Memory and Latency in Contemporary Anglophone Literature 9783111067384, 9783111063584

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Yvonne Liebermann Memory and Latency in Contemporary Anglophone Literature

Buchreihe der Anglia / ANGLIA Book Series

Edited by Andrew James Johnston, Ursula Lenker, Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Daniel Stein Advisory Board Derek Attridge, Laurel Brinton, Elisabeth Bronfen, Philip Durkin, Olga Fischer, Ursula K. Heise, Susan Irvine, Christopher A. Jones, Verena Lobsien, Liliane Louvel, Christopher Morash, Terttu Nevalainen, Susana Onega, Martin Puchner, Ad Putter, Peter Schneck, James Simpson, Emily Thornbury

Volume 81

Yvonne Liebermann

Memory and Latency in Contemporary Anglophone Literature

ISBN 978-3-11-106358-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-106738-4 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-106778-0 ISSN 0340-5435 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023931169 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements The present book represents the slightly revised version of my dissertation, which I submitted to the Heinrich-Heine University of Duesseldorf in September 2021. My two supervisors, Prof. Dr. Birgit Neumann and Prof. Dr. Gabriele Rippl, made it possible for me to successfully defend my dissertation in February 2022. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes for granting me a doctoral scholarship and for providing me with excellent support. Within the framework of their events, I received a lot of important input and had enriching discussions. I am very grateful to the editors of the Anglia series, Prof. Dr. Martin Middeke, Prof. Dr. Gabriele Rippl and Prof. Dr. Daniel Stein, for accepting my study into their series and to de Gruyter’s Dr. Ulrike Krauß and Katja Lehming for their help and support. I would also like to offer my thanks to the Graduate Studies Office and especially to Dr. Julia Siep, who never tired of answering my emails. A separate and especially big thank you goes to my supervisor, Prof. Dr. Birgit Neumann, for her unwavering support and belief in me. She has helped me grow not only as an academic but also as a person. I am very grateful to her for introducing me to her networks and for always having an open ear for my projects. I am also deeply grateful to my second supervisor, Prof. Dr. Gabriele Rippl, for her willingness to discuss my work with me and to enrich it with constructive suggestions. My supervisors’ immense knowledge and plentiful experience have been an inspiration to me. Getting through a dissertation required more than academic support and I have many people to thank for listening to me, discussing my work with me but most of all for keeping me sane. My colleagues and friends Christina Slopek and Miriam Hinz provided constant encouragement and were always willing and enthusiastic to assist in any way they could. I thank you for all the lunch breaks and numerous voice messages and pep talks. I cannot begin to express my gratitude and appreciation for my friends who have been my rocks during my academic journey: Cecilia Judmann, Dimitri Kessler, Jana Waters, Jasmin Kreilos, Kira Bungert, Lea Omers, Marie Kühne and my sister Jacqueline Kappel. You have been invaluable. My most profound appreciation goes to my mother, Angelika Kappel, and my husband, Max Liebermann. You have supported me from beginning to end with unwavering optimism and constant enthusiasm, even though it has often not been entirely clear to you what I was actually doing. For your trust and love I am forever grateful. Last but not least, all my love to my son, Mika, whose naps were mostly excellently timed. Oberhausen, January 2023 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111067384-001

Contents  Introduction: Latency as a Mode of Memory . Remembering Non-Events 7 . New Ways of Reading 10 . Multidirectional Memory 11

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21  Memory – Latency – Eventfulness . Rethinking the Concept of the Event 21 .. The Event at the Core of Narratology: Structuralist Approaches 26 .. Poststructuralist Concepts of Affective Eventfulness .. The Event and the Everyday 33 . Tracing Memory Studies: From an Identitarian to a Transcultural 36 Approach . Memory and the Market 51 . Memory, Literature and the Productivity of Not Knowing 59 63 . Exploring the Stowaway: The Concept of Latency  . . . . .

Being Notably Absent: Uneventfulness and Digression in J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013) 74 Lack of Eventfulness 78 Digression as a Marker of Latency 83 Removing Memory from Nationalistic Discourses 87 94 Relocalising Memory: Embodied Memories Conclusion: Reflecting on the Intersection of Migration and Memory 98

103  Idiorrhythm in Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) . Ambiguous Absences: Memories and the Blind Spot . The Affordances of Rhythm 111 . The Rhythm of Reading Open City 114 . Rhythm on the Micro Level: Julius Walking the City . Conclusion: Reading for Entanglement 127 

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118

Non-Evental Multiperspectivity: Column McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009) 130 . Multiperspectivity: Creating a Network of Relations 133 . Changing Perspectives: Challenging Contemporary Politics of Grievability 140

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When the Present Was Still the Future of the Past: Latent Memories 150 of 9/11 Conclusion: Grievability beyond the Victim/Perpetrator Binary 158

.

 “Places are Ghosts, too”: Yvonne Owuor’s Dust (2014) 160 . “There is no purge through mourning, no effective reconciliation, no 166 closure”: Memory Politics in Kenya . “This land, its awful age – here time hums an ancient, eerie tune”: 168 Haunting . The Memory of Space: Animism, Wuoth Ogik and the Northern Kenyan 174 Landscape . Conclusion: Linking Memory Studies and the Environmental Humanities 183 185  Re-Membering Modernism: Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018) . Approaching the Contemporary 188 190 . Modernist Allegiances . Modernist Entanglements: Cosmopolitanism 195 . Critical Cosmopolitanism 197 . Re-membering Modernism: The Flâneuse 199 204 . “At this time, in this place”: Contouring the Contemporary . Conclusion: The Cosmopolitanism of Form 209  . . . . .

Remembering Britain’s Lost Children: The Myth of Filiation in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child (2015) 213 Literature’s Memory: Rewriting and Writing Back 217 Latent Anachronic Entanglements: Transtextualisation 221 Entangling Race and Class through Latent Juxtapositional Memory Forgotten and Unseen: Remembering the Female Subaltern 229 Conclusion: The Latent Future 234

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Conclusion

Works Cited Index

280

239 259

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1 Introduction: Latency as a Mode of Memory In his newest book Blind Spot (2017), a blend of photography and written text, the novelist, photographer and critic Teju Cole explores the powers of the inconspicuous, “the mysteries of the ordinary” (Pinsky 2017: n.pag.) as one reviewer puts it, and shows that memory can be found in the most unlikely places. Anyone familiar with Cole’s work knows that his texts and images never work straightforwardly but rather lead the reader’s and viewer’s eyes to the inconspicuous, the margins. Asking his readers and viewers for a different kind of attention, Cole blurs foreground and background and encourages them to read and look differently. Cole’s images “are populated with human life, but for the most part that life is implicit: with a notable, climactic exception, there are few faces. These choices are deeply purposeful. The abstaining, in texts and photographs, is ardent” (Pinsky 2017: n.pag). The act of abstaining, which this reviewer puts at the centre of Cole’s work, is also at the heart of this study. In Blind Spot, Cole juxtaposes images and texts to often eye-opening effects. Often, there is a discrepancy between the initial impression of the image and the accompanying text’s tone. The image-text constellation called “Capri”, for instance, juxtaposes an image of a beautifully lit sea and many sailing boats reflecting the sun with this text: Later on, I thought of the catalogue of ships in the Iliad: ‘I could not tell over the multitude of them nor name them, / not if I had ten tongues and ten mouths, not if I had / a voice never to be broken and a heart of bronze within me, / not unless the Muses of Olympia, daughters / of Zeus of the aegis, remembered all those who came beneath Ilion.’ But that was literary, that came later. On the day itself, on the evening of the morning in which I opened up the window of my room to see the apparition of a shining fleet on the Mediterranean, what I thought of was what Edna O’Brien said to those of us in the audience: ‘We know about these beautiful waters that have death in them.’ (Cole 2017: 16)

Memory, this short text underlines, can be found in the most unlikely places. The ‘beautiful waters’ harbour a gigantic graveyard that is not directly visible to the eye and the text remembers this graveyard in its last line, making this memory resonate with the passage from the Iliad. Cole’s text-image collection is vastly concerned with what I will call latent memory, memory that works from beneath the surface and which is not addressed explicitly. While many of the pieces in Blind Spot are concerned with explicit memories of places – a concern that is emphasised by every heading being a specific place on the globe – this particular quote shows that memory can also be latently present in non-spaces, in heterotopic spaces, as Michel Foucault calls them. Taking on palimpsestic qualities, spaces, according to Foucault, can be overlayered: at the same time real and unreal, there https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111067384-002

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and not there (1998: 231– 233). Therefore, the surface, Cole reminds us, can be deceptive and should not be trusted. Sometimes it is the apparently innocent sites, publicly acknowledged sites, which vibrate with latent memories. These “real places”, “formed in the very founding of society” (Foucault 1998: 231), are a Janus face, because they are not only what they appear to be but implicitly are also countersites, in which “the real sites, all the other sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (231). The beach, the shore, the sea, when read as heterotopias, are intricately connected to memory, even if this connection might not be directly discernible. History and memory, Cole reminds us, are in the small things, too. However, sometimes no matter how many “tongues” or “mouths” you possess, you cannot speak unless what you want to say is also embedded in the official discourse, which Cole referring to the Muses brilliantly links to artistic forms of expression and which lines such as Derek Walcott’s “[w]here, in which stones of the Abbey, are incised our names?” (1990: 196) also poignantly link to institutionalised forms of memory. Thus, what the quote from Blind Spot also underlines is the connection between knowledge and hegemonic epistemologies on the one hand and memory on the other. The reference to the Iliad, one of the most prominent examples of the western literary canon, is certainly no coincidence. While the Iliad celebrates an understanding of history based on the heroic acts of individuals in service of their nation, authors like Derek Walcott in his epic poem Omeros (1990) contest an engagement with history that exclusively focuses on imperial conquests and that deviates from the premise that the writing of history – with which the writing of epics is compared –¹ needs to be “based upon events that are part of a collective consciousness” (Burkitt 2012: 14). The everyday life of local fishermen, Omeros underlines, is just as entangled with history, memory and the past as the explicit description of national pasts as, for instance, in the Iliad. Instead of focusing on the history remembered by archives, monuments and museums, Walcott’s epic poem brings to the fore the “river’s memory” (1990: 4), “the past of another sea” (12), “the prose of abrupt fishermen cursing over canoes” (15). Although the poetic persona claims that in the Caribbean one thinks of the past “as better forgotten than fixed with stony regret” (192), the past is not forgotten in Omeros. Rather, it has to be looked for in different places. Much like Cole’s Blind Spot and Walcott’s Omeros, this study is also concerned with the blind spots of cultural memory, with the past lurking in the everyday, the apparently marginal or unim-

 Katherine Burkitt refers back to Aristotle who proclaims that “epic poets set to work as though they were writing history” (qtd. in 2012: 14).

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portant and the ways in which an apparent ‘abstention’ can indeed be powerfully ‘ardent’, troubling a secure sense of distance. This study introduces latency as a mode of memory in literature. In their essay “Concepts and Methods for the Study of Literature and/as Cultural Memory”, Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning demonstrate the manifold relationship between literature and memory. Drawing on work done in literary studies, they emphasise three concepts that can describe the relationship between literature and memory: “These basic concepts are 1) the memory of literature, 2) memory in literature and 3) literature as a medium of collective memory” (Erll and Nünning 2006: 13). The memory of literature describes the potential of literary works to refer back to other literary works or generic traditions or problematise literary history and canon formation. The manifold intertextual relationships that texts establish (Lachmann 2008) constitute a memory of aesthetic forms which ascribes memory “a memory of its own” (Erll and Nünning 2006: 13). Memory in literature, on the other hand, refers to the ‘staging of memory’, that is the depiction of specific events and their mnemonic afterlives. Studies which deal with this mimetic function of memory are based on the premise that “literature refers to the extra-textual cultural reality and makes it observable in the medium of fiction” (Erll and Nünning 2006: 20). Most scholarly work is done in the second field, that is the representation of memory in literature.² This study is neither primarily concerned with the memory of literature nor with the ‘staging of memory’ – meaning the direct representation of memory – in literature. Rather, this study will extend the third entanglement between literature and memory designated by Erll and Nünning in order to shed light on hitherto unacknowledged facets of literature as a medium of memory. As Erll and Nünning have noted, research in this subfield of memory in literature is just beginning and still has many gaps to fill (2006: 14). Modes of memory can be very different in their approach to the past. In her introduction to the Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, Astrid Erll defines the

 See, for instance, publications with titles such as: Memories and Representations of War: The Case of World War I and World War II (2009), The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Literature and Culture (2010), Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the ’Iliad’ to Iraq (2011), The ’Image-Event’ in the Early Post-9/11 Novel: Literary Representations of Terror after September 11, 2001 (2012), The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film (2014), Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War (2016), Writing the Yugoslav Wars: Literature, Postmodernism, and the Ethics of Representation (2016), Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (2017), Relocated Memories: The Great Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1846 – 1870 (2017), War Is Here: The Vietnam War and Canadian Literature (2017), Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (2017). Although, of course, these books might also deal with the memory of literature, their titles focus on the representation of a specific historical event in literature.

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difference between history and memory in terms of them being different modes of remembering. She elaborates on what she means with ‘modes of memory’: […] there are different modes of remembering identical past events.³ A war, for example, can be remembered as a mythic event (‘the war as apocalypse’), as part of political history (the First World War as ‘the great seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century), as a traumatic experience (‘the horror of the trenches, the shells, the barrage of gunfire,’ etc.), as part of family history (‘the war my great-uncle served in’) […] Myth, religious memory, political history, trauma, family remembrance, or generational memory are different modes of referring to the past. Seen in this way, history is but yet another mode of cultural memory, and historiography its specific medium. (Erll 2010: 7)

Latency as a mode of memory has different functions and characteristics than the modes outlined by Erll. Still, latency is not a counter-discourse to memory studies but rather an integral part of it. Latency as a mode of memory is, of course, less graspable than these other modes of memory. By its very design it refrains from being visible on the surface and does not generate a network of mnemonic artefacts as, for instance, religious memory or family history do. However, as the modernist Michael Levenson rightly points out, “vague terms still signify” (2003: vii), and it might be productive to probe them for their potential to open new ways of thinking. Latency is indeed a slippery term that is not limited to literary studies but widely spread across different scientific and cultural disciplines and discourses. Yet, what all of the definitions have in common is that they use the term to designate something which is at least partly or temporarily hidden and thus not available for direct scrutiny (Khurana and Diekmann 2007: 10 f.; Haverkamp 2002: 10). In relation to literary studies, the concept of latency broadly speaking describes a lens to look at literary texts through “whatever we believe is in a text without being unproblematically graspable” (Gumbrecht 2009: 87). In contrast to the text’s plot, the latent is not directly analysable, it does not lend itself to direct decipherment. Rather, the latent works beneath the surface, withdrawn from direct cognitive accessibility (Haase and Setton 2007: 209), initially escaping notice (Haverkamp 2002: 7). While Gumbrecht claims that “[t]elling history or describing history presupposes that whatever may be present from the past has been interpreted, in the simple sense that it has been transformed into concepts” (2006: 325), latent structures in a literary work “present themselves to us as nuances that chal-

 This quote is just one example among many which demonstrates the instinctive connection between ‘memory’ and ‘event’ (see also Edkins 2003: 2 f; Kansteiner 2002: 182; LaCapra 1999: 700 ff; Rothberg 2014: xiii; Vermeulen 2014: 141; Caldicott and Fuchs 2003: 12; Assmann 1988: 129; Antze and Lambek 1996: xviii; King 2000: 20 f.; Bell 2006: 2).

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lenge our powers of discernment and description, as well as the potential of language to capture them” (Gumbrecht and Butler 2012: 4). In relation to Gumbrecht’s concept of latency, Slavoj Žižek’s concept of anamorphosis is helpful. Originally a concept from the realm of painting, Žižek uses the concept of anamorphosis to describe the latent potential of the ‘background’. He claims: “If you look at the thing too directly, at the oppressive social dimension, you don’t see it. You can only see it in an oblique way if it remains in the background” (2007: n.pag.). Žižek’s idea that dealing with “the oppressive social dimension” profits from its relegation to the margins and background of art has important consequences for evaluating the relationship between memory and literature. Relegating memory to the realm of the latent, that is the not-directly-graspable dimensions of a text, the novels at the centre of this study withdraw from overt memory discourses. Instead by only hinting at or marginally, indirectly, obliquely mentioning the past, they create new ways of re-membering that challenge the temporal tripartite of past, present and future and negotiate what is ‘memorable’ in the first place. I do not want to impose a rigidity of definition on a concept that derives part of its affective force through its indeterminacy. Yet, what this study intends to do is show different ways in which latent memories crystallise in novels without ever becoming completely graspable and how these moments of crystallisation change the readers consideration of memory. If we understand memory as an oppositional term to forgetting – as, for example, Marc Augé has put it, “[m]emory is framed by forgetting in the same way as the contours of the shoreline are framed by the sea” (qtd. in Winter 2010: 1) – there is a lot that we do not take into consideration. Jay Winter commenting on Augé’s dichotomy poignantly explains: [T]he topographical metaphor employed here is clearly incomplete. We need to see the landscape of the shoreline in all three dimensions. Doing so enables us to observe a vertical dimension to the creation and erosion of the shoreline which is dynamic, unstable, and at times, intrusive. We speak of those deposits below the surface of the water which emerge with the tides or with other environmental changes. In the framework of how we think about memory and forgetting, these hidden shapes cannot simply be ignored because they are concealed at some moments and revealed at others. They must be examined as part of the cartography of recollection and remembrance. (Winter 2010: 1)

This study puts the “hidden shapes” that only slowly come to the surface and only at certain moments centre stage. However, although they stay hidden most of the time, their intrusive power – just like the power of the vast sea to shape the shore – must be reckoned with. Hidden shapes which are only temporarily visible are liminal spaces that become “the process of symbolic interaction” (Bhabha 1994: 5). They work against “primordial polarities” (5) and keep identity an open, dialog-

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ical process. Just as Winter describes silence as “the presence of ambient and unintentional noise rather than the complete absence of sound” (2010: 4), the implicit, hidden, subtle dealings with memory can at times be just as affective as explicit and politically saturated dealings with memory and the past. Latent memories thus are the hidden shapes that maintain memory open to constant dialogue, constantly “in the works” (Rigney 2010: 345). Over the last few decades, memory as a field of study and interest has risen to prominence within both various academic fields and society more generally (Nikulin 2015: 1). Duncan Bell, for instance, explains that “it has been asserted by a number of critics that societies in the west (and increasingly in the non-west) have become obsessed with memory to an unhealthy degree” and that “in a sense, the turn to memory represents a pathological condition of contemporary political life” (2006: 25; Bond 2015: 1; Nikulin 2015: 2). Indeed, memory studies is a very pervasive field of study in the twenty-first century. Although the field is so pervasive, there are certain trends in memory studies to focus on specific aspects of memory while neglecting others. As studies in the field of memory studies such as History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998), Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory After Auschwitz (1998), Trauma Und Erinnerung: Oral History Nach Ausschwitz (2009), The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012), Frames of Memory After 9/11 (2014): Culture, Criticism, Politics, and Law (2015) or Memory and Morality After Auschwitz (2017) highlight, certain ‘events’ such as the Holocaust or the 9/11 attacks have come to set new parameters of remembering that will shape the public perception of future events.⁴ Of course, these studies are important in that they portray how major events change how discourses in the west frame the past and how these two atrocities of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries resonated with the western public. However, the prioritisation of certain events to become milestones of memory studies while others are neglected and kept at the margins establishes a hierarchy of suffering and establishes inevitable blind spot in our thinking of the past.⁵ As Rob Nixon – maybe a little flippant-

 In 2009, Kristiaan Versluys’ Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel opened the debate by calling 9/11 “[t]his most real of all events” (2009: 3) and postulating that “[i]n a time of globalized witnessing and shared vicarious experience, an event like 9/11 is a rupture for everybody” (2009: 4). As Michael Frank however rightly argues, this is “a statement that is remarkably sweeping in its assertion that the whole of humanity shared the same experience of 11 September 2001” (2020: 177).  See, for instance, Rob Nixon, who argues that “[e]fforts to make forms of slow violence more urgently visible suffered a setback in the United States in the aftermath of 9/11, which reinforced a spectacular, immediately sensational, and instantly hyper-visible image of what constitutes a violent threat” (2011: 13).

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ly – argues, “[f ]alling bodies, burning towers, exploding heads, avalanches, volcanoes, and tsunamis have a visceral, eye-catching and page-turning power that tales of slow violence, unfolding over years, decades, even centuries cannot match” (2011: 3). Indeed, the “[v]iolence against those who are already not quite living” in the sense of not being publicly grievable, “leaves a mark that is no mark” (Butler 2004: 36). None of this violence, Butler rightly claims, “takes place on the order of the event” (36). Latency as a literary mode of memory, I argue, works against the “unequal attention given to spectacular and unspectacular time” (Nixon 2011: 6) by re-calibrating readerly attention. The importance of latency as a mode of memory rests on three main contributions to contemporary culture and criticism. First, latency as a mode of memory opens up a space in literature to remember non-events, that is, forms of violence that are not event-based but slow and structural. Second, texts which remember through the mode of latency introduce a different form of reading. In this sense, fictions of latent memory can result in shifting perceived fields of intelligibility and thus feed back into memory culture more generally by raising awareness for forms of exclusion and unequal framings on the so-called ‘memory market’. Third, fictions of latent memory establish a form of reflection on memory which strives on connectivity and what Michael Rothberg calls “multidirectional memory” (2009) and thus move away from traditionally identitarian and nationalistic framings of memory.

1.1 Remembering Non-Events While fictions of memory most often take their cue from a specific event in the (mostly nationally informed) past, fictions that work through latency liberate memory from an officially sanctioned discourse of the past that works alongside hegemonic notions of eventfulness.⁶ In contrast, these literary works whose mar-

 Fictions of memory, Birgit Neumann points out, highlight the mutual entanglement of memories, identities and narration (2005: 1). Fictions of memory, she elaborates, often use memories and transform them to suit a preformed image of the nation and create “biographical continuity” (2005: 1, translation Y.L.). In a similar vein, Astrid Erll also underlines, “the linking of past, present and future in a meaningful way” (2011: 147) has for a very long time been at the core of fictions of memory. Fictions of memory, however, also have the potential to interact in complex and multiple ways with extraliterary memory practices, “reflect the conditions of a meaningful reconstruction of memories” (Neumann 2005: 9, translation Y.L.) and communicate new imaginations of memory and identity (2005: 9). Fictions of latent memory, in contrast, do not focus on the connection between memory and coherent concepts of identity. Fictions of latent memory shed further light

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gins and backgrounds palpably work to disturb their foreground forego nationalistic and other narrowly limited lenses with which to look at the past and instead open up a third space of remembering which is freed from such allegiances. By focusing on the ‘literary events’ that these novels create instead of the way they reconfigure ‘real events’, I want to outline how “a different kind of attention and emphasis that tries to avoid the formal separation between the real and the fictive, between particular and general” (Rowner 2015: 12) can help overcome the concepts of recognisability that many memory discourses and fictions of memory inevitably fall prey to. Thus, instead of analysing how literature depicts and performatively re-creates historical events, I want to analyse “literary events” as described by Ilai Rowner and their potential to create a discourse that allows for non-hierarchical memory. In his study The Event: Literature and Theory (2015), Ilai Rowner addresses the crucial difference between the narration of events in literature on the one hand and what he calls ‘literary events’ on the other hand. Rowner, admittedly drawing on a rather rigid understanding of history, claims that “[i]f history demands what exactly has taken place in a given moment of the past, literary inquiry aspires for the non-place of the taking place: what is there in the event that does not reveal itself exactly in the happening” (2015: 12). What is thus brought into focus are the gaps, the inconsistencies and the opaqueness of a narrative rather than its central plotline, its characters or its setting. Rowner elaborates, referring to the French philosopher Maurice Blanchet, that “[n]arrative is not the relating of an event but this event itself, the approach of this event, the place where it is called on to unfold, an event still to come, by the magnetic power of which the narrative itself can hope to come true” (Rowner 2015: 13). Derek Attridge makes a similar claim in his study The Singularity of Literature (2004), stating that the literary event in fact is constituted by the reader’s willingness to be transformed by the singularity of the literary text and its introduction of alterity. Bringing together Rowner’s and Attridge’s argument with memory studies, it is the claim of this study that literature, if it restrains from ‘relating events’ that belong to one or several memory discourses, can prefigure the past as “an event still to come”, thereby dissolving a clear differentiation of past, present and future. Being the event itself, literature can redefine the definition of ‘eventfulness’ and thereby can create “new movements of writing” (Rowner 2015: 1), inaugurating “new writing events that create new perceptions” (15). After all, to “read creatively” as Attridge puts it, “is to work against the mind’s tendency to assimilate the other to the same, attending

on the entanglement between narration and memory and show that latency as a mode of memory can be a further means to reflect extraliterary memory discourses.

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to that which can barely be heard” (Attridge 2004: 114). This is in line with Rowner, who claims that the “task of literature” is to “value the insignificant, to reveal the unheard-of as a new source of inspiration, or to bring to light the detail that defamiliarizes the most common” (Rowner 2015: 15). By ‘valuing the insignificant’, as Rowner puts it, literary events recalibrate our understanding of what is worth remembering or acknowledging and shift what Judith Butler calls “field[s] of intelligibility” (Butler 2016: xx). Shifting perceived fields of intelligibility also implies shifting what we pay attention to. As literary works that remember through latency make something palpable and hint at hidden stowaways, they ask for a different way of reading. As Michael Sayeau puts it, “[s]imply by virtue of being encased within the frame of the literary work, what might have otherwise been uneventful is marked as significant, worthy of attention” (2013: 12). Although I agree with Sayeau, what is in the focus of my study is the importance of this ‘encasement within the frame of the literary work’ taking place in the background, working through hidden strata and niches of the political quality of the everyday, the banal, the inconspicuous. In the words of Ilai Rowner, the literary event needs to “retain[…] its enigmatic force” (2015: 25), needs to stay opaque. Although Rowner does not connect his idea of the literary event directly to the ‘everyday’, he also calls for a redirection of attention to what might at first glance be considered ‘banal’: “[M]y argument consists of examining these break-out-moments in which the work reaches its limit. These moments are not necessarily the great episodes of the work; they may even be of secondary and local importance” (Rowner 2015: 24 – 25). These moments of semantic indecision that might at first glance seem to be ‘of secondary and local importance’ are elements that “diverge from the structure of the plot in such a way that the discourse of the literary event is not forced to pass through the construction of the work as a whole” (Rowner 2015: 22).⁷ It is the aim of this study to stress the value of looking for the break-out-moments of a text, because they might just be the access points to a different layer of the texts and thus also the “moments when a literary work sets thought, debate, and even action in motion” (Eshel 2013: 21).

 In this regard, analysing literary events in this study radically differs from “the use of experimental, (post)modernist textual strategies” which, as Stef Craps and Gert Buelens argue, are most often associated with trauma studies (2008: 5). The presence of latent memories in a text and the potential of literary events to alert the reader to the latent is connected to specific moments in the narrative and not to the imitation of trauma on the level of form.

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1.2 New Ways of Reading In her seminal essay “On Style”, Susan Sontag writes about art: “Art is seduction, not rape. A work of art proposes a type of experience designed to manifest the quality of imperiousness. But art cannot seduce without the complicity of the experiencing subject” (1964a: 22). The same holds true for the literary event and latent sublayers of a text. The literary event consists of affective moments that depend on the reader’s interaction with the text, their attention to the small details. The literary event is not “a finite happening fixed in the text” (Rowner 2015: 22) but depends on the reader being affected by an irregularity, an “undefinable movement” (25), or a perceptible yet unexplainable shift in a novel’s rhythm or atmosphere. Literary works that remember through latency thus bind readers into open and non-teleological meaning-making processes that forego pre-figured schemata. In relation to memory, Erll stresses that memory, too, must be actualised by individuals (2010: 5) and without these individual actualisations, “monuments, rituals, and books are nothing but dead material, failing to have any impact” (5). Thus, even though some fictions of memory might be connected to certain discourses at one point, their intellectual mapping is dependent on actualisations. Still, latent memories, I argue, are even more likely to be actualised in a variety of ways because they are indeterminate and need not be attached to one culture alone and thus can offer even more ways of different entanglements. While Erll classifies the individuals who remember as “members of a community of remembrance” who rely on “shared notions of the past” (5), the mode of latency allows for more fluid and varied actualisations which actually might challenge perceptions that rely on these “shared notions” and broaden the field of memorizing agents. Fictions of latent memory train readers to refrain from an impulse to pre-categorise or over-contextualise and instead call for a sensitisation for the less apparent mechanisms at work in novels. While Sontag claims elsewhere that a text’s “manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning – the latent content – beneath” (Sontag 1964b: 7), this study does not understand the latent as something which offers ‘true meaning’. Rather, latency as a mode of memory activates readers to change their ways of approaching texts. Literature, in this understanding, cannot be hermeneutically approached to the end of finding ‘truth’ but serves as a means to make readers more perceptive to other forms of meaning and signifying. Fictions of latent memory work through formal literary devices that hint at latent stowaways. Similar to Rowner’s emphasis on “the unknown movement of the happening that affects literature’s performative language and its manner of speech” (2015: 13), Gumbrecht also attests the force of the latent to ‘literature’s performative language’. He claims that we are often “alerted to a potential mood in a

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text by the irritation and fascination provoked by a single word or small detail – the hint of a different tone or rhythm” (Gumbrecht and Butler 2012: 17). Fictions of latent memory thus sensitise their readers for the socio-political potential of literary forms. As Gabriele Schwab argues, the “most pervasive aspect of literary moods resides in its non-representational dimension” (1997: 115), alerting the reader to another dimension of the literary text without resulting in the mood ‘dominating’ the text but rather working through a “subtle, mostly unconscious, perception of formal qualities” (1997: 115). Encouraging their readers to learn to ‘read’ differently, these texts convey transferable skills and open various new dimensions for the study of memory.

1.3 Multidirectional Memory As latent memories work through the background, through the margins and the “Unfug of the code” (Haverkamp 2002: 166), the “narrative noise” (Massumi 2002: 26), it is not as easy to assign them to certain hegemonic discourses as it might be with other modes of memory. While history writing, family history and trauma all are connected to public discourses and power constellations surrounding these discourses, latency is a mode of remembering that due to its indeterminacy remains unaffected from public discourses.⁸ By refraining from positioning themselves within prior established discourses, literary works that remember through latency underline that “language itself is social and political, not individual” (Edkins 2003: 7). Of course, literary works that remember through latency are not outside of discourse or language. However, by actively refraining from using a certain vocabulary that is semantically fixed in order to communicate an experience or a memory, literary works that remember through latency open a discursive space for acts of memory that strive for multiple effects and open room for reflecting on connective and entangled memories. This study is greatly indebted to the current discourses of memory studies and especially what has come to be known as the transcultural turn in memory studies. Transculturality has come to designate both, a turn in memory studies that “directs us to examine memory networks across national and cultural borders” (Butt 2015: 16), and a turn in how we remember itself. In his groundbreaking study, Multidir-

 Of course, this is not true for the authors of the novels who are always part of existing discourses. However, with literary works that remember through latency, once the novel is written, its latent content cannot as easily be taken advantage of, because it is not instantly visible and cannot be made to synecdochtically stand in for the novel as such and thus be easily instrumentalised.

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ectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in an Age of Decolonization (2009), Michael Rothberg explains: The understanding of collective remembrance that I put forward in Multidirectional Memory challenges the basic tenets and assumptions of much current thinking on collective memory and group identity. Fundamental to the conception of competitive memory is a notion of the public sphere as a pregiven, limited space in which already-established groups engage in a life-and-death struggle. In contrast, pursuing memory’s multidirectionality encourages us to think of the public sphere as a malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being through their dialogical interactions with others; both the subjects and spaces of the public are open to continual reconstruction. (Rothberg 2009: 5)

As this quote highlights, Rothberg wishes to abandon a competitive understanding of memory and instead asks us to “consider memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” (2009: 3). While this study sees the public sphere a little bit more critically than Rothberg (see chapter 3.3. Memory and the Market), it shares Rothberg’s idea of “malleable discursive space[s]” and probes how literature can be such a space for memory through latency. Latency as a mode of memory at once acknowledges the limits of the public sphere and counters them by construing memories as dialogical and multidirectional. Memories articulated through latency can be both at the same time: local and global. They are a Kippfigur (an ambiguous figure which can change its appearance at any moment) that combines explicitly local contexts and global entanglements. Still, I am aware of the controversy surrounding transcultural studies and the difficulties that arise when one tries to detach memories from closed off groups. Questions such as “can we still talk about distinct cultural groupings in the era of globalization, and how do we move past such ideas without collapsing any notion of identity into an indistinct homogeny?” (Bond and Rapson 2014: 6) are highly relevant in this context. As Astrid Erll also underlines, “[m]emory is always shaped by collective contexts” and we always use and in fact need “schema which help us recall the past and encode new experience” (2010: 5). What I want to analyse, however, is in how far these ‘collective contexts’ need to be tied to concepts of cultures as closed-off entities. While some scholars claim that memory “always depends on cultural vehicles for its expression” (Antze and Lambek 1996: xvii), this study embraces the premise that memory can also be carried by multiple cultural vehicles which interact and intersect and make closed-off, ‘pure’ cultures ever more questionable. The latent does not adhere to closed off categories as the nation and cultures, but rather shows their intractable entanglement. By analysing the politics of literary works that remember through latency and their different ways to unleash

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affect and therefore put to test preformed emotional framings and schema, this study intends to enhance the parameters to analyse the presence of the past in literary memory studies. This study will show that while memory might indeed be described as “the past made present” (Rothberg 2009: 3), this act of making present can take many forms and variations in literature, latency being one of them. Literary latency can unfold its effects in various ways and can be analysed on different levels. This study combines the analysis of the novels’ overall structure with close readings of selected passages in order to link latency as a mode of memory with the productive agency of formal literary devices that work both on the micro and macro level. Partly, this study sees the working of latency analogously to what Toni Morrison claims with regard to the elusive presence of race in William Faulkner’s work: “So the structure is the argument. Not what this one says, or that one says. It is the structure of the book” (qtd. in Serpell 2014: 9 – 10). However, this study does not only want to analyse structural elements on the macro level but also consider what Eric Hayot calls “the specificity of literature: literature is that which escapes generalization. Instantiation thus generates an ontological premise: it is the nature of literature to be the ungenerizable instance” (2012: 16). In order to sufficiently acknowledge the specificity of literature, it is thus imperative to combine the analysis of latency as a mode of memory found in a text’s structure with close readings of certain passages that through the use of specific narrative forms potentially alert readers to latent memory content. Due to its characteristics, it is impossible to clearly pinpoint latency in a literary text. It can therefore not be analysed with a static, pregiven methodology. It might thus indeed seem an insecure adventure to base an analysis of latency partly on close readings. For this reason, this study will always consider the text’s structure and its use of formal devices in its totality, only reflecting on individual passages to highlight the workings of specific formal devices which in turn inform the narrative as a whole. Still, I am aware that analysing latency – a concept that is based on the premise of not being instantly graspable – by close reading specific passages of the novels is heavily influenced by my own subjective rendering of these passages as insightful with regard to the novels’ workings of latency. Hence, I do not take the representativity of the chosen passages for granted. Rather, my choice of passages to illuminate such a slippery concept as latency should help to link my argument to the specificities of the texts at hand while simultaneously inviting readers to test these claims and engage with them critically. However, as the literary critic and theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith puts it in her general discussion of close reading as an instrument in literary studies: “The fact that a critic’s interpretation is based in part on his or her observations as an in-

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dividual reader does not compromise the interest or usefulness of that interpretation” (2016: 68). My analyses do not position latency as the primary category with which to interpret the novels. Rather, I follow a premise that Carla Namwali Serpell elaborates on in her compelling study Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014). According to Serpell, a text “has properties that suggest how it might be used” (2014: 21, my emphasis, Y.L.). Comparing a text to a building, she continues: “We might say the beams of a building guide how its space is divided and how a body might move through it; the structure does not enforce movements but makes them available. Analogously, a textual structure affords ways of reading” (2014: 22). The texts that this study is concerned with make latency as a mode of memory available without forcing it upon their readers. Not every reader will read these texts with an eye to latent memories, but it is their narrative structure and their specific poetics which make this form of memory available. This study is concerned with this process of making available and the formal devices that invite and enable the text’s affordances to come to the fore. Far from presenting a taxonomic or exhaustive overview, this study will uncover different formal devices that can alert readers to latent sublayers of the text within the specific constellations of the novels analysed. In this sense, this study does not intend to demonstrate a clear link between a specific formal device and a specific effect for the reader. Rather, the formal devices challenge learned ways of meaning-making and introduce uncertainties into the reading process, engaging in ever new interactions with one another and the text’s memory policy as a whole. Thus, this approach is meant to gesture towards the many possibilities that literary forms might offer for the study of memory that goes beyond the narrow confines of identitarian and event-bound ways of meaning-making. The main concept which can redirect the reader’s attention to the underlying levels of the narration is the concept of ‘literary events’. ‘Literary events’ are thus one of the main narratological categories that this study will engage with in order to approach the latent. As latent memories unfold in the background and the margins of a literary work, this study approaches the latent through a close analysis of the margins. In order to trace the latencies in the Anglophone novels that this study is concerned with, I will engage in close readings of those moments which, as Rowner puts it, “at first glance seem to be ‘of secondary and local importance’” (2015: 22). By focusing on narrative moments of digression, that is plot elements that seem narratively unmotivated and unconnected to the overall motifs of the novels, instead of on individual characters and their memories, I want to forego a too individualistic approach to a phenomenon that is rather collective (Rothberg 2008: 230). What is being analysed are the plotlines that deviate from

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the main plot. Especially the traditional literary category of the ‘event’ will be probed and challenged. Moreover, space and time configurations play an important role for the analysis of latency. Latency often disturbs normative understandings of time and space and this will become evident in the form of the narratives and how they construct time and space. The mode of latency disturbs the linearity of narratives and often constructs space as over- and multi-layered. This study therefore analyses temporal narrative categories such as anachrony and duration, probing whether narrative scenes have more potential to create an awareness for latent memories than narrative summaries. Literary space configurations will also be analysed with regard to their interaction with the plot: Literary space configuration do not represent an end to themselves (Hoffmann 1978) but establish relations and contrasts among each other and also to the extraliterary world. They thus function as carriers of meaning. The literary semantisation of space will be analysed with regard to its connection to latent structures. A key question of this study will be which forms of literary space description have the potential to redirect the reader’s attention to the realm of the latent. The choice of novels for this study is drawn from the pool of ‘contemporary Anglophone literature’, a category that is, one might claim, rather vague. Especially the combination of the ‘contemporary’ with such a broad denomination as ‘Anglophone literature’ begs explanation. As Terry Eagleton and Daniel O’Gorman rightly underline (referring to Judith Butler), the “contemporary moment, like all temporal categories, is geographically bounded: the contemporary in one place with one culture, will not be the same contemporary experience in another place, by another culture” (2019: 4). This understanding of the ‘contemporary’ would question a comparative approach that juxtaposes contemporary novels from different cultures and continents. Similarly to Eagleton and O’Gorman, Natalie Melas in her study All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (2007) warns that “[c]omparison is, in practice, a normative and generalizing activity” which runs the risk of “assimilating the singular” (2007: 37, Friedman 2013: 36). Eagleton, O’Gorman and Melas are certainly right in bringing to attention the risks of unifying experiences across different spaces and socio-political realities. On the other hand, Susan Friedman in her essay “Why Not Compare” (2013) attests that “comparison as the capacity to see first sameness in difference, then difference in sameness, is one of the key modes of analytical or conceptual thought” (2013: 37). In her understanding, it is comparison that enables theory, that is the “cognitive capacity to conceptualize, generalize, and see patterns of similarity” (37). Although Friedman also warns that comparative studies might run the risk of decontextualising and universalising local knowledges, she at the same time underlines that comparative practices can draw attention to “circles that partially overlap”

