Spiegelman and Woolf

Although most of the texts we’ve discussed have, in one way or another, resisted falling into the neat category of the “traditional novel” in terms of narrative structure, none have done so quite as obviously as Spiegelman’s Maus. Now, it seems redundant to say that—of course, simply by virtue of including images, this piece fundamentally stands out from the rest.  However, when considered in conjunction with Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, I was surprised to notice that, for all the factual and structural similarities between the two stories—nostalgia, war-related trauma, disconnectedness from the present, isolation, loss—the structures of the books themselves force the reader to interact with those stories in incredibly different ways.

That is, no matter how I attempt to place the two narratives in conversation with one another, the glaring formal differences between the two tend to complicate and even overshadow other, possibly deeper, issues.  I don’t mean to say that this provided for a less comprehensive reading of either text; I’m actually struck by the fact that I was much less aware of the structural elements when reading each individual piece (that is, the unique formal structure of each text provides the only governing logic for that unique “world,” so I accept the rules of, say, dialogue boxes and graphic rendering, as standard). With that in mind, I also don’t mean to say that either form presents a more convincing or rewarding mode of storytelling.  Structurally, the two books simply shape the reader’s perception of characters, events, themes, and even emotions so fundamentally differently that, much as I want to place them on the same plane, I have a lot of trouble doing so.

For example, one could grasp upon the fact that both narratives are highly concerned with the notion of preoccupation.  In a sense, Clarissa Dalloway’s near-obsessive attention to the details of the party, coupled with her constant sojourns into memory, loosely parallels narrator-Art’s (rather than author-Art’s) preoccupation with documenting his father’s story in order to serve his own artistic interests.  In both cases, the emphasis lies somewhere other than the present—Clarissa is concerned with her future party and her past with Peter; Art is concerned with his father’s past, and apparently cares very little about the man’s present needs and troubles.

Such a correlation might be loosely constructed, but, in terms of formal influence, it yields a very interesting point: namely, that the structure of these similar narratives deeply affects the ways in which the reader receives them.  For instance, Clarissa’s preoccupation with the past manifests itself in her observations of physical appearances, most notably in terms of aging. She notes, “how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence” (29).  Here, Woolf creates incredibly compelling visual imagery, but does so entirely with language; it is important to note that the reader never sees any of these images beyond the realm of his/her own guided imagination; the narrator suggests the images, but does so with an expressionistic, hazy quality that forces one to engage dynamically and, in a sense, create the story visually oneself.

On the other hand, almost diametrically opposed to Mrs. Dalloway, Maus largely speaks in literal images (literal in the sense that the figures literally appear on the page, not that they appear without opportunity for interpretation).  The same notion—preoccupation with a time other than the present—appears on page 84, but does so in a very different fashion.  The first two boxes indicate to the reader that Vladek feels strongly about the hanging he narrates, and the next two boxes (notably smaller than the hanging “memory” box and almost depicting the same image as each other) jump immediately to Artie’s factual questions, nodding to the reader that the young writer seems to be striving so eagerly for the past that he neglects aspects of the present.  This sentiment furthers itself in the next two boxes, which demonstrate that Artie’s preoccupation actually interrupts his father’s narrative (in the lefthand box, Artie’s hand is outstretched in pause, and in the righthand box, his smoke actually forces his father to stop pedaling, and to stop narrating).

In this sense, the two works narrate a similar idea in very different terms.  That is, counterintuitively, Clarissa Dalloway’s preoccupation—imparted to the reader as a series of thoughts, without any physical in-text images—actually seems to be more inherently visual than Artie’s, with which the reader is provided pictorial moments.  In the textual atmosphere of Mrs. Dalloway, images serve to provide a figurative framework for the story (visual elements create intertextual ties—the green dress visually links to green foliage, to the green sea; even the ever-expanding circles of leaden time occur to the reader as an image), whereas in Maus, where images provide the literal framework for the story, the emphasis lies as much on the visual boxes as it does the energy in the negative space, the dynamic movement between images.  In that sense, the formal differences between the two works renders the act of reading—the very perception of time—fundamentally differently.  Mrs. Dalloway presents, with words, a myriad of visual moments in the frame of one day; Maus presents, with images, a myriad of active moments across the span of years.  Of course, this is not to say that each work only possesses either image or action (which are not themselves mutually exclusive), but I do find it interesting that the form of these two books, as considered without regard to their actual content, shapes the reading experience so fundamentally.

