Storytellers and Storymakers
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The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of Liberal Arts RECONNECTION AND/OR RECOMMENCEMENT: NARRATIVE DESIRE AND THE BLANK PAGE IN ANNA SEGHERS’S TRANSIT, VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S PALE FIRE AND J. L. BORGES’S “TLÖN, UQBAR, ORBIS TERTIUS” A Dissertation in Comparative Literature by Kerri A. Pierce © 2012 Kerri A. Pierce Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2012 COMMITTEE PAGE The dissertation of Kerri A. Pierce was reviewed and approved* by the following: Djelal Kadir Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature Dissertation Adviser Thomas Beebee Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and German Martina Kolb Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature Daniel Purdy Associate Professor of German Caroline D. Eckhardt Professor of Comparative Literature and English Head, Department of Comparative Literature *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. ii ABSTRACT This dissertation explores the way in which first-person narratives are constructed from a position of displacement. In particular, I focus upon the way in which the blank page in J. L. Borges's "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1940), Anna Seghers's Transit (1944), Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962) becomes a metaphor for caesura and an extension of exilic space. It is my contention that the presence of the blank page in these tales forces the first-person narrators to actively explore, and ultimately to choose between, two narrative desires: reconnection to history or recommencement upon the blank page. I further argue that these two narrative desires result in different strategies of narrative- building and history-making: one end-directed and one that relies upon a postponed conclusion. Though each narrator faces the same choice, the vacillation between reconnection and recommencement plays itself out in different ways. The nameless narrator in Anna Seghers's Transit, for example, opts for reconnection, while Charles Kinbote of Pale Fire chooses recommencement. "J. L. Borges" of "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," however, vanishes at the end of the story, thereby leaving the question of reconnection or recommencement to the reader, who must now decide how to read the story. The question of whether to embrace or postpone ending, furthermore, is similar to the choice that confronts Odysseus upon Calypso's island. Considering the first-person narrators' relationship to the blank page, which acts as a metaphorical Calypso's island, allows for an examination of the narrators' relationship to history, both their own and that of others. In each text, it is a consideration that actively implicates the reader as well. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- vi Introduction ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1 CHAPTER ONE The Two Faces of Odysseus: Telling the Tale for the Sake of Reconnection or Recommencement ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8 Odysseus's Critical Choice ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 9 The Adventure of First Person Narration -------------------------------------------------------- 9 Critical Witness to Oblivion ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 10 Reconnection and/or Recommencement -------------------------------------------------------- 12 Storytelling and Storymaking -------------------------------------------------------------------- 16 Summary -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 25 CHAPTER TWO Storytelling and Storymaking: Odyssean Exceptionalism and the Myth of the Island Kingdom in Anna Seghers's Novel Transit ----------------------------------------------------- 27 Storytelling------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 30 The Magic Ring ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 35 The Primeval Wilderness ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 38 The Odysseus Connection ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 41 Odyssean Exceptionalism ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 45 The Blank Page ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 48 Storymaking: Seidler, Weidel and the Vanishing Threshold --------------------------------- 53 From Storymaker to Storyteller ------------------------------------------------------------------ 60 CHAPTER THREE Bastards, Ghosts, “…And Zembla”: The Narrator’s Rented Castle ------------------------- 66 Rereaders and Rewriters -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 72 Untrammeled Extensions ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 76 Text and Pre-text ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 89 Small-town Continuity ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 94 Eons of Transparent Time, Naturally ---------------------------------------------------------- 100 Reader and Rereader ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 105 Bastard and Ghost -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 110 CHAPTER FOUR "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and the 'Style' of Narrative Desire -------------------------- 115 The Critical Chronotope ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 118 The world, unfortunately, is real --------------------------------------------------------------- 126 iv The World That Will Be Tlön ------------------------------------------------------------------ 145 CONCLUSION No Longer and Not Yet: A Reader's Conundrum -------------------------------------------- 164 Works Cited -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 170 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation advisor, Dr. Djelal Kadir, as well as my committee members, Dr. Thomas Beebee, Dr. Martina Kolb, and Dr. Daniel Purdy—not to mention the Department of Comparative Literature—for their unwavering support through the time it took to complete the present work. I would also like to thank my mother and father for reading through the various drafts and my husband for encouraging me at every turn. My sincerest thanks also go out to Barrett and Carol Pierce for all their kind words. Finally, I would like to thank Linnaeus Elliot for giving me a reason. vi INTRODUCTION Exile is often described as a state of suspension. Milan Kundera writes that living in exile is like "walking a tightrope high above the ground," an act performed without the network of the familiar—"family, colleagues, and friends"—not to mention the ability to speak "in a language [one] has known from childhood" (75). This image evokes the feeling of distance—the fact of suspension—as well as a void that is described by the exilic individual's struggles not to fall. In the consideration that follows, I focus on how the exilic individual’s struggles not to fall are concretely reflected in the act of first person narration. Too often, it seems, discussions of exile literature get caught up in abstractions. One such abstraction is the process of trying to define the term exile itself. As Johannes F. Evelein remarks: “everyone pitches his or her semantic tent somewhat differently and demarcates the territory to be explored accordingly” (12). And while such semantic parsing can make for an interesting discussion— establishing, if nothing else, a context from which discussion can begin—I have chosen to focus on the way in which the experience of exile, as a forced displacement with no possibility of return, shapes the first-person narrative act. In this way, my approach to the subject of exile— and the narrative subject in exile—functions in a broad range of contexts. At the same time, I am aware that, as Caren Kaplan points out, “all displacements are not the same” (2). A broad focus, such as the one that I have adopted, risks overlooking the specific contexts—for example, the cultural, the political, the historic—in which displacement happens. For this reason, and because I am interested in the way in which the experience of exile, as a forced displacement with no possibility of return, concretely shapes instances of first person 1 narration, I will engage in a close reading of each text. This will allow for a specific exploration of the context in which each first-person narrator experiences, and then narrates, the fact of displacement. Although the context in which displacement happens varies from work to work, each text in this consideration—Anna Seghers’s Transit (1944), Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), and J. L. Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940)—dramatizes exile as a physical and narrative displacement with no possibility of return. This idea reflects the way in which each writer engages with the rise of totalitarian governments and the catastrophes that marked the first half of the twentieth century. One particular concern of these writers is the way in which totalitarian governments manipulate history to suit their own ends. In this way, the writing of history comes to resemble the writing of fiction. It is the idea, as Hannah