Butler and White

In a way, Octavia Butler’s Kindred is a first-person American slave narrative, albeit an unusual one involving the time travel of Dana, a modern black woman from California, to a 19^th century Maryland plantation owned by one of her distant ancestors. Much of the first part of the novel is set on this plantation, and thus is also set within the historical time period in which American slavery existed. The protagonist, however, comes from 1970s California, and on every trip brings along with her the values, mindset, and sensibilities she developed within her own culture and society. The novel Kindred is itself a first-person narrative; the fact that the novel is in most part set within a the historical time period of American slavery also gives the novel a layer of the historical, though the status of the novel as simply a ‘historical novel’ is complicated by the fact that the protagonist is not of that time period.

To bring Kindred in relation to Hayden White’s “Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”, it would be productive to understand how the novel might fit in within the framework White lays out. White defines narrativizing discourse as something separate from historical discourse – historical discourse is “a discourse that openly adopts a perspective that looks out on the world and reports it” while narrativizing discourse “feigns to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story (White 6-7). That is, historical discourse reports events while narrativizing discourse portrays events as if they were telling the story themselves. Narrativizing discourse is thus a particular way of telling history, a way of representing history/historical events as full, coherent, and complete – whole in the way that we imagine the stories and narratives we tell to be whole. Turning back to Kindred, it is not entirely clear where the novel fits in this framework. In some ways the novel undoubtedy exhibits fictional storytelling – i.e., the very fact of time travel – but in other ways the novel exhibits a kind of factual (perhaps more historical) storytelling, at least in how it represents much of the oppression and hardship of slavery and racial tension.

It is possible that Dana’s status as a modern woman transported back in time to her distant ancestor’s plantation, and her subsequent narration of her experiences – which we experience by reading the novel – is also a comment on White’s idea that the impulse to narrativize always contains within it the impulse to moralize. White holds that “narrativity, certainly in factual storytelling and probably in fictional storytelling as well, is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any morality that we can imagine” (White 18). He goes so far as to ask in the final sentence of his article if it is even at all possible to narrativize without moralizing, where moralizing is again defined as identifying reality or events of reality with a social system that we are able to imagine. Dana is the narrator of this novel, and she comes from a different time period – perhaps the very fact of her modern-ness and the narrativation of her story, which we experience as the novel itself, suggests Hayden’s claim that within narratization is the impulse to moralize. In her narratization of her story there is everywhere the impulse to moralize, to identify, compare, and ultimately judge the reality she experiences as a slave in America, which she will inevitably do given that her values, mindset, and sensibilities, are all borne out of a different social system. That, in turn, opens up a question as to how any narrativizing individual (whether narrativizing factually or fictionally) might also be moralizing events of reality, simply by virtue of being embedded within a social system that is different than the social system which bore the events being narrativized.

 

Works Cited

Butler, Octavia E.. Kindred. 25^th anniversary ed. Boton: Beacon Press, 2003. Print.

White, Hayden. The value of narrativity in the representation of reality. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Print.

Shammas and Spiegelman

Formally, Shammas’ Arabesques and Spiegelman’s Maus are two considerably different works, the most evident difference being that Maus is a graphic novel and Arabesques, a novel. One of Arabesques’ most distinctive formal characteristics is the separation and layering of individual characters’ narratives, a separation which eventually lends the novel a sense that past and present events are unfolding in unison through the telling and retelling of events and stories. Maus also separates and layers (at least two) narratives – Vladek’s Holocaust narrative as well as the narrative of Vladek recounting his story to Artie – but the graphic novel achieves this in an entirely different way by virtue of its form. Instead of Arabesques’ use of separate chapters, numbered sections, and shifting narrators, Maus achieves the effect of past and present events unfolding in unison via separate frames on a page, which can depict the graphic novel’s two narratives as literally unfolding side by side. Despite such formal differences between the two works, each is able to achieve this separation and layering of narrative to produce works that treat memory not simply as a remembrance of things past but rather as something that is always being activated in the present. That is to say, in each work, memory somehow persists into and is also perpetually created in the present through the recounting of stories, which in these works most often happens (or originally happened) in dialogue with family or community members. This continual activation of memory in the present brings to mind an idea once discussed in class – that trauma is not so much remembering past events and as it is an emotional reliving of past events in the present, where trauma is a kind of failure of memory. Functional memory could still exhibit this particular characteristic of traumatic memory, where memories are also being perpetually experienced again and again in the present.

