daß die scheinbare Unordnung in ihren Dingen in Wahrheit so etwas wie eine vollendete oder doch der Vollendung zustrebende Ordnung darstelle”. (Sebald 1997, 18–19). 11 For readings that interrogate directly the relationship of Open City to the concept and discourses of cosmopolitanism, see Breger (2015), Hallemeier (2013), Oniwe (2016), and Vermeulen (2013). For an essay by Sebald, in which he discusses melancholy as an ethical mode, see Sebald (1994, 12); for an affirmative reading of Sebald’s stance see Santner (2006, 44–45); for a critique see Whitehead (2004), Cosgrove (2006), and Kaakinen (2017). 12 For a comprehensive theorization of the concept of the possible in relation to the ethics of storytelling, see Meretoja (2017). In Meretoja’s narrative hermeneutics a historical context is seen as a space of possibilities that “encourages certain modes of experience, thought, and action, and discourages or disallows others” (Meretoja 2017). References Assmann, Aleida. 2013. Ist die Zeit aus den Fugen? Aufstieg und Fall des Zeitregimes der Moderne. München: Carl Hanser Verlag. Breger, Claudia. 2015. “Transnationalism, Colonial Loops, and the Vicissitudes of Cosmopolitan Affect: Christian Kracht’s Imperium and Teju Cole’s Open City”. In Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature, edited by Elisabeth Herrmann, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner, 106–24. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Cole, Teju. 2011. Open City. New York: Random House. Cole, Teju. 2012. “Always Returning”. The New Yorker, July 30. www.newyorker. com/books/page-turner/always-returning. Cole, Teju. 2013. “Die Situation in den USA ist abscheulich”. An Interview by Joel von Fokke. Zeit Online, June 12. www.zeit.de/kultur/literatur/2013-06/ interview-teju-cole-open-city. Cosgrove, Mary. 2006. “Melancholy Competitions: W. G. Sebald Reads Günter Grass and Wolfgang Hildesheimer”. German Life and Letters 59 (2): 217–32. Craps, Stef. 2013. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich. 2014. Our Broad Present. Time and Contemporary Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Hallemeier, Katherine. 2013. “Literary Cosmopolitanisms in Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief and Open City”. Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 44 (2–3): 239–50. Hartog, François. 2015. Regimes of Historicity. Presentism and Experiences of Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Kaakinen, Kaisa. 2017. Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary. Reading Conrad, Weiss, Sebald. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. 2014. “Affect, Body, Place. Trauma Theory in the World”. In The Future of Trauma Theory. Contemporary Literary and 158 Kaisa Kaakinen Cultural Criticism, edited by Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone, 63–76. London: Routledge. LaCapra, Dominick. 1994. Representing the Holocaust. History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca: Cornell. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins. Meretoja, Hanna. 2017. Ethics of Storytelling. Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oniwe, Bernard Aye. 2016. “Cosmopolitan Conversation and Challenge in Teju Cole’s Open City”. Ufahamu 39 (1): 43–65. Pflaumbaum, Christoph. 2014. Melancholisches Schreiben nach Auschwitz. Studien zu Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Jean Améry und W. G. Sebald. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Rothberg, Michael. 2013. “Multidirectional Memory and the Implicated Subject: On Sebald and Kentridge”. In Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, edited by Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik, 39–58. New York: Routledge. Santner, Eric L. 2006. On Creaturely Life. Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sebald, W. G. 1994. Die Beschreibung des Unglücks. Zur österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis Handke. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Sebald, W. G. 1997. Die Ringe des Saturn. Eine englische Wallfahrt. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Sebald, W. G. 2001. Austerlitz. München and Wien: Hanser. Sebald, W. G. 2002. The Rings of Saturn. Translated by Michael Hulse. London: Vintage. Sebald, W. G. 2011. Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Modern Library. Silverblatt, Michael. 2007. “A Poem of an Invisible Subject”. In The Emergence of Memory. Conversations with W. G. Sebald, edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, 77–86. New York: Seven Stories Press. Silverman, Max. 2013. Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Swales, Martin. 2003. “Intertextuality, Authenticity, Metonomy? On Reading W. G. Sebald”. In The Anatomist of Melancholy: Essays in Memory of W. G. Sebald, edited by Rüdiger Görner, 81–87. Munich: Iudicium verlag GmbH. Vermeulen, Pieter. 2013. “Flights of Memory: Teju Cole’s Open City and the Limits of Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism”. Journal of Modern Literature 37 (1): 40–57. Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2006. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press. Whitehead, Anne. 2004. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 10 Memory as Imagination in Elina Hirvonen’s When I Forgot Riitta Jytilä In recent years, cultural memory studies have devoted more and more attention to the imaginative and future-oriented aspects of memory. Many contemporary scholars, such as Michael Rothberg (2009) and Max Silverman (2013), have stressed the close relationship between memory and imagination, and they have drawn attention to memory’s capacity to build new solidarities. Also, Anna Reading (2002, 186) criticizes a hegemonic view of memory as separate from imagination. According to her, late capitalist Western cultures seem obsessed with memory and remembering. Its dominant conceptualization of memory is based on a sequential and teleological view of time underpinned by an either/or logic common to Western philosophical traditions. Thus, memory is distinct from fantasy and is conceived as being in relation to another aspect of the past—history. Literature and art more widely have great potential in imagining and dreaming of possible lives, and particularly artists of the younger generation have been increasingly interested in the imaginative potential of the past. Changes in the forms of cultural remembrance and the rise of the new memory studies started after the generation who had experienced the Holocaust began to fade away and media products became the only means of making experience available to others (Erll 2008, 9). This creative force of memory is noticeable in many conceptualizations of memory of the new century, such as postmemory (Marianne Hirsch) and prosthetic memory (Alison Landsberg). Astrid Erll (2008, 2) suggests a provisional definition for cultural memory as “the interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts”. Although she aims to keep the definition broad, the imaginative potential of memory in literature and other art forms could be stressed even more. For example, in Deleuzian thinking, the conception of memory is not necessarily linked to “real” experience but to the imagination. In this sense, memory is no longer psychological but a faculty in which individual consciousness and history are profoundly related (Deleuze 1989; Silverman 2013, 5–6). The past is not a separate moment in time but a dimension of the present and the future (Parr 2008, 24). In a related manner, feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti emphasizes memory as a productive and affirmative force. Shaping memory as imagination 160 Riitta Jytilä also entails reinventing the self through affective encounters. Instead of molar memory that represents the self as a linear and self-present entity, Braidotti suggests a molecular nomadic counter-memory, in which the self endures but the capacity of endurance is collective and shared through narratives, stories and affects (Braidotti 2008, 53). From its first moments, remembering is understood as collective, intensely involved with power-related cultural practices and the politics of imagination. This chapter focuses on the debut novel When I Forgot by Elina Hirvonen, contemporary Finnish novelist, journalist and a documentary film-maker. When I Forgot, published in Finnish in 2005 and in English in 2007, enjoyed international success, most probably because it was the first Finnish novel dealing with the experience and aftermath of 9/11 and thereby could be part of so-called “WTC [World Trade Center]-literature”.1 The novel is a story about Anna’s childhood and adult life darkened by the mental illness of his brother Joona. In the novel, Anna has come to the café to read Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, seeking refuge from her unpleasant thoughts in this other world, with its account of one day in the lives of three different women in three different eras, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In the café, Anna recalls her earlier life and the moments of painful memories that are intertwined with the stories her parents and grandparents have told her about their lives. Anna has fallen in love with Ian, who has moved from New York to Finland to teach creative writing in the aftermath of 9/11. In dialogue with Ian and his own personal traumas, Anna’s memories no longer leave her alone but rather come inescapably to life. When I Forgot could be characterized as a so-called circadian novel in which all the action takes place in a single day in April, but inner, psychological and subjective time makes it possible to move between different time levels. As the title of the novel suggests, it deals with the interplay of forgetting and remembering in a very personal manner and thus seems to invite the reader into the realm of intimate experiences and the recollection of past, traumatic memories. However, this chapter aims to argue that while it is usually speculative fiction that is considered to deal with the “what if” scenarios of life, the question of the (im)possibilities of life and the role of imagination are also crucial in narratives about remembering. In addition, speculations about (im)possible lives and lives worth telling render visible the political and ethical dimensions of remembering. All Hirvonen’s novels speculate about the questions of possible past and future. Hirvonen’s second novel Kauimpana kuolemasta (2010, “Furthest from Death”) focuses on colonial history and sexual violence discussed through the intersecting life stories of Westerners and Africans. In her latest novel, Kun aika loppuu (2015, “When Time Runs Out”) Hirvonen considers the violent consequences of global warming and widens the perspective from the significance of human life to the Memory as Imagination in Elina Hirvonen’s When I Forgot 161 larger images of destruction caused by human agency. Life stories are stories for people, but they are not always stories about people. In When I Forgot, the memory of the Second World War and the Vietnam War is the central framework through which Hirvonen addresses complex ethical and political questions and present-day topical issues, such as the aftermath of 9/11. In addition, the process of remembering is tied to imagining alternative life stories, particularly regarding Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. Anna has met her boyfriend Ian at the university in Finland where Ian came from the United States to teach creative writing. Ian introduces her to Virginia Woolf’s life and writing and gives his students an assignment to write about the worst thing that ever happened to them. For Anna, “[m]emory is one of life’s burdens that we can do nothing about” (Hirvonen 2007, 5). All Anna wants is an escape from memory. Despite their varying subject matters, Hirvonen’s novels always return to the question of the possibility of the future; and more importantly, they do it in a way that stresses power-relations and the affirmation of “marginalized others”. In contemporary Finnish literature more widely, the growth of memory culture and the experience of war and a traumatic past are widely discussed. In particular, traumatic, intimate experiences and the ways of “othering” based on gender, race and class are emphasized. It has become noteworthy that instead of national unity, religion, ideology, ethnicity, and gender are increasingly the central coordinates of cultural remembering (see Erll 2011, 2). As Astrid Erll (2011, 4) observes, memory proves to be a fundamentally political phenomenon with strong ethical implications. Memory is inseparable from the issue of authority; who has the authority to look back, to describe and to define the past and the present (see Reading 2002, 2). Those “others” who have been historically marginalized and reduced to the less than human status of disposable bodies raise issues of power and exclusion, politics and the ethics of remembering. Feminist and post-colonial theory have proposed new alternative ways of looking at the “human” from a more inclusive and diverse angle by embracing the politics of location and experimenting with new models of the self (Braidotti 2013, 15, 28, 39). Thereby the ethical and political potential of emphasizing memory as imaginative lies exactly in imagining and speculating about (im)possible lives. In the following sections, I focus on memory as imagination from three angles. First I discuss the imaginative potential of transnational memory and reading and writing as the processes through which layers of past become part of the orientation towards the future. After that I move on to discuss memory as affective, concentrating particularly on the promise of happiness as a main goal of life and exploring alternative, more speculative ways of telling memories. In the final section, I consider the relationship between personal and political remembrance by asking who’s suffering the story is dealing with. 162 Riitta Jytilä From Mental to Material Memory: Reading and Writing Lives In Finland, literature and particularly the genres of war literature and the historical novel have traditionally dealt with great Finnish national and historical events, such as independence, the Civil War in 1918 and the Second World War. Literature has served the needs of ideological nation building and earlier, literature formed a significant part of national culture and the difference between “us” and “them”, establishing Finnish literature as distinct from other national literatures (see e.g. Pollari et al. 2015, 8–9). More recent Finnish literature has been increasingly concerned with questions about transnational memory, challenging the very existence of any culturally distinct and separate entity which might be called “Finnish literature”. The concept of transnationalism has come to highlight cross-border social and cultural relations that are upheld by other kinds of actors than those based on the nation state (Pollari et al. 2015, 14).2 For instance, Katja Kettu has considered the Second World War and the co-operation between Finland and Germany (the war in Lapland) in her novel Kätilö (Midwife) and highlighted the memory of the Holocaust as part of Finnish literary memory culture. The novel has attracted a lot of attention, above all in Germany. The topic of gendered and sexual violence during the Second World War has featured in several novels, Sofi Oksanen’s Purge being internationally the most well-known example. Purge and Oksanen’s oeuvre more widely could be considered as prime examples of geographical and linguistic border crossings (see for example Pollari et al. 2015). The shift from national to transnational perspectives also has an impact on acts of remembering, which is now considered to be both a transnational and spatial phenomenon. Memories migrate from one continent to another and are brought into new social constellations and political contexts (Assmann and Conrad 2010, 2–6). Remembering could reinforce nationalistic tendencies, but transnational sites of memory such as 9/11 demonstrate that we can no longer think solely in terms of national memory (Erll 2011, 2). In When I Forgot, cultures are not considered as separate and pure categories but always in some ways in connection with each other. The New York Times book review wrote, regarding the novel, how the September 11 attacks have been felt throughout the world, even in distant Finland (Schillinger 2009). Cultural memories are available more widely; and, memories travel across borders and are in a constant state of change. For the characters in the novel, September 11 is a watershed in their lives, when each of them realizes that something irreversible has happened. 9/11 is a moment in history that brings forth other histories of suffering. For Anna, 9/11 is the day her brother Joona, classified as mentally disturbed, calls her in panic after watching on television as the planes crashed into the twin towers in New York and Memory as Imagination in Elina Hirvonen’s When I Forgot 163 thousands of people died. Anna and Joona grew up with a father who had himself been raised by a disturbed veteran, prone to violence after his return from the battlefields of the Second World War. The war has changed the life of Anna’s and Joona’s grandfather, and the spiral of violence, silence and shame continues to Anna’s and Joona’s father. The war on terror has also had a memorial impact on Finnish literature and particularly on When I Forgot. It appears in the novel through the character of Ian and his family history, which emphasizes the local specificity of memory (see Assmann 2010, 103). For Anna’s American boyfriend Ian, it is just after September 11 when he realizes that his father, who had fought in Vietnam and returned home mentally ill, would never recover. Long before 9/11, Ian is sitting in the movie theater watching the film Apocalypse, Now and starting to feel sick: “He had passed from the world into the film, into his father’s mind or into a new reality, in which the images on the screen and the memories of all veterans blurred together and formed a web that he could not escape” (Hirvonen 2007, 49). Different times and places, even other people’s experiences, filter through Ian’s mind. For him, both cultural and individual memories serve as the basis for imagination. Memories are not his own but they form a web that creates connections between different bodies: Movement opens the space for affective ties and shared memories. Subject formation takes place in-between spaces (local/global, present/past) that flow and connect the binaries (see Braidotti 2013, 164). Alison Landsberg uses the term prosthetic memory to describe this form of cultural memory, in which recollection of the past is deeply felt although never lived. Memories in the age of mass culture could be acquired by anyone. (Landsberg 2004, 2–3) Prosthetic memory emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past and at an experiential site such as a movie theater or museum. Technologies, such as cinema, can structure imagined communities that do not necessary presume any kind of affinity among community members. Memory is experienced by the body and it derives much of its power through the affect which is associated with it (Landsberg 2004, 8). In When I Forgot, the movie theater is a site of traveling memories, acquired by affective experiencing, not living through the real traumatic events. After the terrorist attack in New York, Ian does not know how to act. In his bewilderment, he packs his bags and moves to Finland as an exchange scholar. His life becomes intertwined with Anna’s and Joona’s lives and their memories of violence. Besides the movie theater, the crucial sites of affective experiencing in the novel are the practices of writing and reading. The close relation between memory and acts of reading and writing is developed in relation to earlier literature and particularly Virginia Woolf, “who filled her pockets with rocks and walked into the water” (Hirvonen 2007, 2). The close relation between memory and imagination is explicitly emphasized 164 Riitta Jytilä as the main purpose of writing and literary imagination. Ian tells Anna why he has become a literary scholar: “I’m convinced that it’s important to remember. Only by remembering can we understand something about ourselves. But I happen to have a terrible memory. I wanted to fill in the gaps by stealing from others” (11). The emphasis on stealing challenges the ownership of memory. This can be elucidated through Renate Lachmann’s (2008) notion of intertextuality as the “memory of literature”. Lachmann considers literature as continually changing textual memory space. As a collection of intertexts, all texts participate, repeat, and constitute acts of memory (Lachmann 2008, 305). Intertextuality could also be characterized in Landsberg’s terms as “prosthetic”. Prosthetic memory creates the conditions for ethical thinking by encouraging people to feel connected to one another while recognizing the alterity of the “other” (Landsberg 2004, 9). Literature as an experiential site deploys cultural memories that do not “naturally” belong to anyone. In contrast to the common definition of remembering as a cognitive process that takes place in individual brains, Astrid Erll (2008, 4) stresses that in literature memory work happens not so much on the level of mental or cognitive memory but on the level of material memory that makes it possible to consider the specific medium through which memories are produced. Literary memories should not be considered merely to be the thoughts shuffling back and forth in an individual mind; rather, they are constituted in the processes of writing and reading. Writing and reading others’ lives support the idea that inner speech and thoughts are socially constituted and that literary imagination depends upon our coexistence with others. Happy Memories Revisited Hirvonen’s novel is imbued with affects, such as hope and despair, happiness and sorrow, dreams and anxieties that are crucial in providing orientations towards the future. Affect seems to offer moments of promise for the future. However, it is unpredictable whether the moment of promise will be realized as somehow better or worse than the “now”. (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, 9) Anna’s search for a happy and meaningful life makes her imagine the ordinary, conventional life that can be told to others. Anna and Joona’s father is a priest, who is portrayed as a biblical figure of protection and punishment, sin and atonement. He takes his family on a ride in an old hearse and this memory of Anna’s is colored by the fairy tale—like and culturally canonized stories of happy families and coherent, meaningful lives where no room is left for the sorrow or the life stories of the victimized: We’re a happy family, I thought. I felt like the sentence had flown into my mind from the page of a book. I imagined myself a rosy-cheeked Memory as Imagination in Elina Hirvonen’s When I Forgot 165 pigtailed girl from a children’s book, off on a huge exciting adventure for which someone had already written a happy ending. (Hirvonen 2007, 11) The father drives so fast that the joyride ends in an accident. Joona challenges his father’s authority by claiming that it was the devil that went into him and got him to drive so fast. After that, Joona was beaten by his father for the first time. The family is often seen as a privileged site of memorial transmission, based on familial transfer of embodied experience to the next generation. Although memories of family seem private and intimate experiences, they are always shaped by collective fantasies and stories, which have an impact on how we remember (Hirsch 2008, 110–14). The demand for a happy ending is intertwined with the expectation of a happy family and it regulates the process of remembering. Emotions impact on how we remember and Anna speculates about the past by concentrating on feelings, particularly narrative happiness as the promise of a good life. The novel also takes account of the possible hypocrisy of moral emotions, such as empathy. For Anna, caring is a hypocritical word, “poisoned by children’s songs and politicians” (Hirvonen 2007, 7). Feminist philosophers have considered the political and ethical implications of the conception of the good life and the idea that there are paths to follow to gain happiness and the social good. Sara Ahmed (2010) has noted that usually happiness is considered as an essential object of human desire, namely the conception of life as the project to become happy. This conception of happiness can be normative and moralizing in that it idealizes middle-class norms, such as marriage, family life, and (mental) health, and excludes experiences on grounds of gender, sexuality, class and age. Definitions of a happy life are strictly tied to questions of how we define normal and deviant. Happiness, defined in this sense, becomes a goal which excludes other possibilities as if decisions about the future are already made (Ahmed 2010, 217). In Ahmed’s analysis, unhappiness is a mood surrounding Clarissa Dalloway who has become almost invisible, because she has taken a middle course in her life as if she lived someone else’s life (Ahmed 2010, 67, 70–71). Just as in Mrs. Dalloway, which was published less than a decade after the end of the First World War, in When I Forgot, war and terror are frames in which micro level affective constellations are shaped. Anna’s “memory” of future happiness is not a real one. It is imbued with power-related affects and cultural conceptions of the good life. The narrative crisis of happiness comes about because of the failure to accomplish the already-told ideal life story. Imagination renders visible political and power-related implications of such a narrative, and as such poses questions of how different forms of memories are classified and inscribed by power; implications for whose lives and what kind of lives 166 Riitta Jytilä are worth telling. This could also be seen in Joona’s school essay on the theme “Why I’m happy” that lists, in an almost ironical tone, the reasons to be happy; family and the love of the Heavenly Father, gifts, his possible future as a Nobel prize-winning scientist, living in a free and safe country. Lauren Berlant has stated that the feeling of normativity and scenes of conventional desire, such as the love plot, family fame, work, wealth, or property are sometimes considered as the solutions that help to survive the trauma and pain of the past, as if dealing with bad memories makes life happy, as if happiness is something to be (morally) earned after all the struggles of life (see Berlant 2010, 112–13). More than happiness as a main goal of life, the novel stresses the sorrows, discontinuities and incomprehensibilities of life stories. Narrative is often considered in terms of coherence that is assumed to be the norm for a good and meaningful life story. The narrative coherence paradigm could be ethically suspicious, because it privileges middle-class conventionality and the vision of the life as a teleological project while rejecting the unexpectedness of life (Hyvärinen et al. 2010, 4–11). 