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(37) without subsuming difference under dominant structures. I follow Friedman in her understanding of comparative practice as a balancing of “the tension between commensurability and incommensurability” (40) of texts from different cultural backgrounds. In my study, I want to bring texts “into relation over a ground of comparison that is common but not unified” (Melas 2007: 43). By way of this disjunctive alignment, I hope to make these texts readable in new and productive ways. All novels discussed in this study were published between 2009 and 2018. Despite all being written within the same decade, the term ‘contemporary’ should not be understood as a purely temporal marker. Theodore Martin in his study Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present (2017) claims that the contemporary is not a period (2017: 2). Instead, he defines the contemporary as a “strategy of mediation”, “as a means of negotiating between experience and retrospection, immersion and explanation, closeness and distance” (5). The contemporary, in this sense, has to be considered not as a temporal denominator but as a “critical concept” (5). In line with Martin, I also understand the ‘contemporary’ as a critical concept that negotiates new forms of experiences, affects and social phenomena, such as – in my study – memory culture. Latency as a mode of memory that negotiates closeness and distance, immersion and explanation will thus be shown to be a means of staging the contemporary which “compel[s] us to think, above all, about the politics of how we think about the present” (5). The denominator ‘Anglophone’ unites the selected novels elected for the analysis, which are not chosen as representatives of any specific nation but for the formal qualities they employ to register latent modes of memory. As the authors chosen for this study come from very different backgrounds – J.M. Coetzee is South African, Colum McCann is Irish, Teju Cole is Nigerian-American, Yvonne Owuor is Kenyan, Anna Burns is from Northern Ireland and Caryl Phillips is Kittitian-British – and the socio-political contexts of the literary works vary, the choice of literary works allows my study to establish latency as a literary mode of memory that is neither nation nor culture specific. What most texts share, however, is a connection to the postcolonial context and a lower standing within a perceived “hierarchy of suffering” (Rothberg 2009: 8). Although the postcolonial context will not be the main focus of this study, I will still trace this connection that the texts share and which surfaces time and again. As Anselm Haverkamp brings to our attention, the concept of latency is connected to a past that has been swallowed, in German vergessen, which remains undigested, incorporated, a “continuous implication” (2002: 169). It is thus no coincidence that many works that implicitly deal with the postcolonial context and concomitant forms of structural violence work through the mode of latency. These works do not enter the postcolonial discourse of resistance

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but still work through a “continuous implication” and therefore highlight that though they are not explicitly dealing with the past, the past is latently present. While the umbrella term ‘Anglophone’ allows for a discussion of these novels which move away from the hallmark concerns of decolonization and nation formation while still reflecting on the “shared experience of the background radiation of colonialism” (Cole 2018: n.pag.), the term is not ideal. Using the term and the categorisation it opens up might seem like emphasising Anglophone belonging over other forms of local, regional, or identity-based affiliation. Indeed, the term ‘Anglophone’ might be seen as a rhetorical move through which the English-speaking world is constructed as a given, replacing other ways of mapping and contouring belonging, thereby constituting not only an act of naming but also of norming. Aamir Mufti (2016), in his seminal study Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures, is right in reminding us that while the global circulation of English has given rise to diversified, locally inflected literary traditions, it has also confirmed many of the inequalities of the colonial past. The term ‘Anglophone’ acts therefore also as an ample reminder of the colonial and neo-colonial histories inscribed in the English language. In order to make visible these implications of the term, this study will not employ it uncritically, but will problematise the invisibility of the role of English as a cultural system and social imagery, for instance in its discussion of the use of Hiberno-English in Milkman, the role of language in The Childhood of Jesus or the use of English inflected with rhythms of the Luo language in Dust. This study is interested in different literary forms to alert readers to latency as a mode of memory. I have chosen six novels from different contexts which all employ different literary forms to hint at latent sublayers of the text. Chapter three, “Being Notably Absent: Uneventfulness and Digression in The Childhood of Jesus”, analyses J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013). While all six novels chosen for this study disregard traditional literary eventfulness, this is most obvious in The Childhood of Jesus. The Childhood of Jesus makes use of uneventfulness and digression as a means to disentangle memories of migration from overly politically saturated contexts and thus invites more philosophical reflections on the topic. In this way, the mode of latency invites a meta-critical engagement with the concept of memory itself. The Childhood of Jesus deals with migrants and their life in a new, unnamed, land without the reason for their flight and migration ever being disclosed. The absence of a proper ‘event’, or rather the deliberate non-disclosure of this event, together with the constant thematisation of the nature of memories makes latency a core element of the novel: Memory surfaces as a central concern without being made specific at any point in the narrative. The lack of classical narratological eventfulness in the novel, I argue, is the basis for thinking memory in a global network rather than in strictly national and identitarian frameworks, mak-

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ing memory a topical concern rather than a plot element. In this chapter, I will explore how specific narrative strategies, such as digression, a specific use of language, and the non-disclosure of in-depth psychology of the characters direct the reader’s attention away from the main plot and alerts them to latent trajectories. Chapter four, “Idiorrhythm in Open City”, analyses rhythm as a narrative device to redirect reader’s attention to latent memories in Teju Cole’s Open City (2011). This chapter focuses on Open City’s distinct rhythm which is created on two different levels that ultimately come to interact. First, the novel creates a rhythm on the macro level for the reader through the iteration of unequally fast chapters and other unusually slow chapters that indulge in lengthy descriptive passages of seemingly trivial details. Second, the novel creates a rhythm on the micro level through the protagonist’s act of walking that creates distinct rhythms for every chapter individually. His routes through the city generate repetitions and patterns whose rhythm links different histories and voices (of other people who tell him their stories) in a way that makes the reader look for underlying connections and latent entanglements. While rhythm normally establishes harmony, Open City’s rhythm works through a fleeting, irregular form rather than a regular, imposed cadence. Instead of creating harmony and helping the reader find their way in the narrative, Open City’s rhythm works through dissonances that disturb the reading process and thereby indicate latency. Chapter five, “Non-Evental Multiperspectivity: Let the Great World Spin”, analyses the potential of a novel to shift readerly focus to slow violence instead of remembering events by employing a special form of multiperspectivity in Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009). Instead of implementing multiperspectivity that sheds light on one event from different perspectives, the novel uses a form of multiperspectivity which makes each new character reflect on a different aspect of New York as a multi-layered space of memory. The novel does not frame a single event through different perspectives but is rather a mosaic of glimpses of different lives in New York City in 1974 with an outlook into 2006 in the last chapter. The different perspectives, which are not in unison, but which portray very different perspectives on the world, challenge contemporary politics of grievability and the visibility of suffering. Through the omission of a central event the novel redirects the reader’s focus to other energies and layers of the text that foreground similarities which are more connected to the everyday and specific microcosmoses of New York. The irregular use of homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narration furthermore challenges the hegemony of certain voices in public discourses and metafictionally stresses the importance of bringing into focus the stories and voices of the margins. In this sense, Let the Great World Spin uses the realm of the latent as a place of counter-memory to the omnipresent memorisation of 9/11.

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In chapter six, “‘Places are Ghosts, too’: Yvonne Owuor’s Dust”, the intersection between memory studies and environmental studies is explored. Yvonne Owuor’s Dust (2013) not only creates a network between different marginalised events (the Mau Mau struggle for independence, the death of Tom Mboya in 1969, the post-election violence of 2006 – 2007) but also between different mnemonic agents. Despite having a family story at its heart, the novel does not focus on the individual family members as singular characters. Rather, what Dust puts into focus is the human entanglement with its nonhuman environment. Being irreducible to human desires and goals, the more-than-human world is configured as an archive that goes beyond human time tracking and thus hints at the imaginative limits of purely human-based memory studies. This chapter concentrates on the potential of spatial descriptions to bring to the fore latent connections, agencies and memories. Latency as a mode of memory, this chapter illustrates, can create a memory politics that goes beyond ‘a people’s’ history and instead focuses on connectivity that configures events as points of surfacing in a chain of latent violence rather than singular occurrences. Moreover, latency is shown to be a favourable literary mode to provide representation to the memory of nonhuman agents without anthropomorphising them. The nonhuman environment is configured in a way that is enigmatic and thrives on affects rather than triggering emotions, thereby doing justice to a nonhuman memory which time and again exceeds human cognition. In this, this chapter strives to show interconnections between the field of memory studies and the neighbouring fields of posthumanism, new materialism and object-oriented ontology and show the role latency as a mode of memory can play in bridging the gap between representation and materiality. Chapter seven, “Re-Membering Modernism: Milkman”, discusses Anna Burns’ 2018 Man Booker prize winning novel Milkman (2018). In Milkman, the Northern Irish writer gives insight into the life of a teenage girl during the so-called ‘Irish Troubles’. However, the conflict is only present in a very allusive manner, never taking centre stage, and never being explicitly named. While the novel is not very concrete regarding names and references to the extra-textual world, it is very detailed when it comes to descriptions of moods and the everyday problems the young narrator encounters. The novel’s focus on the seemingly banal together with a use of twentieth-century modernist techniques – manifest in the novel’s employment of readerly disorientation, eschewing of linearity and its focus on a microcosm rather than a macrocosm – inflects Milkman’s latent memory and critique of concepts connected to Modernism, such as cosmopolitanism, flânerie and city writing more generally. Employing a modernist style in conjunction with a plot that is centred on a narrator-protagonist whose flâneusing in the city is decidedly limited as well as on a society where the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are firmly held in place, the novel employs a modernist style to critically engage with

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concomitant concepts such as cosmopolitanism. In this, the novel re-members, that is, modifies and recharges, the literary style of Modernism, thereby making it speak afresh to the challenges of the present. Finally, the last chapter, “Remembering Britain’s Lost Children: The Myth of Filiation in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child”, turns to intertextuality and the affordances of this formal device for latent memories in Caryl Phillips’ penultimate novel The Lost Child (2015). The Lost Child remembers through latency on two different levels. First, the novel more or less explicitly addresses an English classic. As its blurb already indicates, the novel builds a connection to Emily Brontë’s classic novel Wuthering Heights (1847) and its enigmatic foundling Heathcliff. This chapter claims that as this connection is far from obvious, the literary intertextuality complicates traditional notions of rewriting. Second, the novel latently entangles questions of race with questions of class through the orphan figure. Entangling class and race through latency, I claim, allows this novel to remember the lost children of Britain – children who due to different sociological, cultural or economic circumstances ‘lost’ their childhood – in a more intersectional way, inviting readers to see how different forms of marginalisation – due to class, race and gender – follow similar mechanisms and often work alongside one another. Through latency as a mode of memory, The Lost Child remembers different ways in which filiation was traditionally thought to work – on the level of the characters and idealised ideas of the family and the nation on the one hand and on a meta-level as filiation to the canon on the other hand – only to discredit both and show that belonging should not be solely a question of filiative heritage.

2 Memory – Latency – Eventfulness 2.1 Rethinking the Concept of the Event 2.1.1 The Event at the Core of Narratology: Structuralist Approaches The ‘event’ as a basic pillar of meaning-making is both essential for memory discourses and the core concepts of narratology. Just as public memory work endows a community with a sense of identity by creating a coherent narrative of past events in relation to the present, narrative plots “stabilize experience by pouring the raw material of life into the mold of events and characters” (Ritivoi 2016: 66). Rethinking literature that deals with memory thus goes hand in hand with rethinking the narratological primary position of the event. In her narratological study Avatars of Story (2006), Marie-Laure Ryan builds on H. Porter Abbott’s definition of a narrative as the combination of story and discourse, whereas “story is an event or sequence of events (the action), and narrative discourse is those events as represented” (qtd. in Ryan 2006: 7). Ryan builds on this definition but adds more complexity to it. She defines narrative in the following way: Narrative must be about a world populated by individuated existents. This world must be situated in time and space and undergo significant transformations. The transformations must be caused by nonhabitual physical events. Some of the participants in the events must be intelligent agents who have a mental life and react emotionally to the states of the world. Some of the events must be purposeful actions by these agents, motivated by identifiable goals and plans. The sequence of events must form a unified causal chain and lead to closure. The occurrence of at least some of the events must be asserted as fact for the story world. The story must communicate something meaningful to the recipient. (Ryan 2006: 8, my emphasis, Y.L.)

As Ryan’s definition underlines, narrative in the classical, traditional sense, is about meaningful events that trigger change in characters who react emotionally to these events. Events, in her definition, are tied to the goals and purposes of ‘intelligent agents’ who have the capacities to react meaningfully to these events. As events indicate change and propel the plot forward, they have both a temporal function as change indicates the passage of time and a consequential function in that they make possible the development of the story. The narratologist Peter Hühn similarly connects the concept of the event to a movement in time: The concept of event has become prominent in recent work on narratology; it is generally used to help define narrativity in terms of the sequentiality inherent to the narrated story. This sequentiality involves changes of state in the represented world and thereby implies

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the presence of temporality time, which is a constitutive aspect of narration (Hühn 2011: n.pag.)

Linking the nature of the event to its function of establishing temporality in a narrative, it becomes apparent that while “[e]very event is a change of state, […] not every change of state constitutes an event. The event, therefore, has to be defined as a change of state that fulfils certain conditions” (Schmid 2010: 8). According to Hühn, one of these conditions is that events in a literary text create sequentiality, which in turn decides on the ‘presence of temporality’ in that text. For structuralists, there are some more criteria that need to be taken into account to determine whether ‘something unexpected happening’ counts as an ‘event. The narratologist Wolf Schmid defines facticity and resultativity as necessary conditions for events to count as relevant and worth noticing. In order to count as a real event, the happening that induces changes needs to actually take place (rather than being simply desired, imagined or hinted at) (Schmid 2010: 9) and be resultative, which means that it has to reach a conclusion (rather than having simply begun or being in progress) (9). Although Schmid names these two conditions “necessary conditions of an event in the strict sense” (9), he emphasises that they alone are not sufficient and subsequently names five more categories that decide upon the eventfulness of a text. The changes on the level of the plot are more or less eventful depending on the extent to which these five features are met, while the first two in Schmid’s hierarchical order must be displayed at least to some degree (9). The prerequisites, which are listed hierarchically starting with the most important one, are those of relevance (significance in the storyworld), unpredictability (deviation from what is expected, from the norms of the general order of the world, constituting a surprise for one of the characters, but not necessarily the reader). Similarly, the literary scholar, semiotician and cultural historian Jurij Lotman sees the boundary crossing of a character in a literary text as something that comes by surprise, something that “did occur, though it could also not have occurred” (Lotman 1977: 236). The event, in this sense, cannot be a logical consequence of the plot; it must be unexpected. Next to these two “primary criteria underlying the continuum of eventfulness” (Schmid 2010: 10), Schmid also lists some “additional, less crucial” features: Persistence (the eventfulness is in direct proportion to the affected subject’s long-lasting perception of the event as surprising and unpredictable), irreversibility (irrevocability of the change’s consequences, the original state is unlikely to be restored),¹ and non-iterativity (a

 In case of a mental transformation, “an insight must be gained that excludes any return to earlier ways of thinking” (Schmid 2010: 11– 12)

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repeatedly occurring change represents a low level of eventfulness, even if it is each time unpredictable and relevant) (Schmid 2010: 9 – 12). All of these parameters for eventfulness are context dependent; they can only be measured “with reference to intradiegetic expectations, to a literary or cultural context”, which means that the event has to be “related to [its] surroundings by an entity (character, narrator, or reader) that comprehends and interprets the change of state involved” (Hühn 2011: n.pag). Hühn elaborates that “the extent to which a change in the narrated world qualifies as significant, unpredictable, momentous, or irreversible” depends on “the established system of norms, the conventional ideas about the nature of society and reality, current in any given case […] and can therefore vary historically between different mentalities and cultures” (n.pag.). This established system of norms can either be established within the storyworld or be the norms that the reader is familiar with, as long as either a character, the narrator or the reader can situate and contextualise the “change of state involved” (n.pag.). Adding the concept of a semantic field to the general idea of ‘change of state’, the semiotician, Jurij Lotman claims that [a]n event in a text is the shifting of a persona across the borders of a semantic field. It follows that the description of some fact or action in their relation to a real denotatum or to the semantic system of a natural language can neither be defined as an event or as a non-event until one has resolved the question of its place in the secondary structural semantic field as determined by the type of culture. But even this does not provide an ultimate resolution: within the same scheme of culture the same episode, when placed on various structural levels, may or may not become an event. (Lotman 1977: 233, my emphasis, Y.L.)

What counts as an event in literature is thus not universal but depends, according to Lotman and Hühn, on the cultural context of the literary work as well as on the semantic field established therein.² As the structuring within the text also decides on the perception of something as an event, Lotman goes on to argue that “[a] plot thus viewed does not represent something independent, taken directly from life, or something passively received from tradition” (1977: 234). Rather, “a plot is organically related to a world picture which provides the scale for determining what constitutes an event and what constitutes a variant of that event communicating nothing new to us” (234). Events in a literary text, according to Lotman, do not stand

 In this, Lotman, Schmid and Hühn differ from Barthes, who claims: “narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself ” (Structural Analysis 252). What Barthes, however, probably means is that all cultures have narratives and have rules for these narratives. The individual units of a narrative, however, cannot be transcultural and transhistorical.

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isolated but need to be viewed in relation to their context and other events and incidents which they could be related to. Eventfulness, in the structuralist understanding, therefore depends on perspective and reflects back on a certain cultural situation in which something is either perceived as something radically new and thus constitutes an event or is considered ‘ordinary’ although it might count as an event in a different context.³ Moreover, it reflects on a very specific moment in time, since deviation from the norm, from the ordinary, as Lotman points out, depends on what the norm is at a certain time and place. The tellability of a story is ultimately related to an act which in the context of the story might be unusual or even prohibited. Falling back upon criminal discourse, Lotman expands that “an event is an act of transgression” (1977: 236), it involves “the violation of some prohibition” (236). This violation of some prohibition is constituted by a crossing of boundaries by an active agent on the level of plot.⁴ Thus, literary texts allow conclusions about established norms through their staging of events or non-events. Ultimately, “the same everyday reality may in different texts either acquire or not acquire the nature of an event” (Lotman 1977: 232), thus making the “tellability” (Schmid 2010:13), the “noteworthiness of a story” (13), culture and epoch dependent and presupposes an implicit reader who knows the cultural codes.⁵ Within the story universe of The Childhood of Jesus (see chapter 3), for instance, the arbitrary appointment of Inés as David’s mother does not constitute an event for the characters, although it might constitute a major form of boundary crossing for the reader. Simón’s discontent with the way of life in Novilla, on the other hand, constitutes an event for the Novillans for whom this is a “violation of some prohibition” (Lotman 1977: 236) while it might seem a normal and logical reaction for readers who have grown up in a capitalist society. While all of the novels discussed in this study test and sometimes plainly break with the structuralist conceptualisation of the event as a meaning-making

 Lotman illustrates this point referring to the newspaper covering of an earthquake in Norway in the thirteenth century: “‘The earth shook … at dinner, but others had already finished dinner.’ Here the earthquake and dinner are in equal measure events” (1977: 235).  Lotman describes these boundaries in terms of simple binaries: “the principle of binary semantic opposition lies at the foundation of the internal organization of textual elements: the world is divided up into rich and poor, natives and strangers, orthodox and heretical, enlightened and unenlightened, people of Nature and people of Society, enemies and friends.” (1977: 237)  Addressing the criticism that his event categories had to face, Schmid makes it clear that his emphasis on tellability does not go hand in hand with an author-centred approach to literature. He declares: “It is a happy truth that literary works provide, more or less overtly, information about the norms and values in terms of which their eventfulness should be understood” (Schmid 2010: 15).

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category, J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013) most prominently refuses to follow this traditional formula. Not only does the novel refrain from providing the reader with meaningful events that trigger change but it also refuses to provide “a world picture which provides the scale for determining what constitutes an event” (Lotman 1977: 234). Its refusal to provide the cultural context that according to the structuralists is so important in determining what counts as an event in literature extends beyond the literary plot and is also mirrored in Coetzee’s publication strategy and acts of translation both within the novel and manifested in its status as born translated, a term coined by Rebecca Walkowitz to describe novels that “approach[…] translation as medium and origin rather than as afterthought” (2015: 3 – 4) (see chapter 3). As has become clear, the participant in the action, the active agent in deciding upon the eventfulness of a text can be situated on various diegetic levels. However, although the structuralists make room for the possibility of the event involving the reader, they never formulate concrete ideas of how to define the event that happens between the text and the reader. Despite its position at the basis of narratology, the event category needs revising as its current definition poses several problems. The structuralists’ nudge towards the transformative power of the reception process builds the bridge to poststructuralist approaches to the event, which will be discussed in the next subchapter. As the structuralist approaches already indicate, the concept of ‘event’ cannot be fully detached from specific cultural contexts. This conceptualisation can also be found in memory studies and underlines the importance of latency as an alternative form of memory that questions the alleged universality of certain remembered events, such as the Holocaust or 9/11 (see subchapter 2.3 and the analysis of Let the Great World Spin in chapter 5, which brings together various forms of memory and trauma through multiperspectivity and decentralises 9/11 as the pillar of interpretation when it comes to trauma and violence). Structuralist approaches to narrative have played an immense role in understanding narrative but are outdated in many respects. In view of the centrality of the ‘event’ category for literary studies and Schmid’s, Lotman’s and Hühn’s insistence on the culture-dependency of the category of the ‘event’, it is questionable whether such an approach would allow for literature to transgress its narrow confines of strict cultural or national affiliations. Can texts, after all, be allowed to travel and transgress national and cultural borders, if they – if one were to approach them strictly through structuralist concepts – so heavily rely on an idea of the ‘event’ that is intricately tied to cultural and national norms of understanding? It is my conviction that the category of the ‘event’ needs to be revisited in order to allow for more literary possibilities which are not as tightly restricted to the text’s concrete context. Concrete contexts and – keeping in mind the overarching topic of this study – the singularity of specific

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memories are, of course, important. But especially when considering the potential of literature to build bridges between different (remembering) communities, it is important to refigure the traditional understanding of eventfulness in narratives. While the literary ‘event’ as I will also argue further below is to be connected to the reader and the event of reading, this event needs to rely less on cultural understanding and more on how texts work formally, testing the breaking points of Lotman’s ‘semantic fields’ rather than reaffirming their firm boundaries.

2.1.2 Poststructuralist Concepts of Affective Eventfulness What structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to the event share is that both see events as “not something that happens with any degree of regularity”; rather, the event “is a unique, singular occurrence. An event is not something that follows some prior rule but is an exception to the rule” (Smith 2015: 388; Derrida 2007a: 228). According to Jacques Derrida, events highly rely on their medial processing, as in our common understanding events are what is reported on “[t]elevision, radio, and newspapers” (2007: 229; Landwehr 2016: 172), and thus acquires the status of ‘newsworthy’. However, as this chapter will show, a definition of the event in general and a definition of what counts as an event in literature specifically are more complex than both our everyday understanding and the structuralist approaches let on. There is bountiful philosophical and poststructuralist theory about ‘eventfulness’. Philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Žižek, among others, have dealt with the ominous term ‘event’. Although each of these philosophers has a different take on ‘eventfulness’, this study does not require an extensive discussion of their different approaches.⁶ What is important for this study is what these philosophers mainly agree on. In the following, I will outline the most important points which I will then later connect to the concept of ‘literary events’ as formulated by Ilai Rowner.

 For Martin Heidegger, the event – that is the German Ereignis – is something a-temporal which precedes the possibility of what he calls pseudo-events to take place. Conversely, the everyday, as he puts it in Being and Time, is nothing else than pure temporality (1996: 340). As Michael Sayeau puts it, Heidegger’s Ereignis is “something like the extra-temporal condition of eventfulness itself ” (2013: 17). Although the idea of the event being a-temporal is enticing, it does not fit the scope of this study. Analysing literature with Heidegger’s ideas of the event would rather amount to an analysis of the underlying super structure of texts, their language and their pre-given potentiality as a-temporal events which make the pseudo-events in a given text possible. As this is not the intention of this study, Heidegger’s thought on eventfulness will not be elaborated on further.

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Taking his cue from literature – from Agatha Christie’s 4.50 from Paddington, which begins with a woman witnessing a murder in a passing train on what would otherwise have been a perfectly ordinary day – the philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek defines an event as something shocking, out of joint, that appears to happen all of a sudden and interrupts the usual flow of things; something that emerges seemingly out of nowhere, without discernible causes, an appearance without solid being as its foundation. There is, by definition, something ‘miraculous’ in an event, from the miracles of our daily lives to those of the most sublime spheres, including that of the divine. (Žižek 2014: 2)

The beginning of the definition is very similar to structuralist approaches to the event, defining it first and foremost as something that “interrupts the usual flow of things”. In contrast, however, Žižek, stresses that the event does not expose its origin, its causes; he marks the event as something unanticipated and surprising (see also Derrida 2007a: 223). For Žižek, the basic feature of an event is “the surprising emergence of something new which undermines every stable scheme” (Žižek 2014: 5 – 6). Undermining stable categories, the event produces a surplus value and thus introduces newness, not only on a micro level but also on a more structural level. As Žižek explains, “[a]t first approach, an event is thus the effect that seems to exceed its causes – and the space of an event is that which opens up by the gap that separates an effect from its causes” (2014: 3). Following Žižek’s conception of events as gaps between causes and effects, a connection to affect theory becomes apparent. According to one of the major affect theory scholars, Brian Massumi, “the primacy of the affective is marked by a gap between content and effect” (2002: 24). Taking a cue from Žižek and Massumi, one could therefore conclude that events are primarily categorised through their affective power, that is their power to go beyond pre-learned emotions and trigger readerly engagement with the hitherto unknown. This affective power is often disconnected from the event’s content as the “event is not something that occurs within the world, but is a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it” (Žižek 2014: 10). Therefore, our ordinary understanding of events needs to be revisited: Not everything that is out of the ordinary, which is a “unique, singular occurrence”, is an event. According to Žižek, and combining Žižek’s with Massumi’s ideas on affect, only affective, sudden and singular occurrences which change how we look at events on a more general level count as proper events. Mark Currie thus postulates that “[t]he question we need to pose here is whether key temporal terms, such as event, unpredictable, unforeseeable, retrospective and surprising, are words that refer to an experience within a horizon of meaning, or an experience as constituting a horizon of meaning” (2013: 80). Rather than understanding an event as just an experience, a component within an already defined

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‘horizon of meaning’, events should be precisely those moments that question and challenge predefined parameters of knowledge that decide upon what might be considered eventful or not. As Derrida puts it, “[o]nce there are rules, norms and hence criteria to evaluate this or that, what happens and what doesn’t happen […] there is no event” (2007: 239). Following the idea of affective events which challenge systems and categories rather than comply with them, we need to stop defining events as punctuated, selfcontained, precise moments in time. If an event is “the effect that seems to exceed its causes” (Žižek 2014: 3), it cannot be reduced to a singular occurrence in the sense that what happens cannot be considered a unique, isolated happening. Rather, events are “ruptures, nicks, which flow from casual connections in the past” which generate “sometimes subtle but wide-ranging, unforeseeable transformations in the present and future” (Grosz 2004: 8). Events, in the poststructural sense, are often connected to time periods rather than a unique moment in time and often emerge from the realm of the virtual, which cannot be pinned down to one moment in time but is defined through its coexistence with the actual. The virtual describes the “potential circuits that do not eventuate (that are not possibilized, for whatever reason of historical contingency, even though they are potentiated to one degree or another)” (Massumi 2016: 217). Existing simultaneously with the actual but on a different conceptual level, the virtual describes “the pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies” (Massumi 2002: 30) that co-exist with the actual. As Massumi goes on to explain, one must think of the virtual “as having a different temporal structure, in which past and future brush shoulders with no mediating present, and as having a different, recursive causality; the virtual as cresting in a liminal realm of emergence, where half-actualised actions and expressions arise (2002: 31). Being connected to the realm of the virtual, events are not only what singularly happened but also that which has not happened, that is the “event’s lacuna point, the moment they have not happened” (Massumi 2016: 208). Events thus should be reconfigured as the connecting pieces but similarly also the disruptive force of history as “transhistorical processes” which are permeated by unactualised, virtual events that “move through” actual, historically understood events (218). Therefore, the “history of the present is not confined to the actual dates of its exemplary events. […] It is as nonlocal as it is transhistorical” (221). Translating this approach to narrative events, it becomes apparent that the literary event, the event of literature, should similarly be understood as a “disruptive force” which brings the actual and the virtual closer together for the reader. Similar to this idea of events being actualised singularities taken from a pool of other, unactualised and virtual but still affective events, Deleuze, in his essay “What is an Event?” (1993), defines the event as an “extension” (1993: 77) of a sin-

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gularity in a realm of chaos. He explains that “[e]xtension exists when one element is stretched over the following ones, such that it is a whole and the following elements are its parts” (1993: 77). For Deleuze, the event is a vibration with an infinity of harmonics or submultiples, such as an audible wave, a luminous wave, or even an increasingly smaller part of space over the course of an increasingly shorter duration […] Then we can consider a second component of the event: extensive series have intrinsic properties (for example, height, intensity, timbre of a sound, a tint, a value, a saturation of color), which enter on their own account in new infinite series, now converging toward limits, with the relation among limits establishing a conjunction. (Deleuze 1993: 77)

Deleuze’s definition of ‘event’ offers a shifting of perspective. By creating the analogy of an audible wave or a luminous wave with events, Deleuze’s definition allows for an analysis of the seemingly ‘un-eventful’, of ‘events’ which are not all-encompassingly present but might only by perceptible from a certain angle or even events which are still virtual and not yet actualised. In the Deleuzian sense, the concept of the event should thus be thought on a scale with more and less intense events. The analyses of Teju Cole’s Open City and Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin illustrate this idea. Both novels almost strikingly refuse to stage events fixable in time and space and rather make diachronically inflected, sensual moments their focal points, their ‘eventful’ moments. Working with Deleuze’s and Žižek’s conceptualisations of eventfulness, traditional narrative ‘eventfulness’ must be rethought, because many canonical texts will, analysed thoroughly through the lens of their critical thinking, prove to be in fact ‘uneventful’ while novels in which on the surface nothing much seems to happen are indeed eventful in more complex ways. Their approaches to the event invite us to look at different layers and levels of texts when trying to define eventfulness in literature. Rather than the obvious plot twists or character decisions that lead to changes within the storyworld, the ‘event’ in the poststructural sense works more opaquely. As Derrida underlines, it is “[w]henever the event resists being turned into information or into a theoretical utterance, resists being known and made known, the secret is on the scene” (2007: 238). Similarly, Žižek’s argues that events “emerge seemingly out of nowhere, without discernible causes” (2014: 2). Events in literary texts, as described by Lotman, rarely fulfil this requirement. Although Lotman asserts that an event is only that which could just as likely not have happened, he also connects the event in a literary text to a superimposed motif, which he defines as “a formula which in its initial stages provides the community with answers to questions which nature everywhere poses, or which confirms those impressions of reality which are particularly striking, appear important or are repeated” (1977: 232). If the events in a literary text provide the answers posed by the overall structure of the text, they cannot “emerge out of no-

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where”, they ultimately are already prefigured in the structure. However, as Žižek points out, “an event is […] the effect that seems to exceed its causes” (2014: 3). The events being dependent on cultural contexts and prefigured semantic fields are rather reactions to events than that they might exceed their causes. One could even go one step further and claim that every event once retold and medialised loses its singularity. In his study with the intriguing name Die anwesende Abwesenheit der Vergangenheit (2016) – roughly translated into “the present absence of the past” – the historian Achim Landwehr addresses the paradox of the event. Referring to Derrida, he maintains that we can always only address an event after it has happened. He thus draws the conclusion that the medialisation of events in fact constitutes a breach in the experience and constrains the “Überrumpelung” (Landwehr 2016: 167)⁷ that is said to be the defining feature of an event. By being medialised and repeated in language, the event thus almost loses what constitutes it as an event in the first place, that is its unpredictability and singularity (2016: 167).⁸ This is where latency as a concept intervenes: latency might introduce a more complex understanding of eventfulness into fiction by shifting the level on which the event takes place and removing it from the directly decipherable plot, thus refraining from explicitly addressing it through language. Latency as a mode of memory in this sense might constitute the event of literature that truly appears “without discernible causes” as a literary text points to the realm of the latent through the “Unfug of the code” (Haverkamp 2002: 166), through what Ilai Rowner calls “literary events”. Literary events, as Ilai Rowner defines them, are constituted by “the undefined feeling of an eventness that does not have any literal expression or telos” (2015: 2) but which is constituted by an “experience […] of that which happens unexpectedly” (Derrida 2007b: 5) or appears unmotivated for the reader.

 The German word “Überrumpelung” does not have a direct English translation. It roughly means “to catch somebody unawares” but also implies a bodily sensation with connotations of being overwhelmed by the surprise.  The original in German reads: “Wir haben es also mit einem Paradox des Ereignisses zu tun, insofern, wie Jacques Derrida sagt, jedes Sprechen vom Ereignis immer nur nach dem Ereignis stattfinden kann – und damit eigentlich schon das Sprechen von einem Nicht-Ereignis ist. Wenn also ein Ereignis eine Differenz, einen Bruch in der Erfahrung, eine Überrumpelung darstellen soll, dann führt die notwendige Medialisierung dazu, dass es seinen Ereignischarakter fast schon notwendig einbußt. Wenn ein Ereignis sich dadurch auszeichnen soll, unvorhersehbar und vor allem einmalig zu sein, dann wird dieser Wesenskern durch die beständige nachträgliche Wiederholung im Sprechen über das Ereignis fast schon wieder ausgehöhlt. Gerade in der schriftlichen Verarbeitung tritt die Nachträglichkeit der Darstellung, das konstitutive und permanente ZuSpät des historischen Tuns deutlich vor Augen” (Landwehr 2016: 167).

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Literary events work through affect, through the gap between content and effect (Massumi 2002: 24). Affect or intensity (Massumi uses the two terms synonymously) break open concepts of linearity upon which eventfulness in literature relies according to structuralist thought. Affect, Massumi declares, is “associated with nonlinear processes: resonation and feedback that momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative present from past to future” (2002: 26). Along these lines, Massumi reconfigures the concept of the event. Introducing the concept of intensity as event, which is “outside expectation and adaptation” and “disconnected from meaningful sequencing” (2002: 25), Massumi claims: “Nothing is prefigured in the event. It is the collapse of structured distinction into intensity, of rules into paradox” (2002: 27). The eventful is now no longer mainly defined by the unforeseeable and surprising on the level of narrated events but rather a more general point of reorganising what we think we know and where we look for the event in texts. Therefore, in contrast to Lotman’s structural concept, literary events are not purposefully directed towards something – a boundary crossing, a superimposed motif – but rather conceal not only their origin but also their directedness. The moment of the literary event is, in fact, “senseless” (Rowner 2015: 2) and breaks open pre-existing structures and concepts. As Massumi points out, “structure is the place where nothing ever happens, that explanatory heaven in which all natural eventual permutations are prefigured in a self-consistent set of invariant generative rules” (2002: 27). Lotman’s concept of literary events as the crossings of boundaries within a semiotic field is in fact a concept of literature as bound to prefigured events: The events made possible by the semiotic field created by the frames of the literary work. Literature, however, can do more. “Literature”, as Rowner notes, “has no interest in the undeniable fact of the event; it is precisely the unknown movement of the happening that affects literature’s performative language and its manner of speech” (2015: 12– 13). Rowner differs from Lotman as he sees literary events as unruly elements in the structure of the plot which do not need to follow an overarching motif and which are not firmly tied to the semantic field. Rather, they constitute these moments where the semantic field is challenged or made visible as a purposeful construct. In order to break open the hierarchy between semantic fields and the potential of literature, “a theory of the literary event must strive to conceive of the event in its own right, without relation to the narrative course of the plot” (22). What matters for literary events is “not the declarative statement of the event but rather the way the ontological, psychological, or ethical information it carries remains partially undeclared” (25), leaving an intentional gap rather than closing a narrative circle. In contrast to Rowner’s assertion that the event should be decoupled from “the narrative course of the plot” (2015: 22), this study does not want to disentangle sin-

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gular passages from the whole plot but rather sees literary events as what Deleuze calls “points of inflection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers, and centers; points of fusion, condensation, and boiling; points of tears and joy, sickness and health, hope and anxiety, ‘sensitive’ points” (2011: 52). Literary events, which most often take on the form of digressions or other formal elements that redirect the reader’s attention, set a different direction for the narrative: “what digression provides – and linear discourse does not – is the titillation of not knowing if the endpoint is absence or some form of rejuvenating presence” (Bernett 2012: 120). Similarly, other formal elements which disturb straight forward meaning-making strategies that focus on character development or central plot elements also open up the narrative for alternative ways of engaging with the known and the unknown, the directly accessible dimension of the text and its latent undercurrents. Rethinking the concept of the event is especially relevant for an engagement with literature that deals with processes of memory, since the “term event”, as Rowner points out, is “the kernel of all historical understanding” (Rowner 2015: 3) which in turn influences memory culture. Analysing literary events together with latent memories through the lens of poststructuralist concepts of the event makes possible a thinking about memory which is not driven by individual or collective intentionality and which puts to test firm linear perceptions of causes and effects. Engaging with processes of memory with the help of the concepts of latency and affect moreover opens up the present for the realm of potential or, as Massumi calls it, the “realm of the virtual”, in which “past and future brush shoulders with no mediating present, and as having a different, recursive causality” (2002: 31). Most importantly, re-thinking memory with the help of affective theory allows us to break open tamped ground and make possible new perceptions and hitherto neglected connections. As Massumi underlines: Affect is the virtual as point of view, provided the visual metaphor is used guardedly. […] Affects are virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing, particular things that embody them. The autonomy of affect is its participation in the virtual. Its autonomy is its openness. Affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction) it is. Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the capture and closure of affect. Emotion is the most intense (most contracted) expression of that capture-and of the fact that something has always and again escaped. Something remains unactualized, inseparable from but unassimilable to any particular, functionally anchored perspective. (Massumi 2002: 35)

Affect is the moment where several different directions of thought and action are juxtaposed in a non-hierarchical way. Affect thus is the moment of possibility, the highlighting of the moment before the choice, before the capture into emotion, that

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is the moment before categorisations. The “seeping edge”, the moment that the virtual is turned into the actual “is where potential, actually, is found” (Massumi 2002: 43). These moments, I argue, correlate with literary events. Literary events are the moments in the narrative that draw attention to the virtual alternatives, to the lurking difference within the narrative. They are the moments when that which could have been is present as a latent alternative. Thus, affective literary events are the moments in a narrative where newness and change can be found. With regard to memory this means that affective literary passages open memory discourses for stories that could have been told, that still linger on in the virtual, pressing on the actual and demanding recognition.

