Art in Memory, Memory in Art (Vol 1, No 2/2009)

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ARS AETERNA

Art in Memory Memory in Art

Vol.1, No.2 / 2009

Constantine the Philosopher University Faculty of Arts

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Názov/TitleARS AETERNA - Art in Memory, Memory in Art

Vydavateľ/PublisherUniverzita Konštantína Filozofa v NitreFilozofická fakultaŠtefánikova 67, 949 74 Nitratel. + 421 37 77 54 209fax. + 421 37 77 54 261email [email protected]

Adresa redakcie/Office AddressFilozofická fakulta Univerzity Konštantína Filozofa v NitreDekanát FF UKFŠtefánikova 67, 949 74 NitraTel.: +421 37 7754 201Fax: +421 37 6512 570E-mail: [email protected]

Šéfredaktor/Editor in ChiefMgr. Alena Smiešková, PhD. Redakčná rada/Board of ReviewersProf. Bernd Herzogenrath (Germany)Doc. PhDr. Michal Peprník, PhD. (Czech Republic)Doc. PhDr. Anton Pokrivčák, PhD. (Slovak Republic)Mgr. Petr Kopal, PhD. (Czech Republic)

Redakčná úpravaIng. Matúš Šiška,Mrg. Simona Hevešiová, PhD.

Jazyková úprava /ProofreadingKehan DeSousa

Názov a sídlo tlačiarne/Printing HouseŠEVT, a.s. Bratislava

Náklad/Copies200

Počet strán/Pages

ISSN: 1337-9291

(c) 2009Univerzita Konštantína Filozofa v Nitre

This publication is the result of the project KEGA 3/6468/08 Teaching intercultural awareness through literature and cultural studies.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

A word from the editorAlena Smiešková

Interview with Manana AntadzeMária Kiššová

Fictional Memory and the Narrating Mind in J. Coe’s Novel The House of SleepMarina Ragachewskaya

Remembering the Other: creating national mythology in A Passage to India by Edward ForsterAnna Bysiecka-Maciaszek

The Attempt Was All – the theme of memory in Ian McEwan’s AtonementPetr Chalupský

Struggling to Remember, Remembering to Struggle: Three Novels by Contemporary Scottish Women AuthorsMonika Szuba

‘You Tell Your Secrets and I’ll tell Mine’: the Gold Dust of MemoriesLudmilla Miteva

Twisted Images of Cultural Memory: Paula Rego’s Visual NarrativeAgnieszka Gołda-Derejczyk

Agnieszka Gołda-DerejczykNoémi M. Najbauer

Folk Tales and Memorial Narratives as Viable Artifacts of Collective MemoryKatarína Školníková

Bringing back the memory: Representations of Wrocław, Lwów, and Szczecin in contemporary Polish culture as examples of reconstruct-ing cultural memoryAgata Strządała

Reviews

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Alena Smiešková

In the contemporary world the words die easily. They are misunderstood, and then they are reinscribed by others with a greater force. Sometimes they are nev-er uttered and then they die even before they are born. They are misused and then their power disappears next time when they are used. They will forever stand between us and the world and yet we would not know how to speak about and know the world without them.

The task of academics is to employ the words to describe what they have observed about the world. We are launching a new academic journal. As such it is going to be filled with words whose ambition is to survive, to endure in the contemporary battle of words, in the world dominated by images that can silence the words easily.

The name of the journal speaks in multiple ways. Its Latin opens up in an interpretation full of oxymorons. On the one hand, as a dead language, which no one in the world speaks anymore, on the other hand as the language that still surfaces in a number of disciplines and is traditionally associated with scholar-ship and science. The word ars delin-eates the scope of the journal. It is our aim to discuss the questions of art, the way it forms and deforms our experi-ence, our perception of the world, our position in the world. Art here is under-stood in a broader and more traditional sense as a skill, stratagem, craft or sci-ence and therefore allows for the fusion

of discussions from various scholarly disciplines. The journal is open to con-tributions of scholars across various disciplines; we would like to establish a platform where the linguists could in-teract with historians, literary scholars with art historians, philosophers with mathematicians. There would not be art without creativity and that is also the quality we assume that each individual paper will strive for -- to become intel-lectually stimulating and illuminating.

The word aeterna has been always linked to Art. The works of art not only transgress any time – subjective, sea-sonal, or mechanical. They have the ability to dislocate their viewers and percipients from a time flow and in that touch the eternity. Therefore discus-sions, analyses, and interpretations of works of art and other cultural products generate a discourse where the world is dealt with as an eternal idea, which comes to existence in myriad forms through the culture, people, and politics or education.

The topic for our first issue is signifi-cant. Living and working in the world at the beginning of the third millennium we face the challenges of globalization, IT technologies, the impact of visual culture, new political and economic or-ganization of Europe and the world. On the one hand, we can occupy the space that is easily interconnected, that has shrunk, we trespass the barriers tradi-tionally insurmountable. Are we able

A word from the editor

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to face these challenges? What can we learn about ourselves and our home place living amongst all networks, diver-sity and difference? Do we see the world differently as teachers, pedagogues, art-ists, historians and philosophers? Do we remain bound to our essential hu-manity or do we adopt multiple selves? Dehumanized, cyborg-like, alienated? How much of a change and rupture can we acknowledge?

The word shibboleth, which entered English through Hebrew and the Bible, is used today to distinguish the members of a particular group from the outsid-ers. Bolivian artist Doris Salcedo used the term to name her installation in the Tate Modern in London in 2007/8. The exposition was staged in the Turbine Hall, monumental entrance of the gal-lery, which as it is widely known, used to be a power plant built after WWII. As many other expositions presented there within the free admission Unilever Se-ries, this also was not a traditional ex-position. The installation touched the very foundations of the building in a long oblique crack that revealed the texture underneath. The concept of the exhibition incorporated the past and the present of London, England and the world. The past, which on the one hand was evolving, developing and opened to progress, for all these qualities the building of the power plant stands for, but which was also colonial, marginal-izing and unfair. It spoke about the past, which many times remains hidden and unrevealed, and comes to light only un-der dramatic circumstances. The past which made the present world so di-verse and multiculturally intertwined.

It also reflected on the present when we do respect diversity not “in spite of the difference“ but we learn to respect the “difference.“

This is the thin red line, which we can find in the current issue of Ars Aeterna. All contributions, though written by specialists from various disciplines, explore the questions of contemporary cross culture identities. Whether they deal with the present cultural products or phenomena or they refer to the past, the authors investigate what cracks re-main in the mind, in the self marked by the colonial power and thought. Their articles discuss the examples of art, sociology, history or pedagogy where the colonial thinking is defied by the moments of hybridity when the world without frontiers, personal inhibitions and boundaries may rise to exist.

The border line between the North and the South of the USA is linked to the most painful chapter of American history. As Jozef Pecina from The Uni-versity of SS. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava in Slovakia points out in his ar-ticle: “When in 1761 two English sur-veyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, marked out the border between the colonies of Virginia, Delaware and Maryland, they could not suspect that their line will some time later divide the so-called free and slave states of the USA”. The South, the territory of the USA loaded with memories, unaccomplished dreams, and the lost cause battle comes to a new view in his article. He discusses the fascination with the Southern cul-ture and history through the examples of American popular culture: the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1952), the film Birth

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of a Nation (1915) and the novel and consequently film Gone with the Wind (1936, 1939). Pecina discloses to what extent these cultural artifacts shaped the understanding of American South and formed the romanticizing view of Southern mythology. His interpreta-tions analyze stereotyped and even rac-ist representations of the South and its population, he, however, also discusses the role popular culture played in the support of the abolitionist movement. As he quotes Cullen in his article Abra-ham Lincoln acknowledged the signifi-cance of the popular novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin written by Harriet Beecher Stowe with these words: “So this is the little lady who made this great war” (1995, p. 14) For Beecher Stowe the recognition of her work together with social and political consequences came almost im-mediately. But sometimes it takes lon-ger, much longer to canonize works of art.

The story of Mary Austin, whose portrait Peter Kopecky from Opava Uni-versity in the Czech Republic delineates in his article, is a story of an exclusion from the cannon. Her works speak from the past, but her views are very topical. In spite of that, the journey her literary works took to achieve recognition last-ed almost 60 years. Her literary voice advocates the unity between the sub-ject and object, human and nonhuman. Using the impersonal narration she erased the borderline between the ob-server and the observed. She represents an isolated voice that in early 20th cen-tury was more suggestive than the lan-guage of political banners in the eight-ies or nineties. She saw the possibilities

for the imaginable evolution or revolu-tion in the cultural syncretism of ethnic groups living in the area of Southwest. The cultural coexistence of Hispanics and Native Americans, the social orga-nization of their pueblos was for her the world beyond the boundaries of law, restrictions and inhibitions, which the dominant white culture spread around. The colonial power and the law did not touch these territories completely and she saw in them the hope for the prospect development. Her fruitful and imaginative ideas were, however, left for a very long time aside. She did not fit the literary canon and expectations of her times. Not only that she was a woman, a writer, but also because her works transgressed the limitations of literary studies. As Petr Kopecky in his conclusion asserts: “Only today, thanks to the growth of interdisciplinary stud-ies, can we fully appreciate the deep in-sights based on her erudition in a host of fields of knowledge.”

Marzena Kubisz from Poland and Ti-tus Pop from Romania discuss contem-porary literature in their articles. The examples they present, writers Marsha Mehran and Salman Rushdie are well-known and recognized representatives of what can be called today postcolo-nial writing in Great Britain. As we have suggested above, postwar Great Britain went through dramatic changes. The colonial empire has become a multicul-tural country whose present is a mosaic of ethnic varieties. The situation inevi-tably affects the lifestyle, politics, social habits and manners. The supposed tra-dition and fixity one associates Great Britain with crumbles and gives way to

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fluidity, changeability and new sensory perceptions.

Marzena Kubisz in her article writes about the cross-cultural encounters and mobilities as we can find them described in the debut of Teheran-born novel-ist Marsha Mehran Pomegranate Soup (2005), now living in Ireland. Kubisz discusses food as a metaphor, which can be equally revealing to the stories of movement and mixing as in other books these are the stories of growing, alienation, personal struggle and rec-onciliation. Her interpretation asserts that in the world where the borders are crossed literally in a search for the new beginning, the immigrant culture becomes an inevitable challenge to the normative codices the culture of reter-ritorialized country represents: “What we witness in Ballinacroagh [the setting of the novel] is the process of becoming: it is the New that is becoming in front of our eyes.”

Titus Pop’s contribution brings to the eye of the reader less known side of a renown writer Salman Rushdie. Selecting Rushdie’s non-fiction works as the focus of his interest, Pop dis-closes the consistent and ultimate effort Rushdie makes, not only as literati but as a public figure, an intellectual and a spokesman for all unheard and silenced voices coming from formerly colonized countries or contemporary immigrant communities.

Rushdie’s case is indicative of the sit-uation in the contemporary world. He creates a work of art, which seems to be harmless in comparison with the arms and weapons the world is equipped today. What he employs are only the

words but those words, paraphrasing Václav Havel, become the power of the powerless. No wonder that he has been put to banishment after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses (1988). He shatters the established status quo and reveals the fanaticism, manipula-tion, and the systems of power that re-strict and degenerate the free, individu-al spirit of the Self. He does so not on a national basis but as a literary fantasy, in an imaginary and imaginative world, which unfortunately for him, speaks so openly about the limitations of the real one that there are those who feel to be threatened by it. The case of The Sa-tanic Verses is double indicative; it also reveals the shallowness with which we may approach a literary text. As Milan Kundera has it: everybody speaks about it but no one actually has read it [The Satanic Verses]. It is self-revelatory that our contemporary discourse employs the catchwords, catchphrases, without their appropriate examination. Thus Pop’s article gives the reader a view of Rushdie as an intellectual in progress, on a constant move, whose writing “obstructs any attempt to define a na-tional or literary influence for it. “ But the fluidity of thought, constant reex-amination and reconsideration of roots and stability also prevent any ossifica-tions, and a possibility to lapse in sta-tus quo. Rushdie, according to Pop, has always questioned historical givens and beliefs and in order to do so employed “the metafictional trope of migrancy to invoke an absolute of rootlessness and hybridity.”

As Tanja Franotovic from Croatia says in her article: “No other medium ...

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can capture the issues of travel, mobili-ty and change [...] as poignantly as film.” She and Petra Pappova from Slovakia focus on the examples from the film and examine the concepts of home, nation and identity, through the idea of be-longing. While Tanja Frantovic focuses on diasporic filmmaking and discusses the film Exiles (2004), the point of de-parture for Petra Pappova’s arguments is the imaginative world of Spanish film, which started to flourish after the fall of Franco’s dictatorship.

Frantovic advocates the medium of the film, which she believes has the representational tools to depict the fluid, relational Selves. She also deals with the concept of national and trans-national identities and suggests that in this respect contemporary Europe should be more humble, less authori-tarian. Instead of unifying stories of EU identity, Europe should learn more about the changes and challenges of the multicultural society from smaller, but specific “marginalized stories”. In this respect Europe should learn from being peripheral, which as Frantovic says “opens up a dialogue between the margins.” Frantovic employs the exam-ple of the film Exiles (2004) to present “the very opportunity for Europe’s new politics of identity, one which not only insists on difference and specificity but also on movement, articulation and syn-cretism.”

The article by Petra Pappova gives a range of examples, which characterise the contemporary Spanish cinema in the period of “movida”. Appearing in the period without censorship all film ex-amples, Pedro Almodóvar’s films in par-

ticular, question the social and national taboos of the past and reveal new, mul-tiple identities. They cross the boundar-ies of gender and sexual stereotypes as well as national identity. Therefore the conflict often takes place between the strange and familiar. Such conflict is, in Pappova’s view, inevitable for any mul-ticultural environment, which tries to preserve the individuality.

The articles, which describe the pro-cess taking place outside of the arena of art, are the texts by Jana Javorcikova from Matej Bel University in Slovakia and José Antonio Ávila Romero from Spain. To discuss the perception of transition in sociological, cultural and educational environments is equally important, be-cause as we have mentioned before all these are interrelated. The changes in art and science condition the changes in society, culture, and education and vice versa. The change takes place in a con-sciousness and in that respect it is never isolated but related.

Jana Javorcikova speaks about the phenomenon of “smiling discrimina-tion”, which is a residuum in the mind and thinking, a concealed form of rac-ism. To remove the colonial power from a certain territory is one gradual step, but the trajectories leading to the re-moval of colonial thinking can be wind-ing and can take much longer. This is what we have referred to discussing Sal-man Rushdie. For the western world he represents the courage, enlightenment and fundamental opposition against fanaticism and fundamentalism. But it is only a small fraction of the Western world that can really understand, what Rushdie opposes, contradicts and ridi-

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cules in his book. In fact, the majority of white, Western, enlightened world remains under certain circumstances racist and colonial.

In the process of mind transforma-tion the role of teachers and educators is one of the crucial ones. Learning lan-guages is a way to deconstruct and re-construct one’s mind and identity. The article by José Antonio Ávila Romero investigates the specific strategies that can be used to teach Spanish in a mul-ticultural environment. They are aimed at self-reflection, on the awareness of learning process and self-progress and thus are significant for any kind of con-sideration about one’s identity. Because learning a foreign language can be a way to know a foreign country but also a way to know oneself and the position of oneself in a dialogue with the Other and the Self, familiar and unfamiliar, un-usual and common.

The knowledge of who I am and where I belong is closely connected with the place one occupies in a na-tional state. The article by Peter Kopal from the Czech Republic leads the read-ers on a long journey into the past in order to disclose the significance of the first Czech chronicler Cosmas of Prague for the constitution of the Czech nation, identity and history. His portrait of Cos-mas is a complex picture showing what misinterpretations history is a subject to in totalitarian regimes. In spite of all Kopal asserts that Cosmas can be still perceived a man of words, a scholar, an artist, a historian who shaped and formed Czech national identity. As he asserts in the conclusion: “It seems that the Cosmas‘ chronicle speaks even to us

today, like a new source of inspiration, thanks to the most topical and signifi-cant element of its ideological content, i.e. thanks to the effort to rationalize the birth, origin and the essence of the na-tional state. Its constitution then started the processes, which at the turn of 11th and 12th C started to accommodate the Czech society slowly to the standards of European countries.”

The interview, in which Maria Kissova from Constantine the Philosopher Uni-versity in Slovakia presents Hall Beloff is a fascinating reading. Beloff’s training and experience is in psychology, visual art and literature. She understands the primary role identity and culture play in the contemporary world. She, however, also warns that the art works, which employ these concepts as the source of their conflicts, may easily move from their “privileged” peripheral position, in which they have the quality to be on the edge, to the mainstream, and thus loose the cutting edge. Beloff has been lured by visual art and culture. One of her books Camera Culture discusses stereotypes in thinking, representation and the way we perceive and compre-hend the world through visual images. She says that “stereotypes are a particu-larly lazy part of conventional thinking. They take for granted traditional imbal-ances of power and the oppression of vulnerable people. They provide a kind of justification for these.” In this respect she sees the importance of documen-tary photography, as the form, which should give people the impetus to re-form. And she does her share in this. As an atheist, or as she likes to call herself a “militant rationalist”, she works for

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Christian charity organisation, because as she says “I don’t believe in Christian-ity, but I do believe in aid.”

The current issue closes with three reviews. Peter Pecina writes about the book by Michael W. Schaeffer on the civ-il war, Maria Kissova reviews Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Simona Hevesiova discusses the second novel of the Nigerian writer Chi-mamanda Ngozi Adichie Half of a Yellow Sun.

Dear readers, we wish the content of the current issue will inspire you to think and discuss further on the ques-

tions of diversity, and multiculturalism. These directly influence the social orga-nization of the world we inhabit, may change our viewpoints, and interact with our opinions. We believe that the art, history and education are the means to learn about them and ourselves more. In this way we endorse the return to the tradition of scholarship that honors the knowledge that appreciates critical thinking and respects the difference in opinion, attitudes or styles.

Works cited: Cullen, J., 1995. The Civil War in Popular Culture. A Reusable Past. Smithsonian Institution Press.

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Interpretation of the text is a necessary part of the literary translation process. Shakespeare´s Macbeth is one of your most recent translations. Some perceive this tragedy as the discourse on evil, with Macbeth infecting the others, becoming himself the victim of it. What is your view on the murderous Scottish king?

MA: Macbeth is terrifying and shocking for everyone. It’s a bloody play, fearful, hair-raising and murky, nervously called ‘The Scottish Play’ in the theatre, not daring to pronounce the name of, as you say, the murderous Scottish king, who is getting what he deserves. Even the word ‘fear’ appears here more often, than anywhere else in Shakespeare´s work.

It is scary also because of its longstanding tradition of unlucky

occurrences. On the day of the premiere I got e-mails like ´I will be crossing my fingers and turning over silver coins in my pocket seven times to wish you luck’ and ‘break your leg!’ But! I love this great tragedy!

‘Boundless intemperancein nature is a tyranny. It hath been the untimely emptying of the happy

throne and fall of many kings’,

says Macduff to Malcolm. Inordinate lust for power brings ruin! Temptation can defeat even the strongest human being! Guilt haunts the evildoer! You remember, after Macbeth kills Duncan, he hears voices – it is the voice of guilt. Later Macbeth and Lady Macbeth hear knocking – this is also the sound of the guilt. The knocker is Macduff, who, in the final act, kills Macbeth!

In the Holy Bible, I Corinthians /10 -

Interviewwith

Manana Antadze is a Georgian translator and the Founder and President of Tumanishvili Theater Foundation. From 1981 to 1989, Manana Antadze was a research associate at the Centre for Contemporary Literary Studies at the Georgian State University. She has been also working as a freelance translator since 1974 and her numerous translations include William Shakespeare´s Macbeth, Irving Stone´s Lust for Life, and J. K. Rowling´s Harry Potter and the Philosopher´s Stone.

Manana Antadze

Courtesy of MA

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12, 13 / we read: 12.‘Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall. 13. No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.’

What moves me is not only a story of murder, madness and death, hero’s fall from grace or supernatural phenomenon, but equivocation, tricky balance of the twin realm: comedy and tragedy, reality and supernatural, joined with mastery of language, with wit and humor, with lyricism. Shakespeare is the greatest of the poets. His later plays allow us to come very close to his deepest interests, but he ‘plays’ a game and you enjoy.

Interpretation is very important in literary translation process and takes courage, but for the first time in my life (it’s my first Shakespeare!) I came across the text with unlimited possibilities of interpretation. ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’ – the most mysterious paradox tells us that nothing is as it seems! /Evil

Courtesy of MA

can wear a pretty cloak! /Everything is equivocal! Shakespeare is a restless experimenter and will always remain untranslatable!

Shakespeare´s plays always represent a great challenge for the translator. What were major influences and inspirations in your work?

MA: My inspiration was the director’s vision. David Doiashvili (Doi) who is now an artistic director of our Music and Drama State Theatre, is one of Tumanishvili’s best students. I was commissioned Macbeth, but before I agreed, Doi told me very clearly about his conception. It seemed so attractive, but the process turned out to be much more complicated and interesting, than I could have imagined.

It was not just literary translation. I was translating Shakespeare for Doi, his cast and his production. I published the full text (of course, it was cut in the production) with the program. Doi erected ‘stage’ in the foyer of his theatre, which is an open space with balconies, thus creating three levels: ‘earth’ – main level, ´heaven’ and ‘hell’ (that’s how they were called in the Globe). Production was stretched vertically. Premiere was on October 12, 2009. We were having International festival in Tbilisi at that time and Macbeth was a great success.

So nothing unexpected happened and you broke the bad spell of Macbeth?

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We began working two years ago and very soon stopped. A lot of things were happening. A make-up lady left the theatre. (Some people say, she was scared of Macbeth, some say she was offered better salary at our National.) So she moved to the National. She really was offered a reasonable salary! Next day she was found dead in the pit, under the lift. How it could happen, nobody can explain. Incredible! The actor, who plays Macbeth (he was the first year student by that time!) became very ill and had to stay in the hospital for quite a long time. I thought Doi would never return to Macbeth again. He did!

Being also inspired by the powerful stories of the Georgian folk tradition while translating the play, do you think that there was a particular story which might have affected the essence of the final translation?

MA: There is no particular story of that kind but you can easily find symbols of temptation everywhere. Georgian folk legends and myths have their own reality of witchcraft or enchantment, which is tied closely to paganism. Wizards are present in the lore of all people. When I was working on witches, I was reading ‘Georgian Magic Poetry’ all the time. We have such! Sure you also have some in your Slovak folk heritage. But the thing is that in the book there were no curses, just spells to avoid evil. Anyway, rhythm of the jinx was useful and helpful as nursery rhymes.

Thinking back on the translation of Macbeth, what were the most

difficult decisions you had to make?MA: Shakespeare wrote in iambic

pentameter. It is not only ten syllables in each line, but also five pairs of alternating unstressed and stressed syllables. Rhythm sounds like: ‘de-Dum, de-Dum, de-Dum, de-Dum, de-Dum’. This particular rhythmical style is natural for English poetry. As they often say ‘it’s the rhythm of heartbeat and breathing.’

Macbeth says Is THIS/a DAG-/ger I/see BE-/

fore ME?

You can’t do it in Georgian. I did a lot of thinking. (I wanted to use iambic pentameter!) Shakespeare has been translated into Georgian many times. Best translations are done in 14-syllable verse. This metrical pattern is more popular in our poetry and I decided to use it as well.

In August I was attending the Shakespeare seminar in the ‘Globe’ and we discussed these problems. We found that many languages have similar difficulties. However, I want to stress that I am not an intellectual theorist of translation. I am a practitioner, and I feel absolutely sure Shakespeare was not counting syllables.

You had been working with Mikheil Tumanishvili (1921 – 1996) for some time and now you are cooperating closely with one of his best disciples. Could you tell us more about this legendary and charismatic icon of the Georgian theatre?

MA: Mikheil Tumanishvili was

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one of the most brilliant directors and teachers of his generation. He was teaching acting and directing at the Georgian State Institute of Theatre. He taught most of the best of the younger Georgian directors and actors. Tumanishvili began directing at Rustaveli National Theatre and worked there for 25 years. I met him when I was the first year student of English faculty at The State University of Georgia. The University invited Tumanishvili to direct Midsummer Night’s Dream. We were playing it in English and I played Hermia.

After leaving Rustaveli, Tumanishvili founded - in 1978 - his own studio theatre, Film Actors Theatre, where he invited me to work as a dramaturg (a literary director). Tumanishvili’s productions were always so young, so free from heavy-weight traditions of theatre! Some of them travelled a lot all over the world. Edinburgh Festival still remembers his Don Juan. Tumanishvili died rehearsing Cherry Orchard in 1996. He was 75.

You said that Tumanishvili´s approach towards the theatre practices was far away from the traditional one.

When Tumanishvili joined Rustaveli National in 1952, as critics say, THE REVOLUTION came! Old romantic productions vanished - there were many directors there by that time - one after another. Vibrant, new productions appeared. Everything was changing: sets, costumes, the psychology of

acting, actor’s art was stressed. The creative image of National has changed; the audience and the stage united. Tumanishvili describes how it happened in his books which are available in Georgian and Russian (they are in the process of translation into English).

As the founder and president of Tumanishvili Theatre Foundation, you hold the competition in ´the best translation´ and ´a new play´ twice a year to promote new material for the Georgian theatre.

MA: I founded ‘Tumanishvili Foundation’ in 1998. It is a non-governmental international organization working on different projects, but last three years we held competitions in the search of new material for our theatres.

In August, being in London, I met Elyse Dodgson, the head of International Department of the Royal Court Theatre and discussed our cooperation. Royal Court is truly an international Theatre. ‘Our job is to support and sustain new writing in other countries, particularly where there is strong theatre culture but the writers don’t have the voice that they might have’, says Elyse Dodgson, ‘and on the other side it’s to produce the best new work we can find and introduce that to our audiences.’ I will meet Elyse in Georgia in March. By that time my competition will have finals and she will meet Georgian playwrights. After that we shall see what can be done.

Could you tell us more about the current theatre practices in Georgia?

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MA: Georgian Theatre has very good actors and directors, most of them are Tumanishvili’s pupils. More than fifty theatres are repertoire theatres subsidized by the State, with the permanent troupe. But they are given not much money, not enough for the productions - especially regional theatres - and they are also in need of new plays as well. That’s why my foundation tries to stimulate writers and translators.

The theme of this issue of

Ars Aeterna is memory. Are the memories of the Georgian past somehow inspiring for you in your work?

MA: Memory is a great thing. Georgia

Courtesy of MA

is fond of looking back into history, as far as the XII century, when the country was united and politically and culturally very, very strong. For example, our traditional singing is an object of adoration for us. In 2002 Jeanne d’Arc’s year was internationally celebrated in Domremy. I organized our traditional singer’s concert there and all of us became honorary citizens of Domremy after that, so it really touched everybody. In the contemporary writing the past is always somehow felt. Isn’t literature the one whole process?!

So to what extent do Georgian writers/ playwrights nowadays look back into the past? Are they haunted by it, do they confront it, is there something like an attempt to de-mythologize or re-write the past?

MA: Whenever they look back into the past, some are haunted, some confront it and some try to mythologize!

The scope of current literary texts translated into Slovak includes mostly bestsellers and classics with just few exceptions. One of the reasons is a rather small Slovak market; another thing is that after the translation appears in the Czech Republic, it is very scarcely followed by the Slovak version. What is the situation like in Georgia?

MA: Georgian market is also very small and even the so called bestsellers are published just in about one thousand exemplars. Harry Potter was an exception and I am sure not

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only in Georgia! We have so many new publishers here. Authors try to get money themselves, but Art and Literature are not the source of living. In the Soviet period Georgia depended on Russia as other republics. You could translate only what was already translated into Russian and not only for copyright reasons! Now the small market has become the biggest problem.

The quality and the amount of children´s literature translations have increased recently in Slovakia due to the fantasy fascination aroused by the Harry Potter series which you also mentioned. Authors such as C. S. Lewis, Michelle Paver, Philip Pullman, Ursula Le Guin and others have become quite popular. Is something similar going on in Georgia?

MA: I cannot say that amount of children’s literature has increased

in Georgia. Children are ‘lost’ in the internet (my grandchildren too). Of course, there are more or less popular books in newest translation, but they are not as popular as Harry Potter.

