Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children's Literature

Ghost Images

Anastasia Ulanowicz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136156199
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Winner of the Children's Literature Association Book Award

This book visits a range of textual forms including diary, novel, and picturebook to explore the relationship between second-generation memory and contemporary children's literature. Ulanowicz argues that second-generation memory — informed by intimate family relationships, textual mediation, and technology — is characterized by vicarious, rather than direct, experience of the past. As such, children's literature is particularly well-suited to the representation of second-generation memory, insofar as children's fiction is particularly invested in the transmission and reproduction of cultural memory, and its form promotes the formation of various complex intergenerational relationships. Further, children's books that depict second-generation memory have the potential to challenge conventional Western notions of selfhood and ethics. This study shows how novels such as Lois Lowry's The Giver (1993) and Judy Blume's Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself (1977) — both of which feature protagonists who adapt their elders' memories into their own mnemonic repertoires — implicitly reject Cartesian notions of the unified subject in favor of a view of identity as always-already social, relational, and dynamic in character. This book not only questions how and why second-generation memory is represented in books for young people, but whether such representations of memory might be considered 'radical' or 'conservative'. Together, these analyses address a topic that has not been explored fully within the fields of children's literature, trauma and memory studies, and Holocaust studies.

Chapter One

“Seeing Beyond”

Memory, Forgetting, and Ethics in Lois Lowry’s The Giver

If there is one book that has rivaled Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as the most frequently taught literary text in the American school-room, it may be Lois Lowry’s dystopic children’s novel, The Giver. Published in 1993, this story of a boy’s act resistance against a futuristic totalitarian society became an instant bestseller; soon thereafter, it collected a number of literary prizes, including the Newbery Medal and the American Library Association’s prize for the best book for young adults of that year. Praised by reviewers and educators for the directness and simplicity of its style and the richness of its characterization, The Giver soon became a main staple in middle school reading curricula, where it has remained a solid presence (Hipple and Maupin 40–41). Decades after its publication, readers continue to find Lowry’s depiction of a dystopic society especially convincing, praising the manner in which her vision of this brave new world “forces us to question values taken for granted and to reexamine our beliefs” (Bushman 80). The novel has also garnered a great deal of attention from scholars of children’s literature, who both praise and question its political significance. Indeed, like many complex and particularly memorable children’s novels (including the aforementioned Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), The Giver has been subject to intense scholarly debate. On the one hand, readers like Carrie Hintz have praised the manner in which it “seriously portray[s] dissent for younger audiences and make[s] it clear that young people should be integrated into political life” (263). On the other hand, more skeptical readers like Susan Stewart have argued that it “fails to address alterity, reinforces cultural continuity, and actually diminishes opportunities to think in terms of difference because of its overriding humanist impetus” (26). Although its implications may remain contested, The Giver’s persistent presence within scholarly conversation, as well as its continued insertion into various teaching curricula,¹ has assured its sustained popularity. In fact, since its publication, Lowry’s novel has been named one of the 100 best books for children, and it has inspired art exhibitions, stage adaptations, and even a Tai Chi ballet (Silvey 147).²

If, nearly two decades after its publication, The Giver has continued to grip young and older readers alike, this may be because it addresses a topic that particularly intrigues the contemporary Western imagination: the question of memory. After all, the novel depicts a totalitarian society which derives its power precisely from the near-obliteration of collective memory—and its denouement involves its protagonist’s scandalous dissemination of memories that were intended by the community to remain secret. Not insignificantly, The Giver’s publication was coterminous with greater cultural efforts to simultaneously archive and disseminate the memories of dying generations. It may not be entirely coincidental, for example, that Lowry’s novel was published in the same year that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC first opened its doors with the express purpose of reinserting into the collective consciousness the memory of one of the bitterest moments in human history. Nor is it insignificant that, in the twenty-odd years preceding The Giver’s publication, literary and filmic works—ranging from Alex Haley’s Roots and its 1977 television adaptation to Roland Joffé’s film The Killing Fields (1984) to Steven Spielberg’s more recent film Schindler’s List (1993)—strove to impress upon contemporary audiences the necessity of remembering traumatic historical events and injustices that they might otherwise just as soon forget. Although these works (and other similar dramas) were intended for the mass consumption of audiences from various racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds, and although their historical settings were often unfamiliar to contemporary readers or spectators, they nevertheless strove to elicit deeply personal responses from discrete individuals. Clearly, these texts were successful in their endeavor. For example, the television adaptation of Roots not only reached viewers from around the globe, but also motivated many to construct their own family genealogies. Likewise, The Killing Fields and Schindler’s List inspired great interest in the Cambodian genocide and the Holocaust, respectively—even in those whose family members were not affected by these historical traumas. Coincident with these new literary and filmic depictions of mass trauma was the emergence of the slogan, “Never Again,” which, although it was initially coined to further Holocaust remembrance, has since been adopted by survivors of other instances of mass trauma, as well as by protestors of civil and human rights abuses. If this slogan has become something of a cliché—and one whose warning unfortunately is not often heeded—even its well-worn use testifies to a new and urgent cultural trend of acknowledging the traumatic past and internalizing its lessons. It is not surprising, then, that The Giver should be published and widely acclaimed at the precise moment this movement toward remembrance began to reach its peak. Indeed, Lowry’s story of a single boy’s defiance of an amnesiac, totalitarian society might even be read as an allegorical illustration of Milan Kundera’s oft-cited statement³ that the “struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” (4).

