Butler and Woolf

 

The protagonists in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway are all acted upon by larger societal forces, like gender, slavery & racism, and war. These characters are not only acted upon but inextricably tied to these outside forces such that they have a major impact on the way they go about their lives. Clarissa Dalloway, for example, is forced to live vicariously through her husband because she is a woman in post WWI England. The bitter Peter remarks, “With twice [Richard’s] wits, she had to see things through his eyes – one of the tragedies of married life” (Woolf 75). Similarly, Dana worries about the limits of her guardianship over Rufus because she is a black woman. She says, “I was the worst possible guardian for him – a black to watch over him in a society that considered blacks subhuman, a woman to watch over him in a society that considered women perennial children” (Butler 68). However, despite these constraints, Dana manages to subvert both gender and racial norms. She wears pants in a society of women who only wear long dresses and skirts. She also manages to get Rufus to stop using the n-word. Interestingly, these two subversions are because she is from another, more progressive time. She merely brings social and cultural norms of her time with her to the early 1800’s and inflects these values to the people around her as much as she can.

One of the ever-present forces acting on all the characters in both of these novels is time. In Woolf this is made clear by the constant references to clocks striking, beginning on the second page of the novel, with “There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air” (Woolf 4). Thinking about time as it passes in the present also implies thinking about time in the past, which is the realm of memory. Mrs. Dalloway is full of memories that ebb and flow throughout the course of the day. This infusion of past with present leads Clarissa to think about herself as dual, wholly her past self and her present self. She says, “ For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms…” (Woolf 42). This same sense of being wholly dual is made literal in Kindred. Dana is a woman from the 70’s thrust into a world of slavery in the early 19^th century. She is completely of her time but also totally in the world of the 1800’s, because it is from there that her ancestors emerged. Dana fights against the idea of being a part of the cruel time of her ancestors, saying “I desperately wanted to go home and be out of this” (Butler 148). This moment comes about midway through the book, and as a reader, it made me think that perhaps one can never really “be out of this” in the way Dana desired. Being past something, especially something historically traumatic like slavery does not mean that one can remove one’s self from it and its consequences. Rather, it becomes something that must be reckoned with on a daily basis, a process which gets represented (albeit in different ways) throughout both Kindred and Mrs. Dalloway. 

 

Spiegelman and Shammas

At first glance, Arabesques and Maus share several common features. Among these is each work’s relationship with genealogy and metafictional elements. I want to investigate these two interests further to discover the differences in treatment of these two things which will speak to the differences between the two texts.

 

Both Arabesques and Maus are the written version of family history, history of which the authors (for the most part) were not a part. Art Spiegelman had grown up hearing stories about the Holocaust from his parents and his parents’ friends (as he says on the very first page of the first chapter, “She was a survivor too, like most of my parents’ friends” – p. 11). Thus, he had felt his life inflected by the experiences of his parents and his parents’ peers’ generation, but did not have access to the memories of his parents. This seems like a traumatic situation in itself, to have a sense of the ghostly pain that existed for your family in the past but to not have memories through which to understand this hurt. Thus, I think the chronological telling of the story is an attempt by Spiegelman to not only be the receiver of his father’s traumatic memories in a way that might be helpful for Vladek but also to construct the past of Spiegelman’s own family so that he might begin to process his own relationship to the memories. At the same time, a chronological story is the most accessible to the general public, so I think that points to a concerted effort on Spiegelman’s part to have this book serve as an outlet for all whose lives have been touched by the Holocaust. While Shammas’s narrative tells family history which ties into a larger national history, his narrative is anything but chronological, excluding the bits at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. I think the way in which he tells his family’s story, with sections of stories being told that only make sense once another later story is told, mirrors the way in which one constructs a genealogical memory. One hears bits and pieces of stories that later fit into other bits and pieces and through this slow series of revealing, one is able to surmise the history of one’s family.

 

The metafictional elements in each story differ in interesting ways also. In Arabesques, these elements are segregated from the rest of the text. It is made clear that these sections are related by the section titles (“The Teller” and “The Tale”), but their physical separation and the lack of mention of the specific work as it is being written make the teller seem quite distant from his tale as an object he plans to produce for the world. However in Maus, the tale is never separate from the teller and his plans to write a book. At the very beginning of the story, Art says, “I still want to draw that book about you…the one I used to talk to you about..About your life in Poland, and the war” (p. 12). Again, I think this could speak to a more dedicated interest for Spiegelman in telling a story for a larger audience. 

