Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st Century Fiction

Jean-Michel Ganteau, Susana Onega, Jean-Michel Ganteau, Susana Onega

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351801140
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Literatura
• Thema: Crítica literaria moderna

Editors Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega) have assembled a volume which addresses the relationship between trauma and ethics, and moves one step further to engage with vulnerability studies in their relation to literature and literary form. It consists of an introduction and of twelve articles written by specialists from various European countries and includes an interview with US novelist Jayne Anne Philips, conducted by her translator into French, Marc Amfreville, addressing her latest novel, Quiet Dell, through the victimhood-vulnerability prism. The corpus of primary sources on which the volume is based draws on various literary backgrounds in English, from Britain to India, through the USA. The editors draw on material from the ethics of alterity, trauma studies and the ethics of vulnerability in line with the work of moral philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas, as well as with a more recent and challenging tradition of continental thinkers, virtually unknown so far in the English-speaking world, represented by Guillaume Le Blanc, Nathalie Maillard, and Corinne Pelluchon, among others. Yet another related line of thought followed in the volume is that represented by feminist critics like Catriona McKenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds.

Part I
Loss of Affect and Victimisation

1 And Yet

Figuring Global Trauma in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being

Catherine Bernard

In the growing corpus of works of fiction showing a political and ethical concern with the environment,¹ the American-Japanese writer and film-maker Ruth Ozeki occupies a specific place as her ecological awareness also ties in with a concern for identity and gender politics. Her debut novel My Year of Meats (1998) already weaves together a meditation on the mass production of meat and a feminist indictment of the fertility trade and of the medicalisation of women’s bodies. This is done in a striking allegory that embraces globalisation and cuts across cultural differences. As is also the case in her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being (2013), the allegory is all the more forceful for developing what Shameen Black has described as a form of “cosmopolitanism” producing “transcultural alliances,” via characters who reach out beyond the confines of their own cultural traditions to appeal to a “world citizenship” or “transnational perception” of the dangers of global capitalism (226, 228).

From the start, her inspiration had also drawn from more autobiographical sources, in which her American-Japanese family background played a key part (see her 1995 film Halving the Bones). Deeply impressed by the historical tensions her own family story refracts, she writes with the innate certainty that our lives unfold in the shadow of trauma, in the wake of collective griefs which must often remain “unclaimed experience[s],” to use Cathy Caruth’s canonical expression. Like other novelists who also strive to find an adequate empathic language for the incommensurate traumas of the 20th century, from Pat Barker, to Kurt Vonnegut or Martin Amis, Ozeki knows that our contemporary set of words, images, and references are necessarily belated, not so much because we come “after,” but because our imagination is doomed to repeat, to approximate images always already exhausted by previous attempts at figuring the unimaginable. Yet, she also believes that our current “crises of witnessing” (Felman and Laub) should not lock us in a paralysing numbness that would be but another form of death, a conviction she shares with Dominick LaCapra:

There is much that can be reconstructed and remembered with respect to the Holocaust and other historical ‘catastrophes,’ and the challenge is not to dwell obsessively on trauma as an unclaimed experience that occasions the paradoxical witnessing of the breakdown of witnessing but rather to elaborate a mutually informative, critically questioning relation between memory and reconstruction that keeps one sensitive to the problematics of trauma. (183)

Writing and, more broadly, all forms of narratives have channelled that process of “mutually informative […] relation” and contributed to the reconstruction of repressed experiences. The tentative “reconstruction” has harnessed varied forms of narratives, from testimonies to fictional reinventions, as is the case in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five or W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. Each rewriting has in turn functioned both as a repetition always already evading the real of the repressed experience and as a diffracted re-enactment of that encounter. Re-presentation is of the essence in its capacity to evade and instantiate the past experience, and to exist at the juncture of experience and elaboration. Needless to say, the word “re-presentation” is itself, from the start, a misnomer. In trauma, there can of course be no reproduction of a referent or simulation. Yet, Hal Foster, in his exploration of the “return of the real” under the guise of “traumatic realism”—as evidenced in Andy Warhol’s Disasters series—also insists on the way the reproduction of traumatic images works against the numbing effect of repetition and “ruptures,” and on the way that reproduction punctures the protective “screens” set up by the subject. The rupture is here “less in the world than in the subject” (Foster 132). Therefore, it may eventually be sublated and may open a dialectical reconstruction or reclamation of the repressed, partial, unclaimed memory.

This process, I would like to insist, is paradoxical and precarious. It deals with fractal instances of the incommensurate that beggar intellection. Jean-François Lyotard’s analysis of the différend that turns to the Shoah, aptly reminds us that the essence of radical catastrophe is the “inconmmensurate”; an incommensurate that precludes all subsumption of the disparate phrase regimes under a common law of trauma (Lyotard 187). The prescriptive phrase regime imposed on the victim is radically incommensurate to all other phrase regimes, and that makes the experience radically incommensurate to any other experience.