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.

Spiegelman and Ishiguro

At first glance, the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus and Kazuo Ishiguro’s (standard?) novel The Remains of the Day seem to be completely different species of narrative, through their respective tones and other formal characteristics. However, they both raise questions about the construction of a heroic self through memory and the effects of war and history on personal memory.

In his narrated personal history in Maus I, Vladek Spiegelman is a hero of almost epic proportions. He does almost everything right – until the very end of the volume – to keep his family members out of Auschwitz for as long as possible: he learns how to make money on the black market, finds food late at night past curfew, and braves a Gestapo train car to avoid suspicion, to name a few examples. His physical strength is also continually mentioned, as he survives spells of starvation, harsh weather and living conditions, and perhaps most significantly a German P.O.W. camp. Spiegelman’s drawings even portray him as tall and broad-shouldered. Similarly, in The Remains of the Day, Stevens’ portrayal of himself is often heroic. He glosses over the real importance of many events in his tale to end on a triumphant note. For example, the night his father dies, he spends barely any time by his side; instead, he focuses on his practical tasks at hand, which include serving several important guests. Afterwards, for all the night’s “sad associations,” Stevens tells us that he feels a “large sense of triumph” (Ishiguro 110).

The reader is guided along to believe that at least what Vladek has told Art is being faithfully reproduced on the pages of Maus; this is one of the functions of the scenes in which Art holds a tape recorder or those in which he continually mentions how he would like to write down every part of Vladek’s story before he forgets it. But is there any way of knowing how true this story – which is being retold through years and layers of other memories – really is? In Stevens’ case, he leaves blatant clues for the reader as to how unreliable a narrator he is. As we learn the flaws in his ability to grasp any substantial meaning from crucial events, we understand that he is also constructing his memories in a “triumphant” light for the reader any arbitrary way he pleases.

I want to argue that these men create these heroic perceptions of themselves to deal with the horrific memories that war has engrained within them. For Vladek, this horror is spawned by personal experience and hardship, and Stevens’ horror stems from a self-imposed inability to remove himself from the gears that set the war in motion. This heroic perception is a rather malign way to deal with these memories when one thinks about it, and many everyday people did in fact turn into heroes during the unfortunate circumstances of World War II and the Holocaust. Furthermore, it could be argued that the collective experience of those who survived the Nazis (and even some of those who didn’t) have been congealed into a broad heroic status by the forces of collective memory – and for good reason.

One assertion to be made off of all this is that both books are extremely enjoyable to read (especially Maus, whose fast pace and stimulating drawings are downright addicting – but the romance and suspense of Ishiguro’s novel makes it hard to put down as well). We enjoy Vladek’s shrewd heroism and even take pleasure in Stevens’ stoic competence and status as a top butler. However, is there an ethical dilemma underlying these heroic narratives? Does a more enjoyable book do greater justice to the war story, hooking the reader in to experience history in full – or does this type of enjoyment glorify war in some ways?

Spiegelman and Freud

I’ll start off with a bang. Maus is a screen memory. This idea might be an extrapolation of an intricate concept, but let’s just go with this possibly flimsy application of Freud’s theory to Spiegelman’s work. When you’re trying to draw a line of comparison between “a novel, a documentary, a memoir and a comic book (Jules Feiffer, the praise on the back cover of Maus) and a theoretical paper you have to start somewhere.

Freud’s definition of this kind of memory process

After the session on Freud, I believe the class has reached a consensus of his definition of screen memories but I’ll review the relevant material. Or rather, I’ll let Freud speak for himself. Freud defines a screen memory as a, “[produced]…memory…which has been to some degree associatively displaced from the former one,” (Freud 234). “These [memories], strangely enough, [are] not concerned with the future but [seek] to improve the past,” (Freud 240). “A recollection of this kind, whose value lies in the fact that it represents the memory impressions and thoughts of a later date whose subject-matter is connected with its own by symbolic or similar links, may appropriately be called a “screen memory” (Freud 243).” To sum it up, Freud describes the process of screen memories as removing the objectionable element from the traumatic experience by, first, expressing it figuratively and, then, molding it into a shape capable of visual representation (Freud 244). The different meanings of the “screen” The word “screen” in screen memories can be understood in a number of ways. Here are two: 1) Freud’s usage of the word “screen” can be thought of as “a fixed or movable upright partition used to divide a room..,to provide concealment or privacy,” (how do you cite the Mac dictionary application? Anyway, Freud’s understanding can be found at the bottom of page 247 when he says “the screen and the thing screened-off.”). 2) Professor Thakkar provided another material representation of this memory process in class when she proposed that the “screen” can be thought of as, “the surface…on which images and data are projected or displayed,” (again, thank you, Mac dictionary app).

