Butler and Dalloway

Time and memory develop as two different concepts in both Mrs. Dalloway and Kindred. Intersecting at certain points, memory and time often play contradicting antithetical roles. For example, in Mrs. Dalloway, the repeated phrase “The leaden circles dissolved in the air” mark moments when the narrative zooms out of the individual stream of thought into a larger consciousness. The layers of individuals collapse effortlessly and the boundaries between people’s thoughts are erased when the bell tolls the time and draws attention to the transience of the moment. Time is the unifying force while memory works in alienating ways. “As they looked the whole world became perfectly silent, and a flight of gulls crossed the sky, first one gull leading, then another, and in this extraordinary silence and peace, in this pallor, in this purity, bells struck eleven times, the sound fading up there among the gulls” (Woolf 20). While everybody in the park perceives the same birds and gulls, anchored by the tolling of eleven, individual perceptions differ to even the most distinguishable detail, such as the word the smoke letters were making, turning a moment of unity into pockets of disconnection. Woolf portrays a society in which everyone is moving in the same direction but in completely closed spheres. These spheres represent the insular quality of human experience and memory and how communication can fail to transmit these ideas to another individual. In the same park, the proximity of Maisie Johnson to Rezia and Septimus allows for a brief connection but the couple are immediately absorbed into the narrative of Maisie Johnson’s life. She remarks “so that should she be very old she would still remember and make it jangle again among her memories how she had walked through Regent’s Park on a fine summer’s morning fifty years ago” (Woolf 25). Memory is a continuous track upon which the human mind can traverse in an infinite amount of variation, while time is a set of discrete set moments moving forth, joining complete strangers in the human condition. This realization estranges individuals from a complete understanding, but is undeniably freeing for Clarissa Dalloway. She, after watching the old woman in the house next door, absorbs the loneliness of the human soul and the inherent singleness of a life and continues to fight against it by throwing her parties in an effort to preserve dialogue and communication between individuals.

Octavia Butler works memory and time differently in Kindred by structuring the narrative to make both memory and time intensely alienating for Dana Franklin. Transporting Dana from 1976 to the 1800s emphasizes the disconnection between her experiences and those around her. Also, her perception of time becomes extremely warped as 5 years there translates to several weeks in the present day.  The flip flopping of times produces a character that never feels at home in either time but instead must put on a mask to conceal both the physical and mental lesions. She learns to lie to doctors at the hospital about her arm and learns to lie to Rufus and Alice about her whereabouts. The tissue of lies she weaves around her person is so thick that a connection is impossible. However, despite the difference in memory and time, Dana manages to understand and even empathize with her surroundings. “Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper” (Butler 134). Weylin is no more a monster than what his society deems him to be and it is this realization that topples Dana from her position of omniscience.  Dana’s moments of insight into the parallels between her present and past worlds, completes a bridge across space and time that brings down her barriers. However, she requires some division in order to protect her identity and prevent it from being absorbed into the cultural fabric. “I played the slave, minded my manners probably more than I had to” (Butler 91). By playing the slave, Dana is preserving her life at the expense of her beliefs. While she has occasional rebellious acts, such as teaching Carrie and Nigel how to read, her inability to defy Rufus at the expense of denying her own future, leaves her at an impasse. Even amidst the torture, starvation and degradation, the connection between her past ancestor and her current experiences, allows Dana to relook and revise her identity and come to terms with the violent history that brought her into the world. In the beginning she had hoped that Alice and Rufus had peacefully coexisted but soon realizes the foolishness and naiveté of that belief. By placing Dana in her own history, “there was no distance at all” between her and past events (Butler 221). So while, Dana is apart from her natural place and time, she is able to meld into society and successfully participate in an abhorrent system. The ease into which she slides into the roles calls into question her entire identity and whether she was the product of her century. By collapsing the 1900s and 1800s together, Butler allows her to partake in a renewal and recovery of identity.

Works Cited

Woolf, Virginia, and Bonnie Kime Scott.Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2005. Print.

Butler, Octavia E.. Kindred. 25th Anniversary ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Print.