3 However, memory’s time is not linear and chronological. In the novel, memories do not underpin a predictable future; instead the self is affective and fluid, prone to the unexpectedness of life. In contrast with the demand of narrative coherence, Rosi Braidotti (2002, 20–22) emphasizes narrativity as a collective, politically-invested process of contributing to the significant figurations of the kind of subjects we are in the process of becoming. Anna does not want to visit her brother in the mental hospital but seeks moments of immersion in distant and imagined lives: I want this moment, nothing more. I want to be any woman on a sunny day on a park bench, waiting for someone or going somewhere. To read this book. I want to be in 1920s England, where a weary writer looks at a man and a woman disappearing into the street and feels lonely, feels the presence of the devil. (Hirvonen 2007, 55) Although subjective time makes it possible to move between narrative time levels and resist the demands of narrative causality, it is not psychological—representing the inner world of the Anna—but it is shared in stories and affective attachments with other people and other times. There is no pre-existing “truth” which the text records or delivers; rather, the text engenders affects, interconnections and relations (Braidotti 2013, 165). In contrast to fixed lives and predictable life stories, storytelling lives in time and the time produces a story which is open to the future. Also, readers’ values and historical location define a desirable future and the premises for a good life. As readers, we engage with fiction as embodied beings with our own desires and anxieties, Memory as Imagination in Elina Hirvonen’s When I Forgot 167 values and beliefs, memories and fantasies (Meretoja 2017). According to Molly Andrews (2014), the use of a narrative for exploring the ways in which human beings operate within complex social environments has grown exponentially, but the role of imagination often remains invisible. In When I Forgot, remembering is imbued with affective imagination that is inseparable from “the real”. The notion that our stories are already told and that we should know in advance what the future should be is subject to severe criticism in the novel. The story of a happy family and normal childhood does not help characters to process the past as a meaningful part of their lives. Ian tells himself stories in which his father “came back from war and understood the meaning of life” (Hirvonen 2007, 41). He insists that he knows why Anna’s father has been violent, but there is no coherent story Anna could tell Ian, only bits and pieces of stories she has heard from her grandmother. In Hirvonen’s novel, the process of remembering is not about retrieving events from the past in a linear manner but, rather, it activates the speculations and alternative life stories in which the self is not pre-fixed, already “told”. The story world is speculative since there is no clear distinction between what “really” happened and what is “only” imagined. Storytelling is not thereby limited to the conventional narrative and the demand for a happy ending but remains open to affective unpredictability and unforeseeable shared moments in time. Splitting the Self—Reflections on Speculative Imagination When I Forgot intertwines familial, micropolitical narrative and personal storytelling with more global and collective phenomena of remembrance and thereby poses questions about the relationship between personal and political memory. The novel includes Joona’s letter to the president of the United States, George Bush. Epistolarity could be defined as an in-between space, bringing together the public and the private (see Braidotti 2008, 50) and this is also the case in Joona’s letter where individual suffering and personal paranoia of mental illness intertwine with the histories of political violence, the aftermath of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. President George Bush, I’m writing to you to warn you of the consequences your planned attack on Iraq will have. You didn’t take seriously the letter I wrote to you during the Afghanistan war so; you’re a murderer. The Disease of the Modern World. This is not a game. PEOPLE die there. Am I a worse person to tell you this just because for a long time I haven’t seen anything but these walls outside my head and everything inside them? Or is my voice the sound of silence that you must listen to? I CAN FEEL IT when they’re shot. Life is not a Grand Narrative, Mr. Bush. Inside these walls that’s very clear. 168 Riitta Jytilä I must fight against your Narrative. I’ve thought of self-deception as an existential question. Your self-deception is beyond the pale. It’s a denial of the value of other people’s existence and by killing others you deny your own value. Generations and generations will follow whose memories you destroyed before they were even born. You Will Not Be Forgiven. God must punish you. Someone has to. Sincerely yours, Joona Louhiniitty, Finland, Europe. (Hirvonen 2007, 127–28) When I Forgot deals with the era of terrorism, the paranoia of our time. Joona’s letter is a counter-narrative to the national narrative, presented by the most intimate means of communication, a letter. In the letter, Joona warns the president not to attack Iraq and insists that he is able to experience the pain of all those who suffer because of the megalomaniac realization of the nationalist Grand narrative and forthcoming genocide in the name of nationalism and imperialism. War breaks up communities and memories, and false hopes and promises are served to people. Joona reminds President Bush that he had been destroying the memories of whole generations before they were even born. Joona’s letter is a warning—almost apocalyptic in tone—about what would happen in the future if the Unites States were to wage war against Iraq. At the same time, the letter shows two forms of hope, one of which is negative and the other is more productive. According to Mary Zournazi, at the heart of terror, there is a hope based on fear and emotional security. Hope is understood in a negative frame when insecurity felt by people becomes part of a call for national unity and identity, a future ideal of what we imagine ourselves to be. In contrast with the idea of this negative form of hope as a means of supporting national unity, the feeling of relating to other people increases the prospects of hope in more productive ways; as a hope that allows different histories, memories and experiences to enter present conversations about our cultural senses of belonging. Affects underpin possible attachments and feelings of belonging and as such, they offer the prospect of something yet-to-be. The “not yet” of affect could be considered as a promise for the future (Zournazi 2002, 15–18). In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Smith and Mrs. Dalloway never meet, but their sufferings interweave because they share the same world. As affect, sorrow sustains remembering when sharing is not possible (Ahmed 2010, 70–79). In a related manner, through the experience of his own vulnerability and the precariousness of his own life Joona can feel other people’s pain. Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. Dependency on others does not necessarily require familiarity or relations of love or even of care but includes those who remain anonymous, those whom we cannot name and do not know (Butler 2010, 14). Memory as Imagination in Elina Hirvonen’s When I Forgot 169 Imaging otherness serves as a possibility of constituting a countermemory to the national narrative that devalues life in a violent way. Memory is never purely individual but always inherently shaped collectively. In this sense, memory is no longer compatible with the notion of a rational or self-sufficient subject, whose constitution takes place only in his or her mind (Braidotti 2008, 46, 56). Within the context of Hirvonen’s novel, what Braidotti calls “the potentia of the subject” (54) could be elaborated as “a speculative subjectivity”, an open-ended and inter-relational self. According to Braidotti (47–48), constant transformations are also the basis for ethical empowerment, since the desire is not to preserve but to change. In the novel, these constant changes are considered through Joona’s hallucinating mind. Joona hallucinates about a stranger who looks at him from the mirror. The man has a thin face and a sad look, his eyes stare right through Joona. The eyes of the stranger would not leave him alone, though he turns away and breaks the mirror. Joona asks his sister for help but still refuses to take his medications because he thinks he has finally started to figure out who he really is. The stranger in the mirror is an image of his mind falling apart, but it is only when he sees this disturbing figure that he starts to see reality. Joona’s schizophrenic hallucinating enables him to move beyond fixed identities by sensing the bodies and feelings of others in distant places. As he is mentally disturbed, Joona is not capable of taking care of himself and he is irresponsible and unable to make sense of his own life. Even though classified as schizophrenic, Joona is not escaping from reality but sensing other people’s pain more clearly. Those nameless people are outside of his life experiences and bonds of “familial love and caring”. The figure of the other should not be dismissed as a delusion; rather, schizophrenic doubling makes it possible to create imagined communities and helps reshape the circles of “us” and “them”. Representations of memories, hopes and dreams and the process of recalling forgotten memories by bringing them to consciousness are often thought to make literary characters more rich, coherent and human. It is perhaps easier to identify with multidimensional characters. This is because they embody the richness and fullness of human life, with all its nuances of emotions. In When I Forgot, however, the question is not so much about the depth of the characters as about what kind of interconnections are enabled by the production of new memories. Experience is born from the affective encounter with others. It is not so much that Joona’s capability to be affected by other people’s pain makes him a compassionate person and moral agent readers could identify with, but the novel poses the question of whose suffering and whose memories are worth telling. According to Birgit Neumann (2008, 334), for a long time, no genre designation existed for texts that represent processes of remembering, but the term “fictions of memory” has been proposed for such works. 170 Riitta Jytilä “Fictions of memory” refer to stories that individuals or cultures tell about their past to answer questions such as “who am I” or “who are we”. The novel does not provide simple answers to these questions but poses more complex ponderings about the power-related impact we have on others we live with and, more importantly, who are those “we” we try to understand and tell stories about. As a literary scholar, Ian has been wondering “when western literature had begun to reflect a concept of humans as unique individuals” (Hirvonen 2007, 15). The story is about Joona, Anna, Ian, and the sorrows of their lives and family histories. In addition, however, it emphasizes those nameless people, almost not characters at all, whose memories are not even born and who are in the periphery of the story. In this sense, there are more voices than represented minds in the novel. The transformative power of subjectivity makes room for otherness and speculations about others’ lives. Conclusion What follows from the notion of memory as imagination is that it allows us to go beyond literary representations of individual minds in the psychological sense and provide more social and future-oriented ways of considering the violent stories of history. The inter-relation between memory and imagination thereby opens a space for considering the utopian impulses and sites of solidarity in literature. Although Hirvonen’s novel deploys modernist conventions focused on the inner life of the experiencing, feeling and remembering self, memories are not individual, but culturally shared and open to an unexpected future. Hirvonen’s novel includes many layers of history (The Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Invasion of Iraq, the post 9/11 world) and it focuses on the experiential and affective dimension of the events with which it deals. The voice of the (literary) other is part of even the most private experience, and experience could be understood in ways which are far more collective and “external” rather than individual and interior and as such it participates in the processes of global mourning. When I Forgot deals with contemporary transcultural dreams and anxieties flavored by historical imagination. Instead of “owning” and living through others’ memories, it makes it possible to deal with shared, cultural and collective experiences in the spirit of new global memory studies, where memories are considered to travel between different social constellations and political contexts. Beyond national memory, memory is considered as a social phenomenon and as such, it deals with the micro levels of everyday life. As an account of individual process of remembering When I Forgot offers a liberating story in which we can follow how the denial of memory may be conquered so that characters are released from their traumatic pasts. In contrast with that, the novel is critical towards the idea of remembering as a healing process that Memory as Imagination in Elina Hirvonen’s When I Forgot 171 provides a happy ending. Instead of the promise of happiness, the novel emphasizes that many paths are possible and that hope persists, and it sketches the prospect of an open future, something yet-to-be. The future-oriented dimension of memory does not guarantee that the future would straightforwardly be “better” and the notion of memory is far from neutral when considering the many sources of difference between individuals, such as class, nationality, race or gender. The novel emphasizes how the processes of “othering” influence the ways we remember by showing that the mechanisms of remembering are not inseparable from the social locations which define the (im)possibilities of memory. Instead of a self-centered concentration on selfhood and its in-depth dimensions the novel makes it possible to think that remembering could entail creative storytelling about the lives of past and future others. Notes 1 Novels included in the “WTC-literature” would be works such as Don DeLillo’s Falling man (2007), Martin Amis’s The Second Plane (2008), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) or Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005). 2 Noteworthy here is that the relation between national and transnational is not a matter of opposition, because a discussion on border crossings presupposes borders, and an analysis of transnationalism necessarily reproduces the idea of nation (see e.g. Pollari et al. 2015, 8). 3 In this critique, Hyvärinen et al refers particularly to Alasdair MacIntyre’s conception of the narrativity of life. References Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Amis, Martin. 2008. The Second Plane. London: Jonathan Cape. Andrews, Molly. 2014. Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Assmann, Aleida. 2010. “The Holocaust—a Global Memory? Extensions and Limits of a New Memory Community”. In Memory in a Global Age. Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, edited by Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, 97–117. Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Assmann, Aleida, and Sebastian Conrad. 2010. “Introduction”. In Memory in a Global Age. Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, edited by Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, 1–16. Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Berlant, Lauren. 2010. “Cruel Optimism”. In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 93–117. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses. Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. 172 Riitta Jytilä Braidotti, Rosi. 2008. “Intensive Genre and the Demise of Gender”. Angelaki. Journal of Theoretical Humanities 13 (2): 45–57. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Malden: Polity Press. Butler, Judith. 2010. Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2. The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. DeLillo, Don. 2007. Falling man. New York: Scribner. Erll, Astrid. 2008. “Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction”. In Cultural Memory Studies. An Interdisciplinary and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 1–15. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Erll, Astrid. 2011. Memory in Culture. Translated by Sara B. Young. Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2005. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Hirsch, Marianne. 2008. “The Generation of Postmemory”. Poetics Today (29) 1: 103–28. Hirvonen, Elina. 2007 [2005]. When I Forgot. Translated by Douglas Robinson. London: Portobello Books. Hyvärinen, Matti, Lars-Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo, and Maria Tamboukou. 2010. “Beyond Narrative Coherence. An Introduction”. In Beyond Narrative Coherence, edited by Matti Hyvärinen, Lars-Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo, and Maria Tamboukou, 1–16. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lachmann, Renate. 2008. “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature”. In Cultural Memory Studies. An Interdisciplinary and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 301–10. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Landsberg, Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. McEwan, Ian. 2005. Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape. Meretoja, Hanna. 2017. Ethics of Storytelling. Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Neumann, Birgit. 2008. “The Literary Representation of Memory”. In Media and Cultural Memory: Cultural Memory Studies: An Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 333–43. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Parr, Adrian. 2008. Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory and the Politics of Trauma. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pollari, Mikko, Hanna-Leena Nissilä, Kukku Melkas, Olli Löytty, Ralf Kauranen, and Heidi Grönstrand. 2015. “National, Transnational and Entangled Literatures: Methodological Considerations Focusing on the Case of Finland”. In Rethinking National Literatures and the Literary Canon in Scandinavia, edited by Ann-Sofie Lönngren, Heidi Grönstrand, Dag Heede, and Anne Heith, 2–29. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Reading, Anna. 2002. The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust. Gender, Culture and Memory. Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Memory as Imagination in Elina Hirvonen’s When I Forgot 173 Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Schillinger, Liesl. 2009. “Hush, Memory”. The New York Times Sunday Book Review. May 8. Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg. 2010. “An Inventory of Shimmers”. In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 1–25. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Silverman, Max. 2013. Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Woolf, Virginia. 1925. Mrs Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press. Zournazi, Mary. 2002. Hope: New Philosophies for Change. New York: Routledge. 11 Popular Representation of East Germany Whose History Is It?1 Molly Andrews I am sitting with Jens Reich, who though much older now, is still recognizable as the face which became so well known to Western audiences in the autumn of 1989, as the bloodless revolution of East Germany unfolded on their television sets. Reich, a molecular biologist by training, was one of the thirty founding members of the group Neues Forum (“New Forum”) which helped to galvanize East German resistance in the revolutionary autumn, and became one of the most well-known voices of the citizen’s movement, especially in the West because unlike many other East Germans, he spoke English very well. It is two decades since we last met, and we are talking about the intervening years, the whirlwind of changes he has witnessed and in which he has been a key player. He is philosophical about how history—this history—is represented. Amidst the fanfare of anniversaries marking the distance of time since the iconic opening of the Berlin Wall, he struggles to recognize himself in what is being portrayed as this moment of political rupture. as history settles … we see history about these things which we were in the midst of—when it’s the 20th anniversary, and soon it will be the 25th anniversary, what we see on television, what we read in books, I have always the feeling, what is being settled as history is not what happened! From one point of view it is highly—one always sees the same images, the same TV clips, even though there is obviously much more in the files and the TV archives—highly stereotypical. Always the same thing. The scenes on the video clips which are showed time and time again do not match his sense of what happened. Who is “settling” this history? There is no lack of archival material to draw from, but still, the stories which emerge are “always the same thing”. Reich continues: they could have quite different material if they would dig somewhere else, and if they would ask people who have gone through this. … I’ve always had the feeling that this is not what really happened. That this is a patchwork of things that were taken out of a swamp Popular Representation of East Germany 175 and presented to you as a typical image of what happened during this time. Everything else is being either suppressed or forgotten. A very strange feeling that things happened in quite a different way than they are presented now. This “strange feeling” is what lies at the heart of what Paul Ricoeur terms “the ethics of memory” (1999, 5). Ricoeur is highly sensitive to “the wounds and scars of memory”, which can be characterized sometimes by “too much memory” and in other places “not enough” (6). Why, for instance, are the same images of the opening of the wall used time and time and time again, while other, very different images, are virtually unseen? Returning to Reich’s quotation above, one is led to ask: what would prompt such a “digging elsewhere”? First one must feel that somehow there is more to the story than the version with which one is confronted. What would motivate such a sense of incompleteness, a sense that there are other ways of telling this tale? In the case of Reich, this sense of unease is prompted by his own direct and personal recollections, not only of momentous events (such as the dramatic opening of the Berlin Wall), but equally of the minutiae of everyday life in East Germany. Still, the “digging elsewhere” might entail encounters not only with other others but also with oneself as another, the self who is always in process, whose life straddles the fault line of 1989. In this chapter, I will examine how East German life has been popularly represented to a non-East German audience, using the Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others as my main example, and I will analyze those representations by discussing critiques offered to me by a small group of East Germans who have participated in a longitudinal study I conducted between 1992 and 2012. The Lives of Others was made by a West German director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who was only sixteen years old when the wall came down. What one sees in this highly engaging portrayal of East German life—set in the prophetic 1984—is history as it is reimagined, by a “Wessie”, whose parents escaped from the eastern side of the border just after the war. The plotline is a marked twist on historical fact, whereby the central character is betrayed by his girlfriend, but saved from exposure by the humane employee of the Stasi. Historian Timothy Garton Ash, who was himself the target of extended Stasi espionage2 writes: Watching the film for the first time, I was powerfully affected. Yet I was also moved to object, from my own experience: “No! It was not really like that. This is all too highly colored, romantic, even melodramatic; in reality, it was all much grayer, more tawdry and banal”. (Garton Ash 2007) 176 Molly Andrews Garton Ash reminds his reader time and again, that the film is just that, a film, made for entertainment, and while the director defends the bulk of the historical accuracy upon which his story is built, he admits to having used his artistic license to heighten the thrill for the audience. But who is this audience? Garton Ash comments: “Like so much else made in Germany, it [the film] is designed to be exportable. Among its ideal foreign consumers are … the readers of The New Yorker” (Garton Ash 2007).3 The director is not unaware of its strong international attraction. However, I have yet to meet any East Germans who share this enthusiasm. Since the opening of the wall in November 1989, and the subsequent unification of the two Germanys which followed quickly in its wake, representations of East Germany and things East German have proliferated in literature, film, museums, as well as in academic scholarship. Leeder refers to the “sheer volume of literature, film and analysis that continues to be devoted to exploring or reimagining the East German State” (2015, 1). Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, historian Timothy Garton Ash remarked: [the GDR] is without doubt the longest, best documented and most interesting footnote in world history. No dictatorship in history— not even the Third Reich—has been so rapidly, comprehensively and scrupulously documented and analyzed. (2009a, 234; quoted in Leeder 2015, 1) But what form has that documentation and analysis taken? Whose past is being portrayed by whom, where, and for what purpose? In 1992 I conducted interviews with 40 East Germans, most of whom were anti-state activists who had participated in significant ways in what has been called ‘the bloodless revolution’ of 1989. Twenty years later, in 2012, I conducted follow-up interviews with 15 of the people with whom I had originally spoken. Although much has been written on the events of 1989, and the twentieth anniversary of those events was greeted with much media fanfare from around the world, there has in fact been very little investigation into the long-term experiences of those who have lived through these changes. That is precisely the focus of my own research which combines a biographical and historical focus. One of the key questions raised by my project is how to frame “the story of one’s life” in the context of acute cultural and political transformation, and rupture. How one lives and tells about one’s life are, after all, questions about culture as much as of individual identity—if indeed there be such a thing. Mark Freeman uses the term “the space of selfhood” (2010, 137) to refer to the interrelationship between culture, narrative and identity, and it is this complex space which forms the focus of my study. While the original interviews had explored the concept of Popular Representation of East Germany 177 East German identity, that construction was in a far more nascent form than it was at the time of the second interview, twenty years later. The Lives of Others came out eighteen years after the opening of the Berlin Wall (and five years before my follow-up interviews). In discussing interviewees’ reactions to this film, the complexity and dynamism of their East German identity over time becomes apparent. Marking East German Identity The fact that in the one and only democratic election in the existence of the German Democratic Republic, citizens voted to dissolve their country is the stuff of classic tragedy. The revolution eats its children, we are told, and so it happened in East Germany in 1989. (Andrews 2007, 114) For most of forty years of the existence of the GDR, the outside world took little interest in what happened there. If someone from the west was asked to talk about their image of East Germans, if they had anything at all to say, it probably would have been with regards to the marked achievement of East German athletes, whose performance, they might insinuate, could have been enhanced by artificial means. All this changed very dramatically in the months leading up to and following the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. Within six months, East Germans held their first democratic elections, in which they voted to dissolve their country. Less than one year after the opening of the wall came the reunification of Germany; both the scale and the urgency of these dramatic changes caught the public imagination of much of the world. Part of this attraction led researchers from around the globe to descend on what had once been East Germany to ask people about their lives, their sense of their new-found freedom. As one observer remarked, in 1989 East Germans were the most interviewed people in the world. East Germans were constantly narrating their lives, both publicly and privately, and many encountered the documentation of their lives by others, in their Stasi files. In my research, I have explored with respondents their sense of their East German identity. In both 1992 and 2012, I asked the same question: “If someone asked you where you were from, what would you say?” The responses I heard varied in scope, but almost everyone claimed for themselves an enduring sense of “being from” a place which now was no longer.4 One of the greatest psychological challenges posed by the acute political change was that people had to effectively reconceptualize their relation to the state, not only in the present, but also recreate a viable past for themselves—one that was not necessarily false, but that was recast in light of those social positions and attachments which emerged as the most valued after 1989. 178 Molly Andrews In a conversation with Andre Brie, a former leader of the communist party and one of its leading progressive theoreticians, I ask him about the role of East Germany in his own sense of identity. His answer is long and thoughtful. A decisive one. I was marked by it, I was socialized and politicized over there. Many of my values come from East Germany. Things I hope I practice myself, e.g. modesty, living among people. I live in a village now, where hardly anyone has a proper job. Those are my friends, those are my neighbors. I work with them, and they help me. I’m pretty much the only one there who is from a somewhat higher social standing. I hope that’s a positive aspect that comes from the GDR. At least, I want it to be that way, and I try to live that way. But there are many other things, cultural things. Many GDRwriters, painters, musicians have influenced what kind of art is close to my heart. This opened my mind. … Songwriters and singers from the GDR—that’s something that I still value greatly today. Another aspect is very important, as well. Maybe that only applies to someone who is left-wing, who thinks about alternative models of society. The GDR was not just a random concept, as there are so many in the political left. It was a powerful reality with its bad sides, with its failure, and possibly also with its positive aspirations. That is a huge treasure of experience I try to use. It’s not like reading an essay, but it’s having experienced something that did not work. … We had 40 years of the GDR, that was our reality, that was our life. A huge compendium of mistakes from which the left-wing can learn. For me, the GDR is still very much alive, because I still deal with it. Brie’s comment here brings in many aspects of the enduring importance of his national identity, in its informal manifestations. It is ironic but not surprising that once the East German state was no longer, and its very explicit projects of national-identity-building thus extinct, there opened a space for individuals to find their own sense of national identity. As Kelman (1997) has articulated, the relationship between personal and national identity is never straightforward, but rather is a lifelong negotiation between individuals and the societies in which they live. Although all states seek to impart a sense of belonging amongst their citizens, some of those efforts are more coercive than others. The attempts of the East German state were so pervasive across society that many citizens experienced national identity as something which was imposed upon them rather than a sense of identity with more organic roots. What many experienced after the demise of the state was effectively fertile ground for the germination of this sense of national belonging. Thus, it was that many people experienced the growth of a sense of their national identity at the very time that that nation was in the Popular Representation of East Germany 179 process of dissolving itself. East German author Christa Wolf (1997) describes “the manner and the speed with which everything connected with the GDR was liquidated, considered suspect” and, writing less than a decade after the ‘Wende’, 5 still views herself and her fellow citizens as being “housed in a barracks under quarantine, infected with Stasi virus” (1997, 241). This context makes ripe breeding ground for a siege mentality in which self-identification is primarily reactive, and in this case at least, retrospective—a recreating of a national sense of self in response to acutely changing conditions; that anything associated with East Germany was regarded with disdain helped to create what Rogteutscher describes as a “counter-identity” (2000, 74).6 I am not anything so much as I am not East German. Looking more closely at the extended excerpt from my interview with Andre Brie, he clearly has a very deep and continuing sense of belonging to East Germany. He was, he says, socialized and politicized “over there”. The language here is telling. As we are speaking in the heart of Berlin, the use of the term ‘over there’ implies a distance that can only apply metaphorically. His entry into this discussion is via a sense of enduring values, as he describes the modesty which he hopes characterizes his village life and the relations with his neighbors. But his sense of being “marked” by the legacy of East Germany is more than in the way he lives amongst his neighbors. Rather, it extends to the books he reads, the music he listens to, the art he admires; these he says, have ‘opened my mind.’ The use of this phrase here is intriguing. In what sense can artifacts of one’s own culture be said to ‘open one’s mind’? To what? I think this sentiment can best be understood only in the context that they are remnants of a disappeared time. The third and final way in which Brie says that East Germany continues to play a significant role in his identity is in the sense of the model it represents—“a reality … a huge treasure of experience” which he contrasts with the abstract political attachments—theories—of some of his western colleagues. There is, he argues, still much to be processed from the forty years of the GDR, and for him, these potential lessons mean that the GDR is “still very much alive”. Andre Brie embraces his East German identity, but it is a complex position which he occupies, particularly with regards to his affiliation with the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit—the “MfS” or “Stasi”. The Stasi kept records on the lives of approximately one-quarter of the population of East Germany, monitoring virtually every aspect of society. They had approximately 125,000 full-time employees and an additional 100,000 informants. Of the official, full-time employees, 1052 were “surveillance specialists” who tapped telephones, 2100 steamed open letters, and 5000 followed suspects, thus earning their internal slogan “We are Everywhere”.7 Although all those who collaborated with the Stasi were strongly encouraged to come forward and to openly acknowledge their 180 Molly Andrews clandestine activities—and given strong incentives to do so—many chose to remain silent. The cost of owning up to espionage was potentially too great, and many who had spied on colleagues, neighbors, friends, and sometimes even family, hoped that they would not be found out. Andre Brie, like many East Germans, was an informal collaborator with the Stasi. Unlike many others, however, he chose to come clean about his actions, although it took him several years to do so. Shortly after our interview twenty years earlier, Brie explains to me, I announced, driven by my own conscience, that I had been an unofficial collaborator of the Stasi. That was very difficult, because I didn’t try to avoid the problems that arose. … It’s not pleasant, but until now, it gives me reason to think about myself and my politics in a critical and constructive manner… but for me, that was the right way. I can’t do anything without starting with myself. When I ask him why was it right to come clean about his involvements, he responds: Because I made those mistakes, not society. If I want to learn something, on both a personal and a political level, I must be consequent about this. It was a spontaneous decision, I could not reflect on it. Maybe it’s just the way I was. Twenty years later, this proved to be right in a quite a fundamental way. It’s one specific example of how you can deal with your personal responsibility in a very critical manner, with the whole GDR, and not deny yourself at the same time. Brie is clear about the importance of acknowledging his connection to the Stasi and believes that it is critical to do so both personally and politically. As mentioned earlier, Brie describes the legacy of East Germany in his life as something which has “marked” him. Looking at the whole of the passage in which he uses the term geprägt or “marked” there is no evidence to suggest that he intends to indicate some form of stigmatization. Yet, as someone who collaborated with the Stasi, and who openly acknowledges doing so, one might guess that this aspect of his identity was one in which he was negatively labeled. But in his description of the effect of acknowledging his actions, the reverse seems to be the case. Ultimately this ownership of entanglements which clearly, and visibly, still make him uneasy, erases the necessity of ‘denying himself’. Although there are several possible explanations for this, my own would be a combination of political and personal: (1) on the political front, although those who collaborated with the Stasi were looked down upon, the real disdain was reserved for those who did not come forward; and (2) in his personal life, the past twenty years have been a happy time for Brie, with a new a Popular Representation of East Germany 181 marriage and a young child. It might be argued that he can accept who he was at least partially because of who he is now. Annette Simon, well-known psychoanalyst and daughter of East German writer, Christa Wolf, uses language which is in some ways reminiscent of that employed by Brie. When I ask her “If someone asks you where you’re from, what do you say?” she immediately responds “Ostdeutschland [East Germany]” and then laughs. MA: What does that mean to you? Why do you AS: 20 years ago, I wouldn’t have thought that say that? I would emphasize that today. But now it really marks an identity8. When a stranger asks me—so that it’s clear from the start: I’m part of that. Then one can see, in what way exactly. It’s a sign of identity, and it makes up more than half of my life. I want to show that. In our conversation together, Simon makes the point that these days, perhaps more than in the past, it is important to make clear that East Germany is a very important part of one’s biography—after all, “it makes up more than half of my life”. At the time of our interview in 2012, she was in the process of preparing a keynote talk for a major international conference: I say right at the beginning that I’m East German, because that tends to be forgotten by the Psychoanalytical Society. There have been several conferences on the history of German psychoanalysis, and East Germany just doesn’t feature in that. So we have to make clear that we’re there! Again, the claiming of an East German identity indicates a step towards affirming not only her own biography but the very existence of the land of her birth, a movement to counter the tendency to forget. In this section I have discussed the ways in which two East Germans with very different biographies feel that their identity is “marked”—that is to say, written on their very being. They have made concerted efforts to claim this identity, in all its ambiguity, for themselves when they feel that it has been concealed—by themselves and/or by others. This open staking of a claim has been psychologically important and possibly liberating. Still, these negotiations over claims of national identity do not happen in a vacuum. Representing life under forty years of state socialism in East Germany has been a recurrent focus of films, literature, and museums. Pop Culture and the Representation of East German Life Over time, the creation and recreation of public narratives about East German identity would become a viable commodity, in terms of films, television, and even national museums. Some of these commodities were 182 Molly Andrews created by East Germans, but often East German identity was being retrospectively narrated by those who were not East German. At the same time, there has sprung up amongst some East Germans what has been termed “Ostalgie” a romantic remembering of a life which is no longer, which perhaps never was. Leeder describes a spectrum of the ways in which East Germany is currently remembered, with one extreme identified as “Stasiland”, the term borrowed by Anna Funders “memorable label for a country remembered through its repressive security network” (2015, 1), and the other as the land of “Ostalgie”. Leeder comments: the two visions of the GDR do not exist in isolation, but are, in Peter Thompson’s phrase, the conjoined twins of really existing socialism … the work of remembering and reinterpreting the GDR is also part of a larger task: that of coming to terms with the possibilities and catastrophes of utopian thinking writ large, and ultimately of the enlightenment project. (2015, 1–2) That the GDR has been the focus of “memory wars” is not then altogether surprising. It is a place which now only lives in the imaginaries created about it—in film, literature, and even the archives. Leeder refers to a “musealization of the GDR” where “the GDR is commemorated—one might say fetishized—in the Trabi tours, the Ostel design hotels, websites for GDR goods or the many GDR museums” (2015, 3). Leeder argues that this “fixation on a plethora of memory icons” directs us to examine “the heart of how we remember: the extent to which our memory of the GDR is being constructed or simulated and how far it is also being commodified” (3). Yet finally Leeder’s observations lead her to comment that “despite the sometimes-overwhelming amount of information, there is also the possibility that the GDR reality will become impossibly remote, an indelibly lost country” (3), reminding us of Jens Reich’s observations on the feeling of disconnection between the portrayal of East German history and that which he lived through. Along with the historian Peter Burke (2011, 191), it is useful to ask here “who wants whom to remember what, and why? Whose version of the past is recorded and preserved” and equally “who wants whom to forget what, and why”. As time passes, the story of East Germany appears to become more and more polished, but by whom? In my twenty-year-follow-up interviews, I explored with respondents their feelings about the ways in which East German life had been popularly represented. Included in this discussion was a question specifically about their reactions to the film The Lives of Others. I was taken aback when I realized how this question animated my interviewees to speak about the way in which they felt their former country was being portrayed to an outside public. Two of them had in fact published articles on their reactions Popular Representation of East Germany 183 to the film—one, a review in a newspaper, entitled “Kitsch on the Highest Level”, and the other in a scholarly journal. In both cases, the participants had been outraged by the version of their lives which was being so widely feted by the outside world. Their sense of their own East German identity was no doubt influenced by this larger context of the struggle to name a national identity of a country that is no longer—as questions of identity always concern more than just the individual. As Annette Simon expresses above, acknowledging the role of East Germany in one’s life is an antidote to the wider cultural tendency either to erase or forget it, or also as alternative, a counter-narrative (Bamberg and Andrews 2004), to the way in which it is portrayed, on the occasions when that happens. In this context, a discussion of reactions to the film The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) is particularly telling. First, a word about the film, which came out in 2006, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 64th Golden Globe Awards. The film cost $2 million US dollars to make and grossed more than $77 million—an international hit if ever there was one. The writer and producer was a 6’8” West German by the name of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who lives in Los Angeles. When the film came out, many acquaintances said to me that this film gave them a sense of the issues which I had been exploring in my work. Each time I heard comments to this effect—and there were many—I cringed. In many ways, there is no doubt that the film was a great success; the acting, the romantic plotline, the cinematography—I had no problem with any of these. In fact, the contrary could be said. My only problem with them was that they were so effective, and viewers became easily seduced into thinking that what they were watching bore a resemblance to actual life in East Germany. It was, quite literally, a Hollywood version of a very painful moment in history. Was it created to be a factual representation of that past? No, it was created as a film, and judged as a film; most people agree that it deserved the acclaim it attracted. However, due to the overwhelming popularity of the film internationally, this is what many viewers might mistake for the ‘reality’ of East German life under the surveillance of the state. It is understandable why those who have made prolonged sacrifices in their lives because of the Stasi— like the participants in my study—might well take offense to the way in which their country, their lives, and their pain had been trivialized. Perhaps the most common criticism of the film was that it presented life in East Germany as many wished it had been. As Konrad Weiss, himself a documentary filmmaker commented: I think that’s a nice fairy tale. Well done, a well-made film, with good actors. … The story is well told, but it did not happen that way. MA: What was not true in Life of Others? KW: 184 Molly Andrews KW: There never was a Stasi officer like the one they show in the film. Someone who really started to think about things and changed sides, in his mind at least. That did not happen.9 The term ‘fairy tale’ appears in several interviews, along with repeated mentions of Hollywood. What particularly offended the respondents was the inaccuracies of the movie, which they felt went beyond artistic license. Irene Kukutz published a piece on the movie which was titled “Kitsch on the Highest Level”. Annette Simon also published an article about the film, which she describes as “a Western fairy-tale about the GDR—with tragic moments”. She suggests that perhaps not enough time has passed for her to be able to treat the subject matter less romantically. “The problem is, that the portrayal of that era perhaps needs more time, I mean the GDR and the conflicts in the GDR, the representation. It’s really difficult to translate this GDR-feeling artistically”. In juxtaposition to the fictional representations, Simon feels that “The best things are documents, documentary films, reports, minutes from meetings—I get more use out of that”. One might say that these criticisms are not fair—that the movie does not purport to be a documentary, nor to represent the realities of East German state surveillance in all its detail. But to do so would be to miss the point. Most respondents acknowledged that as a film, it worked. This was not the problem, or rather as Reinhard Weisshuhn states, its success was part of the problem because many mistook the fiction for a representation of real life—their real life. In my interview with Ulrike Poppe, I ask her: “for you who had so much direct experience of having the Stasi in your life, how did you feel watching this representation which made such a hit all over the world?” to which she responds “I was annoyed, even though the acting is good. But the story isn’t right”. A fictional story is one thing, but the story of her experience is quite another. This sentiment is echoed by others. For Poppe, perhaps the most grating aspect of the film was that those who made it simply had not done sufficient research; several times she repeats to me how many “mistakes” there were in the film. While acknowledging artistic license, she nonetheless feels that If one had informed oneself more, done better research. For example, it was not possible that one Stasi official had insight into all levels of a case: as an interrogator, as an observer, as someone who plans the procedure, as the person sitting there with his listening device, as someone who is directly in touch with the people. Different people were responsible for each of these levels. And because everyone only saw a small excerpt from the case, it wasn’t possible that he could be swayed by getting to know this person. One should have done that differently. … There are quite a few mistakes in the film. Popular Representation of East Germany 185 Poppe, who was very familiar with the Stasi both as someone whose life was continually infiltrated by them, and more recently as one who works towards re-integrating them into civil society, is particularly critical of the way in which they are portrayed in the film. Far from the lonely depiction in the film, she explains that the Stasi were not people who didn’t have family and friends, and all just lived on their own. The Stasi itself was one family, where they celebrated and drank and laughed time and time again, and made jokes. You didn’t just command each other around. You can read about this, they [the film makers] could have informed themselves. That was the crucial thing: Your boss knew your family, your children, your wife. Your future wife was checked before marriage and if possible, won over to the Stasi as well. It was all very familiar, and that is what held, motivated and controlled people. She concludes by joking, “When I’m retired, I’ll make a new movie!” When I speak with Ruth Misselwitz, who had been the target of malevolent Stasi interference, she focuses on the portrayal of the kind, if conflicted, Stasi agent: RM: This Stasi-man who listened to them in the attic, who [laughs] saves his victim’s life—that is Hollywood. … I never experienced anything like that. But that is probably the longing for reconciliation, for an end of the story, and that everything turns out well in the end. To Ruth, the idea that a member of the Stasi would risk his own safety and save the life of the person he had been reporting was literally laughable. But as someone who has dedicated much of her personal and professional life to working on peaceful reconciliation, she suggests that the inclination to rewrite history in this way is evidence of the wish for a happy ending. Like Ruth, Werner Kratschell is a person of the church. He too sees the film as “unrealistic. That is a Western dream. That is a happy ending. That is Hollywood. A man full of repentance, and so on. No!” Both Misselwitz and Kratschell challenge the construction of the restorative narrative which attracts so many. Writing about his work with Holocaust survivors, Geoffrey Hartman (1994, 133–34) states: “we who were not there always look for something the survivors cannot offer us. … it is our search for meaning which is disclosed as if we had to be comforted for what they suffered”. Those who lived under the gaze of the Stasi for so many years do not draw comfort from its recent benign depiction in these cultural artifacts created by those who were not there and did not have to endure the impact of its intrusion into their lives. It is not surprising why so many East Germans find this movie and the world which it portrays as an affront not only to history but indeed to their own identity. 