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Witnesses to the Unpresentable: Narratives of Memory and Trauma at the End of History Marc Di Sotto PhD Thesis University of Edinburgh 2014 Declaration This is to certify that the work contained within has been composed by me and is entirely my own work. No part of this thesis has been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Marc Di Sotto, MA (Hons) MSc Abstract This thesis investigates the problem of historical representation in the context of the contemporary turns to trauma and memory visible in cultural theory and in wider popular culture and contemporaneous with post-Cold war ‘end of history’ discourse. Rather than apply the theories of trauma to readings of contemporary texts, the present study proposes that trauma theory be seen as part of the wider cultural tendency towards memorialization, characterized by a privileging of the notion of witnessing, an emphasis on the punctuality of the traumatic moment, and the fetishization of the historical trace. This thesis argues that what unites these various features of memorial culture is a notion of history that emphasises both the impossibility of comprehension and representation and yet a sense of proximity to a literal past through the traces that remain. If postmodernism designates a ‘crisis of historicity’ which delegitimizes the authority of representations of history, to think history through the prisms of memory and trauma reasserts a notion of historical truth, albeit relocated in the traumatic memory of the survivor, in the ethical imperative to bear witness, or in an aesthetics of the aporia. The parallel discourses of history as trauma and history as memory conflate the problems of historical representation with problems of historical witnessing, and in doing so conceptualize a notion of an historical event with no actor, proposing instead a passive subject without agency and thus without politics. The thesis is organized through close readings of four key texts, each of which can be read to be in dialogue with wider memorial culture, but which also problematize the orthodoxies of contemporary trauma theory in its application to the literary text—Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Robert Harris’s Fatherland, Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock and Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project. Focusing on notions of witnessing, testimony, traumatic memory and the trace, and drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Rancière, this thesis sets out to resist the theoretical creep that would see all history as trauma and all text as testimony, and instead reasserts the necessary role of fiction and the imagination in constructing a relationship to the past. Acknowledgements I’d like to thank my supervisor, Dr Aaron Kelly, for his advice and support throughout this project—especially in the final months leading up to submission. I would also like to thank my examiners Prof Randall Stevenson and Dr Alan Gibbs for their constructive and encouraging feedback. I am also grateful to the College Research Scholarship which made this work possible. I am fortunate to be surrounded by many people who have supported me and spurred me on in difficult moments, often without knowing it, for which I am very grateful. To my parents who instilled in me a passion for learning; my siblings, Carina, Laurence and John-Anthony, who make sure I never feel like I have understood anything; and to Aude, Calum, David, Gareth, Kajetan, Maxim and Pablo, for their friendship over the years. But most of all, this piece of work is dedicated to Elodie, my co-conspirator, without whose love, patience, generosity and stubbornness I would never have made it through to the end. Contents I: Contexts .......................................................................................................................................................... 1 1: Remembering History after the End of History ...................................................................... 2 I: The end of history 1 ................................................................................................................... 4 II: The end of history 2 .................................................................................................................. 9 III: History and memory .............................................................................................................. 15 IV: The remembered past ............................................................................................................ 21 2: Witnessing the Past .................................................................................................................. 27 I: Traumatic memory ................................................................................................................... 31 II: Witnessing history .................................................................................................................. 37 III: Remembering realism............................................................................................................ 41 IV: Testimony.............................................................................................................................. 48 II: Texts ............................................................................................................................................................ 54 1: ‘But what really happened?’: History, Realism and the Aesthetics of Trauma in Ian McEwan’s Atonement ................................................................................................................... 55 I: Separate minds: on seeing and knowing .................................................................................. 58 II: Trauma and postmodernism ................................................................................................... 69 III: What really happened?: two absences, two deaths ................................................................ 81 2: Doubled Reality: Traces of Ideology in Robert Harris’s Fatherland ................................... 90 I: Holocaust memory and the archive .......................................................................................... 92 II: Man and uniform: the distorted mirror of ideology .............................................................. 103 III: The red brick: memory and recognition .............................................................................. 114 3: ‘How could I be both that and this?’: Doubles and Documents in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock: A Confession ................................................................................................................. 124 I: That and this: testimony and realism ..................................................................................... 125 II: Documents of the real: the fiction of fact ............................................................................. 137 III: An appropriate language: on the unrepresentable ............................................................... 149 4: ‘Something is always true’: Photography, Space, Memory and the Fictions of History in Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project ................................................................................ 159 I: Imagining history: archive, memory, space ........................................................................... 162 II: True stories: fictions and memory ........................................................................................ 173 III: Living history: death and the photograph ............................................................................ 183 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 193 Works Cited ........................................................................................................................ 201 I: Contexts 2 1: Remembering History after the End of History In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its North Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again. Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’