Butler and Amis

One of the constant struggles with history and literature is whether to evaluate the morality depicted within the literature in terms of our modern reading or in terms of the time in which it was written or set—even though the world has not always agreed on what the “right thing” is at any given moment in practice, the general consensus seems to be that some decisions on morals should be inherently simple. Although Kindred is actually categorized as science fiction, while Time’s Arrow is not, the ways in which these narratives deal with time as it differs from forward linear motion require the same suspension of disbelief that is so important in reading science fiction. Through the authors’ sharp contrasts to the normal perception of time, they call into question the concepts of absolute morality and human nature throughout literary history and history in literature.

In Time’s Arrow, the unknown narrator and Tod/John/Hamilton/Odilo shift backwards through time in a relatively linear fashion, passing through every possible period of history where the vast majority of the world has come to realize that the Nazi persecution of the Jews was incredibly immoral, and yet this realization is never directly addressed. While this may be due to the fact that the narrator only experiences “the sense of starting out on a terrible journey, toward a terrible secret” until the great unveiling, thus missing the most relevant time periods for (re)evaluation, Odilo’s greatest acknowledgement of a sense of wrongdoing seems to come only from physical manifestations of guilt, such as impotence (Amis 5). One of the refrains of the section of the narrative in Auschwitz is the phrase “here there is no why,” (125) implying that there is no desire to examine one’s actions, their causes, or their implications, if not an outright desire to avoid examination. This tendency to shy away from making a true judgment call is driven home when the narrator finally says, “I’ve come to the conclusion that Odilo Unverdorben, as a moral being, is absolutely unexceptional, liable to do what everybody else does, good or bad, with no limit, once under the cover of numbers” (157). In this way, the narrator’s relative nonchalance towards and seeming retrospective understanding of how the persecution of the Jews unfolded offers an unsettling interpretation of how easily a person could do something terrible in a certain context.

Similarly, Kindred’s rapid and unexpected shifts in time seem to make it difficult for the characters to maintain a solid sense of themselves and what they believe to be right and wrong. When Kevin first arrives in the past, Dana needs to step in between Rufus and him before a larger conflict breaks out over differences in laws and preferred vocabulary: she explains to Kevin that Rufus “learned to talk [derogatorily] from his mother.…And from his father, and probably from the slaves themselves,” seeming to give Rufus a context-based free pass, while Kevin himself realizes that there’s “no point” in trying to explain modern concepts of respect to a young boy from the antebellum South (Butler 60-61). As time passes and the past becomes more familiar to Kevin and Dana, Dana finds herself “disturbed” at how easy it is even for them to adjust to their “places in the household of a slaveholder” (97). Although the situation is less than ideal, nothing so bad has happened that the modern people cannot wrap their minds around it. There are also hints of a disconnect in the experiences of the two time-travelers as they perceive the history unfolding around them: when Kevin mentions how fascinating it would be to see the West, Dana replies, “That’s where they’re doing it to the Indians instead of the blacks!” prompting Kevin to look at her “strangely” (97). This strange look gives Dana—as well as the reader—the jolting realization that even a relatively progressive person from a modern time can still have a different affective response to morally faulty history when placed in a certain setting.

When the characters in these narratives suddenly find themselves in societies and entire ways of life where awful practices are occurring, they may try to make a stand, but often find it easier to go along with supposedly standard behavior for their own well-being. In Odilo’s case, the reality of what he is aiding in Auschwitz does not seem to consciously register—when Herta sends him letters suspicious of the work he is doing, the narrator thinks, “Obviously, the misunderstanding will have to be cleared up” (Amis 126). Although the reader can certainly imagine that this thought process occurs because Odilo has already worked himself into the Nazi mindset, the fact that Amis never truly addresses the much larger societal and military pressures beyond Odilo’s immediate circles additionally problematizes any dubious, Nuremburg-esque defense the narrator may make. As far as self-preservation, Dana also seems to makes cautious decisions on which rights to fight for because her risk as a black woman in the slaveholding South is particularly high: when Kevin finds it ridiculous that she is not allowed to stay overnight in his room, she admits that they may need to leave the house if they are caught because the Weylins “might not be willing to tolerate ‘immorality’ from [them]” (Butler 85). While putting the word “immorality” in quotation marks indicates that Dana is making a distinction between what is moral for the Weylins and what is moral for her and Kevin, the notion that she still feels an obligation to operate under a construct of morality different from her own shows that the context of the past has a great deal of control over her, and that it may have the power to gain even more control. Although the relatively removed reader may like to think that some of history’s most terrible concepts should have been impossible with only the use of basic human decency, these novels and their reorganization of time, which should allow the characters to share the reader’s modern ideas of right and wrong, demonstrate how difficult it can be to maintain a stable sense of self and morality outside of one’s own well-defined space and time.

