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Koba the Dread – Laughter and the Twenty Million

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Koba the Dread – Laughter and the Twenty Million Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy In the Shadow of the Gulag: Martin Amis's Koba the Dread and House of Meetings Supervisor: Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the Dr. Stef Craps requirements for the degree of “Licentiaat in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Germaanse Talen” by Nele Ostyn May 2007 Ostyn 2 Ostyn 3 Acknowledgements THANKS TO Dr. Stef Craps, for his continuous advice and thorough proofreading my parents, for their help and support my aunt Kaat, for layout-business my friends, for being there Ostyn 4 Rothko, Mark. Black on Maroon. 1958. Tate Modern, London. Oil on Canvas, 2667 x 3812 mm Rothko, a Jewish-American painter often associated with abstract expressionism, was born in Dvinsk, Latvia. As a child, Rothko witnessed the occasional violence brought upon Jews by Cossacks, attempting to suppress revolutionary uprisings. The rectangular shapes in his work are, according to certain critics, a formal representation of the dug-up pits, where Cossacks were alleged to have buried Jews they kidnapped and murdered. However, Rothko‟s memory may be disputed, as no mass executions were said to have been committed in or near Dvinsk during this period. Ostyn 5 Ostyn 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................... 7 1.1 Trauma Theory ................................................................................................ 8 1.2 Martin Amis ................................................................................................... 15 2 KOBA THE DREAD: LAUGHTER AND THE TWENTY MILLION ............................. 17 2.1 MAIN TRAUMA THEMES IN KOBA THE DREAD .................................................. 17 2.1.1 Memory .................................................................................................... 18 2.1.2 Truth ........................................................................................................ 21 2.1.3 Laughter ................................................................................................... 28 2.2 COMMUNISM VERSUS NAZISM ........................................................................ 37 2.3 AMIS‟S PERSONAL TRAUMA ............................................................................ 46 2.4 DENIAL AND COLLECTIVE TRAUMA ................................................................. 52 2.4.1 Sympathy for the revolution ....................................................................... 52 2.4.2 Causes of Denial ....................................................................................... 54 2.4.3 Camus and Sartre ...................................................................................... 58 2.4.4 Amis and Hitchens ..................................................................................... 78 3 HOUSE OF MEETINGS: TRAUMA AND LITERATURE .......................................... 81 3.1 Literature as a means for working through trauma ............................................ 81 3.2 House of Meetings ......................................................................................... 84 3.2.1 Memory, Truth, Laughter and Denial ........................................................... 89 3.2.2 Trauma .................................................................................................... 92 4 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................ 102 5 ABBREVIATIONS ........................................................................................... 108 6 WORKS CITED .............................................................................................. 108 Ostyn 7 1 INTRODUCTION When animals find themselves in life-threatening situations, they react instinctively. Lions and bears go on the attack. Horses are known to flee from every danger they encounter. Deer and donkeys just stiffen and do nothing when faced with danger, just like rabbits caught in the headlights of a car. All animals, including human beings, flee, fight, or freeze when confronted with an unforeseen threatening or painful situation. Human beings, however, sometimes find themselves in situations in which they are completely helpless, in which neither fleeing, fighting nor freezing will be of any help, in which none of these options can be chosen to effectively overcome the events unharmed. In a situation like this, it seems as if the human body tries to combine these three defence mechanisms, which causes our perceptive system to malfunction to a certain extent. A temporary blocking of that system, a failure of our normal way of processing sensual information then occurs. This is generally called trauma. It is a “crisis of experience itself” (de Graef et al. 248); it is an extraordinary way of dealing with an extraordinary situation. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the way trauma is dealt with in the work of the contemporary British writer Martin Amis, in particular in his two texts that deal with Stalinism, namely Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million and House of Meetings. I want to examine the connection between literature and trauma, both in how trauma can be represented through literature, and in how literature can offer a means to work through trauma. Before looking into Amis‟s works, I will try to explain what is implied by the term “trauma theory,” and give some introductory information on Martin Amis. In chapter two on Koba the Dread, I will begin by discussing the main trauma elements in the book, namely memory, truth and laughter. Those three concepts acquire a different meaning in the USSR of Stalin. Next, I will look into the way Amis represents differences and similarities between Nazism and Stalinism. After a chapter that deals with Amis‟s personal Ostyn 8 trauma in Koba the Dread, I will discuss the question that dominates Koba the Dread: Why is Stalinism not looked upon with the same horror and disgust as Nazism? Why are the attitudes towards both aberrations so very different? The general indifference towards the agony of the USSR under Stalin can be regarded as a sort of collective trauma, shared by everyone. I will elaborate on this trauma by comparing the disagreement between Amis and the journalist Christopher Hitchens that Amis initiated by addressing a letter to Hitchens in Koba the Dread– in which Amis challenges him to denounce his communist sympathies – with the famous rift between Camus and Sartre. In this comparison, I will rely on theoretic work of Shoshana Felman, who connected the disagreement between Camus and Sartre with different ways of dealing with trauma. Amis and Camus will try to work through trauma, wherears Hitchens and Sartre deny the problem, and continue to be blinded by the Soviet ideology. In the chapter on House of Meetings, I will try to show how Amis presents House of Meetings as a sort of solution to the trauma problem. Fictionalizing traumatic events, reworking the themes of the horror stories of our times, can be a remedy against denial, and might help people in coping with and working through our collective traumas. Nevertheless, House of Meetings exemplifies that testimony to trauma is not simple and straightforward, but that it is a trial-and-error process. Amis delivers a very ambiguous message with this novel. As a writer, he seems to believe in the power of art to achieve redemption and cure, but the main character of House of Meetings has given up any hope for closure. There is no ready solution for trauma on hand, so coping with trauma, working through trauma will always remain an attempt, never a certainty. 1.1 Trauma Theory According to the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary, a trauma is “a mental condition caused by severe shock, especially when harmful effects last for a long time” (“trauma,” def. Ostyn 9 1). However, there is more to trauma than this seemingly simple explanation would suggest. Cathy Caruth, one of the leading trauma theorists, speaks of a remarkable connection between “the elision of memory and the precision of recall” (“Recapturing” 153) concerning traumatic experiences. First of all, a traumatic event is not assimilated by the victim in the same way other events are: “The trauma is the confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge” (Caruth, “Recapturing” 153). Established frames of reference are not valid to contain an event that is terrible and shocking to such an extent that the normal modes of understanding malfunction: Central to the very immediacy of this [traumatic] experience […] is a gap that carries the force of the event and does so precisely at the expense of simple knowledge and memory. The force of this experience would appear to arise precisely, in other words, in the collapse of its understanding. (Caruth, “Trauma” 7) Confronted with traumatic experiences such as rape, unwarranted violence, war, genocide, or terrorism, people have difficulties grasping, understanding what exactly is going on: “Massive trauma precludes its registration; the observing and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out, malfunction” (Laub, “Bearing” 57). The traumatic event is not fully perceived, and consequently, when asked about their experiences, many trauma survivors are unable to recount the events; often they seem to have had some sort of blackout. The traumatic event is thus not remembered in a conventional way; recollection is problematic.
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