Spiegelman and Woolf

In both Maus and Mrs. Dalloway, temporality – how it is shared among the characters and how it is altered through the narrative – is explored and dissected. Beginning with Maus, Vladek’s recount of life in Poland before and after the Nazi occupation occupies the same temporal space as Spiegelman’s account of his time with his father. As Spiegelman listens to his father’s story in Maus, he also draws it to share with his readers. This allows Spiegelman to not only retell his father’s story, but to intersperse within it his father’s reaction at the time, his own reactions, and what is occurring during the time he is listening. One good example of this can be found when panels of Spiegelman with his father are interjected between panels of his father in the war (Spiegelman, 44). In this way, the memory’s time is compressed within Spiegelman’s memory of his father. The compression lies not only with the fact that the sections are bracketed by Spiegelman and Vladek’s interaction, but in the very medium of a picture. Actions, emotions, dialogue and thoughts are reduced and compacted into each panel.

In Mrs. Dalloway, shared time is represented by the network of character consciousness’s that are intruded upon and explored within the span of a day. With contact, objects, and childhood as triggers, the reader shifts between the various residents of Mrs. Dalloway’s London. The characters share the same time with the narration shifting to illuminate the thoughts of the various characters in this one day time frame. For instance, the narration follows Septimus while he is distracted at the park with Rezia beside him, then shifts to Maisie Johnson who is watching these events unfold. It would seem that the memories in Woolf’s work are in a sense compressed in that the thoughts of multiple people occupy this single day.

This shared temporality seems to suggest that memories are not only compressible, but also that memories are linked to a sense of present time. This attachment to the present serves is social. That is, memories relate to the present because it is through the reflection that relationships are explained.

In Maus, the relationship being explored is one between father and son. The process of recollecting a story and telling it to one’s son highlights the gap that exists between their experiences. This time is distancing in that age and experience contribute to Spiegelman and Vladek’s rocky relationship. That time gap between the events mirrors the personal gap between Spiegelman and his father. In Mrs. Dalloway the relationship being explored is between people who share the same time and space. In this narrative, though the reader can gain a window into each character’s consciousness, the characters themselves are blind to one another’s thoughts. There is a gap between them in this way and their inability to bridge this gap comes from their inability to share these thoughts with one another. The narrative gap here mirrors the social gap that exists in Mrs. Dalloway’s London.

This gap in Maus seems to prompt the improvisation or possibly even an invention of the missing information. The pictures show details that were most likely not told to Spiegelman. For example, Spiegelman draws paintings into Anja’s house and fashions them to look somewhat like landscapes (Spiegelman, 31). This is not so much so in Mrs. Dalloway. However, both works rely on the reader to fill in gaps for themselves using what is presented to them. The reader is left to interpret the emotions and images being placed before them and to find meaning from it.

Shammas and White

White suggests that “the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself” (White, 5) and that “the events that are actually recorded in the narrative appear ‘real’ precisely insofar as they belong to an order or moral existence” (White, 26). These two suggestions on the nature of narrative are illustrated in Shammas’ Arabesque in which the narrative takes the form of reflections and that may or may not be true.

The book’s narrative, and more specifically the truthfulness of these recollections being shared to the reader, is brought into question early on. After recounting a story regarding Surayyah Sa’id, the narrator tells the reader it is “just a tale,” (Shammas, 60). The truthfulness of his other memories are also now under scrutiny. There is even a suggestion by Shammas that these memories and stories have an element of fabrication. Shammas goes so far as to title the parts of the novels as “The Tale” (Shammas, 1) or “The Tale Continued” (Shammas, 151).

There seems to be a suggestion then not in the “real” that consists of what has actually happened, but the real that, as White puts it, “belongs to an order of moral existence” (White, 26). This moral existence is focused on, and even separated from the narrative in that it would seem the narrator, both as the storyteller and an actor in the stories, exists as the moral backing. The focus on this is made as Shammas juxtaposes the parts titled with “The Tale” to sections titled “The Teller” (Shammas, 75).

It is interesting though that the narrator both distances himself from his memories and also latches onto them, unable to separate his existence from those that populate his story. This distance is mainly illustrated in how Shammas tends to have the narrator jump in with references to his own place within the memory later on in those accounts. For instance, when the narrator recounts the time his father first saw his mother outside the barbershop, he says “She is on her way to the girl’s school…where I myself will go to class twenty years later” (Shammas, 21) at the end of the account. His existence in a present time is not only revealed here, but there is a sense that he is also trying to link himself to the past that he was not a part of.

The narrator’s constant appearance seems to in some sense ground the narration. In addition, it would seem that the narrator is morally motivated when speaking of visiting Surayyah Sa’id. He says, “I found the courage and took the step to break the silence I had imposed upon myself after reading about the woman with the blond hair” (Shammas, 34). However, when the narrator retracts his story and makes a new one about the same event as he does with Surayyah Sa’id’s tale (Shammas, 60), he becomes not a unifying source for the narrative, but a destructive one that destabilizes the rest of his memories. Here, though the moralizing element that White suggests can be seen as the storytellers, the storytellers themselves seem to complicate the truth and even confuse it such as in part two titled, “The Teller: Pere Lachaise” (Shammas, 75) in which fragments of events are being told in different voices to the reader. There comes into question whether or not this moral backing exists not within the storytellers, but in the events they are distorting.

