Butler and Shammas

What Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Anton Shammas’ Arabesques share is a looping kind of disregard for time and space within the encompassed field of their narratives. Even disregarding the impossibilities of different forms of time travel introduced in both novels and the very different settings of time and place and attitude, there is a very similar continual expansion and contraction of narrative scope and movement that occurs in both novels that produces varying effects. In Kindred, the force with which Dana is first yanked into Rufus’ 1800s Southern plantation is extremely dizzying and abrupt, to the effect to where not only is the reader, along with Dana, caught completely unaware, but that the abrupt change in language on the page itself also triggers this strange nausea. The “pale, almost colorless eyes” of Kevin and the  concerns of “nonfiction” and “bookcase” ordering were neatly grounding in a sort of domestic, interior way (Butler 13). In the next instant, in a space of only several intervening words, the scene becomes one of not only the “outdoors,” but the specificity of the “green” “ground beneath trees” (Butler 13). Though the prologue and foreshadowing of “trouble” and “the day I met Kevin” would seem to wish to indicate a forthcoming shift in scene, the violence of the ensuing temporal rift moves beyond expectation (Butler 12). The agency of the prologue as a type of beginning-at-the-end type of hook into the story works in a similar manner as memory is commonly expected to, mirroring our natural, collective patterns of understanding one anothers’ experiences through cause and effect. This way of drawing the reader into the story almost seems natural enough to avoid causing alarm, but the utter incongruity between the memory’s trigger and the contents of the memory itself parallel the disorienting rift that Dana herself experiences.

In contrast, although Shammas’ first shift from Part One: The Tale to Part Two: The Teller: Père Lachaise is also greatly divergent in content, style, and temporal reality, it does not express the same level of surprise at itself. The “red candies of memory” (Shammas 73) and her “red hair” (Shammas 77) may seem almost too easy of a connection to make, but it is precisely these small comforts of familiarity and easily traceable leaps of thinking which ease the weight of memory’s unknowable connections. The shift comes more naturally for Shammas than Butler this first time and in subsequent shifts, partially with the aid of the gradually easing quality of the third person. With this slight remove, it is no longer the reader’s responsibility to make sense of the dizzying move- for if the narrative itself pays no particular heed and finds nothing alarming in its sudden shift, then the situation must be contained and safe.

Through the different but similarly vast playing fields of both novels, one from 1970s California to 1800s pre-Civil War Maryland and the other from a 150 year long Israeli history to the modern day cornfields of Iowa, it would seem that Kindred and Arabesques would produce similar expectations to memory, their effects in contrast produce a richer if not understanding, then acknowledgement, of the power of memory. Whereas Dana fears and is physically and emotionally tormented by the literal pull back into the memories of her literal but unlived past, Shammas’ tale and characters seem to be greatly enriched and benefited by all the forgiving slowness and range of time. Whereas Dana’s memories seem to be chasing and closing in on her not only through the intense race relation tensions produced by her fall into history but through her inability to control her temporality except through grievous harm, Shammas’ woven memories show memory in the slow light of introspection and weaving. It seems that agency may be comprehended in the way connections are formed between moments of memory; when the events of the present day cease to interfere (creating new memories even as the old are being reviewed), memory can finally take center stage at its own pace. It is interesting to see how both novels play with the differing speeds and the ensuing pushing and pulling at which memory and real life seem to wish to occur.  

Spiegelman and Woolf

Viewed through the extremely divergent but eerily similar lenses of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the act of memory seems to act as a tool of great resilience and flexibility while also serving as an unmovable barrier, or anchor. It would at first seem logical to point to form as the node of divergence between the two works; that the formal modes of storytelling- a hand-drawn, graphic novel held up against a novel of pure sentences and paragraphs- would naturally, in their different expectations and constraints of construction, create different rules for the allowances and tensions of memory to navigate. But to see form as the basis for memory’s strange workings is to ignore the power of memory as a strong, conducting force behind not only the direction of story-telling but the agency of pushing and preventing certain conclusions.

Within Maus, Vladek’s history and Spiegelman’s process of recreating Vladek’s history seem to intertwine seamlessly from past to present, but often one or the other story will interrupt the process of the other with a sudden jarring leap back into another era and moment. In the very midst of the action and at the moment of confrontation as a POW by a threatening German cat, the present wends its way delicately past even the most vivid of memories. The past is never allowed to completely consume the tale, as on page 51, when Vladek, as a quick aside, notes that “Like you, Artie, my hand were always very delicate” and the image shifts to the suddenly cozy picture of story-telling (51). Vladek does not recall these memories as an self-initiated exercise, but is prompted specifically by Spiegelman’s purposeful visits (“to get more information about his past”) (43). The intertwining of past and present is one purposefully forged by Spiegelman, yet neither he nor his father has direct control of how the past will manage to also affect the present. In these visits, the directive power of memory is made clear; the sharing of a memory’s simultaneous promise of understanding and almost reliving another’s life with the impossibility of ever reaching such a complete understanding drive not only Spiegelman’s visits, but the frustrations, successes and pleasantness of his interactions with his father’s current life.

But while Spiegelman’s journey down memory lane with his father yields a new, shared memory for both father and son (one of telling and one of listening), Clarissa and Peter and all the rest in Mrs. Dalloway seem increasingly isolated by the paths of their memories. In the differences in the way things are remembered, or the different moments in the day that same event is recalled, a greater sense of interiority is created as each character, as a result of sinking further into memory, sinks away from the world.  The selfishness of memory is its ability to drag anyone at any moment away from the very real present and back into the unchangeable past. The hold of the past on the present directs the way Clarissa hears the strokes of Big Ben, the way she reacts to Peter’s reappearance after many years,the way she talks to guests at her dinner party, and its relentless grip on life never allows a moment of peace. There is always a connecting thread between memories and people, and in this way, isolation becomes a curiously sad but sought after method of escape from memory.