186 Molly Andrews The Enduring Legacy of East German Identity My project explores the meaning of East German identity, over time. How does one’s sense of being from a particular country change once that country is no longer? The case of East Germany is particularly intriguing in that twenty years after unification both the chancellor and the president of Germany are East German. For some that might be read as an indicator of how successfully the unification has been. And yet the story for most of those with whom I spoke was more complicated than that. It is perhaps most useful here to separate national identity into its formal (or official) and informal manifestations. The ground upon which official East German identity had been built was never very firm, and the more forcefully the state demanded public allegiance from, and control over the lives of, its citizens, the less they internalized a sense of belonging. Yet once the country had been dissolved, there opened a new space in which individuals began to feel more connection to their country which was then no longer. The fall of the wall opened new spaces for East Germans to experience their common history, both that which they had lived through and that which they were making. Times of political upheaval are particularly ripe conditions for collective narrative reconstruction (Rogteutscher 2000, 62) and this, in turn, has high potential for the renewal of collective identity. Thus, it was that in my interviews, more than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall there lingered for all my interviewees a very strong sense of themselves as being East German, not only in the past, but reconstituted in the present. My follow-up interviews were guided by a seemingly simple question: I wanted my participants to tell me about how their lives had unfolded over the twenty years since we had last met. This involved not only taking stock of their personal lives—the emergence of new loved ones, the loss of others, the ability to travel, their professional development, their experience of aging, their relations to those who are both younger and older than them—but also placing these aspects of their lives in the wider political context of Germany as it has evolved post-1989. So, what, after all, is the nature of this exercise? If remembering is a cultural practice, then how can I as a collector of stories account for what is being told to me? Here I have no choice but to take as my starting point that the context in which people are asked to account for their lives has everything to do with what they do and don’t say, with what they perceive as tell-able, and that which might be secret, unknown or unknowable even to themselves. In Brockmeier’s work on cultural memory, he refers to the “cultural architecture of our knowledge” (2002, 8). How is it that we know what we know? This is a question, not only of epistemology and psychology but also a question of politics and morality, demanding a scrutiny of the dynamics of power and resistance in the ongoing negotiation of how we account for ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. Popular Representation of East Germany 187 Those women and men who have spoken to me about their sense of national identity have done so in conversations with a lag time of twenty years, and this passage of time has implications for how and what they tell me. Gadamer argues that “objective knowledge can be arrived at only when there has been a certain historical distance” (2011, 181) and that over time “new sources of understanding … reveal unsuspected elements of meaning” (182). And yet, as Gadamer concedes, the temporal dimension “is not a closed dimension, but is itself undergoing constant movement and extension” (182). There is then, no “perfect” place for standing back and trying to make sense of either the tumultuous political changes which surround us nor of the tugs and pulls of our personal lives, with the dreams and challenges which we face every day. How these same men and women will narrate their sense of national identity in twenty years’ from now is an inviting question. The one thing we do know is that those constructions will themselves be influenced by the stories which are in wider circulation about the meaning of an identity which was forged in the long ago and faraway land of East Germany. At the heart of this contest over how East Germany is to be remembered lies a tension in what Ricoeur calls “the ethics of memory” (1999, 5). While Ricoeur identifies numerous reasons underlying the “duty to tell”, the most relevant here is that telling acts “as a means of fighting against the erosion of traces; we must keep traces, traces of events, because there is a general trend to destroy” (10). Films such as The Lives of Others do not, I would argue, contribute to this fight, but rather function as fertilizer for such erosion of traces, offering a version of the past which is not only unrecognizable to those who lived through it, but also reimagining that past in a particularly seductive and politically-charged way. (The “telling” of East Germany is not a matter of “if” but rather of “what”—for the forty years of that country’s existence has been anything but ignored.) Here Ricoeur offers a most apposite insight; “it is”, he says, “always possible to tell in another way. This exercise of memory is here an exercise in telling otherwise, and in letting others tell their own history, especially the founding events which are the ground of a collective memory” (1999, 9). The research I have engaged in over the past twenty-five years in East Germany has been my attempt to provide such a platform for “telling otherwise, and … letting others tell their own history”. But even for those who played very active roles in the shaping of East German history, the task is not an easy one, captured in the words of Reinhard Weisshuhn: Even in the East, little is left of what used to be the East … It’s breathtaking to see how quickly history disappears. Vanishes from one’s consciousness, and become wholly meaningless for one’s own life … The GDR [becomes] inconceivable, and one has no idea what it actually was. 188 Molly Andrews Notes 1 This chapter draws on Andrews 2015, with the permission of the editors (Roberta Piazza and Alessandra Fasulo) and the publisher (Palgrave Macmillan). 2 See his account of this in The File (2009b). 3 Von Donnersmarck also comments on how the Japanese love the musical aspect of the film, while in Spain “they only go on about the fact that I beat Almodovar at the European Film Awards” (Orange 2007). 4 Of course, we are all, in some sense, “from” places which are no longer, as even when nations continue to exist, they do nonetheless change. Thus, it is that people sometimes comment that they no longer recognize the country in which they grew up. 5 Wende, or turn, is the term which is widely used in Germany to refer to the events of 1989. However some East Germans find this term—and that of the closely-related Wendehals, the turning of the neck—ideologically loaded and refrain from using it. 6 For more on the development and transformation of East German identity in the first decade after the fall of the wall, see Andrews (2003). 7 For a fuller account of this, see Andrews (1998). 8 The phrase Simon uses here is “jetzt markiert es wirklich eine Identität” indicating that for her, being East German is a defining feature of her identity. 9 Only two of the fifteen respondents did not criticize the movie. Andre Brie felt that the film “showed a Stasi office from his human side, in his inner conflict. That was a real character like one always needs in art, no abstraction”. As already mentioned, Brie was himself an informal informant for the Stasi. The other person who thought the film was realistic in its portrayal was Jens Reich, who in fact had Stasi employees living in his attic, concealed, just as it happened in the movie. References Andrews, Molly. 1998. “One Hundred Miles of Lives: The Stasi Files as a People’s History of East Germany”. Oral History 26 (1): 24–31. Andrews, Molly. 2003. “Continuity and Discontinuity of East German Identity Following the Fall of the Berlin Wall: A Case Study”. In Political Transition: Politics and Cultures, edited by Paul Gready, 107–26. London: Pluto Press. Andrews, Molly. 2007. Shaping History: Narratives of Political Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Andrews, Molly. 2015. “The Nice Stasi Man Drove His Trabi to the Nudist Beach: Contesting East German Identity”. In Marked Identities: Narrating Lives between Social Labels and Individual Biographies, edited by Roberta Piazza and Alessandra Fasulo, 43–57. London: Palgrave. Bamberg, Michael, and Molly Andrews. 2004. Considering Counter-Narratives: Narration and Resistance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Brockmeier, Jens. 2002. “Introduction: Searching for Cultural Memory”. Culture and Psychology 8 (1): 5–14. Burke, Peter. 2011. “History as Social Memory”. In The Collective Memory Reader, edited by Jeffrey Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy, 188–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freeman, Mark. 2010. “The Space of Selfhood: Culture, Narrative, Identity”. In The Sociocultural Turn: The Contextual Emergence of Mind and Self, Popular Representation of East Germany 189 edited by Suzanne R. Kirschner and Jack Martin, 137–58. New York: Columbia University Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2011. “Truth and Method”. In The Collective Memory Reader, edited by Jeffrey Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy, 180–83. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garton Ash, Timothy. 2007. “The Stasi on Our Minds”. The New York Review of Books, May 31. www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/may/31/ the-stasi-on-our-minds/?pagination=false. Garton Ash, Timothy. 2009a. “Preface”. Oxford German Studies 38 (3): 234–35. Garton Ash, Timothy. 2009b. The File: A Personal History. London: Atlantic Books. Hartman, Geoffrey, ed. 1994. Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory. Oxford: Blackwell. Kelman, Herbert. 1997. “Nationalism, Patriotism, and National Identity: Social-Psychological Dimensions”. In Patriotism in the Life of Individuals and Nations, edited by Ervin Staub and Daniel Bar-Tal, 165–89. Chicago: Nelson Hall. Leeder, Karen, ed. 2015. Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orange, Michelle. 2007. “Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck on ‘the Lives of Others’”. IFC News, February 5. www.ifc.com/2007/02/florian-henckelvon-donnersmar. Ricoeur, Paul. 1999. “Memory and Forgetting”. In Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Continental Philosophy, edited by Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley, 5–11. London: Routledge. Rogteutscher, Sigrid. 2000. “Competing Narratives and the Social Construction of Reality: The GDR in Transition”. German Politics 9 (1): 61–82. Wolf, Christa. 1997. Parting from Phantoms: Selected Writings, 1990–1994. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 12 Realities in the Making The Ethics of Fabulation in Observational Documentary Cinema Ilona Hongisto It is thus necessary to go beyond all the pieces of spoken information; to extract from them a pure speech-act, creative story-telling which is as it were the obverse side of the dominant myths, of current words and their supporters; an act capable of creating the myth instead of drawing profit or business from it. —(Deleuze 1989, 269–70) The above quotation from the concluding remarks of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989) presents a challenge for conventional understandings of storytelling. Story-telling, for Deleuze, is an act that is not concerned with telling a story, conveying a message, but an act that resists dominant myths. It is an act of telling that confronts current words and their supporters in favor of creating alternative visions to dominant circumstances. The hyphen between the words “story” and “telling” is a further indication that something other than a language-based operation of sharing information is at stake here. Indeed, the form “story-telling” reflects the genealogy of Deleuze’s conceptual postulation. The hyphen can be traced back to the English translation of Henri Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1935, 88–89), where the French term “fonction fabulatrice” has been rendered as “myth-making function”. In Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989, 150), the same term has been translated as “story-telling function”, or simply “story-telling”. Fabulation as myth-making and story-telling are integral to Bergson’s and Deleuze’s respective projects on social cohesion and the role of images in creating social consistencies. Bergson mobilizes myth-making in his discussion of religion. Myth-making consists of creating “phantasmic representations” and “hallucinatory fictions” that have real effects (Bergson 1935, 88, 91). These representations, Bergson argues, have “semi-personal powers” and they are used in the running of “closed societies”, such as religious communities. Here, images take on the role of “efficient presences” that have the capacity to regulate group behavior. For Bergson (1935, 149, 167), myth-making is a visionary faculty that enforces closed societies (see also Bogue 2007, 91–94). Realities in the Making 191 Whereas Bergson explores the controlling function of efficient presences, Deleuze finds a more affirmative side to fabulation. He speaks of the visionary faculty in relation to creating collectivities beyond those that exist in actuality. For Deleuze, story-telling creates visions, efficient presences, with which new social formations can be inaugurated. In this sense, story-telling in the arts does not enhance existing social conditions, it is an issue of “inventing a people” (Deleuze 1989, 150; 1995, 125–26; Bogue 2010, 16–18). Inventing a people links Deleuze’s notion of fabulation to the conception of observational documentary cinema followed in this chapter. Whereas observational documentaries are most often treated with a “fly-on-thewall” rhetoric and considered in their non-participatory dimensions, this chapter looks at observational documentaries that are remarkable in their collective scope. Instead of keeping a distance, the camerawork in these films is decidedly participatory—it asserts itself as a partaker in the same unfolding reality that the filmed subjects inhabit. Consequently, the documentaries discussed here do much more than just document social groups and communities that are already in place. With their participatory dynamic, the films in question work towards efficient presences with which the beginnings of new social formations can be initiated. This has direct implications on documentary ethics. With fabulation, documentary ethics can no longer be evaluated on the authenticity of the created representation. Instead, the ethics of storytelling is transposed to the moment of filming—to the process in which the mutual participation of the filmmaker and the filmed subjects sets forth an efficient presence that indicates how actuality could be arranged differently. In other words, ethics concerns what is created in the shared moment of filming. The argumentation of the chapter draws from close readings of selected canonical and contemporary observational documentaries from Jean Rouch’s classic Moi, un Noir (France 1958) to Roberto Minervini’s The Other Side (USA 2015). Although the films deal with a variety of subject matters in distinct geographical areas, they come together in a shared premise; the lives of the filmed subjects are marked by poverty, illness, racism, homophobia, and trauma. Here, fabulation is a cinematic response to unsustainable conditions—a creative story-telling act that envisions how the actualities of the filmed subjects could be arranged differently. The documentaries are not didactic in style nor are the created visions verbalized explicitly. Rather, the created efficient presences take the form of a myth in the sense that the factual begins to impinge on the fictional. The Observational Event in Documentary Cinema Deleuze’s discussion of fabulation coincides with the transition from classical to modern cinema. This is not a mere distinction in form, but a more complex articulation of the work of film in the real. According to Deleuze, classical cinema sides with narration and modern cinema with 192 Ilona Hongisto the story (‘récit’) (Deleuze 1985, 176–79; 1989, 134–37). D.N. Rodowick (1997, 155–57) summarizes the distinction succinctly by noting that in Deleuze’s treatment narration is the kind of storytelling that maintains subjective and objective perspectives as distinct, whereas récit engages in a free indirect oscillation between the two. This chapter will address two related issues that bear directly on the present argumentation. First, in Deleuze’s (1989, 126–37) account, classical cinema abides by a linear narrative form where attention is drawn to what happens next. This implies a cinema that emphasizes the distinctive qualities of the past, present, and the future. In other words, the narrative form keeps these temporal phases as separate. Modern cinema, on the other hand, delves into what there is to see in an image. It draws attention to the depths and borders of the image and invites the viewer to explore simultaneous layers of time in the images. In modern cinema, we often encounter memories of the future, such as in the cinema of Chris Marker and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Although it is not conceptually worthwhile or even interesting to try and fit observational documentary into Deleuze’s distinction between classical and modern cinema, there are elements in his articulation of the latter that resonate with the films discussed in this chapter. Namely, although observational documentary coincides most easily with the present tense, the works discussed here offer a more nuanced temporal slate. The present is framed in a way that opens it up to both the past and the future. Second, Deleuze (1989, 147–55) argues that narration and story postulate different relationships between the true and the false. Whereas narration enforces a difference between the two by making sure that dreams and hallucinations are distinguished from ordinary reality, the story embraces the “powers of the false”1 in a way that ties the true to the false immanently. Fabulation in the documentary entails the creation of effective presences where the true and false are inseparable. Deleuze’s point of entry to the immanence of the true and the false is the speech-act. Or, more precisely, he is interested in the act of speaking on camera. He notes instances in observational documentaries where the filmed subjects engage in verbal accounts where memories, perceptions, hopes and dreams intertwine with one another. He notes that although the filmed subjects “make fiction”, they are nevertheless not “fictional” (Deleuze 1989, 150). Here, making fiction is the creative story-telling act that has an immediate impact on the lives of the filmed subjects. The two authors Deleuze considers particularly important in this regard are the French filmmaker Jean Rouch and the Canadian Pierre Perrault. Both made many of their seminal works at around the same time as modern cinema peaked in the 1950s and 1960s, and both embraced distinct styles of participatory observation. For Rouch and Perrault, participation did not entail putting themselves in the frame or making their Realities in the Making 193 personalities known on screen—rather, participation meant living with and engaging with the daily lives of the filmed subjects, and welcoming their views and habits as foundations in the films. For Rouch, this was part of his anthropological inquiries in Africa and for Perrault, a practice of documenting the lives of the Québécois without resorting to the perspectives engrained by his French-influenced upbringing in Quebec, Canada. These post-colonial practices of participatory observation could be paraphrased as ethnographies of the living present or as “living cinema” (Michael 2004). In Perrault’s renowned Pour la suite du monde (Canada 1963) the living present entwines directly with the past and the future. The documentary is set on the island of Ile-aux-Coudres, which is demarcated from both the Anglophone and the French-Canadian cultures of Quebec. The people of the island speak a distinct dialect that is hard to understand, even for native French speakers. The distinct culture of the island has slowly been waning and their traditions have been forgotten. In the documentary, Perrault encourages the islanders to take on fishing white beluga whales with the traditional method of erecting a weir barrier in the St. Lawrence River. By “pushing” the islanders into action, the making of the documentary facilitates the re-actualization of a tradition that in the past gave the island community cohesion. The tradition becomes an efficient presence that institutes a newly found sense of community to the islanders. The created sense of community has a direct impact on their future, as the islanders start making plans on how fishing the beluga whales could sustain them economically in the future. This is also referenced in the title of the film, which can be loosely translated as “for the continuation of the world”. What is particularly noteworthy here is the speech act involved in re-actualizing the fishing tradition. By engaging with the ancient fishing techniques, the islanders speak about the traditions which underpin their community. Their account, however, is not a factual account of the tradition, but a “communal lore” that includes memories, beliefs and technical details in equal measure. In this way, the tradition emerges as an efficient presence that is the obverse side to the official histories of declining rituals and a struggling culture. As fact and fiction entwine, the communal lore takes on mythical qualities, and the impact of these qualities on the community is immediate. Perrault and other Quebec filmmakers have often been distinguished from their French contemporaries because of their emphasis on the speech act. However, the Québécois “cinéma de la parole” finds an interesting counterpart in Jean Rouch’s celebrated Moi, un Noir (France 1958) in which young Nigerian immigrants tell the story of their lives on the soundtrack to images recorded on the streets of Treichville, Abidjan, on the Ivory Coast. In the documentary, scenes filmed on the streets are freely narrated by one of the protagonists. He speaks in the present 194 Ilona Hongisto tense over scenes of himself and his friends. The remarkable feature of this speech act is the narrator giving them roles familiar from Western popular culture—such as Tarzan, Eddie Constantine, and Edward G. Robinson—and accounting for their actions through these fictional and celebrity characters. Consequently, the documentary creates an efficient presence where the young adults are not trapped in the everyday struggles of Nigerian immigrants on the Ivory Coast. Rather, they live the lives of a famous boxer and an actor. Here, too, the mythical qualities are apparent and their function is to create cohesion at a time of difficulty. Deleuze names Perrault and Rouch’s method of efficient presences a “story-telling function of the poor” (1989, 150). He does this to emphasize the filmmakers’ desire to overcome their own colonizing perspectives of language and filmmaking—including the habits internalized by their respective upbringings—and to foreground the irreplaceable role of the filmed subjects in the process. Here, documentary fabulation entails giving the stage to the filmed subjects and thus facilitating the creation of myths that bear directly on the community in question. From this point of view, fabulation raises ethical questions about the effects of the created myths. Pour la suite du monde and Moi, un Noir are relatively benign in this regard as the documentaries clearly add to the lives of the filmed subjects in their own terms. Their story-telling emerges from what they want to do or enjoy doing in life. Shirley Clarke’s observational documentary Portrait of Jason (USA 1967) is more complicated ethically, although the film shares the premise of giving the filmed subjects a stage to do what they love the most in life. Clarke’s documentary was filmed over one night in a New York City apartment where Jason Holliday, a black gay man in his forties, talks to the camera about his painful and pleasant childhood memories, his years of hustling, and his faraway dreams. Presented in chronological order, the documentary follows the changes that take place over the night as Jason gets more intoxicated from the liquor and joints he consumes while speaking. Dreaming of a nightclub act he has been planning for years, Jason not only speaks about the roles he would want to play but also takes up performing them for the camera. He sings excerpts from the musical Funny Girl in an earnest manner and thus invents himself as a nightclub actor while performing. Although the odds of him landing a role on Broadway are slim, the documentary provides him with a stage, a space he has waited for many years. This comes with the important detail that the tiny crew consisting of Jason’s friends Richard and Carl, the filmmaker, cameraperson and the sound recordist prompt him from behind the camera. They ask him questions and direct him to talk about certain topics. This, it is legitimate to argue, puts Jason in a vulnerable position. However, the point here is that despite his intoxication and the prompts, Jason takes pleasure out Realities in the Making 195 of performing for the camera—it is something he has always wanted to do. In this sense, the filmmaking process adds to his life by giving him the stage for one night. The ethical deed is enabling his self-invention as a Broadway star. Reality Actualized Documentary films are generally renowned for focusing on those who are excluded from official histories and who live outside normative structures. The examples above attest to the fact that documentary cinema has taken upon itself to bring the obverse side of official accounts into the frame. This is often characterized as giving a voice to those who have previously been deprived of such a privilege. It is undoubtedly true that documentary cinema, by inviting the elsewhere into the frame, has challenged and even changed harmful assumptions about “the other”. Indeed, the documentary’s ethical work is often described as bringing alternative stories and histories into the frame. However, as the above discussion of efficient presences has already indicated, this is not enough to account for the complex ethical process that emerges at the moment of filming. In this process, documentary cinema works in another register from the representational debate of who or what gets to occupy the frame at a given time. In his second feature documentary The Other Side (Louisiana) (2015), Roberto Minervini takes the viewer to the backyards of the American dream. The documentary portrays drug addicts, struggling families, and paramilitary groups that exist outside the grid of state institutions; communities left to their own devices in the swampland of the American South. By placing these individuals in focus, the film contributes to the lineage of marginal narratives of contemporary America. But what is particularly remarkable about Minervini’s documentary is how it frames these communities. One of the film’s protagonists is Lisa Allen, the sister of Todd Trichell whom Minervini got to know in the process of making his previous documentary Stop the Pounding Heart (2013). Whereas Todd relocated to Texas in search of a better life, Lisa stayed behind in poverty-stricken Louisiana and now shares her life with Mark Kelley, the documentary’s key protagonist. The two share their intimate and tumultuous relationship with the film crew and the viewers. This is the first outstanding feature of the documentary—each frame is imbued with often excruciating intimacy. Minervini has noted in interviews that his connection to Todd Trichell and his wife Linda, who also became the production manager for The Other Side, was seminal in building a human connection and consequently a working relationship between himself and the community; someone on the inside invited him in and hence he could be trusted. 