History, Memory, Trauma in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction
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HISTORY, MEMORY, TRAUMA IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH FICTION BEATA PIĄTEK HISTORY, MEMORY, TRAUMA IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH ANG IRISH FICTION UNIVERSITY PRESS Reviewers dr hab. Joanna Burzyńska-Sylwestrzak, prof. UG dr hab. Anna Branach-Kallas Cover design Zuzanna Czwartos © Copyright by Beata Piątek & Jagiellonian University Press First edition, Kraków 2014 All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereaft er invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Th is volume has been published thanks to the fi nancial support of the Faculty of Philology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków ISBN 978-83-233-3824-6 www.wuj.pl Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego Redakcja: ul. Michałowskiego 9/2, 31-126 Kraków tel. 12 663-23-81, 12 663-23-82, fax 12 631-23-83 Dystrybucja: tel. 12 631-01-97, tel./fax 12 631-01-98 tel. kom. 0506-006-674, e-mail: [email protected] Konto: PEKAO SA, nr 80 1240 4722 1111 0000 4856 3325 Acknowledgements - - I would like to thank the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiel lonian University in Kraków for funding and other forms of encourage- ment, which made this publication possible. I am particularly grateful to my colleagues from the Department of Comparative Studies in Lit erature and Culture for moral support, intellectual inspiration, endless supply of books and great friendship. My special thanks go to Professor Joanna Burzyńska-Sylwestrzak and Dr hab. Anna Branach-Kallas, whose constructive criticism and careful reading of this book have helped me immensely in the final stages of my work. Piątek.indd 5 2014-11-21 06:57:32 Piątek.indd 6 2014-11-21 06:57:32 Table of Contents List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................................... 9 Why Barker, Barry, Ishiguro and Banville? PREFACE .................................................................. 11 Why History, Memory and Trauma? CHAPTER 1 ................................................................................ 15 History vs Fiction ................................................................................................................... 18 Memory Studies ..................................................................................................................... 23 Trauma: Terminology .......................................................................................................... 32 Before Trauma Theory ........................................................................................................ 34 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder ....................................................................................... 38 Trauma Theory from the 1990s Onwards .................................................................. 40 Critical Voices: The Pitfalls of Trauma Theory .......................................................... 45 SECTION I: HISTORY AND TRAUMA Pat Barker – The Trauma of World War I CHAPTERThe Regeneration 2 .....................................................................Another World 51 Double Vision Trilogy – Historical Revisionism and Cultural Trauma .... 52 The Past Invading the Present – Transgenerational Trauma in 72 : The Omnipresence of Violence ......................................................... 78 From Cultural Trauma to Victim Culture ..................................................................... 84 Sebastian Barry – From Historical to Historicized Fiction CHAPTER 3 The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty A Long Long Way ................................. 87 An Irish Aeneas in The Secret Scripture ........................................ 89 On Canaan’s Side : The Irish in the Trenches .............................................................. 93 The Trauma of Irish History in .............................................. 104 : “Four Killing Wars” in the Life of One Woman .................... 111 Piątek.indd 7 2014-11-21 06:57:32 8 SECTION II: MEMORY AND TRAUMA Kazuo Ishiguro ‒ The Movements of the Mind Remembering CHAPTERA Pale View4 of Hills: When We Were Orphans ........................ 119 Buried History and the Trauma of the Text ....................... 121 : Mummification of Childhood ........................................ 128 John Banville – Crisis of the Self CHAPTEREclipse 5 Shroud: ......................................................................................... 145 Ancient: StrandedLight in the Past ............................................................................................. 151 “a talking shell, an empty costume” .............................................................. 161 : The Invention of the Past ...................................................................... 169 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................................. 179 BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................................................. 187 Piątek.indd 8 2014-11-21 06:57:32 List of Abbreviations Pat Barker R Regeneration ED The Eye in the Door GR The Ghost Road AW Another World DV Double Vision Sebastian Barry WEM The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty LLW A Long Long Way SS The Secret Scripture OCS On Canaan’s Side Kazuo Ishiguro PVH A Pale View of Hills WWWO When We Were Orphans John Banville TNL The Newton Letter E Eclipse S Shroud AL Ancient Light Piątek.indd 9 2014-11-21 06:57:33 Piątek.indd 10 2014-11-21 06:57:33 PREFACE Why Barker, Barry, Ishiguro and Banville? A Pale ViewThe of presentHills study has its origins in a conference on interiority for which I wrote my first text about Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel, . The discussion that followed made me return to this novel- and the more I read it, the more I felt that I experienced something disturbing, which I now know to be the “witnessing of trauma”. Fac ing Ishiguro’s novel, I had an uncanny feeling of being placed in the position of a witness, even a therapist, whose task is to bear witness to the trauma of the protagonist narrator. I wrote those intuitions up into an article about the trauma of the text (Piątek 2011a) only to discover later the confirmation of my ideas in the work of Shoshana Felman, Irene Kacandes and Jill Bennett, who all discuss art mimicking trauma and the reader’s role as a witness. With time the article on an early novel by Kazuo Ishiguro evolved- into this book, which examines various forms in which contemporary- British and Irish writers engage with the past. Starting from a hypoth- esis that our culture is marked by an uneasiness about the past, I dem- onstrate how the literary explorations of the past lead to the examina tion of wounds, whether personal or national. For this purpose I distin guish between literature that engages with public history, which takes- a broad perspective, and literature that engages with private history by applying a modernist microscopic vision. In the literary material se lected for this study, either the writer adopts a broad perspective, he- or she investigates public history and collective trauma, or he or she- is preoccupied with an individual in crisis in the context of private his tory and therefore explores individual memory and its role in reinte Piątek.indd 11 2014-11-21 06:57:33 12 grating the fragile sense of self. In the former category the writers focus- on public history, in the latter on individual memory. Nevertheless, as I attempt to show, both types of texts couple the examination of mem ory, be it individual or collective, with various stylistic devices used to represent trauma. As I have discovered in the course of my research, contemporary fiction moves beyond mere representation of trauma and engages in a form of a therapeutic project in which the reader plays an important part as co-witness and enabler of the process of working- through trauma. - The distinction between public history and individual memory is re- flected in the analytical part of this book, which is divided into two sec tions, with each section containing two chapters. Thus under the head ing of “History and Trauma”, I discuss selected works of Pat Barker and Sebastian Barry, two contemporary writers interested in the effects of violent historical events on nations and individuals. Under the heading of “Memory and Trauma”, I discuss selected works of Kazuo Ishiguro and John Banville in order to demonstrate their way of dealing with the suffering of individuals; their search for consolation and redemption in memory. The analytical part is, however, preceded by a theoretical chapter in which I place the notion of trauma in a broader historical and theoretical context. As I argue, our culture’s preoccupation with trauma is linked to its obsession with memory, which, in turn, stems from the debate about the relationship between history and fiction. Since I have come across an astonishingly large number of novels- touching upon the notion of trauma, I had to be selective and for the sake- of clarity, I would like to explain what this study is not. It is not a clas sification or an inventory of different types of traumatic events as rep resented in fiction, for it was not my ambition to discuss novels dealing- with a wide range of traumatic experiences.The Therefore, Regeneration the Trilogyreader may have an impression