The last question for our interviewees traditionally deals with their current reading. Has there been any special (re)discovery in your reading experience recently that you would like to share with us?

MA: Frankly speaking, I didn’t have much time, since I was finishing Macbeth and then I worked on the translation of Camino Real by Tennessee Williams for my company. Now I am translating The Tempest!!! But since the Cambridge seminar in July I have read Jim Crace´s The Pesthouse, Jeanette Winterson´s The Stone Gods and David Lodge’s last novel Deaf Sentence. I intend to translate one of them.

Ars poeticaTell me how once the wind was bornand how it makes the earth go round -Tell me how joyful the aphid dancedon the moaning plant in the chamber -Tell how you just clutched your inkand how you spread it out on your sheet, your habitat -Tell me how the food slowly turned coldin a thoroughly bled bowl -Tell me how the moon the child the seathe branch and the bulb fatigued themselves today -And tell me how her body existshow on earth it’s possible that her body as such exists -Describe it for me, then.© Steven Pollet

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Abstract:

In his 1959 Rede lecture at Cambridge “The Two Cultures and Scientific Revolution”, C.P.Snow pointed out to the difference between those who study words and those who study the rest of nature. He very strictly polarized “literary intellectuals” and ”the other scientists” (Snow, 1959, p. 4). In the British novel of the very end of the 20th century, however, (in House of Sleep - 1997, namely, it becomes of critical importance that the reflection of the changed knowledge about ourselves and the world in literature becomes radically new. One of the issues appearing of great artistic concern is that of human memory and the way a fictional text treats its unresolved mysteries. The problem of false memory is the one directly related to the mysteries of human consciousness and

made into a narrative strategy in such novels as Tough Guys Don’t Dance by N. Mailer, Inventing Memories by E. Jong, and One Hundred Years of Solitude by G. G. Marquez. Jonathan Coe’s House of Sleep is a new and quite experimental work that uniquely highlights some memory related concerns.

Coe takes up some of the most daunting puzzles of human psyche related to the functions of consciousness and memory. Central to these is the problem of sleep, the very trivial function of all living organisms, which is featured in the book as a transitive step between medicine and the metaphor of being. The plot of the novel is reminiscent of a medical case, a history, of Sarah Tudor, whose entire life becomes a troublesome mixture of dream and reality with no clear borderline between them. It

Fictional Memory and the Narrating Mind in J. Coe’s Novel The House of Sleep

Marina RagachewskayaMarina Ragachewskaya is an Associate Professor at the Department of World Literature

at Minsk State Linguistics University, Belarus. She teaches History of British and American literature; History of World Literature; Fiction interpretation. She got her PHD in Minsk in 2003 with a thesis titled “D.H. Lawrence’s psychoanalytic theory and its implementation in his prose”. Dr. Ragachewskaya published about 70 articles (at home and internationally) on DHL and some other British and American authors in (the focus on psychoanalysis, modernism, text analysis, etc.). She is currently working on the prospective habilitation thesis.

The paper discusses the ways Jonathan Coe, a famous British satirist, highlights unre-solved memory problems and elaborates on specific issues of narcolepsy, thin borderline between dream and reality, the deja vu and jamais vu as fictional devices, fact and fiction, homo- and heterosexual love, and the past and present. On each level of his intricately wo-ven narrative he deals with the tricky nature of human memory, playfully turning it into a fictional mind inventing its own history, blending science and fantasy. Finding the gap in scientific knowledge, Coe leads the reader’s self to striking discoveries about the nature of our memory.

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turns out that Sarah suffers from what then becomes professionally termed as narcolepsy1. Sarah’s childhood is clouded by unfortunate dreams posing as well-remembered reality and leading to punishments from teachers, mockery from peers, and deep internal conflict. Her reputation among students fluctuates between being called Rip Van Winkle and Mad Sarah, leading to further alienation, dissatisfaction with her sexual partners, lesbian relationships into which she enters in a narcoleptic fit, etc. And her mature life [continues it becomes] still harder: several collapses in front of the class of schoolchildren, severe reprimands from authorities, dismissals, and bitter self-effacement.

While showing the condition of a narcoleptic, the author makes informed use of another notion – cataplexy (or catalepsy) – sudden weakening of all body muscles, and temporary loss of consciousness caused by strong emotions, such as laughter or anger². If Sarah were an 18th- or 19th-century fictional character, she most certainly would be placed within the Gothic. Long before Psychology achieved a level of recognizing and adequately interpreting narcolepsy and cataplexy, writers produced characters whose symptoms of these altered consciousness conditions served as justification for mystifying and thus marginalizing them. Roderick Usher’s sister Madeline (“The Fall of the House of Usher” by E. A. Poe) is mortally stricken with catalepsy, as well as the narrators of “The Premature Burial” and “Some Words with the Mummy”. However,

with densely interwoven psychological discourse, Sarah’s uncanniness is wiped off. The discursive features of the narration eliminate mystery and fear, but produce a tension between the psychological type of discourse and the fictional one, working towards, perhaps, popularizing psychological knowledge about memory collapses and making it a vehicle of Coe’s literary reputation as a satirist. Otherwise Gothic, the contemporary marginal Sarah proves society as unable to come to terms with the unknowable, queer, and incurable. Identity formation is strongly dependent on being assessed by others, and Sarah’s collapses seem to indicate the psychic inability to accept the common or opposite opinion, to be propped into a hostile or foreign surrounding, to correspond to the conventional memory patterns. Her memory works in its unpredictable vein and roots in her consciousness a destroyed identity based on her persistent memory that comes from a dream – a frog with enormous eyes. We learn that Sarah’s first boyfriend Gregory (later on Dr. Dudden) was fascinated with Sarah’s eyes, but in a way that reveals the negative memory formation. At night he used to press his finger tips against her closed eyelids. “Soon she felt the pressure of his two fingers against her shielded eyeballs – gentle at first – and she stiffened, a familiar terror stirring inside her. She had developed a method of dealing with this sensation, which involved emptying her mind of all ideas relating to the present moment” (Coe, 1998, pp. 15-16).

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The condition of memory loss and invention, related to the main character, constantly produces puzzles in the plot structure of the novel, when the notion of human memory is tested against itself as an ability to correctly reproduce past events. And as such, it starts a series of memory games, which are both reality-related and expressly fictional. The famously termed psychological states of “déjà vu” and “jamais vu” become functional devices conditioned, on the one hand, by Sarah’s psychological disorder, on the other – some events in the novel acquire the status of denied evidence (jamais vu), others – reenactment of the powers of a visionary (déjà vu). It turns out, the jamais vu state propels one of the crucial plot lines: Sarah’s memory deletion in relation to Robert’s life story creates a fictional twin sister for Robert. As a result of growing feeling towards Sarah, Robert, in his selfless and most tender love for her, tries to fit into her idea of a perfect partner, friend, lover… his self-annihilation leads him ultimately to the change of sex: after the surgery Robert inhabits a female body, calls himself Cleo (after Sarah’s imagined character whom she devised in a dream but was never able to realize it), spends some time studying psychology, and finally takes a position as Dr. Madison in Dr. Dudden’s clinic for the treatment of sleep disorders.

Sarah’s collapses into sleep coincide with the decisive moments of her life. A particularly notable déjà vu episode is when she ruins Terry Worth’s career (a successful film critic,) also causing the closure of a journal and seven

court suits. When asked to introduce the editor’s corrections of footnotes into a completed text she falls asleep at the start of the work under a powerful reaction to the content of her female lover’s “betraying letter”. When she awakes, the allegedly marked copies of the article remain so vividly in her memory, as if she indeed had finished doing the task that she safely seals them and sends to the publisher. The scandal that breaks out can hardly be compared to a real one, for Coe’s ability to create an ironic word game is almost unsurpassable. In the remarkable full-size “reproduction” of the article in question Coe, in fact, uses his Swiftian/Orwellian skills to direct his satire against the shallow and flippant world of film-makers. Moreover, the footnotes in the wrong places magically restore the “truth” of this satire, when respectable places and companies receive scathing references in the article’s footnotes; for example, when Pope Paul VI, instead of the matching footnote mentioning The Confessions of St. Augustine and The Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich, is reported to have said that books like Wet Knickers, Pussy Talk, and Cream on My Face “were among the most inspiring and influential works he had read”(Coe, 1998, p. 271).

The déjà vu state experienced by Robert in his dream where he sees a nurse in white pointing to some hospital in the background materializes both into his own career and transsexuality, and into an old photograph serving as evidence of a lost film by a famous producer researched by Terry.

Expressly poetic in the novel’s

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structure and content is its transcendent condition of dream-like reality and its much too realistic dreams. We see how the narcoleptic Sarah reenacts the dreamed-up events. Sarah’s selective unconscious presents her with some events she partook of as absolutely unknown, while others appear as if she had seen them already (her friend Veronica’s room in the house Sarah never visited, or the image of Cleo). The two disparate frames of reference connected with the content of the dream and artifact stress endless ambiguity and the incomprehensibility of the phenomena of consciousness while mocking the attempt of scientific knowledge to explain, let alone treat, the failures of memory and the powers of the mysterious energies sleeping in the psyche.

Human memory in Coe’s novel becomes a metaphor of continuity, realized through a number of artistic devices. The description of the setting for the most excruciating happenings is a vivid memory link. The novel pictures the story of four major characters in two temporal stages: student life at the university in Ashdown, a “huge, grey and imploring” building with a hundred years’ history, always beaten by the nearby sea, always in shadow, ”bleak, element defying”, and “unfit for human occupation”(Coe, 1998, pp. 26-27) – and their self-realization and professional activities some 12 years later. The odd-numbered chapters relate to the former period, the even-numbered to the latter. This neat alternation puts in the first paradox to be reckoned with – a sense of change, a movement through time –

and a sense of self remaining unaltered, a sense of continuity of self cemented by memory, when each character throughout the whole of the narration preserves and further develops his most essential identity features.

The pivotal events in the novel are those where the three male characters return to their former place of study, Ashdown, now a clinic for the treatment of sleep disorders headed by Dr. Dudden, an eccentric, surly, and annoyingly meticulous physician who has invented subtle methods of treating (or, to be exact, investigating) sleep disorders, and no less subtle experimental equipment meant to test sleep deprivation on animals and later even on humans. For Dr. Dudden (ironically nicknamed Dr. Death), Terry is a unique individual who is a model of a perfect human being not wasting his life in the stupid condition of unconsciousness and idleness, but actively implementing given energies and talents. Dr. Dudden’s strong arguments are Mrs. Thatcher, who presumably confessed she needed only two or three hours’ sleep a night; Napoleon, who was a light sleeper, too; and Thomas Edison. The philosophical idea about sleep as time wasting is taken much too seriously and pragmatically by Dr. Dudden. As a result, instead of much craved for fame for great scientific discoveries, Gregory Dudden ends up making himself the horrible subject of his own torturing experiments, destroying the whole clinic, losing self-control, and obviously maddened by his obsession.

The House of Sleep, borrowing a lot from postmodernist uncertainty,

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echoes a rather shamanic view of the universe, where “…nothing is fixed, one thing can become another … Time can shift and be dislocated. Space can be compressed or expanded at will. There is an acute awareness of indeterminacy, process and change – a deep sense of the fluidity of the universe – a universe of ceaselessly modulated energies that are interpenetrating and interdependent” (Danvers, 2006, p. 252). Coe compresses the novel’s space to that of the symbolic house of sleep, and expands it to the outlandish American consciousness which he sets out to mock at several times in the text. Time shifts, but the chapters discussing different time periods are nevertheless connected through one sentence, suddenly broken in the preceding chapter and picked up in the ensuing one, as if showing the thread of memory connecting the past and the present. The gender identity appears as a matter of indeterminacy which becomes suddenly a matter of revelation in a moment of epiphany realised through an example of stream-of-consciousness (Robert feels a vital need to share through speech his deep psychological disturbance about Sarah’s homosexuality and chooses the sleeping Ruby, a small girl he and Sarah once took care of in her parents’ absence). And exactly at this moment Robert makes a fatal decision to become Cleo, Sarah’s ideal image of a lover. But the finality and narrative coherence are once again undermined when Robert/Cleo accidentally learns, just at the moment he is going to present himself as a woman before the unsuspecting Sarah, that she was married (but also

divorced)! How could such a shock be dealt with but through a character, Ruby Sharp, who never forgets anything, and, we guess, eventually brings Sarah and Cleo together.

Together with Sarah’s symptoms of awkward and untimely sleep patterns, the topical metaphysical dilemma is being resolved for modern society: humans are devising extra ways to save more time for numerous activities and information offered by modern technologies and sources. However, the argument that underlies the novel’s plot line – can humankind exist without or with very little sleep? Is it an atavism or a vital necessity? – is being reenacted with a model of pure knowledge: Gregory Dudden and the whole fictional tale itself. As one of the clinic’s staff observes about Dudden, “It’s not about treating people, you know … All he’s interested in is knowledge (Coe, 1998, p. 95). Knowledge about the processes in the human brain in its pure dehumanized form is entrapped into an artistic metaphor of obsession – a crazy scientist victimizing his human self for the sake of pure knowledge, depriving himself not only of sleep but of integral human emotions of compassion: Dudden’s cruel experiments on rats, rabbits, and dogs make Terry shudder at seeing them.

It is noteworthy that the ability to dream and, furthermore, to remember dreams and talk about them defines a “higher-order consciousness”. Danvers in this respect writes: “The development of ”socialized dreaming” means that communities can share, interpret and apply symbolic value to dreams in

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a way that was not possible before. This may be one distinction between Neanderthals and Homo-Sapiens” (Danvers, 2006, p. 254). Thus the value of dream-work, even with sometimes disastrous but in the end justifiable effects, is stated in the novel’s logical structure, having at the core the recognition of the importance and centrality of fictional consciousness.

Drawing further connections between the novel and psychology and cognitive science, where it is admitted that the sensory, mental, and imaginative spheres of consciousness are dynamically interactive, we can observe how on different ontological levels The House of Sleep produces a fictional model of the mind, where the metaphor of the house as the body unites the purely mental (Gregory), sensory (Robert and Sarah), and imaginative (Sarah and Terry)

capacities. As Danvers observes, “the idea of the self as a quasi-literary fiction has taken root in many areas of philosophy, psychology, cultural theory, and semiotics. One interesting paradox in this account of selfhood is the obvious fact that the self is both a narrative construction and somehow the author of, or the authorial voice within, that narrative. We are simultaneously the unfolding story, the story-maker, and the primary story teller” (Danvers, 2006, p. 145). This and D. Lodge’s statement (“recent scientific work on consciousness has stressed its essentially narrative character” (Lodge, 2002, p. 14) to a great extent enlighten our interpretation of The House of Sleep” as a highly complex narrative self, a construction of a life story the way the narrating voice and the voices of those who speak within it prefer it to appear.

Endnotes:1 Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness and recurring unwanted episodes of sleep (“sleep attacks”). People with narcolepsy may fall asleep at almost any time, including while talking, eating and even walking. The attacks may range from embarrassing or inconvenient to se-verely disabling, interfering with a person’s daily life. The cause of narcolepsy is not known with certainty, and there is no cure. (from the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2007, p. 33720.2 Other symptoms of , occurring just after falling asleep or upon awakening, include sleep paralysis (a feel-ing that one cannot move) and vivid hallucinations.

Works Cited:Coe, J., 1998. The House of Sleep. London: Penguin Books LTD.Danvers, J., 2006. Picturing Mind: Paradox, Indeterminacy and Consciousness in Art and Poetry. Amster-dam: Rodopi.Lodge, D., 2002. Consciousness and the Novel. Cambridge: Harvard University PressSnow, C.P., 1993. The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Abstract:

The glorious image of the British empire drawn by writers, scholars, explorers, and missionaries was not solely a powerful means to propel some imperial propaganda. Most importantly, the writing of empire provided a mythology which, as Edward Morgan Forster famously remarked in his novel Howards End (1919), the English lacked. And since the English colonial history happened abroad the fictional and non-fictional accounts of this time filled the empty space in national memory. Having no opportunity to experience India personally, those who stayed in the motherland relied on some “translated” and edited representations of the oriental Other, while the white inhabitants of the

British Raj recreated their homeland abroad both not to lose sense of belonging and to fight back the feeling of the uncanny, and estrangement. In this way, the former were provided with the memory of the present and the latter with the past, the memory which strengthened their national identity. Edward Morgan Forster’s descriptions of the empire in such works as A Passage to India (1924) and The Hill of Devi (1953), or the Indian essays collected in Abinger Harvest (1936) and Two Cheers for Democracy (1951) reveal his interest in the ‘real India’ and not the idealistic one, manufactured in fiction and biography and circulating in national consciousness. Forster looks for authenticity, and not a mythology

Remembering the Other: creating nationalmythology in A Passage to India by Edward Forster

Anna Bysiecka-MaciaszekAnna Bysiecka-Maciaszek is a graduate of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, where she is currently finishing her doctorate. Her research focuses on postcolonial studies, particularly the issues of hybridization and alienation of postcolonial subjects, the concept of mimicry, the Self/Other opposition and identity crisis in contemporary British novel. Her publications include essays on V. S. Naipaul, Z. Smith, M. Ali, H. Kunzru and a review of D. Huddart’s Homi K. Bhabha. She has participated in conferences in Poland and abroad and is a member of MESEA and EACLALS.

The article analyses the influence of colonialism on shaping national identity and creating the English mythology. It shows how the mechanisms operating behind colonial and Orientalist discourse (stereotypes, binarism, and generalizations in particular) determine the way of perceiving the East and the colonized Other. Entrapped by western discourse, both the dominating and dominated subjects are pre-determined by language and ideology and denied authenticity. Given the role of educators and a civilising mission, the white inhabitants fight back the feeling of estrangement and unfamiliarity experienced in a foreign land, while the natives strive for a site of enunciation that would restore their authority.

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provided by colonial fiction, as Francis King writes in Forster’s biography, “Forster had travelled India to learn about the Indians” (King, 1978, p. 75). His India is not a place of adventure, excitement, picturesque beauty, or the civilizing and noble work of the British officials. It is a meeting point for the West and East, a site for uncompromising situations, difficult or impossible choices, and omnipresent illusions. Genius loci, that is, the spirit of the place, is a means to analyse the western traditions in a foreign environment and provide some detachment from the familiar so that the disclosure of the other self is possible. Forster tries to go beyond the tourist gaze, its superficiality and a pretended willingness to see ‘real’ India, and he aims at showing the country as it can be experienced with all senses – it is the picture which stays in memory as the English are ‘bombarded’ with pictures, sounds, tastes, and smells of the East which all make the image of India more complete and durably imprinted in their memory.

The relationships shown in A Passage to India are unavoidably read in the context of the colonizer-the colonized opposition, and Forster’s novel remains “a historically important novel for its scathing exposition of social and ethical calcification under the Raj” (Boehmer, 1995, p. 152), “a dissenting imperial allegory, which assails the ills of Anglo-India” (Peppis in Bradshaw, 2007, p. 47). Though dismissed by the author as a political novel, A Passage to India relates to several historical events (it echoes Gandhi’s return to India and the start of the civil disobedience campaign,

the first Government of India Act, an upsurge in Indian nationalist feeling, British promises of independence, and the Amritsar Massacre; Childs, 2002, p. 1), which shaped Forster’s feelings towards his Indian novel. In Orientalism, a book which shows some images of the Orient in western consciousness and memory, Edward Said lists Edward Forster among those authors who contributed to building Orientalist discourse, that is a set of representative figures and tropes and “the vocabulary employed whenever the Orient is spoken or written about” (Said, 1978, p. 71). In Orientalists’ accounts the East is fictionalized and shown not as a factual entity (but as it was orientalized) and thus it is less a place than a topos, a set of references: a place of romance, exotics beings, haunting memories and landscapes, and remarkable experiences. While Said agrees that all cultures impose some translation and transformation of ‘raw’ reality when changing it into units of knowledge, he points to the nature of such conversion – in the case of the Orient, it is caught in perpetual translation. The critic states: “cultures have always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures, receiving these other cultures not as they are but as, for the benefit of the receiver, they ought to be. To the Westerner, however, the Oriental was always like some aspects of the West. […] the Orientalist makes it his work to be always converting the Orient from something into something else: he does it for himself, for the sake of his culture, in some cases for what he believes is the sake of the Oriental” (Said,

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1978, p. 67; italics in original). Since it is fictionalized and its history is in and for the West, the knowledge of the Orient seems to be “a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient” (Said, 1978, p. 177) and not real-lived experience. It is an adjusted and edited picture that enters national consciousness and the memory of the place is always distorted through the narrated experiences, biased in favour of the familiar and known.

Indisputably, Orientalism creates an object that can be manipulated for political and economic reasons and it positions the West as the unquestioned authority. The Orient is denied any pre-existent history, any thoroughly organized sets of national, cultural, and religious principles which would give it some recognition, intelligibility and identity. In Following the Equator, a travel book written by Mark Twain that reports on a 1897 voyage to India among others, the place is shown as the land of the savage, the uncanny, and the Arabian Nights: “the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendour and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle” (Twain, 1989, p. 347-348). Although Twain gives credit to Indian traditions and the past, his perception of the place is tainted with some generalisations and stereotypes present in western consciousness, which is the way India functions in collective consciousness rather than as it is objectively experienced. Similarly, in A Passage to India Edward Forster

generalizes his observations of human relations in order to make them universal and not fixed within historical limits, nevertheless, he does not escape reducing characters to some types and thus plays along some stereotypes of the Orient. Forster’s India becomes a partial construction based on colonial policies where colonizers carry out their civilizing mission and act out their roles as educators, peacekeepers, and reformers, while the colonized subjects are confined to staging their Orientalism according to the colonizer’s script. In the novel both dominating and dominated subjects take on some roles ascribed to them by Orientalist discourse: the West is fixed as rational, developed, humane, and superior, and the Orient is aberrant, undeveloped, and inferior (Said, 1978, p. 300). In this way both images are pre-given and enter collective consciousness in their altered form, compliant with western discourse, which makes the Other familiar for its English recipients (and thus fighting back the feeling of the uncanny). While analysing colonial discourse in terms of the colonizer-colonized relationship Abdul JanMohamed in “The Economy of Manichean Allegory” observes that responding in terms of sameness must inevitably result in ignoring significant divergences and in judging the native according to the colonizer’s cultural values and ways of thinking. The assumption of difference(s) does not secure authentic and unbiased comprehension of the Other because the colonizer tends to choose the security of his own perspective rather than adopting the viewpoint

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of alterity. The English and Indians occupy a strictly defined space which is governed by binarism: “a field of diverse yet interchangeable oppositions between white and black, good and evil, superiority and inferiority, civilization and savagery, intelligence and emotion, rationality and sensuality, self and Other, subject and object” (JanMohamed, 1985, p. 63). Both the dominating and dominated subjects are caught in the net of the Manichean oppositions that determine the position of each individual and block his authentic, i.e., outside pre-defined roles, development. Forster’s text does not give an alternative to binarism and only partially opens up a space for new sites of enunciation, free from constrictions imposed by western discourse.

In the fictional India, generalizations and stereotypes not only help to familiarize the Other for the western audience but also to sustain a unified vision of the Other that can serve as the opposite and counter-define the colonizer. Exclusions and inclusions, categorizations and classifications help the colonial authorities to perform their civilizing mission in a terrain inhabited by supposedly inferior subjects – they bring political cohesion by binding the entire subcontinent under their efficient aegis, and ensuring peace. One of the British officials remarks on the English “mission” in India: “We’re here to do justice and keep the peace […], to hold this wretched country by force. […]. We’re not pleasant in India, and we don’t intend to be pleasant. We’ve something more important to do” (Forster, 2005, p. 45). To perform their civilizing mission

the English impose some razor-sharp distinctions, which results in some people being left on the margin, outside the privileged position: “We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing” (Forster, 2005, p. 34). These are the superior colonizers who are to be privileged and supervising the oriental Other. Viewed through their national characteristics, and the social and political roles they perform in India, the English are rarely seen as unique individuals, separate from their “sort,” as the power lies in the communal. In the English club “the communal bond is encouraged so that the exiled people can find their own identity with their own clan to withstand all kinds of real or imaginary hostility in a foreign land” (Ganguly, 1990, p. 61). Yet, consequently, the colonizers remain outsiders, gathered in separate and distinct enclaves, cut off from their motherland, willingly isolated from the real world they invaded, and leading a fictitious life. Unable to cope with the actual people the colonizers locate the ‘real’ India within the physical borders of their own microcosm and simplify it to natives riding elephants. What is outside the manageable circle is scary and, therefore, denied its existence; thus, the image of the Other which is created in their memory is fixed on negatives and simplifications and disseminated among other English subjects. What is more, not only the knowledge and memory of the colonized subjects are distorted – similarly, in the process of adjusting and familiarizing the Orient, its authentic surrounding is altered to a great extent. In Stones of Empire

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Jan Morris observes that buildings erected by the English in colonial times are indicative of their need for ‘home feeling’ and some familiar images of “tropical adaptations of the Georgian terrace, orientalized railway stations, or seaside villas, whisked from Paignton to Weymouth, that were inventively adjusted to Himalayan conditions” (Morris, 1994, p. 8) secure a sense of belonging. These “transplanted” images keep memories of the motherland from being erased as it seems that entering the world of the Other and taking it as their own would result in the loss of their national identity. The English identity is a simulacrum of ‘Englishness’; that is, the ‘essence’ of the national identity translated onto a foreign land and determined by some pre-defined roles imposed by colonial discourse. In Simulacra and Simulation Jean Baudrillard explains the mechanisms operating behind producing a simulacrum in the following way: “The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control […]. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instances. It is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from radiating synthesis of combinatory models in hyberspace without atmosphere. […] It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real […]” (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 2). The result is a simulacrum:

an artificial entity where the real is substituted with a new real created out of fiction, and the original is lost, the Other is “frozen, cryogenized, sterilized, protected to death” (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 8; italics in original), eternally immobilised (Said, 1978, p. 208) and becomes a living specimen. In A Passage to India both English and Indian characters operate on ‘adjusted’ realities: the natives are convinced that the English microcosm mirrors life in the colonizers’ motherland, whereas some of the English are made to believe the ‘real’ India materializes itself in elephants and child-like inhabitants.

In A Passage to India Forster shows the Orient as viewed through the lens of colonial discourse (even if he aims at ‘real India’) and remembered by its masters – it is the colonizer who allows Indian colonial history to enter the discourse and become its part. Indian history becomes its integral component, but only as a one-sided account, and thus history is distorted and biased towards the dominating subjects. The British Raj “seems to be […] rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe,” where “the west is the actor, the Orient passive reactor, [t]he West is spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behaviour” and “the vision of Orient as spectacle, or tableau vivant” (Said, 1978, pp. 63, 109, 158). It is the memory of the spectacle, not the actual happenings, that stays in the memory of Forster’s western audience. The place and its inhabitants are both narrated and created through western discourse; its factual and fictional images diverge, whereas

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“this little matter of the colour of the skin” (Scott, 2007, p. 70) makes equal relations impossible and determines the way in which the oriental Other enters and stays in western collective consciousness. It is language, ideology, and discourse which define the Other and produce his colonial subjectivity, the construction of his identity being an end-product of these influences rather than a conscious action. Reducing the

colonized to a fetish allows for the denial of subjectivity, agency, voice, and the inscription of the Other into the discourses of primitivism or cannibalism, which in turn facilitates the application of binary oppositions. Still the variety of colonial accounts and the gaps in the biased pictures of the stereotyped Other promise alternative, in-between spaces which mark the sites of colonial resistance.

Works cited:Baudrillard, J., 1994. Simulacra and simulation. Jackson: University of Michigan Press.Boehmer, E., 1995. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Migrant Metaphors. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Childs, P., 2002. E. M. Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’. A Sourcebook. Abingdon: Routledge. Forster, E. M., 2005. A Passage to India. London: Penguin Books.Ganguly, A., 1990. India: mystic, complex, and real. A detailed study of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers.JanMohamed, A. R, 1985. “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature.” In: Critical Inquiry. Vol. 12, pp. 59-87.King, F., 1978. E. M. Forster and his World. London: Thames and Hudson.Morris, J., 1994. Stones of Empire. The Buildings of British India. London: Penguin Books.Peppis, P., 2007. “Forster and England.” In: Bradshaw, David (ed). The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 47-61.Said, E., 1978. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books.Scott, P., 2007. The Raj Quartet. London: Alfred A. Knopf.Twain, M., 1989. Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Mineola: Dover Publications.