2.1.3 The Event and the Everyday A shift from narratological classical events, as outlined by Lotman, Hühn and Schmid, among others, to literary events on the discourse level is often connected to a novel’s thematic concerns. The formal shift from traditional narratological events to literary events can be a tool to draw attention to a thematical shift from the engagement with ‘historical events’ to an engagement with other forms of ‘events’ that might not be categorised as such. Questioning what is perceived as ‘eventful’ on the level of narrative might lead to a contemplation of what counts as ‘newsworthy’ more generally. As Michael Sayeau outlines in his book Against the Event: The Everyday and Evolution of Modernist Narrative (2013), the idea of ‘historical events’ always presupposes the ‘everyday’ against which these events can irrupt: “the novel, from its very start, has been structured by a rhythm that moves between the continuities of ordinary life and their disruption by or eruption into significant occurrences, crises, events” (2013: 5). Cultural critic Ben Highmore makes the dichotomy even clearer by talking about the “non-events” of the everyday, defining the everyday by a lack of eventfulness (2011: 1). However, Highmore instantly challenges this perception, bringing to attention that ‘nothing much’ happening might only mean that nothing much is visibly happening: If, when asked ‘what have you been up to?’ or ‘what’s been happening?’ you reply ‘nothing much’ then what is this ‘nothing much’ referring to? ‘Nothing much’ is an odd formula: half of it sounds like the indignant cry of children when questioned by parents or anyone when questioned by the police (‘what are you doing?’ ‘nothing!’ […]. (Highmore 2011: 3)

Indeed, Achim Landwehr similarly criticises the often-internalised association of the ‘event’ with the extraordinary, the sudden and significant (2016: 172), referring back to the French writer Georges Perec, whose concept of the “infra-ordinaire”

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(qtd. in Landwehr 2016: 172) attests to the eventfulness of the small things by emphasising elements of change which occur below the normal range of attentiveness. Nothing much happening can also mean a refusal to put what is happening into firm categories. The ordinary or everyday, in opposition to clearly articulated and visible events, is “continually hidden” (Highmore 2011: 4) to a certain degree. Nothing much happening might just be a short cut to a right to opacity, a right to non-codification, instead of empty time. Literary events in Rowner’s sense can, I claim, shift attention away from the big historical events and unto the ‘everyday’, highlighting how on the one hand we can never fully grasp the ‘event’ anyway and on the other hand how the so-called ‘everyday’ can latently be informed by structural forms of violence and oppression (as, for instance, racism, ableism, sexism and classism) that are not acknowledged as ‘events’ and are thus not given sufficient attention. The everyday is indeed not an unproblematic category and proves to be complex and always already entangled in politics and history. As Michael Sayeau outlines: [T]he everyday is not, in my usage, simply a synonym for ‘ordinary life,’ nor any of these other terms [empty time, boredom, banality, stasis], even if it borders on all of them. There is an obvious problem with any positive definition of the everyday. The ordinariness of things is very much a matter of the eye of the observer. […] Think, for instance, of those staples of English consumption during the twentieth century – tea, tobacco, sugar – and the vast and bloody imperial history that brought these items to the table. To speak of ‘ordinary life,’ in other words, is almost always to speak either tautologically or deceptively. (Sayeau 2013: 8)

Claiming that defining the everyday depends on the perceiving subject – the eye of the observer (Sayeau 2013: 8) – might sound as if individuals independently decide on what the everyday is. What Sayeau, however, means is that the everyday is a politically determined category. The everyday might just as well be that which politicians or other leading figures in a society want to remain unexamined, unquestioned and unchallenged. As the sociologist Michel Foucault points out, discourses – that is the set of statements that we accept as representing a form of ‘truth’ – are products of ideology and run through all of our everyday interactions: “Systems of power produce and sustain discourses […] the problem is not simply changing people’s consciousness – what’s in their hands – but the political, institutional regime of the production of truth” (1980: 133). This production of truth works through the constant repetition of what Foucault calls “major narratives”. He explains: I suppose, though I am not altogether sure, there is barely a society without its major narratives, told, retold and varied; formulae, texts, ritualised texts to be spoken in well-defined circumstances; things said once, and conserved because people suspect some hidden secret or wealth lies buried within. (Foucault 1972: 220).

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Discourses that permeate our everyday lives thus are always already the products of regimes of truth and existing power relations and therefore intricately connected to politics. The connection between tea, tobacco and sugar and imperial history that Sayeau mentions bring to the fore latent histories of violence which are always present in the everyday while simultaneously being palpably absent – that is unaddressed. Similarly, our everyday use of language is often latently informed by systems of power and suppression.⁹ As these explanations highlight, by shifting the attention, latent structures and processes come into focus which do not directly relate to one specific and singular event, but which are certainly informed by them. In this sense, Ben Highmore is certainly right in reminding us that “[t]o invoke the everyday can often be a sleight of hand that normalises and universalises particular values, specific world-views” (2002: 1). The analysis of Milkman (2018) illustrates what is at stake here. Violence and trauma are not intricately connected to ‘events’ in the traditional sense but permeate the novel’s descriptions of the everyday and the seemingly uneventful. At the centre of this study is literature that puts to the test the alleged binary relationship between ‘the event’ and the ‘everyday’ and explores the level of the latent in its possibility to negotiate “the way that the opaque and oblique machinations of global politics (economic, environmental and cultural) punctuate and syncopate the rhythms of ordinary life” (Highmore 2011: 20). Taking my cue from Highmore’s assertion that “[e]veryday life is not simply the name that is given to a reality readily available for scrutiny; it is also the name for aspects of life that lie hidden” (2002: 1), I want to look at latent structures and processes which are left in the background – to stay with Žižek’s idea of anamorphosis.These structures ask for a different kind of attention than typical ‘memory narratives’ which focus on the depiction of historical events. Analysing literary texts through the lenses of the old dichotomy between eventfulness and the everyday might “reveal underlying structures and latent contents” (Highmore 2002: 8) in the everyday which cut across a linear understanding of time and show that while ‘events’ might belong to the past, their aftermaths and ongoing consequences do not.

 For Michel Foucault, power should not be understood as wielded by people or groups by way of acts of direct domination or forceful coercion but rather as pervasive and part of everyday experiences. He explains the connection between language and power in The Archaeology of Knowledge: “I suppose, though I am not altogether sure, there is barely a society without its major narratives, told, retold and varied; formulae, texts, ritualised texts to be spoken in well-defined cicumstances; things said once, and conserved because people suspect some hidden secret or wealth lies buried within” (1972: 220). It is these narratives told and retold which inform identity politics and, I claim, memory narratives.

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Narratives which ‘work through the background’ bring to the fore the troubling discourse surrounding conventional definitions of ‘events’: Often being understood as punctual interruptions of the everyday, events run the risk of appearing ‘contained’, ‘manageable’ and ‘finite’. Focussing on the latent energy of the everyday and the uneventful, stripping it of its inconspicuousness, questions this understanding by highlighting the continuous quality of the past instead of categorising events and trying to relegate them to one temporal dimension only. As Michael Rothberg rightly points out, some memories and traumata have “a sudden event of extreme violence” (2014: xiv) at their basis, but what both memory studies and trauma studies often neglect are “system[s] of violence that [are] neither sudden nor accidental” (xiv) in which these events are embedded. It is therefore crucial to move away from a perception of the event as ‘contained’ or ‘finite’, because such an understanding leads to a continuation of conditions while mourning one allegedly singular event which was caused and facilitated by said conditions.¹⁰

2.2 Tracing Memory Studies: From an Identitarian to a Transcultural Approach The traditional organisation of literature around questions of ‘eventfulness’ has manifold consequences for the engagement with memory in literature. Among other things, a focus on ‘eventfulness’ results in an “evental organization of time” (Sayeau 2013: 6), which establishes meaning for the present on the backbone of past ‘events’. The temporal organisation of the novel mostly derives from an emphasis of ‘evental’ time, in which the logic of the narrative follows a “syntagmatic or linear course which every narrative is bound to follow” (Sturgess 2001: 31). This perceived linearity established by the ‘event’ as the focal point of a narrative with its ‘before’ and ‘after’ can similarly be perceived in traditional engagements with memory.

 Rothberg gives the illuminating example of two factory fires in South Asia in 2012. The clothing factories produced clothes for “subcontractors of European and American companies such as H&M, Wal-Mart, and Gap” (2014: xiv). The events of the fires were, of course, violent and traumatic, but Rothberg underlines their embeddedness in a system of “exploitation in an age of globalized neo-liberal capitalism” (2014: xiv). Rothberg’s example can moreover illustrate how the everyday – the choice of clothes for instance – is tied to the political: Wearing clothes from such European and American companies as H&M or Wal-Mart can be considered as a complicity in the system of exploitation. In our everyday life, “we are implicated subjects, beneficiaries of a system that generates dispersed and uneven experiences of trauma and wellbeing simultaneously” (Rothberg 2014: xv).

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Ian Watt calls this relationship between time, the event and the novel “contextual causality” (2015: 68; Carroll 2001: 128), outlining that the novel can be best distinguished from prior forms “by its use of the past experience as the cause of present action: a causal connection operating through time” (Watt 2015: 68). For obvious reasons, fictions of memory are especially prone to this ‘evental organisation of time’ which furnishes the present with a ‘usable’ past that offers explanations and perspectives on present situations. As Astrid Erll also underlines, “the linking of past, present and future in a meaningful way” (2011: 147) has for a very long time been at the core of fictions of memory. Although many fictions of memory that deal with traumatic memories seem to disturb a linear understanding of time by making the past haunt their protagonists in the present, they still rely on this ‘evental organisation of time’ in that the past is configured as something that returns against the so-perceived ‘natural’ order of time. Theorising fictions of memory and their connection to an ‘evental organisation of time’ is as important now as it was with the rise to prominence of memory studies in the 1980s. This is due to a fundamental shift in the understanding of memory and its relation to identity, culture and nationality and underlying teleological approaches to memory more generally. As Lucy Bond, Stef Craps and Pieter Vermeulen attest in Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (2017), “[m]emory is not what it used to be” (2017: 1). Today, memory circulates, migrates and travels and “is more and more perceived as a process” (2017: 1), undergoing a “transcultural, transgenerational, transmedial, and transdisciplinary drift” (1). As especially the first two key words underline, memory is no longer primarily analysed for its culture-specificity or understood in a linear way as transgenerational concepts of memory stress the reoccurring, haunting quality of memories, which defies the idea of a future disentangled from the past. What differentiates this thinking about the return of a haunting past from earlier approaches is their open-ended approach: The haunting of the past is no longer considered something to be overcome, but something to be lived with rather than worked through. This is especially stressed by transgenerational approaches to memory, which detach memories from the lifespan of the immediate witnesses and thus present memory as something which might linger on, without the ‘natural’ order of time being reinstated after a certain amount of time. This, however, is only the latest shift in memory studies, often called the “connective turn” (Hoskins 2011: 29) or the “transcultural turn” (Bond and Rapson 2014). In order to portray the importance of engaging theoretically with memory almost 40 years after its rise to prominence in the humanities, I will briefly sketch the development of memory studies in the past years and its continuing entanglement with concepts of ‘eventfulness’. This will allow me, in a next step, to identify latency as a subfield of memory studies and position it within memory studies’ legacy.

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Within the development of memory studies, latency can be positioned as part of a movement away from the remembrance of specific events and towards a more inclusive understanding of pasts worth remembering. With the widespread emergence of memory studies in the 1980s in the humanities,¹¹ memory used to be mainly considered within the frames of the nation and related issues of group identity formation (Merck et al. 2016). Memory was a tool to “stabilize[…] our sense of the world” (Terdiman 1993: vii) and give meaning to individual subjects, underpinnng their sense of self (Terdiman 1993: 8; Neumann 2005; Antze and Lambek 1996: xii-xxi; Pensky 2012: 257 f.; Conway 2005). Building on earlier ideas by the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, memory was increasingly considered a collective construction rather than something natural or exclusively individual. How we remember is dependent on our environment, the media and groups we share memories with. In various approaches to memory theory in the 1980s this construction was entangled with questions of identity and nationality and therefore highly teleological (Caldicott and Fuchs 2003: 12– 13; Antze and Lambek 1996: xii, xxi; Neumann 2005; Bell 2006: 1; Olick 1998: 377). An important figure at this early stage of memory studies was the French historian Pierre Nora. One of Nora’s most memorable legacies is his concept of lieux de mémoire, sites of memory. It is Nora’s argument that our ‘natural’ connection to memory was disappearing: “We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left” (1989: 7). In order to ensure the living on of the past, memory, according to Nora, needs to be embodied in “certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists” (7). These sites encompass not only geographical locations, monuments, archives but also festivals and works of art more generally (12), also including literary texts. In Nora’s text, lieux de mémoire are necessarily connected to the nation and events which are considered ‘meaningful’ with reference to that particular nation, in Nora’s case France. This form of memory most often leads to a “memorialization of war […] that reproduces stories of national glory and heroism” (Edkins 2003: 16), fostering nostalgic reactions in the present consumer of these memory sites. Sites of memory, which are fundamentally important for national identity and a nostalgic image of the past, have to fulfill a function in society and “intentional symbolic signification” (Erll 2011: 24). Nora’s approach to material manifestations of national memory is a good example of the pitfalls of such an approach which links identity, nationality and material memory culture in a direct line. As scholars have outlined (26), Nora’s approach to public memory and its  Of course, Aby Warburg and Maurice Halbwachs’ works from the 1920s are essential in memory studies. However only in the 1980s did memory see an uprise in literary and cultural theory, giving rise to the “new cultural memory studies” (Erll 2011: 13; Buelens, Durrant and Eaglestone 2014: 2).

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manifestation in society is problematic, because it only takes into account the view of the hegemonic part of society, thereby ignoring what might have symbolic value for, e. g., the French colonies or immigrants in France. Nora’s “construct of a nationmémoire” (26) can therefore be considered a good example to highlight the sociocultural factors that play a role in questions of memory visibility and acknowledgement. Given this entanglement between socio-political factors and memory culture, it is vital to ask the important question “to whom?” when analysing memory culture. When Nora, for instance, claims that memory sites fulfil a function and have symbolic signification, it is important to be aware that the answer to the question “to whom?” builds on mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion and consequently establishes a hierarchy regarding whose memories matter and whose are neglected in public discourse.¹² The “to whom” question is moreover also entangled with questions of the object of remembrance in Nora’s model. In order to be an object of public memory, the past needs to serve a nostalgic image of the nation’s past. Subsequently, what is remembered in France during the time in which Nora wrote his study is restricted to glorious events that foster a positive image of the nation and thus actively perpetuate an incomplete image of the past which benefits some while excluding or possibly damaging the self-image of others. Traditionally, memory was not only intricately connected to questions of natural identity, but it was also considered an important part of people’s culture. In the 1980s, the idea of memory as a collective experience that “constitutes and maintains culture” (Erll 2011: 22) first gained a foothold in public memory discourses. The concepts of nation and culture, however, lack clear-cut definitions in most conceptualisations. Mostly, the nation is thought alongside the hegemonic culture of its inhabitants. For instance, Aleida and Jan Assmann’s pioneering work in cultural memory studies also implicitly ties cultural memory to national institutions – thereby almost directly entangling cultural communities with the concept of the nation as the container for these cultural communities. In his seminal work The Cultural Memory (1992), Jan Assmann differentiates between communicative and cultural memory. Communicative memory is “created through interaction and everyday experience” (2011 [1992]: 56) and stretching over three or four generations. In contrast, cultural memory is tied to a “mythical past” (56) which is analysed by specialists who function as experts of this past. Cultural memory is ceremonialised and tied to material objects like monuments, statues and museums, which are inevitably tied to one place. Jan Assmann establishes certain criteria for a memory to

 Alois Hahn, for instance, underlines that memories are first and foremost also “agencies of forgetting” (2010; translation Y.L).

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enter the realm of cultural memory. For a memory to enter the archive of cultural memory, it needs to serve the concretion of identity (groups of people derive their identity from this memory) and it needs to be derived from present needs of the respective remembering group. Moreover, it is perpetuated through stable forms of expression, it is institutionalised and mirrors a clear system of values and thus reflects a group’s self-image (1992: 112). Unlike Pierre Nora, the Assmanns do not explicitly tie memory to the nation, but through the explicit linkage of cultural memory to institutionalisation and material manifestations of memory, their concept is still very much tied to national frameworks and the state’s power hierarchies. Memories need to serve the concretion of identity, and – so Assmann’s thesis – different cultures fundamentally remember differently. As he puts it: “Societies imagine their self-images and maintain an identity over the course of generations by developing a culture of memory, and they do this in entirely different ways” (2011 [1992]: 18, my emphasis, Y.L.). Although shifting the focus from nation to culture, this concept of memory relies on mechanisms of exclusion. Cultural memory, as Caldicott and Fuchs argue, “provide a group with an awareness of its unity and peculiarity” (2003: 18) and is thus dependent on fictions of national glorification. Minority cultures seldom have the means to establish a strong sense of cultural memory in the Assmanns’ sense, because they lack the material conditions and the acknowledgement of institutions to materially support their stories of the past and make their voices heard. While the memory of the group might be nurtured from within, it lacks the mechanism to spread beyond the confines of the community. This can be illustrated by the fact that the Museum for African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., only opened as late as 2016 or by the “Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration” in Montgomery, Alabama, which opened in 2018 and which is “the first national memorial to the more than 4000 victims of lynching in the American South” (Sodaro 2018: 1).¹³ The differentiation between communicative and cultural memory reflects a hierarchy at the basis of public memory discourses, since it attests that only those memories stand the test of time which become institutionalised. A missing institutionalisation of memory, this conceptualisation of memory suggests, reflects a diminished collective interest in certain memories, while it is in fact rather a reflection on the interests and goals of those in power to institutionalise certain memories and not others. While cultural memories are symbolically encoded, communicative memory is mediated by what Astrid Erll calls “individual minds, expe-

 This is, of course, not to say that minority cultures lack a memory culture. The point I want to make here is that the Assmanns’ model does not take into account the limitations that an acknowledgement of memory culture-based on institutions and ritualised norms accepted by society poses.

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rience, hearsay” (2011: 29). Due to this lack of “specialized carriers of tradition” (29), these communicative memories are more ephemeral. However, this study wants to highlight that these non-institutionalised memories which rely on carriers that might not be nation-bound or even culture-bound are not necessarily ephemeral but need to be looked for in different places. Since the 1980s, critics have taken up and rethought Aleida and Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory, stressing the performative aspect of memory, which, in the words of cultural scholar Ann Rigney, is constantly “in the works” (2010: 345). Although public memory is certainly tied to the parameters outlined by the Assmanns, memory also has a disruptive agency, popping up unexpectedly and in unexpected places, often to disrupt officially sanctioned memory discourses. These disruptive memories question ‘stable forms of expression’ which make memory appear static and unchanging. While memory has for a long time been regarded mostly through the frames of the nation, in fact being considered “one of the major mobilizing forces in the modern nation state” (Hodgkin and Radstone 2012: 169), more recent studies try to abandon the fixed frame of the nation, considering instead the possibilities and different parameters for Transnational Memory (De Cesari and Rigney 2014) or Transcultural Memory (Crownshaw 2014; Bond and Rapson 2014). New movements in memory studies now “oppose the idea that memory is a stable product, tied to a specific place and connected to the identitarian needs of seemingly homogenous groups” (Neumann 2020b 133). While transnational memory departs from the nation as the major parameter of processes of remembering, transcultural memory is to be seen as the departure from some of the core ideas of the tradition of Cultural Memory. While cultural memory accentuates the connection between memory and “socio-cultural contexts” (Erll 2010: 4), transcultural memory studies presumes forms of collectivity that go even beyond the realm of individual cultures. However, the transcultural turn does not come surprisingly. Already in the 1920s did the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs claim that collective memory is dependent on social structures and the interaction and communication with others.¹⁴ How we are social and with whom we interact is of course bound to the media that are available. Today, a huge part of a person’s social life takes place online for many people. It is thus not surprising that with the arrival of the ‘digital turn’ our “social frameworks for memory” (Halbwachs 1992: 38) have also changed. If social interaction is predominantly relegated

 However, Halbwachs tied the collective reconstruction of the past to hegemonic structures within society. The collectively reconstructed image of the past, he claims, “is in accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society” (1992: 40).

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to the world wide web, it is not surprising that the thought patterns and cognitive schemata (Erll 2011: 15; Caldicott and Fuchs 2003: 15) by which we remember might detach themselves from the concepts of the nation and even closed-off cultures and instead become (partly) transcultural.¹⁵ New forms of being social foster new concepts of communities, and “in light of the incessant processes of digitalization and globalization, both media and memory studies are challenged with the rapid reconstitution of their fields of study and their object(s)” (Lagerkvist 2017: 177, van Dijk 2007: 2). Although individuals communicating and remembering online are, of course, influenced by their individual cultures, classes, religions etc., the Internet as a place to remember still fosters new ways of bringing people from different cultures together. This, then, might lead to a revision of perceived cultural practices and hybrid forms of remembering which come into being through intercultural contact.¹⁶ The term ‘transcultural’ first rose to prominence with Wolfgang Welsch’s essay “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today” (1999) at the end of the twentieth century. Criticising both the term ‘intercultural’ as well as the term ‘multicultural’ for their perpetuation of a concept of culture which “proceeds from a conception of cultures as islands or spheres” (1999: 196), Welsch suggests the term ‘transcultural’ to stress that “there is no longer anything absolutely foreign” since “in substance everything is transculturally determined” (198). In this vein, the transcultural turn in memory studies, according to Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson signals “a rejection of the formerly pervasive model of container culture” (2014: 9), instead stressing that “memories exist in an essentially dialogic relation to each other” (2014: 19). Indeed, Michael Rothberg in his dialogue with Dirk Moses in Bond’s and Rapson’s The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory between and beyond Borders (2014) calls for an analysis of mnemonic “diasporic networks” (2014: 31). According to him, “[t]he transcultural turn offers a necessary intervention into the study of memory at all the levels: it draws attention to the palimpsestic overlays, the hybrid assemblages, the non-linear interactions, and the fuzzy edges of group belonging” (32). Analysing dialogic relations and mnemonic networks, the transcultural turn aims at establishing solidarity not just across national borders but also across cultural borders. Although it is indeed progressive to start paying attention to “palimpsestic overlays” and “interactions” between cultures, this does not dissolve cultural boundaries or make these interactions transcultural. Analysing cultures in “diasporic networks” does not automatically imply  Still, while memories travel and often form networks across different cultures, it is imperative to not lose sight of their cultural contexts and their singularities.  Due to the possibility of staying anonymous on the Internet, remembering on the Internet might also take on forms that go beyond cultural identification.

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transculturality. Diasporic networks can just as well still be attached to different cultures or even different nations. The simple creation of “networks” does not dissolve national and cultural divisions that might inform these networks and as the term ‘interactions’ already implies, networks describe the working alongside of different groups which come together and ‘inter-act’ regarding a certain problem or commonality, but which ultimately remain separate from each other. Of course, conceiving of groups as networks might lead to a departure from strict hierarchisations by granting a similar amount of agency to the parties interacting. However, one still needs to keep in mind who creates these networks, validates them and perpetuates them and thus ultimately decides on the distribution of agency or visibility within the network.¹⁷ For example, within the Caribbean, which is most often described in terms of a network, hierarchies still prevail.¹⁸ Taking his cue from Paul Gilroy’s call to abandon national histories and instead regard the Atlantic Ocean as a “transcultural, international formation” (2007 [1993]: 4) and regard it “as one single, complex unit of analysis in their discussions of the modern world” (15), Rick Crownshaw, too, wants to analyse memories in “transcultural ‘relational networks’” (2014: 4). According to him, memory culture in the diaspora might look for roots but inevitably also emphasises the displacement of ‘culture’ itself: “[t]he turbulent and highly contingent cultural hybridisation, fraternisation and creolisation produced by the conditions of diaspora means that memory work is truly deterritorised” (4). However, ‘fraternisation’ does indeed connect memories and establish similarities of experiences between different diasporic subjects, but it does not ultimately deterritorise memory. Though black Caribbean people, African American people and African people share the memory of the transatlantic slave trade, this does not make the memory itself transcultural, because the memory attains different meaning depending on the place of its actualisation.¹⁹ Studying memory from a transnational or transcul-

 Anna Reading and Tanya Notley remark with reference to digital memories which one might assume forego clear hierarchisations through their inherent network character: “scholars need to pay more attention to the economic and political dimension of digital-global memory in order to understand how local and transnational memories work in uneven and unequal ways that result in substantial costs to both the environment and the less privileged who are left outside of the global north” (2018: 235). Even memories created or perpetuated online are subjected to power inequalities and operate within the framework of “globital memory capital” (2018: 235) – not least because not every country has equal access to electricity and thus cannot participate equally in the global memory landscape (2018: 237).  Compare Hall (2003), who draws attention to what he calls the “difference within”. The French Caribbean, he claims, is mostly differently perceived than the formerly British Caribbean.  See, for instance, Caryl Phillips’ nonfiction work The Atlantic Sound (2001), in which he discusses different ways in which the transatlantic slave trade is remembered in the diaspora.

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tural perspective therefore needs to stay attentive to the pitfalls of the global memory arena. As Barbie Zelizer underlines, “when memory moves into the global flow of news, it by definition loses some of its locality, internal variation, nuance, and particularity” (2011: 28). Global networks of memory need to still stay attuned to local particularities and differences within mnemonic network communities and not lose sight of their singularities. Michael Rothberg also advocates rethinking the relationship between different memories in the public sphere. He wishes to abandon a competitive understanding of memory and instead asks us to “consider memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” (2009: 3). He elaborates that “[t]he model of multidirectional memory posits collective memory as partially disengaged from exclusive versions of cultural identity and acknowledges how remembrance both cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites” (11). Following Rothberg’s approach of multidirectional memory, Rick Crownshaw deconstructs the firm connection between identity, culture and memory that form the basis of memory studies (Erll 2010: 2; Rothberg 2009: 4; Neumann 2005; Antze and Lambek 1996: xii, xxi; Caldicott and Fuchs 2003: 12– 13): It is the multidirectional nature of memory itself – ‘the model of multidirectional memory posits collective memory as partially disengaged from exclusive versions of cultural identity and acknowledges how remembrance both cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites’ (Rothberg, Multidirectional 9) – that affords the possibility of a common ground of remembrance and justice for past wrongs. Indeed, an ethics can be found in the conceptual ability of multidirectionality to trace the legacies of specific events as they take the form of interactive memories […]. (Crownshow 2014: 5)²⁰

Crownshaw posits transcultural approaches to memory studies as ethically sounder than memory discourses “under the name of uniqueness and exclusivity” (2014: 5). For him, entangling memory from the nation or pre-figured ideas of culture is necessary to create what he calls “common ground of remembrance and justice for past wrongs” (5). Contesting discourses of uniqueness and exclusivity,

 However, the term ‘transcultural’ is criticised by some scholars because it allegedly presupposes a world “divided into distinct, relatively autonomous ‘cultures’” (Macdonald 2013: 163). Similarly, de Cesari and Rigney prefer the term transnational to the term transcultural, because ‘transcultural’ for them too implies that cultures as such are closed-off containers. They prefer to operate with the term ‘transnational’ because nation borders are a construct but do have legal status (2014: 3). On the other hand, scholars such as Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson underline that the term indeed troubles “the formerly pervasive model of container culture in favour of a more fluid and transient paradigm of relations between societies” (2014: 9).

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transcultural memory studies posit it as their goal to “examine memory networks across national and cultural borders from a broader perspective, involving not only non-Western cultures and literatures, but also their overlapping with the West and its literary heritage” (Butt 2015: 16). Although Crownshaw derives his understanding of transcultural memory from Rothberg’s concept of ‘multidirectional memory’, the concepts differ in a decisive aspect. While Rothberg mainly emphasises that approaches to memory should be multidirectional instead of competitive (2009: 3), paying attention to overlappings and entanglements, ‘transcultural’ memory implies a different understanding of ‘memory’ itself which might run the risk of overshadowing exactly those power structures that Rothberg addresses in Multidirectional Memory. ²¹ Paying greater attention to the overlappings of different histories and drawing comparisons between different histories “make[s] us perceive parallel traumatic histories in the non-Western context” (Butt 2015: 16) and also stresses “cross-cultural encounters” (16) that contest the purity of cultural memories. For Nadia Butt, “transcultural memory is defined as ‘shared memory’ or ‘intertwined memory’, located in, what Said has termed, ‘overlapping territories, intertwined histories’ (1994 [1993], 48)” (16) and transcultural memory studies, for her, means analysing “the overlapping cultural connections of the carriers as well as inheritors of memory in heterogeneous cultural setups” (17). For Butt, transcultural memory is a form of counter-memory that addresses the voids of history and nationalistic discourses of memory (18). Literature, Butt shows, offers an opportunity to express transcultural memories. “The novels of transcultural memory”, she writes, “show us both sides of the story in order to re-collect, document and preserve what the ‘dominance of a singular history’ seeks to dismiss or erase” (18). These novels are of course important in addressing the gaps in history and creating a more equal balance of literary voices which results from analysing traumatic pasts across cultural boundaries. This certainly has an ethical significance in rethinking human relations. “Allowing for the transmission across society of empathy for the historical experience of others” (Craps and Rothberg 2011: 518), the juxtaposition of memories and the highlighting of their points of entanglement fosters a thinking beyond the self and has the potential to “help people understand past injustices, to generate social solidarity, and to produce alliances between various marginalized groups” (2011: 518; Bell 2006: 5).  As, for instance, becomes obvious in his research questions: “What happens when different histories confront each other in the public sphere? Does the remembrance of one history erase others from view? When memories of slavery and colonialism bump up against memories of the Holocaust in contemporary multicultural societies must a competition of victims ensue?” (Rothberg 2009: 2).

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These “novels of transcultural memory” which in the words of Craps and Rothberg “produce alliances between various marginalized groups”, however, also run the risk of creating new dichotomies in their attempt to overcome old ones. If, as Nadia Butt claims, “[t]he concept of transcultural memory […] looks decidedly at non-Western memories and addresses histories that are not necessarily bound up with the questions of racism, slavery or trauma” (2015: 18 – 19), it not only presumes a homogeneous entity that she calls “the West”, but it also makes possible some networks of remembering while explicitly excluding others. In this sense, it can be presumed that so-called ‘transcultural novels’ also run the risk of reproducing binary thinking to counter dominant memory discourses. At the same time, the endeavour to produce “alliances between various marginalized groups” (Craps and Rothberg 2011: 518) might overshadow singularities of local memories in order to produce an experience of commonality for the memory consumer. Still, an emphasis on local specifities should not suggest the idea of ‘pure’ cultures whose specificity is isolated from cross-cultural contacts. Astrid Erll is certainly right in claiming that “[a]ll memories produced in culture are transcultural. They are borrowed from elsewhere, inspired by neighbours, stolen from strangers. They are co-constructed and amalgamated” (2017: 6). However, this co-construction, borrowing or theft – adapting Erll’s terms – is rarely acknowledged and mostly only benefits those memory cultures that are already quite visible. As “[g]lobalisation, mass migration and regional integration” challenge the “purported homogeneity and autonomy of national cultures” (Rigney and Erll 2017), the call for a “global frame of reference” becomes louder and louder – or, to use Aleida Assmann’s and Sebastian Conrad’s fittingly combative expression: memories “enter a global arena” (2010: 2). Although memories might be transcultural coproducts, calling them thus consequently conceals the power structures of the global arena where some memory’s cultural allegiances are more acknowledged and visible right from the start. As Birgit Neumann rightly points out in her engagement with what she calls “glocal memories”: “While some memories dash across the world, many others remain immobile, causing multiple forms of historical marginalisation, global forgetting, and socio-political exclusion” (2020b: 223).²² The concept of transcultural memory can also be seen as problematic due to its implied conceptualisation of the meaning of culture. For Chiara de Cesari and Ann Rigney, the concept conceives of cultures as closed-off entities which can then  It is within this context that Birgit Neumann calls for an engagement with what she calls “glocal” memories: “glocal memories are as much about local and rooted histories as about worldly trajectories, movements, and global orders: Global memories are shaped by local exigencies and acquire meaning in distinct contexts; conversely, local memories emerge from processes of exchange and bear the traces of global networks” (2020b: 223).

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be moved beyond (2014: 3). In contrast, talking about ‘transnational’ memories makes more sense to them as nation borders are also a construct but do have legal status and are thus at least legally recognisable as distinct from one another, which forms the basis of deconstructing said distinction. De Cesari and Rigney start their study on transnational memory by calling for “collective remembrance beyond the nation-state” (2014: 2). Instead of taking nationality as the ultimate parameter for deciding on a remembering community, they want to foster a global understanding of memory which they see “deeply connected to the propagation of human rights and respect for the memory of the Holocaust as a moral benchmark in a new world order” (3). In a similar vein, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider in their work Human Rights and Memory (2010) also connect the capacity for global compassion with the propagation of human rights, claiming that “[t]he language of human rights provides us with a framework to begin to understand why pictures of strangers being beaten and tortured by other strangers concern us” (2010: 2). Although it is highly desirable to abandon the construct of the nation as a rigid frame for remembrance, de Cesari and Rigney still favour the Holocaust as the propeller of ‘human rights’, which not only favours one specific historic event as the benchmark for global acts of memory but which also neglects that ‘human rights’ themselves are nation-bound to a certain degree.²³ Most often, a transnational, transcultural or as Max Pensky calls it ‘cosmopolitan’ approach to memory is still tied to “a moral, psychological, political-institutional, or cultural discourse that both describes and recommends normatively important identities and relationships beyond national belonging” (Pensky 2012: 256). As Pensky’s own elaborations highlight, even ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘transnational’ memory is still bound to ‘political-institutional’ discourses which are reliant on nations and their position in existing, hierarchical power relations in which “sections of the planet (usually ‘the west’)” are conflated “with the totality of world politics” (Bell 2006: 18). Cosmopolitan or transcultural memory “not as a global alternative to national memory, but as a dialectical complication and destabilization of the normative and functional elements that national memories once served” (Pensky 2012: 256) remains an ideal that as of now still seems out of reach.²⁴

 Hannah Arendt first voiced the now-ubiquitous notion that human rights are nor really universal rights – they are rights imagined as pertaining to all peoples but secured for citizens by their respective nation-states. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argues that the “right to have rights” is actually contingent upon citizenship (1968: 296 f.).  Contrary to many scholars who engage with transculturalism or transnationalism, Pensky seems to be aware of the inevitable nation-boundedness of concepts such as memory: “Cosmopolitanism therefore does not […] refer to a simple transcendence of national identification in favor of an abstract, ‘memory-less’ loyalty to a context-free world community. It refers instead to the di-

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Even though a scholar such as Seyla Benhabib calls for a “transition from international to cosmopolitan norms of justice” (2008: 16) which accrue rights to individuals and not to nations, she at the same time also reminds us that “[m]embership in bounded communitites […] remains nevertheless crucial” (20). In this vein, ‘human rights’, though being extra-national, still rely on bounded communities and, more importantly, some form of authority that decides on the exact parameters of these human rights, as Benhabib herself underlines when she asks: “What is the authority of norms that themselves are not backed by a higher authority, either in the conceptual sense or in the sense of enforcement?” (26). We therefore, she reminds us, need to stay aware of the fact that ‘human rights’ despite all their positive attachments are not neutral but also decided upon by a limited, arguably still very western, range of nation states which sign the contracts and make the crucial decisions.²⁵ Cosmopolitan memory, while a promising concept theoretically, needs to be considered critically. What Levy and Sznaider neglect in their work on the intersection of memory and human rights is the fact that “the frames through which we apprehend or, indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of others as lost or injured […] are politically saturated” (Butler 2016: 1) and are thus indispensably linked to power relations which in turn decide who is in control over the distribution of value. “[O]ur capacity to respond with outrage, opposition, and critique” to images of violence across the globe “will depend in part on how the differential norms of the human is communicated through visual and discursive frames” (77). Therefore, although replacing the national framework of remembrance with more globally inclusive parameters of remembrance is a first step in the right direction, scholars in memory studies need to stay cautious to not equate the transcultural with the universal (Crownshaw 2014: 5).²⁶ As enticing as a “cosmopolitan conception of

alectic of universal and particular in which context-transcending moral and political norms have to be articulated, explored, realized, and lived from within the thick contexts of national-state narrative histories” (2012: 257, my emphasis, Y.L.).  Levy and Sznaider themselves connect human rights to “the centrality of western Europe for the articulation and dissemination of human rights discourse” (2010: 10). Still, they maintain, “[e]ven when viewed as simply a Western ideological move or just another sophisticated form of colonial imposition, human rights have turned into a global phenomenon that must be reckoned with” (2010: 2).  See, for example, Levy’s and Sznaider’s claim that “[m]emories of the Holocaust have evolved into a universal code that is now synonymous with an imperative to address past injustices” (2010: 4). The danger of universalising tendencies can also be seen in Levy’s equation of Americanisation with universalisation which betrays a conceptual hierarchy: “The diminishing significance of particular memories is accelerated through the Americanization, that is, the universalization of Holocaust representation” (2010: 18, my emphasis, Y.L.).

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memory” (Levy and Sznaider 2010: 6) sounds, in reality it is more often than not still tied to certain world views while eschewing others.²⁷ So far, what is called ‘transcultural’ approaches to memory are still very much dominated by western discourses and western concepts of recognisability and grievability (Butler 2016). Memories do not simply surface in the ‘global arena’ but are consciously evoked and intricately connected to power structures and global capital – be it economic or cultural. Vice versa, memory discourses and their position in the global arena feed back into world politics, with “historical memory” impacting “the dynamics of ethnic wars to the calls for justice in newly democratic regimes” (Bell 2006: 6).²⁸ Memory, the history of memories, has implications that make it too simple to just assume a ‘transcultural’ position in the present and neglect the diachronic situatedness of memory discourses. It is crucial not to overlook the power structures that have informed and still inform memory discourses when considering networks of memories. Although Crownshaw uses the term ‘transcultural’ memory, he also warns that approaching memory studies from a transcultural perspective should not try to gloss over the fact that a “top-down or ‘political memory’ that rides roughshod over local landscapes, institutes, sites, places, spaces, and textures of memory” (2014: 5) still decides on what is visible and what is neglected. This hierarchical dilemma, which infiltrates many memory discourses, not only leads to privileging “European genocide, particularly the Holocaust, in its various forms, over non-European genocide” but also over “other, slower, structural forms of violence and oppression experienced in colonial and postcolonial scenarios” (Crownshaw 2017: 246) as, for instance, “dispossession, forced migration, diaspora […], segregation, racism, political violence” (Craps and Buelens 2008: 3). As Stef Craps outlines in his study Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds (2013), theories about trauma – which form a subfield of memory studies – “take for granted the universal validity of definitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of Western modernity” (2013: 2). These western theories of trauma adhere to a traditional,  According to Levy and Sznaider, they consider what they call the “cosmopolitanization” of memories as a process in “which universalism and particularism are no longer exclusive ‘either/ or’ categories but instead a coexisting part” (2010: 7). However, they neglect to consider that only a limited range of countries in fact do contribute to what enters the range of the so called ‘universal’ norms, values etc.  Or, more generally, how a country can behave in the global arena. As an example, Bell talks about America’s global position: “The way in which American elites (as well as the powerful mnemonic vectors of popular culture) view and represent the position of America in the world, the elaboration of strategic doctrines, and the understandings of American interests and ‘destiny’, have all been marked deeply by specific and often widely shared interpretations of the past” (2006: 13 – 14).