Ishiguro and Butler

Although Kindred is labeled as Science Fiction and African American Literature, its powerful and disorienting narrative of historical recovery and remembrance transcends boundaries of genre. Akin to Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, which also deals with the same themes of loss and memory, Kindred initiates a conversation between the present and the past by physically transporting the main character, Dana Franklin, from 1976 to 1815. The blurring of time as narrators jump physically and mentally between the past and present causes the destruction of a linear cause and effect. There is instead a loop-like feeding of information along with a feeling of not only remembrance but also discovery. The present and past are no longer connected by a single direction but is instead complicated by the instability of the past. Moreover, the site of historical reinterpretation moves according to the author’s choice of formal narrative techniques. Ishiguro uses metafiction to reconstruct the past and give Mr. Stevens perspective on the present while Butler riffs on a variation of metalepsis to portray Dana’s unique limbo.

The process of revisiting the past for Stevens involves interweaving in several streams of consciousness into one coherent explanation and rationalization for his past thoughts and actions. Such a case occurs when he muses on Harry Smith’s socialist and draws upon “an instance that comes to mind”(Ishiguro 194). He subverts the denigration of the lords who mock him for his political ignorance into another personal affirmation and invites closeness into this view by using second person narration as if “great affairs will always be beyond the understanding of those such as you and I” is a widely held opinion (Ishiguro 199). Stevens at the beginning of this memory is on very sure and firm footing. He has held this opinion for so long that it is not so easily dislodged. So when he dives further and further into narration, he attempts to engage the reader in rhetorical and pointless efforts of validation. He needs the reader to also testify to the purposeful of his life so that the artificiality of the construction is built on more than his own subjectivity. However, the acknowledgement of the inherent bias in the story imparts a sense of Steven’s need to concretize history and move past the instability of memory. His remark “It is hardly my fault if his lordship’s life and work have turned out today to look, at best, a sad waste – and it is quite illogical that I should feel any regret or shame on my own account” (Ishiguro 201), can be seen as a desperate ploy to regain footing of the present after a reconstruction of a previously known past has failed. His confidence shaken, Mr. Stevens now only desires to affirm a sense of self.

Dana Franklin also desires to retain a sense of self while in a, literally, constantly changing world. Instead of being self-conscious, Kindred does not seek to explain the process of time-travel nor does even question it. It is accepted as a process of preserving lineage and a matter of Dana’s responsibility. However, while there is the same impression of history’s fragility, the feeding of information from the past to the present does not do the same work as in Remains of the Day. Stevens looks back and fills in the cracks of errors and “triumphs” with justification of his actions and validation of his current continuing actions and thoughts. Dana is caught between preserving an abhorrent history and her lineage or the destruction of herself and her family. The same line of inaction and agency continues through both of the novels as Stevens remains paralyzed by his choices and Dana is forced into paralysis for the sake of self-preservation. What marks Dana with further distinction is her floating state between worlds. Karen in her glossary post on metalepsis described it as a “space between nesting matroyshkas” or as “the world of the telling and the world of the told” (Gu). This is comparable to Dana’s movement between the present and the past and her interaction with 1815 as both a possibility and a foregone fact. “We weren’t really in. We were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us…We never really got into our roles. We never forgot that we were acting” (Butler 98). The world of 1815 is an expired world that Dana is reliving with all of the expectations and mannerisms of the present day. To survive, she must become apart of the slaves but never quite forgets her falsity. As someone who is actively involved in daily plantation life yet still preserves the partition of modernity and history, Dana is a paradoxical agential intrusion onto a “told” world that demands inertness and inaction. The site of historical interpretation is moved entirely into the past and somewhat into the physical realm as Dana sustains several severe injuries include the loss of an arm. While the possibility of changing the past occurs, Dana is bound even more than Stevens and so is rendered into another space between agency and impotence. “It was so hard to watch him hurting her – to know that he had to go on hurting her if my family was to exist at all” (Butler 180). The instability of the past still influences her present self but the physical closeness of the past and the continuing inability to change it causes Dana to seek self affirmation in other ways. She rebels but within the social confines of the world. Her sense of self is gradually eroded as she spends more time in the past and realizes “How easily we seemed to acclimatize. Not that I wanted us to have trouble, but it seemed as though we should have had a harder time adjusting to this particular segment of history – adjusting to our places in the household of a slaveholder” (Butler 97).  The question of whether character remains constant or is influenced by outside forces can be analyzed further through Butler’s characterization of Rufus and the odd duality of Dana and Alice.