ShitlandFeel how the wind caresses my bladesand how I stretch out all my limbs. Pulla blanket over me, perceivein me the greenest south.Then trample me down under loud bellowing -I want to feel the sinking of your hoofs:take me in, stroll me straight, lick me lush.Graze me till a barren steppe.© Steven Pollet

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Abstract:

The novel Atonement (2001) is one of the most prominent works of one of the most acclaimed contemporary British writers, Ian McEwan. Not only has the book been considered by many to be McEwan’s most outstanding work, but its miscellaneousness and complexity enable one to read it as much expected evidence of the author’s potential. Seen from this perspective, Atonement is an unprecedented work in the writer’s career as it is the first to touch openly upon the themes of writing, history, and memory. Although Atonement is no longer McEwan’s only book concerning the past since On Chesil Beach (2007) narrates events happening in the early

1960s, its subjectively tinted narrative perspective, as opposed to the editorial omniscience employed in most of On Chesil Beach, makes it the author’s most profound treatment of the theme of the relation between history, memory, and writing, one shaping “questions about moral responsibility for both a personal and a collective past” (Grmelová, 2007, p.154).

As the theme of history and memory logically cannot be treated in isolation, it is useful to mention the most recurrent themes McEwan explores in the novel: the tense atmosphere of paralysed sterility disguised as seeming peacefulness and evoking

The Attempt Was All – the theme of memory in Ian McEwan’s Atonement

Petr ChalupskýPetr Chalupský received his doctoral degree from the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, Charles University in Prague. He currently works as assistant lecturer in English Literature at the Department of English Language and Literature at Faculty of Education, Charles University, Prague. He teaches courses in English and British Literature and Literary Theory. His research interests include the image of the city and its culture and commercial culture in general in contemporary British Literature.

This article focuses on the treatment of the theme of memory and recollection of the past in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001). As its theoretical point of departure it refers to selected studies by David Lowenthal and Linda Hutcheon. The main aim is to show the originality with which McEwan explores the theme by employing narrative strategies of multiple perspectives, periphery of vision and fragmentary moments. It argues that the force of the combination of the latter two strategies derives from the fact that the narrative itself resembles the very process of recollection.

I do not know the truth, or I do not know how to tell the truth. All I have are stories, night thoughts, the sudden convictions that uncertainty spawns.

Anne Enright, The Gathering, p. 2

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sinister expectations, culminating in “the revelation of psychological and emotional disturbances beneath an ordered social veneer” (Head, 2002, p. 217); the theme of an imposed order based on some institutional or conventional, and thus unnatural, dominance of a certain individual or group over others, namely the despotism and arrogance of the patriarchal world; and the theme of childhood, especially the ambivalent and unstable border between childhood and adulthood, seen as the time during which one’s identity and character are formed.

Atonement also employs several of McEwan’s favourite narrative strategies, most of which are further developed in this novel. The first is the convoluted narration of a somehow detached, willingly or unwillingly uninvolved narrator, “one that suggests inevitability stripped of significance” (Bradford, 2007, p. 19), a strategy that simultaneously renders the reader inside and outside of the narration. The second is the narrative of moments offering the reader “a series

of imaginative set pieces which seldom coagulate into a fully realized work” (Malcolm, 2002, p. 161), the basic idea of which is that modern human existence often lacks a smooth linear continuity from one event to another, and rather is constituted by a series of fragmentary experiences and episodes. The third is the final twist of the novel which, in Atonement, represents a far more ambitious ending than in McEwan’s other novels, since it is both shocking and playful and as such has a qualitatively different effect1. The fact that the reader is left feeling insecure about what really happened and what was merely a product of the writer’s imagination indicates that the aim of such a final twist is not to simply shock or amuse the readers, but to draw their attention to the fact that two new themes have been explored by the writer – the actual process of writing itself, and that of memory and its dubious role in the recollection and recreation of the past. The aim of this article is to focus on how the latter is dealt with.

Out of a foreign country - memory and history

It is undeniable that the past is an integral constituent of human life. Who and what we are is crucially conditioned by where we come from, who our ancestors were, what we have experienced in life. Our awareness of the past shapes our identity and self-consciousness. Therefore, to understand and come to terms with past events represents an essential condition for our capacity to apprehend

the present. Understandably, each historical era has its own motives and reasons for exploring and narrativising the past. The growing postmodernist interest in history can be partially explained by people’s need, and often desperate search, for certainties, that are so scarce in their overwhelmingly disparate and ungraspable everyday lives. As many people find themselves at a loss when facing up

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to the discontinuous and de-centred postmodern condition, they tend to become nostalgic for the good old days as a compensational strategy – while the future is too unpredictable and the present too elusive to be given any shape, the past appears to be something tangible and conclusive which can be studied, known, understood and thus made immortal. Under such circumstances, one can find solace in cherishing everything connected with bygone times, from glorious monuments to single memories. Though most people do realise that the past is far from recoverable, they at least keep trying to reconstruct or, more precisely, reinvent it by attributing new meanings to it using their imagination, personal wishes, and idealised projections.

The problem, of course, is how we can know the past. The answer seems very simple – through the texts and records we read, the relics we are surrounded by and which we perpetually try to interpret and endow with meaning and, last but not least, through memories and recollections of events we ourselves have witnessed. It is needless to emphasise that what we have experienced, as well as events that have happened in the course of our lives, are of much greater importance to our notion of who we are than anything that happened prior to our conscious existence. It follows that the role of memory is absolutely crucial for our making sense of the world in which we live: “All awareness of the past is founded on memory. Through recollection we recover consciousness of former events, distinguish yesterday

from today, and confirm that we have experienced a past. […] Memory pervades life. We devote much of the present to getting or keeping in touch with some aspects of the past. Few waking hours are devoid of recall or recollection; only intense concentration on some immediate pursuit can prevent the past from coming unbidden to mind” (Lowenthal, 2006, pp. 194-5). For all these reasons, people tend to consider memory as a credible record of the past, which derives its consistency and reliability from its eyewitness status. This persuasion, however, can easily be discredited due to the very nature of memory, which is in principle rather unreliable.

A determining property of memory is its intensely personal character. Unlike history, which is largely collective and can thus be shared with other people, memory is much more inviolable and private. We automatically keep most of our memories and recollections off-the-record or even secret. Memory thus operates as a uniquely personal mechanism, one with more far-reaching consequences for those who remember than for those who choose to share and discuss other people’s recollections. This aspect of memory causes each person to inevitably transform what he or she has experienced into a subjectively coloured version of reality. As a result, there is rarely an absolute overlap and correlation between two different recollections of the same event. Another extravagant belief is that once we remember something, such a memory remains intact and unaltered forever. As we spend much

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of our conscious time thinking about what happened to us in the past, we in fact keep working with our memories and recollections by re-ordering them, putting them into new contexts, viewing them from different perspectives, re-evaluating them in the light of some newly obtained knowledge or experience, and selecting those we like and displacing those we would like to forget. Moreover, alongside the process of remembering, there is always the unavoidable and natural process of forgetting, which makes our memory even more inconsistent and unstable. The third determining factor of memory and its processes is the fact that although we perceive our experience as a consecutive flow of acts and events, our memory does not record it as such, but rather in the form of separate and often self-contained instants. Therefore, what we call ‘logical’ causal connections between these moments are in fact the workings of our imagination, assumptions, and speculations, which enable us to fill in the most convenient link at hand, one that is most in concord with how we wish the past to have happened in order to explicate its present consequences.

All the above-mentioned character-istics of memory make it a rather untrustworthy guide to the past, which is beyond retrieval (ibid., p. 106). Although our memories were recorded at the time of the original experience and therefore seem congruent, they have in fact undergone substantial alterations in the course of their recollection and verbalisation as a result of our tendency to perpetually personalise, revise, and

imaginatively reinvent them, with our changing notions about how things should have been as well as what other people have told us. The primary aim of these processes is not, as many believe, to preserve the past objectively, but to adapt it in order to legitimise and manipulate the present. Remembering and recollecting are, in other words, one of the key strategies we employ to comprehend the complexity of our existence.

We can find several affinities between the recollection of memories and creative writing. In fact, whenever we interpret or share our memories we face up the problem of how to convert our dispersed recollections into continuous narratives. If we want to communicate and comprehend our past we have to employ our creativity so as to make it more intelligible and plausible. The result of such a process is the creation of reworked stories based on the often incoherent bits we remember. “The contingent and discontinuous facts of the past become intelligible only when woven together as stories. […] History is persuasive because it is organized by and filtered through individual minds, not in spite of that fact; subjective interpretation gives it life and meaning” (ibid., p.218). Transforming our memories into narratives thus requires a great deal of invention and their communication represents a contract similar to that between a writer and his or her readers: the writer ‘sells’ a story which is both intriguing and convincing, and readers ‘buy’ it because they believe it can enrich and extend their life experience. “All accounts of

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the past tell stories about it, and hence are partly invented; as we have seen, story-telling also imposes its exigencies on history” (Hexter, 1972, pp. 289-90). Although these stories never fully

explain what actually happened, they make the past vivid and accessible and thus more likely to be appropriated by the ever-changing present.

Casting light on the present – history and memory in contemporary fiction

While all of McEwan’s novels before Atonement dealt more or less with contemporary Britain (Enduring Love), Britain of a not-so-distant past (The Cement Garden) or future (The Child in Time), or the contemporary world in general (The Comfort of Strangers, Black Dogs, Amsterdam), in Atonement his interest shifts to the theme of the past, the (im)possibility of knowing it objectively and exactly, and the ambiguous relation between memory and reality. McEwan has thus joined other contemporary British and Irish writers who have made the past one of the central themes of their works, such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Peter Ackroyd, John Banville and Anne Enright. Therefore, Atonement, like other postmodern historiographic novels and other fiction dealing with the past, “reinstalls historical contexts as significant and even determining, but in so doing, it problematises the entire notion of historical knowledge. […] And the implication is that there can be no single, essentialised, transcendent concept of “genuine historicity’” (Hutcheon, 1992, p. 89). The novel attempts to confront the problematic nature of the past as a univocal object of our present-day knowledge. We know that the past did

exist; the question is how we can know it and what we are able to recall of it.

As already mentioned, writing fiction dealing with the past and human memory are, in many respects, similar processes. They both transform discrete past events into coherent narratives and, by doing so, they keep the past alive and thus more easily utilised by the present. As Linda Hutcheon (1992, p. 110) argues, “postmodern fiction suggests that to re-write or to re-present the past in fiction and in history is, in both cases, to open it up to the present, to prevent it from being conclusive and teleological”. It follows that, like our recollection of the past, each historical fiction represents a particular creative reinterpretation of the original events, one that has its inner logic, consistency and discursive strategies. However, there is one substantial difference between historical fiction and memory: the first is much more conscious of the impossibility of bringing the past to the present in a preserved, intact form than the latter. These fictions appear to prefer those narrative perspectives that underline the narrator’s subjectivity and problematise his or her ability to reproduce the past with any certainty. Therefore, although they create a totality in the form of a self-contained narrative,

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they do so only in order to challenge its validity; they install “totalizing order, only to contest it, by [their] radical provisionality, intertextuality, and, often, fragmentation” (ibid., p. 116). In other words, they often make their narrators believe in the reliability and integrity of their own memories and recollections.

The fact that memory operates on traces, dispersed moments, and remnants suggests that the past it recollects is not given but constructed by knitting together selected facts into stories. This is well reflected in postmodernist fiction, which “establishes, differentiates, and then disperses stable narrative voices (and bodies) that use memory to try to make sense of the past” (ibid., p. 118). Like memory, contemporary fiction dealing with the past works on the principle of selectivity – it constitutes its objects and decides which historical facts and events will become legitimised by being sealed in the narrative. The key reason behind fiction’s use of the theme of memory is not so much to restore the past but to define and give meaning to the subject, and

consequently to the reader and his or her notion of the world and themselves. The distinction between the factual and the fictional thus becomes blurred “and the real world seems to get lost in the shuffle. But of course this is precisely the question postmodernist fiction is designed to raise: real, compared to what?” (McHale, 1987, p. 96). It seems to be a universal experience of people in the postmodern era that simulacra of reality often appear more real, more enticing and believable, than the actual reality they reflect or substitute. And if our present reality is made subject to questioning, what then can be said about the past? The purpose of fiction’s focus on history and memory is to explore the complicated relationship between these two notions and show the possible effects they can have on our lives – and this is exactly what McEwan’s Atonement does. As Geoff Dyer (2001) puts it: “It is less about a novelist harking nostalgically back to the consoling uncertainties of the past than it is about creatively extending and hauling a defining part of the British literary tradition up to and into the 21st century”.

The power of detail - memory in AtonementThe spectrum of themes Atonement

touches on is very wide – guilt, love, penitence, writing, childhood, and the fragility of human relationships are only a few of many. In her review, Laura Miller (2002) argues that one of the central themes of the novel is lying in its various forms, which is undeniable since, as we have already seen, whenever memory, remembering, and

recollecting are involved, lying occurs as both a conscious and unconscious byproduct of these processes. McEwan’s novel revolves around the theme of memory and recollecting the past, and, by doing so, it must necessarily operate with such phenomena as forgetting, revising, selecting and other strategies commonly employed when people are trying to reconstruct their

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past. As a result, each such attempt in fact represents a certain kind of lie or at least a partial or incomplete truth. What makes Atonement an outstanding achievement among other novels exploring this theme is the complexity and playfulness with which the novel approaches it – Briony’s different perspectives, first as a child and then as a reputable writer in her late seventies, the fact that there have been eight different drafts of her novel, the seemingly irrelevant war-focused Part Two depicting Robbie on the front, and the in places debatable Part Three, in which the novice nurse Briony attends to the incoming wounded, which she believes might serve as her atonement. In addition, there is the novel’s final irony: its narrator is suffering from vascular dementia, a succession of tiny strokes resulting in a progressive failing of her memory and mastery of language. What all these aspects have in common is that none of them contributes to the story’s factual credibility, yet each of them makes it more absorbing and vivid to read.

McEwan does not rush into a mention of the theme of memory and recollection of the past as he at first very patiently draws the readers into the protagonists’ anxieties and the tense atmosphere of the household. The pivotal moment of the story is the scene depicting the incident between Cecilia and Robbie, which takes place at the fountain. After the readers learn what actually happened between the two young people, they are offered Briony’s misguided perspective of the event. Although she repeatedly

strives to remain an objective observer, accepting that “she did not understand, and she must simply watch” and “how easy it was to get everything wrong, completely wrong” (McEwan, 2001, p. 39), she does not resist attributing the scene a comprehensible resolution – when a confused Robbie is leaving the scene, she imagines him as “no doubt satisfied” (ibid., p. 39). Briony also realises that she only coincidentally became a witness of the incident, one of an infinite number of others that happen outside the limits of her own experience: “But she knew very well that if she had not stood when she did, the scene would still have happened, for it was not about her at all. Only chance had brought her to the window” (ibid., p. 40). The main aim of these passages, beyond scrutinising a thirteen-year-old girl’s mental processes, is to introduce the theme of how people perceive events happening to and around them, and how they later remember and recollect them. No matter how disparate and illogical these events might seem to us while they are happening, we always tend to impose some kind of an interpretative framework upon them in order to make them an intelligible component of our ‘continuous’ experience. This tendency becomes even stronger with passing time as we forget some details and ‘less important’ circumstances and have to literally reinvent the original event in the form of a narrative. Therefore, Briony, who believes that the incident at the fountain could only make sense written as a story, becomes a metaphor of not only a writer, but also of any person who tries to recollect the past in

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a form accessible to those who do not share the same experience.

At the end of the chapter, the narrative perspective changes and it is no longer Briony but McEwan, who makes readers aware of the scene’s significance for the development of the theme: “When the young girl went back to the window and looked down, the damp patch on the gravel had evaporated. Now there was nothing left of the dumb show by the fountain beyond what survived in memory, in three separate and overlapping memories. The truth had become as ghostly as invention” (ibid., p. 41). It is at this point that the narrative invites a new possible reading as of a philosophical novel dealing with the blurred memory/fiction-reality polarity, which is “pitting the imagination against what it has to imagine if we are to be given the false assurance that there is a match between our fictions and the specifications of reality. The pleasure it gives depends as much on our suspending belief as on our suspending disbelief” (Kermode, 2001). As the illusion of any ‘objective’ reality dies as soon as it occurs, and what we are left with is nothing more than our subjective memory which tends, over time, to be more and more selective, imaginative, and unreliable, the power of history derives not from a few historical facts, but from its infinite potential of reinvention, serving thus as a permanent challenge for the natural human need to make the past intelligible and sharable through recreating and telling it in the form of stories. The whole structure of the novel, with its final twist, can thus be seen as both an

imaginative and elaborate variation of this theme – the process of a fictional invention of past events, the years 1935 and 1940, is made a subject of the elderly Briony’s meta-commentary, while they are both narrated within another fictional invention, the actual novel by McEwan.

The perpetual questioning of the relation between reality and one’s perception of it continues in Part Two, which depicts two days of the 1940 Dunkirk retreat and evacuation when the much damaged and demoralised remnants of the BEF are heading to the coast in order to be transported back to Britain. The power of the episode is achieved by the fact that although it is an account of the war, readers in fact see no fighting and the war is viewed as if from the periphery. The events are refracted through Robbie’s exhausted, half-hallucinatory, self-focused point of view, influenced by his wound and the fact that all his acts are motivated almost exclusively by his desire to survive while retaining an essential sense of humanity. By using this narrative perspective McEwan manages to create a narration which is very authentic as it closely resembles a participant’s recollection of events – discontinuous and non-cohesive, things happen without having a cause or any logical explanation, life breaks into disparate, almost picaresque, moments of high emotional intensity which the narration unfolds in a series of vividly realised scenes and details – “corpses, craters, a shoe-shop, the drone of oncoming German fighters, which sharpen McEwan’s prose into some of

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its characteristic split-second clarity” (Shone, 2002). Robbie is well aware of the uniqueness of an individual’s experience of history in the making when he observes the atrocities around him: “Who could ever describe this confusion, and come up with the village names and the dates for the history books? And take the reasonable view and begin to assign the blame? No one would ever know what it was like to be here. Without the details there could be no larger picture” (McEwan, 2001, p. 227). Minute details rather than any overall exhaustive picture are what McEwan’s narrative account resembling memory recollection attempts at above all.

However, it is exactly these details that often, under the pressure of oncoming events, slip out of one’s memory, leaving the account of what actually happened even more disrupted and irretrievable. Again, McEwan lets his thoughtful protagonist contemplate this phenomenon: “It wasn’t the wound, though it hurt at every step, and it wasn’t the dive-bombers circling over the beach some miles to the north. It was his mind. Periodically, something slipped. Some everyday principle of continuity, the humdrum element that told him where he was in his own story, faded from his use, abandoning him to a waking dream in which there were thoughts, but no sense of who was having them. No responsibility, no memory of the hours before, no idea of what he was about, where he was going, what his plan was. And no curiosity about these matters. He would then find himself in the grip of illogical certainties” (ibid.,

p. 246). When it comes to recollecting and interpreting past experience, the only certainty we are left with is that it lacks a purely logical structure, which is not available in a ready-made narrative form; rather, it resembles a dream that is often difficult to retell sensibly. In the middle of the pulsing present it turns out to be impossible to retain a clear-cut notion not only of one’s past but also of one’s role and position within it. Under such circumstances, what remain are isolated, mostly mutually disconnected, reminiscences about moments of great emotional intensity, and even these are usually reduced only to certain words, gestures, or images which, with every single recollection, appear more and more remote and hazy. This is what happened with Robbie’s most precise memories of the few intimate moments with Cecilia: “His most sensual memories – their few minutes in the library, the kiss in Whitehall – were bleached colourless through overuse. He knew by heart certain passages from the letters, he had revisited their tussle with the vase by the fountain, and he remembered the warmth from her arm at the dinner when the twins went missing. These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as BC and AD” (ibid., p. 226). The effect of such memories is that they further reinforce and make even more persistent the already monstrous and incomprehensible present.

The main difference between Parts One and Two is the narrative

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perspective of limited omniscience. The narrator (Briony) presents the whole episode through Robbie’s eyes, yet, as is made clear at the end of the novel, she could not hear it from him. Moreover, even if she could read the letters the lovers wrote in the archives of the War Museum, they definitely did not contain any account of his last day. Even if we accept that in Atonement we are reading Briony Tallis’s autobiographic novel, in Part Two the narrative abandons the still not very reliable ground of possible eye-witness evidence and leaves us to wonder whether the events happened or not, whether anyone could vouch for their truthfulness. The fact that she has had her draft proofread by a person who himself experienced the events suggests that, even though based on thorough research, we are still reading a mere fictional recreation. The ‘war’ part reveals McEwan’s stylistic mastery as it maintains persuasiveness and authenticity exactly through its focus on the depiction of details rather than their explanation, in other words, by employing the mechanisms of memory and recollection in the narrative. Yet, we also learn a new piece of information in this part of the novel about the drowning incident between Briony and Robbie, whose consequences could have played an important role in what she did three years later. The fact that it is not mentioned before thus casts doubt on the reliability even of Part One, as protecting her sister from a violent ‘maniac’ no longer seems a satisfactory motivation for Briony’s acts, which is confirmed later when the reader learns the ending of her juvenile play The

Trials of Arabella.A similar strategy is employed in Part

Three, although here the point of view is Briony’s and the reader learns what she was doing in London during the war years. She originally decided to become a nurse as a way of repenting for what she did, but she gradually finds out that her atonement will lie elsewhere, in the fiction she writes when she is not on duty. Her first draft, however, is far from that as it represents a kind of modernist treatment of the single episode at the fountain without any mention of what came after. Briony admits the auto-therapeutic and evasive nature of her novella after she receives a supportive rejection letter from Cyril Connolly, editor of Horizon, who encourages her to go on writing but suggests that she should find her own style. “Did she really think she could hide behind some borrowed notions of modern writing, and drown her guilt in a stream – three streams! – of consciousness? The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella – and was necessary to it. What was she to do now? It was not the backbone of a story that she lacked. It was backbone” (ibid., p. 320). She realises that instead of recalling the original events as they happened she in fact avoided this by displacing most of the crucial acts and moments from the narrative. Once again, her writing parallels her recollection of the past as it perpetually selects its convenient parts and revises and reorders them while simultaneously ignoring some others. Like the proofreader’s comments on

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the details of the war scenes, though more playfully, Connolly’s letter has the function of making the novel highly self-reflexive as it contains a critique of its own first draft. Moreover, in both cases, when we read the particular passages again we can see that most of the suggested revisions have been made. In effect, the status of the narrative is similar to that of Part Two – a fictional reworking of the past rather than its

reliable account. Moreover, any illusion of this part’s truthfulness is destroyed by the made-up final scene in which Briony visits Cecilia and Robbie in their London lodgings. As we know that nothing like that took place in reality, we are forced to question other ‘facts’ of the story as well. Did Briony really serve as a nurse? Was not the letter from Connolly an invention? How much are we captives of the narrative, ambiguously signed ‘B.T.’?

Within the realm of the possible

It is undeniable that we almost unceasingly encounter the past and make very little distinction between the personal and the collective past as both are recollected and reinterpreted through the prism of our contemporarily lived life experience. As we grow older, more mature, and experienced in the course of our lifetimes, our perception of reality changes along with our interpretation of past events and we simply see things differently than we did at the time when they happened. What we experienced in the past has already been repeatedly filtered by the perspective of the present. Moreover, this perspective is perpetually being shaped by the numerous influences of the socio-cultural environment in which we find ourselves – its prevailing values and beliefs, its schema and discourses, its medial representations and other determinants of our notions of who we are and what kind of world we live in. Our past and our memories are thus gradually woven into stories, at first separate, unrelated and existing as if outside chronological time, later, in the

process of their incessant retelling, we tend to include them in chronologically ordered narratives with relatively precise cause-effect mechanisms. And so already at the beginning of the novel Briony admits to her memories having been repeatedly fictionally revised in the course of her life: “it was not the long-ago morning she was recalling so much as her subsequent accounts of it” (ibid., p. 41).

Therefore, no matter how honest our intentions to restore the past are, we always end up trapped in our attempt to explicate, justify, or otherwise give meaning and sense to the present. The more historically distant the event, the more we remember it as we wish it to have happened. As a result, one clearly remembered detail can overshadow much of what preceded and followed it, which is exactly the case of Briony’s testimony: “[she] was to have no memory of what suddenly prompted her. An idea of great clarity and persuasiveness came from nowhere, and she did not need to announce her intentions, or ask her sister’s permission. Clinching evidence,

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cleanly independent of her own version. Verification. Or even another, separate crime” (ibid., p. 176). What becomes important then is not what kind of truth survives but whose truth and history gets told (Hutcheon, 1992, p.123) and, consequently, which motives lie behind their narrative construction. Briony’s motive was to atone and so she amended the past in order to face up to her feeling of guilt. However, at the end of her literary career she is no longer fooling herself that a writer who becomes God in the act of creation can stretch her omnipotent power beyond the realm of the fictional world and that what was destroyed in real life can be mended by writing. The lesson that Briony learns is that no writing can absolve its author from the moral responsibility for his or her past acts. All a writer can do is to make his or her version be heard, to offer a piece of fiction in which truthfulness does not apply as a criterion of evaluation. The potential of putting our memories and recollections into stories consists in making our own and other people’s lives more meaningful, enriching, and therefore more pleasant. As McEwan claims at the end of his novel, atonement for a novelist is always an impossible task; what really matters is the attempt to create not necessarily a truthful but, above all, a forceful story because “novels need this force, and must find it where they can, if only in the annals of the past” (Updike, 2002).

Since Atonement is, among other things, a novel concerning the mechanisms of writing, one of its central themes of is that of the past,

how we remember it, and how our recollections can be represented in language and in fiction. This theme is a challenging one and as such it brings difficulties because it drives the writer to consider the impossibility of any plausible verbal representation of the past, often resulting in “a vague but self-conscious authorial gesturing towards the difficulties of representation, rather than any perceptive engagement with them” (MacFarlane, 2001). The result can thus be a relativist postmodernist text toying with the ultimate absence of any certitude concerning the relation between the past and the possibility of its recollection. McEwan, however, manages to avoid this trap as he “focuses on the way in which we create the future by making it fit templates of the past; how the forms into which the imagination is shaped by fiction are applied to life. It is in this way, he suggests, that literature can make things happen, and not always for the good” (MacFarlane, 2001). Our memory may not be an absolutely reliable record of what originally happened, but still it is the most natural source to hand, and to dismiss it would mean to give up on comprehending our past and to render the formation of our identity impossible. In this respect, fiction has a different position as it is not motivated by the desire to depict reality as it was but rather as it could have been. McEwan’s treatment of the theme of memory follows Milan Kundera’s (2005, p. 43) persuasion that “[a] novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred; existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything

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that a man can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility”. The theme enables McEwan to pose the question concerning the mutual influence between reality and fiction. While the first always determines the latter, the influence in the opposite direction is far more limited. Briony’s novel proved useless in helping its author with her

burden of moral responsibility, yet it by no means prevents it from becoming a book people can enjoy and appreciate reading. Although stories do not generally directly alter our lives, they add an important dimension to them, one that is necessary to enable us to understand who we are and make us ask what it means to be a human being. From this point of view, Atonement is a rare achievement.

Endnotes:1. For a more detailed analysis of McEwan’s characteristic themes and narrative strategies see Chalupský (2006).