LW

Works Cited

Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow. New York: Vintage International, 1991. Print.

Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston: Beacon, 1979. Print.

Spiegelman and Ishiguro

One of the ideas that we have discussed many times in class is what it can mean to be “burdened” by someone else’s memories and life, specifically those of another generation. Some people consider this relationship to actually be burdensome, while others treat it as more of a gift, and even for the same person, this can change depending upon the context. In this vein, Stevens reveres his father in his narrative, which his father will never see, while finding it impossible to put his father on a pedestal to his father’s face. Similarly, Art Spiegelman depicts his often-tense relationship with his father very honestly, while still pouring creative energy into honoring his father’s story. Thus, Stevens and Spiegelman seem to indicate that narrative has played an important role in distancing the narrator from the difficult reality of his relationships so that he can express what he considers to be his true feelings towards his father.

In one of his many discussions of “dignity” and “greatness,” Stevens devotes most of his words to retelling his father’s story, and goes out of his way to explain why this is warranted. He describes his father’s career as “the one [he has] always scrutinized for a definition of ‘dignity,’” and goes on to state his “firm conviction” that his father indeed embodied dignity (Ishiguro 34). When he follows this by saying that his father may not have had every quality that should be expected of a high-quality butler, but that any absent qualities were those that are clearly not relevant, the reader can see the reverence with which Stevens regards his father and Mr. Stevens Sr.’s work as a butler. In this way, Stevens demonstrates how heavily his father’s life has influenced his own understanding of how to carry himself in his work—and thus his life, given Stevens’ complete devotion to being a butler—even though he never finds a way to share this with his father.

Spiegelman’s narrative does not seem to share Stevens’ dedication to depicting his father in a particularly lofty manner, but nevertheless shows (at least the first half of) Vladek’s triumph of the spirit throughout the persecution of Jewish people. The author is the one who originally presents the story idea to his father, explaining that he wants to hear “about [his father]’s life in Poland, and the war,” ostensibly even if no one else does, and alludes to the fact that he has wanted to “draw” this book for a while (Spiegelman 12). His desire to focus the narrative on his father’s personal experience, which he refers to as making the story “real – more human” (23), indicates that he truly cares about his father’s past and how it has influenced the present (for anyone connected to their family), and may also be his way of developing and understanding his relationship with his father without the two of them actually sitting down and discussing how this may be the case.

In spite of their overarching desire to honor the memories and lives of their fathers, Spiegelman and Stevens both find it very difficult to connect with the men who were important enough to warrant so much time and effort. In the pivotal moment where Stevens must limit his father’s household duties, he mentions how little he and Mr. Stevens Sr. have conversed, and refers to his father’s room as a “prison cell,” but seems to avoid thinking any deeper about how his father will truly feel upon receiving this revised task list, or about how he himself must feel as his father ages (Ishiguro 64). Spiegelman has similar problems in dealing with his father on a more intimate level: when he finds out that Vladek is depressed after reading “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” he finds himself only able to awkwardly say, “I-I’m sorry” (Spiegelman 104). When he says to Mala that Vladek normally “doesn’t even look at [his] work when [he] sticks it under [Vladek’s] nose,” this hints at a long-standing complicated relationship among Vladek, Spiegelman, and Spiegelman’s work, upon which Spiegelman does not ultimately deign to elaborate.

Thus, narrative seems to be necessary for Stevens and Spiegelman to actually engage with their fathers and their fathers’ stories, as opposed to reacting (or in Stevens’ case, not reacting) to the immediate situations before them. For better or for worse, these father figures and their burdens have played huge parts in how their sons perceive and interact with the world around them. Although it may not be the express purpose of the narratives to focus on the sons’ relationships with their fathers, narrative seems to have been the best—if not only—way for them to work through their feelings for and understandings of their fathers.

 

LW

Works Cited:

Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. New York: Vintage International, 1993. Print.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. Vol. 1. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Print.

Shammas and Woolf

Both Arabesques and Mrs. Dalloway feature characters who have experienced trauma, but the ways in which the novels deal with traumatic memories diverge: Septimus primarily fixates on Evans’ death, while Shammas’ characters seem burdened by lifetime accumulations of baggage. Although the cases do not overlap perfectly, an interesting relationship emerges in comparing Septimus to Laylah Khoury. These characters claim a significant lack of feeling that stems from trying to cope with a past trauma, but this absence has carried well past the initial moment of upheaval. In examining the debatable effectiveness of emotional distancing as a coping mechanism in dealing with trauma, Anton Shammas and Virginia Woolf show how traumatic memories do not exist solely in the past for their characters.

