Posthumous Temporality and Encrypted Historical Time in Fiction and Life Writing

1 Posthumous Temporality and Encrypted Historical Time in Fiction and Life Writing J. P. Randall Goldsmiths, University of London Ph.D. 2 Declaration of Authorship I, James Patrick Randall, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: 2 March 2018 3 Posthumous temporality and encrypted historical time in fiction and life writing James Randall Abstract This thesis considers ways of reading posthumousness in narrative in various theoretical and literary constellations by focusing on temporality and historical time. Defining posthumousness in terms of a narrative perspective adopted after the death of a character or the narrator, I consider how writers reanimate historical characters, adopt imagined posthumous perspectives and reconstruct historical memory. I combine approaches to temporality by Paul Ricoeur and Mark Currie, incorporating elements of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory including Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s writing on crypts, Ned Lukacher’s analysis of primal scenes and prosopopoeia, and Jacques Derrida’s writing on the archive. Each chapter considers how historical time is imagined within narratives concerned with posthumousness. Chapter 1 considers how historical time is given a place within the posthumous narrative of Iain Sinclair and Rachel Lichtenstein’s Rodinsky’s Room. Chapters 2 and 3 develop ideas of historical time and the posthumous in relation to Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book. Chapter 4 compares Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Chapter 5 analyzes posthumousness in Bruno Schulz’s stories, and how these are reimagined by Jonathan Safran Foer (Tree of Codes), David Grossman (See Under: Love) and Cynthia Ozick (The Messiah of Stockholm). I focus on these novels’ engagement with posthumousness, including how primal elements of memory and historical time are given new presences. I consider how this approach to fiction and historical time gives the past a new life in narrative, giving time for what Schulz describes in his story ‘The Age of Genius’: ‘events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided and allotted; events that have been left… hanging in the air, homeless and errant.’ 4 [Image excluded in this version for copyright reasons: Andrzej Klimowski’s The Secret, linocut, 2002] 5 Posthumous temporality and encrypted historical time in fiction and life writing Contents Acknowledgements p. 6 Introduction p. 7 Posthumousness and readings of temporality, crypts and historical time Chapter 1 p. 31 Temporality and the narrative crypt: Posthumous archival presences in Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair’s Rodinsky’s Room Chapter 2 p. 69 Posthumous temporality and fictional crypts: Posthumous presences of historical time in Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book Chapter 3 p. 104 Posthumousness in fictional and historical time: Doubling, ruptures and resolutions in Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book Chapter 4 p. 141 Posthumous temporality and crypts of historical time: The presence of posthumous scenes in Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis Chapter 5 p. 187 ‘Spring dusk’: Posthumous and primal scenes in Bruno Schulz’s fictions and fictions that reimagine his work and life Conclusion p. 238 Posthumousness and fictional conjunctions and encryptions of historical time Bibliography p. 248 6 Acknowledgements This thesis has benefitted greatly from the ongoing faith and patience of my supervisor Professor Josh Cohen, without whom this thesis may have remained encrypted. While it remains cryptic, this work exposes some of the forces at play when we try to decrypt and uncover the life of the past that writing might convey and that our thinking remains possessed by. Acknowledgements here are a hint at these obscured presences. My exploration of the posthumous has taken on a number of forms since the inception of this research, explored at conferences in Bristol, Vilnius, Canterbury, Colchester and London, including various British Comparative Literature Association conferences for which I gave papers. The European Network for Comparative Literature Studies conference in London in 2012 led to the electronic publication of ‘Sculpting in Lost Time: the Fragmentation of Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles in Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes’ in Comparative and Critical Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), which forms much of the argument in Chapter 5. Various contributions from the English and Comparative Literature department at Goldsmiths, University of London have helped to develop my research and cohere my approach, including helpful critiques from Professor Lucia Boldrini, Dr Carol Sweeney, Dr Andreas Kramer and Dr Caroline Blinder. Before that (going back further in time), thanks to Professors Steven Connor and Roger Luckhurst at Birkbeck, University of London (2001-03), whose respective work on ventriloquism and telepathy prompted me to consider the textual life of posthumousness further. Prior to this, Erasmus-funded MA ethnographic research in Granada, Southern Spain, via the University of Edinburgh and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona took me into new Islamic communities of Andalusia and on my first vertiginous ventures into posthumous fictional accounts of history via Juan Goytisolo (Count Julian and The Virtues of the Solitary Bird) and Jan Potocki (The Manuscript Found in Saragossa) and more contemporary returns of the repressed. This has all been written with the care, inspiration and support of my partner Eleanor and our children Charlie and Josefa, and my parents and other family and a host of friends and colleagues, mostly in Devon, London and now also Bath and Bristol. 7 Introduction Posthumousness and readings of temporality, crypts and historical time Outline In my approaches to posthumousness, I will explore narratives chiefly in terms of perspectives and temporalities relating to the real or imagined death of a main character or the narrator and how their pasts are brought to life within writing. These deaths change how narratives may approach historical time, creating a new relation between narrative, the past and the temporality of the character or narrator. Afterlife and other narratives can use the posthumous perspective to reconsider historical time, using imagined future anterior times of looking back and also through the senses of the present being encrypted with past time. Fiction provides settings for reconsidering and reimagining temporality. Gérard Genette writes that fiction’s engagement with time in narrative is not just ‘the temporality of the narrative but in the final instance governing it: the temporality of the narrating itself’.1 Posthumousness is a concept bound in ideas of time, yet sometimes may appear or promise to be a liberation from them, especially perhaps when the narrator or a character participates in the temporalities opened up by posthumousness. When Paul Auster’s narrator describes Quinn in The New York Trilogy ‘as if he had managed to outlive himself, as if he were somehow living a posthumous life’,2 he is presenting the ambiguity of the temporality of posthumousness, living and outliving. Posthumousness indicates an idea of the afterlife, but it also includes how a life already lived exists in relation to death. Temporalities of posthumousness may appear to exist among the veils of theories of haunting and spectrality that can seem to dematerialise understandings of the past. However, the concept of posthumousness is constitutive and structuring in terms of fictional time, bringing historical figures back to life and represencing past times. I refer to posthumous temporality to describe how past times imagined after death are made present, while also interposing within historical time, as if mimicking and creating new ruptures of the past. These temporalities draw on experiences of everyday life and 1 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. by Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 157. 2 Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 5. 8 reading, in which the past comes alive and memories are incorporated within the present, informing our understandings of historical time while also disrupting them. Posthumous temporality comes after life, but it can be imagined in terms of flashing back into historical time from a perspective projected into the future, after a death. To consider posthumousness in relation to temporality and historical time, I am focusing on how specific historical lives and times are explored in fiction posthumously and how these reimagine the relationship between fictional time and historical time. I combine various theoretical approaches including narratology and poststructuralism together with analyses of selected texts. My readings of the posthumous relate to various wider fields, which I outline below. The key areas of my argument relating to posthumousness are: 1. Temporality; 2. Crypts; and 3. Historical time, my focus being how historical time is encrypted within narratives. 1. Posthumousness and temporality Posthumousness in fictional narratives creates new configurations of narrative temporalities; I will consider a range of narratives

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