Works Cited

Shammas, Anton. Arabesques. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 2001.

White, Hayden. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in Critical Inquiry 7:1 (Autumn 1980), 5-27.

Freud and Amis

Freud’s “Screen Memories” and Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow

An interesting topic touched on by both of these works is the relationship between feelings and image recollections, and more broadly, how this relationship persists when recalled by a person other than the experiencer.

In “Screen Memories”, Freud describes a screen memory as an image based memory that hides or reconstructs a repressed thought or memory. He explores this kind of memory using a case study as an example. In this particular study with one of his patients, Freud recounts the patient’s screen memory that includes an image of children playing in a field of yellow flowers. Here, Freud suggests a connection between feelings and the images that arise in our memory, namely, but not exclusively, that feelings can prompt recollections (Freud 237). This “wealth of impressions” include, in this particular case, feelings such as “longing,” “excite[ment],” “love,” and “doubt” (Freud 240). Here, not only is the image recountable, but the feelings experienced at the time are as well. Because the case study in “Screen Memories” is recounted in a linear sequence, the patient’s feelings can be seen alongside the recollected image.

This, however, is not the case when looking at Time’s Arrow. The events of Time’s Arrow occur chronologically backwards though the narrative structure goes forward. This narrator has “no access to his [Odilo’s] thoughts – but [is] awash with his emotions” (Amis 7). Here, feelings arise as something separate from the narrator and don’t necessarily prompt recollections. There is no obvious relation between a recollection from the narrator and a feeling related to it and the very act of recounting a past event is problematized. It seems that events experienced by the narrator seeing the world backwards prompt images as recollections more often than feelings. For instance, the narrator will refer back to Irene in instances with women rather than in instances when thinking about love. At times, these associations cause him to recall an image of Irene that he later uses in referencing his present time.

The relationship between Freud’s case study and Amis’ narrator is that the case study in “Screen Memories” and the events of Time’s Arrow are told by narrators who did not themselves experience the events they are describing. Both storytellers didn’t experience the events or feelings first hand, and must impose a narrative over the memory when recounting it to a listener.Whether or not the feelings and recollections were told or experienced, there exists in both these pieces a mediator that must impose another narrative onto the one that is being shown to a reader. This is related to Freud’s statement that “there is a phychical significance of an experience and its retention in the memory ” (Freud 230) in that some meaning is ascribed to a memory. Not only is meaning ascribed to memory, but in turn meaning is ascribed to the narrative that unfolds from this memory.

Works Cited

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

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.

Point of View

On a simple level, point of view refers to the perspective from which a story is seen through and told from. It is in one sense something like a location – a vantage point from which the story is observed and presented (Baldick). In another sense, it is something like a painting – a representation of the story influenced by a story teller whether it be “a narrator, a character, or another hypothetical entity” (Niederoff).

In both cases, point of view relates to a narrator or some form of story teller observing something. Indeed, unlike other literary devices that are often concrete in nature (Niederoff), point of view exists as a relationship between the observed and the form the observed takes when it is presented to us, between observation and narration (Klepper, 5).

Various “types” of points of view have been theorized. A very common distinction is made between first-person (those using “I”) and third person narration. First-person narration is usually limited to one character’s knowledge and experiences. These first-person narrators usually have no access to the thoughts of other characters. Third-person narration on the other hand can either follow a character (and be confined to that character’s knowledge and experience) or can be omniscient and have unrestricted knowledge of the story (Baldick). In any case, the point of view from which the story is told from is influenced by a degree of factors, from the “position, personality, and value” of the story teller (Niederhoff) to the society and surroundings of that story teller (Klepper, 12).

In it interesting to note that the concept of point of view began to emerge in the 19^th century and was first theorized by Henry James (Klepper, 9). James recognized that problem of “breadth and infinity” that existed within novels, in that within a novel, the number of relationships was practically infinite (Klepper, 13). By using point of view to create a “centre of interest” (Klepper, 13), the “problems of economy and proportions” (Klepper, 14) could be solved. It is the “centre of interest” created by point of view that both serves as a mode of observation and a normalizer that holds the narrative as a composition together (Klepper, 15).

As examples, take for instance Martin Amis’ novel, Time’s Arrow. In the beginning the narrator says, “I moved forward, out of the blackness…” (Amis, 3) and begins to observe a world that seems to be moving backwards. Throughout the novel, this narrator makes moral judgments about events and characters that influence the way in which he tells his story. Contrary to this approach, Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs.Dalloway, is told in third person and shifts to follow a variety of characters. Readers move from following Rezia and her feelings, “For she could stand it no longer…” (Woolf, 22) to Septimus who thinks “…She [Rezia] was always interrupting.” (Woolf, 24).

 

Works Cited:

Niederhoff, Burkhard. “The Living Handbook of Narratology.” Perspective – Point of View. N.p., 11 June 2011. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.

Baldick, Chris. “Point of View: The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.” Oxford Reference. Oxford, 2008. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.

Klepper, Martin. “Introduction.” Introduction. The Discovery of Point of View: Observation and Narration in the American Novel 1790-1910. Heidelberg: Winter, 2011. 1-40. Print.

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

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York, New York: Harcourt Inc, 1925. Print.