In the sections in Mrs. Dalloway that offer the reader some amount of background information for Septimus’ apparent mental illness, it seems as though he is having difficulty reconciling the idea of “manliness” with his actual emotional experience of war (Woolf 86) When the narrator explains that “when Evans was killed […], Septimus, far from showing any emotion […], congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably,” this seems to refer to an immediate necessity for repressing any feelings about Evans’ death until Septimus himself is somewhat safe (Woolf 86). Even after Septimus ostensibly comes out of the war with a sense of invincibility, however, he seems to divide his time between tears and a continued lack of feeling. In this way, Woolf highlights how one traumatic moment in Septimus’ life caused a split between the continuity of the past and that of the present that Septimus ultimately finds impossible to mend.

While Leylah’s outcome is at least far more functional than her literary counterpart’s, there are hints that she has remained adversely affected by the ways in which she needed to desensitize herself to trauma. The narrator describes her actions as “indifference” and “concession,” even in describing her sons, and her demeanor throughout her interaction with the narrator gives the impression of resignation rather than engagement (243). In her own words, she sometimes believes that it was her guardian angel who experienced everything while she “stood off to one side and watched [her] own life going by” (243-44). This interaction seems to highlight Laylah’s overarching lack of control over most aspects of her life, from her moving—and abuse—as a child to the problems with which her own children are born. Having grown up such that her only form of control seems to be control over her emotions and reactions to the things that happen to her, and given her continued struggles, Shammas here shows that not feeling can become a way of life when one’s wishes and one’s reality are so fundamentally and perpetually different.

The way that these moments are narrated in the novels also interacts interestingly with the idea of detachment and lack of control in memory. Septimus’ background story seems to be told by an ambiguous narrator: rather than attribute thoughts or words directly to Septimus, Woolf works around this with a certain amount of free indirect discourse (Woolf 86). Although Shammas offers information about Laylah and her character through a dialogue with his narrator, there is still little real opportunity to determine what Laylah actually feels; instead, it is the narrator who describes how she says one thing but not how she says another (Shammas 243-44). With this style of narration, these authors have further driven home how an initial deprivation of agency from their characters carries on indefinitely within their narrative lives and memories.

LW

Works Cited

Shammas, Anton. Arabesques. Berkeley, CA: U of California Press, 1988. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1953. Print.

Intertextuality

Discussing “intertextuality” is a matter of discussing how a text does not exist in a vacuum—it is influenced by the works that have come before it, and it will most likely exert some kind of influence over works to follow. Authors may use this particular technique of referencing the style or content of other authors to give readers some background information, while still giving them a new perspective. As discussed in class, reading is always rereading to a certain extent, because of the literary experiences readers already bring to the table. Themes that are relevant and striking to readers in one context often appear again in treatment by other authors, but in variations that offer the audience a newer author’s own interpretation.

At a foundational level of intertextuality, authors incorporate the ideas, definitions, and concepts of their cultures into their works. According to Julia Kristeva, the attributed originator of this term, “texts […] have to be seen as systems of signs that exist in relation to other systems of signs” (Dictionary of Sociology). Because this situation of pulling in background culture can arise without the express knowledge of either the author or the reader, Roland Barthes points out that this can lead to problems. By his analysis, readers may incorrectly seek “the explanation of a work […] in the man or woman who produced it,” when they should instead examine the broader range of factors that influenced the text; the readers’ better understanding should then lead to something resembling the “death of the Author” (Barthes in Allen 71, 70). This extreme viewpoint opens the door for the claim that literary works depend on each other, as opposed to a work depending only on its author.

A completely original text thus seems impossible, although works can be intertextually related to different degrees. Authors virtually never regurgitate a perfect replica of a previous text—instead, they frequently produce “anagram, allusion, adaptation, translation, parody, pastiche, imitation, and other kinds of transformation” as a way to offer their own unique spin on a technique or theme (Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms).

Examples of intertextuality include James Joyce’s Ulysses, which draws from Homer’s The Odyssey, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which, in fact, draws from Ulysses. The perpetual influence of intertextuality becomes even more apparent when readers can learn that Mrs. Dalloway is a roundabout product of a Greek epic poem. In terms of a more recent example, Meg Cabot’s Abandon converts the myth of Persephone into a young adult novel set in a modern Florida high school, while also beginning each chapter with relevant lines from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno.

LW

Works Cited:

Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno. Trans. John Ciardi. New York: Signet Classics, 2009. Print.

Barthes, Roland. Image – Music – Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. Print. In Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. London: Routledge, 2000. Print.

Cabot, Meg. Abandon. New York: Point, 2012. Print.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Classics, 1997. Print.

“Intertextuality.” A Dictionary of Sociology. 3^rd ed. 2012. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.

“Intertextuality.” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 3^rd ed. 2012. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1953. Print.