I hope everyone is having a great winter break! I just wanted to share this NPR article, which features a woman quite similar to the character in Borges’s short story:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/12/18/255285479/when-memories-never-fade-the-past-can-poison-the-present?utm_content=socialflow&utm_campaign=nprfacebook&utm_source=npr&utm_medium=facebook

Supplementary Links

As we start winding down the quarter and begin drafting our final projects, I wanted to share a couple of articles I’ve had floating around my head the past few weeks. They seemed to pop up just as we began to address issues of cultural and genealogical memory, especially as these concepts might relate to establishing particular narratives and uncovering hidden or forgotten truths.

The Nazi anatomy article, especially, deals with the questions of who owns various memories and the difficulties in present accurate and deferential memorials to victims while figuring out how to treat the perpetrator’s stories. (Additionally, it goes into interesting detail on the various postwar generations and how they variably strive for truth, apologize, forget, etc.) The second link, articulating the effect the AIDS crisis has had on the present generation of queer artists and mentors, also seemed particularly relevant to discussions of cultural memory, what happens when there are gaps in those cultures, and how generations profoundly impact the development and transmission of cultural narrative.

The Nazi Anatomists – Slate

The Velvet Silence: Mentoring across the AIDS Queer Artist Gap – Slate

~Philip

Butler and Haneke

Kindred and Caché both contain tactile representations of the past, capable of being physically felt and handled. In Kindred, pain can be felt long after returning to the present; dirt and blood come back along with Dana. In Caché, the past – or things meant to evoke the past and past memories – shows up in the form of tapes, tapes that can be received, touched, and played. Such representations allow us to think about memory as something that isn’t always versatile, ever-changing and slippery, but as something that has an objective, earthly sense to it. And yet, of course, in the narratives themselves, these apparently matter-of-fact representations of the past soon become problematic. In Kindred, we are constantly led to question the consequences of this connection between past and present. What would happen if Rufus or any of Dana’s ancestors got killed prematurely? What would happen if Dana or Kevin actually became a part of the antebellum South and started a chain of events that would inevitably have to change the present in some form? The past is no longer so clear – the realer it becomes, also the more muddled it becomes. There’s also the threat of a closer bond between Rufus and Dana than might be appropriate for two people from different times, radically different times. In Caché, the deeper we get into the tapes, the more muddled we also become. How the filming and sending of the tapes were possible is unclear, especially in light of who might have done them. The suspects are all likely and unlikely at once. And who the sender of the tapes is (or are) might lead us to reinterpret the past and its consequences in a significantly different light. Yet, as this is never really shown in the movie, we merely become more confused as we try more to find out how the tapes might have come about.

In both instances, the physical and unlikely poppings-up of the past at first glance seem to simplify and clarify, but actually become more difficult to fathom. They seem to me intended to show us that memory and the past simply cannot be presented or observed objectively. Perception and experience, that is, the encounter with a memory itself distorts it. 

Butler and Shammas

Although the formal construction of both works is radically different – Butler’s novel is a more conventional, chronological account to Shammas’ fluidity, interweaving of folk memory with one family member’s experiences abroad, and moments of metalepsis – Kindred and Arabesques are concerned with genealogical memory as it is experienced, and produced, by a particular actor in a family. Dana, over a “missing” year of her life (or three weeks, depending on which calendar one looks at) becomes an actor in an entire boy’s life and economy; on the other hand, Anton the writer draws from the family memories that have been told to him, throwing himself in at various ages but also completely leaving himself out at times. The roles, then, that Dana and Anton play as protagonists in their families’ histories are concerned with similar issues but experienced differently.

The specific conditions of Dana’s time-travel throw her into an impossible situation where she is forced to play out a role in her own family history. She is a restricted actor, though, which she recognizes and narrates at various points. She seems to be there purely to enable the conception and birth of her ancestor Hagar, with the possibility of non-existence looming should she fail, but this prevents her from lashing out against Rufus too strongly, or encouraging Alice to run away too early. The narrative and genealogy of her family has already been written – it was started by Hagar and passed down in a Bible (Butler 28) – at it is left a mystery how much agency Dana is afforded when experiencing it herself.