Spiegelman’s treatment of memory

As the quote by Feiffer reveals, Maus struggles to be defined. A comic book? A graphic novel? How could one neatly classify a long-form representation of collective, generational and individual memory? Here’s another question, a jump backward to work our way to the beginning of it all, that is why Maus is the way that it is. How does one represent these kinds of memory when they are of the Holocaust, an event (even using the word “event” seems to be ill-fitting diminution) that cannot be portrayed due to accuracy and the ethics of aesthetic representation of such an unimaginable trauma? But I’m getting ahead of myself, before one can think about the appropriate way to represent the Holocaust, let’s consider this: How does one approach these memories? Work through them? Process them? Now, how about if these traumatic memories are not one’s own? How does one process these memories if they are initially experienced by a first-generation and then transmitted so powerfully to a second that the ownership is now shared? If they are internalized so deeply but somehow, simultaneously, unknown to these new possessors? I’ve worked my way back to one of the intentions of the book (you could say coming to terms with his relationship with his father and his mother as one, resolving personal, mental afflictions as another, and I’m sure there are many others). In Maus, Spiegelman is answering all of the above questions for both the individual and the larger community through a documentation of memories from one of many. Who are the individuals? The larger community? The one of many?

The one (or rather the couple) of many: The story of Maus is the collection of memories from Spiegelman’s father, Vladek. Also, while not mentioned explicitly in the story, he seems to be relying on memories from this mother, Anja, collected and acquired throughout his life to guide his research. Which leads to…

The individual:

Art, lovingly known as Artie by Vladek, is the individual in the story that is coming to terms with but he is just one of many like him, of bearers of secondhand Holocaust memories.

Which leads to…

A larger group of individuals, the second-generation of the Holocaust survivors and perpetrators that seem to be working through these memories that aren’t theirs.

Which leads to…

The global community:

Zoom out from the memory of those involved and the associative memory of their descendants, from the Jewish community, of the German and the Polish and on and on and on to larger group. If I can boldly assert, this moment in history is not exclusively theirs. Due to the acts of memorializing and studying of the Holocaust on the global scale, there is a larger collective memory. And now back to one of my original questions. How do we (the individual, the smaller and global communities) reflect on such a personal and unimaginable event?

Maus is a screen memory

Well, not quite. It’s not to be understood in a strict sense of Freud’s theory, in that Maus is an objectionable memory experienced in childhood that becomes suppressed psychical material, replaced with a pleasant symbol. But his theory is an interesting way to begin thinking about the above question. If one takes the basics of Freud’s screen memory theory, that a way that one works through traumatic memories is by visually representing them in an aesthetic, trivial and pleasing way and then combines this with Professor Thakkar’s idea that memory can be thought of visually and projected on a screen, we can think about not only how the genre and form of Maus allows for a representation of both traumatic individual and shared memory but, also, how Maus is a way for Spiegelman, the communities of the children of the survivors and perpetrators and the global to perform a similar process as the 38 year-old man in Freud’s case study. Maus is way for these groups of people to approach and process a traumatic event, that as I say above, alludes such work by sheer scale of size and atrocity. Instead of attempting to reveal the Holocaust in all of its clarity, Maus creates an “artificiality [which] makes it possible to image the reality beneath,” (the praise from Newsweek on the back). It is a compression of a lived experience into a two-dimensional rendering. Or rather, the genre of the comic book/graphic novel is a screen on which the figurative and visual memories, the form of anthropomorphic symbolism (Poles are pigs, Germans are cat, Jews are mice, or “die Maus” or from the German verb, “mauscheln” which means to speak Yiddish, or the more derogatory connotation, “to speak like a Jew.” That fact isn’t relevant to this comparison of Spiegelman and Freud; I just wanted to throw out some cool German knowledge.)is projected.