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“event-based model of trauma, according to which trauma results from a single, extraordinary, catastrophic event” (31).²⁹ Similarly, violence is “customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility” (Nixon 2011: 2). Linking trauma to a specific violent event, western trauma scholars, according to Craps, assume that trauma can carefully and strategically be worked through when “disclosed truthfully” (LaCapra 1999: 696). One of the most prominent trauma scholars, Cathy Caruth, explicitly connects trauma to a singular event. She, in adherence to the American Psychiatric Association, understands trauma “a response to an event ‘outside the range of usual human experience” (1995: 3). Trauma is thus intractably connected to a singular event, it being “a repeated suffering of the event” (1995: 10). Western trauma scholars therefore neglect the long-lasting effects of slow and structural violence which cannot be reduced to one single event but can still feel traumatic for the people suffering from it. Because of their focus on singular events, these theories neglect to take into account these structural forms of violence and oppression that Crownshaw addresses and too often assume that trauma is “truthfully discloseable”, to stay with LaCapra’s terms, that is explicitly nameable, acknowledgeable and thus potentially capable of being ‘worked through’. As Craps elaborates, drawing on Maria Root’s understanding of ‘insidious trauma’, the impact of everyday racism for instance “takes the form of daily micro-aggressions” (Craps 2013: 26) and cannot be broken down to a singular event “registered or recorded by the usual processes of memory” (Jill Matus qtd. in Craps 2013: 26). Classic trauma theory pays attention to events and not systems (Rothberg 2014: xiii) and thus fails to encompass experiences such as racism but also sexism and other forms of everyday psychological and/or physical abuse. Though being in close connection to specific historical events, racism “is not related to a particular event, with a before and an after” (Craps 2013: 32). Rather, racism often latently prolongs the past, questioning hegemonic ideas of eventfulness which define the event as something singular (Deleuze 1993). Instead, structural forms of violence such as racism deconstruct the “selfstanding singularity” and “internal coherence” of the event (Derrida qtd. in Rowner 2015: 25). Scholars who engage with postcolonial trauma theory thus contest notions such as, for instance, voiced by Dominick LaCapra that “forms of prejudice (such as anti-Semitism, racism, or homophobia) can be engaged ethically and po See, for example, LaCapra, who asserts that “historical trauma is related to particular events that do indeed involve losses, such as the Shoah or the dropping of the atom bomb on Japanese cities” (1999: 724), or Cathy Caruth, who with reference to the American Psychiatric Association’s definition of PTSD calls a trauma a “response to an event” (my emphasis, Y.L.) that is “outside the range of usual human experience” (1995: 3).

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litically only when they are specified in terms of their precise, historically differentiated incidence” (1999: 713). Instead, an ethical treatment of the past entails an acceptance of incommensurability of certain forms of trauma into western stories of teleological working-through and historically specific moments. Thinking about the past in terms of latency means abandoning notions of specific, singular and finite events as the catalysts for the present and rather perceive of it as a continuum constituted by continuous feedback loops and the “hidden agency” (Nixon 2011: 10) of other forms of violence. In this sense, latency, as a mode of memory, gives shape to the “violence discounted by dominant structures of apprehension” (Nixon 2011: 16) and can be seen as one means to remember beyond the category of the event and pre-learned cognitive schemata. Especially the analyses of Milkman (chapter seven) and The Lost Child (chapter eight) highlight the multiple ways in which a past marked by traumatic everyday realities (rather than punctuated events) creates continuous feedback loops that are registered by the specific formal elements these texts make use of in order to communicate a past that is not yet past and continues to inform present day realities.

2.3 Memory and the Market The focus on the west as the basis for understanding genocide and trauma that Stef Craps and Rick Crownshaw lament is intricately connected to the dynamics of the so-called memory market. While more and more memory content is being generated and circulated in the public sphere, resulting in what the ethnologist and museums scholar Sharon Macdonald calls a “remembrance epidemic”, “commemorative fever” or “memory mania” (2013: 3), this content is at the same time tailored to fit specific needs. Terms such as “memory industry” underline memory’s increasing commercialisation, of which literature is not unaffected, as Erll and Nünning underline when they talk about the “institutionalized memory of literary studies” (2006: 20). As Macdonald observes in her chapter “Selling the Past: Commodification, Authenticity and Heritage” in her book Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today (2013), “[h]istory is becoming business; money is being made out of memory” (109). Recent publications in memory studies draw attention to the fact that memories are not only judged according to their capacity of “becoming business”, but are also subject to institutionalised hierarchies and – especially if they are performed or analysed with the parameters of the nation – run the risk of creating artificial

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communities instead of fostering the needs of already existing communities.³⁰ As Lucy Bond, Stef Craps and Pieter Vermeulen outline in their introduction to Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (2017), “memory, like all cultural societal practices, operates within the closed horizons of global capital” (6) and is thus dependent on and influenced by global actants which steer the recognisability of certain ‘historical events’ while undermining or neglecting others. Just like history, memory is not outside of “systems of knowledge and power” (Hodgkin and Radstone 2003: 11). As memory studies become more and more institutionalised, they heavily rely on preformed categories. As Judith Butler elaborates on in Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2010), it is imperative that preformed categories that establish definitions of life, value and grievability are made visible and scrutinised. She stresses the general power that normalised categories have: “These categories, conventions, and norms that prepare or establish a subject for recognition, that induce a subject of this kind, precede and make possible the act of recognition itself. In this sense, recognisability precedes recognition” (Butler 2016: 5). In a similar vein, Wulf Kansteiner accentuates this socio-political construction of recognisability and the unqueally distributed attachment of value to certain memories. He emphasises the role that ‘official recognition’ plays in memory studies: “Cultural memory consists of objectified culture, that is, the texts, rites, images, buildings, and monuments which are designed to recall fateful events in the history of the collective. As the officially sanctioned heritage of a society, they are intended for the longue durée” (Kansteiner 2002: 182). This ‘officially sanctioned heritage’ is of course not innocently decided on or – in the case of canonised fiction – actively created. As the word ‘sanctioned’ already implies, memories are selected according to preformed categories and parameters that determine what should be remembered on a larger scale and in the long run. The heritage of a society is thus dependent on purposeful calculations concerning their usability in the public realm. These calculations are tied to the goals of certain groups, as Nancy Wood notes: “[i]f particular representations of the past have permeated the public domain, it is because they embody an intentionality – social, political, institutional and so on – that promotes or authorizes its entry” (1999: 2; Mattern 2004: 11 f.;

 As Vlad Beronja and Stijn Vervaet show in their study Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian Literature and Culture, memory culture often glosses over central differences in order to create a coherent, usable past: “While the ‘official’ Yugoslav historical narrative of the Second World War centered on heroic acts of communist partisan resistance against the Nazi occupiers, it simultaneously aimed to smooth over the (memory of the) ethnic tensions that had so violently disrupted this multinational country during the war” (2016: 4).

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Said 2000: 176). In relation to museum culture, Amy Sodaro in her study Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence (2018) claims that “memorial museums are deeply political institutions and their utopian goals are often challenged by their political genealogies” (4). She elaborates that [m]useums are frequently used as central mechanisms for addressing past injustices and legitimating nations or groups in the eyes of the international community – by recognizing past victimization and demonstrating a new regime’s willingness to learn from history […] they are political tools, often created and utilized with specific political agendas that can and often do compromise their declared efforts to openly confront and learn from the past. (Sodaro 2018: 4– 5)

Memories do not simply float through a society but are clearly hierarchised and instrumentalised according to their benefit for those in power.³¹ Similarly, forgetting is also not always a natural process but one which can be enhanced or delayed by a society’s policy of mourning and its conditions of expression.³² The maintenance of memories is dependent on social and political structures, as, for instance, institutions – and their financial backup and/or support from the state – which perpetuate them and grant the public access to the specific memories.³³ Social and political agents will, however, only support the maintenance or visibility of those memories which do not harm the public image they want to uphold. Indeed, “the collection and preservation of an authentic domain of identity cannot be natural or innocent. It is tied up with nationalist politics, with restrictive law, and with contested encodings of past and future” (Clifford 2002: 218). If nations are nowadays considered mainly as “imagined communities” (Anderson 2016), the same also holds true for coherent national memories. The ‘memory market’, that is, the institutions and agencies which trade in memories’ visibility, which also influences the literary market, thereby focuses more on the present needs of society than on the actual pasts and their adequate

 This becomes also apparent when, for instance, considering Germany’s delayed confrontation with the Holocaust, which only set in in the 1960s (Bell 2006: 13) or France’s neglect of the Algerian War.  Luisa Passerini emphasizes the telling roots of the word ‘oblivion’: “The Latin root ‘oblivisci’ […] means ‘to take away’, while the English ‘for-get’ and the German ‘ver-gessen’ literally mean ‘to receive away’. This significant expression implies a mixture of passivity and activity […]. Although from certain points of view ‘oblivion’ and ‘forgetting’ can be considered as equivalent terms, the former indicates a state of mind, while the latter is used to mean a process which can take place at various levels, and which includes daily life more easily than does the former” (2006: 238).  Zeina Tarraf, for instance, points out that western finance behind filmic reports about the Beirut civil war highly influences the way this historic event is received and represented (qtd. in Reading and Notley 2018: 239).

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– that is multi-perspectival – representations. Although ‘adequate representation’ is of course a slippery term – what after all is an adequate representation? –, I want to stress the many factors that come into the mediated creation of pasts that ultimately make representation an end to itself. As soon as the ‘market’ plays a big role in memory constitution and distribution, memories tend to become homogenised. Indeed, if the past is only actualised for commercial ends, “[r]eal diversity will be swept away in a barrage of predictable forms of superficial difference” (Macdonald 2013: 109). In this vein, memory discourses run the risk of relying on and actively perpetuating forms of recognisability which inhibit the perception of other, non-prefigured forms of memory – or simply memories which do not benefit “current social and political agendas” (Zerubavel 1995: 5).³⁴ It is therefore that Laura Passerini calls it the task of researchers “to break institutionalised links in order to establish risky ones” (2006: 240) which allow for new forms of recognisability. The memory market encourages memories that are tied to specific events since those are more easily representable and marketable than systems and structures of violence and inequality. The recognisability of traumatic historical events is often in conjunction with “event-specific knowledge” (Erll 2017: 123; Eckstein 2006³⁵; Young 1990: 10³⁶; Caruth 1995: 4) that fosters a “sense of veridicality” or

 According to Duncan Bell, an example of the connection between political agendas and public memory that sticks out is the American instinct memorisation after the terror attack of 9/11: “The Bush administration engaged in a ‘rush to memory’ – a rush to commemorate the victims, to code them as sacrificed heroes (drawing, notably, on the narrative of Pearl Harbour), and to use this memory in defending subsequent military strategy. The State Department sponsored a travelling photographic exhibition in order to generate international sympathy and support for American policy. Memory and ‘memorialization’ were thus tied intimately to justifying and perhaps even shaping American foreign policy decisions” (2006: 15).  Although Lars Eckstein in his important study Re-membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory (2006) makes the important differentiation of ‘manifest’ mnemonic references which means references made in “other texts, music, images, or genres of texts, music, images” and ‘mental’ references, which he describes as “sensory data resulting from the personal perception of the writer” (12), Eckstein still links both modes of memory in a text to an “individual historical event” (12). Thus, although he broadens the horizon of what might be considered “true” about the past to include non-written accounts (mental references), he does not deviate from the event focus as such.  James E. Young, for instance, draws attention to the fact that literature is sometimes even taken as ‘proof ’ for historical events: “[W]riters and readers of Holocaust narrative have long insisted that it literally deliver documentary evidence of specific events, that it come not to stand for the destruction, or merely point toward it, but that it be received as testimonial proof of the events it embodies” (1990: 10).

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“truthfulness” (123, Caruth 1995: 153). As Wulf Kansteiner underlines, “[m]ost studies on memory focus on the representation of specific events within particular chronological, geographical and media settings” (Kansteiner 2002: 179). These chronological or geographical anchorings are supposed to create a sense of authenticity and relevance. By entangling memories and stories with specific ‘real’ places, times and people, these stories are supposed to create connecting points for the receiving group. ‘Event-specific knowledge’, after all, is necessarily tied to a certain group and their specific perspective; it can never be objective or universal.³⁷ By favouring some ‘knowledge’ – however it be decided on what counts as knowledge – memory discourses tend to categorise memories hierarchically in “the competitive arena of memory” (Kansteiner 2002: 179; Rothberg 2009: 3), by, for instance, categorising some as “key events of the 20th century” (Erll 2017: 125) while making others invisible or appear less important. The decision what to consider ‘key events’, in turn, is of course influenced by global economic and cultural capital, as the choice what to value as a ‘key event’ is a decision with material after-effects. Not only do categories such as ‘key events’ establish a clear hierarchy of events, they also often conceal connections between events, epochs and places. As Kansteiner claims, these ‘key events’ are most often perceived within the frames of a linear understanding of time and rigid geographical borders, which often leads to a neglect of connections and interactions between different spaces and times. This discourse around memory studies, which strives for a “sense of veridicality”, furthermore becomes visible by the proclaimed “memory boom” (Wiegand 2017; Bond 2015), which Frauke Wiegand connects to “physical markers” (2017: 221). These physical markers – most often statues, monuments or museums – are originally closely connected to the nation state and a rigidly enclosed geographical area and are supposed to grant the visitor or onlooker a sense of authenticity. As Macdonald also notes, “[t]he national monuments that proliferated during nation-making thus served to demarcate particular events, individuals and locations as especially significant to the nation’s memory; and to materialise this in durable form” (2013: 166). Physical markers thus serve to first establish authenticity and secondly to attribute importance to selected events, persons and locales. In this sense, the past becomes meaningful by being transformed into a “durable”, visible form that marks specific ‘events’ and the individuals officially connected to these events. As “the dynamic work of memory […] is dependent on the acts and scenes of remembering and forgetting; memories depend on inscription, investment, and me-

 As Dan Todman outlines in his study The Great War: Myth and Memory (2007), many ‘facts’ that we think we know, for instance, about the First World War turn out to be cultural myths when further investigated, often perpetuated through literature and other media.

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diation” (Wiegand 2017: 231), which once again accentuates the role that sanctioned practices and institutions play in the creation and perpetuation of memories. The western focus of memory studies becomes once more apparent when considering that marking history and memories by physical markers is not a universal practice. A discourse that intricately connects the recognisability of a ‘grievable past’ – or an ‘honourable past’ – with these physical markers automatically designates cultures as non-grievable or less honourable or heroic which do not remember in this way. As the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott famously declared, some memories lack physical markers in the western sense and are thus not included in the writing of History with a capital ‘H’. In his poem “The Sea is History”, he shows how memory practices are culturally specific and cannot be presumed to be universal: “Where are your monuments, your battles, your martyrs? / Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, / in that grey vault. The sea. The sea / has locked them up. The sea is History” (Walcott and Baugh 2009: 123). Although Frauke Wiegand, for instance, emphasises that “[a]n event or experience made physically manifest by a marked memorial site or object of some kind may be transformed and reevaluated through the acts that give meaning to it and the media in which it is represented” (2017: 223), this assumption presupposes first that these events or experiences are “made physically manifest” in some sort and secondly that they are then re-presented by different media. In reality, this privilege, however, is only granted to some memories. If memories indeed rely on “inscription, investment, and mediation” (Wiegand 2017: 231), we need to acknowledge that these practices are highly influenced by pre-existing memory discourses and current socio-political agendas which regulate the visibility and recognisability of these memories. In this sense, Michael Rothberg is right in calling for scholars to ask what the “material conditions – social, economic, political – that lead to memory conflict” are and how these material conditions make possible ethical approaches to the past (Rothberg and Moses 2014: 33). As these remarks on the prevalence of physical markers in memory discourses highlight, it is not surprising that many literary works that remember through latency use physical markers of memory as their point of departure. Often, the semantisation of a certain place serves to inscribe this place with alternative memories which are not included in the public discourse and thus overlay this place with latent memories. Especially in literary works that remember through latency, the description of places is not just an aesthetic means of description but carries meaning. While memory has indeed become, as Andrew Hoskins calls it, “[p]ervasive, accessible, disposable, distributed, promiscuous” (2011: 19) due to developments in digitalisation, they are still reliant on “inscription, investment, and mediation” (19). It is true that more and more, the general public intervenes in acts of remembrance, thereby often transgressing their original socio-cultural groups and enter-

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ing new entanglements online, “the commonality of [their] memory” being made “through hyperconnectivity, with each other, with the network, with the archive” (Hoskins 2018: 92). Memory has, in the words of Abigail de Kosnik, “gone rogue” (2016: 1). Agency, many claim, has shifted, and it is now ordinary people who participate, “more peer-to-peer” (Garde-Hansen et al. 2009: 8), in memory creation and perpetuation, creating multidirectional conversations which often serve as an alternative to institutionalised memories. However, digital memories and related forms of memory activism cannot be seen as completely separated from institutionalised memory practices as “organizations with more time, money, personnel, and structure are better able to leverage the benefits of these new [digital, YL] tools to make their voices heard and their influence felt” (Schradie 2019: 7) in the digital realm. In her recent study The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives (2019), the sociologist Jen Schradie underlines that “[r]ather than offering a quick technological fix to repair our democracy, the advent of digital activism has simply ended up reproducing […] pre-existing power imbalances” (7). Memory thus is still dependent on the similar power structures as before the digital revolution, it is still tied to “the intentions of the ‘memory makers’, the formal qualities of commemorative media” but also on the “responses of the ‘memory consumers’ who purchase it, visit, watch, or listen to these objects” (Bond 2015: 4). As these phrasings already highlight, memory seems to follow a market dynamic which runs the risk of reproducing structures of inequality.³⁸ Through their influencing of the recognisability of memories, the discursive regulations of memory discourses as well as their material possibilities run the risk of creating a “hierarchy of suffering” (Rothberg 2009: 8). As Pieter Vermeulen reminds us, “designating certain events and experiences as traumatic, far from being a mere academic exercise, not only reflects but also shapes contemporary power relations” (2014: 141). However, not only within the negotiation of what counts as traumatic, but also between ‘acknowledged’ traumata there is a tension and a gradient between different traumata and their grievability. As Terri Tomsky, for instance, rightly remarks: “In contrast to the cosmopolitanization of a Holocaust memory, there exist experiences of trauma that fail to evoke recognition

 As Crownshaw stresses, “no matter the intentions of the makers of the material of memory, and no matter the ostensible significance of the material itself, and the forces behind its distribution, its significance will ultimately rest on those who receive and consume it” (2014: 1– 2). However, even if its significance rests with the consumers, it is still dependent on their pre-learned discourses.

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and subsequently, compassion and aid” (2011: 49).³⁹ While some traumatic experiences are rendered legitimate through public discourse and “physical markers” (Wiegand 2017: 221) of their relevance for society, others remain mostly invisible. The public realm plays a very important role in deciding on the visibility or invisibility of events of the past. Claims, as for instance by Jeffrey Alexander, that the Holocaust was the “only trauma with a capacity for globalization” (Assmann 2010: 108) or E. Ann Kaplan’s assertion that 9/11 was the “supreme example of a trauma that was experienced globally” (2005: 2) perfectly illustrate what is at stake. Scholars such as Pieter Vermeulen criticise this assumption, maintaining instead that “9/11 was followed by global events that had very different evental structures” (2015: 14). While 9/11 was a “punctuating event that […] was strikingly easy to narrate within the paradigm of trauma” (Luckhurst qtd. in Vermeulen 2015: 14), “the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also developments like global warming and the financial meltdown, lack the readability and narratability of 9/ 11, and require different strategies of engagement for which no narrative templates were available” (Vermeulen 2015: 14– 15).⁴⁰ In a similar vein, Aleida Assmann rightly emphasises: There are other countries that lie outside the historic constellation of the Holocaust. China and Japan are preoccupied with their own memories of defeat and victimhood; India and Pakistan commemorate the partition; the descendants of African tribes who were deported into colonial slavery commemorate the Middle Passage; and former colonial powers, such as Australia or Canada, commemorate the extinction of their Indigenous populations. These countries are the inheritors of their own historic traumas and burdens. (Assmann 2010: 108)

Although not all memory studies would follow Alexander’s assertion of “the uniqueness and sacredness of the Holocaust as a touchstone of universal moral maturity” (Assmann 2010: 108), the Holocaust still has a very prominent position in different memory discourses, often being considered as a “unique, sui generis event” (Rothberg 2009: 8; compare for instance LaCapra 1999: 725, Stone 2004: 128). Rosanne Kennedy, for instance, also attests that the “value of Holocaust mem-

 Even within the memory of the Holocaust, there is a ‘hierarchy of suffering’. As Luisa Passerini points out, the mass killings of the Roma by the Nazis “were not addressed at the Nuremberg trials […]; as late as 1995 only one Nazi had received a sentence for crimes against” Roma (2006: 241).  It is imperative that we stay aware of the connection between ‘events’, their ‘narratability’ and thus their global visibility. While for many trauma scholars, 9/11 was a “traumatic event” for hundreds of millions of television viewers across the world, this claim actually reveals a great deal not about the event itself but its medialisation and the politics of making events visible (see Frank 2020). Globalising memories therefore often results in a universalisation of local experiences.

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ory” lies in its potential to “raise awareness for genocides in general” (2017: 48). Introducing the word ‘value’ in the context of memory studies underlines perfectly what is at stake in this study: If some memories attain a certain value in that the events that they remember obtain a surplus function that lies outside the historical event itself, then memory studies run the risk of taking “the form of a zero-sum struggle for pre-eminence” (Rothberg 2009: 3) or even developing into what Max Silverman calls “memory wars” (2013: 4). As Peter Novick explains: “The assertion that the Holocaust is unique – like the claim that it is singularly incomprehensible or unrepresentable – is, in practice, deeply offensive. What else can all of this possibly mean except ‘your catastrophe, unlike ours, is ordinary’” (2000: 9).⁴¹ Once we talk of the “value of Holocaust memory”, we set a rigid frame for the Holocaust’s perception which highly influences the readings and interpretations of literary works that deal with the Holocaust. But, more importantly, such a framing also pre-determines the perception of all other historical instances that from that moment on run the risk of only being interpreted within the framework of Holocaust memory.

2.4 Memory, Literature and the Productivity of Not Knowing There are many different media that engage with different forms of memory. This study focuses on literature as a medium of memory. Literature is an important medium to challenge normative structures and hegemonic discourses in society. In his study Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (2013), Amir Eshel explains that “[p]oetic language offers us utterly new ways to experience the world and all its potential, and thus the possibility to recreate it […]. Metaphors and creative narratives enable us to reshape habits, feelings, and even social relations” (6 – 7). In a similar vein, Gabriele Schwab attests that it is through literature that we are able to test the boundaries of our knowledge and approach the wide realm of the ‘unknown’: “it is through literature (and artistic works more generally) that one can tap into experiences that were never fully known but have nonetheless left their traces” (2010: 7), thus “transforming […] the boundaries between conscious and unconscious experience and knowledge” (7). It is in light of these potentialities of literature that I see the transformative power of literature to ex-

 The historian Daniel Stone’s criticism that “the Holocaust stands out from other genocides because it was committed in the heart of civilized Europe rather than in the midst of (supposedly) primitive or barbaric societies” (2004: 133) perfectly illustrate what is at stake here.

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pand, challenge or counter existing memory discourses and their parameters of grievability. Many fictions of memory contest normative historic accounts of past events and fill the gaps that hegemonic accounts leave out. In her important work on – among others – the intersection between memory and literature, Memory in Culture (2011), Astrid Erll outlines many functions of literature for cultural memory and thus sheds some light on Ansgar Nünning’s and her earlier question of how literature functions as a medium of cultural memory (Erll and Nünning 2006: 23). According to Erll, literary texts “fulfil a multitude of mnemonic functions, such as the imaginative creation of past life worlds, the transmission of images of history, the negotiation of competing memories, and the reflection about processes and problems of cultural memory” (2011: 144). As the chosen nouns here already indicate – transmission, negotiation, reflection – memory and literature intersect on various levels. Not only can literature have an informative and a challenging, disruptive function, it can also serve as a meta-commentary on the working of memory itself. Erll outlines that literature’s potential for world-making (144) resides in “its similarities and differences to processes of remembering and forgetting” (145) According to her, there are three main intersections between memory and literature: condensation, narration and genre. ‘Condensation’, according to Erll arguably the main characteristic of literature, means the compression of complex ideas into a single, fused or composite object (145) and the “superimposition of various semantic fields in a very small place” (145). The second intersection, ‘narration’, describes the creation of temporal cohesion and a linear organisation of time, linking past, present and future in a meaningful way (147). Cultural memory, Erll claims, basically relies on narrative processes (146). From all impressions of the past available, only a few are “selected” and “remembered”. These chosen elements “only become meaningful through the process of combination, which constructs temporal and causal orders” (147). Lastly, Erll remarks that literary genres and their conventions are themselves “contents of memory” (147), as they actively shape how we understand the world through the literary text. These conventions are thereby inevitably semanticised in our minds while we read literature, as we “automatically draw on genre schemata (retained in out semantic memory) when we read literary texts” (148). As these intersections highlight, our experience of reality is symbolically pre-formed by the narratives and the genres we learn, but the literary texts simultaneously feed back into memory culture. As Erll’s category of ‘narrativisation’ underlines, memory is first and foremost a selection process which is guided by present needs of the remembering group. “Acts of remembering”, this makes clear, “rarely occur in a vacuum” (Grabbe and Schindler 2007: 6). Although literature can open up existing discourses and “takes up existing patterns, shapes and transforms them, and feeds them back into memory culture”

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(Erll 2011: 148), literature is also highly influenced by the already existing extra-literary patterns of recognition, especially when it comes to the selection of what is worth remembering. Sometimes this selection is quite conscious, but sometimes culture’s influence on what is perceived as ‘memorable’ can also operate unconsciously. Not only are writers consciously or unconsciously influenced in their selection process, but their texts are also objects of cultural evaluation. Cultures, according to Erll, create symbolic orders and establish hierarchies of value not only through their particular historiography or commemorative rituals, but also through the literary texts that they support and distribute. Collective texts that disseminate and shape cultural memory have to “fit, have to be able to resonate with a memory culture’s horizons of meaning, its (narrative) schemata, and its existing images of the past” (Erll 2011: 165) and therefore act within certain frames of perception. The influence of extra-textual memory discourses can be so drastic, Erll claims, that the “structure of [the text’s] paradigmatic axis of selection” can indicate “from which cultural field the text draws its elements” (Erll 2011: 153). Though literature thus helps in “transforming the past from an explosive into a discursive field […] where common ground could be mapped out” (Pensky 2012: 255), one still needs to keep in mind that discursive fields are not innocent either. Indeed, literature that deals with memory and remembering often creates the political, social and private present as the consequence of past events. “Traditional and exemplary narratives”, for instance, “deploy historical events to promote foundational myths” that serve to support a positive image of the nation, while “skeptical narratives” which surface with the connecting age of globalisation and human rights discourses “also incorporate events that focus on past injustices committed by one’s own nation” (Levy and Sznaider 2010: 10; Sodaro 2018). Analysing literature through the lenses of memory studies thus has manifold benefits. It allows examining the intersections between concepts such as the nation, identity, trauma, culture and dominant socio-political discourses. Demonstrating how the present needs coherent narratives of the past and how we construct this past to our own needs contests not only the allegedly objective approach of historical discourses but also demonstrates how we construct communities, as different communities remember the past differently (Halbwachs 1992). Literary memory studies moreover often highlight the performative aspect of literature: Not only does literature participate in non-literary discourses, but it also actively shapes individual and collective forms of remembering (Neumann 2005: 5). Literary memory studies therefore form an important part in highlighting the world-making potential of literature (Nünning, Nünning and Neumann 2010). However, the fact that literature and the depiction of memory in literature is not isolated but rather an associated part of ever-changing memory discourses, makes the depiction of memory liable to current trends in memory culture and

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the consumer-oriented memory market discussed in the previous chapter. Due to literature’s entanglement with societal concepts of memory, the hierarchies and inequality within memory discourses, it is all the more important to pay attention to literature’s specific characteristics as a medium of memory. Although memory in literature is not only a reflection of society but also an active and aesthetic creation of memory in society and culture, many fictions of memory are still very closely tied to concepts of identity, nationality and human intentionality. As Mieke Bal notes, “[c]ultural memory can be located in literary texts, because the latter are continuous with the communal fictionalizing, idealizing, monumentalizing impulses thriving in a conflicted culture” (2009: xiii). Since fictions of memory often participate in the memory market, they are liable to certain prefigured expectations of what that text should ‘offer’ the ‘memory consumer’, which forecloses the possibility of other approaches that focus on different non-acknowledged or less prominent aspects of the literary creation of memories. When memory becomes a consumer good, it also becomes inevitably “appropriated and instrumentalised by the institutions of the public-political sphere” (Bond 2015: 10). Catering to a perceived public need, the mediation of memory can become “reifying rather than dynamic – closing down, instead of opening up, the experiences and perspectives encoded in commemorative culture” (10). In this sense, one can connect Bond’s insight regarding the increasing industrialisation of memory culture to Butler’s “field[s] of intelligibility” (2016: 34), asserting that this reifying of certain narrative patterns within memory narratives “premediate[s] memories of an event by enfolding them within recognisable cultural narratives” (Bond 2015: 11; Neumann 2008: 341). Often functioning as “vehicles of normative preconceptions and conventions”, premediated memory narratives “shade and, to some extent, determine the shape of the memory articulated therein” (Bond 2015: 11). Due to the always lurking politicisation of memory in literature, it becomes all the more relevant to analyse the ways literature can deal with memory without making it directly locatable. It is thus ever more important to shed light on literature’s potential to circumvent the memory market and its narrative patterns. Latency, this study contends, is one mode of memory that can counter the market and strive on literature’s open-endedness and its potential to continually reinvent itself and its forms. As Birgit Neumann and Sybille Baumbach assert in their recent study New Approaches to the 21st-Century Anglophone Novel (2019), “[d]isplaying enormous generic flexibility and offering ample room for stylistic experimentation, the novel incessantly pushes the boundaries of established narrative techniques and genres to their limits” (Neumann and Baumbach 2019: 2). Exploring latency as a mode of memory that might circumvent and counter market interests is thus one further endeavour to shed light on the formal possibilities of literature to participate in unexpected ways in socio-cultural discourses. As Cathy Caruth

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with relation to trauma studies reminds us, “literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing” (2010: 3). Analysing latency thus means expanding on literature’s potential to participate in, challenge and maybe counter hegemonic discourses, while at the same time underlining the productivity of ‘not fully knowing’ and of embracing the undefined, unarticulated and vague memories that inform everyday life. Literature, due to its manifold possibilities of overlayering, juxtaposing, changing the rhythm or temporal construction of a narrative can achieve this. However, this can only be achieved when specific attention is paid to the workings of the medium and its poetical potential, which means looking at ‘literary events’ instead of analysing the representation of historical events.

2.5 Exploring the Stowaway: The Concept of Latency Analysing latency as a mode of memory enables a shift of attention. Latency challenges traditional notions of temporality, agency and presence. Although there certainly is a connection to trauma studies, a sub-branch of memory studies, in that latency is also connected to a restless past that claims presence, this study does not aim to place itself firmly within trauma discourses but rather aims to analyse latency as a mode of memory more generally. Before I will map my use of the term ‘latency’, I will now first of all trace its uses in trauma studies to show how my use of the term differs from its use there. The term ‘latency’ is used by Sigmund Freud and subsequently Cathy Caruth in relation to the well-established paradigm of trauma. For Cathy Caruth, trauma is the “response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event” (1995: 4). The trauma is thus characterised by the belated return of an event against a person’s will. Latency, in her understanding of trauma (which she derives from Freud), is the “incubation period” in which time has elapsed between the event and the symptoms of the trauma (Freud qtd. in Caruth 1995: 7). This ‘incubation period’ is “the period during which the effects of the experience are not apparent” (1995: 7) and the trauma lies dormant. My use of the term latency differs from Caruth and Freud’s understanding of it as a passive incubation period. Another point in which my use of the concept of latency differs from Caruth’s is the way in which latency disturbs linear concepts of time. It is right that Caruth’s approach to trauma already destabilises an exclusively linear understanding of time in that she defines trauma as

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the return of the past which intrudes powerfully into the present.⁴² For Caruth, the power of the traumatic event lies in its belatedness, “its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single place or time” (1995: 9). The traumatic event therefore crosses temporal and spatial boundaries and, being belated, seems to defy normative and linear understandings of time. However, this destabilisation only operates on the surface. Trauma, for Caruth but also for many other critics, is considered to be a disease (see, for instance, the essays in Raoul 2007)⁴³ and is classified and treated as such. In trauma, the past is late, it arrives belatedly, that is, not as it should have.⁴⁴ Being perceived as a “rupture” (King 2000: 16), a disease, trauma is automatically also perceived as a deviation from the norm, thus paradoxically reinforcing said norm. Classifying the return of the past as a deviation establishes the linear understanding of time as the normal, that is as the rule. This becomes also evident when considering the etymology of the word ‘trauma’. Derived from the Greek τραύμα, the term means ‘wound’, “originally referring to an injury inflicted on a body” (Caruth 2010: 3). The semantic field of the term therefore already suggests the possibility of ‘healing’, that is, of overcoming the trauma and returning to the ‘unwounded’, normal state.⁴⁵ In this sense, while the return of the past as a trauma unsettles the distinction of past, present and future, it still also reconfirms the norm just as trauma as a disease reaffirms the allegedly ‘normal’ state of

 Indeed, as Gutman, Sodaro and Brown attest, “the traditional view of temporality as a linear process moving in one direction – from past to present to future – has been challenged by memory studies from the beginning” (2010: 2).  See also Joshua Pederson, who speaks of ‘rehabilitation’ with regard to trauma: “Speaking trauma pulls it from the realm of painful obscurity and hastens the process of rehabilitation” (2014: 338) or Duncan Bell who defines trauma as the “failure to regard the past as past” (2006: 8, my emphasis, Y.L.).  Compare also Nicola King, who emphasises that Freud’s conceptualisation of trauma as the belated return of the past (Nachträglichkeit) “disrupt[s] the ‘normal’ functioning of memory” (2000: 12).  Caruth then goes on to specify that the term later came to refer to a wound inflicted “upon the mind” (2010: 3). The wound inflicted on the mind, she elaborates, is “not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable event, but rather an event that […] is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (2010: 4). Although Caruth clarifies that the trauma of the mind is not simply healable, she still insinuates that when the trauma “imposes itself again” it might become fully knowledgeable. However, Caruth asks to keep in mind that traumata have an “endless impact on a life” (2010: 7).

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mind.⁴⁶ Latency as I understand it in this study, in contrast, stresses a simultaneity of different temporal categories and a co-presence of these constructed categories, thus destabilising the basis of their traditional distinction. My understanding of the concept is based mainly on the understanding of the leading scholar in the field of latency, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, who published a monograph on the topic, After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present (2013), as well as several articles.⁴⁷ He connects the phenomenon of latency with the idea of a presence (2011: 10). He defines latency as that “which appears to be in a text without being graspable” (2009: 87). This presence is not within the realm of our direct perception but rather operates subliminally and is not within our direct cognitive access (Ellrich 2009: 7; Haase and Setton 2007: 207). However, whatever is latent can approach our realm of perception and that which is latent can start to “crystallize” (Gumbrecht 2011: 11). What is meant by this is “a process, in which our intuition suggests that something hidden is beginning to take shape, that we are closer to grasping what has been latent, without the latent having appeared yet” (2009: 93). In this sense, rather than being ‘empy time’ between two meaningful periods – the event and its return – Gumbrecht sees latency as a vibrating force that has affect and troubles safe subject positions and is not necessarily bound to classical ‘events’ but hides its origin which could also be multiple. Thus, contrary to trauma discourses, latency is not restricted to individual or collective human experience exclusively. While the past of an individual or a collective can be latently present, the concept also allows for a broader understanding of the presence of the past. While only human beings can be traumatized, the past can be latent in humans, but also in spaces, everyday practices and cultural goods, such as novels. Although the concept of latency as I analyse it in this study has several overlappings with trauma, it is still different in that it is not event-based, does not focus on the actual physical manifestations of a return of the past but rather considers what Freud calls the “incubation period” as an affective state that has influence and makes itself felt. Moreover, latency is not necessarily a condition that has to be overcome. Although some approaches to latency conceive of it as a time period that needs to be analysed in order to successfully cope in the present, this study focuses on the productive effects of living with a present past. I consider latency a mode of memory that incorporates memories into a work of fiction without actively countering and challenging dominant discourses or nec McNally explicitly connects the so-called working through of trauma with the reconstruction of temporal order: “Narrative memory is […] a speech act that defuses traumatic memory, giving shape and a temporal order to the events recalled” (McNally 2003: 71).  His monograph Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature (2012) is also closely related to the topic.