Popping into and out of the life of the Weylin farm, it is unclear to Dana whether she is autonomously impacting the people around her, or whether her actions are playing out the slave narrative again and again without meaningful influence. It’s why when her travels are done, she goes to find the historical records of what happened following Rufus’ death, “To touch solid evidence that those people existed” and question whether it might have played out differently (Butler 264). The fact that Butler writes Dana as recounting the events herself, rather than experiencing them in the moment (for example Dana says, “Rufus himself was to teach me about the attitude” (Butler 210), anticipating and drawing connections for the next episode before it “happens”) gives the whole work the sense that Dana is a limited actor who is merely playing things out the way they are supposed to happen. She “participates” in her family’s history, but she does not dictate it.

Dana’s compressed experience of an entire generation on the Weylin farm (her one “missing” year to Rufus’ 25) comes across as antithetical to Shammas’ expansive and pervasive investigation of generations and how Anton fits into the history, is removed from it, and recounts it. The book jumps around frequently, drawing connections across removed times and places through threads of objects and motifs, looking at different events as experienced by this family of Palestinian Christians. At the same time, the book can feel like a labyrinth of vignettes and objects carefully crafted, perhaps with the intention of limiting or restricting Anton the writer. Metafictional moments such as the red feather appearing both in folktale recounting and the stolen draft of Pére Lachaise draw attention to the conflict in “teller” and “tale”; when the “other” Anton, Michael Abyad reveals his documents at the end of the work, one wonders whose story Anton was telling and how much control he had in its formulation. Shammas encapsulates this theme beautifully when Anton asserts,

Uncle Yusef, in his great cunning, gives me a tiny key to use to find my way through the winding chambers of the arabesque…But I know very well that he foresaw it all, down to the smallest detail. He knew that I was destined to retell his story one day. That’s why he so graciously granted me the key that let me into all the corridors but kept the master key in his own hands. (Shammas 227)

For Anton the narrator, writing comes to be a way of acting as an agent in his family’s history, crafting the narrative in a particular direction, despite his feeling that it was determined by outside forces that he would end up in such a position.

For both protagonists, the telling and way that they go about locating themselves in their families’ histories seems critically important to their psychology: Dana reveals thoughts frequently to the effect of how trapped she feels, how she’s losing her present to her past, how she wishes at times she were not inextricably tied to this child who will cause so much suffering; Shammas’ interweaving of many different stories and styles of telling also seem to work to how much Anton bears witness to the history (as Yusef intended) versus how much he is an actor in it, or whether his primary mode of acting is by weaving the tale. Although I feel both works are concerned with the issue of agency as it relates to genealogical narratives and filial memories, and I’ve hopefully shown how these works seek to complicate that theme, I’m not sure where to go from here.

Butler and Spiegelman

            In Olivia Butler’s Kindred, Dana’s family history connects her back to her ancestors, one of whom belongs to a family that owns slaves in a society that “considered blacks subhuman” (Butler 68). The idea that Dana’s blood kin can both be the reason that she is alive in 1973, but also the cause of so much physical and emotional pain in Dana and her ancestor’s lives, is interesting to me. For one, Dana’s time travel escapades reveal that creation and destruction are not mutually exclusive: that Rufus produces offspring that subsequently become Dana’s ancestors does not mean that he is necessarily their caretaker. Rufus tries to rape Alice; he asks his children to call him “Master” instead of “father.” Societal norms push Rufus to conform, rather than acting like a proper father would. More than that, however, Dana’s situation reveals that blood is a thinner relationship than convention generally implies—the fact that two people are kin does not guarantee a certain life trajectory.

            This is most apparent when contrasting Dana with Rufus. Even though they are kin, the color of their skin results in completely different treatment: Dana lives the life of a slave, while Rufus is assumed to be her future master.