2 196 Ilona Hongisto Within the intimate setting, the frames capture explicit sex, drunken parenting, and drug use over generations without taking a patronizing viewpoint to the lives ravaged by unemployment and methamphetamine. We see Mark injecting a heavily pregnant stripper, a mother passing the pipe on to her son, and a drunken man knocking down a young girl in her chair in an effort of playfulness. In these moments, when intervention feels most necessary, the camera keeps its observatory position and captures the events in long takes. The persistence of the long takes, however, gives the stage to the people of West Monroe, Louisiana. Their lives are not caught unawares but willingly lived on camera. Some scenes are set up and re-enacted for the purposes of the narrative, but as the camera lingers on, the lives of the protagonists unfold unscripted. The working relationship between the filmmaker and the protagonists relocates the documentary’s drive from representing the community as authentically as possible to a more dialogical mode of storytelling, where the protagonists are equally the film’s makers.3 Because of the long unfolding takes, there is a prevailing sense of each scene being a key scene—somehow encapsulating a complex dynamic and emotional landscape in a few sentences or gestures. This, I contend, is the actualizing work of the documentary frame. The persistent takes realized by the director of photography Diego Romero Suarez-Llanos frame the protagonists in a manner that draws out sentiments that might otherwise go unexpressed. These emotional landscapes are the efficient presences that hold the communities together. One such sentiment is anger. As the camera frames the protagonists in lingering, intimate shots, it creates the conditions in which expressions of anger might actualize. This “aesthetics of the frame” (Hongisto 2015, 12–18) is in operation for example in a scene where a group of intoxicated adults gets into a heated debate about politics in a worn-down backyard. What begins as an exchange of oft-heard arguments about the government not caring evolves into a complex speech act where appraisals of Hillary Clinton are captured simultaneously with the failure of democracy in Suarez-Llanos’s long takes. In a comparable scene, the film observes a paramilitary group that prepares for the prospect of UN declared martial law in the marshes of Louisiana. Their drills first come off as childish exercises of discontent, but as the scene progresses and the camera lingers, the rage of the group begins to grow and becomes more pronounced. The section ends with a lengthy passage where a car gets completely mauled in the middle of a field. The time and dedication put into destroying the car are linked to the depth and extent of their rage toward president Obama. Hence, the work of the frame in The Other Side (Louisiana) is especially noteworthy because it surpasses the level of letting “the other” voice their concerns. Instead, the observational documentary lingers on and participates in the lives of the people of West Monroe and in so Realities in the Making 197 doing, it captures and expresses the complexity of the fraught emotional landscape and the desolate socio-political situation. In a manner loosely comparable to the documentaries discussed above, the lingering camera of The Other Side pushes anger to take form in its complex actuality. Anger is offered to the viewer as the compound that holds the depicted communities together, and it is up to the viewer to listen, think and analyze its scope and impact. Given the recent turns in US politics, it is legitimate to claim that the film’s offering went unnoticed in establishment politics. The way in which the documentary captures and expresses the work of efficient presences in the American South is the kind of storytelling that could inaugurate the beginnings of new social formations. Instead, in the recent presidential elections, the “hallucinatory fictions” and “phantasmic representations” were successfully deployed for business and profit. Conclusion Throughout this chapter I have argued that the ethics of fabulation is contingent on what is created in the observational event. Whether this involves re-activating an ancient tradition (Perrault), impersonating celebrities (Rouch), performing Broadway numbers (Clarke), or capturing and expressing anger (Minervini), what is created is dependent on the presence of the documentary camera. However, this dependence should not be understood as a sign of inauthenticity. Rather, the examples discussed in this chapter witness a transposition in the work of documentary cinema from producing authentic representations of real events to creating events in which the real actualizes. Here, the ethics of storytelling can no longer be considered in terms of the representational quality of the film in question; instead, it aligns with the creative moment of filming. Following Deleuze’s notion of story-telling, the mutually inclusive observational event in the documentary is not satisfied with what is directly observable through the lens of the camera. It looks beyond, to the side and above to extract efficient presences with which the dominant modes of speaking, thinking, feeling and doing can be challenged. This, I believe, is particularly important politically. As observational documentaries engage with realities in the making, they ask us to consider the conditions in which particular actions and sentiments take form. They are not content with expressing a different viewpoint, but call into question the circumstances in which reality actualizes. Notes 1 “Powers of the false” link Deleuze’s account to Nietzsche’s postulation of will to power. In the section “How the ‘true world’ ultimately became a fable” of The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche (2007, 22–23) moves from the Platonian disposition of the true world being present to the pious and the virtuous to a disposition in which the idea of the true world becomes 198 Ilona Hongisto fable-like. Both Nietzsche and Deleuze’s projects dispose presumed ideas of truth for the creative force of time. Whereas Deleuze speaks of time as a stretch of becoming that is no longer subjugated to movement, Nietzsche argues for time and free will—a will to power that is no longer subjugated to a model of truth. Time as becoming, continuous change, challenges the ontological discernibility of the true and the false, and puts the emphasis on becoming as potentialization. This is the ontological premise of Deleuze’s notion of fabulation (see also Bogue 2010, 31). 2 See, for example, Minervini (2015), Père (2015), and Rapold (2016). 3 Elsewhere, I have conceptualized this dialogical mode of storytelling in terms of ‘intercessors’ and ‘facilitating’ (see Hongisto 2015, 78–82; Hongisto and Pape 2015, 7–11). References Bergson, Henri. 1935 [1932]. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Translated by R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton. London: Macmillan. Bogue, Ronald. 2007. Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Bogue, Ronald. 2010. Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1985. Cinéma 2: L’image-temps. Paris: Les Éditions de minuit. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 [1985]. Cinema 2. The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995 [1990]. Negotiations. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. Hongisto, Ilona. 2015. Soul of the Documentary: Framing, Expression, Ethics. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Hongisto, Ilona, and Toni Pape. 2015. “Unexpected Artivism: The Fabulatory Function in Kumaré”. Studies in Documentary Film 9 (1): 69–83. Michael, Charlie. 2004. “Claiming a Style: The ‘Living Cinema’ of Pierre Perrault’s ‘Pour la suite du monde’”. Velvet Light Trap 54 (1): 32–47. Minervini, Roberto. 2015. Interview. Cannes Film Festival. https://youtu.be/ YfZrD1eEG3I?list=PLDJNOOIRMQojy-kjhK8u87b1So-0s4fCE (accessed 6 December 2016). Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2007 [1888]. Twilight of the Idols. London: Wordsworth. Père, Olivier. 2015. Interview. ARTE. https://youtu.be/dA31t-OXP2A?list= PLDJNOOIRMQojy-kjhK8u87b1So-0s4fCE (accessed 6 December 2016). Rapold, Nicolas. 2016. “Interview”. Film Comment, May 3. www.filmcomment. com/blog/interview-roberto-minervini/. Rodowick, David N. 1997. Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham: Duke University Press. Films The Other Side (Louisiana) Dir Roberto Minervini. Perf’s Mark Kelley, Lisa Allen, James Lee Miller. Film Movement, France/Italy/USA 2015, all media. Stop the Pounding Heart Dir Roberto Minervini. Perf’s Sara Carlson, Colby Trichell, Tim Carlson. Big World Pictures, USA 2014, all media. Realities in the Making 199 Portrait of Jason Dir Shirley Clarke. Perf’s Jason Holliday, Shirley Clark, Carl Lee. Milestone Films, USA 1967, all media) Pour la suite du monde Dir’s Michel Brault, Pierre Perrault. Perf’s Léopold Tremblay, Alexis Tremblay, Abel Harvey. National Film Board of Canada, Canada 1963, all media) Moi, un Noir Dir Jean Rouch. Perf’s Oumarou Ganda, Gambi, Petit Touré. Icarus Films, France 1958, all media) Part III Narrative Engagements with Violence and Trauma 13 The Empathetic Listener and the Ethics of Storytelling Aleida Assmann Introduction The investigation of narration and narratives has become a central focus of literary studies. This subfield has received much inspiration from structuralist analyzes and the comparative study of folklore and myths since the 1960s (Vladimir Propp, Claude Levi-Strauss, Tzvetan Todorov, Claude Bremond, John Campbell). It was developed into more and more complex forms of analyzing and describing the mediation between narrator, reader and the narrated world (Franz K. Stanzel, Gérard Genette, Ansgar Nünning). In the meantime, narratology has undergone a further transformation and become a vital part of cultural studies. It has proved, indeed, a topic with the potential to open literary studies to much broader questions of anthropology and culture. An example for this transformation of narratology from literary studies into cultural studies is the work of Albrecht Koschorke. He has redefined and redesigned this field in terms of what he calls basic research (“Grundlagenforschung”), by which he means the study of founding strategies with which humans organize power relations, meaning production and social coherence in a society. With such broad intentions, he has focused on the practice of storytelling and described it as the central device with which humans and societies reflect upon themselves. Koschorke (2012, 9) begins his study of the foundational role of narratives with the universality of the act of storytelling, sketching an anthropology of the “homo narrans”. His point is that the basic act of storytelling has always transcended the realm of literature and is being used and performed in the many contexts and dimensions of culture where so far it has not yet been traced and inspected. Narrating, Koschorke claims, has transcended all barriers, not only those of genres and media but also those of cultural domains and institutions. He notes that narration “has become one of the most successful and expansive literary concepts transgressing disciplines and cultural domains” (19). Some scholars have already announced a “narrative turn”; Koschorke is, however, less interested in a new academic paradigm than in the ubiquity of narration itself in everyday communication, in the mass media, 204 Aleida Assmann but also in fictions of law and “the founding myths and self-delusions of whole societies” (19–20). We are indeed becoming more and more aware of the fact that narrating is an elementary mode of community construction and sense-making that is productive not only in the realm of literature and fiction but is a much more general tool of world making and a central “medium of permanent cultural self-transformation” (25). The amazing extension of the literary concept of storytelling became possible with the introduction of a new and very important distinction between “narrative” and “narratif”. Narrative is a term for concrete actual stories that are told in interactive communicative speech acts and realized in various media formats in imaginative and compelling ways. Narratif, on the other hand, is a radical reduction of a narrative, referring to the blueprint of a narrative that identifies its shape and structure, its hidden logic or grammar very much like an x-ray reveals the invisible make-up of a human body. The abstract structure of a narratif foregrounds the selection and combination of heterogeneous events which make up a structure consisting of a beginning, middle, and ending. It brings to the surface the red thread that binds together various events and focuses on the dynamics that endow narratives with meaning and a telos. Thus, the narratif provides access to the story as a meaning-making machine for human action and experience, collective identity and political goals. The general power of the narratif consists in a construction that helps to define the rules of the world, to control affect, to shape emotions and to provide orientation for individual and collective action (see also Müller-Funk 2002). The ‘magic’ effects of narration as a form of meaning production have been employed for diverse purposes. Here are some of the important functions of storytelling: to pass or stretch time to create relief from anxiety to exorcise ghosts to explain what remains otherwise inaccessible or mysterious to construct meaning to convey indirect messages to legitimate action and support political goals. The narrator is, of course, a prominent figure in the analysis of literary texts. We have come to know various types of narrators, some of whom are all but omniscient and hardly in charge of the story that they are telling. The growing sophistication of storytelling has introduced the unreliable narrator, who is noted for his limited and limiting point of view. Through this limited and sometimes even distorted view of the events that are being told, a new dimension of the inaccessibility, hiddenness and mystery of reality is conveyed in the very The Empathetic Listener and the Ethics of Storytelling 205 act of narration. The oblique view of the narrator also emphasizes the quality of multi-perspectivity and irreducible mediation that is always involved in our relation to the external world. We may generalize this development by distinguishing between the unlimited and the limited narrator. While the unlimited narrator does not self-consciously pose the problem of constraints or access to knowledge, the latter introduces three new important aspects into the artistic practice of storytelling: epistemological limitations including barriers of knowledge, attention, awareness and evaluation, philosophical skepticism referring to the multiple forms of perception and cultural creations of meaning, and reframing in terms of foregrounding mediation and remediation. In this chapter, I focus on another new type of narrator that has emerged only recently in the wake of a new narrative genre that may be termed “testimonial narratives”. In testimonial narratives, knowledge and truth are at the center of the story, but it is a severely impaired knowledge that has been deformed under the pressure of a violent event or a history of violence that disfigured truth, obstructed communication and effaced narratives. The narrators in such narratives are often in search of a knowledge that they are lacking because it has been blocked or silenced. In addition to the narrator who is in search of a hidden past and is collecting evidence for a story that has yet to be told, I want to introduce the narrator as listener, as a new type, in the inventory of storytelling. How can a narrator, the personified medium of storytelling, occupy the position of a listener, and why should he or she double the role of the external listener/reader? I want to describe this new type of narrator, analyze his or her important connection to the testimonial genre and show how he or she is linked to the ethics of storytelling. Primo Levi and the Ethics of Witnessing After the Second World War, a new mode and function of storytelling were developed to cope with collective trauma. It was intimately that he did not only tell his own story but also became the mouthpiece of those who had perished. This new narrator, who later also came to be called a ‘witness’, was defined by Claude Lanzmann as “porte-parole des mortes”: “j’appelle les protagonistes juifs de «Shoah» des «revenants». Parce qu’en réalité aucun d’eux n’aurait jamais dû survivre et, s’ils ont pu le faire, c’est par miracle. Je les tiens pour des héros, des saints et des martyrs. Ils s’oublient totalement, ils parlent avec une abnégation totale. Ils ne racontent pas comment ils ont survécu. Ils ne disent jamais «je», ils disent «nous». Ils sont les porte-parole des morts” (Lanzmann 2013). Primo Levi is a paradigmatic example of this new type and its ethos. His ‘I’ is always entangled with a ‘we’, harking back to the voices of those who did not survive the horrors of the concentration camp. In his book, Survival in Auschwitz, he acts as a ‘remembrancer’, a term that 206 Aleida Assmann was used for the medieval tax-collector and that Peter Burke recovered for the function of the historian who reminds others of what they would like to forget.1 Levi tells not only his own story of survival but also becomes a collector of tales, telling the stories of those who were murdered in the death camp. Throughout his memoir, Levi presents himself as someone who recalls and records names for the world to come. In this way, for instance, he includes a description of Resnyk, the Pole who was assigned to be his new bedfellow. After having commented on their relationship, Levi continues: [Resnyk] told me his story, and today I have forgotten it, but it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel and moving story; because so are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of stories, all different and all full of a tragic, disturbing necessity. We tell them to each other in the evening, and they take place in Norway, Italy, Algeria, the Ukraine, and are simple and incomprehensible like the stories in the Bible. But are they not themselves stories of a new Bible? (Levi 1961, 59) Storytelling in Auschwitz was obviously very different from storytelling after Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, it was a precious form of communication that allowed for rare moments of mutual recognition, attention and empathy, while creating also a common world of reference and a shared time zone outside the destructive and empty time of the concentration camp. After Auschwitz, for the survivors, storytelling became the prime medium of remembering and witnessing. When Levi wrote down his experiences, reflections and memories, about his 16 months at Auschwitz after his return to Italy, he had already forgotten the story of his tall bedfellow Resnyk. And yet he tried to recall as many names and to remember as many stories as possible in his memoir to become a chronicler of those who did not survive the vortex of the Nazi factory of human destruction. But Levi was not only a collector of stories, he also created a new cultural frame for these individual stories of suffering and dying. In calling them “stories of a new Bible” he sanctified them as part of a new secular canon. In doing so, he committed these ephemeral and already half-forgotten stories to a longterm cultural memory, a project later taken up and supported by the archive of Yad Vashem and various video archives of survivor testimonies. With his concept of “a new Bible” Levi has expressed and laid the ground for a new ethics of remembering, storytelling and witnessing at the end of the 1950s, but it took another four decades for his concept to become generally accepted and realized. Long before the “historians’ quarrel” (Historikerstreit) in 1986–1989, a debate among German historians and intellectuals in which the mode of presenting and interpreting the Holocaust was discussed, Levi identified the Holocaust as a The Empathetic Listener and the Ethics of Storytelling 207 foundational past that should not pass, requiring artistic cultural efforts to prevent it from sinking back into oblivion. Many survivors considered the dead the primary witnesses of the Holocaust because it was they who experienced the full force of its destruction, which is why the survivors considered themselves to be witnesses for these witnesses. The Greek term for witness is “martyr”, referring to religious witnesses who heroically die for their faith or religious affiliation. The term fuses the meanings of testifying, suffering, dying and victory. The testimony of the religious witness requires another testimony of a secondary witness who tells the martyr’s story. When Levi collected the stories of his concentration camp inmates in a new Bible, he elevated the historic witnesses of the Holocaust to the level of secular martyrs. Art Spiegelman: The Entangled Listener Art Spiegelman’s rendering of his father’s testimony as an Auschwitz survivor in his equally epochal graphic novel Maus (1991) is another instance of the ethics of witnessing. In this book, the father as narrator of his testimony is doubled by his son as another narrator, acting as a collector, preserver and mediator of his father’s testimony. The introduction of the figure of a listener points here to the transfer of the trauma from the first generation of survivors to the second generation of their children and to the transfer of the testimony from family memory to a public work of art and an anonymous readership. In the images of this graphic novel, the son Art is not only included as the recorder of his father’s testimony but sometimes also projected into the story narrated by his father. This becomes especially obvious when Art appears in the same frame next to his father or draws himself in a concentration camp uniform, showing “his complete transposition into his parents’ history” and the “incorporation of their trauma in Auschwitz” (Hirsch 2012, 13). In such images, the boundary between the experience of the father and the son as an empathic listener is blurred aesthetically, emotionally and ethically. Starting as a distanced listener in the first volume, the son is more and more drawn into the father’s story, which is clearly shown in various panels of the comic that create a fusion of time and space, pulling the son into the narration and presenting him on the same level as his father. This son, however, is not exactly the model of an “empathetic listener”, as the bond that connects father and son is much too close, causing also considerable friction and tensions. Neither is the son a pure medium of this family memory, but he connects different legacies of trauma including his own and, in addition, he confronts the narrated story of his father with the silenced one of his mother. As a narrator acting as listener to his father’s memoir, the son is concerned and highly attentive, but he does hardly indulge in empathetic responses to what he is hearing. He has his 208 Aleida Assmann own agenda and is rather independent in his decisions about what should go into his book, commenting freely on the problems, dissent and struggle with his aging father. What connects the two is the intimate link that Marianne Hirsch has lucidly theorized as “postmemory”. The son identifies with the story of his father, which he comes to absorb more and more as his story in the process of transmission. This form of identifying goes beyond the imaginative projection that is common in the reading of fiction or the watching of films. The testimony, rather, turns out to be part of a legacy that the son has to bear also on his own shoulders, as his life is no longer separable from the stories and tragic fates of the other family members. Starting as a cool and distanced mediator who acts as a reporter, the son cannot stay in this comfortable position but is drawn more and more into a story that connects all the family stories, including his own. His act of witnessing is therefore clearly embedded in an entangled network of told and untold stories. The story that is being told and retold becomes more and more inclusive and fuzzy as it opens up to different testimonies and muted family stories. Dori Laub: The Secondary Witness as Empathetic Listener In an important book on trauma written together with Shoshana Felman, the psychotherapist Dori Laub has described his experience with Holocaust survivors whom he interviewed for the newly founded “Fortunoff Archive of Holocaust Video Testimonies” at Yale beginning in the 1980s. His chapter, entitled “Bearing Witness”, is a reflection on his own role and position as an interviewer who acts as a mediator, enabler and even midwife of the testimony of the survivor (Laub 1991). In Laub’s description, the different settings of video recording and therapy session become somewhat blurred when he steps into the role of a “secondary witness”. His main function in this role is to help recover the testimony of the survivor. This interviewer thereby acts as a witness for the witness. In this intimate interaction, he enters belatedly a contact zone between past experience and present reenactment. Laub has described in detail the role of the interviewer assisting in the recording of an oral testimony. He emphasized the mutual interaction in the co-production of the testimony by both interviewer and interviewee. Like the therapy session, the interview session is not a situation in which the memory of an event is recorded but a framework within which the shared knowledge of an event is produced. According to Laub, this is a form of co-production, though one that is very different from co-authoring a text. Laub’s two complementary images for this process are the role of the midwife, on the one hand, who assists in the process of giving birth, and the screen or page on the other hand, on which the writing becomes visible: The Empathetic Listener and the Ethics of Storytelling 209 While historical evidence to the event which constitutes the trauma may be abundant and documents in vast supply, the trauma—as a known event and not simply as an overwhelming shock—has not been truly witnessed yet, not been taken cognizance of. The emergence of the narrative which is being listened to—and heard— is, therefore, the process and the place wherein the cognizance, the “knowing” of the event is given birth to. The listener, therefore, is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo. The testimony to the trauma thus includes its hearer, who is, so to speak, the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time. (Laub 1991, 57) Laub’s description of the interview situation does not apply to everyday communication which, in fact, often differs vastly from it. Dan Bar On has shown us the multiple obstacles that must be removed before such an interaction can take place. He frequently commented on blocked primary and secondary witnessing, creating a rift between a nonspeaker and a nonlistener who are separated by a “double wall of silence” (Bar On 1994, 293). The first wall of silence comes down when the survivor is ready to speak about his or her experience. There is no guarantee, however, that the testimony will also be heard and acknowledged in an empathetic atmosphere. For this to happen, a second wall must come down, which is that of the listener. From this point of view, it is, in the end, the listener who makes the communication of the testimony possible. This means that the role of the empathetic listener is co-constitutive for the creation of the testimony. Dan Bar On coined the phrase when writing about the relations between Nazi perpetrators and their children, but, as Zerubavel has pointed out, the structure also applies to their