It is not surprising, as well, that The Giver should join the ranks of scores of children’s novels published with the intention of impressing upon the minds of young people the value of remembering the traumatic past. In fact, Lowry’s fantastical story of resistance was immediately preceded by her first Newbery-award winning novel, Number the Stars (1989), which depicts a Danish girl’s attempt to protect her Jewish best friend from her Nazi oppressors. Number the Stars itself added to an increasingly growing list of children’s books seeking to teach children about the Holocaust—a list that includes such renowned titles as Doris Orgel’s The Devil in Vienna (1978) and Jane Yolen’s much-celebrated The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988). Moreover, other children’s texts, such as Eleanor Coerr’s Sadoko and the Thousand Paper Cranes (1977), Esther Hautzig’s The Endless Steppe (1987), Adam Bagdasarian’s Forgotten Fire (2000), have sought to kindle the memory of such traumatic historical events as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalinist efforts at “dekulakization,” and the Armenian genocide, respectively. Like contemporaneous texts intended for adult audiences, these children’s books have not shied away from confronting their readers with depictions of a violent past, nor have they refrained from insisting upon readers’ responsibility to commit to memory their difficult subjects. In this way, The Giver, whose fabulous, futuristic setting nevertheless uncannily resembles sites of actual, historical traumas—ranging from Nazi Germany to Stalinist-era Soviet Union to even the McCarthy-era U.S. – rearticulates a plea for collective remembrance of major catastrophes that is already familiar to young readers.

However, even as The Giver reiterates a general call for remembrance, it also gives expression to a certain cultural anxiety about memory’s shadowy twin, forgetting. Indeed, as Kundera’s maxim makes clear, the will to remember past injustices always entails a struggle against forgetting—a struggle whose outcome is as ambiguous as that of a solitary individual’s quest to resist power. By now, it has become commonplace to argue that, in an information age driven by a collective desire for the newest stories and the most novel experiences, the past is steadily being swept away into the dustbin of history. For example, in a meditation upon Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus,” Walter Benjamin imagines the “angel of history” as a figure helplessly blown into the future by the “storm” of “progress,” thwarted in his desire to redeem and “make whole” the “wreckage” of the past (“Theses” 257–258). More recently, French historian Pierre Nora has argued that memory has been overtaken by an “acceleration of history”; additionally, he has maintained that we “speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left” (7). Moreover, contemporary scholars have warned that even attempts to resuscitate the past do not necessarily guarantee its survival within the present. For example, in her study of Holocaust poetry, Susan Gubar makes the counterintuitive claim that “the Holocaust is dying” even as historians, artists, writers, filmmakers, and witnesses try to keep its memory alive (1). According to Gubar, the “dying” of the Holocaust is evident not only in the inevitable aging of its very youngest witnesses, but in the proliferation of “TV programs and bestselling novels, fictionalized biographies and popularized films” that “jeopardize . . . that history by commodifying or fetishizing events that continue to recede further from view” (5).

Given the warnings of Benjamin, Nora, and Gubar—whose respective writings on the past are each motivated by different and often conflicting theoretical and political concerns⁴—one might well wonder whether con-temporary Western society bears a greater resemblance to Lowry’s amnesiac community than might be desired. Like this society, which makes occasional, superficial appeals to the past only in an effort to inoculate itself against it, our own appears to relegate memories of the traumatic past to easily consumable but ultimately extrinsic narratives. Thus, although readers often cite the ambiguity surrounding the survival of the novel’s protagonist as one of the most fascinating aspects of Lowry’s novel, it may be the survival of memory itself that constitutes the text’s most intriguing theme. At the heart of this novel is one of the most pressing questions of the latter century: is it possible, in contemporary Western society, to sustain the memory of the past, or has our culture instead become one of forgetting?

