Four Re-Collections
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE ANCIENT WORLD: FOUR RE-COLLECTIONS by Lynn Jenner A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Victoria University of Wellington 2013 Abstract The thesis is made up of four separate but related texts recording the author’s investigations of loss, searches and re-constructions. Questions of ownership are also examined, with particular reference to objects of cultural and artistic significance. The Holocaust is a major focus, especially attitudes of the New Zealand government and New Zealanders themselves to the refugees who wished to settle here before and after World War II. The thesis is a hybrid of critical and creative writing. The first three texts, “The autobiographical museum”, “History-making” and “Cairn”, are also hybrid in genre, containing found text, new prose and poems, discussion of other writers’ work and the author’s experiments in ‘active reading’. The fourth text is an Index which offers an alternative reading of the other three texts and helps the reader to locate material. While somewhat different from each other in form, all texts focus on the activity of gathering objects and information. All four texts are fragmented rather than complete. Interviews with curators, education officers and CEOs in two Australian museums that have Holocaust exhibits provided information on the aims and processes of these exhibits. Meetings with six Holocaust survivors who act as volunteer guides in museums and reactions of visitors to the museums provided other perspectives on the work of the museums. The author also reports on visits to the Holocaust Gallery at the Auckland War Memorial Museum and the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand in Wellington. Activity Theory, a cultural-historical model often applied to the analysis of learning and pedagogy, is used in the thesis as a metaphorical backdrop to the author’s own activity. The author’s focus on intentions, tools, processes, division of labour and financial pressures reflects the influence of Activity Theory as does the author’s willingness to let understanding take shape gradually through tentative conclusions, some of which are later overturned. Over the period of the research, records of the past are recovered and re-examined in the present, as was intended. Individual and collective memory, including archival records, fiction and poetry are resources for these investigations. The author receives an object lesson in the power of the informal networking role of the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand, as well as benefiting from its formal displays and materials. 1 During the research the author writes records of the present because it seems necessary to do so. By the time the research ends, these have become records of the past – an outcome which Emanuel Ringelblum would have predicted but was a surprise to the author. 2 Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the generous support of my supervisors Bill Manhire and Chris Price and my classmates from the International Institute of Modern Letters PhD programme. I am enormously grateful to my partner Tony Pine who encouraged me to begin this project and has supported my work in every way. Thanks to my mother, Lesley Jenner for her encouragement and to my sister Kerry for her practical assistance near the end of the project. I would like to acknowledge Tordis Flath who put her expertise in indexing at my disposal so that I could learn and who formatted this Index. Thanks also to Heather Elder who proofread parts of the text. Thanks to George Beran and other relatives of Karel Beran and to Kitty Hilton, Inge Woolf and Claire Bruell for their support with the project at critical points, and thanks to Ross Vinnell for conversations on the subject of risk. Thanks also to Navina Clemerson, Avril Alba and John Leuthart for feedback during the project and to Alison Chetwin for her active support during my time at New Zealand Police. Thanks to Jeanette Schollum, Lynn Davidson and Hinemoana Baker for listening and sage words. I received financial support from the Victoria University Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Fund for fieldwork during this project. 3 4 Table of Contents Page Abstract 1 Acknowledgements 3 For the avoidance of doubt 7 Foreword 9 Part One: The autobiographical museum 31 Part Two: History-making 105 Part Three: Cairn 177 Part Four: An Index 259 Report on experience: An afterword 273 Appendix 279 Works Cited 285 Selected Bibliography 293 5 6 For the avoidance of doubt Everyday Life in the Ancient World: Four Re-Collections is a fully hybrid critical and creative thesis, made up of four texts. The Foreword provides some context for the thesis itself. It outlines the origins of the project, literary influences on it and my intentions for the project as it developed. It describes my research and writing methodology. It contains some reflections on the difficulties of writing ‘about’ the Holocaust as I understood this problem in February 2013, the time at which the thesis was submitted. The final two potential problems in this list are an exception though, having been added in May 2013 as a result of readings suggested by the examiners. The Foreword also discusses genre and spelling and gives an overview of the structure and form of all four parts of the thesis. The afterword, named “Report on experience” as a respectful tribute to John Mulgan, looks back on the four parts that make up the thesis, from the position of February 2013. I am very grateful for the examiners’ added resource suggestions, especially the work of Saul Friedlander and Claude Lanzmann. I have added these later resources and other references I found as a result of these suggestions to the Selected Bibliography. These additions are marked with an asterisk. * Readers who wish to engage only or first with the thesis should turn to page 31. Lynn Jenner June 2013 7 8 Foreword Origins This dissertation began as two intentions: to write an exploration of ‘missing people’ and to use the form, style and structure of my exploration to echo experiences of loss and absence. I was interested in making work which requires the reader to be active in creating a personal and context-specific understanding of the text: what is present, what is absent and what these inclusions and absences mean. I had not settled on any genre for my creative work. Dear Sweet Harry, my first book, contained poems, found text, prose narrative and images. It was described by others as a collection of poetry, as a long poem and as a mixed genre work. Although it won a prize in the category of Poetry, I thought of it as a non-continuous narrative, hovering on the edge between fiction and non-fiction. I chose missing people as the subject of my dissertation because of the emotional significance this topic seems to possess in my own and in the collective imagination. My intention was to use the whole notion of ‘missing people’ and ‘search and rescue’ to help me notice different forms of people being lost and searched for, which I could investigate and report on. So, although I had not settled on a genre, there were clear signs from the beginning that the work was going to be related to research about missing people and would be attentive to the process of that research. In terms of the critical component, I imagined I would write a separate section of literary criticism in which I would examine techniques used in the work of some particular writers whose work contained multiple perspectives and voices, fragmentary structure, and a strong emphasis on historicity and cultures. W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants was the first such work that I had identified. I was interested in how, in The Emigrants, Sebald gives the impression of people in extreme distress without ever referring to that distress. I was interested specifically in Sebald’s use of objects and places and dates in the text as symbolic evokers of mood. Sebald described his use of symbols in an interview with Eleanor Wachtel: People always want what seem to them to be symbolic elements in a text to have single meanings. But of course that isn’t how symbols work. If they are any good at all they are usually multivalent. They are simply there to give you a sense that there must 9 be something of significance here at that point, but what it is, and what the significance is, is entirely a different matter. I think that it was a question of trying to find, in a text of this kind [The Emigrants] ways of expressing heightened sensations, as it were, in the form of symbols which are perhaps not obvious. (Wachtel 53) I began my thinking on this question about The Emigrants by making a copy of the opening section of the text of “Dr Henry Selwyn” and expanding it to include visual images and small background summaries of each object that was mentioned to better understand the associations of these objects for a northern hemisphere reader, or a reader with knowledge of northern hemisphere objects. However, while I was beginning this critical work, and before any creative work had been done, one of my supervisors suggested I read Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter. I was impressed, as anyone would be, by the beauty of these translations; both the language and also the appearance of the poems on the page. But I was at least as interested in the stories of the fragments themselves. My response was to begin research into the processes by which the fragments are known to us.