Sorry about the length…in my attempt to be thorough I got carried away…I still didn’t quite get to where I wanted but we’re at almost 1200 words…ask me to elaborate!

-Stephanie Koch

Spiegelman and White

The most obvious difference in Spiegelman’s representation of memory from other authors we have read is his use of images. Although he still relies on words and written narrative to tell his father’s story, he also uses pictures to convey memories that do not take the narrative form. For example, he draws his father’s family sitting around a dining room table, and while they talk about how hard times have become, he draws his father’s son dumping his food onto the table (Spiegelman 75). The conclusion is, therefore, that although the family is not getting the same amount that they are used to, they are not yet starving. Later, he draws a sign that says “For Every Unregistered Jew You Find: 1 Kilo of Sugar” in a panel about the Jews’ relocation to a ghetto (82), using words to portray the Holocaust without incorporating them into his narrative.

These portions seem to contradict Hayden White’s claim that people feel the need “to give to events an aspect of narrativity” (8), to take true events and tell about them. Indeed, Spiegelman says that he wants to “draw” a book about his father (12), taking his father’s story out of the realm of traditional narrativity. But although Spiegelman portrays parts of the story with pictures instead of words, they still contain the aspects of narrativity White found important for a historical narrative: a moralizing purpose (White 18) and an authority conflict (White 17).

White says that the moralizing purpose in a historical narrative comes from the narrator’s decisions about what to include and what to leave out (14), where to begin and where to end (24). Spiegelman says that he wants to make the Holocaust story personal (23), and to do so he includes anecdotes about his father’s life that were separate from his experiences with the Holocaust. His father argues that such a telling is disrespectful to the event (23), that his story should demonstrate the horrors imposed upon his race and not focus on him personally. But in focusing on his father, Spiegelman manages to draw a story about how the Holocaust affected survivors (hoarding (116), suicide (100)), not just a story about the gas chambers. And he chooses to end the story with the revelation that Spiegelman’s father has burned his mother’s diaries (159), making Maus just as much about the necessity of telling stories from a family’s past as it is about the Holocaust.

White also claims that a historical narrative must concern events which contradict the current social order (17), and the SS certainly threatened the values which Spiegelman, living in America decades after World War II, takes for granted. Hitler’s social system, had it succeeded, would have rendered Maus impossible. Thus Spiegelman’s father’s story takes on a broader meaning: it is both a personal and a historical narrative, letting one man’s story portray broader historical events.

Spiegelman, therefore, succeeds in narrating his father’s story in an unconventional medium: drawing. He portrays simultaneously his father’s personal story and the Holocaust story, personalizing a historical event to show the importance of maintaining these stories and passing them down from generation to generation.

Spiegelman and White

Maus has two sub-titles: a survivor’s tale and my father bleeds history. Each creates a distinct sense of the story to come. The first, reads like a typical novel, a chronologic telling of a story, linear and neat; the second is visceral and visual and inspires a sense of flow, of feeling, of pain both old and new. In Maus we follow the story of Vladek, as narrated to his son, Artie—but we also get glimpses of their lives outside of the recollections. Everything is set in a strange dual context, where we are reading a memory of hearing memories. Hayden White raises the question of what narrativizing history (and memory) means, and his discussions of real and true stories within historical discourses apply quite neatly to Spiegelman’s Maus. White poses the question of why when “real events are properly represented [with] the formal coherency of a story” we are so satisfied. (9) He suggests it lies in human nature: that narrativizing the world is so inherently human that we must do it because it is the only way we know how to remember and discuss our world. In this way, Maus is a prime example. Vladek tells his tale as he remembers it, and often strays into side notes about the people he brings up. Artie serves as the director, and frequently guides his father back on track, back to chronological time—“Please, dad, if you don’t keep your story chronological, I’ll never get it straight…” to which his father answers, “So?”(82) And really, what does it matter if the story maintains linearity? White notes that to be properly received in narrative form, “events must be not only registered within the chronological framework of their original occurrence but…revealed as possessing a structure, an order of meaning, which they do not possess as mere sequence.” (10) Somehow by taking memory down and giving it a form, we impart meaning. In Maus, Spiegelman manages to capture the horrors of being a Jew in 1940’s Europe, the tensions between father and son, husband and wife, and the difficulties that come with growing old with the burden of memory. By taking his father’s story and framing it between segments of ‘real’ time, Spiegelman imports a chronology and sense of flow to it that a list of events, as White would argue, would not have. This structure gives Spiegelman the opportunity to make us aware of the present just as much as the past, and of the changes that occur in the relationship between him and his father as time moves forward both in the story Vladek recollects and in the time that Artie hears it in. Rather than jolting us in and out of time, Spiegelman’s art mixes the past and the present just as the story itself does; while Vladek narrates, we have an image of him as an old man on the bike. We have interspersed through the memories images of Artie listening, of Vladek’s emotions upon recollection. This creates a steady stream of a tale—the tale of a survivor, and also gives us the poignancy of a man bleeding history.