And yet, narratives, memorials, and archives insist. They resist that certainty that radical trauma is incommensurate and beggars elaboration and representation, while being fully aware of it. As often as not, the reclamation process harnesses the power of objects and things, with their full synecdochic impact, to narrative elaboration. Photographs (Felman and Laub, Hirsch, Tseti) but also objects crystallise the “economy of belatedness” (Saltzman and Rosenberg 272). Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg have explored art’s capacity to instantiate “trauma’s phenomenality” (xi) and to capture the very paradox that lies at the heart of traumatic elaboration. Critics have also insisted on the critical function of objects in the representation of trauma, even as object symbolism contributes to an aestheticisation of trauma (see Ganteau 2004). As evidenced in Esther Shalev-Gerz’s video installation at the Buchenwald memorial: Menschendinge. The Human Aspect of Objects, objects also open “the psychic space in which the overwhelming might be held” (Saltzman and Rosenberg 272). The makeshift spoons and battered cups featuring in Shalev-Gerz’s video provoke one of those “intractable encounters” characteristic of the “premium placed on the remain” (Saltzman and Rosenberg 274), a remain that necessarily misses the traumatic real and yet works on us, as if fractally, towards a phenomenological, empathic instantiation of reclaimed experience.

Figuring the Incommensurate

In her 1995 film Halving the Bones, Ruth Ozeki already experimented with the reconstruction of fractured memory by piecing together the story of her Japanese grandmother’s life. In her second novel, All Over Creation, she once again straddled the border between private and collective memory by setting the intersecting narratives of her characters’ lives against the background of intensive farming and the development of GMOs’ industry. In A Tale for the Time Being, she remains faithful to that same poetics of interweaving the private with the collective by combining an exploration of Japanese war memory and the all too topical experience of global catastrophe as crystallised by the Fukushima tsunami and ensuing nuclear disaster. Even more than in her previous works, she writes with the full knowledge of the incommensurate nature of trauma. Various regimes of the incommensurate are seen to coexist in the lives of her characters who become victims of a collective fatum whose meaning lies beyond their grasp.

Connecting the private with the public and turning the characters’ lives into terrains of historical speculation is nothing new. As amply analysed by Georg Lukács or more recently Franco Moretti in The Way of the World (129–39) or even Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious (151 and passim), such a poetics of analogical connectedness is of the essence of the Western novel’s vision of character as destiny. A Tale for the Time Being takes up that sense of historical connectedness to push the text’s ethical agenda into new historical directions and to rework the dialectics of victimhood and agency already central to her previous works.

The sense of connection does not merely result from the rising sense of global crisis that links all points of the compass. It also finds its roots in a traumatic past whose repressed memory surfaces in a no less violent present. As in her film, Halving the Bones, Ozeki returns to her Japanese roots to understand how our sense of global meltdown may be rehistoricised through a confrontation with the critical power of hauntology at the heart of all lives. The term, borrowed from Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, seems to best capture Ozeki’s quest for a narrative form that will dramatise and make us see the multi-dimensionality of our lives as they are inscribed both in time and space. Embracing life as inherently chrono/geological implies that the imagination confronts itself to the lasting experience of haunting. With Derrida, Ozeki seems to insist that “learning to live—remains to be done,” that “it can happen only between life and death” and that, consequently, “[w]hat happens between two, and between all the ‘two’s’ one likes, such as between life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost” (Derrida xvii). Learning to live with ghosts and even to have “a vacation with ghosts,” as Ozeki pictures herself doing in a 2004 New York Times essay, might of course condition our ethical politics of living: “And this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations” (Derrida xviii).

Ozeki acknowledges the pathological turn of our collective life, along with many other observers of what Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman have defined as the “empire of trauma,” that “commonplace of the contemporary world, a shared truth” (2). But, like Isabelle Stengers, she also refuses to bow before the sense of impending catastrophe (Stengers 93) that has overtaken what Mark Seltzer has diagnosed as our “pathological public sphere” (4). She cannot ignore the erotics of our wound culture hinging precisely, according to Seltzer, on the “switch point between individual and collective, private and public orders of things” (5); yet, she posits the possibility of an empathic re-empowerment of experience that may make of us “time beings,” beings of our time, fully “awake” to its agonistic historicity, rather than expectant victims content with existing in the meantime—a mean time—or, for the time being, before the advent of catastrophe.

That sense of historical urgency requires dramatic strategies at least asymptotic to the incommensurate nature of the “empire of trauma.” It calls for a capacity to make us see, to make us imagine the extent of the oncoming private and collective disaster so that we may intuit the scale of the rupture entailed. To do so, Ozeki invents a polyphonic narrative in which her own cosmopolitan identity proves instrumental to the production of an empathic poetics in tune with our global sense of mourning. At the centre of her novel stand two narrators united by a mutual bond: a novelist, named Ruth, who, like the author, has American and Japanese roots and lives on an island off the coast of British Columbia, and a young teenage girl living in Tokyo. One day, Ruth retrieves from the flotsam a Hello Kitty lunchbox enclosed in a freezer bag that contains Nao’s diary, a watch, a notebook, and some letters.