victims and their children. The double wall of silence in the homes of the survivors is the product of “the interweaving of two kinds of conflicted energy: on the part of the survivor, (the) suppression of telling; on the part of the descendant, (the) fear of finding out” (Zerubavel 2006, 50). Taken together, Laub and Bar On provide an interesting analysis of the complicated and communicative setting of the act of witnessing, emphasizing both its barriers but also its possibilities. After having looked briefly at the transmission of testimonies in memoirs, social interaction and psychotherapy, I will now move on to the framing of primary and secondary witnessing in a fictional context. W. G. Sebald’s Staging of the Empathetic Listener W. G. Sebald is an author who has crossed the line between the two silences, moving from the silence of the perpetrators to that of the victims. In his writings, he introduced the empathetic listener as a new type of narrator. We can trace a line of development in his literary works, 210 Aleida Assmann reconstructing the genealogy of this new type of narrator from book to book. His novel The Emigrants (1992) reconstructs four life-stories of the first half of the twentieth-century, creating a new form of writing mediating between the public and the private, between memory and history. It connects the description of landscapes with the wounded lives of emigrants whose stories are diligently reconstructed. The integrating element is the particular tone, mood and style of the first person narrator. He is affected by melancholy and involved in a search rather than in research. His project is subjective and imagined rather than objective, creating prolonged spans of attention and saturated with a sense of irrecoverable loss and mystery. In this book, the narrator as empathic listener makes his first appearance. He is placed in a post-traumatic world, witnessing the aftermath a cataclysmic rupture of history. In response, he becomes a collector of tales and mediator of forgotten and ignored life stories, which he connects with landscapes and material fragments. In The Rings of Saturn (1998, Die Ringe des Saturn, 1995), Sebald transformed this writing into a new form of cultural history, using the format of subjective travel writing. Here, he introduces a first-person narrator as a reader of landscapes and a rummager in the cultural archive, discovering neglected, forgotten sites and items of memory. This pilgrimage is again framed in a specific mood that permeates the whole book and gives it its genuine artistic shape. In striking contrast to Walter Pater’s approach to cultural memory in Appreciations, written in the mode of venerating classical beauty, Sebald (1998) writes in the grave mode of melancholy, focusing on remnants of material history, marking traces and fragments that provide an oblique access to a riddled, obscure or lost past. When he enters the historical archive and explores forgotten remnants of material cultural history, Sebald’s style is fraught with knowledge, first-hand experience and insight but it is never pedagogical or instructive but always highly subjective and tentative. Like Pater, he creates an imaginary, reflexive and even hallucinatory mood, which he uses as the ambiance and continuity for his convoluted and labyrinthian novel. The novel is a search for trans-historical affinities and effects of “levitation”. But it is only in Austerlitz (2001) that the empathetic listener is fully developed as a new narrative type. He is constructed in a pact of witnessing and endowed with distinctive features and a generational profile that shows clear parallels with the biography and character of the author himself. The first and foremost function of this first-person narrator is his capacity to listen; he has no other job than to be in the right place at the right time, existing in a standby position and always on the alert in case the witness is ready to break the silence and starts to speak. The novel Austerlitz is the eponymous protagonist’s interrupted and resumed monolog, filtered through the mouthpiece of a first person narrator who has no other role and function than that of an empathetic listener. While The Empathetic Listener and the Ethics of Storytelling 211 the first section of the book deals in a conversational tone with questions of architecture, cultural history and the traces of genocidal violence, the rest of the novel unfolds the story of the protagonist in the form of a fragmented but uninterrupted monolog. Jacques Austerlitz does not tell his story in a void; he remembers “to” the empathic narrator who is present as the enabling support for confronting his trauma. The situation of mediation and framing is doubled and trebled whenever the protagonist includes other voices into his speech. This structure of reframing and recursive mediation is maintained throughout the text, creating a complicated structure of multiple embedding that has an artificial and estranging effect countering the effect of naive identification. The narrator neither responds nor comments on what he hears but records verbatim the words of the witness. As the faithful and reliable recorder of the protagonist’s disrupted but continuing memory work “he contributes to restoring the internal thou in the life of Austerlitz which is constitutive for the concept of witnessing” (Fuchs 2004, 42). The term “internal thou” was introduced by Dori Laub to describe the minimal condition of a sociality based on trust which was so brutally destroyed in the Holocaust, leaving its victims bereaved and speechless. Laub adds: “It is the encounter and the coming together between the survivor and the listener, which makes possible something like a repossession of the act of witnessing. This joint responsibility is the source of the reemerging truth” (Laub 1995, 69). In Sebald’s text, the profile of the first-person narrator is specified through information about his health, profession and biographical background. He is suffering from a sudden eye disease impairing his vision, which he explains as the effect of too much studying and reading. This prompted him to see an ophthalmologist in London who had to inject a fluid into his eyes putting him into a state of slight visual delirium. It is in this particular state that he meets Austerlitz again after twenty-years in the Bar of the Great Eastern Hotel where narrator and protagonist enter formally into what may be termed a “testimonial contract”. At this moment, Austerlitz is “eagerly looking for a listener for his story which he has only been uncovering recently”. Without further ado he embarks on his testimony, which has a ‘search-of-identity’-narratif, beginning with the sentence: “Since the days of my childhood and youth, I had no idea who I really am” (Sebald 2001, 64). While the reader follows the unfolding of the identity-mystery of the protagonist step by step, she knows a bit more about the identity of the listener who joined this pact of witnessing and shares many features with the author. Visually handicapped, this narrator has to fall back on the sensual organ of the ear and, like many of Poe’s characters, on his aroused imagination. But there is more to it: he also recalls something, namely a childhood memory of winter in the mountains, including “the total silence and the wish that everything be covered up with snow” 212 Aleida Assmann (Sebald 2001, 54). The image refers to the double wall of silence and hints at the blankness of the page on which the testimony comes to be written. It is made clear that he is a German of the second generation who has been living in voluntary exile in England since he was 20, but who has never forgotten that he grew up in the country of the perpetrators, carrying perhaps his own burden of “postmemory” (33–34). He is also a tourist visiting historical sites of Nazi violence where he gathers as much background information as he can possibly get. His persisting mood is again melancholy which is his answer to an oppressive silence of the Nazi past and the general lethargy of forgetting. He wonders how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on [.] (35) Like the author, the narrator embodies the generational project of the German protest movement of 1968. This project was aimed at uncovering and working through the Nazi past that had been suppressed and silenced by their parents. Neither the narrator nor the protagonist, however, had been ready for their pact of witnessing as a joint enterprise when they had met in the 1960s; the time had not yet been ripe for it. The historical moment for their encounter came only in 1996 when they met again by sheer coincidence and “the force of an inner logic” (Sedald 2001, 64). Thus, Sebald stages in this novel an ideal match between a victim finally eager to speak and a narrator ready to listen and to record. Sebald’s novel commits to cultural memory individual stories of Holocaust victims, enlarging the number of Primo Levi’s “stories of a new Bible” this time by assisting in the recovery of the testimony of a child survivor’s traumatic past. It is remarkable that Sebald’s narrator never intervenes in the monolog of the witness. His range of this narrator’s activities has dwindled from The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn to Austerlitz; it is finally reduced to his pure presence and the exact recording of the voice of the other. All he does is listen, and it is this act of listening that creates the frame for the testimony to unfold and the story to be told. The plot or narratif of testimonial writing focuses on the working through of traumatic memory and its transmission by recording the voices of primary and secondary witnesses. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz creates a pact and a contact zone for a memory and a story to emerge, however shot through with blurs, blind spots, unsolvable riddles, inconclusive threads and irrecoverable gaps of forgetting. The new literary type of the narrator as empathic listener has yet another function: he is The Empathetic Listener and the Ethics of Storytelling 213 not only an enabler for the witness on the level of the story, he is also a model for the reader of the novel. The Era of “Postmemory” and the Concept of “Secondary Witness” “We who come after do not have memories of the Holocaust”. When Eva Hoffman wrote this in 2004, she was referring to her own “generation of postmemory” (Hoffman 2004, 6). Her “we” was clearly defined: she spoke for the children of survivors, the second generation (2G). We can, however, also read this statement as a valid description of a much more general “we,” namely the inclusive community of Holocaust memory from the point of view of all succeeding generations. This means that we have arrived at a temporal threshold when the concept of “postmemory” needs to be revised and enlarged. From the highly specific generation marking the hinge between the survivors and their children, it is now becoming a much more general and even universal condition and predicament. Moving along the temporal axis from second to third and fourth generation, the condition “postmemory” is becoming a condition “post memory” (which I prefer to write in two words to distinguish it from Marianne Hirsch’s term). The ‘post’ that had referred to a specific affective link between two generations is thereby replaced by a ‘post’ that confirms and seals a general insurmountable temporal distance to the event of the Holocaust. There are considerable differences concerning Holocaust memory when we compare the historical moment of the 1990s and the problems facing us today. Even though the second generation was belated, its state of post-ness was qualified by the continuity of an embodied memory that unconsciously carried the affective charge of the traumatic impact from one generation to another. As this experiential link to “a deeply internalized but strangely unknown past” (Hoffman 2004, 6) recedes further and further on the temporal axis, this happens in a world that is at the same time marked by an overabundance of images and symbolic representations of the Holocaust. When we consider the future of this memory, this means that the link to this event will have to be reconstructed without the help of an indexical “umbilical cord” that had been a significant trope of the generation of postmemory (Hirsch 2012, 111). It will also have to do without the interactive contract and contact zone that Sebald staged in his novels between survivor and listener. We will, rather, must, rely solely on external and material forms, frames and genres of mediation. In a few years’ time, the memory of the Holocaust will consist only of images, narratives and information circulating across the globe along the channels of analogous and digital communication. In view of such a “popularization” and “trivialization,” theorists of the older generation already speak with bitterness of “the 214 Aleida Assmann end of the Holocaust” (Rosenfeld 2013). 2 For theorists of the younger generation such as Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2006), on the other hand, this is rather a source of optimism. They argue that thanks to the transmission of Holocaust memory through the channels of pop culture in the last decades of the twentieth-century, it has acquired the status of a global, universal, or cosmopolitan memory. The urgent question, however, is: what will be the quality of this memory in the future? Is it still possible and justified to apply the term “memory” in the era of “post memory”? How can memory create “an affective link” to a more and more distant past in the true sense of “an embodied ‘living connection’” (Hirsch 2012, 111)? Since there is no possibility of prolonging, extending or transferring existing memories, the only alternative is to recreate as memory what exists as data in a mediated form in the archives. Memory, in other words, will be linked to the archive and become a project of conscious revival and imaginative reanimation based on the production and reception in the domain of cultural media. This is the context in which a new notion of the “secondary witness” comes into play. The term “secondary witness” without a generational limit was first introduced by Terrence des Pres and Lawrence Langer (cit. Hartman 1998, 38–39). While the primary witness of the trauma of the Holocaust is severely damaged by what he or she witnesses, the secondary witness is an onlooker who is exposed only to media representations that affect and stimulate his or her imagination. This contact to the trauma does not take place in a (belated) real life context but in the mediated shape of a symbolic and artistic form that does not endanger the physical integrity of the spectator. In the absence of living embodied testimonies, the secondary witness is confronted only with symbolic representations. This position is open to any person, blurring the boundaries that had defined the “frames of transmission” channeling the event in different memory communities. What now becomes more and more important, however, is the mode of reception in which this encounter takes place. At this point, I would like to reintroduce the concept of the “secondary witness” as an important figure in the long-term guardianship of Holocaust memory. As the survivor who had been a primary witness disappears as a living resource and point of reference, the act of witnessing has to be transferred to secondary witnesses who can take shape in flesh and blood in generations to come. According to Geoffrey Hartman, a secondary witness deals with the Holocaust not as an event in history that is receding into a more and more distant past, but as an event in memory that retains its charge in the present and continues into the future. Receiving it as a memory means that it is received in the modes of identification, ethics or empathy, fueling consequences for one’s own life, value system and actions. Receiving in this sense means actively responding to a representation of the Holocaust. The important hypothesis is here that a “punctum” in Roland Barthes’ sense of an affective link The Empathetic Listener and the Ethics of Storytelling 215 between the viewer and the image can be recreated and re-experienced in a new media setting. This experiential quality can indeed occur when viewing a film, reading a book or paying attention to a video testimony. In an important essay on “Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification”, Alison Landsberg has described in detail the contexts and processes in which such empathic viewing and listening may be stimulated by products of mass media. She refers to these mediatized images as “prosthetic memories” that emerge at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theater or museum. In this moment of contact, an experience occurs through which a person sutures him or herself into a larger historical narrative. In this process, the person does not simply learn about the past intellectually but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live in the traditional sense. (Landsberg 2009, 222) There are also other possibilities of ethically meaningful historical contact as Michael Rothberg has shown by introducing such concepts as “multidirectional memory” or the “implicated subject” (Rothberg 2013). These terms stand for possibilities of accessing the past across distances and differences that circumvent established identity links and the prerogative of direct experience. He argues convincingly that there are indeed many indirect subject positions, modes of participation and ways of suturing oneself into a larger historical narrative if we accept that history is not a linear narratif but a yet largely undiscovered network of analogies, points of contact and entangled relations. In the era of post memory, writes Hartman in his own memoir, and this sounds almost like a repetition of the words of Sebald’s narrator, “so much of value that had been built up cannot be recovered or transmitted. The novel, the memoir, the oral testimony must then supplement history writing, help it to become the bearer of a retrospective “thick description,” saving bits and pieces that could seed a renewal” (Hartman 2007, 24). In such a spirit the secondary witness recasts his or her relation between the present and the past, between documentation and projection, between internal and external images, and between the self and others in an enlarged circle of concerns. If such a contact acquires the force of a punctum, new mnemonic energy is injected into the stream of transmission. It is such creative and receptive acts which constitute the “living chain of transmission” in the era of post memory (Hartman 2007, 36). We must not forget that from the very start, representations and mediations have been an integral part of Holocaust memory. After the passing of the embodied memory of the survivors, however, the future of the Holocaust will solely be grounded in mediated symbolic representations such as books and performances, films and exhibitions. 216 Aleida Assmann In this new historical context, the important ethical question is: Will these texts and images be perceived as passing history or as an abiding memory, and what will determine the difference? It is a specific quality of empathy that can turn the mere spectator into a secondary witness. This response is based on intellectual interest, active imagination, emotional investment and ethical engagement. The empathic listener and spectator assume the role of a “witness for the witness” who “actively receives words that reflect the darkness of the event” (Hartman 1998, 48). LaCapra speaks in this context of the “labor of listening and attending that exposes the self to empathetic understanding and hence to at least muted trauma” (1996, 198). Participation in such a memory creates an affective community that is independent of the filiations created by blood or nation or religion. Empathy is an imaginative act that works on the level of media presentations, creating the human possibility to think and feel in the position of another without blurring the distance between self and other. Empathy can be blunted, worn out and blocked, but it can also be trained and cultivated by visual and verbal art to expand the realm of experience of the self to include in our circle of concern the suffering and experience of others who are not like us. “No one bears witness for the witness” (“Niemand/zeugt für den/ Zeugen”, Celan 1967, 68). 3 This line from Paul Celan’s poem “Aschenglorie” describes the situation of the 1950s and 1960s. In a society that was determined to focus only on the future and to leave the past behind, the survivors were left alone with their trauma and testimonies. Today, the future of Holocaust memory is again precarious. There is a plethora of media representations and an abundance of institutions and archives acting as guardians of information and knowledge, but whether this will be transformed into a living memory will depend on the reception, resonance and response of these sites and performances, texts and images within an affective community. Such a community depends on secondary witnesses who embrace the role of empathic listeners and viewers, suturing themselves into a larger historical narrative. In doing so, they have the power and responsibility to transform the symbolic archive of representations into a living memory. They are the ones who become a link, a hinge and a relay in the ongoing chain of transmission. Notes 1 Burke combines the critical function of historiography with the ethical function: “I prefer to see historians as the guardians of awkward facts, the skeletons in the closet in the cupboard of the social memory” (Burke 1989, 110). 2 Rosenfeld looks at the proliferation of books, films, television programs, museums, and public commemorations related to the Holocaust and argues that the increase of mass media presentations have perversely brought about a diminution of its meaning and a denigration of its memory. 3 See also Baer (2000). The Empathetic Listener and the Ethics of Storytelling 217 References Baer, Ulrich, ed. 2000. ‘Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen’. Erinnerungskultur und historische Verantwortung nach der Shoah. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bar On, Dan. 1994. Legacy of Silence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burke, Peter. 1989. “History as Social Memory”. In Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, edited by Thomas Butler, 97–113. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Celan, Paul. 1967. Atemwende. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Fuchs, Anne. 2004. Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte. Zur Poetik der Erinnerung in W.G. Sebalds Prosa. Cologne: Böhlau. Hartman, Geoffrey. 1998. “Shoah and Intellectual Witness”. Partisan Review 65 (1): 37–48. Hartman, Geoffrey. 2007. A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe. New York: Fordham. Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Hoffman, Eva. 2004. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York: Public Affairs. Koschorke, Albrecht. 2012. Wahrheit und Erfindung. Grundzüge einer Allgemeinen Erzähltheorie. 2. Aufl. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. LaCapra, Dominick. 1996. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Landsberg, Alison. 2009. “Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification”. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. Special Issue: Memory and Media Space 22 (2): 221–29. Lanzmann, Claude. 2013. “Je refuse de comprendre…” Bibliobs – L’Obs, November 17. http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/essais/20090305.BIB3088/claudelanzmann-je-refuse-de-comprendre.html. Laub, Dori. 1991. “Bearing Witness”. In Testimony: The Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, edited by Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, 57–74. New York: Routledge. Laub, Dori. 1995. “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle”. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 61–75. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Levi, Primo. 1961. Survival in Auschwitz. The Nazi Assault on Humanity. New York: Collier Books. Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. 2006. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Müller-Funk, Wolfgang. 2002. Die Kultur und ihre Narrative. Eine Einführung. Vienna: Springer. Rosenfeld, Alvin H. 2013. The End of the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rothberg, Michael. 2013. “Multidirectional Memory and the Implicated Subject. On Sebald and Kentridge”. In Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, edited by Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik, 39–58. New York: Routledge. 218 Aleida Assmann Sebald, W. G. 1998. The Rings of Saturn. Translated by Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions. Sedald, W. G. 2001. Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Random House. Spiegelman, Art. 1991. Maus. A Survivor’s Tale. Vol 2. New York: Pantheon Books. Zerubavel, Eviatar. 2006. The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 14 Transformative Tales Theater Storytelling, Ethics and Restitution Anna Reading In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston wrote: “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you” (2010, 176). Yet, ethically speaking, does the told story relieve the agony of the inhumane condition—of a home and loves lost through war or conflict, of a childhood mutilated by child sexual abuse—since grief does not in itself diminish but rather we grow around its pain (Tonkin 1996, 10)? Perhaps, the restitutional potential of storytelling lies in its work to grow and sustain the human life of the self or community around the pain of the inhumane condition? This chapter discusses the ethics of storytelling in the theater and its potential and limits for restitution. Bringing together insights from human rights literature as well as literary studies, the essay argues that restitutional storytelling is not about a transition to another future state, or a restoration—a return—to what was. Rather, storytelling, and theater storytelling in particular, contribute to the historical imagination of the self and society in ways that are on-going and unfinished; a play and its performance mobilize and consolidate historic imaginaries that are part of what I model here as the restitutional assemblage which is momentarily transformative of the inhumane condition over time. The chapter begins with a discussion about the significance of storytelling as part of restitution within human rights discourse within transformative and indigenous justice. The transformative justice paradigm recognizes the wider social, cultural and economic inequalities that contribute to human rights violations and seeks to transform those inequalities for the future (Gready and Robins, 2014). The indigenous justice paradigm is holistic, rather than adversarial, involving a circle of justice that involves everyone connected to the problem or conflict who work on a continuum to restore peace and order (Gray and Lauderdale, 2007). The chapter then turns to insights on restitution within literary studies particularly within and around the writing of W. G. Sebald. Together, these suggest that restitution is not simply a one-off economic contract involving the return of capital or property; restitution also includes non-material elements1 and the transformation of symbolic, spiritual and emotional capital in a process that is continually emergent 220 Anna Reading rather than finished or complete. Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (2003), this suggests that ethically restitution is better conceptualized in terms of an ‘assemblage’ in which storytelling is integral. The restitutional assemblage may involve the payment of money, the building of monuments, and state apology which are then linked through different kinds of storytelling from judicial testimony to stories in the theater that mobilize and consolidate discursive formations and material practices that are briefly recognizable as restitution. Framing the second part of the essay through the model of the restitutional assemblage, I explore this idea in practice by examining the potential and limitations of storytelling as restitution in some of my work as a playwright. The stories I have told over many years are always difficult or taboo. I have often worked with charities and non-governmental organizations on topics that have included rape and incest, homelessness and poverty, prisons and crime, pornography and the abuse of the elderly. I reflect in this chapter on the restitutional potential and challenges within Kiss Punch Goodnight (1987) which tells the story of familial child sexual abuse. Kiss Punch Goodnight has been performed at various venues throughout the UK by different theater companies. I begin by discussing restitution in relation to storytelling more broadly. Storytelling, Restitution and Transformative Justice Storytelling does not figure highly within Western legal frameworks in which restitution is concerned with one-off economic acts involving the return of disadvantage or loss in terms of goods, money or property. The concern with property is the focus of key works on restitution such as Elazar Barkan’s classic The Guilt of Nations (2001) based on research in European states after the Second World War. Barkan sought to show the multiple economic disadvantages, “the confiscation of all personal and communal property” and “flight taxes demanded of Jews” (Barkan 2001, 4). Although post-Second World War restitution required multiple acts of testimony as part of the restitutional process, storytelling was only valued as testimony within the judicial domain (Von dem Knesebeck 2011). Western justice systems require the separation of the Judiciary from the State and religious institutions. Thus, the case for harms done is narratively framed within the formal adversarial judicial context narrated by expert strangers on the victim’s behalf. The formal stories or testimonies in the performance space of the courtroom are required to be told within a set period and framed so that abuses of human rights are isolated from the stories and context of the wider society. Restitution within a Western context is largely based within a transitional justice model conceptualized in terms of economic measures pursued by states to redress human rights violations. The U.N.’s Transformative Tales 221 Rights to Remedy and Reparations for Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Law outline five kinds of reparation: restitution, satisfaction, rehabilitation, compensation and guarantees of non-repetition. Symbolic and narrative story modes such as apology and public acknowledgment of wrongs done fall under what is understood to be satisfaction rather than restitution. Restitution is concerned with restoring the victim to conditions before the violations occurred (De Greiff 2006). The transitional justice model does not recognize the differential impact of violence, atrocity and abuse that arises from on-going social and economic inequalities, although human rights violations have a greater impact on those who are poorer, especially women and children (Carranza 2009). In contrast, the newer and emergent model of transformative justice recognizes the context for human rights violations, including the fact that pre-existing and continuing inequalities are a contributory factor in the impact of harms done. The transformative justice model contends that any acts of justice should also seek to transform inequalities (Gready and Robins 2014, 347). Thus reparations should address and seek to transform both the harms done as well as the unequal structures of societies that have driven the conflict or abuse (347). The transformative justice model suggests that ethically restitutional storytelling would render into narrative and memory not only the historical imaginary of harms done but also the on-going uneven distribution of resources and the social hierarchy of context for the human rights violations themselves. Significantly, such an approach is long established within indigenous models of justice and storytelling; these in turn point to an ethical model in which restitution is an assemblage of acts and practices rather than a one-off finite transaction. Storytelling, Restitution and Indigenous Justice Systems Semantically, restitution in the English language refers to a material return, but it does have a secondary meaning deriving from the science of physics which means the return of energy. Thus, although restitution may involve a historic imaginary of the material impact of harms done and the material inequalities that led to those harms, ideally, restitutional storytelling within the theater should also articulate the non-material impacts of conflict or abuse to offer an energetic return that might be thought of as the spiritual and affective dimensions of the restitutional process. Indigenous justice systems have long recognized the non-material elements or energetic dimensions within restitutional processes. Colonial violence to indigenous peoples in Canada and Australia involved the theft of land and cultural genocide that stripped survivors of cultural knowledge, language, religion and kinship ties (Everingham 2005). 222 Anna Reading Consequently, Western models of restitution for indigenous people’s losses caused by colonialism are inadequate; they fail to address the on-going and trans-generational damage to spirituality which is deeply imbricated within land and culture (Ramos 2010, 55–72). Initiatives such as Truth and Reconciliation Canada (TRC) 2008–2015 were criticized for adopting imported models of storytelling that emphasize the history of colonialism and victimhood. This, has in turn, led to the revitalization of indigenous spiritual storytelling models which are key to more inclusive forms of restitution (Corntassel, Chaw-win-is, and T’lakwadzi 2009). Restitution in practice is thus increasingly recognized as requiring a range of “memory practices” beyond the judicial and narrowly economic (Rigney 2012). These have involved storytelling practices beyond those told in court, such as the theater of apology and public acts of remembrance (Short 2012). The arts and professional artists are also increasingly recognized as having an important restitutional role: in post-Apartheid South Africa, for example, artists and story work enabled the further reworking of narratives that came to dominate those facilitated through the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of Apartheid in 1994 (Buikema 2012). While Western justice relies on a linear and sequential sense of time symbolically inscribed by the clock and the calendar, Indigenous justice systems encourage a more open and folded understanding of time and temporarily. 2 Indigenous systems also operate through whole communities working together in an examination of the context, causes and impacts of the injustice or conflict (Melton 1995, 126–33). This model gives much more emphasis to storytelling as part of restitutional processes; while these might include the Western idea of formal apology it can also include performance, poetry, song and dance with the whole community involved spiritually and energetically (126–33). Literature and Restitution Within literature, there is also recognition of the ways that stories can incite non-material restitution. According to the writer W. G. Sebald, it is the imaginative arts—particularly imaginative literature—rather than testimony, that offer most restitutional potential. In “An Attempt at Restitution”, translated and republished in English in 2004, Sebald writes, “There are many forms of writing; only in literature, however, can there be an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts, and over and above scholarship”3 (Sebald 2004). Literature has the capacity to ask, “unnerving questions” with alternative imaginaries, that “worry away at claims of historical veracity” that facilitates projects of restitution (Baxter, Henitiuk, and Hutchinson 2013, 2). To Sebald restitution through literature is only an “attempt”; an experiment which may not work or which may have unexpected outcomes. Transformative Tales 223 Jon Hollander makes similar claims for poetry arguing that while poetry cannot put things right, it enables readers to imagine another life, another place which is crucial to a renewed sense of becoming (Hollander 1997, 39–63). In The Human Condition (1998) Hannah Arendt endorses a view that supports the transformational potential of storytelling more broadly. She argues that although such transformation may be largely expressed through the stories of those designated as artists, such transformations are possible by anyone: The most current of such transformations occurs in storytelling and generally in artistic transposition of individual experiences. But we do not need the form of the artist to witness this transfiguration. Each time we talk about things that can be experienced only in privacy or intimacy, we bring them out into a sphere where they will assume a kind of reality which, their intensity notwithstanding, they never could have had before. (1998, 50) Thus, Michael Jackson’s ethnographic work with refugees and their accounts of forced migration in The Politics of Storytelling (2013) has shown how their stories build a bridge between personal experience— of violence, or colonialism, of war—with collectively shared myths and narratives (Jackson 2013). Stories in the Theater as Restitutional Assemblage Imaginative stories in the theater arguably might offer something distinct restitutionally since the story moves from written texts to performances told within a domain collectively experienced with a live audience. Christopher Bigsby in his examination of Peter Weiss’s The Investigation suggests that documentary theater is part of a “chain of memory” that can then take the audience from “testimony to play to novel” (2006, 23). Perhaps stories in the theater offer something in the Arendtian sense of the “in-between” (1998) in that they are able to mobilize testimonies as well as other art forms.4 Andreas Mahler (2016) in his analysis of restitution within the work of Shakespeare and English Renaissance Drama also reminds us that theater offers a sense of “cyclical restitution”: this involves in the historic imaginary of the play a sense of repeated “cyclical ‘atone’ment (attunement)” as well as the possibility within the imaginary of the story in the theater of the rediscovery of unit, or a momentary being “‘at one’ again” (2016, 21). What these insights point to is that restitution is so much more than a one-off economic act; it is more like an ‘assemblage’ or a range of processes over time and that may be unfinished. The concept of the 224 Anna Reading assemblage developed by Deleuze and Guattari (2003) describes an on-going process of self-organizing elements that are heterogeneous. What we might then term the restitutional assemblage5 is an on-going process that involves discursive formations and material practices. These are mobilized and consolidated through various forces (including storytelling) in different domains. Stories of different kinds mobilize and consolidate moments of restitution that, as Tonkin (1996) suggests, then help grow the life of the self around that which was and is inhumane. Storytelling, which might include the informal stories of survivors within families, autobiographical and fictional stories, storytelling projects led by NGOs, stories mobilized by journalists in the media, testimonial stories told by victims to courts and commissions are all then integral to the assemblage that involves restitutional mobilization, transformation, change, emergence and consolidation. The ethical art of restitutional assemblage seeks to transform not only the pain and suffering caused by human rights abuses but also seeks to mobilize and consolidate recognizable transformations of on-going social and economic inequalities out of which on-going human rights violations occurred. The Restitutional Assemblage and Kiss Punch Goodnight What good then is the theater as part of the restitutional assemblage?6 In this next section, I examine the ethics of storytelling in the theater as restitution for familial child sexual abuse, focusing on the script and production of one of my plays, Kiss Punch Goodnight. The play was written and publically performed by Strip Search Theatre Company in 1987 in York (England) and Edinburgh (Scotland). It has had several productions since in arts centers and theaters in Warwick, London and Belfast with diverse companies including the Women’s Playgroup and Low Life Theatre. The Edinburgh production of the play was videoed and shown to women’s groups on the East coast in the US. I revisit this play and its production to explore how an individual story involving human rights abuses within the domestic realm can ethically be made public through the story in the theater. The play, I suggest, goes beyond voyeurism or shock and instead mobilizes and consolidates restitutional processes in many transformational ways. The play focuses on one story of familial child sexual abuse; the story of Dawn, who is sexually abused and raped by her father from the age of four up until the age of eighteen when she escapes by leaving home. In 1987, it was highly controversial to give voice to the subject of familial child sexual abuse; the topic was silenced for ideological and judicial reasons and because of the trauma involved for survivors. Since 1987 there have been significant changes both to the law on rape and sexual abuse in the UK (Temkin 2002). The Sexual Offences Act of 2003 changed the definition of child abuse and to some extent then made its reporting Transformative Tales 225 easier with changes to the statute of limitation which had meant that any sexual abuse which a person had experienced more than three years previously could not be taken to court.7 The year 1987 in the UK, however, marked the beginnings of a long journey towards increased public awareness in part mobilized by a number of plays that same year about child sexual abuse, including Foursight Theatre’s Secret Vice and the Works Touring Company’s Cross My Heart and Hope to Die. Kiss Punch Goodnight was singular however in that it was child-centered and, as The Yorkshire Evening Press noted, was “set to cause its own storm with the message that attention should be focused on children rather than parents” (“York Gets Incest: Play Preview” 1987). Journalist Margaret Greenfield noted: A child’s difficulty in communicating its fear and grief is illustrated when Dawn desperately tries to persuade her mum not to go out for the evening. Leaving her alone with her father. When the mother tries to placate her with the usual platitudes, she screams at the audience, “I wanted to tell her. I was screaming inside, but I couldn’t”. (Greenfield 1987) Drawing on the script itself, my notes on its first production in 1987, as well as the wider context of reviews and letters in response to the play, I argue that the play and its production were momentarily transformational for individuals and for broader public discourse; it opened upnew historic and future imaginaries, as well as action and thought for the cast, for the audience and for a wider public. It unsettled the dominant silencing of the subject of familial child sexual abuse at the time to produce new courses of action. Restitution and Transformation The play’s content and structure are in themselves an assemblage. The main plot focusses on the story of the character of Dawn from the age of four to eighteen and shows scenes of sexual abuse by her father through to her disclosure to her mother after an attempted suicide. Such an approach was fraught with ethical challenges; these included the danger of voyeurism, as well as the risk of alienating men and thus failing in the ethical responsibility to tell the story of survivors by engaging with all members of the audience and providing them the possibility of transformation. However, I wrote a script using what on critical reflection is an assemblage affording a multi-perspective approach so that the central story of sexual abuse was graphic but never sordid and served to reach both men and women: This is an extremely engrossing piece of work handled with commitment in the writing, in the performances and in the direction. 226 Anna Reading Dealing with father-daughter-rape, it employs a variety of dramatic modes to explore the hidden inner world of pain, shame, confusion and lasting injury to what to all the world looks like an ordinary girl from a normal family with normal parents. The horror of the atrocities against childhood in this innocent-looking prison emerge cogently and movingly into their awful legacy in the adult woman. Despite that this is not a male-battering play but a positive and illuminating exploration of a dark corner. (Campbell 1987, 11) Structurally, the story connects the inner and outer worlds through alternate imaginaries: as the title Kiss Punch Goodnight suggests, a kiss is followed by a punch. Naturalistic moments are overturned by interventions through the fourth wall; grueling scenes of abuse are interrupted and/or followed by cabaret, farce, slap-stick comedy and puppets to tell stories of the wider power structures of gender oppression, as well as short monologues of a range of adult women who relate their own experiences of child sexual abuse. Such alienation techniques might be interpreted as simply classically Brechtian devices to take the audience out of an emotional state and into an intellectual one. But the assemblage structure is a deliberate splicing of seemingly unrelated elements that did not necessarily immediately and directly connect, to enable a journey of viewpoint switches around the harrowing story of the central character of Dawn. As W. G. Sebald suggests the possibility for the restitutional in literature involves using association to make “strange connections” that go beyond “causal logic” (Sebald 2004). Even within the play’s naturalistic scenes, the script flipflops between grim horror and humor. An example is when Dawn, aged ten, is trying to tell her only friend Sian about the abuse by her father. She does this indirectly by telling the made-up story of another a girl she calls Debbie. The scene, set in a school playground, opens with Dawn and Sian whispering while crouching down behind a bench to hide from a boy who has been chasing after them. Dawn: Her dad, well he’s Sian: He’s reading one of a bit funny. his comics now. Phew. We’re safe. What is he round the bend then her dad? Dawn: Nooo. He’s just funny. He sometimes. Touches her. Sian. Who? Dawn: Debbie. Sian: Debbie? Well my dad touches me. Dawn: Does he? Sian: Doesn’t yours? Dawn: Oh Yeah. (Pause). How though? How does your dad touch you? Sian: Well, like anyone. You do say stupid things Dawn. Transformative Tales 227 Dawn: How though? Sian: He holds my hand. Gives me a hug, you know, like my mum. Dawn: No, no, no. I didn’t mean like that. This dad he, Debbie told me, he sometimes, starts breathing, kind of funny. Sian: You keep saying funny. What do you mean funny? Dawn: Just funny. Sian: What, like an asthma attack? My dad gets asthma. Dawn: No, not really. Sort of hard, and fast. Sian: Sounds like asthma. Perhaps he’s been running or something. (Reading 1987, 29) Dawn tells her own story of abuse fictionalized as the story of the made-up friend “Debbie” but the reaction from the ten-year-old Sian is devastating: Sian: She told you that? That’s disgusting. You’re lying. Dawn: I’m not lying. Sian: Why would he do that? It’s horrible. Dawn: He does. Debbie told me. She did. Sian: My dad wouldn’t do that. Her dad sounds like a monster. Dawn: He’s not a monster. He’s (pause) nice sometimes. (Reading 1987, 30) The scene closely observing the ten-year-old child’s viewpoint is immediately followed by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud bursting onto the stage to give a sudden lecture, wearing the white coat of the scientist but satirized through him donning swimming goggles: In the cases of neurotica I have studied, blame was laid by my female patients on perverse acts by the fathers, or close relatives. Yet, it hardly seems credible that such perverted acts against children could be so general. So, I have been driven to recognize that these reports were untrue. (Reading 1987, 34) Freud: Freud continues by explaining that all the female patients’ symptoms are because of their own fantasies arising from penis envy which he then absurdly illustrates with puppets. In this way, the play is synoptic: the personal story told from the child’s perspective collides with the respected work of the founding father of twentieth-century psychoanalysis. However, Freud’s authority is undermined through the use of parody combined with puppets: the scene is alluding to academic debates stimulated by Jeffrey Masson’s The Assault on Truth (1984). Masson (1984) argued that Sigmund Freud 228 Anna Reading switched from initially believing his patients’ accounts of sexual abuse to discrediting the reality of their experiences following pressure from the Viennese establishment. The scene thus debunks Freudian authority and consequently the wider ideology, power structures and inequalities of patriarchy that might be said to contribute to the denial of the sexual abuse of children in the family. As Sebald observes, individual eyewitness accounts (in this case Dawn’s) are put alongside other synoptic and artificial viewpoints, because “Some strange connections cannot be explained by causal logic” (Sebald 2006, 204). The play was said to display “a deep understanding not only from the child’s point of view but also from those in authority, thus giving a rounded picture of the whole situation in the community” (Kennedy 1987, 10). Playwriting, I would suggest, perhaps more so than other story forms, is able to offer multiple perspectives that are more akin to the indigenous justice model; it thus enables a restitutional storytelling process that seeks to explore atrocities through and with the whole community. Although the play has female and male characters, a Foreword outlines the ethical framework for any production: The play is written to be performed by an all-women cast. This is because certain scenes if performed by male actors would serve to perpetuate male violence rather than expose it. (Reading 1987, 1) I wanted the play to be able to show—not just tell—the grim reality of child sexual abuse but without voyeurism. Flloyd Kennedy notes that consequently while the scenes showing on stage child sexual abuse were tremendously shocking, they were never pornographic or lurid, because of the decision to have “the men’s roles played by women” (Kennedy 1987, 10). In all subsequent productions the male perpetrator, the father, has always been performed by an adult woman and the four-year-old child who becomes an adult woman is also performed by an adult woman. Other male authority figures in the play are performed by adult women. The all-female adult cast was an ethical choice to suggest that sexual violence against women and girls by men is not the result of innate male perversions but is a matter of power, linked to wider gendered inequalities which thus have the potential to be transformed. As Andrew Moody, Professor of English Literature at York observed: As an audience discussion after the performance showed, it does touch both men and women profoundly, and it does this because it prompts re-examinations of ourselves and not just outrage and concern. It gets through the clichés and sanitized treatments and the evasions. (Moody 1987, personal communication) Transformative Tales 229 The play thus mobilizes as part of the restitutional assemblage a wider emphasis on the need for transformational justice in which restitution is seen as requiring an understanding of and transformation of wider social inequalities (Gready and Robins 2014). Alternative Imaginaries One of the naturalist scenes that provokes much discussion amongst the cast and audience is the penultimate scene. In this, Dawn discloses to her mother, Sue, that she was sexually abused by her father throughout much of her childhood. During the scene, the mother’s responses are transformed from complete denial to shock and outrage, to inquiry and then—quite rapidly—to belief in the reality of her daughter’s experience. Sue subsequently confronts the father—her husband—before then angrily but calmly walking out of the house with Dawn. (to Dawn) Just look what you’ve done, you’ll regret this, my girl. Look what you’ve done to your mother. How dare you upset your mother like this. It’s alright Sue love. It’s alright, calm down. We’ll get this all sorted out. Sue: Get your hands off me. I said get your hands off me. You perverted. Get out of this house. (She stands up and pulls Duncan up.) Just get out. I said get out Duncan. If you don’t I’ll (she slowly pushes him back into the chair). No. In fact you keep our little house, our wonderful house, and everything inside it, the nice curtains, nice furniture, nice kitchen, nice garden, nice bedrooms. You can keep it. The whole bloody lot. Keep your objects, your possessions. (She puts her arm around Dawn.) Well, you don’t possess us. Not anymore you don’t. And you can just sit there and rot you bastard. Rot in your own holocaust. (Reading 1987, 67) Duncan: The father is abandoned center stage, a solitary and lonely figure in front of a series of slides that echo slides at the beginning of the play that connect the nuclear family with militarism and wider power structures, ending with a heartbeat and an image of a nuclear holocaust. All the actors then come on stage and remove part of their costume; they hold hands with the actor who has played the father and sing a song called Building Bridges, which includes the lines “I reach out for you, will you reach out for me / With all of our voices and all of our visions, sisters we can make such a sweet harmony” (cited in Reading, 1987, 69).8 The alternative imaginary of the final scene in Kiss Punch Goodnight is very different from other literary imaginaries of sexual abuse. Festen, a Danish film by Thomas Vinterberg (1998) adapted for the stage and first produced in 2004 by David Eldridge (2013) is also the story of a 230 Anna Reading father’s abuse of his children: in Festen, after one adult daughter commits suicide, the son discloses the abuse to the rest of the family gathered to