Works cited:Bradford, R., 2007. The Novel Now. Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.Chalupský, P. 2006. “Atonement – Continuity and Change in Ian McEwan’s Works”. In Bubíková, Š., Roe-buck, O. (eds.). Continuity and Change in Culture and Literature. Pardubice: Univerzita Pardubice, pp. 1-10.Dyer, G. “Who’s afraid of influence?” [review of Atonement]. The Guardian 22 September 2001.Enright, A., 2007. The Gathering. London: Vintage.Grmelová, A. 2007. “About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters”: An intertextual reading of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. In: Procházka, M. (ed.). Literaria Pragensia, vol. 17, no. 34, pp. 153-157.Head, D., 2002. Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Hexter, J. H., 1972. The History Primer. London: Allen Lane/Penguin.Hutcheon, L., 1992. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge.Kermode, F. “Point of View” [review of Atonement]. London Review of Books 4 October 2001. Kundera, M., 2005 (1998). The Art of the Novel. London: Faber and Faber. Lowenthal, D., 2006 (1985). The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Lowenthal, D., 1998. The Heritage Crusade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Malcolm, D., 2002. Understanding Ian McEwan. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.McEwan, I., 2001. Atonement. London: Vintage.MacFarlane, R. “Atonement” [review of Atonement]. The Times Literary Supplement 28 September 2001.McHale, B., 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.Miller, L. “Atonement” [review of Atonement]. Salon.com 21 March 2002. Available at:<http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review/2002/03/21/mcewan/index.html>.Shone, T. “White Lies” [review of Atonement]. The New York Times 10 March 2002.Updike, J. “Flesh on Flesh: A Semi-Audenesque Novel from Ian McEwan” [review of Atonement]. The New Yorker 4 March 2002.

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Abstract:

Across the wide range of Scottish writing there is a recurring preoccupation with memory and how it determines and reflects consciousness. Memory is as central to the major novels as is their concern for identity; it is a constant reference in their works. In the novels written in Scotland in the last three decades the theme of memory takes an important place. Remembering is associated with effort, and memory is depicted as a painful struggle, all the same acknowledging the importance of memory. Characters in the novels by Galloway, Kennedy, and McWilliam analyse their past to learn something about themselves. We may closely observe the act of fishing out the past to understand the present. Memory of the former self shapes the contemporary one. It enables the characters to emerge from the trauma

and reminds them about the necessity to of wrestling with reality. This article will attempt to investigate the function of memory, and the influence of the past on the present, as well as the strategies of deploying memories in forming personal identities in Janice Galloway’s The Trick Is to Keep Breathing (1989), A.L. Kennedy’s Looking for the Possible Dance (1993), and Candia McWilliams’s Debatable Land (1994).

Janice Galloway created perhaps one of the most striking portraits of beleaguered women in contemporary Scottish fiction in The Trick Is to Keep Breathing (Galloway 1989). Joy Stone is not “the self-reliant feminist of myth” (Burgess, 1994, p. 99). She is a woman whose name is the exact opposite of the way she feels, and who probably realizes it since she reveals her name very late in the novel. She undergoes

Struggling to Remember, Remembering to Struggle: Three Novels by Contemporary Scottish Women Authors Monika SzubaMonika Szuba completed her PhD. on the subject of strategies of contestation in the novels of contemporary Scottish women authors at Gdańsk University, Poland. She has published a num-ber of articles on Scottish literature, and is a grantee of Cirius Programme at the University of Southern Denmark (2007). Her research interests include twentieth-century British fiction, Scottish fiction, post-colonial studies, feminism, comparative literature, and French literature.

In the novels of three contemporary Scottish novelists, (Janice Galloway, Candia McWilliam and A.L. Kennedy,) memory is granted a special role; namely, it serves to bring back the for-mer self in order to comprehend the present. In each novel the characters rely on the act of remembering, reworking the past which at times takes the form of a struggle when charac-ters traverse especially painful memories. Reworking the past is also an important part of the grieving process. The novels portray individuals in search of identity, lost, or muddled. Through memories and with the help of memory they (re)gain knowledge of themselves.

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a severe depression and struggles in search for her identity after the loss of her lover. The reader learns about this in fits and starts as the narration is torn in a manner similar to Joy’s disintegrated personality. The disintegration and fragmentation of her personality progresses throughout the novel. Her consciousness is shattered and this, in turn, is reflected in the fragmented memories and images of the past coming back to her. In his short prose text, How It Is (1964), Samuel Beckett presents memory as a painful struggle. Reminiscing on one’s life is compared to crawling through mud. Similarly, Galloway’s character has to crawl through a heap of painful memories first to emerge changed. Differently than in Beckett’s text, however, the crawling has a positive result.

As the pieces of her dismantled story are assembled again, it emerges that her lover had drowned on their holiday in Spain. The scene, after she has been reminded about it, haunts her unstoppably. She is not mentioned as a grieving person, as opposed to his legitimate wife, during the man’s funeral. The funeral scene as well as the scene by the pool do not cease to return in the text. These traumatic experiences reverberate in Joy’s narrative and inevitably become one of the reasons for the loss of her identity. Petrie claims that “such a systematic erasure of self, which is manifest in various aspects of Joy’s behaviour, can only be seen in relation to the operations of a social system where the identity of ‘mistress’ has a similar meaning and value to that of ‘prostitute’” (Galloway, 1989, p. 68).

Petrie compares this portrayal with James Kelman’s protagonists: “Joy Stone’s predicament recalls the similar plight of Kelman’s damaged male characters” (Petrie, 2004, p. 67). Joy Stone is an example of an oppressed female struggling against dominant discourses. As a consequence of her lover’s death, she suffers from trauma resulting in depression, anorexia, and a suicide attempt. Her memories, though painful, help her traverse a harrowing stage in her life and emerge altered.

Equally, a female body, depicted as fragile and vulnerable, constitutes a reflection of an overall susceptibility of women to coercion and injury. Joy’s body, “withering in anorexia” and not menstruating any more, “has become a tissue of other people’s discourses, her own voice barely registered, left outside the body of the text and ‘bleeding’ into the silence beyond its boundaries” (Craig, 1999, p. 193). When her body forgets how to bleed, Joy makes an appointment with a doctor who scans her for possible pregnancy. What she sees on the screen is emptiness: “This green cave was me. I make light on the screen therefore I am. (…) Maybe I really was pregnant. We might be doing more than discovering I exist: someone else might exist in me too. I scoured the screen looking for something sure to surface on of the haze of the monitor” (Galloway, 1989, p. 146). But the there is nothing to be seen. The gynecologist confirms what others have pointed out that Joy is empty inside. After the doctor states “Nothing there at all” (Galloway, 1989, p. 146), she looks to check whether she is still there, whether she has not

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been erased entirely. “I looked. I was still there. A black hole among the green stars. Empty space. I had nothing inside me” (Galloway, 1989, p. 146). The scene is a symbolic demonstration that in a patriarchal world woman is an absence; she has been erased from the important social spheres. As Craig writes this “the black hole” suggests not only a woman “negated by a patriarchal society but (…) a society aware of itself only as an absence, a society aware of itself only as an absence” (Craig, 1999, p. 199). She is forgotten by society, rejected by it; she experiences the overwhelming sensation of being negated and erased. Consequently, healing involves remembering her erased identity, re-placing herself; recovering entails the difficult task of remembering herself.

When, tormented by depression, she is unable to get up and go to work, she remembers: “I can’t think how I fell into this unProtestant habit. I used to be so conscientious. I used to be so good all the time” (81). Then she explains what “good” means. It is “productive/hardworking/wouldn’t say boo” (81). She was a good student, so “eager to please” (Galloway, 1989, p. 81), so overzealous that other people made fun of her. “Good” is also “value for money” (Galloway, 1989, p. 81) and “not putting anyone out by feeling too much, blank, unobtrusive” (Galloway, 1989, p. 82). Memories of the former self are excruciating.

The fact that she fails to be good is for her the cause for the death of her lover. She believes her condition is God’s punishment. Prillinger notices Joy feels responsible for Michael’s drowning and

“perceives her illness as a failure to be good” (Prillinger, 2000, pp. 182-3). She also thinks she should be punished, for she merits punishment (Prillinger, 2000, p. 184). The guilt she experiences is to some extent her own and “partly induced and promoted by her society” (Gifford, 1997, p. 608).

Butler admits she does not know when a person has mourned another person successfully or “when one has fully mourned another human being” (Butler, 2004, p. 20). It is believed that “the task of mourning” involves incorporation, i.e., melancholia. However, Butler does not agree with Freud’s assertion that to overcome melancholia and thus end mourning successfully one has to “exchange one object for another” (Butler, 2004, p. 20). She suggests that mourning “has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance” (Butler, 2004, p. 21). Her assertion that “there is losing… but there is also the transformative effect of loss” (Butler, 2004, p. 21) is applicable to the two novels by Kennedy and Galloway. Joy’s madness is persistent, yet she manages to recover with time. The memories of her lover’s death reappear in the novel as if in a loop. Reliving the traumatic experience, she can begin her healing process (Prillinger, 2000, p. 181). Her recovery is hinted at at the end when Joy has the idea to learn how to swim: “Maybe I could learn to swim (…) I’m gawky, not a natural swimmer. But I can read up a little, take advice. I read somewhere the trick is to keep

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breathing, make out it’s not unnatural at all. They say it comes with practice” (Galloway, 1989, p. 235).

Galloway uses the same metaphor that Graham Swift does for a short story called “Learning to Swim”, which is also a name for his collection of short stories published in 1982. Similarly to Swift, for Galloway swimming is a metaphor for living (Prillinger, 2000, p. 181). Thus, learning to swim is learning how to live for Joy. The brave resolution she makes constitutes a glimmer of hope. Prillinger draws a parallel between Michael’s drowning, caused by a blow on the head, and Joy is receiving “an emotional blow” (Prillinger, 2000, p. 181) which may entail her drowning. Consequently, “to keep breathing” means being persistent and not surrendering to whatever bad happens — keeping on living (Prillinger, 2000, p. 181). Joy’s recovery starts when she is ready to forgive herself:

The voice is still there. I forgive you. I hear it quite distinctly, my own voicein the empty house.I forgive you (Galloway, 1989, p. 235).

Petrie calls this a “small victory” and claims it “is a vital acknowledgement of self, a necessary precursor for Joy to begin the arduous task of rebuilding her identity as a woman and as a human being” (Perie, 2004, p. 69). In the course of recovery she remembers to struggle for herself.

Kennedy’s novel, Looking for the Possible Dance (1994), opens with a childhood scene in which Margaret’s father teaches her how to dance and live her life. She reminisces on one of

the ceilidhs that her father participated in. This is an event imbued with harmony and intimacy: “Beginning with her wondering, or the cold, or the beautiful plume of her father’s breath which clouded up to make small rainbows around the moon, Margaret often remembers that night” (Kennedy, 1994, p. 2). The “possible dance” may mean seizing the day; it is “a code word for seizing the chance to enjoy oneself whenever possible” (Prillinger, 2000, p. 75), as Prillinger suggests. But the possible dance is at least questionable in a Calvinist country where pleasure is denied. However, Margaret’s father wants her to remember that only “being alive is important” (Kennedy, 1994, p. 5). Her father encompasses all the qualities a perfect man should have according to Margaret. The father gives Margaret a priceless life lesson, a lesson she will not forget. “Everything else is a waste of time” (Kennedy, 1994, p. 1). The father is now dead and Margaret still feels at a loss what to do.

As Stoddart suggest, “the dance metaphor feature in the book’s title works to conjure up an imaginary fullness of communication between individuals or groups who are otherwise uncertain or alienated” (Stoddart, 2005, p. 142). Margaret’s mourning is similar to Joy Stone’s mourning. Both characters are unable to continue their lives normally. However, we do not observe the same dissolution of the character’s psyche in Kennedy’s novel.

The protagonist “is trapped emotionally in a dependence on the memory of her father, who raised her alone, danced with her, held her

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safe” (Gifford, 1996, p. 44). Gifford’s interpretation of the title differs slightly from Prillinger’s reading. He suggests that Margaret “is looking for a possible new dance, a way of carrying past into the future, a way of accepting the disjunctions of present Scotland and Glasgow” (Gifford, 1996, p. 44).

A circular pattern appears in the novel in the scenes of dancing. The circularity of the novel is further reinforced by the fact that Margaret undertakes the trip from Glasgow to London during which she recalls her life and then makes the same journey in reverse. Leaving places and people (her father, Colin, Glasgow) and returning to them gives the novel a circular quality (Dunnigan, 2000, p. 145). Margaret’s relationships with her father and Colin, and her difficulties with her boss, make her leave Glasgow. On the train she meets a fourth man, the disabled James. She starts a journey to London to obtain a perspective on her relationship with Colin, to escape. During this journey, she returns to vital scenes involving her father, her lover, or her boss.

The meeting with James alters the objective of the journey and makes her think her life over. Prillinger writes that he changes the trip into a meditation on distinct issues such as love, responsibility, dependency, and enjoyment (Prillinger, 2000, p. 130). Numerous flashbacks are interwoven in the course of the journey which is thus transformed into “a transitory process which has changed her awareness of her surroundings and which makes her re-evaluate her position (131).

In Debatable Land (1994) Candia

McWilliam addresses issues of “identity and nationhood” (Alexander, 1997, p. 639). She introduces a group of six characters on the enclosed space of a yacht, The Ardent Spirit. Each of them follows an interior journey. According to Alexander, McWilliam uses a “device of the small, enclosed group of characters to pursue personal histories and tensions which are resolved at the end of the journey” (Alexander, 1997, p. 639).

Most of the characters reminisce about their childhood. Alec, the centre of consciousness of the novel, goes back to his early days spent in Edinburgh, reviewing the image of his mother gutting the fish, obsessed with cleanliness, to a befriended brindle dog and the camera obscura on the top of the castle tower. Logan Urquhart, the captain of the boat and the heir of a wealthy Scots American family, returns to his dreary childhood spent in a grim mansion. His meek wife, Elspeth, remembers a trip made together with her parents to a historical site in Scotland, Culloden.

Alec Dundas, correspondingly to the characters of Galloway’s Foreign Parts and Kennedy’s Looking for a Possible Dance, is a travelling Scot, “a restless wanderer” (Petrie, 2004, p. 189). This, according to Petrie, approaches the protagonists to the figure of the Wandering Jew. Petrie points out a narrative strategy common in contemporary Scottish literature which involves protagonists crossing the border between Scotland and England. This is “a journey in which the physical and symbolic crossing of the

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border is paralleled by a psychological, intellectual or moral transformation” (Petrie, 2004, p. 189).

One of the relationships examined in the novel is the one with the mother, or as in Alec’s case, two mothers. Significantly, his first memories are those of his mother, Mairi, and her hands which “had been cured to salt hams by working life gutting and filleting the fish” (McWilliam, 1994, p. 4). Alec seems to have been as close to her as the protagonist-narrator of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu is to his mother, even if their backgrounds are so disparate. His memories are equally vivid. He remembers with wistfulness his “mother’s clarity”, the quality not found in the women he has been involved with, sophisticated and incomprehensible. He yearns for the long-lost simplicity of childhood, when life does not seem complicated, a simplicity he assumes his parents possess.

Alec’s first images are those of gutted fish, vulnerable new born kittens, and ravenous seagulls mercilessly taking out their eyes. This is the grim world of callous cruelty, hard toil, and fishy smells as he recalls it. His mother is obsessed with cleanliness, scouring the floors with a zeal that surpasses all expectations. There is a meek suggestion that she makes an attempt at purging the ubiquitous smell which signifies the slippery surface of a deck under which her grandfather lost his life swept by a wave from his shell of a boat. What is surprising, however, is that Alec, named after his grandfather, does not share his mother’s qualms. On the contrary, terra

firma seems to represent more dangers to him than the waters of the Pacific.

Alec remembers how his mother’s obsession with cleanliness included him. As a child Alec hears his mother get up very early in the morning in order to “flush out the house’s dirty secrets, before she came to get started on his own” (ibid., p. 13). All these repetitive activities, their unmistakable immutability, have a soothing effect on Alec. One of the most vivid memories from the early childhood involves the bathroom window. Having to spend a lot of time in the bathroom, undergoing ablutions, he discovers the beguilingly mysterious world behind a window pane: “Its thick glass was moulded in a million asterisks, a frozen field of dandelion clocks” (ibid., p. 15).

Admittedly, this marvellous discovery provides the little boy with incessant entertainment on long gloomy days. He can spend hours locked in the bathroom putting the pieces of the shattered world together, marvelling at the dazzling possibilities. Alec reminisces that “the privacy of what he enjoyed as he pressed his cold face to the starry window, gave him a sense of being real that did not otherwise outlast his dreams” (ibid., p. 15). The secret window – Alec does not tell either parent about it – allows the eight-year-old boy to create worlds of his own. More importantly, it also forms Alec into an artist. This early sensitivity bears great significance; it sensitizes his eyes, which “inform him, freeze him (…) also feed him” (ibid., p. 59).

As Alec admits himself, he is not a “modern” child; his window is not a toy that could impress his peers. In fact, the

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whole house is a “sumptuously wasteful toy” for him. He “sensed he was pale in the bright colours of the modern street, not up-to the-minute, not developed, his nature not fixed. He was not modern, nor old-fashioned in a way readily understood by modern people” (ibid., p. 16). All these precious images from his childhood have strongly influenced Alec, the painter.

Alec’s childhood memories include a trip to the heart of Edinburgh, its castle and the camera obscura hidden inside it. There, he sees the city of Edinburgh “laid out in a bowl” for the first time. Thus he sees its streets from a different perspective, recreated like the landscape outside his bathroom window. This is an intense experience for the eight-year-old Alec, and he remembers aching with concentration as he is gazing into the city conjured on a dish, “displayed tantalizingly bowlful by bowlful” (ibid., p. 25). The most uncanny sensation that Alec recalls of that day is the silence enveloping the streets and monuments of “voiceless” Edinburgh. It emerges that this is the moment Alec makes a decision for life to choose sight above hearing, as the whole sight is so titillating. Understandably, this is the second moment in his childhood when his artistic creativity starts budding.

Recalling his early days, he endeavours to learn more about himself. Gaining perspective by leaving his motherland allows him to analyse his feelings towards Lorna, the woman he used to live with. Although he is uncertain why he is roaming among the Pacific islands, reminiscing about his childhood helps him find some of the answers. According

to Petrie, Alec “gradually regains a sense of identity and purpose” (ibid., p. 195). He remembers to fight for Lorna, his love, the mother of his child.

He has his own Proustian madelaine, rushing the past to him. It takes a more general form, as his mother is fond of all the sweets. He claims it to be a national addiction: “The addiction to sugar among Scots – nostalgia for the nation’s happy childhood” (ibid., p. 47). Hence Alec indulges himself in sweets, too, storing them on the boat, so that they last until the next island. Correspondingly, McWilliam uses a sweets-related metaphor when Alec reflects on the way he remembers both his mothers. He compares it to the Ancient Romans preserving babies’ bodies in honey: “preserved them in a sweet suspending medium through which it’s hard to see what they were like”. Both his mothers die early, thus allowing Alec to soak them in an oblique sweetness.

Elspeth also admits to a sweet tooth when asked by Alec. They compare their memories of Scotland, though they are careful not to step on debatable lands. They talk about Edinburgh, a different city for both of them. Her reminiscences are closely related to the Scottish past. She remembers vividly her visit to Culloden, where Butcher Cumberland slaughtered the Jacobites and names it “the first place she had been to in her whole life whose air seemed heavy with grief” (ibid., pp. 154-155). Once they arrive at the place, little Elspeth perceives it as a dull and ugly place, of all things. She is afraid the experience will change her life forever, something

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she will not bear. She experiences an uncanny sensation of the ground shaking and her bones trembling. Her childish perception leads her to take it for the devil. It appears that the feeling is unduly complex for a little girl to grasp; however; she remembers the moment vividly.

In the three novels written by contemporary Scottish authors the subject of memory is given special importance. In each novel the characters rely on the act of remembering and reworking the past, which at times takes the form of a struggle. The novels portray individuals in search of identity, lost or muddled. Through memories and with the help of memory, they (re)gain

knowledge of themselves. McWilliam’s preoccupation is with memory and its effect on the confined and observed self. Alec goes back to his childhood, reminiscing his mother and other experiences that shaped him as a man and as an artist. Kennedy and Galloway broach the subject of mourning, a form of remembering: the former of the father, the latter of the lover. Both their characters are incapable of leading their lives after the death of a loved person. The work of grieving involves reworking painful memories. Their memories are preserved in honey, soaked in sweetness; they are like a camera obscura, a lens which distorts the past even as it brings it closer.

Works Cited:Alexander, F. 1997. “Contemporary Fiction III: The Anglo-Scots.” In: Gifford D. and D. McMil-lan (eds.). A History of Scottish Women’s Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Beckett, S. 1964. How It Is. London: John Calder Publishers. Borthwick, D. 2007. “A.L.Kennedy’s Dysphoric Fictions.” In: Schoene, B. The EdinburghCompanion to Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 264-271.Burgess, M. 1994. “Disturbing Words: The Fiction of Dilys Rose, Janice Galloway and A.L.Kennedy.” In: Kidd, H (ed.). Calemadonnas: Women and Scotland. Dundee: Gairfish.Butler, J. 2004. Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.Craig, C. 1999. The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Dunnigan, S. M. 2000. “A.L. Kennedy’s Longer Fiction: Articulate Grace.” In: Christianson, A. and A. Lumsden (eds.). Contemporary Scottish Women Writers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Galloway, J. 1999. The Trick Is to Keep Breathing. London: Vintage.Gifford, D. 1997. “Contemporary Fiction II: Seven Writers in Scotland.” In: Gifford, D. and D. McMillan. A History of Scottish Women’s Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 604-629. Gifford, D. 1996. “Imagining Scotlands: The Return to Mythology in Modern Scottish Fic-tion.” In: Hagemann, S. Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the Present. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, pp. 17-49. Kennedy, A.L. 1994. Looking for the Possible Dance. London: Minerva.McWilliam, C. 1994. Debatable Land. London: Picador.Petrie, D. 2004. Contemporary Scottish Fictions. Film, Television and the Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.

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Prillinger, H. 2000. Family and the Scottish Working-Class Novel 1984-1994. A Study of Novels by Janice Galloway, Alasdair Gray, Robin Jenkins, James Kelman, AL Kennedy, Wil-liam McIlvanney, Agnes Owens, Alan Spence and George Friel. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.Stoddart, H. 2005. “ ‘Tongues of bone.’ A.L. Kennedy and the problems of articulation.” In: Bentley, N. (ed.). British Fiction of the 1990s. London: Routledge, pp. 135-149.Swift, G. 1982. Learning to Swim and Other Stories. London: Picador.

Because- a death notice

Because it must.Because it is.Because our mountains are highand our fears mountain higher.Because you.Because I.Because the illness relapses in us.Because the doctor has no hands.Because the air here’s grey and thinand nobody wonders how come.Because the people.Because the animals.Because the fins are sharp.Because the ribs are swollen.Because memory erodes likeof an ocean the horizon.Because the women are soft and tenderand the men are hard and tender.Because fjords are nearly transparentand nail bombs are sharp as words.Because veins bursting with thrombocytes.Because trees chockful of nuts andsea seaful of water.Because the wanderer never shelters.Because baby-heels are round.Because clouds are lowand emptyand lightand deadand complicit.© Steven Pollet

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Abstract:

Memory is an organism’s ability to store, retain, and recall information. According to scientists there are three basic types of memories as far as information processing is concerned: sensory, short-term, and long-term. From the point of view of information type there are more subtypes of memories: explicit memory for conscious recall of information, which can be semantic (concerns facts taken independent of context) or episodic (concerns information specific to a particular context. This it is used for more personal memories, such as the sensations, emotions, and personal associations of a particular place or time). Episodic memory is further subdivided into autobiographical (for particular events within one’s own life) and visual (preserving some characteristics

of our senses pertaining to visual experience). As a counterbalance to explicit memory, implicit memory primarily employed in learning motor skills. (Anderson, 1976). In case this classification has failed to confuse us, things become even more complicated when we consider our own perception and understanding of memories. The plural form is not accidental there; it underlines the difference between the concept of memory, studied, analyzed, and classified by scholars, and the deeply emotional meaning of the word. How could we explain memories then? They are ‘keepsakes from the past for the future’; they can be fascinating and amazing; they have the unique ability to suddenly pop up; with their help we are able to grow, mature,develop, and look back on things we have been through;

‘You Tell Your Secrets and I’ll tell Mine’: the Gold Dust of Memories Ludmilla Miteva

Ludmilla Miteva is a lecturer at the Department of British and American Studies, University of Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria, where she teaches Children’s Literature and Analytical Reading of Literature. Her PhD. thesis was on “Humour in Late 20th Century British Children’s Literature (Roald Dahl, Terry Pratchett, J. K. Rowling)”. Miteva’s current research focuses on the develop-ment of the concept of childhood from the seventeenth to the twentieth century and the rela-tionship between children’s literature and painting.

Our memories are ‘keepsakes from the past for the future”. Sometimes we share our memo-ries, very much like the family members in Berlie Doherty’s book Granny Was a Buffer Girl. The main heroine Jess collects the memories, the secrets, and the love stories as well as the ghost stories of her family in order to reaffirm her sense of identity and then embark on her journey into life as an independent young woman. Doherty’s novel finds a parallel in Salva-dor Dali’s painting The Persistence of Memory, which through its own ambiguity visualizes and enriches the complexity of Doherty’s young adult novel.

Memory and memories

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and there are good memories and bad memories. The bad ones are those that touch us round the neck, sending chills down our spines because they pertain to our mistakes. Bad memories are also

useful because sometimes (hopefully more often than not) we learn our lesson and move forward to collect new ‘good’ memories as keepsakes.

Berlie Doherty’s book Granny Was a Buffer Girl (Carnegie Medal, 1986) is a book of memories, both ‘good’ and ‘bad’, mostly memories of love. Jess, the protagonist, is an 18-year-old girl who is about to leave home to study in France. Her extended family gathers for a celebration, a party to say goodbye, but also a party to mark the birthday of her brother Danny, who died when she was 8. After the party her mother promises her that she “wouldn’t be going away from home without sharing all its secrets, all its love stories, and all it’s ghost stories too” (Doherty, 1988, p. 11). The narrative suddenly shifts to the 1930s with third person narration, focusing on, Jessie’s maternal grandmother Bridie’s, story of love and prejudice. Bridie comes from a large Catholic family, but she falls in love and secretly marries Jack, whose parents are deeply religious Protestants. Dorothy, Jessie’s paternal grandmother, is the next to reveal her secret of having experienced love for the wrong guy, again a third person narrative. Dorothy, the “buffer girl” of the title (a buffer girl was a worker in the Sheffield cutlery industry who used the polishing machinery on the steel tableware), goes to a ball where she dances with the boss’s handsome son, but when, the next day, he fails to recognize her in her

grimy work clothes, she gives up her dream of escaping the narrow streets and accepts the matter-of-fact proposal of her boy-next-door sweetheart, Albert, a young steelworker. It is now Jess’s father’s turn (again a third person narration) to reveal in the next two chapters his memories of a rebellious would-be teddy boy (British youth subculture from the 1950s associated with rock and roll music and style of dressing ‘for show’), awkward around girls and nervous about his National Service. His story is of the I-love-him-but-he-loves-herhim type. Finally, however, as he leaves on the train, he meets Josie, Jack, and Bridie’s daughter. Chapter six is about love and loss, about Danny, Mike, and Josie’s first child, born disabled, and in a wheelchair from the age of six. He asks his parents for a baby sister, so although already concerned about the responsibility of caring for Danny, they decide to take the risk, and John and Jess are born. At Jess’s birth the book switches back to first person narrative and from then on concerns Jess’s memories of her family, memories of love for the members of the family: Danny’s death at the age of 17, her brother John and the pigeons, her grandpa Albert’s friend Davie, her great-aunt’s “fierce” husband, and Jess’s own first romantic encounter

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with an older man who, unknown to her, is married. The book ends as Jess departs for France, confident about the challenge of changing from a child to an independent adult after hearing her family’s stories: “Going away, going away, going away. That was what the rain had always said to me when I was a child off on an outing. But I wasn’t a child, and I never would be, never, never again. The snake had shed its skin” (Doherty, 1988, p. 131).