            In drawing this contrast between Dana and Rufus, Kindred ultimately calls to question the precise significance of blood relationship, particularly across generations: What does it mean for later generations trying to make sense of their past given the disjointed continuity between each generation? Dana is both a victim of her ancestry and, by virtue of being related to Rufus, a part of it. Perhaps an even bigger question: when do your ancestors become mere characters in a story—figures that exist to teach you a lesson about a past that is distant from your own being—as opposed to people who reflect who you are and where you come from? In other words, in what ways are your ancestors merely people who belong to stories from long ago, and in what ways are they the unique people who inform you of who you are in the present?

            Of course, it’s difficult to justify that one’s ancestors from generations ago reflect too much of one’s character; given the social changes that occur between the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the conditions in which Dana and Rufus live are so starkly different that it is difficult to give comparison much merit. However, Maus suggests that much is lost even passing down events between one generation, between father and son—and that what is lost is in part the fault of the preceding generation. Even though Artie wants to show the “more real—more human” side of his father, Vladek pushes back and insists on focusing on the Holocaust (23). Spiegelman portrays the writing process that Artie goes through and through this concedes the shortcomings of Artie’s portrait of his father. However, Vladek ultimately remains a character that Artie exploits—at least in the first volume of Maus. In the narrative that Spiegelman reveals, there is no attempt on Artie’s front to make sense of himself through his father’s past. Rather, the story remains very much Vladek’s.

Butler and Spiegelman

In what ways can genres that challenge the literary authority of the novelistic form represent history in an arguably more authentic way? Is authenticity in representing the historical found more in the objective account found in textbooks, or more in the subjective account of a diary or oral history? These are some questions that I’d like to discuss in relation to Spiegelman’s Maus and Butler’s Kindred.

Both of these works share a formal alienation from the accepted authority of a conventionnal literary novel. Maus is a graphic novel and Kindred bends the genres of science fiction and historical fiction, and despite being outside of the conventional form of a literary novel, both works seek to confront a ‘capital H’ history that is filtered through the lenses of unconventional forms.

In Maus’s account of the Holocaust through personal intergenerational history through the layered narratives of Artie and Vladek, reality is suspended in Spiegelman’s representational world of animals. Similarly, in Kindred, Dana’s cyclic journeys through time place the narrative firmly outside of the real world and pushes it into the realm of the fantastic. But, for all the self conscious genre bending work that these two works accomplish in their unconventional form, there is a very specific attention to preserving the detail that they represent in their respective historical events.

Maus’s comic format allows for the reader to also be a see-er as Spiegelman shows Vladek’s memories drawn on the page and also Artie’s process of talking to Vladek to record his story. Spiegelman’s panels are packed full of details just how Vladek packs his possessions closely and obsessively in his New York home in the present of Maus. Even though they are drawn as mice, we are immersed in a world constructed by a subjective memory that is at the same time a crucial piece of objective history.

While Maus operates through two distinct points of view with respective temporalities, Kindred places Dana’s singular point of view in her present and her embedded genealogic past. She is inextricably bound to this deep past by a supernatural tether and thus the reader is able to view the past through her present self. We are privy to her thoughts and reactions when she is transported to the Wyelin estate, and we can see how she frames her experience within the past with her other life in her temporality. The rules of the world of Kindred are not given explicitly to the reader. We know that Dana is bound to Rufus and sucked backwards in time when his life is threatened and we know that her very existence in the present is contingent of Rufus and Alice having children together, but other than that there is no metaphysical explanation of time travel that is explicated in Kindred. The suspension of these ‘rules’ places Dana’s subjective experience in a position of authority as objective reality is effectively suspended through the use of time travel in the book.