These two works also treat objects of memory in different ways. In Arabesques, many objects serve to activate memory; the pillow, the olive oil in its various forms, the amulet, hair, the journal, and the wooden box all serve as objects which do some kind of work to invoke memory and story-telling, where story-telling is a kind of memory-making in the present, a phenomenon in which past events can unfold in the present through the act of telling a story to a real or imagined audience. In Maus, objects are treated somewhat differently – on one hand, there is an obsession with random objects as exemplified by Vladek’s inclination to preserve everything from cruise ship menus to the plastic pitcher from his stay in the hospital. This tendency to be a packrat causes Mala to exclaim “he’s more attached to things than people!”(Spiegelman 93). While Vladek seems to be obsessed with ‘things’ and objects, those things are seemingly random and unconnected to his memory – for example, in one scene Vladek picks up a stray bit of electrical wire on the street in order to reuse the inner metal wires; Artie asks him why he won’t just buy new wire, and Vladek responds that to do so would be a waste, especially when he can use the perfectly good wire in the stray bit of electrical wiring that he found. In this case, Vladek’s behavior could actually be an example of memory expressing itself through behavior rather than expressing itself through more conventional memory-invoking mediums, like stories.  On the other hand, in Maus there is also the destruction of objects which directly activate memory. After Ajna committed suicide, Vladek destroyed all of her journals – he explains to Artie, “after Ajna died I had to make an order with everything… these papers had too many memories. So I burned them”, to which Artie vehemently responds by calling his father a murderer (Spiegelman 139). Vladek’s obsession with random, seemingly memory-less objects thus could actually be an expression of his memory, while the impetus to destroy more clearly defined memory objects could stem from the fact that objects like Anja’s journals too directly and powerfully invoke raw memory; it would seem that, at least for Vladek (one who experienced the Holocaust), such objects do not work well enough to screen raw experience. For Artie, a generation removed, the destruction of objects of memory seems to be much more a crime than it is for Vladek, possibly because the separation in generation is already enough of a screen between raw experience and the recounting of experience; such objects can serve those in Artie’s generation as memory-invoking objects without all the violence of actual lived experience.

 

Works Cited:

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

Spiegelman, Art. Maus. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1986. Print.

Haneke and Amis

The theme of disavowal of memory runs through both Caché and Time’s Arrow, a theme which manifests itself in each piece by means of certain formal choices made on the part of director and writer, respectively. In Caché, Hanke uses objective shots, which to us as viewers almost always signifies that we are watching one of the mysterious video tapes received by Georges, as well as subjective shots, which indicate Haneke’s hand within the film as story maker. To complicate the distinction between these objective and subjective shots, there is no visible qualitative difference between the tapes and the rest of the film, and often we are unsure if a scene is indeed subjective until more than halfway through the scene when the camera makes a tell-tale move – which even then remains ambiguous in certain shots. Many of the subjective scenes are shot in similar ways to the objective scenes on the tapes, with very subtle differences, lending a sense of suspense to the film as a whole as we are unsure when we are watching the footage of an anonymous tape or not. The confusion between subjective and objective shots, as well as dialogue throughout the film, makes it clear that Georges has in a way so deeply buried certain memories of the past that at first he can’t remember his actions at all. This is the first indication of his disavowal of memory at the subconscious level. And when Georges does remember certain details, like his treatment of Majid when they were children, he purposefully leaves such details out when he relays the story to his wife. This is a conscious disavowal of memory, an attempt to erase certain important details by telling a story which leaves these details, and their significance, out of the record.