Work Cited

Butler, Octavia E., Kindred. 25th Anniversary ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Print.

Gu, Karen. “Metalepsis.” Narrative and Memory. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2013. <https://narrativeandmemory.wordpress.com/?s=metalepsis&submit=Search>.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. New York: Knopf :, 1989. Print.

Shammas and Ishiguro: Memory and Identity

Ostensibly, Shammas and Ishiguro seem worlds apart. Shammas, an Arabian Christian, with roots in Syria, Galilee, and Lebanon, wrote Arabesques in Hebrew. This background, as Yaes Feldman describes it, surrounds his narrative and “gets implicated in the cultural baggage of the “other””(374). Ishiguro, a Japanese British novelist, is nevertheless an unwavering English writer who deals with the history and people of his adopted country in The Remains of the Day.  However, they both write in the context of national turmoil: Ishiguro, when England was moving from World War II and Shammas during the Arab-Israeli crisis. While this historical context proves to be important, it is still only a subtle background on which the true conversation of memory, narrative and identity plays out.  Amidst the dialogue of nationality and cultural background, Ishiguro and Shammas’s narrative remain similar in their methods in relating the fragility and validity of memory to identity.

Shammas, who travels from Paris to Iowa City, and Stevens who takes a motoring trip across England take the concept of a “journey of the self” to a much more literal level. While the present day Shammas and Stevens can be relied upon to report their situation accurately. The relationship of memory and the past is prone to failure. Stevens relays his history as fragments interwoven with the future and always filtered through his own perceptions. He acknowledges frequently his realization of the fallibility of his memory. “But now that I think further about it, I am not sure Miss Kenton spoke quite so boldly that day”(Ishiguro 60). His entire conversation with Miss Kenton, detailed with confidence, is revealed as false.

The deceiving narrator is also seen in Shammas when it is assumed that the narrator of “The Tale” and the narrator of “The Teller” is one and the same. Shammas’s choice of language in the different parts furthers the confusion since the association of vivid metaphorical language with reality is so strong that the usurping of this assumption leads to a reevaluation of Shammas’s entire identity. The basis on which Shammas’s character had been built, including the revisited rite of passage into the cistern, is shattered and has to be rebuilt on shakier foundations. Ishiguro and Shammas deal with the same circular and associative concept of memory. Memory generates and surrounds itself, as evident in Steven’s wandering through the opening and closing of doors and Shammas’s mixture of figurative language. “Abu Shakar’s heart creaked in his chest like the iron plate of his olive press” brings back images of the olives and the iron so that the intertwining of objects and memory forms an entangling arabesque (Shammas 125). The John Barth quote in Arabesques can further clarify Shammas and Ishiguro’s concept of identity and memory. “The narrator of the story is the story itself” (Shammas 249). The crux is not in the truthfulness of the “autobiographies” but in the manner in which the story is told. “I decided to write my autobiography in your name and to be present in it as the little boy who died…You were still a child when he left the village, so I filled the gaps from my own imagination”(Shammas 233). The layers between Shammas and the reader are larger and more opaque after the realization. What was previously conceived to be Shammas’s story is now Michael Abyad’s story, filled in by Shammas, retold by Shammas in Hebrew and relayed by, a not necessarily believable frame narrative of Shammas’s own physical journey.

Stevens’s haziness is as much a part of the story as the plot itself. Similar to Shammas’s decision to separate the tale and the teller, Ishiguro presents the narrative as Stevens’s remembering the past, instead of the objectively retelling the past itself, in order to form a subtler identity that involves penetrating through the facade of the narrative and the facade of the character. Stevens’s identity can be found closer to the reader since the interpretative work applied to his narrative does not rely so much on the validity of the narrative but rather the filter through which it relayed. The filter is Steven’s defense mechanism and by understanding the reasons behind his prevarication, his identity can also be understood. Shammas’s reasons for blanketing his narrative in layers of misdirection perhaps lies in his belief that “ ‘I have to come away so far from it’ in order to understand it all”(Shammas 150). Distance from the past, distance from his native land, and distance from his native tongue provides the space needed for a clearer perspective on what transpired in his family. Shammas’s identity can be then found in the interlacing patterns of his story. His complicated family history, nationality and language cannot be expressed in any other way then a matryoshka doll of narrative. By uncovering each layer, more of Shammas is discovered and understood. The relationship of memory and identity works in almost the same way in each of the narratives. Memory is perceived to be inherently moldable and can be used to push a certain agenda. Identity is found when that agenda is unearthed and used as a vehicle for understanding the narrative instead of an obfuscating factor. Such as when Stevens’s obstinate “dignity” can be viewed as a crutch and a filter and when Shammas’s false autobiography can be peeled into layers of complicated historical and cultural contexts.