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essarily fixating the memories on specific events. Rather, latency can enable us “to think and write beyond the evental organization of time” (Sayeau 2013: 6), inscribing past realities into the present and the future instead of taking them as an object of interpretation. Memory as an object of interpretation is often bound to “the temporalities of different recognizing authorities” (Radstone 2005: 146) in order to enter the public discourse, which is most often oriented towards collective needs in the present for a “usable past” (Halbwachs 1992: 40; Erll 2011: 106; Hahn 2010: 100 f.). These ‘collective needs’ of course do only include the needs of those whose needs intersect with the ‘recognising authorities’, and memory discourses therefore fail to represent the needs of marginalised groups. Latency, on the other hand, enables a thinking about memory that is not dominated by a “streamlining of temporality down to universal linear time as the self-evident calibration of human existence” (West-Pavlov 2013: 6)⁴⁸ and in general does not work through text-external intentionality. Itself a liminal concept, latency at its core challenges easy classifications and negotiates an understanding of time and memory that sees the past as “the time of memory”, the present as “the time of conscious awareness” and the future as “the time of anticipation” (Scott 2014: 1). Addressing the “absences, gaps and slips produced by [memory] articulations” (Radstone 2005: 148), latency is a concept that always makes room for an unruly rest, new configurations and rhizomatic, non-linear relations through space and time. Latency as a mode of memory cannot be instrumentalised for the goals of individuals and is thus not directly connected to identity politics. Allegedly universal,⁴⁹ linear time which divides time into “past/history, present, and future suppresses the ability to see how temporalities spread across these conceptual divides” (Birth 2017: 95). Latency, however, foregoes this conceptuality. While trauma theory often makes use of the tripartite division of time into past, present and future and construes it as even necessary in order to come to terms with the past,⁵⁰ latency blurs the distinctions and shows that a ‘leaving behind’ of the past is an

 Dominick LaCapra does acknowledge that trauma also does not follow a stringent linear development but that it often follows a “belated temporality […] [which] makes of it an elusive experience related to repetition involving a period of latency” (1999: 724– 725). However, LaCapra does not consider this period of latency any further and does not consider it a productive part of trauma, but rather an intermediary state that needs to be overcome in order to work through the trauma.  Of course, this conception of time is a construct and by no means universal. I use this description of linear time as universal to stress its hegemonic position.  See, for instance, LaCapra, who underlines the importance of firmly upheld temporal distinctions, especially the “crucial distinction between then and now wherein one is able to remember what happened to one in the past but realize one is living in the here and now with future possibilities” (1999: 699).

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illusion and that we in fact live in a network of simultaneous temporalities. With reference to the politics of public trauma, Jenny Edkins claims that “the process of re-inscription into linear narratives, whilst possibly necessary from some points of view – it is argued that telling the story alleviates traumatic stress, for example – is a process that generally depoliticises” (2003: 15). By fitting the past into pre-formed understandings of time, the classic understanding of trauma as something that needs to be narrativised in order to be worked through reconfirms the western framing of time and experience. Latency in this sense re-politicises memory. What is latent in a text can itself not be allocated to either the realm of the ‘present’ nor the ‘absent’ and thus lingers between conceptual binaries, highlighting that memory, as Michel de Certeau claims, in fact is “unlocalizable” (2011: 108) and often connected to the “presences of diverse absences” (108). The latent withholds its origin and thus does not allow for direct causal relations. The latent as a mode of memory makes routes of influences opaque and thus suspends chronological continuities. In this sense, latency opens up a “space for genuine political challenge” (Edkins 2003: 15) because it destabilises already politicised categories and makes room for new figurations of experience. Latency re-politicises memory in that it highlights the inequalities of public memory discourses and calls for a responsible engagement with various forms of past violence. Although this study is not concerned with ghosts as such,⁵¹ since the ghost has a human form and in the traditional understanding follows very specific goals – one need only think of the maybe most prominent example of the ghost, Hamlet’s father in Shakespeare’s Hamlet –, Derrida’s concept of hauntology is still useful in engaging with concepts of latency. Learning to live responsibly and justly, according to Derrida, “can happen only between life and death” (2006 [1993]: xvii) – that is, in an engagement with the ungraspably present past. Derrida’s ‘ghosts’ are not explicitly apparitions as one commonly understands the term. Rather, a ghost in his understanding is “this, which is neither substance, nor essence, nor existence, is never present as such” (xvii). In order to live responsibly, one has to try and be just to the past, and in order to be just to the past, one needs to acknowledge the “non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present”

 There are plenty of studies that engage with the ghost motif. See, for instance, Joanne Chassot’s Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-Visioning History, Memory, and Identity (2018), Jay Rajiva’s Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma (2017), Tiya Miles’ Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era (2015), Michele Hanks’ Haunted Heritage: The Cultural Politics of Ghost Tourism, Populism, and the Past (2015), Pietro Deandrea’s New Slaveries in Contemporary British Literature and Visual Arts: The Ghosts and the Camp (2015), Jenny Sharpe’s Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives (2003).

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(xviii) – that is the contemporaneity with the spectral past. Spectrality, or the perceived presence of something absent, calls into doubt what Derrida calls “this reassuring order of presents and, especially, the border between the present, the actual or present reality of the present, and everything that can be opposed to it: absence, non-presence, non-effectivity, inactuality, virtuality” (48). For Derrida, this “this being-with specters” is a “politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations” (xviii). Importantly, Derrida’s concept of hauntology deviates from eventbased understanding of memory and trauma. Derrida’s concept of the ghost is not tied to a bodily understanding of the ghost, and he includes various forms of an unjust past as the triggers for a haunted present: What is needed, he argues, is a sense of responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of war, political or other kinds of violence, nationalistic, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism. (Derrida 2006 [1993]: xviii)

Although Derrida mentions victims of war and the concept of the nation, so prominent in memory and trauma discourses, he also mentions racism, colonialism, sexism and oppression connected to capitalism on the same level. Detaching the presence of a haunting past from singular events, Derrida’s concept of hauntology works alongside the “non-knowledge and the non-advent of an event” (2006 [1993]: 19). The ghosts do not reveal themselves or their motivation; their disclosure thus remains an event in the becoming, an event never to be fully materialised. Not only does Derrida thus acknowledge the traumatic dimension of structural violence, but he also makes possible an engagement with ghosts at the interstices between different forms of violence. Derrida’s concept of hauntology opens up memory discourses to a concept of temporality that assumes a plural simultaneity. Ghosts, Derrida maintains, always exist alongside each other in a network that transgresses and dissolves binary thinking: “Spirits. And one must reckon with them. One cannot not have to, one must not not be able to reckon with them, which are more than one: the more than one / no more one [le plus d’un]” (2006 [1993]: xx). The plurality of spirits, of ghosts that exert pressure on the present can no longer be perceived individually. According to Derrida, simply the fact that they exist alongside each other, dissolves their unified selves. The fact that there are more than one automatically leads to the conclusion that a self-contained ‘one’ is no more. This idea makes Derrida’s ghosts potentially global in their scope. Their attachments have been dissolved and replaced by their function as knots in a network. This becomes especially evident by the fact that they are not named, in fact not even identifiable: The

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ghost is “an unnameable or almost unnameable thing: something, between something, and someone, anyone or anything, some thing, ‘this thing,’ but this thing and not any other, this thing that looks at us, that concerns us [qui nous regarde], comes to defy semantics as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy” (5). The unnameable, uncategorisable ghost watches and thus has agency to see while at the same time being invisible itself. The ghosts therefore undermine human agency as the only driving force in memory processes. What most links the concept of hauntology to the concept of latency is the indeterminate nature of that which haunts and disrupts the present. As Colin Davis rightly points out, “for Derrida […] the spectre’s secret is a productive opening of meaning rather than a determinate content to be uncovered” (2005: 377). The ghost, the presence of the past, “does not belong to the order of knowledge” (376). Thus, it will not “reveal some secret, shameful or otherwise”; rather, it “may open us up to the experience of secrecy as such: an essential unknowing which underlies and may undermine what we think we know” (377). Derrida’s ghosts disturb the order of the presence, but they do not disclose a message that will lead to the possibility of ‘working through’ the past. Rather, they ask for a living-with the ghosts of the past, that is, an acknowledgment of the non-linearity of the present. In this sense, they “destabilize any neat compartmentalization of the past as a secure and fixed entity, or the future as uncharted territory” (Buse and Scott 1999: 14). The disjunctive temporality of latency and hauntology enables another shift within thinking about memory. While event-based memory discourses ultimately rely on emotions (Ahmed 2014: 202; Hogan 2011: 140), latency and hauntology work through affect. Memory discourses often mobilise specific emotions that have attached themselves through perpetual repetition to certain events of the past and their configuration in certain genres of fictions of memory.⁵² As Fionnuala Dillane convincingly argues, certain genres draw on specific “repetitive, affective, recognisable framing patterns” (2017: 145) in order to achieve “emotional power” (2017: 145).⁵³ Emotion, in this sense, is the “sociolinguistic fixing of the qual-

 In fact, Pieter Vermeulen attributes this tendency to “instill particular habits of feeling” (2015: 6) to the novel as a genre. However, just like the novels that Vermeulen discusses in his fine study Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form, literary works that remember through latency destabilise this emotion-mandate of the novel and of fictions of memory in particular. For a more general analysis of the connection between narratives and preformed emotional framings, see Hogan 2011.  One of Dillane’s examples is the emotion of shame. Though being a feeling that acknowledges a past wrong, “shame as a response more broadly, is insufficient and problematic for its affecting indulgence that in fact reinforces the ‘then/now’ progressive, moving-on binary, which fails to at-

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ity of an experience” which draws on the “conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning” (Massumi 2002: 28). Fictions of memory often rely on action-reaction scenarios in their framing of certain events and their aftermaths and as Massumi’s use of the word ‘insertion’ underlines, the pre-formed narrativised patterns decide on the figuration of the emotions. In a similar way, Primo Levi emphasises that “a memory evoked too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become fixed in a stereotype” (1988: 11– 12). In other words: Only those emotions are made possible which fit the preformed, often repeated pattern. Thus, fictions of memory inevitably draw on “sociolinguistic fixing[s]” of these memories they portray and performatively recreate. In the case of 9/11, for instance, narratives are often framed within the parameters of “strategic topoi of sentimentalism or nationalism” (Däwes 2011: 5), “fear and tragedy” (Ames 2017: 177) and a clear-cut binary between victims and perpetrators.⁵⁴ Aleida Assmann and Ute Frevert similarly point out that “the collective memory is always a politically employed memory” (1999: 40 – 41) and thus politics often pre-frame the perception of the emotional range a memory covers and determines.⁵⁵ Assmann’s classification of four different subtypes of collective memory makes this quite clear. She distinguishes between the memories of winners and losers and of victims and perpetrators, which all connote historical events emotionally. As these subcategories indicate, many fictions of memory that fall back upon “empathic identification as a substitute for more difficult considerations about the structural conditions that produce and continue to reproduce inequity and discrimination” (Dillane 2017: 151) ultimately refrain from triggering a more profound reflection on systems of oppression and structures of violence and discrimination. The framing of memory discourses not only regulates the recognisability of others’ lives and their memories but also strives to trigger a certain set of emotions that are “sociolinguistically fixed” (Massumi 2002: 28) and which can serve a certain “agenda behind [their] production” (Bond 2015: 4, Tomsky 2011: 58). As Butler rightly outlines, “our capacity to respond with outrage, opposition, and critique will depend in part on how the differential norms of the human is

tend to wider motivating impulses of both abusers and those who knew but did not speak” (2017: 151).  A good example of this binarism is Jenny Edkins’ claim that Vietnam veterans are not subject to trauma because they were “perpetrators of violence rather than victims” (2003: 3 – 4).  Jenny Edkins poses the question: “Do political communities such as the modern state survive in part through the scripting of these events as emergencies, or even, indeed, as traumatic?” (2003: 5), thereby highlighting that a labelling of an event as emotionally perturbing, traumatic, can be a conscious political framing.

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communicated through visual and discursive frames” (2016: 77). However, this idea also works the other way around: If our capacity to respond with outrage or other emotions depends on and needs mediated frames, this also means that mediated frames can manipulate our emotional responses, not only enabling certain emotions but also actively triggering them. Latency because of its indeterminacy does not trigger emotions. The latent creates an atmosphere that cannot be directly translated into words or pre-learned emotions. Gumbrecht describes these – admittedly quite vaguely defined – atmospheres as forebodings that affect us and alert us to something latent (2011: 11). In contrast to emotions, affect describes “visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing” (Gregg and Seigworth 2011: 1). Latency works through affective “forces of encounter” (Gumbrecht 2011: 2) which leave the reader in suspense and overwhelmed instead of pushing towards certain fields of emotion. Not being made concrete, atmospheres and moods “tend to be vague and indeterminate, as if they tried to capture qualities that resist our attempts at verbalization” (Caracciolo 2016: 115). These qualities are decidedly not captured by the vocabulary that the field of emotions makes accessible to us. A mood or an atmosphere “is by definition something that persists or lingers on, coloring a large chunk of experienced time or space” (2016: 115), drawing the reader’s attention to this colouring without attaching knowledge to it. As the vague description of “coloring” already signals, “mood, tone, atmosphere, and sense of place seem to emerge from a text but cannot be pinned down in it: they are poised between ‘objective’ textual features and the reader’s affective responses to the text” (2016: 115). As Brian Massumi declares in his ground-breaking study Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002), the “primacy of the affective is marked by a gap between content and effect” (24) which triggers a “state of suspense, potentially of disruption” (26). This state of suspense is neither a state of passivity, as it is filled “with vibratory motion, resonation” (26), but at the same time this motion is not “of the kind that can be directed towards political ends” (26). Bringing together affect and literature, Pieter Vermeulen in a similar way dismembers affect theory from an understanding of a pre-conscious or pre-linguistic signification: “Affect in literature is then not a fatefully pre-linguistic and pre-conscious substance, but an effect of the inability of literary works to fully contain the intensities they irresistibly unleash; rather than a warrant of knowledge and readability, […] affect is a placeholder for unreadability” (2015: 9). In this sense, literature that works through affects restrains from “cognitive mapping” (4) and intentionally disappoints genre conventions in order to “morph into zones where unexpected feelings can emerge” (7). Literary works that remember through latency thus often “use traditions of realism to represent everyday life and experience in ways that are affectively powerful without being sensationalizing, so much so

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that the lack of dramatic focal points or readily intelligible characters or events prevents easy readings of class or politics” (Staiger et al 2010: 8). It is this prevention of easy readings which endows latency as a mode of remembering affective potential in that it confronts readers with experiences that do not easily fit into preformed discourses or emotional categories. The “lack of dramatic focal points” calls for a different kind of reading, one which less stresses individual events and rather focuses on unruly presences in the text. In this sense, the latent working alongside affect instead of emotion, refrains from creating political counter-discourses, but still alerts the reader to an unruly presence – or as Gumbrecht calls it – a stowaway (2013: 23). Although it would be too narrowing to establish certain characteristics of situations of latency in order to then mechanically check novels for these characteristics, I want to establish various formal elements as markers of latency. While Gumbrecht mainly establishes references to the weather and music as indicators for situations of latency (2012: 4), I would rather focus on how poetic texts achieve to create this ‘sense of a stowaway’ through poetological rather than referential means. The latent is that which is present in a text without ever fully materialising, that is, something which is situated in the text and at the same time is not fully localisable within the text. The latent can therefore not be found in interior monologues of characters or detailed descriptions of characters’ feeling and motives, for the latent is that which cannot be directly expressed. Rather than a revelation, the latent is characterised by an absence. For this reason, the literary text’s constant postponement of a meaningful event or a changing realisation in the characters – that is the enigmatic moments in a narrative, where something could happen but ultimately does not – hint at some involved force that troubles the meaningmaking mandate of the narrative. These moments are affective in that they signal the potential of the virtual. The event therefore needs to be rethought through latency: not as something manifest and definite but as something undecided, lingering and potentially virtual. Latency thus invites a reassessment of the event as “that which arrives at the river’s shore [arrive à la rive], approaches the shore [aborde la rive], or passes the edge [passe le bord] – another way of happening and coming to pass by surpassing [outrepassant]” (Derrida 1993: 33). The event in this sense needs not to be something which manifests itself and makes itself visible and pinpointable but should rather be conceived of as something in constant flow and ever-changing, possible to touch different shores at different times. Affective forces of encounter in a literary work can result in the “collapse of structural distinction into intensity, of rules into paradox” (Massumi 2002: 27). In this vein, affects triggered by latent energies can derange the differentiation between the ‘banal’ and the ‘event’, or, in other words, remembered histories and neglected, structural, everyday forms of violence that are informed by past histories.

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In this study, I will analyse Anglophone novels that do not directly address or overtly contest specific memory discourses. Instead, I want to look at novels which in different ways point to a latent stowaway which is related to the past but not necessarily to one specific past ‘event’. By analysing the politics of these novels and their different ways to unleash affect and therefore put to test preformed emotional framings, this study intends to enhance the parameters to analyse the presence of the past in literary memory studies. The first analysis will be J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013), which most strikingly brings together a discourse about memory with the conscious omission of a central event.

3 Being Notably Absent: Uneventfulness and Digression in J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013) You may think you are washed clean, but you aren’t. You still have your memories, they are just buried, temporarily (Childhood 26)

Memory is a constant topic in J.M. Coetzee’s novel The Childhood of Jesus (2013). The Childhood of Jesus makes memories – or rather the lack of memories – the prerequisite for the story: The inhabitants of the fictional city Novilla are all refugees or migrants (Childhood 68; 123) who, ‘washed clean’ from their former lives and all memories attached to it, are expected to start their new lives in a strange and unknown country from a tabula rasa. The protagonist, Simón, however, cannot let go of a feeling that the past is still with him, informing his ideas and feelings and thereby making him different from the Novillans. For him, the memories are still there, but temporarily unavailable – he cannot grasp them, but he feels that they still have an impact on how he behaves and how he perceives his new world. The fact that the omnipresent memories from which Simón “suffers” (Childhood 69), as Elena, one of the other characters, phrases it, are never specified or revealed but still have effects for the narrative is the main focus of this chapter. What, this chapter asks, are the effects of a narrative which displaces its central event – the reason for the migration of the Novillans – and makes non-event bound observations about memories its underlying thread? Rather than specific memories, The Childhood of Jesus latently negotiates the concept of memory itself, allowing the text’s latency as a mode of memory to remember diverse histories of migration and concomitant acts of violence and forceful forgetting alongside one another. The Childhood of Jesus conspicuously differs from Coetzee’s earlier work, as it cannot be unequivocally connected to a specific historical context. “In the history of nations”, Chantal Logan argues, “there are dark epochs when the lives of their inhabitants seem to be completely defined by the tragic circumstances which enfold them. Catastrophic events have a way of laying upon the shoulders of the would-be story-teller a burden and a responsibility difficult to assume” (2014: 43). In the context of post-Apartheid South Africa, she continues, “South African literature for decades was largely defined by the politics of its oppressive regime” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111067384-004

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(43). J.M. Coetzee’s fiction is no exception, being in fact a point of controversy among critics, “his allies defending the ethical value of his literary production and his critics pointing to his aloof-ness or lack of political commitment” (44). While his novels Life and Times of Michael K (1983), Age of Iron (1990) and Disgrace (1999), for instance, are being read explicitly within the contexts of national politics and concomitant public discourses, his more recent fiction turns away from clear national allegiances and contexts.¹ The Childhood of Jesus does not take up the responsibility to represent a specific event or a specific historical situation and does not give its readers guidance as to how to read the novel – it denies them both interpretational clues and clear socio-political contexts. Elizabeth Anker thus cogently argues that “if The Childhood of Jesus is a difficult, confounding novel, much of that difficulty surrounds the problem of how it should be read” (2017: 186). The novel does not lend itself to easy classifications and, as Anker convincingly argues, disappoints every attempt at interpretation guided by different theoretical paradigms, as “whatever theoretical llave maestra might appear to unlock its riddle-like details” (188), new passages of digression prove this ‘llave maestra’ to be insufficient, ultimately portraying the story as “a cipher whose key has been lost” (Bellin 2013: n.pag). Of course, the novel can be read through a postcolonial lens, a postmodern lens, discourse analysis and many more theoretical approaches, but ultimately, the text always leaves an excessive rest that defies being deciphered through theory (Anker 2017: 205). The novel “concludes on a notoriously indeterminate note” and showcases a certain “impossibility of closure that both renders interpretation permanent or unending” (190). The text thus entices its reader to reflect their own process of reading. They are asked to abandon predefined theoretical paradigms or learned ways of reading, challenging a “particular, narrow kind of reliance” on theoretical models (185). Instead, the novel invites the reader to embrace the specificity of this singular text and the ways it operates through latency. The text is not a code that can be deciphered if only approached with the right theory at hand but rather depends on what Derek Attridge calls “readerly hospitality”, that is, the reader’s “readiness to have one’s purpose reshaped by the work to which one is responding” (2017: 113). When abandoning to look for a ‘llave universal’, the reader can encounter different levels of the narrative, as, for instance, latent forms of memory, without, however, being able to rely on these levels to provide ultimate answers or ‘make sense’ of the text as a whole. Some gaps are productive to make readers keep interpreting and embracing a text’s openness, as this is what ultimately allows texts

 This is not least reflected in his language and publication strategies (see Walkowitz 2015: 3 – 6; Neumann 2022).

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to keep travelling and their alterity to be guarded off from mechanisms of ideological appropriation. The absence of a proper ‘event’ that is remembered, or rather the deliberate non-disclosure of this event, together with the constant implicit and explicit thematisation of the nature of memories makes latency one possible way to approach the novel. Something not quite graspable latently informs the text and constantly asks to be taken into consideration, without being made specific at any point in the narrative. Not only does the narrative conceal its central event, it also defies the ‘event’ as a traditional narratological category more generally: Nothing much happens which might trigger ‘change’, and if it does, it is overshadowed by long passages of digression which take up more space and intensity than the presumable ‘events’ of its plot. Maybe precisely because of its many passages in which basically nothing ‘happens’, the novel was reviewed with mixed feelings. One reviewer even wonders whether the novel had been read as widely had Coetzee not already had a reputation as a great writer (Bellin 2013: n.pag). While many scholars and reviewers praised the novel for its artistic style and its engagement with philosophy, it has also “puzzled reviewers and critics with its curious elusiveness” (Tajiri 2016: 72; Seshagiri 2013: 643; Rutherford and Uhlmann 2017: 2). Reviewers describe it as “bizarre” (Farago 2013: n.pag.), “unnerving, perplexing” (Anker 2017: 185), an “odd book” (Markovits 2013: n.pag.) and “stranger than any reader could wish or anticipate” (Bellin 2013: n.pag.). Joy Lo Dico also wonders whether the novel might not be “something too elusive to provide satisfaction” (2013: n.pag.). Indeed, the novel’s content is enigmatic and opens up more questions than it can possibly answer. What is more, the novel is also enigmatic with regard to its form. It is a text “almost exclusively of dialogic exchange” (Mehigan 2017: 165), “quasi-philosophical dialogues” (Anker 2017: 185) that “overtake their plots” (183). It is in its interplay between content and form that the novel situates latency as a mode of memory, since memory is thematically present as a sublayer in the plot while the novel’s form activates readers to look for it on a meta-level. The novel consists mostly of short episodes which are sometimes only vaguely connected. Together with its poetic language and abundant symbolic references, the episodic structure alienates readers and inhibits direct identification with the characters and the story-world. Centring on philosophical questions, the text lacks lengthy descriptive passages of both spatial settings and characters; comments regarding characters or the setting are mostly mentioned fleetingly without in-depth descriptions or elaborating comments which would help the reader create a rounder picture of Novilla and its inhabitants who are mostly reduced to flat, one-dimensional characters. As Simón observes, these characters “are friendly enough but strangely incurious” (Childhood 26) and do “not see any doubleness in the world, any difference between the way things seem and the way things

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are” (76). Its composition as well as its mostly eventless plot make some scholars read the book as ‘fiction’ rather than as a novel (calling it, for instance, a “philosophical debate[…] staged in fiction” [Mosca 2016: 127]), a differentiation which Coetzee supports. Before reading from his then new work in Cape Town, Coetzee himself remarked that “a little bit of obscurity […] never did anybody any harm” (Twidle 2013: n.pag.). This chapter will explore to what extent “a little bit of obscurity” not only does no harm but might in fact be a productive tool to question established categories and ways of reading and thinking. The Childhood of Jesus might not engage in a specific memory discourse, but through latency as a mode of memory, it engages in an act of ‘multidirectional memory’ (Rothberg 2009), that is, an act of bringing diverse singular memories together “as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” (3). Although Logan is definitely right in claiming that “with history comes the burden of disgrace and the weight of historical guilt; with change the loss of one’s place or privilege from judge to ‘petitioner’; but without it, engaging and disturbing stories like Waiting for the Barbarians (1981) or Disgrace could never have been birthed” (2014: 53). The Childhood of Jesus does not directly engage with history but offers its very own insights and through its use of latency makes it possible to juxtapose a variety of scenarios and discourses surrounding what it means to be a refugee, a newly arrived who has to conform to a new life without a remembered past. The text’s multidirectional memory politics allows the narrative to establish a feeling of responsibility for the present in copresence with the latently remembered past and through its dystopian composition also the future. This chapter will explore several aspects of the novel which are connected to latency as a mode of memory. The lack of classical narratological eventfulness in the novel, I argue, is the basis for thinking memory in a global network rather than in strictly national and identitarian frameworks. The first focus of this chapter will be on the effects the withdrawal of the main triggering event of the narrative has on readerly approaches to the novel as a whole. Related to this, I will also explore the form of the novel and how specific narrative strategies, such as digression and the non-disclosure of in-depth psychology of the characters, directs the reader’s attention away from the main plot and alerts them to latent trajectories. Among these narrative strategies is also Coetzee’s thematization of language. As the characters’ origin is not revealed and their mother tongue never mentioned, their story is removed from national affiliations. While the text is written in English, it, as Rebecca Walkowitz puts it, “pretends to take place in Spanish” (2015: 4) but at the same time does not reference any Spanish speaking country as the novel’s setting. Removing memory discourses from strictly national discourses is thus as much a concern of the novel’s form as its plot. The second part of this chapter then focuses

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on what these “shadows” (Childhood 77) or “shades of images” (98) which Simón ‘suffers’ from and which constantly mark him as different in his host society are. Rather than individual memories, Simón recalls structures of thought that are latently remembered in his body. In this part of the analysis, I will thus focus on embodied memories and their implications for negotiating the concept of ‘transcultural memories’. I will therefore read the novel in two interrelated ways: First, I want to show how the form of the novel and its use of latency disentangles memory from pre-defined, identitarian discourses and thus makes its memory politics resonate more widely, establishing similarities of experiences that forego clear national demarcations. Second, I want to show that The Childhood of Jesus despite its abstract approach to memory does not ultimately de-localise memory by linking it to the concept of embodiment. By making Simón remember certain symbolic meanings which he connects to his body, the novel shows that a global, cosmopolitan approach to memory still cannot gloss over local specificities and cultural embeddings. What the novel ultimately fosters through latency as a mode of memory is a thinking of being-with differences that eschews universalising tendencies as well as too narrow nationalistic and exclusive approaches to memory.

3.1 Lack of Eventfulness The Childhood of Jesus opens in medias res, catapulting its readers to an enigmatic situation at a gate where two “new arrivals” (1) try to find shelter for the night. The reader gets to know a man and a young boy who need to get a place to sleep for the night and who are hurrying toward the Centro de Reubicación de Novilla to do so. Already the first pages offer the reader various information: The man and the boy speak Spanish (albeit not perfectly: “Reubicación: what does it mean?” [1]), although the text is written in English; they have come from “the camp” (2); they seem to be in an unusual relationship, the man being “responsible” (2) for the boy but not related to him, and they have been ‘given’ an age to which they refer rather than their ‘natural’ age which they do not seem to know. In fact, the novel’s beginning promises its readers an exciting, mysterious novel of discovery which they expect will answer the open questions that the novel’s entry poses. In a rather typical fashion, the novel’s opening poses an enigma for the text to solve, a situation to trigger suspense in the reader and make them look in retrospective teleology for the background story of the initial situation, trying to make sense of the protagonists’ “li[v]e[s] [as] a time-evolving event; more precisely, […] as a step-by-step development in chronological time” (Brockmeier 2001: 269), finding answers to questions such as: Where did the two protagonists come

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from? Why did they have to leave the place they have come from? What impact will their former lives have on their new lives? The form of the opening passage thus raises expectations in the reader which the narrative then disappoints: The lives of Simón, David and the Novillans are not portrayed as a “step-by-step development” as their background, their pre-story is not revealed at any point in the narrative. Leaving out the crucial beginning of their journey and never turning back to it makes possible various readings of the narrative. After a few pages, the reader realises that the novel will not proceed as fast as it started and might not set out to provide the reader with answers to its enigmatic beginning. Already in the first chapter, the description of dull bureaucratic processes slows down the narrative and destroys the illusion of an action-centred narrative of discovery. In fact, after the opening passages, the narrative slows down and the content of the novel is quickly told: Simón, an approximately 40-year-old man takes on the task of looking for the mother of an approximately five-year-old boy, David. After randomly meeting a woman named Inés, Simón decides that this woman is David’s mother. The ‘quest’ of finding David’s mother thus being completed, the rest of the novel deals with Simón and David’s problems to assimilate into their host society of Novilla. These problems, however, are of ideological rather than practical nature. David and Simón think differently than the Novillans: Simón starts an argument at the docks where he works because he cannot understand the Novillans’ work ethics; David is expelled from school because he is reluctant to yield to the ways of thinking that the school imposes on him. In the end, the text takes on a circular structure, as David, Simón and Inés decide to leave Novilla in search for “somewhere to stay, to start our new life” (Childhood 329). In-between what one could call the novel’s more ‘eventful’ passages – though still not in the classical sense as I will elaborate later on – as, for instance, finding Inés or the argument about ways of production and the following accident at the docks, the novel is dominated by enigmatically unconnected, slow and uneventful passages in which the reader is left in the dark as to their function for the overall narrative. The novel’s “strangeness” (Bellin 2013: n.pag.) challenges its reader to re-examine what they think they know about the novel as a form. Coetzee himself wanted to publish the book as ‘fiction’ rather than as a novel (n.pag.), because he was “sick of the well-made novel with its plot and its characters and its settings” (qtd. in Bellin 2013: n.pag.). Coetzee’s disapproval of the ‘well-made novel’ as he calls it becomes apparent in the design of The Childhood of Jesus, whose plot rather focuses on small everyday occurrences than typical ‘events’ and surprising plot twists or complex sub-plots. Not only does the novel mainly refrain from descriptive passages, it also features characters that lack psychological depth and thus almost appear flat or as stock characters as well as a narrative voice that lacks “both ornament and descriptive detail” and thus “maintains an ironic and affectless distance from

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the action that is itself subordinated to a concern with abstract ideas (principally staged through the dialogue)” (Farrant 2019: 166). As Roger Bellin claims, the book sets up expectations “only to frustrate them: the expectations of psychological depth and descriptive realism, for example, or the promise of forward narrative motion” (2013: n.pag.). The Childhood of Jesus is not a novel of happenings – its poetics works differently. Rather than evolving around a cause-and-effect construction, “ordering actions and events in a linear temporal succession” (Brockmeier 2001: 275), the narrative obscures the causes for its happenings – which in themselves are rare and underdeveloped – and thus refuses to perceive of these happenings as logical consequences of some prior event.² For instance, although Simón announces that his guardianship for David is motivated by their mutual quest to find David’s mother – according to Pippin one of the major threads in the novel (2016: 146) –, the ‘event’ of finding her is oddly anti-climatic and quickly told: While wandering through the countryside, they stumble upon La Residencia – an reclusive residential building that stands in contrast to the living blocks where David and Simón live – and watch three people play tennis: “The ball thuds into the fence. Turning to retrieve it, the woman sees them. ‘Hello,’ she says, and gives the boy a smile. Something stirs inside him. Who is this woman? Her smile, her voice, her bearing – there is something obscurely familiar about her” (Childhood 82). Without further ado, it is decided that this woman must be David’s mother and Simón reveals this to her without much prior thoughts: “The boy has no mother. Ever since we got off the boat we have been searching for her. Will you consider taking him?” (89). Although the woman, Inés, takes a night to consider this unusual proposal, the quest which the reader thought might be at the heart of the story – finding David’s mother – is quickly resolved and lacks much meaningful insight into Simón’s motivation for choosing this woman to be David’s mother. Also, it is never disclosed whether he actually knows she is the boy’s mother, and if so, how he has come to this knowledge. The whole scene plays out more like a transaction than like something more meaningful. Simón asks: “will you accept this child as yours?” (90), and this seems to be all it takes, for Inés returns the next day to accept the stranger as her son, without many questions asked or an insightful exchange between her and the boy. What the reader might have expected to be eventful and triggering major change – the fulfilment of the protagonists’ quest – turns out to be a rather dull and flat scene that might leave the reader feeling puzzled.  The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) continues this technique by telling a murder but without disclosing the murderer’s motives and the circumstances of the murder. Rather, the reader is confronted with endless monologues by the perpetrator about guilt and responsibility which on the surface seem to lead nowhere.

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Although the characters engage in private, albeit ultimately dispassionate conversations about the meaning of life, death, sex and desire, their conversations seem mechanic and lifeless, ultimately obscuring the characters’ interiority, their motives, desires and wishes. It is only Simón who laments the shallowness of his new life and the conversations he has: “Everyone I meet is so decent, so kindly, so well-intentioned. No one swears or gets angry. No one gets drunk. No one even raises his voice” (Childhood 36). Although the characters in The Childhood of Jesus do not have problems to openly discuss private matters such as, for instance, their low sex drive, the text still does not provide meaningful insight into their interiority or their thought processes, which makes them appear eerily lifeless. The reader feels distant to the characters because they are embodiments of goodwill (Álvaro), pragmatic efficiency (Ana) or motherly (over)care (Inés) but do not seem to be “living flesh-and-blood” (Ulin 2013: n.pag.) characters. Rather, they are “signifiers of some idea” (n.pag.), which inhibits readerly identification. Moreover, the inhabitants of Novilla are never arguing and unitedly do not question the system (with the exception of Simón, David and later Daga). Despite hearing Simón out and listening to his ideas, the Novillans are unchanging in their beliefs, showing emotions only in a damped way, which makes it difficult for the reader to identify with them. Although Simón claims that “[l]ike all of us, señor Daga thought he was special” (Childhood 59) to explain Daga’s behaviour to David, the citizens of Novilla generally do not seem to aspire to be special. Contrary to Simón, the people of Novilla have accepted the new world and do not question it, nor the role they have been attributed in society. Álvaro, one of Simón’s co-workers, for instance, proclaims: “This isn’t a possible world […] It is the only world. Whether that makes it the best is not for you or for me to decide” (Childhood 51). Especially for readers who are accustomed to the humanist notion of self-determination, this patient acceptance of the status quo seems unusual and odd, yielding to a fatalism that many readers might be sceptical of. Álvaro’s attitude is shared among the people of Novilla: For them, their new life is lacking in nothing and they are content to do work without knowing the good that will come of it, such as filling the barn with grain just for the rats to eat it and do unnecessarily hard work without complaining. In light of its anti-climatic nature and its nondisclosure of character motivations, the novel might well be read as a novel pointing towards the end of the novel as proclaimed by Pieter Vermeulen. In his study Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form (2015), Vermeulen asserts that while the “novel is assumed to have inculcated and sustained a particular distribution of interiority, individuality, domesticity, and community – a constellation that has defined modern life” (2015: 2), contemporary fiction often dramatises the end of the novel thus understood and instead “conveys a sense that neither these modern forms of life nor the novel’s cultural power are quite what they used to be” (2).

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The novels Vermeulen studies “ascribe to the novel (as) genre the now obsolete power to choreograph the distribution of modern life into individuals, families, communities, nations, and empires; their declarations of the demise of that cultural power serve as so many scaffolds for their explorations of different forms of affect and life and for their interrogations of the ethics and politics of form” (2015: 4). In this way, the works Vermeulen discusses in his study mobilize the conviction that the novel can no longer assume its authoritative cultural role for the exploration of a weaker aesthetic mission, which is more attuned to forms of life that are no longer sovereign and centered, and to forms of affect that are not yet codified and controlled. Even if they lack the capacity and confidence to articulate a clear response to the ethical and political challenges they intuit, their formal experiments at the very least affirm the urgency of imagining such a response. (Vermeulen 2015: 12)

The Childhood of Jesus seems to subscribe to a similar endeavour. Intentionally staging traditional expectations that a reader would have of a novel – meaningful ‘events’, character development and interiority (Boxall 2015: 15) – only to disappoint them, the novel questions the “authoritative cultural role” of what Coetzee calls the “well-made novel” (qtd. in Bellin 2013: n.pag.). Especially due to its dialogic structure and lack of interior monologues or lengthy descriptions, The Childhood of Jesus refrains from a “particular distribution of interiority, individuality, domesticity, and community” (Vermeulen 2015: 2). The people of Novilla do not work towards a visible goal, they do not seem to have mundane desires, wishes or passions (Forest 2019: 149) and in general seem to lack the will to critically think about their lives.³ For Simón, this way of living is “too placid for his taste, too lacking in ups and downs, in drama and tension” (Childhood 76). It is this placidity that the narrative often addresses in digressive passages, as for instance, Elena and Simón discussing the value of sexual intercourse. These moments stand out in the narrative as they exceed the main plotline – which might be said to be Simón and David’s search for his mother and the subsequent journey to a new home – in extensity and length. This disproportionate distribution of seemingly unimportant passages of the novel and passages that might be identified as following some main plotline leads to a redirection of readerly expectations and thus is an invitation to rethink the way novels operate, challenging readers to look for the novel’s possible meanings elsewhere.

 However, the Novillans do engage with philosophy. Visiting philosophy courses at the institute in their free time, they debate “the table and its close relative the chair” (Childhood 142).

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3.2 Digression as a Marker of Latency The confusion or maybe even dissatisfaction of the reader⁴ with the uneventfulness of the narrative is reflected in the central character Simón. Simón’s desire for “ups and downs, […] drama and tension” (Childhood 76) can be interpreted as Simón – similar to the reader – desiring a ‘story’. Simón is striving for desire – according to some scholars one of the main forces behind narrative (Brooks 1984; Vermeulen 2015) – he craves teleological developments and considers change inevitable. Novilla thus mirrors the policy of the novel as a whole: There is barely any story, there are no ups and downs in the narrative, no drama and no tension. The novel lacks events in the classical, structural sense – that is, turning points which influence the sequentiality of the novel, which “involves changes of state in the represented world and thereby implies the presence of temporality time, which is a constitutive aspect of narration and distinguishes it from other forms of discourse such as description or argumentation” (Hühn 2011: n.pag.). Still, it charms the reader, as Roger Bellin puts it, through “its persistent strangeness”, which is triggered by strangely unmotivated, out-of-place conversations and situations which are mostly connected to digressive moments in the narrative. Mundane scenes which appear to be of no importance for the narrative to progress forward – they do not trigger change or introduce new characters or character developments – take up whole chapters in a much more passionate and engaging way than expectedly eventful scenes such as the discovery of David’s ‘mother’. For instance, Simón and Álvaro’s discussion about the “ultimate goal of life” (Childhood 130) and the town’s policy of grain production, Simón and David’s conversation on “the law of numbers” (176) or their philosophical discussion about poo (156) ultimately take up both more space and more narrative investment. In the end, nothing is changed or initiated by these passages (or sometimes whole chapters), no real insight is gained, and no further plot element triggered. Still, passages like these stand out, precisely because they take up as much space – if not more – than expectedly ‘meaningful’ passages of the novel such as the discovery of Inés. These passages that interrupt what the reader would expect to be the main plot are called digressive passages. These digressive passages have two contradictory effects: First, they slow down the narrative since they postpone possible plot developments and thus slow down the progression of the supposed ‘main plot’. Second, since the narrative features a large number of digressions often one after the other, they lend speed to the narrative by introducing and linking

 Of course, I cannot speak for a general reader. This observation is drawn from the reviews discussed in the introduction to this chapter.