To complicate this question further, The Giver introduces the problem of second-generation memory. Initially, its protagonist, Jonas, is as ignorant of the past as are his fellow community members. However, once Jonas is chosen to become the protégé of a mysterious stranger he knows only as the Giver, he becomes privy to secrets of the past that were once withheld from him. As the Giver gradually bestows upon Jonas the repressed memories of the community, Lowry’s young protagonist finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish these shared memories from those that constitute his own, personal mnemonic repertoire. Moreover, he becomes gradually more impatient with his fellow citizens’ profound ignorance of the past, especially when he recognizes that their ignorance allows them to sustain an unjust system of power. Although the setting of Lowry’s novel is clearly fabulous, its depiction of a child’s inheritance of unexperienced memories nevertheless bears a striking resemblance to accounts of actual, living children who claim to have assimilated their living forebears’ memories of past traumas. Jonas’s story, it turns out, is not unlike those narratives offered by children of Holocaust survivors or descendants of victims of racial hate crimes in America. Thus, inasmuch as The Giver has come to be considered as an allegory of twentieth-century instances of repression and resistance, it may also be read as a fable of second-generation memory.

As a fable of second-generation memory, Lowry’s novel provides insight into the processes by which this order of memory functions. Not only does its development of Jonas’s relationship with the Giver delineate the necessarily intergenerational aspect of second-generation memory, but its depiction of this relationship as an intimate and radically physical one—the Giver may only transmit his memories to Jonas through a process of laying-on-of-hands—also suggests that this phenomenon is as viscerally felt as it is intellectually experienced. Moreover, and perhaps most crucially, by situating its protagonist within a fantastical community whose crisis of memory uncannily resembles that of our own contemporary moment, The Giver suggests that second-generation memory is at once a consequence of and a possible response to this present crisis. On the one hand, the novel illustrates Nora’s claim that, in the wake of the disappearance of “lived” collective memory, individuals take upon themselves the duty to bear the memory of a past that once was communally shared. On the other hand, however, it posits that these same individuals occupy an ethical position that prompts them to return memory to the collective in such a way that fosters social change.

Memory against Forgetting

As Michael Levy argues, the setting of The Giver may be characterized as an “ambiguous utopia” (52). At the outset of the novel, Jonas’s community appears attractive: indeed, it is reminiscent of earlier (and equally problematic) visions of utopia, including Plato’s Republic.⁵ However, as the narrative progresses, this society is gradually revealed to be dark and suspect. If the Community—whose generic name is always ominously capitalized within the narrative—does not immediately appear to be threatening, this may be because, as Levy notes, it is “enormously seductive” (52). In this alternate world, conflicts of gender, race, ethnicity, and class appear to have been overcome. For example, Jonas’s mother confidently assumes her responsibilities as a judge, a role that traditionally has been considered a male occupation, even as his father is content with nurturing infants in the community’s nursery. Although Jonas’s neighbors bear such ethnically marked names as Andrei, Michiko, Roberto, and Fiona, there appears to be no ethnic or racial strife between any individuals or groups residing in the Community. Domestic strife is happily missing as well: families reunite for daily meals to discuss their dreams and anxieties and to exchange the news of the day. What may be most attractive about this society, however—and especially so for Lowry’s pre-adolescent and adolescent readers—is that no pressure is placed on the Community’s children to discern their vocations, because a group of Elders assigns jobs to each according to his or her scrupulously observed abilities.

However, if the reader is initially seduced by this apparently utopian community, she soon learns that it is not what it appears to be. Jonas’s parents might well take on non-traditional gender roles in their respective professions, but gender inequality still persists. Just as in Margaret Atwood’s dystopic novel The Handmaid’s Tale⁶ (1985), the Community’s population is sustained by the conscription of young girls to serve as birth mothers; once they have fulfilled their obligations, which are clearly viewed as unenviable by their fellow citizens, these mothers are separated from their offspring and sold into hard labor. Similarly, as healthily multicultural as the Community might initially appear, it is gradually revealed to be oppressively homogenous: despite the international flavor of the citizens’ names, all are all white and all are committed to a prevailing ideology of “Sameness”⁷ (94–95). Even the idyllic character of family life is ultimately a sham, as marital relationships are revealed to be perfunctory and unerotic and as family conversations are exposed as scripted exchanges performed for the benefit of the Big Brother–like Community elders who listen in through two-way intercoms.