celebrate the father’s 60th birthday. In Eldridge’s adaption, the family struggles with the truth and largely continues to disbelieve, discredit and ostracize the victims. With Kiss Punch Goodnight, the play mobilizes alternative more hopeful possibilities and opens a different course of action as well as invoking a collective orientation towards the future. As Russell J. A Kilbourn (2013) suggests, restitution is different from retribution in that it seeks to restore agency. Kiss Punch Goodnight does not (indeed cannot) restore agency to victims of abuse, but rather imagines a moment of agency and points to a wider set of power structures and inequalities that are momentarily transformed through the material practices and discursive formation of the play. In reality, of course, victims are far more likely to be further victimized by being disbelieved by their family, including their mothers, and by the criminal justice system. The story in Kiss Punch Goodnight is unrealistic in suggesting that a mother would immediately leave the family home: for many women, there would be nowhere to go and they would have no money of their own. But the playwright, like a wheelwright, has the opportunity through stories to put the wheels back on the wreckage of human life; I wanted the story of Kiss Punch Goodnight to provide an alternative historic imaginary in which Dawn is transformed through a sense of female agency and power. The alternative imaginary was incredibly provocative for audience members in terms of mobilizing a discussion about why women and girls are disbelieved and why it is so difficult for mothers of children who have been abused to leave their partners. Repetition and Restitution As the playwright and director for the first production both at York Drama Barn and at the Edinburgh Fringe, I would sit in the audience and watch the play. Each evening the production team, the actors, lighting and sound crew, producer, writer-director, as well as those on the door, were taken on a grueling two-hour journey into a historic imaginary of abuse, escape, survival and idealized maternal support. Each performance night was a repeated private and public restitutional process for those present that was momentarily transformative. Each night members of the audience had the opportunity to tell fragments of their own stories at the end in the post-performance discussion. What was also significant was that some members of the audience, usually those who had in some way shared their stories afterward, often came back to watch further performances. This impermanent transformation combined with repetition is, as Hanna Arendt points out, a key feature of the power of plays and drama. In The Human Condition, Transformative Tales 231 she suggests that drama has a significance in society and politics because of its mimetic qualities that are reified as “a kind of repetition” (Arendt 1998, 187). This repetition should not be understood in the psychoanalytical sense but rather is a key element of stories in the theater as part of the restitutional assemblage: it constitutes a temporary consolidation of the assemblage when restitution is momentarily felt and recognizable but is then subsequently changed again and thus requires future consolidation in the future. Restitution as Words and Action The production itself drew politically on the ideas of the playwright John McGrath in A Good Night Out (1981) who stressed the importance of caring for the audience before, during and after the performance. The playwright is not only responsible for writing the script but must also take responsibility and care for and with the performers and production team as well as the audience. Thus, the Foreword of Kiss Punch Goodnight states: It is advisable for the cast to have some workshops … before approaching the text itself and for discussion and group responsibility to be maintained throughout rehearsals. (Reading 1987, 1) As the Director, I included workshops with the actors on familial child sexual abuse and incest so that there was a deeper understanding of these issues in terms of their causes, impact and wider history and politics. We worked with the emergent stories of the actors themselves who during rehearsals could disclose their own related or disjunctive experiences. In addition, the Foreword also emphasized that affective and psychological care should be taken of the audience: The play if possible should be followed by an informal discussion at the end with the cast and the audience. It is advisable that contact numbers and local information about Rape Crisis Centres … are provided in the programme. (Reading 1987, 1) Audience members are treated as integral to the process in terms of giving recognition and space to their own emergent stories mobilized by the play. After each performance, audience members were invited to stay and talk with the actors, production team and me as the writer about the play, to ask questions and to give their thoughts and experiences of it. This often led audience members to tell their own stories or fragments of them and how they connected or indeed did not connect with those 232 Anna Reading shown on stage. The discussions were difficult, painful, and frequently filled with both tears and laughter. Yet, as Flloyd Kennedy noted, this meant that victim-survivors in the audience at the end of Kiss Punch Goodnight were not left feeling alone. Instead they know “they have the right to object and that there are people and organizations that can help them to come to terms with the experience” (Kennedy 1987, 10). Every production of the play ensures that audience members are also provided with information about the local Rape Crisis Centre and / or counseling and support available as well being invited to donate to that cause. The Foreword to Kiss Punch Goodnight also states that the audience should be asked for donations to national or local charities. The play in all its performances has thus connected economically with organizations that include Rape Crisis in York, Edinburgh and Coventry, as well as Child Line, and MOSAC, Mothers of Sexually Abused Children. Consequently, each performance, as Aileen Christodoulou noted in Spare Rib, led to further active discussions with the audience that provided moments of empowerment: The strength of the play lies in its ability to portray a personal experience as a social evil. For the women in the group, as well as the audience, this was an example of feminist creative therapy at its best. We united in laughing at the absurdities of our society and shared the anger of our powerlessness. It sparked a discussion which proved to be far more positive than clapping passively. (Christodoulou 1987, 20) The discussions led to audience members writing cards or letters to me and the production company afterward. One woman (whose name is changed here) wrote: Thank you so much. The play stirred so many emotions, said so many things, that have been screaming in my head. For so long I’ve been silent even to myself. Please consider making a video. There are so many of us who need to speak out and ‘feel again’. Take your play widely. Good luck. Thanks. Love and Peace. (Carlton 1987, personal communication) Thus, the play mobilizes restitutional processes through enabling audience members to tell their stories and to connect with others in what Arendt has formulated as the wider social network of action (1998, 189). Kiss Punch Goodnight points to how storytelling in the theater can mobilize and consolidate historical imaginaries for the individual and communities that are then integral to an on-going restitutional process or assemblage. Transformative Tales 233 A Play Is Only a Play So, ethically, what good are stories told in the theater? What good was Kiss Punch Goodnight in relation to restitution for victims and survivors of child sexual abuse? Within the wider context of the late 1980s and 1990s, although victims in the UK could or might then go to the police with the view of giving a statement and taking their abusers to court, the statute of limitations prevented the possibility of historic cases being successfully prosecuted. It took until the noughties for changes in the law and prosecution practices in the UK and indeed more widely to modestly alter, which has since led to cases of historic abuse being taken to court, the most prominent of which have involved media celebrities who committed acts against strangers in the 1970s and 1980s. Studies continue to show, however, that there remains an overemphasis in the public domain by the media on celebrity cases of historic abuse against children who are strangers to them. There is a continual reinforcement of the myth of the stranger-paedophile as the greatest danger rather than family or friend which then masks hegemonic masculinity and patriarchal power inequalities (Cowburn and Dominelli 2001). This, in turn, continues to make familial incest and abuse by family members invisible (Itzin 2001). Twenty years on studies show how “the popular focus on ‘stranger danger’ belies the fact that most children are abused by someone well known to them” (McAlinden 2006, 339). Ethically, neither Kiss Punch Goodnight nor any play in terms of the story in the script or its performance should in my view ever be considered as restitutional in either a material or non-material sense. Rather, stories in the theater and stories more widely might be understood as part of an on-going process or what I have modeled here as the restitutional assemblage. The story in the play and its performance involves material—of production, of bodily acting, of the domain of the theater—along with the discursive and expressive formations—the play, the stories of the actors, the stories of the audience—that then mobilize and momentarily consolidate recognizable moments of restitution. Furthermore, for the story to be restitutionally transformational it needs to mobilize a historical imaginary and recognition of the harms done, but also tell the wider story of the on-going inequalities that led to it. While Kiss Punch Goodnight tells a story in the theater in which there were moments of consolidation in which restitution was recognizable, this was only as part of an assemblage of the emergent stories and actions of others. Ethically, the restitutional work of the story in the theater about a childhood mutilated by child sexual abuse lies in its endeavor to grow and sustain the human life of the self or community around the inhumane condition knowing that the story, quite rightly, is never finished. 234 Anna Reading Acknowledgements With thanks to all those involved in the first production of Kiss Punch Goodnight at York Drama Barn in 1987, to the women of York Rape Crisis and to Val Huet whose work with me made the writing of this chapter possible. Thank you also to Professor David Moody, Department of English, University of York, who kindly gave permission to quote from his 1987 letter and Richard Drain for his inspiration as a playwright. Notes 1 The term non-material arises within discussions within sociology and spirituality, see Holmes (2016). For discussions on symbolic and emotional capital, see Wetherall (2012). 2 The French philosopher Michel Serres also suggests a “folded” sense of time, see Serres (1995). 3 Translated, from the German, by Anthea Bell. The text of this essay was first delivered as a speech at the opening of the House of Literature in Stuttgart in 2001 and was published in The New Yorker in 2004. 4 On the “in-between” in the context of narrative studies, see Meretoja’s (2017, Ch. 3) discussion on the “narrative in-between”. 5 The concept of the restitutional assemblage is outlined in more detail in Reading (2017). 6 The phrase is an allusion to Sebald’s question “So what is literature good for?” which is a reference to a book chapter by Martin Heidegger “What Are Poet’s For?” that discusses Friedrich Hölderlin’s line “and what are poets for in destitute time?” from the elegy “Bread and Wine”. See Heidegger (2001). 7 Although as Maggie Wykes and Kirsty Welsh argue in Violence, Gender and Justice (2009) familial sexual abuse, which is the majority of abuse against children, mostly girls, is not deemed as newsworthy as assault by a stranger. 8 I have analyzed the particular trajectories of Building Bridges which was created at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, see Reading (2015). References Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barkan, Elazar. 2001. The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historic Injustices. New York: W. W. Norton. Baxter, Jeannette, Valerie Henitiuk, and Ben Hutchinson. 2013. “Introduction: ‘A Quoi Bon La Literature?’” In A Literature of Restitution: Critical Essays on W.G. Sebald, edited by Jeannette Baxter, Valerie Henitiuk, and Ben Hutchinson, 1–12. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bigsby, Christopher. 2006. Remembering and Reimagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buikema, Rosemarie. 2012. “Performing Dialogical Truth and Transitional Justice: The Role of Art in the Becoming Post-apartheid of South Africa”. Memory Studies 5 (3): 282–92. Carlton, Wendy. 1987. Personal Communication to Anna Reading. [Unpublished Letter] Transformative Tales 235 Campbell, David. 1987. “Around the Fringe. Festival Review: Kiss Punch Good Night”. The Scotsman, August 27. P. 11 Carranza, Ruben. 2009. “The Rights to Reparations in Situations of Poverty”. Briefing Paper. International Centre for Transitional Justice. https://www.ictj. org/publication/right-reparations-situations-poverty [Accessed 22.05. 2017] Christodoulou, Aileen. 1987. “Events to Look Out for: Kiss Punch Goodnight. Strip Search Theater”. Spare Rib 181. Corntassel, Jeff Chaw-win-is, and T’lakwadzi. 2009. “Indigenous Storytelling, Truth-Telling, and Community Approaches to Reconciliation”. ESC: English Studies in Canada 35 (1): 137–59. Cowburn, Malcolm, and Lena Dominelli. 2001. “Masking Hegemonic Masculinity: Reconstructing the Paedophile as the Dangerous Stranger”. British Journal of Social Work 31 (3): 399–415. De Greiff, Pablo. 2006. The Handbook on Reparations. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2003. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Eldridge, David. (2013) Festen London: A and C Black Everingham, Mark. 2005. “Interdisciplinary Collaboration on Land Restitution and Indigenous Rights”. https://global.wisc.edu/funding/sag-archive/reports/ 2005-everingham.pdf. Gray, Barbara, and Pat Lauderdale. 2007. “The Great Circle of Justice: North American Indigenous Justice and Contemporary Restoration Programs”. Contemporary Justice Review 10 (2): 215–55. Gready, Paul, and Simon Robins. 2014. “From Transitional to Transformative Justice: A New Agenda for Practice”. The International Journal of Transitional Justice 8: 339–61. Greenfield, Margaret. 1987. “Domestic Drama: Kiss Punch Goodnight”. Yorkshire Post, August 19. Heidegger, Martin. 2001. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper Collins. Hollander, Jan. 1997. The Work of Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press. Holmes, Peter C. 2016. “Spirituality: Some Disciplinary Perspectives”. In A Sociology of Spirituality, edited by Kieran Flanagan and Peter C. Jupp, 23–42. London: Sage. Hurston, Zora Neale. 2010 [1942]. Dust Tracks on the Road. New York: Harper Collins. Itzin, Catherine. 2001. “Incest, Paedophilia, Pornography and Prostitution: Making Familial Males More Visible as the Abusers”. Child Abuse Review 10: 35–48. Jackson, Michael. 2013. The Politics of Storytelling: Variations on a Theme by Hannah Arendt. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen. Kennedy, Flloyd. 1987. “Kiss Punch Goodnight”. The Stage and Television Today, September 10. Kilbourn, Russell J. A. 2013. “The Question of Genre in W.G. Sebald’s ‘Prose’ (Towards a Post-Memorial Literature of Restitution)”. In A Literature of Restitution. Critical Essays on W.G. Sebald, edited by Jeannette Baxter, Valerie Henitiuk, and Ben Hutchinson, 246–64. Manchester. Manchester University Press. 236 Anna Reading Mahler, Andreas. 2016. “Shakespeare’s Enclaves”. In Shakespeare and Space: Theatrical Explorations of the Spatial Paradigm, edited by Ina Habermann and Michelle Witen, 17–38. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillian. Masson, Jeffrey. 1984. The Assault on Truth. Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. McAlinden, Anne-Marie. 2006. “Setting ’Em Up’: Personal, Familial and Institutional Grooming in the Sexual Abuse of Children”. Social Legal Studies 15 (3): 339–62. McGrath, John. 1981. A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre, Audience, Class and Form. London: Eyre Methuen. Melton, Ada Pecos. 1995. “Indigenous Justice Systems and Tribal Society“. Judicature 79 (3): 126–33. Meretoja, Hanna. 2017. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moody, David 1987. Letter to Anna Reading ‘Kiss Punch Goodnight’. Unpublished. York. Ramos, Ana Margarita. 2010. “The Good Memory of This Land: Reflections on the Processes of Memory and Forgetting”. Memory Studies 3 (1): 55–72. Reading, Anna. 1987. Kiss Punch Goodnight. Unpublished Playscript. See www.annareadingarchive.com for images from productions. Reading, Anna. 2015. “Singing for My Life: Memory, Nonviolence and the Songs of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp”. In Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggles: Powerful Times, edited by Anna Reading and Tamar Katriel, 147–65. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Reading, Anna. 2017. “The Restitutional Assemblage: The Art of Transformative Justice at Parramatta Girls Home, Australia”. In From Transitional to Transformative Justice, edited by Paul Gready and Simon Robins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rigney, Ann. 2012. “Reconciliation and Remembering: (How) Does It Work?” In Memory Studies 5 (3): 251–58. Sebald, Winfried Georg. 2004. “An Attempt at Restitution”. Translated by Anthea Bell. New Yorker Magazine, December 10. www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2004/12/20/an-attempt-at-restitution. Sebald, Winfried Georg. 2006. Campo Santo. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Random House. Serres, Michel. 1995. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. With Bruno Latour. Translated by Roxanne Lapidus. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Short, David. 2012. “When Sorry Isn’t Good Enough: Official Remembrance and Reconciliation in Australia”. Memory Studies 5: 293–304. Temkin, Jennifer. 2002. Rape and the Legal Process. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tonkin, Lois. 1996. “Growing Around Grief: Another Way of Looking at Grief and Recovery”. Bereavement Care 15 (1): 10. Vinterberg, Thomas. (1998) Festen. Dir: Thomas Vinterberg. Nimbus Films Von dem Knesebeck, Julia. 2011. The Roma Struggle for Compensation in Post War Germany. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire. Wetherall, Margaret. 2012. Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London: Sage. Wykes, Maggie, and Kirsty Welsh. 2009. Violence, Gender and Justice. London: Sage. “York Gets Incest: Play Preview”. 1987. Yorkshire Evening Press, August 12. 15 Towards an Intercultural Aesthetics Shaping the Memory of Political Violence and Historical Trauma in Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Artwork Where is Where? Mia Hannula Shaping the Memory of Historical Trauma Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s artwork Where Is Where? opens a specific view of colonial violence and its aftermath in the contemporary world. In the artwork, the conflictual relations between Western and Arab cultures are put into historical perspective in a way that invites an intercultural encounter. In this chapter, I address the aesthetic resources of audio-visual narration in the pursuit of linkages between histories that intertwine with and determine each other but are often kept apart in conventional history writing. The epistemological approach in this study involves tracing a method of addressing violent traumatic events that pose challenges for knowledge. Ethical aspects are grounded in the need to examine and evolve ways in which these limit experiences can be addressed. Ethics is conceived here as a grounded social relation; it is a process of examining the self and his or her social relation regarding historical and global events and of the very means of this observation (Figure 15.1). Ahtila is an internationally established Finnish contemporary artist whose films and multi-screen installations explore and experiment with storytelling. In her art, Ahtila examines the processes of perception and its meanings. Thereby, she addresses larger cultural themes, such as traumatic experiences, mental disintegration, interpersonal relations, colonialism and responsibility. Where is Where? exists in two versions, a multichannel video installation (2008) and a four split-screen film (2009). In this chapter, my focus is on the performative narrativity which can be observed when documentary material is used in artistic performances. My analysis is concerned with how the conception of historical events is constructed through memory acts which art enables. The starting point of the film is based on real events in Algeria at the end of the 1950s, during Algeria’s struggle for independence from 238 Mia Hannula Figure 15.1 T  he artwork Where is Where? addresses the inheritance of traumatic history and shows how it continues to shape both the inner, interpersonal and socio-cultural worlds of their subjects. French colonial rule (1954–1962). It involves a traumatic event, the summarily executed inhabitants of the village of Rivet by the French, and the revenge for it by two Algerian boys, who were thirteen- and fourteen-years old at the time. One of the boys had lost relatives in the massacre and their revenge was to murder a French playmate. The starting point is one of the case studies discussed by psychiatrist Frantz Fanon in his book The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre, 1961) in the chapter entitled “Colonial War and Mental Disorders”. The case is documented in the transcript of an interview which Fanon conducted with the Algerian boys, as part of Fanon’s psychiatric work on behalf of the French legal system. It is part of a group of cases “in which the event giving rise to the illness is in the first place the atmosphere of total war which reigns in Algeria” (Fanon 1985, 217).1 At the end of the artwork Where is Where? one sequence follows the interview from Fanon’s book. What is said in a few lines is revealing. When the male doctor asks one of the boys why he killed his friend, the boy responds with a question: “Have you ever heard of the Rivet case?” In the artwork, a female doctor explains the case that is presented in the book in a footnote: “A village called Rivet became famous in 1956 when the French gendarmes attacked the village one night, dragged forty men out of their beds and murdered them”. Then, the boy continues: “Two of Towards an Intercultural Aesthetics 239 my relatives were killed there. At home, they said the French had sworn to kill us all, one by one. Has even a single Frenchman been arrested for killing all those Algerians?” … “Not a single one has been arrested”. When the doctor states to the other boy “And yet you were pals?”, the boy responds “Well then, why do they want to kill us? His father is in the militia and he said we ought to have our throats cut” (Fanon 1985, 217–19; Eija-Liisa Ahtila 2010, 114). These citations indicate that the sense of the relation of oneself to others is radically transformed not only by the violent events but also by the expectation of any kind of violence—both physical and structural violence in the colonial contexts—and of the normalization of it in society. The ethical questions of justice, agency against oppression and responsibility become relevant here as well. When traumatic events are extreme and unintelligible in nature, their victims’ emotional and cognitive capacities may tend to balk, change drastically and lead to inimical behaviour. In the demeanour of two boys, this incapacity to feel and the faltering of communication becomes visible in their deadpan, unemotional speech and the crystal-clear logic of their argumentation, demonstrating the characters’ ability to rationalize but still not fully understand their abrupt violent act. The artwork Where is Where? shows how political violence and traumatic historical events continue to shape both the inner, interpersonal and socio-cultural worlds of their subjects. The concept of postmemory of trauma by Marianne Hirsch (1997, 1999) serves to describe the consequences of political violence that the artwork engages with. The term refers to the inheritance of traumatic history that marks one not through primary experience but inter-generationally, through hearing the stories or the silences the events imposed on the primary victims. What then may happen is that the next generation adopts the traumatic experiences—and thus also the memories—of others as their own. The posttraumatic memories are based on stories and images, which are, nevertheless, so powerful and monumental as to constitute memories. The concept of postmemory demonstrates how the self is multiply interconnected with others, hence, the self is determined as social and relational (see e.g. Brison 1999). It is a question of ethical relation. What is characteristic of postmemory is that it is a form of memory that is mediated not through recollection but through imaginative projection, investment and creation. Its spatial and temporal qualities are characterized as displacement and belatedness. As such, the memory of a traumatic historical event is understood as “an act in the present on the part of a subject who constitutes herself by means of a series of identifications across temporal, spatial, and cultural divides” (Hirsch 1999, 6; see also Hirsch 1997, 6–9, 2008; Bal 1999; cf. van Alphen 2006). It reveals that memory is intercultural, imaginative, social and political. This case attests that to understand trauma historically, as E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang assert, we need to move beyond a short period, 240 Mia Hannula beyond the positivist focus on the events and psychic mechanisms, and move to probe patterns of crisis and the dynamics of social change from a longer historical and a wider geographical perspective (2008, 18). Kaja Silverman (1992) has developed the concept of historical trauma in relation to memory. She introduced the idea of a cultural trauma against the prevailing view that trauma only concerns individual crises. In Silverman’s conception, individual trauma is always connected to the social sphere; social conditions shape trauma’s impact. With the term, historical trauma Silverman refers to “a historical ramification extending far beyond the individual psyche”. Historical trauma depends for its impact on what she calls the dominant fiction; “the mechanism by which society ‘tries to institute itself as such based on closure, of the fixation of meaning, of the non-recognition of the infinite play of differences’” (1992, 54–55). 2 To resist and counteract any kind of ideological closure, the examination of the construction of the historical trauma becomes rele