Freud and Haneke

Freud’s “Screen Memories” provides an interesting lens through which to view Michael Haneke’s film “Caché,” a film invested in invented memories, willful forgetting and the visual processes of memory, particularly as captured on a video camera. The first overlap between the two that can be seen is Georges’ insistence to his mother that he had completely forgotten about Majid until recently. As the viewer knows, the thing that jogs his memory is the tapes and the eerie drawings included. The man in the case study in “Screen Memories” has a similar jogging of his memory. He mentions that “it seems to me almost a certainty that this childhood memory never occurred to me at all in my earlier years. But I can also recall the occasion which led to my recovering this and many other recollections of my earliest childhood” (Freud 239). He goes on to say that it is a stay in the country, for the first time since his early days of living there with his parents, before they were forced to move because of job prospects. It is for this man a place which brings back many recollections from his childhood, while for Georges it is the childlike crayon images of a head with blood gushing out. Interestingly, however, it is at his mother’s house, his childhood home, where Georges has the first extended recollection of Majid, beyond the second-long flashback of a child with a bloody mouth that the viewer had seen prior to that.

However, the memory that Georges has at his mother’s house in a dream is an invented one. As the viewer finds out later on in the film, Georges as a child convinced his parents that Majid had been threatening toward him. Georges ordered Majid to kill a rooster and then convinces his parents that he did it to scare him. In the dream/memory, the child Majid kills the rooster as Georges had instructed him in real life, but then comes toward Georges with the axe, raising it above his head, at which point Georges wakes up. This is an interesting take on Freud’s notion of the screen memory, which is that “the essential elements of an experience are represented in memory by the inessential elements of the same experience” (Freud 234). Perhaps before this recollection came upon Georges as a result of the tapes, he had a screen memory which covered over the memory of Majid in his life. But now, he is haunted by a memory of Majid which he has himself invented. This haunting memory ultimately comes to fruition in real life, when Majid kills himself in front of Georges. There, the very thing Georges created as a child to try and distance Majid comes back in full force upon Georges through Majid’s ultimate suicide.

Finally, there is the use of the camera as a present entity to show the visual processes of memory. For one, in the first viewing of the surveillance tapes, the disembodied voices of Georges and Anne attempt to recall their days, their comings and goings, as they watch it unfold as it happened in “real life” on the videotape. Later, the viewer sees Majid being taken away from Georges’ parents’ house in the same steady, one shot only technique of the camera, pronouncing the definitiveness of this occurrence in time. In this way, the kind of work that memory does according to Freud (to remember more or less based on a memory’s psychical importance, p. 230) and that occurs to Georges in his (perhaps) willful forgetting of Majid is drawn in sharp contrast to the creation of a definitive physical memory that is employed by the steady shot video camera.

Works Cited:
Freud, Sigmund. “Screen memories.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III (1893-1899): Early Psycho-Analytic Publications. 1962. 299-322.

Cache. Dir. Michael Haneke, Sony Pictures Classics, 2005. Film.

Exegesis

Exegesis is to glean multiple meanings of a text through the use of “figural or typological reading.”¹ Originally developed by the early fathers of the Catholic Church, this kind of analysis sought to uncover the “literal, allegorical, [and] tropological”² meaning within a biblical passage. A traditional, biblical exegetical reading of a passage like, “Then [Jesus] took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, which is given for you”³ would look as follows: literally, the word “body” refers to the bread Jesus is breaking, allegorically, “body” could refer to the church as the thing which Jesus is giving to the disciples, and then tropologically (morally), the “body” could mean the physical body which Jesus sacrifices for the redemption of sinners.

In modern times, exegesis has been co-opted by literary critics who seek to do the same kind of rigorous meaning-searching in “any poetry or prose.”⁴ This is particularly useful in a work like James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is intentionally littered with double meanings and permeable imagery. In this excerpt from the Lestrygonians episode, Leopold Bloom contemplates the circularity of life and death: “One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa.”⁵ Literally, this blood of the lamb imagery refers to the actual bloodiness of a newborn child. More figuratively and allegorically, this passage could refer to the idea of the inherent presence of death from the first moments of life, seen in the fact that the lamb is sacrificial. Bloom’s son Rudy died as a baby, so this is something at the forefront of his mind. With that death in mind, the blood of the lamb imagery could be read as a reference to Passover, in which the Jewish Bloom actually identifies with the Egyptians who lost their first born sons.

¹David Mikics, A New Handbook of Literary Terms (New Haven: Yale, 2007), 112

²Ibid.

³”Luke 22:19,” Oremus Bible Browser, accessed October 17, 2013, http://bible.oremus.org/

⁴”Exegesis,” Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, accessed October 16, 2013, http://www.oxfordreference.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780199208272.001.0001/acref-9780199208272-e-428?rskey=nfefXa&result=428

⁵James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1986), 134-5

– Grace F.