Maus’s representational world of cartoon animals also takes the question of objective reality, and thus strictly objective history off the table. The stylized drawings allow the reader to take the narrative content at face value without struggling with the idea that this is a graphic novel that wholly encapsulates and represents the entirety of the Holocaust. Both Kindred and Maus use a suspension of the conventional form to subvert the authority given to written histories and canonized literary accounts of history. Through unconventional elements like the comic form and sci-fi conceits, Maus and Kindred afford themselves a freedom that is detached from the demands of works that seek to more fully represent an accurate mimetic form than in genres that seek to subvert these constructions of truth in unexpected ways. In both works, it is the very lack of narrative and representational reality that allows the reader to find a closer subjective experience of these eras through personal narratives that place themselves outside of conventional generic forms.

Butler and Shammas

What Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Anton Shammas’ Arabesques share is a looping kind of disregard for time and space within the encompassed field of their narratives. Even disregarding the impossibilities of different forms of time travel introduced in both novels and the very different settings of time and place and attitude, there is a very similar continual expansion and contraction of narrative scope and movement that occurs in both novels that produces varying effects. In Kindred, the force with which Dana is first yanked into Rufus’ 1800s Southern plantation is extremely dizzying and abrupt, to the effect to where not only is the reader, along with Dana, caught completely unaware, but that the abrupt change in language on the page itself also triggers this strange nausea. The “pale, almost colorless eyes” of Kevin and the  concerns of “nonfiction” and “bookcase” ordering were neatly grounding in a sort of domestic, interior way (Butler 13). In the next instant, in a space of only several intervening words, the scene becomes one of not only the “outdoors,” but the specificity of the “green” “ground beneath trees” (Butler 13). Though the prologue and foreshadowing of “trouble” and “the day I met Kevin” would seem to wish to indicate a forthcoming shift in scene, the violence of the ensuing temporal rift moves beyond expectation (Butler 12). The agency of the prologue as a type of beginning-at-the-end type of hook into the story works in a similar manner as memory is commonly expected to, mirroring our natural, collective patterns of understanding one anothers’ experiences through cause and effect. This way of drawing the reader into the story almost seems natural enough to avoid causing alarm, but the utter incongruity between the memory’s trigger and the contents of the memory itself parallel the disorienting rift that Dana herself experiences.

In contrast, although Shammas’ first shift from Part One: The Tale to Part Two: The Teller: Père Lachaise is also greatly divergent in content, style, and temporal reality, it does not express the same level of surprise at itself. The “red candies of memory” (Shammas 73) and her “red hair” (Shammas 77) may seem almost too easy of a connection to make, but it is precisely these small comforts of familiarity and easily traceable leaps of thinking which ease the weight of memory’s unknowable connections. The shift comes more naturally for Shammas than Butler this first time and in subsequent shifts, partially with the aid of the gradually easing quality of the third person. With this slight remove, it is no longer the reader’s responsibility to make sense of the dizzying move- for if the narrative itself pays no particular heed and finds nothing alarming in its sudden shift, then the situation must be contained and safe.

Through the different but similarly vast playing fields of both novels, one from 1970s California to 1800s pre-Civil War Maryland and the other from a 150 year long Israeli history to the modern day cornfields of Iowa, it would seem that Kindred and Arabesques would produce similar expectations to memory, their effects in contrast produce a richer if not understanding, then acknowledgement, of the power of memory. Whereas Dana fears and is physically and emotionally tormented by the literal pull back into the memories of her literal but unlived past, Shammas’ tale and characters seem to be greatly enriched and benefited by all the forgiving slowness and range of time. Whereas Dana’s memories seem to be chasing and closing in on her not only through the intense race relation tensions produced by her fall into history but through her inability to control her temporality except through grievous harm, Shammas’ woven memories show memory in the slow light of introspection and weaving. It seems that agency may be comprehended in the way connections are formed between moments of memory; when the events of the present day cease to interfere (creating new memories even as the old are being reviewed), memory can finally take center stage at its own pace. It is interesting to see how both novels play with the differing speeds and the ensuing pushing and pulling at which memory and real life seem to wish to occur.  