Work Cited

Feldman, Yael. Postcolonial Memory, Postmodern Intertextuality: Anton Shammas’s “Arabesques” Revisited. New York: MLA, 1999. Print.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. New York: Knopf , 1989. Print.

Shammas, Anton. Arabesques. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Print.

Allegory

An allegory is a cohesive set of interconnected symbols, figures, and metaphors that can be abstracted from a basic level of plot so that every element is a stand in for political, religious, or other abstract ideas. It is a work that pieces together understandable and recognizable symbols throughout an entire text so to explain complex concepts outside of the novel’s world. It is often compared to an extended metaphor but its difference lies mainly in that an “extended metaphor…contains language that relates directly to both the source and the target. Allegory, by contrast, typically only has language which evokes what may be seen as the elaborated source domain” (Steen 124).

Works such as Animal Farm and A Brave New World are at once dystopian imaginings and commentary on modern day political and cultural forces but these works never mention the commentaries’ target except in reference to the source material. Also, characters in allegories have no personality other than as a thinly veiled embodiment of a certain moral abstraction. The character of Napoleon and Snowball do not possess any distinctive traits other than what Orwell intended for them to represent. “‘No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?’” (Orwell 35). The overt literal meaning is that of concern for the animal’s welfare. However, Orwell conjures up a sinister parallel with the Soviet Union and its tendency toward revisionist history due to Stalin’s hypocritical propaganda and twisted logic. Every element of the book needs to be connected back to an overreaching network of metaphors and ideas. Orwell accomplishes this dexterously in Animal Farm by connecting the microcosm of an anthropomorphic group of animals to the formation and corruption of the Soviet Union in the 1940s. Then in Brave New World, Huxley uses the source domain of a society anesthetized with pleasure to try and understand a larger and more complex conceptual target. “Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality in a bottle. Christianity without tears – that’s what soma is” (Huxley 261). Aldous Huxley is commenting on the seduction of progress and technology in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and mass production uneasy transformation of the world. Soma is part of his allegory on allowing our desires and pleasures to trump truth and knowledge.

There must be on some part of the author a consciousness that he is using characters and images to produce abstractions distilled from life.  So while many stories can have religious and political meanings forcibly extracted from them, a literary allegory demands aspects of the author’s point of view and opinion. “The story [Cinderella] is, basically, an allegory of Christian redemption: Cinderella is the soul, he said; her initial consignment to a place in the ashes represents the soul’s initial confinement to the flesh; the fairy godmother is Grace, the transformation of the pumpkin is transubstantiation” (McQuillan 143).  McQuillan’s account of his friend’s rendition of Cinderella summarizes some of the confusion surrounding what constitutes an allegory. While Cinderella does not have a recognizable personality other than her virtue, the allegory still differs from a fairy tale, fable, metaphor or parable in its penetration into a fictional work. Allegories can usually be distinguished by the length of a work and by the lack of a simple conclusion or moral. Some allegories might have religious or animal imagery but all parables and fables contain lessons conducted through animals or other inanimate objects. Another point of blurriness is whether a narrative can be allegorical but not an allegory. Since reading and criticizing literature requires abstracting ideas from the literal plot, “De Man suggest that allegory is the general condition of narrative since all language can always be read as saying something other than intended by the speaker” (McQuillan 314). The difference between a true allegory and an allegorical work depends on the level of abstraction. Animal Farm and Pilgrim Progress are “purer” forms of allegory since they maintain the separation of target and source material. It is when the lines between the two blur, that an allegory may simply become an extended metaphor inside a larger work.

Works Cited

Steen, Gerard. Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage: A Methodological Analysis of Theory and Research. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 2007. Print.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World: A Novel with the Essay “Brave New World Revisited”. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. Print.

McQuillan, Martin. The Narrative Reader. London: Routledge, 2000. Print.

Orwell, George. Animal Farm. Orlando: Harcourt, 2003. Print.