Shammas and Ishiguro

In an interesting passage of Shammas’ Arabesques (and one of the many narratives within the larger narrative), the narrator describes the eccentric village priest, Father Sim’an, and his relationship to a ribbon bookmark. Father Sim’an steals a “scarlet ribbon” in a “moment of weakness” from a Church missal (Shammas 67). He knows that he was wrong for stealing it, but he has a reason for keeping it: it will aid him in some way in his writing project, which will chronicle the “history of the Catholic Church in the Holy Land” (Shammas 67). This episode raises issues of morality, religion and also the significance of the small and mundane object – stealing the insignificant ribbon keeps the priest up at night and propels this small narrative. However, the more relevant questions that the scene raises deal with writing’s role in preserving or releasing memory.

The process of writing itself seems to diffuse the memory of the ribbon. Some time after completing his project, the priest completely forgets about the ribbon and his promise to return it: “in time the origin of the ribbon slipped away from his conscience” (Shammas 68). Right away, the reader is alerted to the circumstances of the first part of Shammas’ own project, which is fundamentally an excavation of his memories. Is he signaling to us that the act of writing can in some ways be detrimental to the writer’s memory?

On the day that Shammas’ aunt Najeebeh goes to consult Father Sim’an for help in curing Grandmother Alia’s mysterious ailment, the priest’s cat knocks his book manuscript into a pot of oil. When Sim’an takes the manuscript out of the oil, he sees that his writing in ink “had returned to its liquid state” (Shammas 68). He sees the ribbon and remembers its context as he pulls it out, but it is significant that he has been able to see it the whole time: it was always “peeping and spiraling out” of the notebook on its shelf. It is only this “return” or release of the writing from its literal pages that in symbolic fashion sparks Sim’an to remember his original deed and return the ribbon (Shammas 68). The writing is freed from the permanence of the page and somehow a memory, which Sim’an was potentially trying to forget (or one that he was actively not devoting mental space to) over time, returns to his conscience.

We have talked briefly in class about the act of writing as a tool for preserving and dealing with memory, and Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is certainly in conversation with this idea. However, how can Ishiguro’s book be seen through the lens of the above passages from Arabesques? Stevens deals with memory in a similar way to Father Sim’an. We have touched on Stevens’ tendency to spin his recollections into moments of triumph and dignity. However, instead of simply of dealing with or spinning these memories into something they clearly are not, Stevens writes them down to rid himself of them, to transfer them from his mind to the page. Of course, there is no direct evidence that the book is Stevens’ written diary or journal, or even a series of letters (despite the fact that he intermittently addresses an unknown “you”), but the novel clearly hints that Stevens is attempting to cleanse himself of his impure memories. Why else would he bring up memories that so blatantly incriminate him, such as his moments of callousness towards Miss Kenton or his ignorance of Lord Darlington’s anti-Semitism? Is he that blind to how the average person will judge these episodes, or is his act of writing them an attempt to find closure with them? In this way, Ishiguro and Shammas both comment on the act of writing and its unclear motivations and interactions with memory.

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.