Butler & Woolf

Butler creates a distinctive experience of temporality in Kindred– moving her main characters between present and past, providing the reader with a unique, and ultimately impossible, account of each historical period. Relating Kindred to Mrs. Dalloway, I began by questioning this formal element- how does the addition of time travel further Butler’s work?  Since a fluctuating temporality is imperative to each novel, I had a sense that investigating this idea could lead to a meaningful dialogue between the two.

To me, this question in Kindred seems inextricable from Kevin’s role in the narrative. It appears that the story line could remain almost entirely intact without his presence, indicating that he must play an important part in the narrative beyond strictly serving as a device of the plot. If Dana had been traveling between her present and Rufus’s present alone, would any of the significance of her travels be lost? Kevin surely complicates Dana’s transition between 1976 and the antebellum South more than he is presented as a source of comfort or ease, this is especially so when they exist apart and in different times. As a black woman and a white man, there is an inherent disparity between the experiences of each in slave-times that is a source of tension for the couple. Dana explicitly expresses her unease at their ability to assimilate to slave culture so easily, committing to her role as slave and taking upon herself responsibility to others, while Kevin exists within it with much less apprehension and preoccupation, focusing most of his concern on his and Dana’s well-being. One wonders how subsumed by her life in the past Dana may have been if not for Kevin’s presence- how much does he serve for her as an anchor to her present, a point of affixation of her self that is 1976 Dana- wife and writer?

Considering these same questions within Mrs. Dalloway, we can come to some conclusions about the transition between the past and present in conjunction with relationships. Woolf’s characters are subjected to the force of the past in a completely different sense than Butler’s, yet it is not unreasonable to draw parallels between the two. Rather than physical transportations, Clarissa undergoes mental voyages into her memories that are depicted as “overpowering the solitary traveller” (p.56) akin to the way Dana was confronted with the past. Woolf writes the past as vividly as the present and, though incomparable to the vividness with which Dana and Kevin experience it, the past is as eminent in the lives of Woolf’s characters as it is for Butler’s; they trace and retrace their existence within it, mentally mapping new paths that will never be forged, travelling impossible distances. Yet, their expected relation to others continually recalls them to the present. Illustrating this, Clarissa’s public persona is the most permanent life she has forged for herself; its dictates author her mindfulness, conducting her consciousness between times in her life. Like a lure on a fishing rod she is flung out into the waters of her memory and nibbled at by the ghosts of herself that lurk there, only to be reeled back in by the hand of the present, the tolling of a bell, the backfire of a car engine, the call to be somebody’s Clarissa.

Reading the two novels this way creates an image of relationships as fixtures of our present selves, attaching us to reality, mooring us in the moment. Their expectations (as we see in Mrs. Dalloway) and our attachment to them (as we see in Kindred) protect us from being subsumed by the past, if not as literally as in the latter, than at least as a, perhaps resigned, rescuing from the reveries of the former.

-Hannah S

Butler and Haneke

Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred and Michael Haneke’s film Caché are both obsessed with the effects of a literal re-living of the past. In Kindred, the protagonist Dana experiences the more literal version of this idea, as she is transported to the antebellum South and forced to physically – as well as mentally – relive the past of her ancestors as a slave. In Caché, the experience of the past is less direct (caused by the chain of reactions that the videotapes produce in the protagonist Georges), but not less haunting. Georges has a series of disturbing dreams and visions, the most interesting example being the boy coughing up blood on Georges’ windowsill. The measure of truth or authenticity behind this vision is irrelevant; the collusion of the boy from the past (who is presumably Majid, culled from the depths of Georges’ memory) and the home in the present tells the viewer that the memory of Majid has vividly worked its way into Georges’ experience of everyday life (if in fact it is Georges who sees this vision, which is its own problematic dilemma).