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thoughts and ideas after one another without exploring their deeper meaning or linking them to the narrative as a whole. While digressions normally mainly function to slow down the narrative, I claim that the series of digressions one after the other makes it hard to fully invest in the singular digressions and thus can also create a hectic reading experience. In The Childhood of Jesus, digressions are both delaying devices as well as passages which, in the words of Katherine Hume, who discusses narrative speed, “whizz[…] by us” and make us “suffer from the sense that [the narrative] flashes along too rapidly for us to grasp the logic or keep track of what is happening” (2005: 107). The novel touches upon many different philosophical questions but refrains from linking them in any obvious way, which makes the reader constantly anxious to have missed out on some crucial information that might provide a link. In the words of Jan Wilm, “Coetzee’s characters and Coetzee’s form are ceaselessly driven forward while simultaneously being slowed down” (2016: 3). While typical digressions might allow the reader to slow down and ponder a specific idea or concept, the use of successive digressions in The Childhood of Jesus has a disorienting effect which results in a sense of loss of control for the reader. Moments of digression, which are moments that are “not end-directed, disciplined, monological” (Long 2011: 11) but rather function as “stepping aside[s]” (7), “[t]extual wanderings” (7), run through The Childhood of Jesus. As mentioned by many scholars, passages such as Simón’s repair of Inés’ toilet and the associated philosophical aside about whether “[t]oilets are just toilets, but poo is not just poo” (Childhood 156) together with “a consistent use of vocabulary that is traditionally associated with ancient philosophy” (Mosca 2016: 129) convey the impression that the novel is in fact a philosophical essay in semi-disguise.⁵ Although certainly interesting, these passages of digression might indeed create a “sense of boredom” in the novel (Tajiri 2016: 75) for those who do not read it with a philosophical interest. However, it is these moments of digression which bring the reader closer to the core of the narrative. As J.J. Long explains, [d]igression, [on the one hand] is something that defers desire, impedes its fulfilment, delays indefinitely the moment of crisis or the overwhelming question. On the other hand, digression is the narratological consequence of desire, constituting the structural manifestation of impulses that cannot be accommodated within the discipline of a teleological narrative structure. (Long 2011: 3)

 Jennifer Rutherford, for instance, claims that “The Childhood of Jesus glimmers and flashes with ideas, as if the entire lexicon of Western philosophy lies under the surface of a prose that has none of the explicit critical engagement of a novel such as Diary of a Bad Year, but that nonetheless encompasses the great impasses of modernity” (2017: 59).

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Digression thus allows for non-teleological elements in a narrative to gain visibility and communicate a latent narrative desire which is not cognitively coded in the narrative itself. As Peter Brooks also remarks, “desire comes to inhabit the language of narration” (1984: 322), whereby “language can ‘mean’ something other than it ‘says’, can suggest intentions of which the subject is not consciously aware” (1984: 322). Not only can narratives communicate desires removed from the uttering subjects on the plot level, but they can also ‘say’ things regarding its composition, which have different, latent meanings. Narrative, Brooks argues, is “condemned to saying other than it would mean, spinning out its movement toward a meaning that would be the end of its movement” (1984: 322). Traditionally, digressions have the effect of general slowness of the text, provoking a “formal deceleration that prompts the reader to ask questions of her own, questions which may or may not correlate with those asked in the world of the texts” (Wilm 2016: 12). Moments of digression, I argue, are the prolonged desire of the text to communicate without narrowing down and limiting its meaning, opening up a space for latent discourses that are removed from direct intentions and goals. Digression in this sense shares a pursuit with latency: Latency is a mode of memory that removes the act of remembering from teleologically informed approaches, but which is still triggered by the desire to make something enter the realm of attention of readers. Digressive passages allow texts to communicate this latent desire and thus will in this chapter be considered a formal device that can gesture towards the latent. The numerous passages of digression trigger the question of so what? In The Childhood of Jesus, the moments of digression and the flatness of both the environment and the characters create an “eerie, dream-like atmosphere” (Tajiri 2016: 74) which alerts the readers to pay attention to a double-layering in the narrative and hidden, latent trajectories. What is at the basis of the novel’s elusiveness, I claim, is its lack of context and eventfulness, which invites readers to pay more attention to the digressive elements of the narrative, which are to a great extent linked to history, memory and a resulting sense of self and subtly direct the reader to these concerns. The literary event of the digressive passages puts emphasis on what these passages might share and thus invites more general reflections on memory, history and identity. By leaving out the main event – where have the characters come from, what precipitated their migration –, the narrative refuses to lend itself to established categories: Are the “new arrivals” refugees who left everything – including their memories – behind to start a new life? Are they immigrants? Are they dead and is Novilla the ‘afterlife’? By not providing this contextualisation, the narrative triggers the affective “collapse of structured distinction into intensity, of rules into paradox” (Massumi 2002: 27). Structured distinctions are no longer valid in Novilla, the “no-city” (Pippin 2016: 153), “aseptic [and] devoid of life”

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(Logan 2014: 51). The fact that Novilla, “[t]he place itself[,] cannot be defined” is, according to Hania Nashef, “Coetzee’s way of challenging the readers’ beliefs and previously held assumptions” (2017: 361). While the digressive passages share an underlying interest in the workings of memory, the novel does not latently evoke specific memories. Rather than relate to one context and one memory, the story defies specific local allocations and is read in relation to different local contexts by different scholars, which attests to its potential of removing the story from specific memory discourses and instead making it operable in several local discourses simultaneously. While C. Logan claims that “[t]he imagined country in The Childhood of Jesus is haunted by a South Africa definitely left behind but whose absence leads the narrative to a dead-end” (2014: 53), other scholars read Novilla as “an unnamed but possibly southern European country” (Oates 2013: n.pag.), South America (Ng and Sheehan 2017: 86; Rutherford and Uhlmann 2017: 2; Farrant 2019: 166), or as “highly evocative” of Australia’s refugee policy (Rutherford 2017: 67). When scholars such as Ng and Sheehan thus claim that the novel “incorporates a great deal of ‘the world that we know’, both directly and indirectly” (2017: 91), it is not entirely clear who is included in the ‘we’, as the novel seems to reflect different places to different people. Although the novel’s setting gives rise to speculation and makes it applicable in many different contexts, it still does not reduce the novel to allegorical functions⁶ despite resonating with different communities, because its aesthetics makes it “a kind of realist novel” (Pippin 2016: 147). The novel’s setting and its politics of place lay the ground for a possibly transcultural discussion of memory as clear national or cultural attachments are lacking in the novel. Memories – very generally – are what makes the protagonist Simón different and thus are a thematic concern the novel keeps coming back to. Memories, the novel suggests, are something essential for our sense of continuity and self, which, when erased – but leaving a troubling trace – cause a disturbing sense of un-belonging in Simón. Joyce Carol Oates even takes the lack of memories to be the core reason for the shallowness of the lives of the Novillans: “Yet no one in Novilla has any anchor in life, since no one has any memory of a life before Novilla” (2013: n.pag.).⁷ The digressive passages thus introduce the importance of

 Tajiri, for instance, notes: “It is as though the allegorical mode were simply offered as a trap” (2016: 73) and Elizabeth Anker remarks that “Coetzee’s allegories often work to destabilize or trouble whatever insights they initially afford” (2017: 192).  Shannon Forest also connects the impression of ‘lack’ felt by Simón to the loss of memories. She, however, explicitly refers to memories of religion and religious doctrines. She explains: “In Coetzee’s interrogation of this ‘turning-away’ from religious consciousness, he warns readers about its ontological, temporal, and epistemological consequences” (Forest 2019: 149). While religion certain-

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memories for one’s life to be anchored and for being able to truly engage with O/ others as one of the underlying threads that pervades the novel.

3.3 Removing Memory from Nationalistic Discourses The narrative does not focus on the triggering event – and makes this quite palpable by making it notably absent – but rather focuses on the main protagonist’s difference due to his prevailing, though decidedly vague and undefined memories, which are the latent underlying thread of the digressive passages of the novel. The “past is not dead” in Simón, as he himself puts it. “Details”, he goes on, “may have grown fuzzy, but the feel of how life used to be is still quite vivid” (Childhood 66). Not only is the absent ‘great event’ at the core of the narrative – the event that propels the narrative forward and establishes the plot’s main premises – not represented, but also do Simón’s thoughts about memory not circle around events. He cannot remember events, persons or other ‘facts’. What Simón claims to carry within him are memories of feelings, structures and ideas. As Jennifer Rutherford rightly points out, “Simón is always stumbling over the absence of symbolic value, as if he alone carries the memory of a world where meaning accrues around bodies, actions and objects” (2017: 63). His memory therefore is not personal, but rather a memory of the symbolic structures of his unidentified former culture. Although his former socio-cultural upbringing is never made explicit, the reader becomes aware of the deep rootedness it seems to have in Simón. Memories, as Maurice Halbwachs claims, are tied to social structures and cognitive frames: Our memories are never our own, they are not exactly personal but always predefined by our environment (1992: 38). The Childhood of Jesus thematises these claims by conspicuously removing the protagonists’ past and cultural background from the narrative but still highlighting that the socio-cultural frames of memory subconsciously persist, making the protagonist’s memories the reason for his feeling of unbelonging. There is no environment for the reader to situate Simón’s memories, and maybe this is precisely why what he remembers is blurry, undefined and abstract. While Simón himself will have formed his memories against the backdrop of certain social frames, the reader is not made familiar with these frames and thus cannot place Simón’s memories within them. What

ly is a central theme in the novel, I do not think that the loss of memories can only be connected to a loss of religion. While the loss of religion is certainly part of the ‘washing-clean’ act obligatory for the Novillans, it can certainly not be reduced to it.

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the novel therefore does not allow for is a contextualisation of memory, a fitting of context and social framings and the content of memories. Thus, the reader has to make sense of Simón’s memories without pre-defined pillars of interpretation. Indeed, nothing is known of Simón’s and David’s former lives: Not their class, not their religion, not their culture or nationality. What the reader gets to know about Simón is scarce and open to interpretation. He comes from a place where English and German are languages not only not spoken but also so far removed as to not be recognizable for Simón (Childhood 80). Moreover, there are some indices as to Simón not being a Christian, which is especially interesting given the novel’s title and the fact that many scholars read the novel as a biblical allegory or at least highly evocative of the bible (Pippin 2016; Seshagiri 2013: 643; Tajiri 2016; Farrant 2019). Although the title evokes religion as a possible thematic concern, in Novilla “there are no churches, synagogues or mosques […]. It would appear to be a wholly secular state, a non-nation, with a predominantly socialist agenda, lacking history” (Oates 2013: n.pag.). However, there are two instances which suggest the shadow of some religious knowledge. When talking about David’s diet and the importance of him eating meat, Simón remarks that Inés should not be feeding him sausages. He explains his remark in this way: “They put pig meat in sausages, not always but sometimes, and pigs aren’t clean animals. They don’t eat grass, like sheep and cows. They eat anything they come across” (Childhood 202). Simón’s remark need not be religiously motivated. However, it is still interesting that the main character in a novel titled The Childhood of Jesus voices an idea which – at least nowadays – is not connected to Christianity but rather to Islam. In fact, clear restrictions concerning the consumption of pig meat exist in Jewish dietary laws (Kashrut) and in Islamic dietary laws (Halal), though not in Christian dietary laws. The fact that Simón gives a different justification than the dietary laws which consider pig meat dirty because of the pig having “a cloven hoof that is completely split, but will not regurgitate its cud” (Leviticus 11: 7– 8) or simply “being impure” (Quran 6: 145), as to why David should not eat pig meat however, make this text passage ambiguous and non-conclusive. Another instance, however, also makes it questionable that Simón used to be a Christian: When David talks about the school he is sent to, Punto Arenas, because of his behaviour in the public school, Inés encourages David to tell Simón how terrible the place is by saying: “Tell Simón about the fish” (Childhood 287). David answers that “[e]very Friday they made us eat fish” and that they are made to wear sandals (287). The fact that eating fish on Fridays is an aberration for David, Inés and possibly Simón⁸ makes

 Interestingly, however, Simón does not react to this conversation.

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Christianity, the dominant religion in the western world, ‘other’, something to be remarked upon. The ambiguity of the characters’ socio-cultural background makes it possible for the novel to carry many different, admittedly abstract memories latently. Rather than thematising a specific memory of a specific event, the novel thus initiates a meta-discussion about what memory actually means and how we understand its workings. As David Ulin claims, the beginning, the moment of arrival in a new, unknown place is possibly “the dramatic momentum of the novel” (2013: n.pag.). However, this initial setting does not climax or trigger a clear-cut narrative about specific newcomers with a specific past and present. Ultimately, the novel’s beginning provides little meaning beyond “the image of a small group of wanderers, adrift in an uncharted universe” (n.pag.). Instead of focussing on a specific historical event or a specific socio-cultural context, the novel offers more general thoughts about what it means to be a refugee or a migrant and more generally challenges concepts such as the ‘traditional family’ in the narrow sense of ‘blood relations’ but also in a wider sense: How we define belonging, “how we elect those we love” (Childhood 113) and how we can feel connected to others although our “claims” may be “very abstract, very artificial” (113). Rather than remembering a specific event, the novel initiates a general reflection on the state of being a refugee. Elena reminds Simón of his “dependent state” in what J.U. Jacobs calls “a veritable text-book definition of the refugee” (2017: 64): You arrived in this country naked, with nothing to offer but the labour of your hands. You could have been turned away, but you were not: you were made welcome. You could have been abandoned under the stars, but you were not: you were given a roof over your head. You have a great deal to be thankful for. (Childhood 127).

Elena’s comment places the novel in a very wide and transnational discourse⁹: What it means to be a refugee and how the role of the refugee “should” be fulfilled. While “[i]n the past there was a tendency to discuss migration in the mechanistic terms of causes and consequences” (Papastergiadis 2000: 4), the novel wilfully refrains from this cause-and-effect logic. The novel opens up a different discourse by  Transnational in the way that it is omnipresent in different nations: Historically, migration is part and parcel of human evolution as a species, examples “of cross-cultural exchanges, complex networks of trade and translocal identities are ever-present throughout history” (Papastergiadis 2000: 9). This does not, however, mean that every nation or culture is always equally affected by the discourse. What I mean is that refugees – analysed from a diachronic perspective – have been from all different religions, nations and cultures, as migration used to be predominantly a phenomenon of movement from rural areas to cities – a phenomenon which, for example, took place all over Europe (7).

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obscuring the causes of the mass migration to Novilla and instead puts the emphasis on the feeling of alienation and especially the forced suppression of former attachments that comes with being a refugee. A refugee, Elena reminds Simón in a manner as if she had learnt the doctrine by heart (see all the colons which convey the impression of fast speech), has to be thankful for very basic acts of hospitality, such as being provided a roof over their head. Her remarks mirror socio-political discourses which always position the newcomer, the refugee, the immigrant in an inferior position: dependent and not in the position to make any claims. The price that they have to accept to pay for their new life – forgetting their old life, attachments, ideas – should be accepted without complaint. And this is exactly what Simón cannot do and what consistently marks him as ‘different’, non-conformist. Although the novel is often read as a dystopia, thus maybe conveying the impression that a total erasure of the past life is a fantastical element that has no basis in present-day realities, the premise of the novel is actually quite close to both past and present socio-political circumstances of migration and flight. As Ng and Sheehan cogently argue, “forgetting is a kind of pre-condition when it comes to national resettlement – for migrants as much as for refugees and their peers (asylum seekers, displaced persons, and so on)” (2017: 84) and thus appears to be a universal precondition of migration of any sort. In her essay “We Refugees”, Hannah Arendt points out that as refugees they were told in their new homelands “to forget; and we forgot quicker than anybody ever could imagine” (1994: 110), stressing that forgetting the ‘past life’ is not just an element in what one might call a dystopian novel¹⁰ but something which is actually connected to the realities of being a refugee in the world today. In her essay, which so poignantly outlines what it entails to be new in a country and what it does to a person to be constantly considered in the framework of “refugee”, Arendt pleads for a change of term. She does not want to be called a “refugee”. Instead, she writes, they themselves call each other “newcomers” or “immigrants” (1994: 110). This resonates with The Childhood of Jesus, as Simón says they are “new arrivals” (1) to the country. The novel’s “intimations of the global refugee crisis” (Rutherford 2017: 60), underlined for instance by situations such as Inés not having “the right papers for David” (Childhood 216), however, change the premise of discourses surrounding refugees in the twenty-first century. While discourses about migration often map the itineraries “in linear terms, with clear co-ordinates between centre and periphery” (Papastergiadis 2000: 7), the novel destabilises a thinking alongside the centre-periphery axis. By making a character who has internalised ideas and concepts connected to the secular western world (influenced by the predominance of capi-

 Or, of course depending on perspective, a utopian novel (Farrant 2019: 169).

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talism) the odd one out, the one who cannot be integrated into the new society, the novel intelligently holds up a mirror to a potential western reader who might unconsciously connect migration and refugees to a recognisably different O/other. The novel makes the reader experience the condition it describes through its form and its opacity instead of only commenting on it. The condition which is at the core of the narrative is that of assimilation and the ways that Simón struggles with assimilating,¹¹ leaving behind his old life and any instincts that might have survived his passage. “Is there something in the etiquette of the sexes or the generations in this new land that he is failing to understand?” (Childhood 33), Simón asks at one point, because he fails to understand the behaviour of Ana, the woman he and David meet on his first night in Novilla. The sexuality of his fellow-citizens and the norms of relations puzzle Simón. The novel thus thematises “the migrant as outsider, as someone forced to adjust to new forms of communal organization” and “could be seen as an exploration of this form of experience – the obdurate strangeness and opacity of everyday life, the seeming counter-logic that governs how the social world is organized” (Ng and Sheehan 2017: 85). While the novel thematises the migrant on the level of content, it also makes it part of its form: First, just as the characters do not display national or cultural affiliation, the text itself contests the idea of a native readership (Walkowitz 2015: 3 – 6). First published in Dutch, featuring characters who appear to speak Spanish even though the text is translated into English, the novel consciously detaches language from geography (15) and by underlining the linguistic – metaphorically and literally – journey the text has undergone before any reader has read the text makes every reader a migrant to the text. Second, while Simón is a migrant to Novilla, a society he does not understand, the reader is a migrant to the elusive and opaque text, the mechanisms of which are never quite graspable. Just like Simón, the reader cannot easily make sense of the society he is confronted with and thus they are migrants to the text, trying to figure out the codes and structures of Novilla and the premise of the novel as such. Thus, the novel performs on its formal level what it thematises: The universal feeling of being lost, of not understanding and constantly feeling that one misses out on something when confronted with the unknown and unfamiliar. This feeling is something which readers from different backgrounds might share when reading the novel: Although they “may have no discursive mean-

 Anker argues that while “the scenario of statelessness and exile might prompt the enlistment of Hannah Arendt or Giorgio Agamben’s thought”, this “plot motif, however, quickly fades into the background and is subordinated to other facets of Novillan life” (2017: 187). Although Anker is right in that the visibility of Simón and David as refugees is reduced the more the novel proceeds, a deep feeling of unbelonging and alienation persists and can thus be considered as a major motif throughout the novel.

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ing of events such as those of the story”, that is the ‘event’ of migration and being new in an unknown country, they “nevertheless ha[ve] an experience of déja senti” (Velleman 2003: 19) on a smaller scale. The novel does not allow readers to “assimilate events […] to familiar patterns of how things happen”, that is, it does not provide a clear causality or sequentiality, but it might refer to “familiar patterns of how things feel” (19), even if only on a micro level. Through its intended contextual vagueness, the novel propels a more general reflection on concepts such as borders, migrants and immigrants and the concept of hospitality. Through the relationship between David, Simón and Inés, the novel ultimately might foster ideas of belonging which go beyond biological bonds or other essential forms of belonging – or even in the case of Simón and Inés, any form of genuine affection. Without contextualisation of the new arrivals’ past and socio-cultural background, the novel shifts its focus to the challenges that these new arrivals or arrivants face, regardless of background. In his book Aporias (1993), Jacques Derrida negotiates the fine line between singularity and generality, exploring the cultural specificity of experience. He focuses on the ethical obligation to host the foreigner and the alien and yet to respect their particular otherness. Contemplating the French word arrivant – a gerund which describes something or somebody who or which is in the process of arriving –, Derrida contemplates the word’s polysemy: “The new arrivant, this word can, indeed, mean the neutrality of that which arrives, but also the singularity of who arrives, he or she who comes” (1993: 33). The arrivant, according to Derrida does not simply cross national borders but deconstructs the concept of the ‘border’ more profoundly: But if the new arrivant who arrives is new, one must expect – without waiting for him or her, without expecting it – that he does not simply cross a given threshold, whose possibility he thus brings to light before one even knows whether there has been an invitation, call, a nomination, or a promise (Verheissung, Heissen etc.). What we could here call the arrivant, the most arrivant among all arrivants, the arrivant par excellence, is whatever, whoever, in arriving, does not cross a threshold separating two identifiable places, the proper and the foreign, the proper of the one and the proper of the other, as one would say that the citizen of a given identifiable country crosses the border of another country as a traveler, an emigré or a political exile, a refugee […]. Those are all, of course, arrivants, but in a country that is already defined and in which the inhabitants know or think they are at home (as we saw above, this is what, according to Kant, should govern public rights, concerning both universal hospitality and visiting rights). No, I am talking about the absolute arrivant, who is not even a guest. He surprises the host – who is not yet a host or an inviting power – enough to call into question, to the point of annihilating or rendering indeterminate, all the distinctive signs of a prior identity, beginning with the very border that delineated a legitimate home and assured lineage, names and language, nations, families, genealogies. (1993: 33 – 34)

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The arrivant in Derrida’s sense challenges conventional categories – the traveller, the exile, the refugee – and instead makes questionable the concept of stable identity, both of the arrivant itself and its host. The characters of David and Simón bring to light the possibility of everybody becoming a migrant at some point, because their background is so obscure and the novel forbids to tie their situation to any cultural or political context. Resonating with Derrida’s assertion, David and Simón do not cross an identifiable threshold and thus the concepts of ‘foreigner’ and ‘native’ lose their validity and become signifiers without signified. The arrivant does not come with a purpose or a mission, “the arrivant does not have any identity yet, its place of arrival is also de-identified” (Derrida 1993: 34). This is fitting for The Childhood of Jesus, which does not furnish Simón with much interiority or identifying characteristics and which also makes Novilla a non-place rather than an identifiable place. Novilla’s status as a non-place, a place without history or culture, underlines that hospitality, the true welcoming of strangers that Novilla lacks,¹² is only possible when the so-called ‘natives’ feel “implaced” (Casey 1993: 23). “Hospitality”, Brian Treanor emphasises, “always happens in a place; it consists in giving place to another and, as such, occurs as part of a relationship between an implaced person and a displaced person. Only an implaced person can be hospitable” (50). The lack of history, culture or diversity in Novilla prevents its inhabitants from becoming implaced persons. The space of Novilla remains alien and therefore fails to become ‘place’. As Edward Casey underlines, place and identity remain entangled even in our highly mobile and interconnected world: [The power of a place] determines not only where I am in the limited sense of cartographic location but how I am together with others (i. e. how I commingle and communicate with them) and even who we shall become together. The ‘how’ and the ‘who’ are intimately tied to the ‘where,’ which gives to them a specific content and a coloration not available from any other source. (Casey 1993: 23)

The fact that Novilla does not provide any form of ‘coloration’ for its citizens might be the answer to their shallowness and mechanical way of being, complacently ac-

 Novilla welcomes new arrivals; however, the welcome is pragmatic and reduced to the bare necessities, as can be best seen by the opening chapter in which Ana makes Simón and David sleep in her backyard like animals. The city’s refugee policy is cold and distanced from the actual human beings affected by it. Discussing the Centre and the city’s social welfare, Ana explains: “Faith has nothing to do with it. Faith means believing in what you do even when it does not bear visible fruit. The Centre is not like that. People arrive needing help, and we help them. We help them and their lives improve. None of that is invisible. None of it requires blind faith. We do our job, and everything turns out well. It is as simple as that” (Childhood 35).

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cepting their position as a newly named figure in the system. “Places”, Treanor notes, “are experienced spaces” (2011: 53) and Novilla is closed off to experiences that would count as meaningful to Simón. Consequently, the citizens of Novilla cannot be hospitable as they themselves are displaced, without place, and therefore without a firm anchor from which to act.

3.4 Relocalising Memory: Embodied Memories Edward Casey and Brian Treanor connect the feeling of displacement directly to our bodies: For them, “[i]t is our bodies that allow us to actively participate in our implacement and orientation in the broader landscape” (Treanor 2011: 53). Simón’s connection to his body, the feeling of residing in a body without memories, hinders him to implace himself in Novilla. When his acquaintance Elena tells Simón that once he had “properly forgotten”, his “sense of insecurity will recede and everything will become much easier” (Childhood 169), Simón agrees that she might be right. However, he is not willing to let go of his memories. He clarifies: “I agree with you: [my memories] are just a burden. No, it is something else that I am reluctant to yield up: not memories themselves but the feel of residence in a body with a past” (169). Not remembering facts or events, Simón claims that “the feel of how life used to be is still quite vivid” (my emphasis, Y.L.). This feeling of how life used to be, these felt rather than consciously processed memories relate to abstract concepts and ideas. Not only does Simón crave beauty, but he also claims to have memories related to gender differences engraved in his body: “Men and women, for instance: you say you have got beyond that way of thinking; but I haven’t. I still feel myself to be a man, and you to be a woman” (my emphasis, Y.L.). In a similar way, Simón believes that the connection between David and his alleged mother Inés is “remembered” in his body. After having met Inés for the first time, he muses: “Better if he had found a way of giving the boy into her arms, body to body, flesh to flesh. Then memories lying deeper than all thought might have been reawoken” (Childhood 92, my emphasis, Y.L.). What Simón thus suggests is that family bonds and learned gender differences¹³ are something which survived in his body just as his way of expressing himself, his ideas about beauty and efficiency – ultimately capitalist ideas – survived the cleaning of memories. Simón’s problems to adjust to his new life in Novilla and the instances where his relation to his environment differs from that of the other Novillans because of his sticking to symbolic meanings are more than once connected to the body, feel-

 Simón’s claim is, of course, a very controversial assumption.

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ings and ways of perceiving. Thus, the novel shows that memories are not only cognitively encoded and manifested in the stories we tell, but manifest themselves also in the everyday, the “physical behavior, in day-to-day living and in the structures of the person’s lived space” (Fuchs 2011: 90). Memory does not only have a discursive dimension but also a bodily, material component. Body memories are removed from cognitive processes and rather operate through a form of “self-opacity which does not even know its own name. Their remove [sic!] in time from the moment of origin does not endow them with any reflective advantage, much less any tendency to articulate their specific content in words” (Casey 1987: 166). Following Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Fuchs also describes body memory as essentially pre-cognitive. He defines the body as “our capacity to see, touch, sense” and body memory therefore designates the totality of these bodily predispositions as they have developed in the course of our development – in other words, in their historical dimension. In body memory, the situations and actions experienced in the past are, as it were, all fused together without any of them standing out individually. Through the repetition and superimposition of experiences, a habit structure has been formed: well-practiced motion sequences, repeatedly perceived gestalten, forms of actions and interactions have become an implicit bodily knowledge and skill. Body memory does not take one back to the past, but conveys an implicit effectiveness of the past in the present. (Fuchs 2011: 91)

The cleansing of memories, the novel suggests, might work on a conscious level, but will always fail to erase the traces of the past on the body which functions as a “carrying medium of the social order” (Heinlein et al. 2016: 5). The body constantly carries latent memories of which we do not have conscious knowledge, but which have an effect on our behaviour. The body carries the traces of the environment, which influences our perception through conscious as well as unconscious selection processes. In fact, the body’s role in our remembering is “constantly at work in one capacity or another, never not operative” (Casey 1987: 147).¹⁴ As Alois Hahn emphasises, it is not only ‘motion sequences” which the body remembers but also, if not predominantly, “elementary normative orientations” (109, translation Y.L.). As Simón’s insistent clinging to his memories and ideas underlines, some normative influences (Prägungen) are so deeply rooted in our bodies that they are immensely resistant to processes of repression. Body memory “is

 Edward Casey notes that “the rooting of the word ‘memory’ in memor (mindful) and ultimately of ‘remembering’, ‘reminding’, and ‘reminiscing’ in mens (mind)” (1987: 258) clearly puts the mind centre stage as the decisive agent in memory processes. This, however, is a false deduction, he claims.

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thus not just something we merely have; it is something we are: that constitutes us as we exist humanly in the world” (Casey 1987: 163). Learned norms are difficult to erase from memory. Alois Hahn suggests that especially “catectic norms” are extremely difficult to ‘unlearn’. Norms which are linked to emotional responses such as shame, disgust or embarrassment are registered latently in our bodies and betray our cultural coding when they are subconsciously triggered. In the novel, the remainder of catectic norms is not only visible in Simón, but also in Inés. While Inés might perform a life without a past, her body still reacts and re-enacts the memory of experiences. The taboo of faeces, for instance, is still registered in her body as triggering “avoidance behaviour” (Fuchs 2011: 96): When her body is confronted with faeces, this “generates feelings of shame” which are outside of her control. Jennifer Rutherford demonstrates this in her essay “Thinking through Shit in The Childhood of Jesus”, in which she analyses “the enduring symbolic power of violating toilet taboos” (2017: 61) in the novel. In her essay, Rutherford shows that it is not only Simón who still has some memories of the old life. Although, she argues, Inés seems to have forgotten the “psychosocial taboos that regulate defecation in the West” (2017: 61), she still bodily shows embarrassment when David proudly presents his “potty” (63). Although Inés “speaks of sewage without embarrassment” (Childhood 151), which surprises Simón, she shows a physical reaction when presented with the materiality of David’s poo, which leads to her rushing into the room, snatching the pot (152) while blushing (159). While Inés was able to train herself – or was trained, the reader does not know – to speak about defecation with ease, her body still remembers the socio-cultural taboos surrounding it. Similarly, Simón’s body is conditioned to think in terms of efficiency and he therefore feels the impulse to ‘improve’ the working situation at the docks although his consciousness tells him that this will create displeasure in his co-workers. In one of the densest chapters, Simón and Álvaro discuss their work and their different ideas about meaningful work. After a hard day’s work, Álvaro, satisfied with himself and his co-workers, says: “Another job done […] Makes you feel good, doesn’t it?” (Childhood 128). Simón, however, does not share the simple pleasure of having done a good job and having finished a day’s work. “I suppose so”, he says, “[b]ut I can’t help asking myself why the city needs so much grain, week after week” (128). While Simón is asking for “any larger picture”, “a grand plan”, for Álvaro and the other workers it is enough to do their job as they are told and be satisfied with the fruits of their labour and the comradeship their working together grants them. Simón seems to ‘remember’ more capitalist ways of working, suggesting importing food and work with better technology to lessen their daily burden of physical work. Moreover, instead of shifting the heavy sacks of grain, Simón wants work “requiring intelligence, not just brute strength” (134). Change, Simón claims, is unavoidable and ever-present and

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history will repeat itself, transforming this apparently communist community in which “[e]ach man carries what he can” (54) and which lacks foreign goods such as spices (71), into a place ruled by capitalism, principles of efficiency and the politics of import and export. The body, these two passages indicate, prevents a total erasure of the past as it is “the ensemble of organically developed predispositions and capacities to perceive, to act but also to desire and to communicate” (Fuchs 2011: 91, my emphasis, Y.L.). These predispositions and capacities are also intricately connected to embodied language. “What do you think I am doing in this country”, Simón asks Elena at one point, “where I cannot express my heart’s feelings because all human relations have to be conducted in beginner’s Spanish?” (Childhood 127). The heart’s feelings, Simón makes clear, are not easily translatable, and the compulsion to use a language that he is not entirely familiar with thus hinders Simón to relate with others in a meaningful way. It is also Simón’s language that marks him time and again as ‘other’, as being imprinted by the past: “there is something in my speech”, Simón remarks, “that marks me as a man stuck in the old ways, a man who has not forgotten” (169), a man with “a body soaked in its past” (169). Memories, passages like these indicate, are intricately connected to the body and language. The novel’s staging of a purification of rational, conscious memories which is then contrasted to bodily remains of memories puts the role of the body centre stage and calls for a refocussing on the embodiment and embeddedness of memories both in the body and the mother tongue. By showing Simón’s memories to be linked to his body, the novel stresses that “[t]he lived body […] is the ‘common, but to us unknown, root’ of all that comes to be classified in rightly stratified ways in modern Western thought” (Casey 1993: 50). Although this statement might be a little too radical, it is still important to refocus the body as an important calibrator for human experience, a feeling of place and memories. Reading a novel for latent memories is therefore connected to a refocussing on the body as a carrier of meaning that enables the “co-immanence” (Casey 1987: 168) of past and present. As Edward Casey argues, our perception of the present as the present is dependent on us embodying the here and now (1993: 50 f.), of being situated in place through the body. Simón’s body, however, is not situated in place, because it stays attached to a there which is unknown to him. “To know where I am”, Casey writes, “is to know that I am determinately (t)here – bodily here in relation to an already known there or set of theres” (54). Embracing his new life in Novilla is impossible for Simón as he cannot feel he truly arrived in the here as his connections to a there, a before is denied to him. This inhibited connection, the impossibility to perceive himself and his body in a spatial dimension influences the temporality of Simón’s existence in an equal measure. The present is haunted by the past as the ‘washing clean’ has unbalanced a bodily “being-in-place” (48).

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The novel puts centre stage that living without being allowed to remember the past can result in feelings of un-belonging and alienation which might hinder rather than enable assimilation. What is more, unconscious, latent memories will always inform people, no matter how hard they try to erase the past. The unconscious, latent memories will always manifest themselves “in the horizontal dimension of the lived body and the lived space” (Fuchs 2011: 94), making it impossible to live without a past. Simon thus does not only suffer, because he cannot remember and thus feels detached from himself, longing to live in a “body with a past” (Childhood 169) – in fact, he does live in a body with a past, but what troubles him is that he cannot act on his body’s desires. Simón’s desperate feeling of incompleteness and unbelonging highlights that new arrivants will never be completely detached from their former lives, even if they put all their effort into trying. What Novilla’s citizens lack is the possibility to connect their felt past with their actual present.

3.5 Conclusion: Reflecting on the Intersection of Migration and Memory The Childhood of Jesus brings two different fields of discourse together: Migration and memory. It decouples both discourses from individual stories and regards them rather as abstract concepts which it then brings close to the reader through latency. The novel foregoes readings that are overtly channelled through specific national discourses by being ambiguous and unspecific, not staging a specific historical event, foregoing a ‘native readership’ (Walkowitz 2015: 6) through its language policy, and ultimately becoming operable in various cultural scenarios. The novel thereby operates on a transcultural level – fostering a “memory formation between, across and even beyond the boundaries of closed groups” (Carrier and Kabalek 2014: 52) – in that it presents a predicament without attaching it to a cultural context, thereby showing that certain feelings and situations go beyond national and cultural borders and are rather globally shared forms of experience. In this, the novel highlights that “transcultural remembrance is not about homogenisation, but the creation of constellations of memory that reveal momentary connections across time and space whose shared qualities may previously have elided us” (Bond and Rapson 2014: 23). The novel latently remembers numerous unnamed stories of migration, exclusion, violent displacement and forgetting and brings them together for the reader, who might read the novel as remembering stories related to South Africa (Logan 2014: 53), southern Europe (Oates 2013: n.pag.), South America (Ng and Sheehan 2017: 86; Rutherford and Uhlmann 2017: 2, Farrant 2019:

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166), Australia (Rutherford 2017: 67) and colonialism (Forest 2019: 161),¹⁵ respectively. Despite bringing together all of these different abstract memories for the reader, the novel through its thematisation of embedded memories stresses the importance of cultural embeddedness into place and singularity of experiences. Ambiguously oscillating between different possible contextualisations and diverse native readerships, ultimately making readers themselves migrants to the text, the novel offers points of identification for different readers and highlights the points of commonality between different singular histories of marginalisation. Localised memories, the novel makes clear, are important for processes of migrant identities. In his study on Migrancy, Culture, Identity (1994), Ian Chambers claims that migrant subjects are all characterised by a hybrid position, living between worlds, living at the “intersections of histories and memories, experiencing both their preliminary dispersal and their subsequent translation into new, more extensive, arrangements along emerging routes” (1994: 6). This is exactly what The Childhood of Jesus refuses its protagonists: They are not living in an in-between position as their past is erased. They do not live between histories and memories. Although the status of hybridity – meaning the presence of cultural difference in identity (Papastergiadis 2000: 14) – is often connected to conflicted identities and feelings of unbelonging,¹⁶ The Childhood of Jesus shows that the opposite, a full emergence into the new culture without traces of the former, is not desirable either. Hybridity is exactly what the novel does not foster, as hybridity “stands in opposition to the myth of purity and racial and cultural authenticity, of fixed and essentialist identity, embraces blending, combining, syncretism and encourages the composite, the impure, the heterogeneous and the eclectic” (Guignery 2011: 2).¹⁷ Heterogeneity is not encouraged by Novilla, people have to conform – as illustrated by David’s suspension from school as a consequence of his different concept of numbers –, nothing is blended or combined, but a new identity is artificially created and established as the norm.

 As Shannon Forest points out: “When Simón takes David into the country to a place called the ‘New Forest’ on a recommendation from Álvaro, we get the fragment: ‘it was once a plantation, but it has been allowed to go wild—you will like it’ (Childhood 54). The subtle, inerasable trace of the past in Novilla bear the mark of a forgotten colonialism that has been ‘washed out’ of memory” (Forest 2019: 161).  As Guignery, for instance, underlines, “[t]hese ‘in-between’ people or hyphenated communities occupy a displaced position which can provoke a sense of fragmentation, dislocation and discontinuity, both in terms of space and time” (2011: 5).  Of course, the term hybridity is itself not unproblematic. Paul Gilroy, for instance, claims that “[t]he idea of hybridity, or intermixture, presupposes two anterior purities. […] I think there isn’t any purity; there isn’t any anterior purity […] that’s why I try not to use the word hybrid” (1994: 54– 55).

