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Witnessing and Testimony of Traumatic Events and the Function Of Witnessing and Testimony of Traumatic Events and the Function of Cultural and Collective Memory in Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes ANIL YENİGÜL Department of English and German University of Barcelona 2011/2012 Research MA Dissertation Supervisor: Dr. Enric Monforte TO MY FAMILY i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Enric Monforte who have helped and encouraged me throughout my project with a great enthusiasm. I am also grateful to all my lecturers in the MA programme Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities at the University of Barcelona for their contribution on the development of my ideas. I also wish to thank my family for their unconditional support and confidence who inspired me and encouraged me to go my own way, without whom this study could not have been completed. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION.....................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER I TRAUMA, TESTIMONY AND MEMORY 1. Witnessing and Testimony of Traumatic Events......................................................8 a) The Importance of Listening...............................................................................14 2. Testimony and Truth.................................................................................................18 3. Trauma and Memory.................................................................................................21 4. Cultural Memory and Collective Memory...............................................................25 a) Representation, Simulacra and the Real ...........................................................28 b) Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs).............................................31 5. Narrating Trauma in Literature and Theatre.........................................................33 CHAPTER II HAROLD PINTER’S ASHES TO ASHES: IN A FAR AWAY DROWNING LANDSCAPE 1. Introduction: Pinter and Reality..............................................................................39 2. The Play......................................................................................................................43 3. A Play on the Holocaust?..........................................................................................46 4. Rebecca as a Witness.................................................................................................50 5. Listening to Atrocities................................................................................................54 6. Rebecca’s Fallible Memory.......................................................................................56 7. The Function of Cultural and Collective Memory.................................................58 8. Personal and Political Voices....................................................................................61 CONCLUSIONS...................................................................................................................69 WORKS CITED...................................................................................................................73 iii ABSTRACT: Ashes to Ashes (1996), one of Harold Pinter’s overtly political plays, depicts a world of violence, political oppression and brutality through the character of Rebecca, whose memory is haunted by the imaginative witnessing of atrocities that mainly resonate with the Holocaust. The play is about the past and how it constructs reality in the present. However, Rebecca’s fallible and unstable memory distorts reality, and instead provides the audience with versions of different realities. This instability in her memory questions the credibility of her testimony to the atrocities recounted. Despite the fact that the truth and reality of the play stay elusive, Ashes to Ashes points out a social reality—that of brutality, violence, torture and oppression— present throughout the world history, which haunts the conscience of humanity reflected in the character of Rebecca. In this sense, the play offers no comfort to its audiences, who share the same cultural and collective memory as Rebecca, as it creates the same sense of responsibility for human suffering in the past and warns the audience about the possibility of acts of oppression and violence taking place in their comfortable countries that seem to be far away from the atrocities recounted in the play. In this regard, this study aims at analysing Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes with a focus on the process of witnessing and testimony of traumatic events, the relation between testimony and truth, and between trauma and memory, the function of cultural and collective memory through an analysis of the relation between reality and its representation, and finally the possibility of representing traumatic events, not least the Holocaust, in literature and theatre. iv INTRODUCTION: “When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us”. (Pinter 2005: 12) What Harold Pinter poetically crafts in Ashes to Ashes (1996) is a way in which to smash the mirror that the whole world is looking into and reveal the truth, which points out humanity’s responsibility for human suffering in the past. While the play brings forward the questions of reality and truth in art and life, it self-consciously makes a distinction between them. The reality in art can be both true and false, whereas, as Pinter clearly states in his Nobel Prize Lecture, “to define the real truth of our lives and societies is a crucial obligation” in order to “restore the dignity of man” (Pinter 2005: 12). Thus, the reality of the play becomes “the reality of political oppression, torture and violence” (Aragay 2001: 252). The play is about the past and how it constructs reality in the present. “It is about two characters, a man and a woman, Devlin and Rebecca” (Pinter qtd. in Aragay 1997: 10) and it is shaped by Rebecca’s memories, haunted by the imaginative witnessing of atrocities, not least the Holocaust. However, the instability of her memories distorts reality through the use of language and provides the audience with versions of realities. The broken mirror is scattered around and every piece of it has blood stains on it; every piece has another reality, another atrocity from the past. Therefore, even though the play contains many images resonating with the Holocaust, Rebecca may not have experienced them herself, which, according to Pinter, “is the whole point of the play” (qtd. in Aragay 1997: 10). Rebecca’s experience could be caused by the effects of cultural memory, through the representation of such atrocities via art. However, is it possible to live such a traumatic experience through the representation of such tremendous events from a “comfortably distanced” (Taylor-Batty 2009: 105) point of view? In Rebecca’s case, she is totally haunted by the traumatic events, which are imaginatively 1 attributed by her as part of her memory. Thus, she is an indirect, imaginative witness of the atrocities that she reveals through the images in her memory. And this distant experience formed by cultural memory, which is constructed and represented by media and art, emphasizes the social responsibility towards human suffering in the past. As the audience also share the same collective memory with Rebecca, the play addresses their consciences in order to create the same sense of responsibility, and it warns them against the potential of oppression and violence in their comfortable countries that seem to be far away from atrocities. Considering that Rebecca identifies herself with the victims of the atrocities haunting her mind and that most of these images are reminiscent of the Holocaust, it is noteworthy to analyse the nature of the process of witnessing and testimony of traumatic events, which will be thoroughly analysed in the first chapter, “Trauma, Testimony and Memory”. Narrating the ‘horror’ of such traumatic events is an arduous process as there are some obstacles to bearing testimony to this kind of events. Initially, language becomes incapable of articulating such a horrific experience, and thus the victims/witnesses of such events fall into silence. However, as long as this silence persists, “survivors who do not tell their story become victims of a distorted memory” (Felman and Laub 1991: 79). Therefore, traumatic events that are not narrated constitute a barrier before victims’/witnesses’ daily lives in a way that they make them “doubt the reality of actual events” (Felman and Laub 1991: 79). In this regard, Rebecca’s experience can be interpreted as a process of constructing and articulating the truth. In this process, she falls into silence many times, and she struggles to articulate the horrific reality haunting her. However, like the survivors/witnesses of traumatic events, she is entrapped between the reality of actual life and the delusion of her constructed memory of the events. She cannot differentiate the past from the present, as she cannot differentiate her actual memories from the invented ones. Her accounts are always contradictory and elusive. 2 One of the significant factors in the process of bearing testimony is the presence of a diligent listener who shares the process of testimony and thus accompanies the survivor/witness
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