The most troubling aspect of this ambiguously utopian society, however, is its utter lack of memory. Certainly, the Community has something that resembles a history, as Jonas’s mother makes clear when she tells him that there exists a “Hall of Open Records” where citizens “could go . . . if we wanted to” (17). Indeed, it even possesses something that resembles a collective short-term memory: for example, during an annual ceremony marking older children’s rite of passage into adulthood, citizens are fond of discussing earlier ceremonies or remarking upon the past foibles of their now-rehabilitated youth. However, this collective memory, such that it is, is ultimately myopic. Jonas’s fellow citizens are totally unconcerned by the question of how their society was founded in the first place or what conflicts or struggles might have preceded and in fact given rise to their present state. Initially, even this arrangement is strangely seductive, because the possibility of a lack of deep collective memory promises a life untroubled by knowledge of war, famine, genocide, and other undesirable experiences. As Lowry’s narrative takes pains to demonstrate, however, such willed amnesia comes at a dreadful cost. Precisely because Jonas’s Community happily refrains from delving into its past, it remains equally uncritical of its present condition, which involves a program of eugenics, the systematic practice of euthanasia, and the maintenance of a subtly tyrannical oligarchy. In case this point might be lost on readers, Lowry’s narrative drives it home by revealing that the Community’s voluntary ignorance of the past has resulted in its members’ inability to see colors. As in Gary Ross’s 1998 film Pleasantville, the trope of communal color-blindness here signals a superficial and uncritical world-view.⁸

Like other dystopian novels—for example, M. T. Anderson’s National Book Award-winning young adult (YA) novel Feed (2004)—The Giver draws on contemporary anxieties in order to complicate its setting and plot.⁹ Indeed, Lowry’s vision of a community without memory is strikingly consonant with Pierre Nora’s argument that Western society has steadily lost its capacity for collective memory. Memory, Nora argues, has been all but obliterated by an “acceleration of history” (8). If there is still a will to preserve the past within the present, Nora maintains, it is articulated through a profoundly historical, rather than mnemonic, sensibility: history treats the past as though it “is no longer” and thus subjects traces of the past to highly systematized processes of analysis, criticism, and quantification, as though the past were a cadaver to be probed and dissected¹⁰ (8). History condemns the past to enclosed, private spaces such as classrooms or museums—or, as it were, to seldom-visited Halls of Open Records such as the one found in Jonas’s Community—and, in so doing, it gradually removes the past from collective consciousness. “History’s goal and ambition,” Nora continues, “is not to exalt but to annihilate what has in reality taken place” (9). In the wake of such a clinical “annihilation,” memory—or what Nora calls the “lived experience” of the past within the present—can no longer thrive. It is hardly possible, he explains, for large collectives to share gestures and habits that continually bind them to, and remind them of, a commonly shared past. If “true,” spontaneous memory still exists, Nora posits, it does so only in small and increasingly isolated pockets of society, such as Orthodox Jewish communities in which quotidian reflexive rituals marry the ancient past to an “eternal present” (8).

Although Nora’s grim diagnosis of memory’s fate is more widely appreciated in his native France, where it inspired a three-volume study of French memory commissioned by then-Prime Minister Francois Mitterand, other, similar, evaluations of the current condition of memory may be more readily recognizable to American audiences. For example, in his popular study of electronic culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), Neil Postman argues that the continuous stream of news stories on television and radio (and now, on the Internet) renders individual reports indistinguishable from one another. According to Postman, television—and especially broadcast news—allows for a “now . . . this” mode of consciousness in which information is disseminated in small, discrete fragments followed by other, quite unrelated fragments, so that “events stand alone, stripped of any connection to the past, or to the future, or to other events” and “all assumptions of coherence have vanished” (110). Such a prevailing dynamic, he argues, not only makes possible a culture of forgetfulness but also enables the paralysis of viewers’ critical capacities. Contemporary audiences—and, one might add, contemporary users of the Internet—are suspended in an eternal present, albeit one that is nearly evacuated of memory.

Similarly, Barbie Zelizer argues that even practices intended to sustain the past within collective memory ultimately result in its swift forgetting. In her study of mechanically reproduced images of atrocity...