ALLEGORIES OF MODERNITY, GEOGRAPHIES OF MEMORY A Dissertation by SEENHWA JEON Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 2012 Major Subject: English Allegories of Modernity, Geographies of Memory Copyright 2012 Seenhwa Jeon ALLEGORIES OF MODERNITY, GEOGRAPHIES OF MEMORY A Dissertation by SEENHWA JEON Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved by: Chair of Committee, David McWhirter Committee Members, Margaret Ezell Marian Eide Richard J. Golsan Head of Department, Nancy Warren August 2012 Major Subject: English iii ABSTRACT Allegories of Modernity, Geographies of Memory. (August 2012) Seenhwa Jeon, B.A., Seoul National University; M.A., Seoul National University; M.S., Indiana University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. David McWhirter This dissertation examines how postmodernist narratives of memory in Graham Swift’s Waterland, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines retrieve the stories of those who have been lost or forgotten in official history and refigure the temporal and spatial imaginary in intertwining personal stories of crisis with public history through acts of remembering. Questioning the modernist ideology of progress based on the idea of linear sequence of time, the novels not only retrace the heterogeneous and discontinuous layers of stories overlooked or repressed in official accounts of modern history, but also re-examine the contradictory and contested process by which subjects are situated or positioned, and its effects on the production of knowledge. These postmodern historical novels examine history as a discourse and explore its limits. The narrators of the novels are engaged with an autobiographical act of rewriting their lives, but their efforts to reconstitute themselves in unity and continuity are undermined by the disjunctive narrative form of the novels. The layered narrative of memory through which the novels reconstruct modern history is allegorical in the double sense that it exposes the act of signification by de- iv centering the symbol of the transcendental signifier while telling an allegorical story of personal and familial history that mirrors national history in a fragmented way. In Waterland, Tom Crick retells his personal and familial stories intertwined with local and national history as alternative history lessons and challenges the Idea of Progress by revisiting sites of traumatic memory. Midnight’s Children constructs counter-stories of Post-Independence India as multiple alternatives to one official version of history and addresses the limits of history in terms of “a border zone of temporality.” In The Shadow Lines, the narrator retells his family history as a story of borders through his struggle with gaps in official history and creates a national imaginary with mirror images and events. The postmodernist narrative of memory in these novels turns the time of the now into a time for the “past as to come,” a time to detect the unrealized and unfulfilled possibilities of the past, through retellings of the past. v To my parents vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS At one point of my long-winded journey with this dissertation, I was surprised to find how much the topics I was struggling with turned out to be personal. This study is a result of my struggle to work through a ‘knot of meanings’ the traumatic points of my life formed. I would like to thank my advisor Dr. David McWhirter for his guidance and encouragement at every step of my journey. He never said no to me even when I presented a preposterous plan. I am also thankful to Dr. Margaret Ezell, Dr. Marian Eide, and Dr. Richard Golsan for their patience and understanding. To Dr. Marian Eide, in particular, I am thankful for encouraging me with her belief in my work. I would like to extend my thanks to Dr. James Rosenheim and the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research for generously providing me with resources and support. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................. iii DEDICATION .......................................................................................................... v ACKNOWLDEGEMENTS ...................................................................................... vi TABLE OF CONTENTS .......................................................................................... vii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: ALLEGORIES OF MODERNITY, GEOGRAPHIES OF MEMORY ......................................................... 1 The Allegorical as a Strategy of Representation and Guiding Principle ............................................................................................... 1 Postmodern Retrospections and the “Past as to Come” ....................... 6 Modernity and the Question of Place ................................................... 22 Stories of the Border in Postmodernist Narratives of Memory ............ 35 II ALLEGORIES OF PROGRESS AND THE LIMITS OF HISTORY: GRAHAM SWIFT’S WATERLAND ................................................... 46 III STORYTELLING AND MEMORY AS BROKEN MIRROR: SALMAN RUSHDIE’S MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN ........................... 92 IV A JOURNEY INTO “A LAND OF LOOKING-GLASS EVENTS”: GEOGRAPHIES OF MEMORY IN AMITAV GHOSH’S THE SHADOW LINES ........................................................................ 134 V CONCLUSION .................................................................................... 172 WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................ 177 VITA ......................................................................................................................... 189 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: ALLEGORIES OF MODERNITY, GEOGRAPHIES OF MEMORY The Allegorical as a Strategy of Representation and Guiding Principle “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” -Walter Benjamin This study is a result of my continued interest in the significance of rewriting history in postmodernity at the supposed end of history. My argument is that recent English/postcolonial historical fiction, or at least a key strand of it, provides a productive response to the kinds of questions raised by the postmodern return to history and narrative, or the surge of retrospective readings of the past, at the time social and cultural transformations in a globalizing world are challenging our conceptions of historical time and space. The novels in question employ the flexible form of memory narrative as a vehicle to examine the shifting boundaries of nation, history, and identity while retelling the past from de-centered subject positions. I suggest that they are not simply “postmodernist” in their self-reflexive play with narrative form turned on questioning conventional historical writing, but present “postmodernity” as a mode of critical ____________ This dissertation follows the style of the Modern Language Association (MLA). 2 thinking that, prompted by a sense of crisis, attempts to grasp the present in a meaningful structure by projecting an end to modernity. In this study, I read these postmodernist narratives of memory as “allegories of modernity” to approach their retrospective retellings of the past in light of recent creative or critical efforts to refigure modernity from the perspective of otherness. By drawing on Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the allegorical in The Origin of German Tragic Drama and of a different conception of history in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” I develop the “allegorical” as a strategy of representation employed in certain postmodern or postcolonial novels whose retellings of the past through the act of remembering are marked by a self-reflexive questioning of the relationship between narrativity and identity. Allegory as a strategy of representation is devised to weave into stories of the past the awareness of incompleteness, of the fragmentary nature of our access to the past real. My approach to the allegorical, however, needs to be distinguished from a poststructuralist focus on the textualization of the past real. Allegory in narrative is considered a method of stringing double meanings based on correspondences between what is being told and a set of meanings that serve as its commentary and interpretation. In its modern variation as reinvented by Benjamin, allegory reveals recognition of fundamental instability underlying the standard interpretive system: “Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else.”1 As such, the allegorical engages with historical traditions in a different way from the symbolic. If the symbolic erases the traces of mediation through the 1 Walter Benjamin. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: Nlb, 1977. 175. 3 process of idealization, the allegorical demystifies the symbolic totality of history and attends to the gap between nature and culture, between what is expressed and what is communicated. The allegorical in postmodernist narratives of memory is a mode of facing a break between a disappearing past and a present by assembling stories of the past in dispersion to form a constellation. What holds them together is the will to remember. A haunting sense of ending or crisis