The subject of ‘families’ has long been a dominant topic in children’s literature, representing the institution of the family “as both a problematic and an ideal social construction: problematic in that ‘the family’ is not a fixed, known entity, but a formation that is always in the process of construction; and ideal in that families carry the burden of the utopian promises of a better future” (Bradford et al, 2008, p. 130, emphasis in the original). Such is Jessie’s family as well – problematic and ideal, fluctuating yet supportive. Jess needs the courage to leave, to mature into an independent person, but for that she needs a final element to add to the complex mosaic of her personal identity. She needs to piece together her family history and the memories of her own family, so that she can find and affirm her place within it, add something to the past, and thus enable herself to enter the future. Constructed like a montage of deep-focus family photographs, exhibiting the interconnectedness of the generations, Doherty’s imaginative and emotional book requires a more detailed look into this rich cluster of characters, where everyone is given space.

Psychologists have long since uncovered the period of adolescence as one comprising the trying, or exhilarating, experience of questioning who you really are and, more importantly, who you would like to be. They have also found that identity development is complex and multifaceted, understood as a series of interrelated developments. Researchers and theorists have usually taken three different approaches to the question of how the individual’s sense of identity changes. “The first approach emphasizes changes in self-conceptions – the ideas that individuals have of themselves regarding various traits and attributes. An entirely different approach focuses on adolescents’ self-esteem, or self-image – how positively or negatively individuals feel about themselves. Finally, a third approach emphasizes changes in the sense of identity – the sense of who one is, where one has come from, and where one is going” (Steinberg, 1999, p. 245, emphasis in the original).

Looking into self-conception is useful and informative when concentrating on the first third of the book. Bridie and Dorothy were two very different girls. Bridie realized the fact that she was beautiful and accepted it: “… she was aware of curious eyes on her, and she blushed self-consciously. She was used to being looked at: something of a beauty – even her mother acknowledged that … she drew many covetous glances, whether she sought them or not” (Doherty, 1988, pp. 12-13). She gave part of her salary to her family; they were proud of their good girl. This is her ‘actual self ’ – who she really was. Her

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‘ideal self ’ – who she would have liked to be, - the readers are given to understand — was a good Catholic, an honest and obedient daughter who received her parents’ approval for her actions. What she was terribly afraid of - her ‘feared self ’ - was being a person who did not meet her family’s expectations. Yet that was exactly what happened. She married Jack, a boy who was her perfect counterpart in self-conception. He did not want to disappoint his parents, he was terribly afraid of hurting them, yet he also did. Both Bridie and Jack stood up to their families’ religious prejudices because “It was not to be stopped, this love” (Doherty, 1988, p. 21). It turns out that there was something else to their conception of the ‘ideal self ’ that they had not even thought about – they wanted and needed to be people who were true to themselves. And that realization, that very important memory from their youth, they manage to offer their granddaughter Jess before her literal and figurative start into independence.

Doherty was “quiet and timid, a born worrier” (Doherty, 1988, p. 31), but also a dreamer, who desperately wanted a handsome prince. She feared life as she knew it – humdrum, monotonous, too ordinary, and so little like a fairy-tail. She was very responsible; she took care of her little siblings and her father after her mother’s death, and she worked hard as a buffer girl in a nightmarish factory. She deserved her dream. But she was mistaken – her dream was an illusion. She met her Prince Handsome in the person of Mr. Edward, but he was too blind to even realize that he had

liked an ordinary working girl. He was too narrow-minded, too much enclosed in his own perception of the world, to be able to recognize that the girl who was all wrapped in newspapers to protect herself and her clothes and who was as black as soot at clocking-out time was actually Princess Beauty. Dorothy saw him with a posy of violets waiting in front of the factory. She wanted to run to him and did, even though her sister wisely warned her that he was not waiting for her. “‘He is’, said Dorothy, breaking free. ‘Not you!’ Louie’s voice wailed” (Doherty, 1988, p. 38, emphasis in the original). Louie was of course right, he was not waiting for her, he was waiting for his quite different pre-constructed idea of a girl that had nothing to do with Dorothy, so “He had to push past the grimy blue-eyed girl on the pavement, and he brushed her dust off his coat in annoyance” (Doherty, 1988, p. 39). This was simply love for the wrong guy. Her real prince had always been there for her, ever since her childhood - the next-door neighbor Albert. And she married him. It so happens that sometimes we have the wrong dreams, Granny Dorothy seems to be telling Jess, and the awareness of that is always painful. But people need their bad memories too in order to learn a lesson and move forward.

Michael’s story is more concerned with self-esteem. He was one of those young people who seemed to attract negative response, always ‘the wrong guy at the wrong place at the wrong time’. He could not keep a job; he could not find himself a girlfriend. His feelings about himself were explicitly negative:

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“They didn’t like him because he wasn’t worth having, and that was that. ‘I’m a freak of nature’, he’d say to his face in the mirror” (Doherty, 1988, p. 44). What helped him was meeting a girl with an equally low self-esteem. The omniscient third-person narrator tells us that “Nobody liked Lucy Cragwell much. She was plain and she was sniffy and she smelled a bit, she always looked miserable, and she always would do” (Doherty, 1988, p. 56). Lucy loved Michael but he loved Jennifer – a real beauty – who, in her turn, did not love him. Michael knew no way out of the situation because he had not yet found who he was; he was still in the awkward position of being in between childhood and manhood. Lucy taught him a lesson: “I thought you were interested in me, but now I know it’s Jennifer you’re after. … We could go on and on like this, with you feeling sorry for me and me trotting round after you because I’m scared of not getting anyone else, for years and years, d’you know that? … I’ve decided I don’t want it. I don’t want a bendy cowardly boyfriend who’s too scared to admit that he doesn’t even like me. … That’s what I think about love. If it isn’t equal, it isn’t real. And if it isn’t real, then it isn’t worth having” (Doherty, 1988, pp. 67-68). On the train, going into the army Michael met his true love, his wife, Jennifer’s sister Josie. This is an I-love-him-but-he-loves-her love story, but it is also a memory of establishing your self-esteem, of uncovering all those remarkably precious segments of the self that can provide the necessary momentum for forward movement.

In his book Adolescence Laurence

Steinberg poses the following question to his readers: “If you were asked to write a novel about your own identity development, what sorts of things would you mention? Perhaps you would talk about a development of a sense of purpose or the clarification of your long-term plans and values, or the growing feeling of knowing who you really are and where you are headed. … that psychologists refer to as the sense of identity” (Steinberg, 1999, p. 258). When the narrative switches back to the 1980s and focuses on the narrator Jess, the readers realize that the time has come for the 18-year-old protagonist to look deeper into herself for some answers, to look for her sense of identity. Her own memories, stimulated by those of her grandparents and father, start popping up, not entirely unrelated to each other for they all concern people close to her heart, yet each with its own significance.

The first, strongest, and most painful one is the memory of her dead brother Danny. It was Danny who wanted more than anything else in the world, more than not being sick, more than life itself, a baby sister — Jessie. They were really close: they shared the same room, they went to the park together, and there they did not play so that they could be together – a little girl with a toy stroller made to look like her big brother’s wheelchair. Then the day came when Danny was dying. Jessie was frightened, ran away from his room, and hid behind the coats in the hall. From there the girl of eight watched people’s legs moving past her, in and out of her brother’s room, lots of legs, too many legs, legs

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that her brother never seemed to have had, till she could bear it no longer and shouted out loud “I hate my brother”. That was Jessie’s haunting memory, the one she desperately needed to tell her mother, the one she had never been able to share before. Her mother also had a haunting memory related to Danny, yet another memory of love and loss. Jess’s mother Josie is presented as a remarkable woman, the mother of three children who she loved and brought up, a great history teacher, and a loving and loved wife. She had her moment of weakness only once when her first born son was given a wheelchair at six, when the painful realization of what was to follow for the next ten years dawned huge and scary on her. Then she told her husband: “‘Sometimes I think it would have been better … if he’d never been born’. That was the terrible thing that my mother said about Danny, and she said it because she loved him” (Doherty, 1988, p. 74). The first person comment draws an unequivocal parallel between Jess’s childish expression of disappointment and pain and the mother’s profound and desperate love. The day after the funeral Jess and John had still not properly parted with Danny. They needed their own way to say goodbye and so the two of them together buried Jess’s teddy bear, Danny’s teddy bear, which he had given Jess as soon as she was born. They buried pain so that they could preserve the memory of Danny, so that this memory remained with them as a precious good memory and not a chilly, scary one.

The other memories of Jess are ones of growing up. Memories of being close with her mother, memories of how her mother gently taught her independence, memories of how her brother John became close with their father, memories that showed to her how love could be more than kissing and cuddling, that it could be a need two people have for each other.

Jessie also shares her first love experience, how she fell in love with a gorgeous young man, whose only purpose was to attract her and not really love her. She found out that much could be hidden behind the mask of love, yet her question “Mum. What would you have done?” functions also as an answer to her problem: at such moments it is the family and the close friends that step in to help.

Jess is now ready to leave. She knows how multifaceted and multidimensional life is; she has a clear idea of her values, and with the help of her family’s memories she seems to have become aware of who she really is and where she is headed. Boarding the train to her college in France (very much like her mother before her) she receives a present: “It was the photograph of Danny, laughing out at me from the past. Danny, celebrating life” (Doherty, 1988, p. 131). Past and present intertwine to emphasize the parallels and continuity between the brother and the sister, between her and the older generations of her family, and to suggest that the past is not as distant or abstract as a young person may think.

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The Persistence of Memory

The irrelevance of time and the perseverance of memory/memories are also visually represented in a magnificent and magical way through another form of art - Salvador Dali’s 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory, or, as it is also known, The Melting Clocks.

The painting has been in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City since 1934; it is very widely recognized, and is a frequent reference in popular culture. Without having seen this painting in person it is not difficult to think that the dimensions of this canvas are bigger than what they really are: only 9 1/2 by 13” inch (24.1 x 33cm).

Whether there is certain meaning in Dali’s work is not questionable, yet the contents of this painting are enigmatic and open to interpretation. It is a collection of ideas that have to do with the interpretation of memories, dreams, the perception of time, birth, and death. This hauntingly strange and memorable image presents a dream-like landscape where giant watches dominate the foreground. These are, however, strange not only because of their size, but also due to the fact that they are soft and draped over other objects in the scenery like discarded clothing, like half — forgotten memories, like time-set pieces of a story. In this respect, the painting indirectly but convincingly parallels Doherty’s text.

It seems to be a coastal region, the bottom two thirds of which are deep in shadow while the upper portion

is lighter with a calm blue sea in the distance. The impression the landscape in the background leaves is that of a person’s inner self. It looks, however, desolate and empty. It is like a mirror reflecting back to the viewer some internal uncertainty. The four watches and the grayish creature in the middle of the canvas fill up the landscape without contributing much to the creation of positiveness or confidence. One of the watches is draped over a thin branch extending from a grayish withered tree. It is an old-fashioned silver pocket watch; it hangs with half of the blue face outwards, and one hand points to the six. A second similar pocket watch, huge in size compared to the other objects on the canvas, is draped over the edge of the platform below. The time on it reads six fifty-five. A third watch lies below and just to the left of it, a gold one with its face hidden in its case. It is crawling with ants – another disconcerting sight. The fourth and last watch is draped over the weirdest object of all – a monstrous, fleshy, grayish object, lying on the sand in the lower middle of the canvas like a beached whale. It resembles a giant human face with a clearly visible wrinkled brow; a nose in profile, pointing down to the bottom of the painting, from which something soft oozes and takes the shape of a misplaced tongue; a closed eye with immensely long eyelashes. There are no other distinguishable human features. Over the cheek area of this grotesque “creature” the fourth pocket watch is draped, and its minute hand is at

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twelve o’clock. There is no agreement in the time each watch reads, as if they are separate memories set apart in time. Yet the watches and the times indicated on their faces are also similar as though they pertain to one and the same individual or one and the same identity. Only the gold watch with the hidden face and the ants on top of its case stands somewhat more drastically apart. Overall the objects in the painting are rather symmetrical, but the pocket watch with the ants has no counterpart. In addition it shows no particular time to the viewer – it is like a timeless piece, a memory that is beyond the dimension of time, possessing eternal significance. Dali often used ants in his paintings as a symbol of anxiety and death. This watch could be perceived as a direct counterpart to Jessie’s memory of Danny because to her he is discretely dead and alive, part of her past but also

a significant element of her future.The grotesque face, something

Dalí used in several period pieces to represent himself in an abstract form of a self portrait, further emphasizes the impression of an unstable, fluctuating sense of identity. A clear representation of movement can be sensed in Dali’s painting: it is fluid but very slow, yet not stagnant - like a visualized recollection of a memory someone is trying to get back or like a representation of the act of piecing together separate memories in order to construct a self, an identity. The light in the painting attaches an optimistic tone to it because from the standpoint of the viewer it is like the light at the end of a tunnel, like the beginning of a new trip positively paralleling Doherty’s heroine’s feelings when she embarks on her journey into the future, into independency, into life.

“Off you go”, she said. “We’ll never get rid of you at this rate” (Doherty, 1988, p. 131)

Memories play a very important part in our lives. We collect them as keepsakes when they are ‘good’ memories, or we push them as far back in our minds as possible when they happen to be ‘bad’ ones. Sometimes we share our memories, mostly with those we love, and this requires at least a certain amount of emotional honesty. Though the family members’ love for each other pervades Berlie Doherty’s novel, it is never sentimental - in fact, Doherty is sometimes brutally honest. She also avoids pessimism, and her stories are suffused with the sense that love and

difficult emotions can (and usually do) coexist. It is in the acceptance of this that contentment and the sense of identity can be found. Dali’s magical painting parallels, visualizes and enriches Doherty’s young adult novel. Dali’s artistic genius lies in his ability to create ideas that are on the edge between being disturbing and arousing curiosity, bewildering but also speaking for themselves. Jess’s mother’s words at the end of the novel “Off you go”, she said. “We’ll never get rid of you at this rate” (Doherty, 1988, p. 131) intensify the momentum needed for taking-off,

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for Jess and all young adults who could identify with the impulse to open up their very own treasure-box and to start collecting their memories like gold dust – tiny and precious – out of and for life.

Thus what Dali’s wife is believed to have said of his painting, “No one can forget it once he has seen it” (Bennet, 2002), has proven true of the painting, and also of life.

Works cited:Anderson, J.R., 1976. Language, Memory and Thought. Erlbaum.Bennett, L., 2002. “The Persistence of Dali”. In St. Petersburg Times. March 7. Bradford, C., K. Mallan, J. Stephens & R. McCallum, 2008. New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature: Utopian Transformations. Palgrave Macmillan.Doherty, B., 1988. Granny Was a Buffer Girl. First American ed. Orchard Books.Steinberg, L., 1999. Adolescence. 5th ed. McGraw-Hill College.

On Edward Hopper, People in the sun (1960)Each blue turns black when evening tends.-We give the dead a chair and some hueand are, for a moment, in a post-war musing,sun-suffused staring at it.On a steaming day like this one, inthis naked scope, I too disappear tobathe in the sun like a corpse.-The world on foot has grown too big for me.© Steven Pollet

On David Hockney, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-1971)Summer. A milk-white sun around openblowingpatio doors. Wallpaper triesto scream, but every effort forbreath is professionally nipped in the bud.To see like a slammed book or a rotaryphone the wealth of bare feet:no luxury is more decadent than purplehips and a white cat on boot cuts.Under a well thought-out position-play mainlythe small things appear: how lady and gentleman aresplit by some backlightand the white liliesfeel -© Steven Pollet

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Abstract

Twisted Images of Cultural Memory: Paula Rego’s Visual Narrative

Agnieszka Gołda-Derejczyk

Dr Agnieszka Gołda-Derejczyk works at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, where she teaches 19th and 20th century British Literature, British History and Culture, and trans-lation. Her research interests include the contemporary British novel (especially the neo-Vic-torian novel), postmodernism in fiction, British cultural studies, and literary translation. Her recent publications include a monograph entitled Through the Looking-Glass: the Postmod-ern Revision of 19th-century British Culture, and a co-edited collection of essays The Contex-tuality of Language and Culture.

The paper analyses a work of visual art, - Paula Rego’s Jane Eyre and Other Stories (2003), as exemplifying the process of cultural reclamation and an implicit challenge to the familiar visions of the past. Rego’s prints as cultural re-visualizations of the past are, in this sense, analogous to a number of contemporary British novels practising literary revision aimed specifically at the nineteenth-century. The paper takes a closer look at the ways this artist visually remembers, re-claims, uses, and abuses images stored in our cultural memory of the nineteenth century to meet her own artistic end.

1. Introduction: (Re)Visualising the VictoriansFor the most part, our evidence of the nineteenth century is acollage of sepia photographs, which suggest a frock-coated,straight-backed sort of place – still, stiff, stern, silent, with ahorizon painted on a studio canvas and a potted aspidistrasomewhere in the background. (Sweet, 2001, p.22)

In her essay entitled “At Home with the Nineteenth Century. Photography, Nostalgia and the Will to Authenticity” Jennifer Green Lewis attempts to decipher the reasons behind the contemporary romance with Victorian pictorial culture. She claims that the recent resurgence of interest in Victorian photography has to do with the modern viewers’ nostalgia for the promise of access, the solace of retrieval, and the pleasures of loss (Green-Lewis, 2000, p. 29). “Precisely because we

see them in photographs,” she argues, “Victorians have all the pathos and appeal of photography itself; whatever attractions the Victorian period has for consumers are actually compounded by their existence in photographs, rather than just in words or paintings.” (ibid., p. 31) The invention and popularity of photographs in the nineteenth-century has made it possible for us to actually see the Victorians. As she further observes: “The Victorians are visually real to us because they

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have a documentary assertiveness unavailable to persons living before the age of the camera.”(ibid., p. 31) The visual presence of the Victorians in contemporary cultural consciousness has thus had its impact on their perception as contemporary culture’s historical other. Nicolas Mirzoeff posits: “In many ways, people in industrialized and post-industrial societies now live in visual cultures to an extent that seems to divide the present from the past.” (Mirzoeff, 1998, p. 4) The centrality of photographic image in the twentieth century can thus be traced back to its expanding popularity in the mid-nineteenth century. By the same token, the current critical debate on the status of photographic image, the question of mass reproduction that cast a doubt on the notions of original and copy, can be traced back to the nineteenth-century. Liz Wells writes that as early as 1859, people were becoming aware of the power of photography to change their relationship to originals. She cites Oliver Wendell Holmes, the American writer who prophesised that “Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. We will hunt all curious, beautiful grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth.” (Holmes quoted in Wells, 2001, p. 20) In this sense, the Victorian age which saw the emergence of what we now perceive as visual culture offers a fertile area for contemporary cultural commentators to analyse the current persistence of the visual image through its reference to the past.

Thus, this simple, yet illuminating affirmation that because we are able to see Victorians, they seem to be an attractive object of visual recreation and reclamation seems to capture the primary intention, numerous though they are, behind an inexhaustible, as it seems, reservoir of cultural instances of imagining, inventing, and reclaiming the Victorians visually. From John Madden’s cinematic recreation of Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown, through Alan Moore’s visual re-appropriation of nineteenth-century literary characters in his graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and its less skilfully crafted filmic version; numerous (including modernised) film, theatre, and musical adaptations of novels written by the Brontës, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Charles Dickens; contemporary celluloid recreations of neo-Victorian novels, e.g., Sarah Waters’s neo-Victorian trilogy or A.S. Byatt’s Possession and so on, there runs in contemporary culture a remarkably strong drive towards visual representation of nineteenth-century culture. Apart from or rather parallel to these more popular forms of cultural re-visualisation mentioned here, examples of reimagining the Victorian culture in art, and visual art of course, are also to be encountered. The works of two artists: Tracey Moffatt’s Laudanum (1998) and Paula Rego’s Jane Eyre and Other Stories (2003) may serve as illustrations of this tendency at re-visualising the Victorians, both fictitious and real, for the purpose of revision.

This article, due to its limited scope, intends to look critically at the latter

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of these two works of visual art as exemplifying the process of cultural reclamation of history and an implicit challenge to the familiar visions of the past. Both works of Tracey Moffatt and Paula Rego may be construed as representing, in visual terms, the trend set famously by a critic and poet Adrienne Rich in her essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”, where she writes:

Re-vision--the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction--is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. [...] A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped us as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name--and therefore live--afresh. […] We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us. (Rich, 1975, p. 90)

Her appeal, in short, laid the foundation for fiction of the feminist bent whose critical lens were directed at the canonical literature, and in many instances, the nineteenth-century novel. Rich’s was one of the many voices proclaiming what I see as the politics of reparation, that is the literary tendency derivative of the ideological revolution of 1970s, the outcome of which was the political fashion for making amends; the process of reclamation and a challenge

to the authority of canonical literature coming from a variety of ideological grounds: feminist, post-colonial, Marxist and so on. The re-visionary novel, born of this rethinking of history or memorizing the past, has in recent years been more and more frequently concerned with one particular historical age: the nineteenth century and what we come to understand as the Victorian age in particular. Moffatt’s Laudanum and Rego’s Jane Eyre and Other Stories as cultural re-visualisations of the past (imagined past in Laudanum and literary past in Jane Eyre…) may thus be seen as analogous to a number of contemporary British novels practising literary revision aimed specifically at the nineteenth-century. In this sense, Moffatt’s and Rego’s visual narratives emblematise a more general cultural mode termed “neo-Victorianism”, that is, the fascination with re-imagining and re-inventing Victoriana.

For Cora Kaplan the principle underlying the ideological and narrative strategy of a substantial portion of revisionary neo-Victorian fiction, is to “highlight the suppressed histories of gender and sexuality, race and empire, as well as challenge the conventional understanding of the historical.” (Kaplan, 2007, p. 3) This definition could well have been used to describe the visual reclamations of the past presented here. Both Moffatt’s Laudanum and Rego’s Jane Eyre and Other Stories, though in their own separate ways and applying their own individual visions and artistic expressions, manage to do as much: “highlight the suppressed histories of gender and sexuality, race

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2. Jane Eyre Through the Looking-Glass: Paula Rego’s Jane Eyre and Other Stories

and empire.” Characters portrayed in both visual narratives are women of the nineteenth century, some of them representing the objects of the process of exoticising and othering, as well as racial discrimination since they are not white: Bertha Mason in Rego’s work and the Asian servant in Moffatt’s series. In many ways, too, both artists come to “challenge the conventional understanding of the historical.” Moffatt, in her twisted images of the nineteenth-century colonial mansion and the abusive relation between the Victorian mistress and the Asian servant, tries to translate into visual language Australia’s history of discrimination and abuse of the non-White population by the dominant colonizer. Similarly, Rego’s

visual narrative retrieves the silence, reticence, and suppressed undertones from Charlotte Brontë’s text, but also often goes beyond the novel’s content. In this article, given the limited space, I shall take a closer look at the latter of the two works of visual art mentioned. I analyse the ways Paula Rego visually remembers, re-claims, uses, and abuses images stored in our cultural memory of the nineteenth century to meet her own artistic ends, and produce images that suit her artistic imagination. Paula Rego’s project which chronologically succeeded Moffatt’s, may serve, in a more extensive way, as an illustration of the tendencies and strategies described above; hence such a selection.

We tend to think of Jane Eyre as moral gothic, “myth domesticated,” Pamela’s daughter and Rebecca’s aunt, the archetypal scenario for all those mildly thrilling romantic encounters between a scowling Byronic hero (who owns a gloomy mansion) and a trembling heroine (who can’t quite figure out the mansion’s floor plan). (Gilbert and Gubar, 2000, p. 337)

I’ve read and reread Jane Eyre of course, and I am sure that the character must be “built up.” I wrote you about it. The Creole in Charlotte Brontë’s novel is a lay figure… She’s necessary to the plot, but always she shrieks, howls, laughs horribly, attacks all and sundry-off stage. For me…. She must be right on stage. She must be at least plausible with a past,

the reason why Mr Rochester treat her so abominably and feels justified, the reason why he thinks she is mad and why of course she goes mad, even the reason why she tries to set everything on fire, and eventually succeeds. (Rhys quoted in Mezei, 1994, p. 58)

Paula Rego’s visual narrative based on the Victorian classical novel Jane Eyre in its often seditious representation of the familiar heroine may be perceived as complementary to a number of attempts, both critical and novelistic, to re-read Charlotte Brontë’s text with the intention of freeing it from the constrictions of the age which largely determined the narrative choices of the novel’s author. Rego in this sense not so much undertakes to provide

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newly interpreted illustrations of the nineteenth-century novel as to catch in her lithographs and pastels all the dramatis personae: Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason, and Rochester as already subject to these cultural revisions. Hence, in her version, Jane Eyre ceases to be read conventionally as “moral gothic”, ‘myth domesticated’”, or mildly thrilling romantic encounter between a Byronic hero and a trembling heroine (Gilbert and Gubar, 2000, p. 337). Rather, Rego, similarly to Rhys’s intention in Wide Sargasso Sea, whose reading Rego acknowledges, tries to “build up” her characters and represent Jane and Bertha not as competitors but both internally linked. Yet, to achieve this end, Rego has not decided to modernise her Jane. In her project she actually echoes the visual style of the nineteenth century illustrators, and the choice of the technique of lithography, with which she became fascinated at the time, is to a large extent responsible for the retro-Victorian look that her work bears. Her visual language could be thus seen as a pastiche of the style of nineteenth-century illustrators, but it is of course an imitation with a twist, a type of visual parody; although at the same time, as Nick Terrell suggests, “the graphic style of Jane Eyre prints is for the most part something like an assertion of their authenticity or kinship with the text” (Terrell, 2008). By drawing on the illustrative style of Brontë’s period, Rego is able to translate, as Terrell puts it “her subversive interpretation in images that proclaim a kind of natural authority or aptitude to speak of Brontë’s world. This is a trick, or a game, but it has an

important part to play in convincing the viewer to engage with the story Rego wants to tell through and about Jane.” (Terrell, 2008).

In the piece entitled plainly ‘Jane’ Brontë’s character is portrayed somehow subversively from the back, her face hidden from the spectator. Such an artistic gesture seems to possess the quality of a warning to the potential viewer that these shall not be read as simply new illustrations for the book familiar to anyone more or less introduced to Anglo-Saxon culture. In ‘Jane’, as it seems, Rego may have included an opening message that her artistic interests lie in uncovering the backstage of Jane Eyre, what Jane might be hiding behind. Or, what Charlotte Brontë had hidden and, by analogy, also what the readers may have suppressed in their reading of Jane Eyre. In fact, some critics who have been trying to decipher the meaning behind Rego’s series, Cora Kaplan among them, see Rego’s creative ‘reminiscences’ as “anti-illustrations” since, they “construct a kind of grotesque dreamscape for which the novel is the occasion” (Kaplan, 2007, p. 31). For Kaplan too, Rego’s drawings, especially these depicting a female figure in a dramatic attitude are reminiscent of the pictures of hysterics in Charcot’s asylum, Salpêtière. (Kaplan, 2007, pp. 31-32). A number of lithographs represent Jane’s solitary figure in a pose expressive of alienation, desolation, or simply humiliation (‘Crying,’ ‘Come to me,’ or ‘Crumpled’). As Marina Warner, who authored an introduction to a collection of Rego’s drawings, notices: “Rego’s portraits of Jane do not

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‘prettify her’; ugly and stunted, she is visually aligned with Bertha, eliding the distinction between heroine and villain, imperial agent and racialised victim.” (Warner, 2003).

One of the most surprising and disturbing images in the whole collection is entitled ‘Loving Bewick.’ Jane is portrayed here sitting, her eyes closed, while an enormous pelican on her lap places his long beak in her open mouth. This is a rather curious interpretation of an event from the beginning of the novel, where ten-year-old Jane gets absorbed in reading Bewick’s History of British Birds:

I returned to my book – Bewick’s History of British Birds: the letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I as, I could not pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of ‘the solitary rocks and promontories’ by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape […]. Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings […]. With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way. (Brontë, 1994, p. 10-11)

Innocent though the scene might appear, it has caught the attention not only Rego’s, but a number of critical readers of the novel before her (Gilbert and Gubar, Gayatri Spivak). Its significance and the symbolic power

might lie in the fact that it immediately precedes Jane’s verbal and physical abuse by John Reed, her subsequent outburst of anger and resistance, her “moment’s mutiny” (Brontë, 1994, p. 14), and her punishment and eventual confinement in the haunting red-room. But it also follows her social banishment from the rest of the inhabitants of the house. As Gilbert and Gubar notice, “excluded from the Reed family group in the drawing room because she is not a ‘contented, happy, little child” – excluded, that is from “normal” society – Jane takes refuge in a scarlet-draped window seat where she […] reads of polar regions in Bewick’s History of British Birds.” (Gilbert and Gubar, 2000, p. 339) For them, Jane’s fascination with ‘“death-realms’ of the Arctic’; her brooding upon “the multiplied rigour of extreme cold” is connected with “brooding upon her own dilemma: whether to stay in, behind the oppressively scarlet curtain, or to go out into the cold of a loveless world.”(ibid., p. 340). For Spivak on the other hand, as Kaplan reminds us, the scene of reading “establishes Jane’s cultural authority as a ‘first-world reader’” (Kaplan, 2007, p. 33). Rego might not have been aware of all these interpretations of the scene, but she must have instinctively sensed its symbolic significance. Warner, for example, interprets the print of Jane billing the pelican’s beak as Rego introducing “a note of true sustenance: it is through the mind-food of books and pictures that Jane survives” (Warner, 2008). In her interpretation of the image, the bird is thus a feeder, and not an assailant.