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The characters in The Childhood of Jesus are no hybrids, but they are no tabulae rasae either. The state they are in – allegedly without a former life but probably not actually ‘washed clean’ – reduces the humanity of Novilla’s inhabitants, being completely deprived of “any intoxication or rapture at the beautiful, and all of its destabilizing dangerous implications, in favor of some pedestrian, rather unambitious view of the good – the secure, peaceful, civil world Simón finds so dissatisfying” (Pippin 2016: 158). The resulting “emptiness” in his new life makes Simón constantly desire more, other things than his new life can offer him. It strikes him as “desolate rather than peaceful” (Childhood 81). What the novel, through its eerie atmosphere and its latent, verbally absent memories, does, is illustrate that transculturality in fact needs the traces of different cultures. The erasure of difference, the novel shows, does not lead to peace and harmony but rather has troubling and depressing effects on the inhabitants of Novilla, “subjects […] untroubled by interiority” (Rutherford 2017: 71) who due to this lacking interiority and their never faltering compliance with Novilla’s policy appear strange to western readers. Simón constantly tries to bridge the gap that separates him from the others, but by being denied a status as a hybrid, someone with the potential to be both “the benefactor of a cultural surplus, and the embodiment of a new synthesis” (Papastergiadis 2000: 15), Simón is unable to overcome his deep feeling of unbelonging. In her study Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies (2011), Julia Creet underlines that memory “provides continuity to the dislocations of individual and social identity” (2011: 3). Similarly, José van Dijk points out that “[r]emembering is vital to our well-being, because without autobiographical memories we would have no sense of past or future, and we would lack any sense of continuity. Our image of who we are, mentally and physically, is based on long-term remembrance of facts, emotions, and experiences” (2007: 3). Memories enable migrants to both develop but also stay connected to parts of their identities, fostering both routes and roots (Hall 2003). The Childhood of Jesus illustrates that social progress and development become hard if affiliations with the country of origin and its language are denied and forcefully washed away. The novel portrays a society which does not allow for its migrants to “participate in and reshape the social worlds within which they move” (Papastergiadis 2000: 21). This policy, creating a homogeneous society, might seem to be effective at first sight. However, what the novel ultimately stages is that the idea that “cultural homogeneity was needed to maintain social stability” (Ng and Sheehan 2017: 97) is too short-sighted. Cultural homogeneity does not guarantee social stability, as people like Simón without apparent motivation start questioning the status quo and the cultural order. “The premise of assimilation – that national identity can be forged, and social stability achieved, through cultural homogenization –”, Ng and Sheehan show, “proves to be

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another fiction” (2017: 100). Ultimately, the culture of Novilla – culture understood as “the forms by which [groups] communicate their everyday social relationships” (Papastergiadis 2000: 103) – does not appear desirable to most readers: Just like Simón, they might feel that it is lacking some depth and fuller meaning. A society without cultural intermingling, the exchange and development of different sign systems and beliefs, the novel shows, creates the illusion of conformity at the expense of “drama and tension” (Childhood 76), “ups and downs” (76) and most importantly, real moments of human connection. Novilla’s ideology and the new arrivants’ wish to conform are very powerful, as the citizens who all, except for Simón – and Daga, who also questions the system – accept the status quo and live according to the rules. However, the novel also shows how order and ideology are also always subject to other latent structures which might run counter to the existent order. Memories, even if suppressed and forbidden, have a way of lingering on and latently inform a person’s behaviour, worldview and perception. The novel emphasises the importance of place and a feeling of ‘being-in-place’, that is, ‘implacement’. Memories are tied to specific places and their particularities; they are not free-floating associations but do come from places from where they then can travel. And lastly, memories are also tied to our bodies, bodies-in-place. Cultural differences, consequently, can also not just be undone through integration, adaptation, accepting the rules of the host society, because they are part of our bodily being in the world. This does not mean that cultural differences are ontologically fixed and a firm dividing line. But our environment, where we grow up, our implacement in the world, the language through which we first encounter this world and other socio-cultural codes that we learn, are registered latently in our bodies and cannot just be ‘unlearned’ through goodwill and dedication. The novel uses latency as a mode of memory to foster an abstract negotiation of memory as positioned between the global and the local. Through its linking of abstract ideas about the connection between memory and identity on the one hand and individually embodied memories on the other, however, the novel also stages an abstract negotiation of what Birgit Neumann calls “glocal memories” (2020a). In the context of world literature and acts of literary worlding, Neumann explains: One literary figuration through which acts of worlding take shape in contemporary Anglophone world literature is the modelling of memories that are at once grittily local and proximate with the global. This is not the kind of ‘new cosmopolitan memory’ that Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2005, 4) celebrate for its capacity to transcend ‘ethnic and national boundaries’ and to provide ‘the cultural foundation of global human rights dynamics’ (4). Rather, it is a minor and rooted cosmopolitan memory, a glocal memory that acknowledges the ongoing relevance of ethnical and national classifications, including the attendant identitarian narratives, while pointing to ‘the difficult necessity of thinking beyond them’ (Boxall 2013, 178). It is a

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genuinely localised memory that refuses to stay still and cannot be tied to a single culture. Admittedly disjunctive and amorphous, glocal memories ramify across places, cultures, and periods and interlink seemingly unconnected histories, locales, and people in frequently unpredictable ways; as they form a polycentric and ‘multidirectional’ (Rothberg 2009) mnemonic ecology, they may give rise to non-identitarian configurations of community. (Neumann 2020a: 222)

While Neumann’s concept addresses memories which are explicitly placed within local contexts, some of her premises still apply to The Childhood of Jesus. While novels such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of Yellow Sun or Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (as discussed by Neumann) both use their stories and their politics of form to address glocal memories, The Childhood of Jesus negotiates the concept on an abstract level, not directly positioning memories in a local context but stressing the relevance of the latter through Simón’s feelings of unbelonging and yearning for his lost individual, localised memories. The novel stresses both, the local and the global, it acknowledges the relevance of culture and roots for processes of memory while at the same time interlinking “seemingly unconnected histories, locales, and people” (Neumann 2020a: 222). In this sense, the novel’s politics of latent memory challenges a competitive understanding of memory and instead asks its readers to “consider memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” (Rothberg 2009: 3) and as a connecting rather than a dividing concept that reaches across cultures and nations while at the same time acknowledging the ongoing relevance of culturally related forms of meaning-making.

4 Idiorrhythm in Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) I think half-remembered things are such an important part of my practice, and for me to resist the urge to pin it down is vital. Teju Cole, Interview with Khalid Warsame (2018: n.pag.)

Teju Cole is a writer whose works are at their heart concerned with memory. On the one hand, they often engage with individual memories of a homeland left behind or of a past one does not want to acknowledge on the level of the individual characters. On the other hand, memories of places, connected to or neglected by history and thematised on a more socio-cultural level time and again play an important role. The question that he poses to himself in his essay “Alabama” – “[l]ong after history’s active moment, do places retain some charge of what they witnessed, what they endured?” (2016: 278) – is an ongoing concern in his fictional works. Teju Cole was born in 1975 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Nigerian parents. He returned to Nigeria shortly after his birth only to return to Kalamazoo at 17 years old to study medicine. He dropped out of medical school and ultimately studied art history, the knowledge of which often finds its way into his writing. His first novel, Every Day is for the Thief (2007), deals with a young man who returns to Lagos, Nigeria, after having lived in New York City for 15 years. His impressions of Lagos are tainted by anger and impatience, conveying a feeling of estrangement and unbelonging. Nigeria is also part of his second novel, Open City (2011), and again, the protagonist, who lives in New York City and thinks about his country of origin as “mostly forgotten” (Open City 155), does not feel it is a place he belongs to. Both novels emphasise the connection between identity, belonging and place. In contrast to Every Day is for the Thief, Open City engages with the question of place, memory and identity on a more abstract level, disengaging it from the direct experience of the protagonist who is stripped of the capability to meaningfully interpret the past. Open City is a novel that consciously plays with the category of the event. Spanning one year in the life of German-Nigerian psychiatrist Julius, the novel thwarts expectations of meaningful developments, culminating in Julius’ quasi-non-acknowledgment of a childhood friend’s claim that Julius raped her when he was 13. Since no ‘event’ takes centre stage in this novel and the reader stumbles from one unconnected scene to the other, “this seemingly plotless novel […] could easily be read as one long transgression” (Goyal 2017: 67). As Giles Foden rightly points out, “action is the wrong spoor by which to pursue this book” (Foden 2011: n.pag.), as it demands a different kind of attention from the reader. The novel is structured around Julius’ wanderings through the city and the seemingly random thoughts the urban environment triggers in him. It also makes room https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111067384-005

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for various stories of people whom Julius meets. However, the stories do not initiate direct engagement from Julius, nor is Julius really touched by these stories. This in turn makes it hard for the reader to fully engage with the stories or the narrator-protagonist. Instead of focussing on the content of the stories or Julius’ random associations triggered by them, the reader quickly learns to approach the novel differently.¹ In an interview with Khalid Warsame, Teju Cole says about his writing practice: “I think half-remembered things are such an important part of my practice, and for me to resist the urge to pin it down is vital” (2018: n.pag.). Open City abounds with half-remembered things that latently inform the narrative without being overly thematised on its content level. Instead, the novel highlights the everyday with its encounters and mysteries rather than central events in the life of the protagonist or historic events as, for instance, 9/11.² Although the seemingly linear structure of the novel – covering the protagonist’s life for almost exactly one year – might invite readers to expect some change in the narrator’s life, his moral development or his relations to others, these expectations are disappointed by the novel which – at least on the surface – does not reveal any changes, events or developments. As Rebecca Clark points out, the novel does not “soar in grand narrative arcs”; rather, “it plods, meanders, veers, and stumbles” (2018: 187), building instead on micronarratives and associative meditations. Frustrating conventional narrative expectations,³ “neither a strictly surface reading nor symptomatic reading approach alone is adequate for this sort of text” (2018: 181). The text challenges readers to look beyond the surface, that is, the directly articulated scenarios and ideas of the novel and instead look for underlying structures of thought that invite historical comparisons and contrasts. At the same time, however, the text does not challenge the reader to uncover the text’s one defining feature or the hidden truth. In line with the novel’s refusal to neither put centre stage one single event nor give insight into the protagonist’s inner life, this chapter will not focus on the central character, his African affiliations and his inability to confront his personal past

 I am aware that there are different kinds of readers who do not all approach the novel in the same way. My claim throughout the chapter is that the average reader is being led through the novel in a specific way which makes them learn how to approach this specific novel.  Neither the protagonist’s alleged rape of a girl when he was a teenager nor the afterlife of 9/11 in New York are foregrounded in the novel. This, however, does not mean that these events do not matter at all, my argument is solely that the novel’s structure does not put them into focus right away.  Pieter Vermeulen, for instance, includes the text in his study on the end of the novel due to its lack of conventional plot elements and structures (2015).

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– although this fact of course remains relevant. Instead, I will have a closer look at the novel’s composition and the way in which a “more deeply embedded story about […] violence and responsibility” (O’Gorman 2015: 58) comes to penetrate the “virtually plotless surface” (58). Following Gabriele Schwab, who asserts that “literary form plays the most crucial role in the transformative encounter with the unthought known” (1997: 122), this chapter focuses on the intersection of “the unthought known” and rhythm as a formal element. In Open City, changes in rhythm alert the reader to the ‘unthought known’ in the form of latent memories. This chapter therefore focuses on the novel’s distinct rhythm, which is created on two different levels that ultimately come to interact. First, the novel creates a rhythm on the macro level for the reader through the iteration of unequally fast chapters, with some creating “speed by cramming in lots of productive activity” (Hume 2005: 118), and other unusually slow chapters that indulge in lengthy descriptive passages of seemingly trivial details. Second, the novel creates a rhythm on the micro level through the protagonist’s act of walking that creates distinct rhythms for every chapter individually. His routes through the city generate repetitions and patterns whose rhythm links different histories and voices (of other people who tell him their stories) in a way that makes the reader look for underlying connections and latent entanglements, as, for instance, “previously ignored links between the Iraq war, the Native American genocide, the transatlantic slave trade and European histories of colonial exploitation” (Neumann 2020a: 144). These two levels interact and ultimately come together in their creation of what Roland Barthes calls an “idiorrhythm”, that is, a structure that is “always made in opposition to power” (2012: 35) and that works through a “transitory, fleeting form” (35) rather than a regular, imposed cadence. Instead of creating harmony and helping the reader find their way in the narrative, Open City’s rhythm works through dissonances that disturb the reading process and thereby indicate latency. Open City’s transitory, fleeting rhythm “shake[s] us around as we try to fit [it] into patterns that cannot quite contain” it (Scruton 2009: 74): While some chapters start in medias res and with no apparent connection to the preceding narrative at all, others directly conjoin with the preceding chapter and produce coherence; and while some chapters seem to be predominated by what Brian Massumi calls “a potentially infinite series of submovements punctuated by jerks” (2002: 40), others nearly lack these submovements at all, focussing instead almost completely on other peoples’ stories (especially chapter 7, Dr. Maillote’s story, a large part of chapter 5, Saidu’s story, chapter 9, Farouq’s story and chapter 15, Dr. Saito’s story). The tempo of the narrative slows down when the narrative makes room for other people to tell their own stories, while it speeds up whenever Julius walks through the city where he inadvertently uncovers latent histories and stories and which metaphorically illustrates “the competitive arena of memory” (Kansteiner 2002: 179).

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This change between slowly proceeding chapters and chapters almost dominated by cinematic cuts introduces a movement in which we ultimately cannot join and that questions universally contained forms of meaning-making. As Kathryn Hume points out in relation to narrative speed in contemporary fiction, “the relative shortness of scenes, the lack of clear transitions from one to the next […] and […] the sheer number of plot units and people: all these leave us feeling disoriented, as if we have been blindfolded and then turned in circles” (Hume 2005: 113). As Hume furthermore points out, “[t]he most immediate effect of narrative speed upon resisting readers is bewilderment. That sensation makes most readers feel more vulnerable to any source of force within the narrative, whether authority against which the speed is being used or the power of the author” (120). Hume’s claim is also relevant for Open City, in which the ‘source of force within the narrative’, I claim, are latent memories that are brought into the realm of readerly perception through rhythmic variations. Open City does not provide closure, answers or readerly satisfaction where plot movement or character development are concerned, and most readers will quickly become aware of the fact that they are dealing with a multi-layered work of fiction that does not give away its secrets unsolicitedly. As Sam Reese and Alexandra Klingston-Reese underline, “[o]ne of the most obvious qualities that critics immediately recognized in the work was its subtlety, relying on a set of almost invisible connections” (2017: 105). While the hectic passages might first induce the reader to open up to “forces within the narrative”, the slower passages of the novel then call on the reader to look for connections, to find the “connective narrative tissue” (Hume 2005: 114). The subtlety of the work leads to a redistribution of literary value on the level of the narrative: Instead of looking for memories only in institutions and officially sanctioned memory practices, the text shows how place is a carrier of buried memories that linger under the surface. In this sense, the novel plays with expectations of presence and absence. As Giles Foden rightly observes, “[n]egative space (the space between forms or around utterances) is key. […]. We have to work hard to get it, searching in the gaps for what Julius calls ‘a double story’” (2011: n.pag.). However, what Foden calls the void between forms and utterances is not an empty space. Rather, it is an “ambiguous absence” (O’Gorman 2015: 74) which re-attunes readers as to what to expect from this novel. Before turning to the affordances of rhythm as a formal element and the two different ways it operates in the novel, I will in a first step show that memory is also an undercurrent theme in the novel on the level of content. Then, I will link this subliminal theme to the novel’s formal composition.

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4.1 Ambiguous Absences: Memories and the Blind Spot But in the dark spaces between the dead, shining stars were stars I could not see, stars that still existed, and were giving out light that hadn’t reached me yet, stars now living and giving out light but present to me only as blank interstices. (Open City 256)

Memory is often understood in terms of a basic dichotomy between presence and absence. In our officially regulated memory regimes, there is history (that which is made present and remembered publicly) and absence, an alleged lack of history and memory (van Dijk 2007: 2, 8). Open City shows that this dichotomy falters. In the final chapter of the novel, the protagonist engages in a reflection on the faultiness of our perception when it comes to perceived absences. Julius visits a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City. He is listening to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra playing Gustav Mahler’s symphonies under Simon Rattle. The ending might catch readers’ attention afresh, since it picks up two themes they have already come across at the beginning of the novel, namely the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler and the theme of migrating birds. Both operate as framing devices in Open City, alerting readers to their relevance due to their status as frame elements. The frame, Marie MacLean explains, “may act as a means of leading the eye into the picture, and the reader into the text, thus presenting itself as the key to a solipsistic world; or it may deliberately lead the eye out, and encourage the reader to concentrate on the context rather than the text” (1991: 273 – 274). In a similar vein, Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart claim that the frame operates as a “help to select (or construct) phenomena as forming a meaningful whole and therefore create coherent areas on our mental maps” (2006: 5). In the case of Open City, the framing through a historical persona and the theme of the migrating birds is too elusive as to constitute a ‘meaningful whole’. However, it does establish a latent topical concern for the novel, which I will elaborate on in the following. Julius is fascinated with Gustav Mahler, whom he calls “the genius of prolonged farewells” (Open City 250). What seems to interest Julius most in Mahler is his “obsession with last things” (250). He connects this sense of an ending with plays of light and dark: Mahler’s final works – Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth Symphons, the sketches of the Tenth – were all first performed posthumously; all are vast, strongly illuminated, and lively works, surrounded by the tragedy that was unfolding in the life. The overwhelming impression they give is of light: the light of a passionate hunger for life, the light of a sorrowful mind contemplating death’s implacable approach. (Open City 250, my emphasis, Y.L.)

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Life, for Julius, is light. “Lively works” are “illuminated”, “the passionate hunger for life” is light and the opposite of death is also light. The dichotomy between light and dark becomes even more apparent when Julius reflects on Mahler’s personal life: “All the darkness that surrounded him, the various reminders of frailty and mortality, were lit brightly from some unknown source, but even that light was shadowed” (Open City 250). As this quote shows, for Julius, darkness is semantically connected to death while light, even if coming from an “unknown source”, is intrinsically connected to life. This dichotomy and the words’ connotations – light being intrinsically positive while darkness is the unknown, possibly dangerous – are well-known throughout western cultures. The framing of the novel is centred on deconstructing this learned correlation. First, the novel runs counter to Julius’ dichotomy by ending on a negative connotation of light, thereby contradicting Julius’ positive association of light with life: At the end of the novel, Julius explains that it is the light of the Statue of Liberty which causes the death of many migrating birds. Migrating birds, just as references to Mahler, are a framing device of the novel. Julius watches the migrating birds from his apartment at the beginning of the novel and they ultimately find a tragic ending at its end. The novel ends with assessing that the Statue of Liberty – one of the prime symbols of the United States of America embodying hope and opportunity for those seeking a better life in America and stirring the desire for freedom in people all over the world – was used as a lighthouse at the beginning of the twentieth century but did not only guide ships into the harbour but also “fatally disoriented birds” (Open City 258). Julius explains that while the birds “were clever enough to dodge the cluster of skyscrapers in the city”, they “somehow lost their bearing when faced with a single monumental flame” (258). The flame, the single light here, in this instance stands in for death and eliminates life. The vast number of dead birds, so Julius concludes, was not entirely explicable and not in proportion to the alleged cause, the light of the Statue, and thus “the sense persisted that something more troubling was at work” (259). The connection between light and life is thus thwarted and tainted with a moment of insecurity that reflects our own gaps of knowledge hidden behind our learned epistemologies. Second, not only does the reader re-examine positive connotations associated with ‘light’ but also Julius himself finds reason to re-examine his understanding of light and dark on the same evening of the concert. Accidently entering the fire escape of the building where he moments ago listened to the concert, he finds himself locked out of the building. In the moment when he finally finds another entry into the building, he is struck by the starry sky, which he only then notices. Although he is struck by the light of the stars he can see, he simultaneously feels that something escapes his notice: “but I felt in my body what my eyes could not grasp, which was their true nature was the persisting visual echo of something

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that was already in the past” (256). The light that he sees, Julius realises, is not “the true nature” of his moment in time and space. Something other is at work, something which is not directly graspable. As Julius realises, “in the dark spaces between the dead, shining stars were stars I could not see, stars that still existed, and were giving out light that hadn’t reached me yet, stars now living and giving out light but present to me only as blank interstices” (256). The light that he does perceive is connected to death while the stars that ‘still exist’ are not perceptible for him, but still there, still having an impact. Finally, Julius comes to understand that his “entire being was caught up in a blind spot” (256). The novel puts this reflection about perceived absences and false learned dichotomies centre stage by engaging with it in its final pages and by connecting it to the framing device of both Mahler and the migrating birds. Light and dark, presence and absence, are relative concepts one has to decouple from learned ideas about them. Whenever we see light, the last passage underlines, there is also something which escapes our attention. This image is intricately connected to the dynamics of remembering and forgetting that are latent in the novel. The dichotomies between visibility and invisibility, past and present and life and death, which are at the heart of Teju Cole’s Open City, are all connected to mechanisms of latency. Just like the stars whose light we see but whose source remains obscure, stories and histories are latently present in the novel, which makes them at the same time present and absent. Memory as a topical concern is not put centre stage in the novel’s story – except maybe for the fact that Julius refuses to remember his own personal past –; there are no historical ‘events’ of the past that are reworked or thematised in connection to the central character. The topic of remembering the collective past – in contrast to Julius’ personal past – is relegated to the realm of the latent. In one of the slow chapters that especially confine our attention, Julius talks to Dr Saito, a retired and terminally ill academic and a mentor to Julius. While Dr Saito and Julius discuss the headlines of the New York Times relating to the ongoing war (the Iraq war), Dr Saito explains that the interpretation of the past is subjective and comments on the necessity of granting individuals the right to tell their own stories: I read the headlines from the Times, and the first two paragraphs of each story on the front page. Most of them were about the war. I looked up from the paper and said, It’s almost too much to think about, all the intended and unintended consequences of this invasion. […] Yes, Professor Saito said, but I felt that way about a different war. In 1950, we were deeply worried about the Korean situation. […] By the time Vietnam came around, it was a different pressure, at least for those of us who had been psychologically invested in Korea. […] You go through that experience only once, the experience of how futile a war can be. […] And now with this war, it’s a mental battle for a different generation, your generation. There are towns whose

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names evoke a real horror in you because you have learned to link those names with atrocities, but, for the generation that follows yours, those names will mean nothing; forgetting doesn’t take long. Fallujah will be as meaningless to them as Daejeon is to you. (Open City 170 – 171)

Memory, Dr Saito stresses, is formed in relation of intimacy to one’s own generation and cultural coming of age and cannot be learned or dictated by any other cultural transmission. True empathy, that is, feeling “horror”, as Professor Saito puts it, for the fate of others, is limited. This short passage of reflecting on memory is central to the thematisation of memory in the novel as a whole, since the novel stresses the co-existence of different if not incompatible collective memories within contemporary society and the competitive nature of their collective remembrance. While different histories and memories lie seemingly forgotten in the texture of the city and the minds of its individuals, their co-existence is deeply dependent on the power structures of present-day memory communities. While latency attests to their co-existence, we as readers should be aware not to generalise histories of violence even if they share a latent co-existence. Latency invites us to read these histories alongside each other, but it might run the risk of glossing over their singularities. The hierarchisation of memory is an underlying thematic threat in the novel. Already the novel’s setting stresses that memory is subject to hierarchisation. Set in the wake of 9/11 and during the Iraq war in Manhattan, the novel could be read as a 9/11 novel. However, as Daniel O’Gorman points out, “Manhattan is a site upon which multiple realities jostle for space” (2015: 41). As Dr Saito’s comments make clear, 9/11 is not “[t]his most real of all events” (Versluys 2009: 3) for all New Yorkers. Which historical events matter in the public sphere and which are less important for a certain community is a subjective evaluation and needs to be seen through the lens of the particular and not the universalising. Although each of the wars mentioned by Professor Saito proves “how futile a war can be” (Open City 170), they are still different experiences for the involved subjects. Through its formal composition – its framing and rhythm – the novel communicates something to its readers about memory, without being didactic or explicit. Rather, it stresses our growing incapability of listening to the slowly evolving, to that which we cannot subsume under the narratives we tell ourselves – or rather the narratives that are being made available to us. Like Julius, we might often find ourselves “unable to be fully present to [the] conversation” (Open City 172), constantly “assimilating the singular” (Melas 2007: 37) into dominant discourses and pre-given stories and formula. As Julius says about Farouq, an African immigrant he meets in Brussels and who “wanted to be the next Edward Said” (Open City 128) but whose thesis was rejected, “[t]here was something powerful about him, a

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seething intelligence, something that wanted to believe itself indomitable. But he was one of the thwarted ones. His script would stay in proportion” (Open City 129, my emphasis, Y.L.). His script has already been written for Farouq and Julius drily remarks that he is unable to deal with Farouq once his story becomes a singularity: “He had brought me too close to his pain, and I no longer saw him” (129). Julius’ “highly selective recollection of events” (O’Gorman 2015: 58) and his choice of whom to truly listen to raise the reader’s awareness as to how memory often works in an institutionalised, medialised society. In a next step, I will show how it is the text’s rhythm that alerts the reader to Julius’ incapabilities and thus functions as a socio-political commentary on memory regimes as well.

4.2 The Affordances of Rhythm The novel’s play with absences and presences and its latent reflection on memory are connected to its formal composition. In the novel, form is inherently linked to socio-cultural commentary. In her influential study Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2017), Caroline Levine emphasises the connection between literary forms and socio-political agency. Her argument is that “paying attention to subtle and complex formal patterns allows us to rethink the historical workings of political power and the relations between politics and aesthetics” (2015: xiii). In her study, she counters the New Criticism approaches to literature according to which the text can or should stand isolated by itself. To the contrary, for Levine, “[l]iterary form does not operate outside of the social but works among many organizing principles” (7). Politics and the social, according to Levine, are intricately connected to ‘forms’ – by which she understands “all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference” (3) – as politics involve “activities of ordering, patterning, and shaping” (3). Analysing literary texts and their formal composition thus allows for an allegory of the organisation of our social and political life. In this vein, her approach to literature clearly considers literature as a forming agent in the socio-political sphere. Since traditional social approaches to processes of remembering are intricately bound to processes of ‘ordering and patterning’, labelling and comparing, Levine’s ideas are especially relevant to reflecting on literature’s interconnection with existing memory regimes. Following Levine’s elaboration, literature has the potential to reshape pre-existing structures of remembering collectively. Forms, according to Levine, can do various things at once, often even contradictory ones (2015: 6). Levine emphasises the latent potential of forms, which she calls a form’s affordance (6). In interaction with other forms, forms bring to the fore potentialities that have stayed hidden up to that point and that only get acti-

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vated in interaction or in a special arrangement. Forms travel and interact and their affordances might change depending on their encounters with other forms or contexts. While form as a concept in itself might suggest constraint, in interaction “[e]ach constraint will encounter many other, different organizing principles, and its power to impose order will itself be constrained, and at times unsettled, by other forms” (7). As “[n]ew encounters may activate latent affordances or foreclose otherwise dominant ones” (7), forms cannot only reflect their own uses and histories but also trigger meta-commentaries on the working of form in general. Emphasising the Eigensinn of literary forms and the ways that they construct new formations which might counter their traditional uses – rhythm, for instance, was originally a formal element to create harmony –, forms can shed light on the “social disorganization” (17) and counter the homogenisation of experience. In this, they can make room for new experiences and challenge well-worn ideas with which we might have become all too comfortable. In this sense, “exploring the many ways in which multiple forms of order, sometimes the results of the same powerful ideological formation, may unsettle one another” (17), asks readers to reconsider what they perceive as stable within non-literary orders as well. Rhythm is one such formal element which has become associated with certain functions but which can also exert the exact opposite function as a form of social critique. In her study, Levine dedicates a chapter especially to the potential of rhythms to exercise political agency: “I make the case that despite their power to coerce and organize, rhythms, like bounded wholes, can be put to strategic ends and have the potential to work with and against other forms to surprisingly transformative political effect” (2015: 52). This transformative political effect can, among many other things, be the way a text interacts with existing memory discourses and challenge or think them ahead. The form of a literary work can work towards shaping and nuancing the text as a mnemonic object. In this, the mnemonic political work is not primarily bound to a text’s plot but is negotiated in the interaction of its formal elements with and beyond the plot. This understanding of form as a mnemonic device widens the intersection between literature and memory by reshifting the focus from content to form but also by focussing on different aspects of a text’s form. Within the context of memory studies, this is an important step. While literary works have often been analysed with regard to, for instance, genre conventions and intertextuality, other formal elements, such as rhythm or tempo, are rarely investigated when analysing a text’s mnemonic work. In this chapter, I want to expand Levine’s work on rhythm, which focuses mostly on poetry, to the manifold workings of rhythm in the novel and investigate how the interplay, the entanglement of rhythm and other formal elements of the novel – such as characters and space descriptions – opens up new trajectories for the novel.

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Rhythm as a formal element is elusive, since the term is a vague term that resists explicit conceptualisations and definitions (Cuddy-Keane et al. 2013: 207). Maybe because of its elusiveness, rhythm has seldom been interpreted with regard to novels.⁴ Broadly, one could understand rhythm as “a more organic, more naturally various form of repetition” (203) which is intricately connected to temporal patternings in novels (Caracciolo 2014: 24). However, while in Modernism, rhythm was most often connected to the establishment of harmony (206 – 207), today rhythm often has a disruptive quality. Rhythm is a formal element that often goes against established forms of temporal experience and counters hegemonic definitions of temporal succession, staging a “struggle between measured, imposed, external time and a more endogenous time” (Lefebvre 2004: 99), that is, a more singular, individual understanding of time which resists universalising tendencies. Rhythms connect “space, time and energies” (18) and thus operate through networks and relationalities (65) instead of pre-destined hierarchies. Therefore, rhythms do not constitute knowledge systems, they “enter […] into the lived; though that does not mean it enters into the known” (77). The rhythmanalysist, as Lefebvre calls those people engaged with rhythms in his study Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (2004), “listens to the world, and above all to what are disdainfully called noises, which are said without meaning, and murmurs [rumeurs], full of meaning – and finally he will listen to silences” (19). Narratives which use specific rhythms can have the effect to refocus readers’ attention. As Marco Caracciolo claims, “[t]he organization of narrative discourse has a major role in shaping recipients’ experience of narrative: we don’t just respond to story-level events and existents (e. g. characters and spaces), we respond to the ways in which they are represented by discourse” (Caracciolo 2014: 50). Rhythm as an organisational element of narrative can thus interact with epistemologies and silences on the content level, alerting readers to pay attention to what is not being said or revealed. In his work, Lefebvre not only connects rhythms to the acknowledgement and creative investigation of the meaning of silences, but also to memory. Lefebvre asks: “Are there not alternatives to memory and forgetting: periods where the past returns – and periods where the past effaces itself?” (2004: 51). While memory and the past are often covered up by the distractions of modern life and ultimately capitalism, rhythm has the potential to uncover remnants of the past and bring them temporarily to the surface. Idiorrhythm thus exposes the “ersatz harmonies of modernity” (Barrows 2017: 180) for what they are and which remain “powerfully

 In Modernism, however, rhythm in novels has been analysed more frequently, especially with regard to Virginia Woolf (Cuddy-Keane et al. 2013).

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fraught with discordance and dissonance just underneath the surface of reality” (180). In this sense, rhythmanalysis “reveals latent and volatile potentialities within the times of the local and the everyday to shape and redirect the rhythms of the global” (189) and the memories that the globally competitive memory arena (Kansteiner 2002: 179) continually perpetuates. Rhythm is therefore not only a formal element of narrative but also a connective device which links the microcosmos of novels to wider socio-political realities. In Open City, the formal element of rhythm interacts with space descriptions to create what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls a Stimmung. “A Stimmung”, he writes, “like weather or music, is something that wraps our bodies and that affects them with a physical touch so light that we are tempted to overlook its material character” (2009: 90). Stimmungen give the reader a “quasi-physical certainty of being in the presence of something latent” (2009: 90). While Gumbrecht concentrates on the potential of weather and music descriptions to create Stimmungen in a literary work, in Open City it is rhythm as a formal element which gives readers the impression of a latent stowaway (Gumbrecht 2013: 23). Just as rhythm itself, Stimmungen work on two levels in the novel. First, the rhythm of the novel’s macro structure affects the reader and makes them feel a “certainty of being in the presence of something latent” (90), thus creating a Stimmung for the reader. Second, on the microstructure, the rhythm of Julius’ walks through the city create a Stimmung that affects him as a character. It is the Stimmungen created by the rhythm that ultimately alert the reader that there are perceived absences at work in the novel and direct their attention away from the narrator-protagonist and toward the formal composition of the novel.

4.3 The Rhythm of Reading Open City In the novel, rhythm mainly designates the temporal structure of the text, its repetitions and its general tempo: Where in the novel does the text linger on, adding descriptive passages that appear narratively unmotivated, and where does it rush through the plot, barely stopping to give explanations? Contrary to what Rawi Hage claims in his praise of the novel, Open City does not “unfold with the tempo of a profound, contemplative walk” (Open City n.pag.). Rather, the novel alternates between suspiciously slow and ‘contemplative’ passages and enigmatically abrupt alternations in topic and voice, the “mental disassociations” (Open City 18) which the reader just as the narrator-protagonist fears “might knock [us] of [our] stride” (18). Open City might make readers feel that the “prose whizzes by us, and we suffer from the sense that it flashes along too rapidly for us to grasp the logic or keep track of what is happening” (Hume 2005: 107). Indeed, even “[r]eading slowly

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and carefully does not entirely free us from the sense that we are missing things through speed” (107). In contrast to Open City’s rushed-by passages, which might trigger a feeling of anxiety in the reader resulting from the impression that the narrative escapes their grasp, there are also some chapters in the novel which consciously reduce speed, a practice which “naturally forces our attention” (Hume 2005: 108). Contrary to the reader’s expectations, however, the slower passages of the novel do not result in some form of relief, insight, understanding, or closure. Although the slower passages might force our attention, the text does not give clues as to where to look and what to focus one’s attention on, resulting in a feeling of being lost in the narrative. Analysing the novel’s rhythm thus does not mean focussing on speedy or slow passages of the novel individually, but bringing into contact these passages and analysing their dynamic relationships, their “plural rhythmicity” (Highmore 2005: 9). The rhythm brings together different traces of the past that come to interact with one another, showing that beneath the officially sanctioned memory culture of cities such as New York other stories lie hidden. Open City highlights that societies such as those of New York or Brussels only on the surface follow a “monorhythmic harmony” which is “in fact shot through with discordant and uneasily harmonized rhythms that signify and indeed are themselves the very foundation for potentiality and transformation” (Barrows 2017: 175). In this, the novel’s memory politics makes a contribution to questioning western heterotemporality. Pheng Cheah explains in his study What is a World: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (2016) that “the world is made up of multiple temporalities that can only be liberated by exploding Western capitalist modernity’s linear time” (2016: 12). To this end, he explains, one has to scrutinise the “complicities between the teleological time of Western modernity’s universal narrative of progress, colonial violence, and the linear time of capitalist exploitation” (2016: 12). Open City’s disruption of monorhythmic harmony contributes to this deconstruction of what Cheah calls “Western capitalist modernity’s linear time” by latently remembering structures and systems of western violence and oppression. By unveiling these cities’ false image of harmony, the novel shows that rhythm is a powerful tool to question learned perceptions, such as that of rhythm as necessarily creating harmony. Indeed, rhythm is intricately connected to power structures (Barthes 2012: 35) and the social order as it is not an inherent quality but rather “a temporal order imposed upon” a sequence (Scruton 2009: 60). The stories and histories that are embedded in Julius’ narrative disturb this imposed harmony and introduce a different rhythm to the text as they do not – as rhythm normally should do – create “a movement in which we can join” (74) but rather constitute the exact opposite of an “implacably regular cadence” (Barthes 2012: 8). Although the text imitates the contrapuntal composition of the fugue (Neumann and Kappel

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2019), it does not create harmony but constant frictions and dissonances which take the focus away from the ‘main narrative’ and increase the sensibility for latent forces and “hidden files” that start to crystallise. The novel’s formal composition thereby unleashes an excessive rest that produces “idiorrhythm” – a structure that is “always made in opposition to power” (Barthes 2012: 35) and that works through a “transitory, fleeting form” (35) rather than a regular, imposed cadence. Idiorrhythm in fact comes into being within “the interstices, the fugitivity of the code” (7) and thus draws the readers’ attention to the margins, to the latent, and teaches them “the ability to trace out a story from what was omitted” (Open City 9). In this sense, the idiorhythmic form of the novel is connected to the latent topical concern of memory introduced by the framing of the narrative. It raises awareness of the gap-structure of public memory discourses which by design create coherent narratives on the basis of other forgotten stories. In the novel, this is most prominently underlined by the juxtaposition of the memory of 9/11 with the lack of remembrance when it comes to the many stories of migration, embodied in the novel by, among others, the Liberian Julius visits in prison or the bootblack from Haiti. Even the story of 9/11 itself, which is often instrumentalised to trigger fear of a threatening Other, is underpinned in the novel by latent parts of this event that are mostly overshadowed by the grander, politically instrumentalised narrative. Julius’ walking brings these latent parts of the story to the fore. “Everyone else”, he notices, “went straight ahead, and nothing separated them, nothing separates us, from the people who had worked directly across the street on the day of disaster” (Open City 58). The rhythm with which he walks the city disturbs the alleged harmony of the cosmopolitan city and creates room for marginalised stories and memories. In this sense, analysing Open City’s rhythm makes the reader “use [their] understanding of the affordances of aesthetic rhythms – repetition and difference, memory and anticipation – to understand social rhythms” (Levine 2015: 53). On a macro level, the novel’s rhythm is created by alternating slow and fast chapters. While the slower chapters are most often dedicated to other people’s stories, the faster chapters connect several “submovements” (Massumi 2002) but without linking the “form of content” with its “intensity” (24), which makes them particularly affective. Chapter two, for instance, is completely made up of these ‘submovements’ which do not congeal into meaningful units of analysis. The chapter begins with a crowd marching outside of Julius’ window. At first, Julius cannot understand the voices, as “the words did not resolve into meaning, and most of the crowd […] remained obscured by darkness” (Open City 22). A moment later, the voices come nearer and Julius can understand the words: “We have the power, we have the might, the solitary voice called. The answer came: The streets are ours, take back the night” (23, emphasis in original). Julius realises that the crowd under

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his window is protesting for women’s rights and he closes the window and the narrative moves on. Next, Julius recalls having met an old friend before coming home who “was especially passionate about jazz” (23), and he remarks that he himself does not have a “strong emotional connection” with Jazz, what he calls “the most American of musical styles” (24). Shortly afterwards, a new digression sets in, which leads Julius from reminiscing about the Yoruba belief of Obatala, a God who fashions “damaged human beings” (25), without further elaboration to a recent visit to the movies, which in turn leads him to think about a book written by one of his patients about law enforcement officer of New Amsterdam, Cornelis Van Tienhoven, “shedding light on a forgotten chapter in colonial history” (26). The movie he then finally watches leaves him frustrated due to its “fidelity to the convention of the good white man in Africa” (29). Outside the theatre, he comes upon two young children who call him a gangster due to his black skin colour before realising “[h]e’s black […] but he’s not dressed like a gangster” (32). The chapter finally concludes with Julius deciding that he wants to find his grandmother in Brussels. The different beats coming together in this chapter do not create harmony, but a recurring rhythm constituted by “temporal and narrative noise” (Massumi 2002: 26) that accumulates to form an intensity whose connection between content and effect remains obscure. The reader is affected by a Stimmung, without being able to discern its origin. According to Brian Massumi and recent affect theory, this gap enables a different kind of connectivity, one that is “narratively delocalized” (25). This narrative delocalisation leads the reader to explore the submovements without linking them directly to the narrator-protagonist, who, while reading the traces of the city and his environment, is rendered unable to interpret these. The common thread that the submovements share is the bringing to attention of unacknowledged histories of western exploitation inscribed into the materiality of the city and which come to the fore due to the open play with rhythm. Similarly, some chapters that work through a hectic and chaotic rhythm characterised by a lacking connection between content and effect deal with Julius’ reluctance to acknowledge his transcultural affiliations and his own past. Eager to affirm his cosmopolitan identity on the one hand and almost denying his African affiliations on the other, Julius asserts that his childhood and his connection to Nigeria “was finished with, and of no import for the present” (Open City 136). The iterative rhythm of the narrative, however, highlights that this is not entirely true. Although he is not keen on acknowledging a possible link between him and several “brothers” he encounters, their historically entangled connection keeps informing the narrative, since references to Julius’ cultural heritage trouble him throughout the narrative in form of dreams and associative recolletions. In this sense, what the hectic rhythm of these chapter highlights, above all, is that “each one of those past mo-

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ments was present now as a trace” (Open City 54) and that Julius is definitely not free of his relationship to Africa and everything that this relationship entails. The change in rhythm, as already indicated before, can be taken as a sign for latency, for something starting to emerge from being relegated to the margin. The incoherent, often seemingly totally unconnected cuts that underwrite any attempt at a coherent, teleological narrative present a “pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies, […] a realm of potential” (Massumi 2002: 30). This realm of potential created by the change in rhythm is where “futurity combines, unmediated, with pastness” (30). Julius’ reluctance to acknowledge his relation to the African continent and Nigeria especially can be read as an analogy for the US’s suppression of overlooked instances of violence and exploitation throughout time. These overlooked or repressed histories start to crystallise in scenes such as Julius’ visit to a detention facility for undocumented immigrants (Open City 62 f.) or the hectic change between him reminiscing about how during the afternoon “time became elastic and voices cut out of the past into the present, the heart of the city was gripped by what seemed to be a commotion from an earlier time” (74), immediately afterwards seeing “the body of a lynched man dangling from a tree” (75) only to realise that it is in fact “dark canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling the wind” (75). Julius does not explain why he might have mistaken the canvas sheeting for a lynched man, but the rhythm of the passage leaves the reader with a Stimmung that invites further contemplation and makes the reader aware of “a pain or […] a fear […] that continues to be present, physically present in part, without having become graspable” (Gumbrecht 2009: 94). The rhythm does not provide a readerly friendly guide through the story but rather works through continuous changes in tempo that intentionally disorient the reader and – to stay with the musical vocabulary to which ‘rhythm’ belongs – introduces what Pieter Vermeulen calls “sheer noise” (2015: 94) which cannot be ordered into categories or easily analysed. The novel’s interplay of different tempos continuously questions linear trajectories and by its very nature stresses “movements and differences within repetition” (Lefebvre 2004: 90). By bringing together seemingly unrelated histories, the rhythm stresses mutualisms and entanglements which disrupt the linear, teleological idea of history, which forms a basic pillar of western modernity and instead shows the recurring nature of neglected memories.