Shammas and Ishiguro

Memory, as constructed in both Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day and Shammas’s Arabesques, presents a logic of polarities.  That is, both narratives occur in moments of dramatic historical change that establish glaring tensions between the “old ways” and their new, altered counterparts; however, neither work presents a linear account of a single shift, or, for that matter, clear notions of what such shifts actually entail.  Rather, against the hazy backdrops of these large-scale cultural, social, and political changes (in Stevens’s case, the loosely-referenced dissolution of the British Empire, and in Shammas’s various narrators’ cases, the highly personal and highly persistent “homelessness” and loss experienced in the wake of ongoing religious and political conflict), more polarities arise.  Both works explore the tension between ownership and dispossesion, between the “private self” and “public self” (though these two are often conflated), between present reality and recollected or imagined past.  Similarly, in the midst of these fluid shifts, both texts follow the narrators’ thoughts as they flicker between real-time observations and memories.

However, though the idea of polarity manifests itself in similar ways in both novels, the extent to which it does so in each reveals radical differences between the two.  Stylistically, though both works jump from one time to another relatively fluidly, Stevens clearly demarcates between past and present.  He repeatedly notes “I remember,” “I recall,” to suggest a distinction between his memories of Darlington Hall and those taking place while he writes from the English countryside (he is both geographically and temporally distanced from his memories). Even the structure of Ishiguro’s book–a day-by-day delineation–alerts the reader to the fact that the narrator clearly acknowledges a break between past and present, though he often draws from one to make sense of the other.

Arabesques, on the other hand, sweeps the reader into a nebulous, ever-shifting system of interconnected units that flow into one another seamlessly (much like the musical or artistic nature of “arabesque” itself, which presents a complex moment of flourishes and intertwining lines that form a coherent, if somewhat chaotic, network).  That is, Shammas’s narrators seem to approach time as a system of altered repetition rather than straightforward polarity: the recurring images of twins, mirrors, reflective pools, and shared names, all seem to suggest a folding of memory (of time itself, even) that yields recurrent, almost seasonal experiences between generations (it is no mistake that the human characters in the various stories are often compared with crops and seasonal weather). However, no reiteration is exactly the same.  Take, for example, the image of Amira and the narrator sitting on the wooden bench (which itself recalls the wooden heirlooms passed down throughout the story) at one of the Engles red-clad receptions in Iowa City.  The same event–a sudden flood of light (again, “folding” onto to the image of fireflies, the flashes of light surrounding the djinnis (186), the sudden bursts of visible female flesh (175, 247, etc.)) disrupts the narrator’s conversation with Amira, and the two look up to see Bar-On wagging his finger (148).  However, the next time it happens, they look up to see Paco, “his face behind a mask,” performing the same gesture (174).  The image, folded and altered, is both a reproduction and an “inverted twin” (150); it serves to emphasize the polarity between past and present, between light and dark, between face and mask, but also to problematize it.

This fundamental difference in the structure of polarities in the two novels–namely, that polarity plays a much more malleable and complicated role in Arabesques than it does in Remains of the Day, simply by virtue of the fact that time itself appears more fluidly–is further emphasized by the question of agency.  That is, even though Stevens spends much of his time shuttling between his present narration and his past recollections, the fact that he segments them gives him a certain sense of volition in the narrative. Though in reality he exerts little agency in his own life, as a character and a narrator, he is nearly obsessed with controlling his emotions, his external persona, and the other members of the staff at Darlington Hall; as a result, he presents an incredibly controlled narrative.  He explains his theories, he jumps backwards in time to prove a point, and he makes logical conclusions between his memories.  However, because Arabesques shifts from one viewpoint to the next, sometimes within Parts, sometimes within chapters, sometimes even within the moments themselves, the narrative seems less controlled.  That is certainly not to say that Anton Shammas doesn’t have control over his language; in fact, the incredibly complex network of metaphors, repeated phrases, and morphed images speaks to a highly skilled hand. But, throughout the novel, the language of helplessness permeates many of the stories. For example, the narrator describes his aunt beating her donkey “. . . with blows of stifled sobbing because of the Arabs and the Jews and the rebels and the soldiers and the wars and the refugees and pitiless Fate and poverty and her bellyfull of it all, and especially because she wanted to stop beating him and she couldn’t” (130).

Whereas polarity gives Stevens something to cling to as a narrator, much as he clings to the glorious past in the face of the impending present, the muddled polarities and folds in Arabesques serve to derail the narrators’ senses of free will within the novel, much as they have been derailed–geographically, culturally, and ideologically–by historical circumstance.

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.