Besides the fact that time in the novel is moving backwards, an important formal characteristic in Amis’ Time’s Arrow is the mental disembodiment and embodiment of the narrator’s consciousness and Odilo’s consciousness as related to the narrator’s knowledge of Odilo’s ‘secret’ – that Odilo had been a Nazi doctor involved in the Holocaust. Up until page 115, the narrator’s consciousness is disembodied from Odilo’s consciousness; additionally, the narrator does not know what Odilo ‘did’ during the war – that is, until page 116. On page 116, the novel enters WWII and the narrator and Odilo become one single consciousness who is narrating the novel. That is to say, the narrator is made aware of the ‘secret’, and then the narrator and Odilo become one. After (or rather, ‘before’) the war, the narrator again becomes disembodied from Odilo’s consciousness, and says that “Odilo forgets everything again” (page 149). The word ‘again’ implies that the narrator’s initial disembodiment was characterized by a kind of forgetfulness on Odilo’s part. From this, it is possible to imagine that this disembodied narrator consciousness is in fact a disconnected part of Odilo’s own consciousness – a consciousness which disavows his memory and performs a kind of willful forgetting after WWII.

Both Caché and Time’s Arrow exhibit themes of the disavowal of memory – a willful forgetting. In both cases, memory is a force of disruption as well as continuity – memory disrupts the stories that each character has told themselves (or, in Caché’s case, the story Georges tells first himself, and then the story he tell his wife), stories which attempt to cover up certain facts of the past. On the other hand, memory also serves as a kind of force for continuity in the sense that such memories refuse to be buried. In Georges’ case, he is confronted with the tapes and drawings which unearth his past, while in  Time’s Arrow the narrator’s consciousness (which may be Odilo’s) is confronted with Odilo’s ‘secret’.  In both cases, memory is trying to make the separate parts of each character’s lives whole, to show that seemingly disconnected parts of one life can never be truly disconnected despite attempts to rewrite one’s story.

Works Cited

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

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

Narrative Discourse

A narrative discourse is a type of discourse, which Michael Bamberg defines as “an exchange of referentially denoted information, ” the most basic discourse being a simple exchange of information, with more complex discourse approaching a kind of interaction between cognitive models (Bamberg 218). Discourse can also be defined as “the range of social practices, customs, and institutions surrounding a given subject matter” (Mikics 90). The Companion to Narrative Theory makes a distinction between story and discourse: story is composed of basic events and situations – the plot— whereas discourse is the composition of story elements into a plot (Phelan 21). Narrative discourse is a particular kind of discourse: an account of (usually) past events represented as having a causal relationship and which are centered around a specific agent or agents. Examples of narrative discourse include folk stories, historical events, mythology, and personal experience and are often characterized by a use of the first or third person as well as a chronological representation of events (LinguaLinks). Narrative discourse is often used in narratives which try to make sense of the ‘origins of things’, which is to say that narrative discourse attempts to organize past events into a sense-making narrative, which can then be useful to the narrator or story-teller. Some examples of how organizing events into a narrative discourse can be useful are in the representation of one’s identity, or in how a community represents relevant events as an expression of community identity.

The following excerpts, the first from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and the second from Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation (a memoir) are examples of narrative discourse as the organization of past events into a useful narrative, which in these cases inform each character’s sense of self and identity.

Excerpt from Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (page 8-9)

Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back like a cat’s; or she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the house with the china cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally, Seton – such hosts of people; and dancing all night; and the waggons plodding past to market; and the driving home across the Park. She remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now in front of her… Did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to buts and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.

Excerpt from Lost in Translation, by Eva Hoffman (page 276)

Perhaps finding… a point of calibration is particularly difficult now, when our collective air is oversaturated with trivial and important and contradictory and cancelling messages. And yet, I could not have found this true axis, could not have made my way through the maze, if I had not assimilated and mastered the voices of my time and place – the only language through which we can learn to think and speak… It’s only after I’ve taken in disparate bits of cultural matter, after I’ve accepted its seductions and its snares, that I can make my way through the medium of language to distill my own meanings; and it’s only coming from the ground up that I can hit the tenor of my own sensibility, hit home.

Works Cited

Bamberg, Michael. “Narrative Discourse and Identities.” N.p., n.d. Web.

Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin, 1990. Print.

Mikics, David. A New Handbook of Literary Terms. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007. Print.

Phelan, James, and Peter J. Rabinowitz. A Companion to Narrative Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2005. Web.

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

“What Is a Narrative Discourse?” What Is a Narrative Discourse? LinguaLinks, n.d. Web. 21 Oct. 2013.