A series of drawings where Rego

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builds up the link between Jane Eyre and her exotic other, Bertha Mason, seem to be most interesting (‘Bertha’s Monkey’, ‘Jane in a Chair with Monkey’, ‘Girl Reading at Window’, ‘Getting Ready for the Ball,’ ‘Keeper’) It is in these pieces that the inspiration taken from Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a feminist and postcolonial revision of Brontë’s text, gets most clearly captured. The pastel entitled ‘Bertha’s Monkey’ depicts a toy monkey, dressed in a white cotton dress, sitting on the ladder, its hands clasped together on her lap as if repeating the familiar human gesture of humbleness. The colour of the background wall is intense dark blue. The toy serves to symbolically represent Bertha herself – an exotic animal out of its familiar environment, a lifeless plaything, a passive object of transient affection, eventually damped and locked away. This same toy monkey reappears in other two lithographs ‘Jane in a Chair with Monkey’, and ‘Girl Reading at Window.’ The first portrays Jane sitting on a chair with her feet resting on a smaller one and the toy monkey on her right, its limbs hanging listlessly off the chair’s armrest. The toy serving as Jane’s companion in a peaceful scene and emblematising Bertha’s complete subjugation and resignation functions as a visible link between Bertha’s fate as we know it and Jane’s potential repetition of Bertha’s enforced madness. The print ‘Girl Reading at Widow’ captures the initial scene of Jane reading by the window, sitting cross-legged on the window-seat, while her cousins Eliza, John, and Georgiana play in the nearby drawing room. The

toy monkey is painted somewhere on the threshold between the two worlds: Jane’s secluded space of private recess separated from the drawing room by the “red moreen curtain” (Brontë, 1994, p. 9) and the space of the family social life, belonging neither to any one of the two. But it has a disturbing quality, too, reminding the spectator of Bertha’s abandonment and isolation, and her displaced identity. In these pieces with monkey, Warner observes, “Rego closes the distance between Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason, and illuminates the fate they could share, if Jane did not use her strength and originality of character to withstand society’s sentence on genteel women.” (Warner, 2003). In two other prints entitled ‘Getting Ready for the Ball’ and ‘Detail of Getting Ready for the Ball’ Rego seems to join in the number of contemporary novelists who tend to surpass Victorian censorship and break the Victorian codes of silence on the questions of sexuality. In these pieces Rego exceeds the novel’s reserve. While the foreground is dominated by all the hassle and preparation for the ball, the real meaning of the scene is hidden in the background, where a woman seated on the lap of a man is visible. This is clear that what we are afforded here is Bertha being sexually abused by Rochester, while everybody else seems too busy to stand by and interfere. Additionally, a small girl, possibly young Jane is watching the couple concealed in a curtained bed. The coloured lithograph entitled ‘Keeper’ has both Jane and her dark double, Bertha in it. It shows Bertha sitting lifeless on the floor, held by her carer Grace Poole, a huge strong

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woman, while Jane retains a distanced posture of an observer, her face showing neither sympathy nor condemnation, but curiosity and fascination.

Rego’s drawings seem to have been infused with the cultural consciousness of the feminist and post-colonial criticism of the novel by Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert, on the one hand, and Gayatri Spivak on the other. Thus her Jane is so much more conscious of what is going on in the attic. And it was suggested that her Jane is very much aligned with Bertha, emerging in line with Gubar and Gilbert’s reading

as Bertha’s double. Nevertheless, the series does not seem to stand the test of originality or innovativeness. Apart from ‘Loving Bewick’, which, disturbing though it is, provokes the spectator to think about its attachment to the novel’s content and leaves the ground open to interpretation, the other prints do not betray this challenging potential. The majority of the pieces, artistically valuable and interpretatively interesting though they may be, do not posses the quality of offering a novel reading of the text’s content.

Endnotes:Paula Rego’s works comprising the series entitled Jane Eyre and Other Stories are available in a book

form either in: Rosenthal, T.G., 2004. Paula Rego: The Complete Graphic Work. London: Thames and Hudson, or Rego, P., 2003. Jane Eyre. A suite of 25 lithographs. London: Marlborough Graphics. They may be also found on-line: http://www.marlboroughfineart.com/exhibition-Paula-Rego-Jane-Eyre-and-Other-Stories-64.html.

Rego herself admitted: “I turn to etching, and now lithography, with a sense of exuberance and relief. With both printing methods, you can give your imagination full-range and see the results almost immediately. So one image triggers the idea for the next one and so on.” Works cited: Brontë, Ch., 1994. Jane Eyre. London: Penguin Books. Gilbert, S.M. and Gubar, S., 2000. The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press.Green-Lewis, J. 2000 “At Home in the Nineteenth-Century: Photography, Nostalgia, and the Will to Authen-ticity.” In: Kucich, J. and Sadoff, D.F. (eds.). Victorian Afterlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kaplan, Cora., 2007. Victoriana – Histories, Fictions, Criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kellaway, K. 2002 “Rego Meets Mr Rochester.” In: Observer April 14, 2002. Available at: http://www.arlindo-correia.com/paula_rego.html>.Mezei, K. 1994 “Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea: the Madwoman in the Attic Speaks (Out of Parenthesis into Story).” In: Dupperay, M. (ed.). Historicité et Métafiction dans le Roman Contemporain des Iles Britan-niques. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence. Mirzoeff, N. 1998 “What is Visual Culture?” In: Mirzoeff, N. (ed.). Visual Culture Reader. London: Rout-ledge, 1998. Rego, P., 2003. Jane Eyre. A suite of 25 lithographs. London: Marlborough Graphics.Rhys, J., 1997. Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Penguin Books. Rich, A. 1975. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” In: Charlsworth Gelpi, B. and Gelpi, A. (eds.). Adrienne Rich’s Poetry. New York: Norton.

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Rosenthal, T.G., 2004. Paula Rego: The Complete Graphic Work. London: Thames and Hudson. Sweet, M., 2001. Inventing the Victorians. London: Faber and Faber. Terrell, N. 2008 “‘Come to me’ – Paula Rego becons Jane Eyre.” In: The Ember on-line magazine. Available at: <http://theember.com.au/?p=291>.Warner. M. 2003 “An Artist Dreamworld.” In: Tate Magazine Issue 8. Available at: <http://www.tate.org.uk/magazine/issue8/rego.htm>Wells, L., 2001 “Thinking About Photography” In: Photography. A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.

Self-portrait with horsesHow I could always so strikingly forget myself: a flashthat made me blinder and blinder, a strokeor struggle that could floor me at once. I tilt,balance on the edge of my self-portraitand carefully climb outside through the window:the broad galaxy slows down the horses in the meadow,thins out the mist that shrouds them. While movingI notice best how still we stand.© Steven Pollet

HOUSE/house (2)One day we will move outside.Then we extract the stones off our wallsthe dinner service off their cupboardsthe sun off the glass -What used to be the inside, will degeneratedewinterateproliferate -The roof undresses us as never beforemakes us thinneremptier -Now that outside blows harder than wind.The open air fills itself with lacking.© Steven Pollet

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Abstract

Memory is the mother of all art. To read a beautiful account of the origins of this notion, we must reach back to the 8th century BC poet Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer and a founding father of Greek and therefore Western literature. In his Theogony, literally the genealogy or the family history of the gods, he describes the Chaos that was in the beginning, and how Uranus and Ge, the Heavens and the Earth, rose out of Chaos. Of their marriage were born numerous titans, among them Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, and

Cronos, father to Zeus. It is out of the union of Zeus with Mnemosyne that the nine muses arose. Said to inhabit Mount Olympus, Mount Parnassus or Mount Helicon, these graceful maiden goddesses of exalted parentage represented the nine branches of art know to Antique man. Calliope was the muse of epic poetry, Clio of history, Erato of love poetry, Euterpe of lyric poetry, Melpomene of tragedy, Polymnia of sacred poetry, Terpsichore of choral dance, Thalia of comedy, and Urania of astronomy (Bulfinch, 1970, pp. 4, 8).

“We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms”: Mnemotechnic and John Donne’s La Corona

Noémi M. NajbauerNoémi Najbauer obtained her BA in English from Yale University in 2004. In her final year

of the Renaissance and Baroque English Literature Program at the University of Budapest (ELTE), she is writing her PhD dissertation on Memory and John Donne. Noémi has been a lecturer at the Institute of English Studies at the University of Pécs, Hungary since 2005, where she enthusiastically teaches courses on Shakespeare, Elizabethan and Metaphysical lyric poets, and the Bible in literature.

Mnemotechnic or ars memorativa is, ironically, a forgotten branch of memory discourse in the West. Though the spatial and physiological dimensions of memory continue to gain recognition, mnemotechnic is no longer explicitly used for training this vital faculty of the mind which, before the advent of Romanticism, was considered the source of human ingenuity. In this paper, I would like to place mnemotechnic in the field of Memory Studies, remind the reader of this long forgotten art and, through a mnemotechnical analysis of Donne’s La Corona, propose the art of memory as an illuminating way of reading.

Memory and her Nine Daughters

A Brief Overview of Memory StudiesThe vital importance of memory

to art in particular and indeed to all human endeavor was underscored in recent decades with the advent of the multidisciplinary field of memory

studies. The surge of interest in memory in the late 1980s and early 1990s can be attributed to a number of factors including developments in the technology of virtual memory, the

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digitalization of written archives, the fall of the Soviet Empire and the availability of archives inaccessible in the past, and the coming of the year 2000. These and other phenomena prompted scholars to reexamine and reevaluate the past, thereby reworking old approaches and developing new approaches to this fruitful undertaking (Rossington and Whitehead, 2007, pp. 5-6).

The most fundamental definition in memory studies is naturally that of memory itself. The concept of memory is commonly associated with the past, but recent definitions, such as the OED definition according to which memory is “the capacity of a body or substance for manifesting effects of, or exhibiting behaviour dependent on, its previous state, behaviour or treatment” are more generous in opening up memory both to the present and to the future. The contemporary philosopher Mary Warnock elegantly described memory as “that by possession of which an animal learns from experience.” (Warnock, 1987, p. 6, quoted in Rossington and Whitehead, 2007, p. 2) In the simplest terms, memory is knowledge of the past that can be accessed in the present to influence the future. As such, it has not only pragmatic but also moral significance.

Despite or perhaps as a result of the superabundance of definitions of memory, the categorization of aspects or types of memory remains difficult. One traditional distinction is made between individual and collective memory. Individual memory is of course the memory of one person, while collective memory is the memory of a

community: ethnic, religious, social or other. Collective memory cannot simply be defined as a sum of the individual memories of all its members, because it is a whole that is both more than the sum of its parts and constantly in flux.

The second important distinction can be traced through the ages in various incarnations. Plato’s original differentiation between dialectical and rhetorical memory lives again as the Medievals’ memoria verborum and memoria rerum, Hegel’s Gedächtnis and Erinnerung, Henri Bergson’s pure memory and habit memory, Walter Benjamin’s mémoire involontaire and mémoire volontaire, and most recently, Mary Warnock’s conscious memory and habit memory. The first set, dialectical to conscious memory, coincides roughly with recall or recollection of past experience and is ‘natural’, the second set, from rhetorical to habit memory, can be described as a learned memory of skills, responses and modes of behavior and is ‘artificial.’ Though the above binary distinctions are convenient, Warnock warns against drawing a clear boundary between them and urges us rather to see the two types of memory as overlapping segments on the continuum towards consciousness. (Rossington and Whitehead, 2007, p. 4)

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The Art of Memory Through Time

The art of memory, variously known as ars memorativa or ars memoriae, or by its Greek name as mnemotechnic, is an ancient art, one might even say, based on the Greek etymology, a τεχνη, a craft or a technology of memory that flourished in the West from Antiquity until the 17th century. Mnemotechnic is a form of individual, habit memory that is no longer taught in schools, indeed, memory training is usually dismissed in our documentary culture, but this is not a result of printing technology. “The valuing of memory training depends more…on the role which rhetoric plays in a culture than on whether its texts are presented in oral or written forms.” (Carruthers, 1990, p. 11) When Cicero identified memory as the noblest of the five parts of rhetoric (i.e. inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio et actio), he irrevocably connected it with oratorical art, and its fate in our culture with that of rhetoric. Cicero, however, is also responsible for ensconcing memory among the four cardinal virtues, Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance. In his De inventione, he writes, “Prudence is the knowledge of what is good, what is bad, and what is neither good nor bad. Its parts are memory, intelligence, foresight.” (quoted in Yates, 1966, p. 20) The tension between seeing a trained memory as mere skill or bravura and considering it the basis of “character, judgment, citizenship, and piety” (Carruthers, 1990, p. 9) will define Western memory theory for centuries to come.

In De oratore, Cicero recounts the tragic story behind the invention of mnemotechnic. Simonides of Ceos (556-468 BC), the honey-tongued poet, was employed by the nobleman Scopas of Thessaly to chant a poem in his honor at a banquet. At the end of the recitation, Scopas offered Simonides only half the sum they had agreed upon claiming that Simonides had made a digression in the poem in praise of the gods Castor and Pollux. At that moment, the disappointed poet was summoned by two mysterious young men to the entrance of the hall, and as he left the building, the roof caved in, burying Scopas and his guests leaving Simonides the sole survivor. What is more, the bodies were so badly mangled in the accident that the mourning relatives were unable to identify their loved ones. Simonides then stood in the middle of the rubble and, with his mind’s eye, reconstructed the entire hall including the exact location in which each of the guests had been reclining. Thus, based on his memory of loci (places) and imagines (images, in this case the faces of the victims) he was able to identify the mangled bodies for proper burial. It is of tragedy, then, that mnemotechnic, the art of remembering through loci et imagines, was born. (Yates, 1966, pp. 1-2) From its inception following a ruined banquet, mnemotechnic came to involve the building up of rooms, hallways, entire palaces in the mind, and the peopling of these palaces with stirring images. It is fitting that the art of memory was born in response to death. Memory is, after all, the sole human antidote to mortality.

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The fullest account of the loci et imagines method ironically comes from an author whose name has been lost to memory, the anonymous creator of the 1st century BC Latin handbook Rhetorica ad Herennium, which up to the Renaissance was attributed to Cicero and forms the basis of both Medieval and Renaissance discourse on mnemotechnic. Concerning loci, the reader is told that to remember a lot of material, we must have a lot of places ready. In order not to get lost among the places, one should mark every fifth place with a golden hand and every tenth place with the portrait of a friend called Decimus. It is best to form loci in a deserted and solitary place. These loci should be of moderate size, not too brightly lit and not too dark, and not too far apart; in fact, with the help of our imagination, we can construct our own, fictitious loci. The anonymous author exhibits and presupposes uncannily keen visual powers. (Yates, 1966, pp. 6-8)

The discussion of images is both lucid and evocative: “Enough has been said of places, now we turn to the theory of images… Now nature herself teaches us what we should do. When we see in every day life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvelous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonourable, unusual, great, unbelievable, or ridiculous, that we are likely to remember for a long time… We ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in memory. ..

imagines agentes…if we ornament some of them, as with crowns or purple cloaks, so that the similitude may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint” they will better aid our memories. (quoted in Yates, 1966, pp. 9-10)

Plato and Aristotle, teacher and student in the 4th century BC, created an important line of division in thinking about memory that was to stretch through centuries of Western thought. They knew only the rudiments of the loci et imagines method as first practiced by Simonides, but preceded the author of Rhetorica ad Herennium by more than two centuries.

In Phaedrus, Plato developed the idea that knowledge of the truth consists in remembering Ideas once seen by all souls in their country of origin, in the World of Ideas. Memory can thus reach beyond individual experience into the world of ideas. (Yates, 1966, pp. 36-37) Eight hundred years later, St. Augustine continues this thought in his Confessions when he finds God with the help of the memory, through “believing that knowledge of the divine is innate in memory.” (ibid., p.48) Had the Western Roman Empire not fallen, there is no telling to what heights Ancient mnemotechnic wedded to Christianity might have risen.

Plato’s philosophy, and within it, his conception of memory, will be resurrected in the Renaissance. Neo-Platonists such as Guilio Camillo, and revolutionary thinkers such as Giordano Bruno and Robert Fludd will strive

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to create so-called memory theaters, actual physical structures in which man can view the entire body of knowledge arranged “in relation to the [cosmic] realities… Camillo’s memory system is based (so he believes) on archetypes of reality on which depend secondary images covering the whole realm of nature and of man.” (ibid., p.37)

Aristotle, in his De memoria et reminiscentia and in sharp contrast with Plato, insisted that all things we know come to us through sense perceptions and that it is impossible to know anything that does not. For mnemotechnic to function well, images used must represent ideas through similarity or dissimilarity and should be placed in some kind of order, like the alphabet, so that we can move backwards and forwards from one piece of knowledge to the next and manipulate them easily. (ibid., p. 34)

Thomas Aquinas takes Aristotle, Cicero, and the anonymous author of Ad Herennium, the most thoroughgoing account of places and images (ibid., pp. 6-10) as the basis for his own reflections on memory. Aquinas divides his reflections on memory into four points: 1) asserting that images need to be agentes because of the weakness of the human soul, which needs such crutches to remember spiritual truths, 2) reaffirming Aristotle’s conviction that we need to be able to move backward and forward in memorized material if we truly wish to master it, 3) adding another insight that we must cleave with solicitude and affection to what we wish to remember, and 4) admonishing the reader that frequent reflection and meditation aid memory. (ibid., pp.73-74)

In the Renaissance, the Dominican order, of which Albertus Magnus and Aquinas were members, will become a standard-bearer for the Christianized mnemotechnic. Two other branches of Renaissance mnemotechnic will be Peter of Ravenna’s secularized mnemotechnic in his bestselling Phoenix seu artificiosa memoria (1491) (Rossington and Whitehead, 2007, p.61) and the iconoclastic mnemotechnic of the great Protestant rhetorician Peter Ramus.

In the seventeenth century, mnemotechnic contributed to the New Science in the works of Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz, who saw it as an important aid to the inductive method. Mnemotechnic went from “a method of memorising the encyclopaedia of knowledge, of reflecting the world in memory, to an aid for investigating the encyclopaedia and the world with the object of discovering new knowledge.” (Yates, 1966, pp. 368-369)

The most promising insight is presented in a provocative reflection entitled “Medieval Memory and the Formation of Imagery.” The author proposes that although the art of memory is an invisible art, it may have become externalized when the Ad herennian idea of harmoniously sized, well-lit loci became a primary contributor to the development of perspective in early Renaissance (she mentions Giotto as a case in point) (ibid., p. 93) and the need for striking and complex images, grotesque and beautiful, may well have brought about a proliferation of images Western visual arts (ibid., p.91).

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John Donne’s life work is exciting from the point of view of memory for a number of reasons. In the wider national context, he was the citizen of a country that had, at least officially, broken with the Church of Rome in 1534 and in which Catholic memory was systematically suppressed or redefined as Anglican memory. Within a narrower context, Donne was born into a Recusant family of militant Catholics, counted martyrs among his forebears (on his mother’s side, Saint Thomas More), had Jesuits for uncles, and lost his younger brother Henry to disease when the latter was imprisoned for harboring a Catholic priest. The collective memory of the English Catholic community at large and his own ardently Catholic family defined Donne’s past and present, and decided his future. “I have beene ever kept awake in a meditation of Martyrdome, by being derived from such a stocke and race, as, I beleeve, no family…hath endured and suffered more in their persons and fortunes, for obeying the Teachers of Romane Doctrine” (Pseudo-Martyr, quoted in Shell and Hunt, 2006, p. 71) wrote Donne who most definitely wanted no part in the glories of martyrdom.

Donne was a convert both from a misspent youth as Jack Donne to responsible maturity as Doctor Donne, and from Roman Catholicism to Anglicanism, with the year of his ordination (1615) simply marking the end of one transformative process and the beginning of another. Donne’s individual, conscious memories of

youthful amatory adventures and his Catholic upbringing fill his later, devotional poetry, which is replete with erotic imagery and takes decades to become truly Protestant. At the same time, the language of theology and the niceties of seventeenth century religious debate haunt Donne’s wittiest love poems. Memory studies could thus be a potent methodology for healing the centuries old Jack Donne/Dr. Donne divide.

In his Doctor Donne phase (1615-1631) Donne produced the La Corona sonnet cycle, the 19 Holy Sonnets and a number of hymns and other devotional lyrics, his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and over 160 sermons. Donne’s deep knowledge and creative use of mnemotechnic is most evident in his sermons, in which he purposely reveals the inward, invisible architecture of his loci, calling the sermon a “goodly palace” though which he and his audience will proceed. First, they will “‘rest a little, as in an outward Court upon consideration of prayer in generall; and then draw neare the view of the palace, in a second Court’ to consider the Lord’s Prayer, and then ‘passe thorow the chiefest rooms of the palace it self ’ which contain four principle arguments about how to pray properly, before finally ‘going into the backside of [the palace]’ to refute objections to those arguments” (vol. V, no. 12, pp. 231-32 quoted in McCullogh, 2006, p. 173) Donne’s mnemotechnical places aren’t always palaces, but are often organic, like a

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tree and its branches, or reflect the geographical excitement of the times (i.e., the hemispheres of the globe, an archipelago of islands.) In his art of memory, Donne reaffirms Yates’ insight that the invisible inner architecture of the mind, as it becomes externalized, will itself become art. Concerning the images with which he populates the palaces of his mind, Donne chooses the Aristotelian-Thomistic line over the Platonic-Augustinian, insisting upon the importance of images to thought and contending that the mind has no knowledge, not even of the Absolute, that it has not sifted through the senses and stored in the form of images. (Masselink, 1989, p. 61) Though he depends greatly both on his own memory and that of his audience, Donne also recognizes the fallen nature of memory, and is in profound agreement with Aquinas that man is in need of striking physical images as crutches to remember subtle spiritual truths. And few images are more striking or memorable than the renowned Metaphysical conceit.

Though Donne’s sermons have come under scrutiny from the point of view of mnemotechnic, no scholar has, to the best of my knowledge, addressed the art of memory in Donne’s lyrical works. Cleanth Brooks came close in his famous essay entitled “The Language of Paradox,” in which he recognizes that in “The Canonization” “the poet has actually before our eyes built within the song the ‘pretty room’ with which he says the lovers can be content. The poem itself is the well-wrought urn which can hold the lovers’ ashes and which will not suffer in comparison with the prince’s ‘half-acre tomb.’” (Brooks, 1992, p. 200) In what follows, I would like to do what Francis Bacon, John Donne’s contemporary, suggested in his Novum Organon. I would like to use the art of memory to gather and hold in place bits of knowledge in order to make a new discovery, in this case, about an underestimated sonnet cycle. In other words, I will attempt a mnemotechnical reading of La Corona.

A Mnemotechnical Reading of La CoronaDonne preserved the sonnet form

exclusively for devotional expression. “His first venture into the religious sonnet—the seven poems collectively titled La Corona, composed around 1608—employs the sonnet to transform Catholic rosary devotions to Mary into a celebration of the life of Christ.” (Targoff, 2008, p. 108) Though Targoff mistakenly implies that rosary devotions are not Christ centric (the fifteen mysteries of the rosary, with two notable exceptions, are in fact fifteen

windows onto the life of Christ), she leads one to discover that Donne, in these early religious lyrics, has begun to conform his Catholic memories to Anglican expectations. He chooses six of the fifteen mysteries: Annunciation, Nativity, [The Finding in the] Temple, Crucifying, Resurrection, and Ascension and places them, along with an untitled introduction, into seven consecutive “pretty rooms,” the word stanza itself designating ‘room’ in Italian.

Michael R. G. Spiller provides an

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almost mathematical description of these rooms: “The ‘proportioned mental space’ which the sonneteers so consistently chose to inhabit emerges, right at the start, as the familiar fourteen-line sonnet, with eleven syllables (or ten, depending on the vernacular) to a line, dividing into eight and six, and using in the octave two rhymes arranged either ABAB ABAB or ABBA ABBA; and two or three rhymes rhyming CDCDCD or CDECDE.” (Spiller, 1992, pp. 2-3) The sonnet cycle is a series of seven rooms which open into one another, with the seventh room opening back onto the first. As the reader leaves one room and enters the next, he will notice above the doorways, seven lines that are both the last line of the preceding sonnet and the first line of the succeeding one. “Salvation to all that will is nigh”¹ is written large on the doorway from room one to two, “Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb” ornaments the doorway into room three, and so on. “Salute the last, and everlasting day” is appropriately on the doorway to the last room, which will bring us back to the first, thereby completing the circle, or as Donne eloquently writes: “The ends crown our works, but Thou crown’st our ends, / For, at our end, begins our endless rest.” The spatial scheme is hauntingly reminiscent of Ad Herennium: the sonnets are harmonious spaces, not too large, not too small, equally distant from one another, and instead of a golden hand marking every fifth place, we have an inscription on the doorway leading from one room to the next.

In each of the seven rooms, we

encounter a paradoxical image, befitting Aristotle’s admonition that images should be either highly similar or dissimilar to what they are to call to mind: in the first sonnet, the crown representing the entire sonnet cycle is pictured as “a vile crown of frail bays”, a “thorny crown” and a “crown of Glory.” The second and third sonnets employ spatial images: Mary’s womb as a prison in which she keeps her maker, the tiny stall in which she lays the infinite Christ, for “the Inn [hath] no room.” The fourth sonnet presents a child arguing with the learned doctors, Christ at the age of twelve “blowing out those sparks of wit, / Which Himself on those Doctors did bestow.” The fifth sonnet raises the spatial paradox of “measuring self-life’s infinity to a span, / Nay to an inch” as Christ, Infinity Himself, is stretched out on the cross. In the sixth room is the poet’s heart. He begs from God “one drop of [His] blood” to moisten this heart which is “Too stony hard, and yet too fleshly.” The last sonnet portrays the ascending Sun/Son (a favorite pun in 17th century devotional poetry) as a “strong Ram, which hast battered heaven for me” and a “Mild Lamb, which with [His] blood [has] marked the path.” Leaving the room of the sixth sonnet to enter the seventh, the attentive reader will both complete the spatial crown and find the crown he must offer to God. In the seventh and first room “begins our endless rest,” Donne writes, unknowingly affirming a beautiful formulation written four centuries after him that “The sonnet is still the place where Desire confronts its Other, and in a small room some fixity is given

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to the restlessness of being.” (Spiller, 1992, p. 197)

“Salvation,” Donne simply wrote in a sermon from 1617, “is the art of memory.” Though aware of the fallen nature of memory, Donne insisted that remembering God’s mercies throughout

salvation history will shape our present and decide our future. In the poet’s hands, mnemotechnic becomes an aid to devotion, a map to the “crown of Glory, which doth flower always,” to “our endless rest.”