From these sundry elements, Ruth will reconstruct Nao’s story and that of her family. The family story follows two equally tragic paths: Nao’s story points to the Fukushima disaster, in which the girl, or so Ruth thinks, may have perished, while her great-uncle’s story takes the reader back to World War II and the repressed sacrifices of the kamikaze pilots who preferred to hurl their planes into the sea rather than targeting American warships, a confession he makes in his own diary written in French so as to escape the censorship of his commanding officer. Gradually, the temporal and spatial distance separating Nao and Ruth narrows down and the novelist is transported back into Nao’s narrative; a journey that eventually takes the form of a metaleptic dream sequence in which, deus-ex-machina-like, Ruth saves the young girl and her father from suicide.

Like other contemporary novels evincing an environmental agenda, A Tale for the Time Being unfolds on the border of the supernatural, where destinies converge, and the far and the near, the past and the present collapse into an alternative fictional dimension, suspended between dream and reality. The conventions of realism no longer seem able to meet the challenge of a change of paradigm that unfolds on a universal scale. As Ursula K. Heise has argued, such a global alteration calls for a displacement of selfhood and a transmutation of literary forms that may function like an analogy of the butterfly effect on the global ecological crisis. Bridging the gap of cultural differences, of time and place, the metaleptic logic of A Tale for the Time Being is thus characteristic of that “eco-cosmopolitanism” (Heise 60–61) meant to match the sense of global mourning (see also Brant 216).

To novelists, the challenge of finding a form adequate to making the incommensurate visible and the intangible palpable is immense. Here, as before, the différend is too intractable to be coerced into manageable form. What Ulrich Beck defines as our “second modernity” (20 and passim) calls for strategies that will make us see, in spite of the intangible and elusive nature of “disaster capitalism” (Klein), but above all that will allow us to imagine the ensuing “cosmopolitan empathy” (Beck 6) inherent in the empire of trauma. The poetics of connectedness is crucial here to dramatise the diffuse nature of disaster, its unpredictability and intractability. The embedded narratives of Ozeki’s text embody a sense of relationality that links all humans, beyond space and time, and that also provokes radical ruptures. When Ruth discovers Nao’s diary and the other preciously kept relics in the Hello Kitty lunchbox, the seemingly smooth chronology of her peaceful life on the island is upheaved. The diary opens a fracture in time that metonymically represents the fractures the successive generations of her family and Nao’s family had to go through. Carried along the waves of the Pacific, from one coast to another, the past literally surfaces in the present, both intact and displaced. For a long time, Ruth struggles with the chronology of the events, repressing the hard fact that the diary is a decade old and that Nao’s name is a deceitful clue to her/our existence in the here and now. The past surfaces in an eternal present, is imagined as always present, yet the memory also drifts across time and space. It exists seemingly timelessly in a kind of suspended “slippage” (Ozeki 2013, 313) which Ruth recognises at last as that of the time of writing when she slips into a fiction in which “the days got jumbled together, and entire weeks and months or even years would yield to the ebb and flow of the dream” (313).

This slippage, we are meant to understand, implicitly characterises the cosmopolitan empathy that allows for the transference of Nao’s life narrative into Ruth’s writerly inspiration. More disturbingly even, we are meant to surmise that Nao may in fact be imagining Ruth into being so that she may in turn imagine and sustain her existence across time and space. In the wake of Paul Ricœur’s analysis in Temps et récit, recent criticism has focused on the complex process of symmetrical ratification by which a text and a reader come into mutual existence. According to Marielle Macé, narratives are endowed with a “consoling” function, the reader confiding his/her selfhood to a narrative which will retrospectively make it whole. Such an act of faith is all the more powerful, Macé adds, as our collective memory has been torn apart: “The current empire of ‘memory’ and our efforts to weave back again the threads of collective history no doubt explain why we project in them [narratives] our own desire for meaning and reparation” (128, my translation).

Relational Memory

Endlessly, from Nao’s narrative to her great-uncle’s letters and diary, Ruth will displace herself and journey along the jagged lines of Nao’s family memory. Her task is to carry out the work of mourning that could not be achieved because of the historical rifts that had torn apart the family memory. When she opens the box containing Nao’s diary and Haruki’s letters, when she reads these textual vestiges of lives on the brink of disaster, she re-enacts the work of mourning that has been done imperfectly. For a long time, Nao’s voice rings like a posthumous one reaching out to Ruth from beyond death, in a sort of suspended elegy, telling us of exclusion, alienation, and dislocation. Like other feminine self-elegies, Nao’s diary “is spoken in a disembodied voice [that] makes the radical gesture of placing itself in a pastoral topos from which the speaker is always already alienated” (Raymond 43).

Ruth’s tentative reconstruction of Nao’s family story produces both a metaphorical ...