Both works also have their own logic or set of rules that offer interesting commentary on the way that memory functions. This is especially present in Kindred, which presents a number of somewhat rational rules to govern the way the irrational time travel works. For instance, Dana experiences days and months of time on the Weylin plantation, but when she arrives back in 1976, mere minutes or hours have passed. (This mirrors how our own memories work at times, especially in dreams, which can appear to span long periods of time.) In addition, Kevin can only transport back and forth by being physically connected to Dana. However, the most significant “rule” or “logic” behind the time travel involves the circumstances that dictate the moments of transportation. Dana is only yanked back to the 1800’s when Rufus, the boy and eventual slave-owner, finds himself in a perilous situation. Dana can then only transport back when she finds herself in a state of physical harm and distress. It is more difficult to explain what this says about our own travels from the past in our memories to our present lives, and all of the stops in between. Why can Dana only escape through moments of physical damage and not moments of mental distress, or the moments in which we normally escape into or out of specific memories?

Caché presents a less-defined but still present logic of its own. Georges’ family is only sent videotapes and disturbing, childish drawings. The videotapes are always filmed by a silent source, which never makes its presence felt; the tapes are always a chilling attempt to capture a scene from a rigid, “objective” point of view. The steady, consistent stream of tapes and drawings mimics the unyielding power of painful memory and its ability to bypass our attempts to block its return. After all, one of the most disturbing aspects of the pattern is how helpless the Laurents seem to be (or alternately, is Georges really helpless against the forces of his memories, or does he choose not to deal with them?).

Butler and Spiegelman

In this course, we have studied a number of different manifestations of memory, including individual and family memories— that is to say, memories one holds of past events in one’s own life and memories passed down among generations within a family. Kindred by Octavia Butler and Maus by Art Spiegelman each include elements of both types of memory, but they also explore the subject of cultural memory.

Maus and Kindred explore two of the most horrific human rights violations of the past 200 years—slavery in the United States and the Holocaust—both of which rightfully became permanently embedded into the memories of those who were directly affected by them as well as their descendants. Between these two works, we as readers are able to see the formation of a cultural memory from several vantage points: Octavia’s as a direct participant when she gets transported back to slave times, Art Spiegelman’s as a member of the generation that immediately follows the creation of a cultural memory, and Octavia’s as a citizen in the twentieth century, over a hundred years after slavery had ended in the United States. This temporally varied presentation of the life of a cultural memory begs the question of how time affects how an individual processes said memory.

While no one would argue that either the Holocaust or slavery will ever be forgotten, there are many voices that claim that memories held by a particular cultural group eventually lose relevance to new and evolving issues faced by the aforementioned group. Slavery is a good example of this phenomenon: it is commonly mentioned during discussions regarding racism in the United States by those who believe that its role as a period in the history of oppression remains important in the fight against the remnants of that oppression. However, there are also many people who deny its continuing importance, citing that because our society is so far removed from the slaveholding society of the 1800s, the discussion of slavery is no longer a fruitful one to have.

Although Butler and Spiegelman certainly don’t deny the transformative effect that time has on the perception of cultural events, they seem to take the position that cultural memories retain an importance to the cultures that hold them in a sense that transcends the historical. Both of them write from the point of view of characters who didn’t go through what their ancestors went through—even Octavia did not live the full life of a slave despite how long she spent stuck in her family’s past. But through their respective experiences of their family’s history—Spiegelman’s through his father’s retelling of his story and Octavia’s through her inexplicable transportation to the past—they both learned invaluable lessons about the profound cruelty that humans are capable of.

The most important lesson they seemed to learn is that people are generally products of their time periods—Rufus called his father fair even though he held slaves, Vladek Spiegelman described certain aspects of life in the ghettos as not so bad despite the human rights violations he and his family endured, and each of these people were right enough given the historical context in which they lived. However, the fact that many behaviors were socially acceptable at one time does not make them right, and as such, terrible atrocities were committed by those who neglected to think critically about what they and those around them were doing. Cultural memories, therefore, can serve as warnings of what consequences there can be when society as a whole refuses to question its own preconceived notions, and to dismiss them as irrelevant to later conversations is to make oneself vulnerable to the type of closed thinking that led to things like slavery and the Holocaust in the first place.