The recurring theme in both these books seems to be the struggle against or the acceptance of the pull of memory. Memory seems selfish only in its power, but its power to draw one out of a the very here and now and into an infinitely more ambiguous time and place is both deeply astonishing and revelatory.

Willa Zhang

Freud and Ishiguro

In Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Stevens the butler is a seemingly staid and upright character with a highly enigmatic deployment of memory. His recollections of the past and indulgences in future speculation through the past seem to heed no one upholding principle, nor do many of them seem very significant in the totality of their action. Yet viewed through the lens of Freud’s idea of screen memories, the strange attention to seemingly trivial peculiarities of Stevens’ memories seems to support  what can only be called the dastardly nature of memory- to appear to clarify and present itself as a capsule of a true moment while allowing it’s currency of honesty to fool the rememberer into forgetting important skepticism.

Freud uses the term “manufacture” to describe the process of memory making, arguing for a certain inorganic (or perhaps exceptionally organic) process that occurs between the occurrence of an event and the later recall of it; it is clear that these two moments are mutually unintelligible (Freud 242). That is, there is no such thing as a memory true to the event, but that perhaps these “works of fiction” are essentially and necessarily what sustain our ideas of self (Freud 242). It is interesting that Freud uses the word “screen” (Freud 243) to describe these memories, as the enigmatical character of the word certainly describes both the shielding and decision making process of memory making. To be thrown into the minute world of Stevens and the painful clarity of his hallway memories is to pinpoint in vain the exact formulation (in the sense of creation and content) of the memory- is he, at the time of the event, completely unaware of the nature of his feelings, or just the later significance of the moment as a missed turning point? The brevity of the moment in contrast to how “vividly” it is recalled already suggests a process of manufacture which has elevated this moment above the plane of ordinary connections, but perhaps this is one more manipulation of screening- to make obvious the significance of the event without letting on to the contents of it’s meaning (Ishiguro 212).

That both memory making and memory viewing are processes of going backwards seems significant too. There is this great distance in all respects of memory that is only truly measured as a great yawning divide when released from the mind of the recaller and given up to the interpretations of another- the Henris’ subject to Freud, Stevens to the reader. Discussed in this manner, dissociated from all the intricacies of the mind that produced it, the memory seems quite clear in the emotion it attempted to capture, but this singular distillation is the closest memory can bring the introspective back to the moment of creation. Stevens’ incomplete grasp of the momentousness of his moment rooted to the spot outside the door still manages to convey the sense of utter loss, noticing a fleeting, powerful moment even as it comes and goes without being grasped, yet the meaning of memory cannot be truthfully deduced in this way. Perhaps this is the kindness of the screen memory when the intensity of life and its millions of rebounding repercussions cannot and should not be reproduced and relived except hidden in the details of the “inessential elements” (234). The threads of self-constructed narrative are too intertwined amongst each other and our minds to do more than notice the passing of the screen memory as it wanders through the hallways of our consciousness.

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.

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

Willa Zhang

Metafiction

Metafiction is “literally fiction about fiction” (Neumann and Nünning). This is fiction that has an inherently self-conscious attitude in its construction and acknowledgment of itself as a piece of fiction; by drawing attention to its status as an “artifact,” the work raises “questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (Waugh 2). Metafiction takes as its subject the very process of creating fiction, which explores “a theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction” (Waugh 2). The reader, in this way very much aware of the story’s fictional status, reaches a greater level of engagement through a heightened sense of awareness of the existence of a relationship between reader and story. In this way, the dialogic possibilities of the metafiction create complex possibilities for exploring the “possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text” (Waugh 2).

The term was first coined by William H. Gass in his 1970 essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction” to address the rising need for a term to address the “emerging genre of experimental texts that openly broke with the tradition of literary realism” (Engler). Though there are suggestions of the presence of metafiction in ancient works such as The Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, metafiction has most prominently come to feature in literary works of the past 20 years and is closely associated with modernist and postmodernist novels.

In Italo Calvino’s novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler, the reader finds him or herself immediately inserted into the story as a character. “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade” (Calvino 1). The first line of the book narrates the very process that the reader undertakes to read those first few lines, resulting in an increasingly self-aware text that questions not only it’s own existence, but the reader’s experience of existence.

In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut both comments on the creation of his own writing and inserts himself into the course of the story itself:

“I met his nice wife, Mary, to whom I dedicate this book” (Vonnegut 5)

“’Mary,’ I said, ‘I don’t think this book is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away’” (Vonnegut 6)

“That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book” (Vonnegut 160)

Some other examples of metafictive devices include: characters writing novels, a novel within the novel, commenting on the story while telling it (perhaps in footnotes), and a character’s realization that they are creations of the novel.

 

 

Works Cited

Bernd, Engler. “Literary Encyclopedia.” Literary Encyclopedia. N.p., 17 Dec. 2004. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.

Calvino, Italo, and William Weaver. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. Print.

Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning. “Metanarration and Metafiction.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology, University of Hamburg, 3 Dec. 2012. Web. 21 Oct. 2013.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. [New York]: Delacorte, 1969. Print.

Waugh, Patricia. “What Is Metafiction and Why Are They Saying Such Awful Things about It?” Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Methuen, 1984. Print.