Endnotes ¹All quotations from John Donne’s La Corona from Clements, A.C. (ed) 1992. John Donne’s Poetry: A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Works CitedBrooks, C. 1992. “The Language of Paradox.” In John Donne’s Poetry: A Norton Critical Edition, pp. 195-203.Bulfinch, T. 1970. Bulfinch’s Mythology. Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside.Carruthers, M.J. 1990. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press. Clements, A.C. (ed) 1992. John Donne’s Poetry: A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Masselink, N. 1989. “Donne’s Epistemology and the Appeal to Memory.” In John Donne Journal, vol. 8, Nos. 1 & 2, pp. 57-88. McCullogh, P. 2006. “Donne as Preacher.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, pp. 167-181.Rossington, M. and Whitehead, A. (eds) 2007. Theories of Memory: A Reader. Edinburgh” Edinburgh Uni-versity Press.Shell, A. and Hunt, A. 2006. “Donne’s Religious World.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, pp. 65-82.Spiller, M. R. G. (1992) The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Targoff, R. 2008. John Donne, Body and Soul. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Yates, F. A. 1966. The Art of Memory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Abstract:

Folk narratives pertain to a very specific part of culture reflecting individual as well as collective memory depending on the genre. Actually, they are an integral entity whose structure is exposed to numerous primary and secondary factors. Therefore they show a great degree of dynamism, and the pristine version stored in internal or external memory is rather rare these days. Viera Gašparíková (1977, p. 232) argues that the scientific circles within folkloristic studies have been polarized: on one hand there is the thesis of folk fairy tale being a subject of dying out, on the other hand the optimistic hypothesis of its lifetime. As their origin is in collective memory

and they are passed on from generation to generation, they form a continuum rather than a scope within which erratic changes take place. Milan Leščák (1977, p.12) posits that those changes are relatively structural and more or less stabilized. “Obvious is their correlation with cultural values recognized by the community at a specific time and in specific space as typical and own.” (Leščák, 1977, p. 12) Thus, on the condition of minor changes in the course of cultural development, those values can be transferred and projected as pristine entities to the contemporary culture system. Until the 70s, the Slovak folkloristic and ethnological studies did not perceive the urgency of observing

Folk Tales and Memorial Narratives as Viable Artifacts of Collective Memory

Katarína ŠkolníkováKatarína Školníková is a PhD student at the Faculty of Humanities and Natural Sciences at

the Prešov University. She is working on the dissertation thesis titled Translation and Inter-pretation of the Prosaic Works by John Irving. She dedicates herself to research of contempo-rary American and English literature, postmodernism and metafiction strategies. In 2009 she graduated from the Matej Bel University, specialization translating – interpreting (English-German). She participates in translation competitions organized by the Ostravská University and the Literárny fond. In 2008, her translations of the short story Cold Iron by Ali Smith and in 2009 the short story Bist du es, Elch? by Uli Rothfuss were put into print.

The article deals with the dialectical relationship between art and its materialization in folk narratives and memory. The article underlines the change of research approach: no more are they viewed as petrified but rather as open, viable systems. Studying them means analyzing their continual development, adaptation process, and the co-existence of the pas-sive and active repertoire stored in collective or individual/internal or external memory. Storytellers and recipients are presented as form/content changing agents who determine the lifetime and life of these forms. Regeneration is recognized as a process after which a narrative can be reintegrated in the memory.

New Research Approach to Folk Forms in General

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culture changes. Only then were the segmentation of the traditional (the material stored in memory long-term) and the untraditional in folk culture (the material being introduced into the system) placed in the centre of attention. An appropriate attention has been paid also to reciprocal relations between the folklore tales, semi-folklore tales, and layman expressions of narratives, including memorial narratives.

Tenets of research have resided in analyses of functional linkage between the piece and authentic regional traditions and recognized values. Michálek (1971, p.101) distinguishes three most important aspects to be discussed when analyzing a memorial narrative: classification of material in terms of folklore genre, its relation to traditional folklore, and artistic value. He also introduces international denotations for memorial narratives such as memorát, memorabile, Alltagserzählung, Wahre Geschichte, vzpomínkové vyprávění, rozprávanie zo života. Obviously, the new approach underscoring the development dialectics of folklore system asserts itself. “The aim of research is to categorize and observe the new-born elements that enter the system as well as the elements that gradually die out and are being emasculated.” (Leščák, 1977, p. 14) Its fundamental hypotheses are based on the idea of the changing of folklore function, not excluding the function of folk fairy tale. Gašparíková (1977, p. 233) accentuates that the folklore in the past is to be differentiated from the term “folklore” that is entrenched in the new conception-based science. Further,

(1977, p. 233) she reminds that these days the experts prefer analyses of the so called untraditional pieces, including life narratives or memorial narratives that are generally considered as modern. Modern in sense of being closely related to recent or contemporary issues, events, experiences that could not exist in the past and thus have been stored in collective memory only recently. For decades regeneration of old fairy tale by means of invention of a newer version used to be conventionally excluded. As Gašparíková (1977, p. 237) rightly implies nowadays the resistance of classic folklore is not measured by its ability to fight against innovations but its capability to absorb new elements and features in the natural process of the folklore regeneration.

Michálek (1971, p. 13) also distinguishes between two contradictory approaches to folklore narratives: the first one prioritizes continual view of folk culture and legitimizes only those new forms that are in some way interconnected with tradition. This approach demonstrates elements of affinity to compactness and continuity within folk narratives. On the other hand, there is a claim that applauds all new impulses and does not narrow the term folk culture but rather attempts its extension. The system is enriched by new forms, even those backed by mass communication means and e-versions. The current state is viewed as a stage of its natural development. The folklorists underscore temporal chronology and problem based determination. The object of studies embraces a broad spectrum requiring the comprehensive

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study of all interdependent factors. The folk culture is not viewed as an isolated entity, but an entity deprived of any dividing lines that would define its scope and range of impact. E.g., empirical works by Michálek (1977, p. 251) detect important deviations in magic fairy tales: Many folk fairy tales have taken on humorous character. The genre group accepted the accentuation of this feature as a feedback to audience demand. Thus, the original genre fuses with new tendencies. The boundaries are blurred and the motif shift within the repertoire is obvious. Michálek illustrates this, e.g., on the function of bogeyman or ghost, which has considerably shifted from a means of triggering horror to a humorous element of the fairy tale. Generally, the storage of magic fairy tales in collective memory in oral forms seems to be on decline. In contrast, it still exists in secondary form, stored in external memory – in written collections and books. It was no earlier than during the eighteenth century when the notion that fairy tales could be written and published for children emerged against the usual hidebound conservative resistance. The content has not remained intact either.

Michálek (1971, p. 12) says that

the structure of folk narratives is exposed to unprecedented flow of new tendencies, dynamics of coping with those phenomena is being disrupted and this results in palpable tension in the system. The body of folk culture keeps developing, growing, changing; new elements arise and try to qualify themselves as eligible for joining the system. “The new research approach calls for recognition of highly differentiated picture of existence forms on contemporary conditions.” (Michálek, 1971, p. 130) Steven Greenblatt said: “ … the work of art is not the passive surface upon which historical experience leaves its mark, but one of the creative agents in the fashioning and refashioning of experience …” All in all, the folk tales and memorial narratives are more read than narrated these days. The folk fairy tale still exists, but takes on new forms of existence. Therefore, we cannot deem its existence stagnation, but rather as modification. The texts, and motifs that recede from the vivid authentic repertoire are kept and revived in the external materialized memory – in printed media – and moreover, the structural elements do not vanish but on the contrary are preserved and might acquire new functions.

Narrator’s And Audience’s Role in Modification Process in Collective Memory

Not only objective aspects determine the process of folklore modification. Michálek (1971, p. 14) admits that tradition as the key agent is not ascribed such a high significance as it used to be

in the past. Currently, more emphasis is laid on the storyteller. Thus, the cultural and anthropological approach win the plaudits and the traditional approach to folk culture is being subverted.

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Evidently, the narrator’s inventions and imagination have a considerable impact on versions of a folk tale and its lifetime course. Idealizations or additions significantly (de)form the original version. Subjective bias, preferences, external and internal influences, the relationship between the individual and the community, even the unsystematic collecting project themselves into the contemporary repertoire of folk prose. The reconstruction of old fairy tales and original forms of memorial narratives is made only by addressing elder storytellers familiar with the narrative and capable of retrospective view. As a result the fairy tale/memorial narrative research is rather anthropo-dependent.

Especially in the case of memorial narratives, the major protagonists are storytellers themselves, thus, the narratives are the best material through which the modification process is to be observed, as the generator and its cause are the most dynamic factors – the man. The topic and motifs of Slovak memorial narratives are dominated by the issue of the world wars, the Velvet Revolution, etc., and attitudes towards and interpretations of events keep changing. The narratives map the segments of history worth being preserved in collective memory. However, the historical frame or approach to regional historic events is being deconstructed and reconstructed, subjective opinions also infiltrate into the way a story is narrated. Sirovátka (1977, p.268) underscores the phenomenon coming up especially after the World War II when many stories have been modified, so we can claim

that their form and content is not rigid and petrified but they also allow a great deal of fantasy and creativity as they have been successfully integrated in the folklore system and are not perceived as nontraditional or new.

Michálek (1971, p. 103) comes up with a different point of view. He distinguishes three stages of memorial narrative, each of which is connected to different amount of manipulation and modification potential. 1. memories by storyteller’s ancestors (high manipulation potential, the point where the individual creation merges with the collective creation), 2. memories and descriptions inspired by own life, 3. narration about contemporary events (newly coined narratives that have not gone through substantial modifications).

However, Michálek defines also the constructive function of storytellers as opposed to the deconstructive one: they play an irreplaceable role in life cycle of fairy tale as they sustain its regeneration and regaining of original, i.e. oral form. That way the material reenters its natural forms and oral tradition. Gašparíková (1977, p. 242) accentuates that the fixedness of a form in collective memory is determined not only by narrator and their subjective preferences but predominantly by listenership/readership who indirectly decide on motifs selection, their regeneration or on the other hand ignorance towards some pieces, filing them in passive repertoire or even their disappearance. Another criterion is the extent of the audience: whether the narration is for broad scope of listeners

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or only narrow social class. Above all, the memorial narrative

problematizes the issue of relationships between the individual and the collective in folk art. Michálek (1977, p.251) elaborates on the idea that even though the folk fairy tales seemingly disappear from the collective memory, the fact of performance opportunities being on decline has to be also taken into account. It is not their number, but the character of conditions for narration that has changed. The grandiose atmosphere in which they used to be narrated has turned into more prosaic everyday-like mood. Undoubtedly, this turn has been projected in the nature of fairy tale narration. “The authentic narration may be likened to fancy folklore costume that is worn by people only on special occasions.” (Sirovátka, 1977, p. 261) Furthermore, Michálek concludes that folk narration is being updated, demythicized, obvious is tendency to realism. The terms like narration drawing on real life, true story, memorial narration have been entrenched in folkloristic studies.

Sirovátka (1977, p. 264) draws a clear dividing line between the memorial narration which usually resides in memory of an individual, and fairy tales, where the tradition and passing on is not absent. The memorial narration is not considered as a collective but as an individual creation with short-term existence deprived of characteristics of continuum inherent in folk fairy tales. To put it in other words, memorial narration is composed of extracted elements from individual memory that plot the storyline. Sirovátka (1977, p.

269) claims that the differentiation moment between fairy tale and memorial narrative is the proportion of the subjective and the objective in memory of either individual storyteller or collective memory of a nation or a community. Where the memories are blurred, unclear, deprived of subjectivity there the historical narration, legends, fairy tales, epos start. Michálek (1977, pp. 250-253) enhances the importance of empirical study and material collecting. A good example of complex analysis of external memory are collections drawing on events from the Bošácka valley by Jozef Ľ. Holuby that are a result of 40 years of his work. The existence of his work Povesti a rozpávky z Bošáckej doliny or the work by Jiří Polívka Súpis slovenských rozprávok have been of great significance for examination of folk narration until now. An important aspect of Holuby´s approach is his attempt not to restrict the field of interest but on contrary: to provide a complex overview of repertoire by local storytellers. Even the collections by P.J. Šafárik and J. Kollár have taken a rescue function and are enormously useful for contemporary research as a basis for the observation of development changes and research of their reasons. Working on Sirovátka´s (1977, p. 271) recognition of the function of collecting we can conclude as follows: only comprehensive collectors’ and documentary involvement can contribute to better understanding of the way and structures in which the ideas, motifs, topics, and narration situations are fixed and stored in collective memory. Moreover, Michálek

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(1971, p. 22) concedes that acquisition of reliable material is not feasible without personal interaction between the collector and storyteller. Only this

way a credible repertoire mosaic of particular region and of particular genre can be reconstructed.

Lifetime of Fairy Tale and Memorial Narrative inCollective Memory

The cliché about the intensive life and the sustainability potential of folklore forms present in our culture decades ago is now being objected to as single-track, narrow-minded and not complex enough. The primary question to be posed is how long is the lifetime of folklore forms? When elaborating on this issue, the state of contemporary folklore tradition has to be clearly defined. Leščák (1972, p. 188) concludes that the synchronic analysis accompanied by inevitable differentiation demonstrates the existence of two categories of folk versions. First category embraces forms still vivid in community and passed on until now. The second category encompasses pieces preserved only in passive memory. To put it in other words, to detect lifetime and identify relevant contrasts it is necessary to record both categories: the vivid repertoire as well as the latent one. The priority of current folkloristic studies is to record also the passive prose material. Objections may state that this material does not live in the truest sense of the word, but Gašparíková (1977, p.234) discards this as a narrow-minded attitude. On no account can it be attributed as dead as it exists in memories or at least in subconscious of storytellers or listeners and the only reason why it is not manifested is the

lack of opportunities for narration, shortage of listeners, interest deficit in audience. Thus, the story is an integral part of repertoire, but so far there has not been form making it desirable and attractive again. Such stories are like filed in our memory, are living but not taking on the appropriate function.

Gašparíková (1977, p. 233) contradicts that any synchronic record taking of folklore is pointless when retrospective lifetime reconstruction of a fairy tale or a genre is infeasible. We have to keep in mind that not everything recorded in past reflects the active repertoire. Some genres or forms absent in older collections used to be also authentic and without those inception and development of newer ones would be inconceivable. Commonly, the prose versions are derived from objective reality and only later do they become the basis for new forms and genres. “Actually, the term lifetime overlaps with life to which two attributes may be ascribed: either unstable or intense. Consequently, unstable life can be made identical with unstable lifetime and vice versa, intense life with intense lifetime.” (Gašparíková, 1977, p. 234) To be precise, there is a nuance differentiating the terms: lifetime implies also future perspective. Accordingly, the forms with prospective lifetime are supposed

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to be prevented from disappearing from collective and individual memory in the near future. Working on this knowledge, we may posit that the lifetime can be

made equal to functionality. Gašparíková (1977, p.235) establishes a relationship of inclusion between those terms:

In general, the real ratio between the life and lifetime of folklore is variable in the course of history.

Gašparíková (1977, p. 235) admits that the possibility of regeneration of folk tales and memorial narratives and prioritizing of other subjects and storylines make the scheme accessible to different

constellations and structures. We can infer this from the general scheme (Gašparíková, 1977, p. 236) depicting the life of a single fairy tale within which the lifetimes of three different versions may be portrayed:

Viera Gašparíková (1977, p. 236) suggests to depict the passive or active life of folklore - both present and

structured in collective memory - as a single line topped by waves or arcs representing the lifetime sequences.

lifetime I lifetime II lifetime III potential futurelifetime(regeneration I) (regeneration 2)

active life pasive pasiveactive active predicted life

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The course of a lifetime in collective memory and cultural community is interspersed with less and more intense periods running through the whole history of fairy tale or memorial narrative development. Gašparíková (1977, p. 236) generalizes that the fairy tale demonstrates the worst lifetime whereas other types of this line such as anecdote or memorial narratives show a better vitality. The presence or absence of humorous storyline is often the decisive aspect of vitality or on the other hand fragile nature of folk form. Gašparíková (1977, p. 240) illustrates why the prominent feature of fairy tale repertoire originating in eastern regions is the dominance of the fantastic or magic fairy tale as if the lifetime of this type has endured until now. The generation of Ľudovít Štúr drew on Gemer and neighbouring regions as a well of fairy tales and comprehensively recorded its repertoire. The folk fairy tale seems to be deep rooted also in the western Slovakia. The reasons are numerous records in the collections by F. Wollmann and his contemporaries. To compare with the research outcome in Orava: at first sight this region is dominated by legends, and demonstrates the absence of magic fairy tales. More detailed research needs to be conducted in order to answer the questions: Has the magic fairy tale ever asserted itself here as a genre or not? Is the present minor occurrence to be interpreted as a loss of former vitality? Accordingly, if we talk about the lifetime of prose forms we often refer to its being recorded, as this is the deciding and determining feature whose absence

leads to lost forms and the denotation of the genre or particular piece as an artifact disappearing from collective memory or an artifact with an unstable lifetime.

Therefore, the records are to be seen as sustaining crutches which enable the folk forms to keep pace with development within collective memory and smoothly transfer borders between generations. “Traditionally, the lifetime has been understood as frequency.” (Gašparíková, 1977, p. 242) The quantitative approach was given priority over the qualitative nature of forms that have been passed on. Modern experts on folklore do not put emphasis on how often a genre or theme crops up but enhance the presented form and its qualities. The key point is the differentiation of fairy tale type or genre. The story tellers themselves refrain from any differentiation of types and file the pieces next to each other as equal forms drawing neither links nor dividing lines between them. But the matter of being stably or unstably stored in collective memory depends also on the popularity of particular genre. Michálek (1977, p. 249) defines lifetime as actually the lifetime of the genre, occurrence and popularity of particular motifs.

Moreover, the fixedness of the form in memory is determined by uneven social development, i.e., some regions or ethnic communities develop faster, some slowly. It is essential to simultaneously consider the territorial division. In fact, some genres are more viable, some less as a consequence of belonging to a certain geographic location.

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Working with the knowledge, factors, and aspects mentioned above, the dialectical relation can be identified between art and memory in terms of folk tales and memorial narratives. In the scope of collective memory there is a position reserved for folk tales, and moreover also for memorial narratives that spring from individual memory. The art in those forms is fixed by means of oral narration and in compliance with demands of current audience and readership recently, rather than in written records like collections, where books take the prominent role. These forms epitomize an external memory that in the course of reception of its various versions repeatedly activates our human (internal) memory. In those literature forms the collective memory of previous generations is infused and by means of the fixated artifacts passed on further. However, this external memory does not keep the pristine, unchanged form of fairy tales or true stories. The form or content of the folklore artifacts keep modifying themselves according to demands and preferences of the recipient or storyteller’s imagination and their authorial license. A good example to justify this premise is one of Jack Zipes´ outcomes of fairy tale research “Fairy tale writers began to make dramatic demands upon the conceptual abilities of children—or, to say this is another way, fairy tale writers began to credit children with a greater capacity for sophisticated thought.”

Zipes writes that authors began “to turn the [fairy tale] upside down and inside out, to question the traditional value system, and to provide new endings—endings that appeared to contradict the notion of wonder and transformation that had been so dominant in the wonder folktales.”

In the contemporary folkloristic study the objective and subjective factors are not considered as disturbing factor that exacerbates preservation of folklore repertoire. On the contrary, they examine the capability of folk tales and memorial narratives to accept and successfully reflect new stimulations and challenges. Last but not least, when conducting research into folklore forms the general trend is to be overshadowed by differentiation. Each folklore form is to be taken as a unique artifact with good preservation potential and as a form exposed to countless manipulations and therefore still open, tolerant and ever developing artifact of external memory which has become an exponent of collective memory of particular cultural community. The changes appertain above all to the primary function, the acquisition of new quality with regard to changed conditions. Actually, the adaptability potential of folklore repertoire is demonstrated. Fairy tales as well as memorial narratives are keys for deciphering the internal, subjective world. They are a means for how to materialize values, philosophies, persuasions, beliefs, and concerns.

Works cited:Bausinger, H., 1959. Strukturen des alltäglichen Erzählens. Fabula 1, p. 240.Dobšinský, P. 1993. Slovenské obyčaje, povery a čary. Bratislava: Pramene.

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Dzubáková, M. 1976. Ku genéze slovenskej folkloristiky. Bratislava: VEDA.Feglová, V.; Leščák, M., 1995. Pramene k tradičnej duchovnej kultúre Slovenska. Bratislava: Prebudená pieseň-nadácia.Gašparíková, V., 2004. Slovenská rozprávka v ľudovom podaní. In: Slovenské ľudové rozprávky 3. Bratislava.Gašparíková, V., 1977. „Životnosť ľudových prozaických žánrov v súčasnosti“. In: Leščák, M. a kol., 1977. Premeny tradícií v súčasnosti 1, Bratislava: VEDA, pp. 232-244.Hlôšková, H. 2000. Tradičná kultúra a generácie. Bratislava: Ústav etnológie SAV.Kaľavský, M., 2000. Identity of Ethnic Groups and Communities. Bratislava: SAP.Kiliánová, G., 2005. Identita a pamäť. Devín/ Theben/ Dévény ako pamätné miesto. Bratislava: Ústav etnológie SAV a SAP.Kiliánová, G., 1978. “Pokus o analýzu problému ľudového rozprávača vo folkloristike“. In: Správy č.13 hlavnej úlohy štátneho plánu výskumu VII-5-9. Bratislava, FFUK, s. 34-56.Kiliánová, G.: “Rozprávanie zo života ako žáner ľudovej prózy“. In: Slovenský národopis, 40, 3/1992, s. 267-279.Leščák, M. a kol., 1977. Premeny tradícií v súčasnosti 1. Bratislava: VEDA.Leščák, M., 1991. Výskum súčasného stavu folklóru na Slovensku. Slovenský národopis, 20, 1972, s. 188.Marčok, Viliam, 1978. O ľudovej próze. Bratislava.Michálek, J., 1971. Spomienkové rozprávanie s historickou tematikou. Bratislava: Vydavateľstvo Sloven-skej akadémie vied.Michálek, J., 1977. „K otázke premien v ľudovej próze“. In: Leščák, M. a kol., 1977. Premeny tradícií v súčasnosti 1. Bratislava: VEDA, pp. 249-260.Miko, F., Rampák, Z. a kol. 1986. Súradnice literárneho diela. Bratislava: Tatran.Pourová-Volbrachtová, L., 1977. „Prozaická vypravování v současnosti“. In: Leščák, M. a kol., 1977. Pre-meny tradícií v súčasnosti 1. Bratislava: VEDA, pp. 277-283.Sirovátka, O., 1977. „Vzpomínkové vyprávění v dnešním vypravěčském podání“. In: Leščák, M. a kol., 1977. Premeny tradícií v súčasnosti 1. Bratislava: VEDA, pp. 261-272.Stoličná, R. 2001. Etnológia a kultúrne dedičstvo. Bratislava: Ústav etnológie SAV.Stoličná, R. 1997. Slovakia-European Contexts of the Folk Culture. Bratislava: VEDA.

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Abstract:

Personal, local, and even national identity is created not only by dramatic and traumatic historical events or great moral dilemmas, but also by everyday life, crowded streets and markets, the sounds of the city, smells from childhood, and the taste of favorite dishes. There have been many attempts in Polish art, literature, cinema, and popular culture in the last ten years to cope with Central Europe’s difficult history in the 20th century. This topic was presented in earlier works of art, but appeared mostly as a martyrological, moral, or political problem, as in the films of Andrzej Wajda, the poetry of Czesław Miłosz, and the books of Tadeusz Borowski. What is innovative

in this new wave, compared with earlier tendencies, is the absence of the strictly martyrological, ethical, and political dimension of the history. They are not less important, or topical, but other aspects of the past are now coming out of the shadow of the “Great Themes”.

The postwar order imposed on Central Europe was legislated and instituted politically and militarily, as well as culturally through the reinvention of cultural memory. The consequence of changing Poland’s borders were both displaced persons, due to the migration of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, and Germans, and the manipulation of the cultural memory in both the lost and the newly acquired

The article deals with the dialectical relationship between art and its materialization in folk narratives and memory. The article underlines the change of research approach: no more are they viewed as petrified but rather as open, viable systems. Studying them means analyzing their continual development, adaptation process, and the co-existence of the pas-sive and active repertoire stored in collective or individual/internal or external memory. Storytellers and recipients are presented as form/content changing agents who determine the lifetime and life of these forms. Regeneration is recognized as a process after which a narrative can be reintegrated in the memory.

Bringing back the memory: Representations of Wrocław, Lwów, and Szczecin in contemporary Polish culture as examples of reconstructing cultural memory Agata Strządała

Agata Strządała is currently working at the Institute of Cultural and Folklore Studies at the University of Opole. She received her PhD. and her M.A. from the Institute of Cultural Studies at University of Wrocław. Her academic experience includes the position of a lecturer at the Institute of Cultural Studies, University of Wrocław and at the Institute of Humanities, Medi-cal University in Wrocław. Her research focuses on cultural studies, intercultural communica-tion, theory of culture, history of eugenics, history of natural science, bioethics and history of culture.

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lands. Now, as the witnesses of this process are passing away, a new kind of cultural memory of these places is emerging.

Memory as a theoretical issue was preceded by the notion of collective consciousness. The concept of collective consciousness as something different and ontologically relatively independent of individual consciousness was invented by the French sociologist and philosopher Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) (Szacki 1964). The members of a society share the same basic ideas, concepts, language, and beliefs. Moreover, these commonly shared ideas are crucial for developing the cultural identity of the group.

Individual consciousness dies with the body of the person. There is no biological possibility to transfer individual concepts and ideas to succeeding generations. Biologically, parents transmit only genes to their children. The parents’ abilities to get though life are not biologically transferred to the offspring. Each new generation has to learn everything from the beginning, such as counting, language, science, and religion.

However, concepts created by individuals can enrich the collective consciousness by their communication and then transmission through tradition. In this way an idea that was the invention of one person’s mind starts to become independent of the inventor. The idea, repeated by other members of the society, can spread to other societies and generations, and can change and develop. It is impossible to imagine the invention of the

automobile without the prior invention of the engine, or even without the prior invention of the wheel. Although the wheel seems so obvious to us that we treat it as something almost natural, we must remember that in many cultures, such as the Aztec or Incan cultures, the wheel was unknown. The name of the inventor, who probably lived in Mesopotamia seven thousand years ago, is unknown, but his idea definitely changed history and is still present in our everyday life.

The concept of collective consciousness was developed by others sociologists and anthropologists, such as the French sociologist of the Durkheim school Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945), who coined the term mémoire collective (Halbwachs 1969). Halbwachs pointed out that both what is included in collective memory and what is excluded are important for national or cultural identity. Not every new idea or historical event is automatically incorporated into the collective memory. Forgetting is as significant in creating the collective memory as memorizing and remembering.

The German Egyptologist Jan Assmann (1938) introduced the distinction between cultural memory and communicative memory. Communicative memory deals with the most recent past, which emerges from everyday life and everyday experience. The everyday experience is objectified though language and direct acts of communication. Communicative memory is shared by the people of the same generation, and it passes away together with that generation (Assmann,

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2008, p. 66). The depth of this kind of memory is relatively shallow, reaching forty to eighty or one hundred years. Carriers of communicative memory, according to Assmann, can be any member of the group of people present during the same period of time and at the same place and who share the same cultural identity, while cultural memory is transferred by specialized carriers of official and institutionalized tradition, such as priests, teachers, artists, and writers (ibid., p.69). Cultural memory is based on a myth about the foundation of the group and crucial historical events and achievements (ibid., pp.70-71).

In the case of Poland, its Christianization in 966 is fundamental to national identity and is regarded as the founding act of the nation. Another example is the Battle of Grunwald (Tannenberg) in 1410 between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania on one side, and the Teutonic Order on the other. Cultural memory deals with the deeper or deepest past, or sometimes even with imagined ancient roots of the whole nation, such as the myth about the three brothers Lech, Czech, and Rus, who became the mythological ancestors of some Slavic nations; Lech is regarded as the founder of the Poles, Czech of the Czechs and Slovakians, and Rus of the Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians.

While communicative memory lives in personal, individual memories, cultural memory is cultivated through media, art, paintings, theater, and science. Only some components of communicative memory are going to become cultural memory, just as only some individual

ideas or acts of perception participate in communicative memory. Because memories in the cultural understanding do not appear in everyday experience, they must be actualized and represented through a medium or during ceremonies and rituals. Notions belonging to cultural memory are constantly repeated in many different forms, such as the “Chronicles of the Famous Kingdom of Poland” by Jan Długosz describing the Battle of Grunwald, the painting of the Battle of Grunwald by Jan Matejko, the national museums where Matejko’s picture is exhibited, and the national library where the “Chronicles of the Famous Kingdom of Poland” is kept and is a subject of historical research. Between communicative and cultural memory is a large gap, called by the ethnologist Jan Vansina (1929) “the floating gap” (Assmann, 2008, p.64-65). People can recall their own memories relatively easily or they remember culturally significant stories from the remote past, but events older than communicative memory (more than forty-eighty years ago) are hidden by collective amnesia.

Moreover, collective memory is generally politically relevant. Political power, especially totalitarian, takes over collective memories (ibid, pp. 85-86). Totalitarian political power influences the processes of collective remembering and forgetting. What is more, Assmann indicated that remembering in an oppressive system can be an act of resistance (ibid, p. 87). In the case of Poland during communist times, for example, recalling the Katyń massacre, the mass murder of Polish

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military officers and policemen by the Soviets at the beginning of WWII, was an extremely dangerous act of courage.

As a result of the imposed new political order after the Second World War, the borders of many countries in Central Europe changed, causing a massive exodus of people. The eastern Polish territories, together with Lwów and Wilno, were taken over by the Soviet Union in 1945, and the eastern parts of the former German Reich were incorporated into Poland. Polish citizens were forced to leave their homes in Lwów, Wilno, and other cities and villages in eastern Poland (Kresy Wschodnie), and move into the homes of the expelled Germans, the inhabitants of Lower Silesia together with Wrocław (German Breslau), Western Pomerania with Szczecin (German Stettin), and the Lubuska Land (Neumark). For both the Poles and the Germans it was an extremely stressful and traumatic process.

The communist propaganda called these incorporated lands “Recovered Territories” (Ziemie Odzyskane) or “Western Lands” (Ziemie Zachodnie). By using the term “Recovered Territories” the communist authorities wanted to suggest that these lands were an integral part of Poland and that after the Second World War they were simply taken back. The propaganda recalled that Lower Silesia was Polish territory in the Middle Ages. The first king of Poland, Bolesław Chrobry (Boleslaw the Brave), established new bishoprics in Wrocław, Kołobrzeg, and Kraków in 1000. Earlier he had established the archbishopric in Gniezno, which was also the first capital

of Poland. Moreover, the Silesian Piasts, one of the lines of the royal dynasty, were ruling in Silesia long after other branches of the family died out. The Piast dynasty did not die out until the beginning of the 18th century.

The communist authorities mani-pulated memory, using the history of the Silesian Piasts to prove that Silesia belongs to Poland and to justify the repopulation of Lower Silesia by Poles. Even some buildings on the main streets of Wrocław had huge painted slogans about “Piastian Wroclaw” (“Piastowski Wrocław”). Creating a new identity for the Polish refugees from former eastern Poland had two objectives: to repopulate the “Recovered Territories” by Polish citizens, and to make them forget about their own lost homes and lands.

Creating a new picture of history always has some function and utility in establishing a new political order (Assmann 2008, p.86). As a result, a huge gap emerged in the collective identity and collective memory of the new citizens of Wroclaw, Szczecin, Silesia, and Pomerania. Between the medieval history of Silesia, Pomerania, and Lubuska Land and the experiences of the exiled refugees after 1945 was a huge gap, analogous to the gap between communicative and cultural memory.

Poland lost Silesia in the 14th century when it came under the rule of the Kingdom of Bohemia. Then, in 1526, Wrocław, together with Silesia, become part of the Habsburg Empire. The territories of Silesia were ruled by the Austrian Habsburg dynasty for more than two hundred years, between 1526

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and 1741. During this period, Silesia had political and cultural autonomy, and local Piast families established many palaces and mausoleums, and still playing important roles among the Silesian and German aristocracy (Davies, Moorhouse 2002, p. 177-226). The partial independence of multinational Silesia, preserved under the Bohemian crown and then in the Habsburg Empire, ended in 1741 when the King of Prussia, Frederick the Great, started to conquer the Austrian territories. Silesia was incorporated into Prussia and lost its autonomy. Integration with the rest of the state led on the one hand to economic growth and on the other to unification and Germanization of the region (Davies, Moorhouse 2002, pp. 268).

Some people who regarded themselves as Poles were still living in Lower Silesia, but they were a minority in the mostly German society. Breslau was a place where many Polish writers, scientists, and artists stopped over during their journeys to Western Europe and many studied in the city, but mostly because it was a large and important metropolis in the 18th to 20th centuries. Since the Prussian period, Breslau was regarded in the rest of the Empire of Germany as a definitely German city, and German culture dominated in the area of Lower Silesia and the western part of Pomerania up until 1945.

After 1945, some Polish citizens of former German Breslau and Szczecin remained in the cities, but the huge majority of the new settlers were refugees, i.e., Poles from other parts of Poland. Some Germans also remained

after the change in borders, but they were the exceptions; demographically there was an almost total repopulation of these cities and territories.

The German period was absent from both the communicative and cultural memories of the Polish refugees. The cultural memory of Lower Silesia and other parts of the “Western Lands” was reinvented by the totalitarian authorities through the recollection of medieval history and the removal of any traces of the former German presence. Many statues which recalled the German history of the cities were removed and destroyed after the communist takeover. Instead of the statue of Frederick Wilhelm III in the main market square in Wrocław is now a statue of Aleksander Fredro (1829-1891), a Polish writer, made by Leonard Marconi in 1879. The statue of Fredro was transferred from Lwów, which Polish citizens had to leave after 1945. The statue of Fredro is called “Freduś”, a softer, more familiar form of the writer’s surname, by the current citizens of Wrocław. The immediate surroundings of the “Fredruś” became an important point on the map of post-war Wrocław. “Fredruś” is one of the most popular meeting points in Wrocław. The same process of removing/forgetting and relocating/remembering occurred in Szczecin; a statue of Kornel Ujejski (1823-1897), a Polish poet, was also relocated from Lwów to Szczecin.

Wrocław, destroyed and abandoned, appeared to the new settlers as a city of a nameless people who left evidence of their lives, but no indication of what it really meant to them. The mute bricks

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and blind windows were speechless witnesses to the great exodus of people, and at the same time witnesses of a bitter beginning for the new Wrocławians. During interviews with people who were refugees from Eastern Poland I heard that they did not unpack their belongings for as long as two years after settling in Lower Silesia. They believed they would return to their former homes. Some of their new homes had stoves and even meals that were still warm, left by the Germans. Whether this story told by my interlocutors was invented is irrelevant, because it tells of how the new settlers remembered the former German inhabitants. But the new generations of Poles born in Wrocław and Szczecin consider these cities their homes and look upon the past in a completely different way.

One of the examples demonstrating the change in the common memory of Wrocław are the books of Marek Krajewski (1966). Krajewski is a classical philologist who studied at Wrocław University, and the author of criminal stories. Krajewski became popular after publishing his first book, “Death in Breslau” (“Śmierć w Breslau”), in 1999. “Death in Breslau” was the first book of a series that is connected by the main character and by the city, Breslau. The main character of the books is a German detective, Eberhard Mock, who is not only a policeman, but also a veritable guardian of justice. Using methods independent of the instructions and commands of his supervisors, Mock solves mysterious and brutal crimes in Wrocław before the Second World War. Besides a criminal plot and an array

of full-blooded characters who fill the streets of the city and the pages of the book, a dominant theme of the book is the city itself.

Descriptions of markets, streets, beautiful architecture, and statues are more than just background. They are an introduction to a city of shadows. Wrocław was terribly destroyed in the spring of 1945 during the Red Army’s offensive. Some streets and buildings still exist, but have different names and are used for different purposes. The destruction of Breslau started long before soldiers of the Red Army crossed the borders of Third Reich, and even before the Second World War. During Kristallnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass”), Nazi Germans burnt an astonishing masterpiece of architecture, the Jewish Synagogue near the present Łąkowa street (Krajewski 2007, p. 11-12).

In the pages of Krajewski’s books the reader can enter the Wrocław of ghosts. The ghosts have shapes, bodies, and voices, and also feelings, hopes, and fears. The same is true for Szczecin and Stettin. The exhibition “Hans Stettiner and Jan Szczecińki: Everyday life in Szczecin in the 20th century” (“Hans Stettiner i Jan Szczeciński. Życie codzienne w Szczecinie w XX wieku”) at the National Museum in Szczecin in 2009 shows Hans Stettiner from an everyday life point of view; he is not an anonymous enemy or a stranger anymore, but a person. Hans Stettiner and Jan Szczeciński are both “Everyman”, but Stettiner represents the German citizens of the city and Szczeciński the Polish refugees forced to settle there.

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The curator of the exhibition, Bogdana Kozińska, of the National Museum in Szczecin, wrote that what is common to both Hans and Jan are not only the streets of Stettin/Szczecin, the harbor, and the same beautiful landscape, but also suitcases, a symbol of the common experience of exile and forced migration (Kozińska 2009). The exhibition is a collection of things which evoke memories: suitcases, old German and Polish milk bottles, German and Polish school diplomas, and family pictures. Szczeciński and Stettiner tell a story not only about Szczecin, but a story universal for all the “Western Lands”.

The books about detective Mock encourage the reader to trace the remains of Breslau and its citizens in present-day Wrocław. There are lists of the described places and streets at the end of every book. On one side are the German place names and on the other the corresponding Polish names. Some names in Polish Wrocław are exact translations from German Breslau, such as plac Musealny and Museumplatz (Museum Square), Nicolasstrasse and ulica Świętego Mikołaja (Saint Nicolas Street), and Neumarkt and Nowy Plac (New Market). Some, although located at exactly the same place topographically, invoke completely different cultural memories. Thus Kaiserstrasse in German Breslau is Grunwald Square (Plac Grunwaldzki) in Polish Wrocław. The new name brings back the successful Battle of Grundawld over the German Teutonic Order. Königsplatz is now John Paul II Square (plac Jana Pawła II), celebrating the Polish pope, while during communist times it was

called First of May Square (Plac 1-ego Maja), which represented Workers Day. Viktoriastrasse (Victoria Street) was turned into ulica Lwowska (Lwów Street), with Lwów, a city essential to the identity of Wrocławians, receiving its own representation. Renaming is a deeply symbolical act; it is not just taking over a point or a building, but taking possession of cultural memories.

Whereas refugees from Wilno and its surroundings were relocated to Gdańsk, refugees from Lwów and the western Ukraine were settled in Wrocław and Silesia. This explains the close connections between Wrocław and Lwów. Many prominent citizens of Lwów went to Wrocław. Professors of the University of Jan Kazimierz and the Technical University in Lwów started lecturing at the University and the Technical University in Wrocław after the war. Also, the great and famous library established by the Ossoliński family was transferred from Lwów to Wrocław. Furthermore, the painting by Wojciech Kossak showing the battle near Racławice during a Polish uprising against the Russians, called “Panorama Racławicka”, was relocated from Lwów to Wrocław.

The pre-war links between Wrocław and Lwów are a theme of one of Krajewski’s latest books, “The Head of the Minotaur” (“Głowa Minotaura. Lwowskie śledztwo Eberharda Mocka”) (Krajewski 2009). Known from earlier books about Breslau, detective Mock cooperates with a Polish policeman from Lwów, Edward Popielski. They work together on the case of a serial murderer who committed murders

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in both Breslau and Lwów. The investigation is an occasion to become acquainted with Polish Lwów, famous in pre-war Poland as the “dream city” or the “joyful city”.

This book of Krajweski’s, besides the standard list of Wrocław streets, is additionally provided with a list of streets and markets in Lwów and a small dictionary of Lwowian slang. From the index the reader can learn that the former Pisłudski street is now Ivan Franko street in Ukrainian Lviv and that Żółkiewska street was renamed to Bohdan Chmelnyćkoho. Polish national heroes like Józef Piłsudski were replaced by Ukrainian heroes like Bohdan Chmielnicki.

Lwów is still a significant city in the collective memory of the citizens of Wrocław. During the communist period there was a popular joke in the anti-communist underground: “Jedna bomba atomowa i wrócimy znów do Lwowa” (“One atom bomb and we’ll return to Lwów”), which reveals that the image of taking back Lwów was identified with the collapse of communism and the Soviet empire as well. Roman

Kołakowski, a poet, song writer, and composer from Wrocław, wrote in a song: “A Lwów to dla mnie zagranica, nie zaznana nigdy miłość” (Lwów is a foreign city to me, a love never fulfilled). Wrocław was identified with Lwów, and Wrocław replaced Lwów in the cultural memory.

In the last ten years, more than fifty years after the end of the war, with the witnesses of exile and forced migration passing away, the communicative memory about those dramatic events dies with them. The younger generations, as predicted in Assmann’s model of collective memory, reinvent the past by semiotization of the cities Szczecin, Lwów, and Wrocław. Breslau and Wrocław, Stettin and Szczecin, Lwów and Lviv are not the same cites; the people who were forced to leave their homes took their memories of those places with them. The new citizens who had to settle in Wrocław or Szczecin brought with them their own memories, dreams, and nightmares. Places, and buildings without memory, are only empty shells.

Works cited:Assmann J., 2008. Pamięć kulturowa, transl. Anna Kryczyńska-Pham, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwer-sytetu Warszawskiego.Davies N., Moorhouse R., 2002. Wrocław. Mikrokosmos., transl. A. Pawec, Kraków: Ossolineum.Halbwachs, M., 1969. Społeczne ramy pamięci, transl. M. Król, Warszawa: PWNKrajewski M., 2009. Festung Breslau, Warszawa: WAB.Krajewski M., 2009. Głowa Minotaura. Lwowskie śledztwo Eberharda Mocka, Warszawa: WAB.Szacki J., 1964. Durkheim, Warszawa: Wyd. Wiedza PowszechnaKozińska, B., 2009. Hans Stettiner i Jan Szczeciński. Życie codzienne w Szczecinie w XX wieku [Hans Stettiner and Jan Szczeciński: Everyday life in Szczecin in the 20th century]. Available at: <http://www.muzeum.szczecin.pl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=134:hans-jan&catid=5:ekspozycje-czasowe&Itemid=5>

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Reviews

Art in the Auditorium is an international project founded by the Whitechapel Gallery in London and its second edition is currently on display in GAMeC – Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Arts, in Bergamo. Besides Britain and Italy, institutions participating this year represent the United States (Ballroom Marfa – Marfa, Texas), Argentina (the Fundacion PROA of Buenos Aires), New Zealand (City Gallery Wellington – Wellington, New Zealand), Turkey (The Institute for the Re-adjustment of Clocks in Istanbul – hosted by the Istanbul Modern) and Norway (the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter of Oslo). Coming from different cultural backgrounds, seven promising young artists chosen by these institutions are showing works in which a moving image (film, video, animation) carries the message. Many of them evoke the atmosphere of the past. Moreover, they speculate on the role of memories in creating and influencing the present and helping us to understand the cultural/ social/ historical contexts of today.

A recent graduate from the Slade School of Art in London - Patrizio Di Massimo – has been selected by GAMeC of Bergamo. His video piece Oae (2009) reflecting on Italy’s colonial era in Libya

is an interesting and thought-provoking link with the past when the colourful images of today’s Tripoli taken in 2008 are combined with black-and-white archival materials, including fragments of the 1981 movie Lion of the Desert. Choosing a historically sensitive subject matter, Di Massimo stresses his attempt to stand outside of his work: “I tried to create an autonomous reality that didn´t use the history in an opportunistic manner – which Italian politicians tend to do today when speaking about the guilt of our compatriots in Lybia – nor in a revisionist manner. (...) The main subjects are the lack of understanding, the languages that mix, the raw and poetic images that are both stereotyped and vertical.” Thus, even though Di Massimo´s camera captures the remnants of the past, they often become a counterpoint to the present.

Inci Eviner´s Between Space and History, Harem (2008) playfully discovers the interpretative potential of an album of engravings, ´Voyage Pittoresque de Constantinople et des Rives du Bosphore´ by Antoine Ignace Melling (1763 – 1831). Enviner animates Melling´s Harem for Sultan Selim the Third and its women are given liberty to — in the author’s words

Moving Memories in the AuditoriumArt in the Auditorium

GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Bergamo (Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Arts), Via San Tomaso, Italy, Bergamo1 October 2009 – 17 January 2010

Reviewed by Mária Kiššová

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—“reveal whatever they hide”. Linking the past and the present, Eviner urges to de-mythologize a woman as such: “Today, women are crushed under the burden of both Western and Eastern discourses. Is it possible for a woman, who is at the core of these ideological rhetoric and the social contract, to position herself as a subject? (...) I am trying to reach my unrecognizable face in my own culture, through rhetoric figures, representations and images constructed by the Western subject to represent and know the East.”

The Norwegian video artist Lars Laumann´s The Berlin Wall (2008) represents Henie Onstad Kunstsenter of Oslo. Taking inspiration mainly from the popular culture, Laumann is fascinated by weird and absurd phenomena, and likes to question historically and culturally rooted notions of the normal. The enchanting documentary presented in Art in the Auditorium depicts the rather eccentric relationship between the Swede Eija-Riita Berliner-Mauer (the surname is not an accident) and the Berlin Wall. It is true that beliefs in the anima of supposedly inanimate objects are familiar to many cultures. This fact serves Eija-Riita Berliner-Mauer for the justification of love for the wall, marriage, and the traumatic experience of “her husband’s fall” in 1989. This bizarre story has found its way to Laumann through the web page created by the Swede dedicated to her love and sexual attraction for the object. As she describes: “We may not have a conventional marriage, but neither of us cares much for the conventions. Ours is a story of two beings in love, our souls

entwined for all eternity”. Especially reverberating through the twentieth anniversary of the Fall (1989) and with the knowledge of what the Berlin Wall represented (in symbolic and literal terms), one inevitably asks where the boundaries of the socially acceptable lie in modern times.

The Whitechapel Gallery of London has also chosen three works by Austrian-born Ursula Mayer. Interiors (2006), The Crystal Gaze (2007) and The Lunch in Fur/ Le Dejeuner en Fourrure (2008) portray women from different and often provoking perspective. Architecture plays a vital role in Mayer´s films. Interiors captures the famous Hampstead apartment of Erno Goldfinger and Ursula Blackwell, an example of the functional work of art. Two enigmatic women silently move among the sculptures by Barbara Hepworth and Max Ernst. With three glamorous women in The Crystal Gaze, we are being seduced by images of the art deco Eltham Palace in South London. As Mayer puts it: “What they articulate is the fact of their own bodies-become-images, exquisitely fragmented and reflected in the metaphor of our and their crystal gazes.” In The Lunch in Fur/ Le Dejeuner en Fourrure we observe the surreal memories and contemplations of the surreal singer Josephine Baker, photographer Dora Maar, and the artist Meret Oppenheim.

Dead Forest (Storm) (2009) is a video by Charly Nijenson, an artist representing Fundacion Proa of Buenos Aires. There is no story, just a hypnotic image of a man floating on the water among the dead trees. His anonymity

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and the sublime atmosphere resemble the early 19th century paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. The video uses symbolic aspects of archetypal concepts, and strongly hints at links with the Romantic concept of a man versus nature. Without additional information, one is free to interpret the work in many ways (an expression of a man’s loneliness, anonymity, and existential fear of the (un)known, an the impossibility of finding stable ground, etc.). Knowing the location site is the unique Amazon basin, the video implies also some specific environmental issues such as deforestation and transformation of the ecosystem of the area.

Nova Paul in Pink and White Terraces (2006) uses a special optical process technique of ´three colour separation´ to (re)construct the Tamaki Makarau and Maukau cityscapes in Aotearoa, New Zealand. The artist, representing the City Gallery Wellington, maps the cultural memory of Aoteraoa, focusing on the recollections of Pink and White Terraces, a splendid geothermal site destroyed in 1886 by Mt. Tarawera’s eruption. Paul´s film thus becomes a meditation on the meaning of genius loci, on the private versus public, and

the stable versus the ephemeral. The seventh artist of the Bergamo

exhibition is Aïda Ruilova, selected by Ballroom Marfa. Her films Two Timers (2008) and Meet the Eye (2009) are fascinating and spellbinding. An image of a naked woman in water caressing a rat is provided with a narrative about Mars and its two moons Deimos (Terror) and Phobos (Fear). The film is enthralling and psychologically very intensive. Though nothing violent happens, the viewer is under the constant tension of the macabre and uncanny when an animal connoting terror (as in Orwell´s 1984) and fear (transmitting deadly diseases) becomes an intimate partner. Ruilova´s fascination for horror movies and experimentation can be also felt in Meet the Eye. Iconic figures of the City of Angels – the visual artist Raymond Pettibon and the actress Karen Black – are in the hotel room, the place where intimacy is desired but not achieved. A chink in the wall connects the inside and outside. There is no warmth, comfort, or consolation, just suspense, disorientation, and fear of what is deep inside (“which one of them is really me?”) and outside (an enigmatic cadaver).

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Holding Death in the Hands of Memories

Nothing To Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes, London: Vintage Books, 2009.

Reviewed by Mária Kiššová

The award-winning author of Flaubert’s Parrot, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, and Arthur & George makes an overwhelming and magnificent journey of self-revelation with his recent book. Julian Barnes’s work – also available in Slovak bookshops - Nothing to Be Frightened Of (first published in Jonathan Cape, 2008) – despite its gloomy theme of death - is far from a bleak and depressive account of waiting for the end of life. The autobiographical narrative offers multiple perspectives and meditations on dying and can be read - paradoxically - as the author’s homage to life and the creative potential of humankind.

Individual stories of dying and death illustrate how uncertain and unconditional this process and its results are despite our effort to make it less so. We learn how people wished to die and how they really died; when, where and under what conditions; what their last words and thoughts were; and most importantly: were they afraid of death? Most of them indeed were; even some - like Rachmaninov - “both terrified of death, and terrified that there might be survival after it” (p. 25). Barnes writes about Flaubert, Zola, Maugham, Stendhal, George Sand, and many others whose spectrum of ideas (on death) and experience (with death) offer wide space and rich inspiration for the author’s own reflections and (re)considerations for

the meaninglessness/meaningfulness of a man’s struggle on Earth.

He naturally speculates on the position of religion/god/God in modern time and often expresses the losses of current society: “Some see art as a psychological replacement for religion, still supplying a sense of the world beyond themselves to those reduced creatures who now no longer dream of heaven.” (p. 75) In his personal search for God Barnes accounts for a variety of different attitudes, from the Pascal-based “Go on, believe! It does no harm.” (p. 21), to the selfish-gene-based atheism of some contemporary thinkers of natural science: “We discover, to our surprise, that as Dawkins memorably puts it, we are ´survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.´” (p. 93), and heads even to the post-humanist world: “The mechanism of natural selection (...) will take us where it wishes – or rather, not take ́ us´, since we shall soon prove ill-equipped for wherever it’s heading; it will discard us as crude, insufficiently adaptable prototypes, and continue blindly towards new life forms which will make ´us´- and Bach and Shakespeare and Einstein – seem as distant as mere bacteria and amoebae.” (p. 216)

All this is bound up with the very private and personal. Suffering the loss of both parents (father died in 1992 and mother in 1997), Barnes brings

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them alive through his recollections and gives them fictional immortality. With the recollections, the problem of the credibility of memories inevitably occurs and it is the clash between Julian – a writer and his brother, a philosopher— which points to the importance of keeping (and storing) memories in fiction: “My brother distrusts most memories. I do not mistrust them, rather I trust them as workings of the imagination, as containing imaginative as opposed to naturalistic truth.” (p. 244) Deaths of other people — besides reminding us of our own mortality —also highlight the uniqueness the deceased represented and which seems definitely lost. Julian Barnes exposes how many family secrets (who was that mysterious girl erased from the photograph, who was Mabel...) have been taken to the other world and will never be revealed. Fortunately, there is still fiction, with its creative power to fill the gaps or to make use of the reader’s imagination to fill them.

Barnes is the master of language, style, and technique. For me, it has definitely been blissful to spot some intelligent –

though maybe just subjective - echoing of other texts. To mention just two: Ian McEwan’s Atonement: “I would expect a dying person to be an unreliable narrator, because what is useful to us generally conflicts with what is true, and what is useful at that time is a sense of having lived to some purpose, and according to some comprehensible plot.” (p190) and Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello: “we put animals in concentration camps, stuff them with hormones, and cut them up so they remind us as little possible of something that once clucked or bleated or lowed.” (p58) I also loved the author’s praise and at the same time – a kind warning for his last reader. If you are the last reader of Barnes, it inevitably means that you have not recommended nor said anyone about his book.

And – finally – do we have to be afraid of what/who is waiting for us when we pass away? The ambiguity of the title suggests it all: depending on the word stressed, one can read it as an optimistic and cheerful “Nothing to be frightened of”, or the darker and nihilistic version, with “Nothing” to be frightened of. There is a (free) choice for everyone.

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History, Memory, Present – Hamlets in Slovakia

Jana Bžochová-Wild: Malé dejiny Hamleta. Bratislava: SND, Slovart, DÚ, VŠMÚ, 2007.

Reviewed by Anton Pokrivčák

There may have been just a few literary characters equalling Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The theatrical Prince of Denmark has provoked the birth of so many artistic, critical, philosophical, anthropological, psychological, political, and religious responses as no other fictional man has done so far. “He” attracts the continual interest of literary critics, psychologists, religionists, politicians – and “fanatic” theatregoers throughout the world. That Slovakia is no exception at all is proved by an interesting book - an embodied memory of the Slovak reception of Hamlet.

Jana Bžochová-Wild’s book was published to commemorate the introduction of Hamlet in the Slovak National Theatre as the opening premiere of the 2007 season. It provides both an informative and visually attractive cultural history of the play in the context of the Slovak theatrical scene, showing how surprisingly different the play has been read by different people in different artistic and social circumstances.

At the outset, the author briefly summarizes results first introduced in her book Hamlet: dobrodružstvo textu (1998; Hamlet: The Adventure of the Text) and adds new information about the 1999 – 2007 stagings. The first part discusses certain “compulsory” topics, such as historical situation and Shakespeare’s biographical data related

to the Hamlet’s first occurrence; the reception of Hamlet in various historical periods and geographical borders (especially in Britain, France, and Germany); and the review of canonized readings of various critical approaches (psychological and psychoanalytical criticism, realistic criticism, imaginative criticism, American New Criticism, feministic criticism, deconstruction, cultural materialism, etc.). Since, as the author says, her book is intended for a wider readership, and therefore the above survey presents just hints and basic facts, those interested in more and deeper information are recommended to read this part of the book together with the mirror English-Czech edition of the play accompanied by Martin Hilský’s and Daniel Přibyl’s extensive studies on Hamlet in the Czech theatre (Torst, 2001).

The principal part of Bžochová-Wild’s book is focused on 9 translations and 16 performances produced on Slovak professional stages during the last 43 years. First, the book introduces a complete list of 9 published translations of the play (beginning with the oldest anonymous translation from the 18th century, continuing through Bohuslav Tablic’s, Michal Bosý’s, Samo Vozár’s, Pavol Dobšinský’s, Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav’s, Zora Jesenská’s, and Jozef Kot’s translations, and ending with the latest translation by Ľubomír Feldek).

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Each translation is documented by a scanned archived file of the manuscript, provided with all relevant historical data as well as a brief profile of the translator, a very short translatological analysis of his/her work, comments on possible adaptations and short examples of the translation, illustrations of publication covers, etc.

The third part of the book, entitled “Hamlet in Slovak Theatre and Criticism”, goes back to the 16 stagings of Hamlet in Slovakia, providing all kinds of information about a particular staging, including information on the theatre and the year when the performance was given, the director’s intention, the design of the play, its short interpretation, the reception, and other relevant notes. The section is enriched by illustrations of original theatre programmes and play posters, pictures,

and photos from performances. Seen in such a complex context, the history of Slovak Hamlets shows very clearly how Hamlet both reflected and was reflected in relation to the time of its staging. Readers see a chronological line of either desperate social and ethical agitation (in the 1920s and 1930s), or nasty political manipulation in the 1950s and 1960s. Hamlet is here once as a miserable simplification (the 1964 Trnava staging), or a modern multilevel ethical experiment (the Prešov staging of 2004), or a modern pop-cultural idol (the Bratislava staging of 2004).

To conclude, Jana Bžochová-Wild´s book is an outstanding publication in all its aspects: informative, critical, and visual. But it is not only this. It testifies to the universality of an artwork – as well as to its ability to address temporary, culture-specific audiences and values.