4.4 Rhythm on the Micro Level: Julius Walking the City Walking the city is central to the very structure of the text and the text’s rhythm is thus also intricately connected to the multi-layered view of the city that it produ-

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ces. In his study Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City (2005), cultural studies scholar Ben Highmore declares: If cities have rhythms, so do all accounts of cities: movement is as essential to film, for instance, as it is to the actuality of the street. […] [A] concentration on movement and rhythm insist on figuring the city as a dynamic and living entity, thus curtailing the tendency towards fixed interpretative accounts of historical materials. (Highmore 2005: 9)

Julius’ way of walking through the city – and while doing so reflecting on its history – results in “unsystematic history” (Cole qtd. in Reese and Klingston-Reese 2017: 108) which challenges ordered, restrictive and hierarchical memory regimes. The rhythm that his walking produces thus “is useful not simply in its foregrounding of the dynamic of urban life” (Highmore 2005: 9). Rather, as Highmore attests, rhythm is also a means to question dualities of perception: “rhythm might well be considered as the third term in a number of dualisms, a third term that supplies the active ingredient for thinking through a dialectical relationship” (9). As Highmore further explains, “rhythm overcomes the separation of time and space – rhythm is on the side of spacing, on the side of the durational aspects of place and the spatial arrangements of tempo” (9). For Open City, the dualistic relationship that is most challenged through rhythm is that between absence and presence, forgetting and remembering. Moreover, focussing on Open City’s rhythm means overcoming the strict separation of time and space and leads the reader to uncover how these two are always interrelated, showing the city to be a place of temporal overlayerings in which “multiple realities jostle for space” (O’Gorman 2015: 41). Walking the ground, Julius uncovers the latent virtuality of the city, that is all the stories inscribed into it which reside in the virtual and have not yet been actualised. Ultimately, as Krishnan maintains in her analysis of the novel, “the open city reveals its rooting as a space of submission and violation, against which the myth of liberty through flux cannot maintain its illusions” (2015: 676). As the novel slowly but persistently uncovers forgotten experiences that displace hegemonic interpretations, it invites us to reconceive systematic history as a power struggle between affirmation and disavowal, identity and alterity, self and other. While Open City touches upon many different topics and concerns – ranging from failed cosmopolitanism (see Vermeulen 2015; Hallemeier; Krishnan 2015; Elze 2017), immigrant experiences (see Elze 2017; Varvogli 2017), to cross-cultural relations and race (see Saint 2018; Krishnan 2015; Neumann and Rippl 2021) – it should not be forgotten that it is also an urban novel that puts the city centre stage as “a site of power, desire and community” (Foden 2011: n.pag.). Its title already alerts the reader to the centrality of the ‘city’ and the protagonist’s practice of walking through the city can be considered the central organising element of the

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novel. The reader follows the protagonist through the city and gets insight into what he sees, which in turn gives occasion for his numerous digressions of thought. The practice of walking the city as an organising element of the novel right from the start puts focus on movement and dynamism. The city comes into being as Julius walks its streets and parks, making visible some things for him while withholding others. What is being made perceptible for the reader is being uncovered through movement and exploration, highlighting that a traditional understanding of remembrance as solely fortified by monuments and institutions is a very limited understanding. Rather than being understood as a lack, silences and absences are often also loaded with memories. The American historian Jay Winter elaborates on this in his essay “Thinking about Silence” (2010): In the landscape we survey, silences are spaces either beyond words or conventionally delimited as left out of what we talk about. Topographically, they are there whether or not they come to the surface; and their re-emergence into our line of sight can occasion a reiteration of the interdiction on talking about them or the end of the interdiction itself … Critically, therefore, we cannot accept the commonplace view that silence is the space of forgetting and speech the realm of remembrance. Instead, we offer the following definition of silence. Silence … is a socially constructed space in which and about which subjects and words normally used in everyday life are not spoken. (Winter 2010: 4)

Open City exposes the idea of silence as an indication of forgetting as socially constructed. Through its rhythm, the novel shows that next to the great monuments of cities such as New York or Brussels there are also silenced histories that are part of the cities’ topography. In her study Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today, Sharon Macdonald attests that “[p]laces are publicly imbued with timedepth through reference to historical narratives, and their historical content legitimated through institutions such as exhibitions, local history books and memorial plaques” (2013: 4). Time-depth and the capacity to carry memory are connected to acts of legitimisation in Macdonald’s study. Indeed, her quote reflects the common association of History with a capital H and certain places. Waterloo, the Somme and Normandy are just the most explicit examples. However, as Jay Winter’s quote illustrates, landscapes also carry memories when they appear to be silent, when they are not connected to hegemonic memory discourses, “they are there whether or not they come to the surface” (Winter 2010: 4). Julius’ practice of walking serves to refocus attention on that which is below the radar, invisible to most. Walking New York and Brussels, respectively, Julius is an “ordinary practitioner[…] of the city” (de Certeau 2011: 93) who operates “below the threshold at which visibility begins” (93). Julius’ walking is not a consciously planned activity. Rather, it is “aimless” (Open City 3) and works through latent mo-

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tivations unknown to the protagonist himself. Following de Certeau, I would claim that Julius’ body “follow[s] the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’” (de Certeau 2011: 93) which directs him through the city. Blindly following where his body leads him, Julius “make[s] use of spaces that cannot be seen” (93) and thus becomes part of a network of which he is not in full control. The networks of which he becomes part through his walking “compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces” (93). It is this “opaque and blind mobility” (93) which not only characterises Julius’ movement through the cities but also the reader’s navigation through the text, since the reader cannot detect an overlaying motive to Julius’ wanderings. The energy of the city drives the protagonist forward in his wanderings and equally, the rhythm of the text drives the reader forward, thereby creating a similar experience for the reader: being driven by a latent force that remains undefinable. The reader and the protagonist thus come to share invisibility as a “perceptual mode” (Reese and Klingston-Reese 2017: 117). Just like Julius, we as readers do not know where the text is taking us and must accept that the macro-structure remains impenetrable to us. The two levels of rhythm converge in that it is mostly passages that describe Julius’ rhythm creating movement through the city which gather in speed formally. This creates the effect for the reader as if they were exploring the city alongside Julius, sharing his restlessness and lack of direction. Entering a subway still absorbed in the day’s work, Julius forgets to leave the wagon when his stop arrives: “when the train reached 116th Street, I simply watched the doors open, stay open, and close. The car moved past my stop, and momentarily I tried to figure out what had happened. I hadn’t been asleep. My staying on, I finally decided, was intentional, if not conscious” (Open City 44). Just like Julius watches the doors of the train stay open only to finally close without anything having happened, the reader also reads through passages such as this one expecting something to happen but finally simply trying to figure out “what had happened” (44). However, the text does not grant its reader time to dwell on possible implications of scenes such as this, because the narrative instantly rushes on. Switching to a train which “happens to arrive on the platform just at that moment” (45), Julius carries on through the city, letting chance decide where he goes and what he sees. Spontaneously getting off at a platform where “no one got off ” (45), Julius finds himself at Wall Street. The space that he enters when leaving the subway is characterised by various forms of enclosure and restriction: “I took the escalator up, and as I came out onto the mezzanine level, I saw the ceiling – high, white, and consisting of a series of interconnected vaults – slowly reveal itself as though it were a retractable dome in the act of closing” (46, my emphasis, Y.L.). The space directly underneath the street that metonymically represents the American finan-

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cial services industry and World capitalism more generally – itself associated with progress and success – makes the narrator think of vaults, thus evoking, among others, the connotations of death and burials. However, the space is more ambiguous and constantly eschews easy classifications. Although the vocabulary creates the impression of an entrapped space, the narrator remarks that he was surprised that the space was “so elaborate” because he has “expected all the stations in lower Manhattan would be mean and perfunctory, that they would consist only of tiled tunnels and narrow exits” (46). The literary description, however, through indefinite and ambiguous nuances challenges the “grandeur of the space” (46): The train station though at first reminding Julius of “the florid Gothic style of England” (46) soon turns out to be more like a “large-scale model” (46), an imitation of something else. The feeling of being in a large-scale model is strangely “increased by the lonely palm trees in their pots, and by the few groups of people” he sees (46). Playing chess and backgammon, their “languid, focused faces” (47) create the impression of being among “life-size mannequins” (47). Additionally, the players in the ‘large-scale-model’ are divided by skin colour: on the one side of the aisle the players are exclusively black while the two players on the other side are both white. The narrative does not develop anything out of this scene; it does not seem to fulfil any obvious narrative function but creates an uncanny Stimmung through strange associations: The text asks us to link the station’s “assemblage of white plastic” to the Victorian era and the “grandeur” of the space to the idea of artificiality, it being just a ‘large-scale-model’. At the same time, the word ‘grandeur’ is set into juxtaposition and contrast with racial segregation in form of the players who are spatially separated in the enclosed space. Julius’ walking results in a juxtaposition of this space with other spaces and creates latent connections between them. Right after he leaves the station, the scene becomes livelier, people “mov[ing] around, talking on their phones, presumably headed home” (Open City 47). Outside the enclosed space there is movement, with “human voices” everywhere (47). The narrative composition, though not explicitly, now contrasts the enclosed space with the open, allegedly more cosmopolitan space of the street where Julius, walking “toward the west” (47), immediately encounters “a falafel vendor” and “black women in charcoal gray skirt suits, and young, clean-shaven Indian-American men” (47). The juxtaposition of the subway scene with Julius’ impressions once he leaves the underground space creates a telling image. Segregation, the composition of this scene suggests, is buried underneath the surface – in the subway station literally, but also metaphorically –, while “toward the west” people of different cultural affiliations apparently coexist equally in the same space. Walking on, Julius comes past Trinity Church and Alexander Hamilton’s monument (49) on its churchyard. The rhythm of the narrative here establishes a recurring theme: The open, more liberal space is

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again made to resonate with a monumental building with acknowledged value. The church, however, similar to the station giving the impression of the “Gothic style of England” (46), is a closed space – this time in the literal sense as the church “was locked” (49). The rhythm brings together scenes that either deal with enclosure in a certain space or exclusion from and impossibility to enter a space. The text therefore brings together “[t]he claustrophobic feeling of being locked into a space that has ‘no exit’ with the opposing, yet complementary obsession of being outside a space that has ‘no entry’” (Gumbrecht 2013: 35), a feeling which Gumbrecht connects to situations of latency. In Open City, the simultaneous exclusion and inclusion of the protagonist in public spaces signals his in-between position and the ambivalence of public spaces and monumental buildings and their relation to latent mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Julius is a protagonist who although he walks and reads the city habitually and seems to know a lot about its architecture and history does not seem to fully belong. By positioning the privileged protagonist – an educated male psychiatrist who is privileged enough to walk the city at his leisure, both by day and night – as somebody who still seems to be characterised from the outside as at least partially Other – one only needs to remember the scene in which the children perceive him as a “gangster” (Open City 32) –, the novel showcases the deep embeddedness of exclusionary practices in modern urban culture and highlights the fragility of cosmopolitan ideals. Ultimately, the spaces closed to Julius or in which he feels enclosed are spaces in which “the open city reveals its rooting as a space of submission and violation, against which the myth of liberty through flux cannot maintain its illusions” (Krishnan 2015: 676). The city’s connection to acts of submission and violence are especially reflected in monumental buildings, which make memory culture an underlying thread in the novel, and which finds its peak in Julius’ description of the 9/11 monument. When Julius then finally arrives at the 9/11 monument, this site has already become one among many. Contemplating the ruins of the World Trade Centre, the narrator remarks that other than being “walled with wood and chain link” (Open City 52), “nothing announced its significance” (52). “The place had become a metonym of its disaster” (52), the narrator remarks, linking the disaster to its locality through the use of the pronoun. The global importance attributed to this one spot in the city that the chapter links to so many other invisibilised stories retained in space is man-made and discursively constructed. The space itself is not more significant than other spaces. It is just the knowledge of its globally circulated history which makes it appear more important than other visible and invisible memory sites in the city. The novel constantly challenges “commemorative discourses surrounding September 11th” which, as Bond and Rapson put it in a different context, “remain entangled with complex hierarchies of life that have been made particu-

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larly explicit in the post-9/11 era” (2014: 5). Especially what David Simpson calls “the rhetorical colonization […] of Lower Manhattan as ‘sacred ground’” (2008: 213) is directly relativised in Open City. What the rhythmic exploration of New York City underlines is that memory work must move beyond the focus on events such as 9/11 with its narrative of easily identifiable victims and perpetrators and instead reflect on the mechanisms that hierarchise acts of memory and make the lives of those who died on 11th September 2001 more worthy of remembrance than the lives of those who died from structural and systematic acts of violence in this world city and who still suffer from these acts of violence today. Julius’ walking practice brings to the fore the disruptive potential inherent in the latent resources of the past to confront the grand monuments hailing the nation’s achievements with acts of exploitation, violence and forced migration. Reflecting on the empty space left behind by the World Trade Centre buildings, Julius warily notes: This was not the first erasure of the site. Before the towers had gone up, there had been a bustling network of little streets traversing this part of town. Robinson Street, Laurens Street, College Place: all of them had been obliterated in the 1960s to make way for the World Trade Center buildings, and all were forgotten now […] The Syrians, the Lebanese, and other people from the Levanant had been pushed across the river to Brooklyn. (Open City 58 – 59)⁵

Julius’ remark shows that claims that “[e]verything has changed” (Gray 2011: 25) after 9/11 do not hold true. He exposes the bias behind such claims by establishing links throughout the city which hint at other disasters connected to the city but not as visible as the events of 11th September 2001. Immigrants, Julius’ remark shows, have always had a difficult time in New York, despite the city literally being built by immigrants, “the Europeans [who] had come up the Hudson and settled on this island” (Open City 49) and many other immigrants coming after. In this sense, the title of the novel may not only allude to the practice of surrendering a city to occupying forces during wartime, but also to “contemporary open cities – or ‘cities of refuge’” which might “‘reorient the politics of the state’ so as to be more open to

 Compare also the following scene in Let the Great World Spin (chapter Seven): “He had gone to the World Trade Center and had strung his rope across the biggest towers in the world. The Twin Towers. Of all places. So brash. So glassy. So forward-looking. Sure, the Rockefellers had knocked down a few Greek revival homes and a few classic brownstones to make way for the towers-which had annoyed Claire when she read about it – but mostly it had been electronics stores and cheap auction houses where men with quick tongues had sold everything useless under the sun, carrot peelers and radio flashlights and musical snow globes. In place of the shysters, the Port Authority had built two towering beacons high in the clouds. The glass reflected the sky, the night, the colors: progress, beauty, capitalism” (Spin 248).

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the values of asylum and hospitality” (O’Gorman 2015: 61) and thus on a meta-level reprimand the alleged ‘open-ness’ of megacities such as New York. The allegedly “fluid cultural borders” that, according to Susanne Gehrmann (2016), are genuine to New York – in her reading a ‘liberal’ and truly cosmopolitan city – are shown to be inextricably linked to histories of violence, displacement and xenophobia: While some aspects of New York’s transcultural history are made visible, many others are erased and simply “forgotten now”, underscoring the hierarchisation of conventional memory practices. As O’Gorman rightly points out, Brussels being the only city in the novel to be explicitly labelled an ‘open city’ makes the “status of New York as an open city […] much less clear”, implying that “it is perhaps not as hospitable to others as it first appears” (2015: 61– 62). The novel’s rhythm together with its subtle contrapuntal structure – making different voices resonate with one another and thus questioning monolithic accounts of history – persistently reminds readers of the haunting presence of latent pasts,⁶ which demand recognition in the present. It thereby challenges the normative perception of time as the “fundamental pattern of the before-after” (Audet 2007: 20). Despite being separated in time, different histories share the space of the city and are connected by Julius’ walking practice. Standing opposite of the AT&T Long Lines building, a telephone exchange or wire centre building, which for Julius “seemed like nothing so much as a monument or a stele” (Open City 219), he proceeds down to a side street, where he encounters a “curious shape” (220) that he only then identifies as a monument when he reads the inscription. It turns out to be a memorial for an African burial ground, hidden “under office buildings, shops, streets, diners, pharmacies, all the endless hum of quotidian commerce and government” (220). The apparently “quotidian” space of a side street here proves to be charged with socio-political relevance and connections which the novel’s rhythm brings to the fore: Seemingly randomly connecting the discovery of the African burial ground with a description of a waiting crowd of immigrants in “fear of being found wanting” (218), Julius forges connections across time, place and peoples, inviting readers to read for the common ground between the two descriptions. What these instances highlight is that although the stories of violent displacement such as the forced migration of the Syrians and Lebanese or the neglect of New York’s connection to slavery have been erased and glossed over, they are still part of the city’s texture. Linking the present situation with a long history of suffering constitutes an “echo across centuries” (Open City 221) that remains obscure and unintelligible “according to the structural logic of language” (Gilbert 2004: 4) and which can only be captured by the novel’s rhythm and its concomitant

 See Neumann and Kappel (2019) for a detailed analysis of the novel’s contrapuntal structure.

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creation of Stimmung. The rhythm endows the echo with an iterative quality, as the past regularly resurfaces and is thus more a perpetual presence that lays dormant in the structure of the novel but surfaces time and again. The same echo that Julius feels surfacing in New York is also present in Brussels, which, according to Farouq “only looks free” (Open City 122) and is not as “color-blind” as Dr Mailotte, a retired surgeon whom Julius meets on the plane to Brussels, claims it to be (89). Similar to New York, Brussels’ status as a global metropolis is tightly connected to histories of violence and displacement. Brussels’ connection to a violent history is already reflected in the novel’s title which hints at Brussels’ status during World War II. After remarking that “Brussels is old – a peculiar European oldness” (97), Julius almost directly links this outward impression to Brussels’ complicity in European history, outlining that it is only due to Brussels complicity in World War Two that “it had remained a vision of the medieval and baroque periods, a vista interrupted only by the architectural monstrosities erected all over town by Leopold II in the late nineteenth century” (97). The title thus already hints at the double play that takes place in the novel and that comes to the fore through its rhythm: What at first sight seems to celebrate cosmopolitanism and freedom of mind and movement ultimately is revealed to be entangled in histories of violent oppression, mechanisms of exclusion and continuous displacement, which stands in direct contrast to New York’s public image as a dynamic, open and progressive city metonymic of western achievements. Similar to New York, Brussels is “a city of monuments” where “greatness was set in stone and metal” (145). But, also just as New York, Brussels’ “impressive sophistication and wealth” (96 – 97) is intrinsically tied to histories of violence – in this case the exploitation of the Congo and the atrocities committed under the rule of Leopold II. With some trams where “whites were a tiny minority” (Open City 98), Brussels at first sight seems as cosmopolitan as New York, bringing together different religions and ethnicities. Visiting a phone shop, Julius is mesmerised by the fact that a “small group of people really could be making calls to such a wide spectrum of places” (112), including Colombia, Egypt, Senegal, Brazil, France and Germany. This image of Brussels is, however, contrasted with racism and xenophobia fed by the persistent fear of the cultural other (98). Moreover, the presence of Africans and Arabs in the city is shown to be connected to either violent displacement or flight rather than free, cosmopolitan movement. Spending an evening in what he at first takes to be a Congolese club, Julius’ attitude towards the people present instantly changes when he learns that instead of Congolese, they are Rwandans. Knowing of the colonial relationship between the Congo and Belgium, Julius had quite narrow-mindedly assumed all Africans in Brussels to be from the Congo (138). Learning that they are in fact Rwandans, he at once perceives the crowd differently: He no longer only thinks of them as displaced but also as possible accom-

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plices in acts of violence: “And I felt some of that mental constriction […] that came whenever I was introduced to young men from Serbia or Croatia, from Sierra Leone or Liberia. That doubt that said: These, too, could have killed and killed” (139). The narrator, however, seems to forget that Rwanda also has a colonial past which forms part of the nation’s long-lasting struggle that led to the genocide. The juxtaposition of these different stories therefore not only creates similarity but also difference: While the colonial history and the violent exploitation of the Congo are present in Julius’ mind, the colonial history of places like Rwanda or Sierra Leone are delegated to the background and often not taken into consideration. Far from creating a coherent whole, the different stories or voices in Open City highlight a sense of the singular as well as a sense of entanglement and interconnection.

4.5 Conclusion: Reading for Entanglement Though marginalised by public discourse, the various violent histories of New York and Brussels are tangibly present, coming back from the past, thereby intervening in the narrative and producing a surplus of energy that persistently interrupts the narrative flow. The different histories and stories that are contrapuntally linked in Open City, however, are constantly moving in different directions at once, linking the past with possible latent futures. What links New York and Brussels, therefore, is not only their status as global metropolises that have a violent past that they try to suppress and which is relegated to the status of latency, but also the materialisation of said past in the form of “intense movement without clear direction” (Gumbrecht 2009: 92). Julius, for instance, wonders whether Brussels had not drawn himself to it “for reasons more opaque than [he] suspected, that the paths [he] mindlessly followed through the city followed a logic irrelevant to [his] family history” (Open City 116). Along the same lines, he feels “a palpable psychological pressure in the city” (98) that remains a mystery to him and that he cannot fully comprehend. By linking the two cities and their violent pasts, Open City demonstrates that the freedoms and possibilities that global cities such as New York or Brussels make possible only mask “the continuation of violence” (Krishnan 2015: 675). The space of the city harbours memories which although suppressed by hegemonic discourses and glossed over by commodified spaces possess a latent energy that guides Julius’ wanderings. Just as Julius feels a “quasi-physical certainty of being in the presence of something latent”, as Gumbrecht puts it in a different context (2009: 90), when he walks the two cities, the reader is similarly made sensitive to the Stimmungen that suggest latent stowaways through the rhythm that guides them through the novel.

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The rhythm that juxtaposes different histories and makes them resonate with each other does not “correspond to classical rules of succession, or to the demands of narrative sequence” (Boxall 2013: 62). The rhythm that constantly inhibits smoothly directed reading practices through iterating speed that does not result in harmony creates a distinctive atmosphere for the reader. This atmosphere invites readers to read for commonalities between the different hinted at or fleetingly mentioned histories. Ultimately, the practice of reading that Open City asks for unmasks the fallacy of perceiving space as “a synchronous surface” and instead uncovers its “diachronic constitution”, operating only as a “hidden file” (Haverkamp 2002: 12). This atmosphere is anchored in the text’s composition but cannot be pinned down to any singular elements. Rather, the atmosphere is “poised between ‘objective’ textual features” – such as its alteration between slow and fast chapters – and “the reader’s affective responses to the text” (Caracciolo 2016: 115). The ‘reader’, as has been pointed out, does of course not describe every reader but rather describes the ideal reader who learns while reading the novel how to approach it and its poetics. As the rhythm operates on these two interrelated levels – the rhythm of the city guiding Julius’ walking through the city and the rhythm of the text’s structure and composition – it fulfils still another function. On the one hand, it alerts the reader to latent sublayers of the city and the text, illustrating two different forms of the workings of latency. On the other hand, it also makes the reader aware of the insufficiency of the narrator-protagonist as the interpreter of memories. As Susanne Gehrmann puts it, Julius is “a detached observer” (2016: 68) for whom the stories of others fail “to register in any minimally transformative way” (Vermeulen 2015: 44). While memory studies often focus on the figure of the witness or on the psychological level of individual memories, this novel features a protagonist who is unable to endow past events with meaning. The novel might thus also be understood as an attempt to widen memory studies for textual analyses that decentre the character as the main unit of analysis and instead focus more on formal elements such as rhythm to endow a text with mnemonic potential. By forging unexpected connections between different peoples, times and places, the rhythm transforms horizontal relations between these into a vertical ordering of temporal flows, a pulsation through which the time-spaces dichotomy collapses. Constantly excavating forgotten past experiences and inscribing these into the metropolitan topography, Open City consciously breaks with chronological and teleological patterns. As the dichotomy between time and space is disrupted and refigured as a disjunctive play that invests the text with a distinct rhythm, the text opens up a “new set of historical possibilities, in which the materiality of the past – its presence as a force which shapes political life and determines the

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texture of our own temporality […] – is encountered through a differently weighed narrative” (Boxall 2013:81) and thus intervenes in strictly hierarchical memory practices through its use of latency. The latency in Open City highlights literature’s potential to “fulfil a multitude of mnemonic functions, such as the imaginative creation of past life worlds, the transmission of images of history, the negotiation of competing memories, and the reflection about processes and problems of cultural memory” (Erll 2011: 144). By delegating its negotiation of memory to the realm of the latent, however, Open City does not openly discuss the blind spots of cultural memory but rather evokes them, thus avoiding creating a direct counter-discourse. Ultimately, the novel thus configures latent memories as an ongoing process and refuses attempts to pin memories down or perceive them as fixed in either time or space.

5 Non-Evental Multiperspectivity: Column McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009) The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances (Spin 248)

Column McCann’s award-winning novel Let the Great World Spin (2009) opens with an epigraph from Aleksander Hemon’s novel The Lazarus Project: “All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is” (n.pag.). Thematising “the Great World” of its title again in the epigraph, McCann’s novel establishes this ‘great world’ at its very start, even before the story begins, as a world of entanglement and latent connections. The ‘great world’ is a network of unrealised possibilities and virtual connections, made up of “all the people we will never know” but who are “everywhere”. Like Open City, Let the Great World Spin features New York city as its setting and almost as a character on its own, with “its own nuances” (Spin 248). And again, similar to Open City, Let the Great World Spin does not focus on the glamour and worldliness of the city, but rather addresses dirty side streets, neglected people and the everyday life of ordinary people. In Let the Great World Spin, latency works on two interlaced levels: For one, the novel’s form, especially its use of what I call non-evental multiperspectivity, brings latent connections between different people and histories to the fore. Secondly, the various protagonists whose voices interact and are juxtaposed by the novel’s form illuminate the cosmopolitan megacity from different angles on the content level, thereby themselves unearthing latent histories of violence, oppression and segregation which inscribe themselves into everyday scenarios. One of the characters, a judge called Solomon Soderberg, remarks on the nature of the city: New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief. He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. (Spin 247)

Within the logic of the story, Soderberg’s theory is quite unmotivated as his narration does not further pursue these thoughts from there on. In fact, the way that the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111067384-006

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judge treats, for instance, the prostitutes in the courtroom, judging them for their way of life without taking into account the long history of slow violence – that is an “elusive violence of slow effects” (Nixon 2011: 3) which is not event-focussed but develops over a longer period of time – that informs their personal histories, marks his thoughts on New York’s relationship to history as odd and unrelated to the rest of his narrative, making his comments stick out for the reader. The concept of slow violence as elaborated by Rob Nixon will be important for this chapter, as the novel does not focus on event-based violence and trauma – the event of 9/11 is conspicuously left out of the narrative – but on the invisible, latent continuities of past injustices and forms of violence. Slow violence is the term coined by Rob Nixon to address structural forms of violence as well as other forms of nonevent-based violence. “Structural violence”, writes Nixon, is a theory that entails rethinking different notions of causation and agency with respect to violent effects. Slow violence, by contrast, might well include forms of structural violence, but has a wider descriptive range in calling attention, not simply to questions of agency, but to broader, more complex descriptive categories of violence enacted slower over time. (Nixon 2011: 11)¹

In contrast to event-based violence and trauma, slow violence, as Nixon explains, “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). Showing how a novel can address and shift focus to slow violence on both the level of content and form instead of remembering great events is one of the aims of this chapter, pointing to latency as a powerful mode of memory to remember slow and structural forms of violence. Going beyond evental time and addressing forms of violence that follow different orders of time is, I claim, one of the potentialities that latency as a mode of memory opens up. The novel does not display an overt ‘regard for the past’ and on the surface seems just as “uninterested in history” (Spin 247) as New York as a city. It does not directly address memory discourses or illuminate dark chapters in New York’s history. However, the alternating focalisation through different characters generates a network of relations and invisible connections which make the past resonate with the present and the future. The novel, though mainly set in 1974, eerily resonates with accounts of 11th September 2001, without, however naming this event explicitly. Ruth Scurr, for instance, remarks: “Reading [the opening of the

 From now on only using the term ‘slow violence’, I refer to forms of violence that are also structural but with an emphasis on agency and time instead of only agency.

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novel] it is impossible not to think of the other figures that fell through that same space 27 years later” (2009: n.pag., see also Hones 2015). Through this narrative interconnectedness, the future thus emerges and intervenes in the ‘everyday present’, making visible the latent effects of slow and structural forms of violence which persist from the past through the present and into the future. In order to analyse the novel’s policy of latent connections and latent historical entanglements, this chapter will first analyse the politics of the novel’s multiperspectival form. I claim that a form of multiperspectivity that does not focus on one single event being narrated from different perspectives but rather uses a non-event as its focal point of attention can be a means to direct the reader’s attention to latent connections and thus make the reader more attentive to other latent trajectories. Second, I will shed light on the different perspectives that the novel brings into dialogue and how they relate to latent histories of suffering and suppression, thus paying attention to how the novel situates latency on both the levels of form and content. As I will show, the different perspectives challenge contemporary politics of grievability and the visibility of suffering. The irregular use of homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narration furthermore challenges the hegemony of certain voices in public discourses and stresses the importance of bringing into focus the stories and voices of the margins. Violence and suffering, the novel affirms, are not always event-based. The different voices show that suffering and misery can equally be the effect of structural and slow forms of violence. While memory discourses are often focused on violence which is “customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility” (Nixon 2011: 2), the novel shows latent diachronic connections of slow and structural violence, which it juxtaposes with a foreshadowing of 9/11. Through its use of latency – the not-quitegraspable presence of the past and the future in the present – Let the Great World Spin complicates “conventional assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound” (Nixon 2011: 3). This deviation from event-based memory practices goes hand in hand with an alternative understanding of time, which is the focus of the third part. The third part further analyses the memory politics of the novel with regard to its breaking up of normative understandings of time, as not only the past is latently present in the novel but also the future. By doing so, the novel challenges the exceptionalism often attributed to the events of 11th September 2001. Ultimately, this chapter wants to show how multiperspectivity as a narratological concept can – provided that it does not focus on a single event and instead focuses on a different point of attention – shift perceived fields of intelligibility and concomitantly what society pays attention to and establishes as worthy of remembrance. Situating the tightrope

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walker as the central – though loose – focal point of all different perspectives, the narrative not only sheds light on slow and structural forms of violence but also shows an invisible link of past, present and future that destabilises chronological accounts which underlie the overdetermining scripts of history.

5.1 Multiperspectivity: Creating a Network of Relations The novel starts by anchoring itself in the real world, referring to a real event that occurred in New York in 1974: Opening from a micro-perspective, it zooms in on a crowd of New Yorkers on the morning of Philippe Petit’s famous walk between the World Trade Center towers on 7 August 1974, looking in astonishment at a figure balanced on a rope in the sky. The narrative underlines the ordinariness of this day, “the city ma[king] its everyday noises” (Spin 3), the day just “[a]nother day, another dolor” (4). The sight brings people to form groups and makes them equal in their awe for the man walking high up in the air: “Lawyers. Elevator operators. Doctors. Cleaners. Prep chefs. Diamond merchants. Fish sellers. Sadjeaned whores. All of them reassured by the presence of one another” (4). However, the central characters are not among the crowd. While hundreds of New Yorkers are “looking up and observing, in a forced, inescapable passivity” (Llena 2016: 366), the main characters are caught up elsewhere in the city and the reader only later is introduced to them one after the other. As the opening scene, describing normally busy and hectic New Yorkers standing still and looking up in wonder, already insinuates, Let the Great World Spin’s aesthetic is a slow one: The novel, as one reviewer puts it, “will sneak up on you” (Mahler 2009: n.pag.). Slowly, chapter per chapter new characters are introduced who, sometimes featuring as the homodiegetic narrator of their own stories and sometimes as the focaliser of a heterodiegetic narration, show the reader different microcosms of New York through their specific perspective. In a loose sense, what connects everyone in this novel is the tight rope walker. However, this ‘event’ is not at the centre of the novel but rather only strangely hovering at its margins. The connecting point between the mostly very dissimilar characters, walking as McCann himself puts it “the ground’s tightrope” (in Johnston 2008: n.pag.), is something else: grief and a longing for connectedness. By juxtaposing different perspectives, different reasons for grief, and different historical entanglements, the novel creates a multidirectional understanding of memory (Rothberg). It does so by making specific historical events secondary and rather highlighting the commonality of grief, regardless of its source. Latency, through its vagueness and high degree of uncertainty and lack of focus, is a mode of memory which has a predisposition to forms of multidirection-

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al memory, as latent memories are not clearly group-directed and often not very specific. The concept of multidirectional memory by Michael Rothberg sees memory not as competitive but “as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing” (2009: 3). The entanglement of multiple perspectives can establish a link of multidirectional, latent memories. This link then makes memories interact and allows the reader to think structures, systems and different forms of slow violence together. Thereby, this latent interaction of multidirectional memories then has “the potential to create new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice” (5). The novel’s characters, whose stories come to interact in the novel’s multiperspectival net, vary from two Irish brothers who cross the Atlantic and are inexplicably always characterised by their ‘Irishness’ by others (Spin 62, 140, 142, 269), a Park Avenue housewife who comes from a southern family whose head of family believes everybody is entitled to a black servant (Spin 78) and her husband who is a judge and who together mourn their son who died in the Vietnam War,² an African-American woman living in the Bronx whose mother “was old enough to have heard all the slave stories firsthand” (Spin 286) and who has also lost her sons in the Vietnam War, a Guatemalan nurse who came to America to become a doctor, two African-American prostitutes who are mother and daughter and live in the Bronx, two privileged Manhattan artists who fail to become successful, a young amateur photographer who captures the tightrope walk on camera, and a handful of boys who hack payphones to get a first-hand account of the tightrope walker who himself also serves as the focaliser of two chapters. The characters are only vaguely connected and cover a range of different stories. The narrative form, however, produces latent connections between them and unearths different layers of the fictionalised New York which – removed from direct scrutinisation – interact and through their interaction link otherwise disconnected memories. In contrast to Open City (see chapter 4), Let the Great World Spin is a New York novel – if one wants to call it that (see, for instance, Hellman 2016: 62) – which constructs the space of New York through the literary technique of multiperspectivity. While in Open City the space is constructed through the perspective of one unreliable homodiegetic narrator, Let the Great World Spin makes the reader experience the city through different perspectives, ranging from prostitutes in the Bronx, the judge who convicts these prostitutes to a tightrope walker who sees the city from high above, “no longer clasped by the streets” (de Certeau 2011: 93).

 For easy readability and because it is the most commonly used designation in English, I will use the term “Vietnam War” instead of the term “the American War” (as the war is called in Vietnam itself ) or the term “Second Indochina War”.

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The narrative technique of multiperspectivity is a blurry concept in narratology, and scholars disagree about one clear-cut definition. While some scholars claim that multiperspectivity is “a characteristic which is always at least potentially present in a narrative and can be foregrounded in various ways” (Hartner 2012: n.pag.), in my use of the term I will follow scholars who argue that multiperspectivity as a distinct concept needs to involve the “emergence of semantic friction” and foreground “epistemological relativitiy” (n.pag.). Generally speaking, multiperspectivity is “a mode of storytelling in which multiple and often discrepant viewpoints are employed for the presentation and evaluation of a story and its storyworld” (n.pag.). These discrepant viewpoints, Vera and Ansgar Nünning point out, juxtapose different versions of the same event (2000: 3) and thereby shift the focus from the event itself to the mode of perception through the different characters (3). The portrayal of a storyworld from different points of view should result in different views in the normative sense (Buschmann 1996: 260). Thereby, it should create dialogism and concomitantly “scepticism towards knowledge and reality” (Hartner 2012: n.pag.), relativising the norms and values of the individual viewpoints (Nünning and Nünning 2000: 4). While this mode of storytelling has been scrutinised with regard to its bringing to the fore the “perceptually, epistemologically or ideologically restricted nature of individual perspectives” (4), I want to analyse its narrative potential of creating latent networks between different characters and contexts, probing the concept for its potentialities for connection rather than primarily highlighting frictions. Understanding multiperspectivity as a device of connectivity instead of friction resonates with Caroline Levine’s conceptions of the form of the network. Traditionally, she explains, the term network was used to “describe objects made out of fabric or metal fibers interlaced as in a net or web. Something like text, the roots of the term imply interwoven strands moving in multiple directions rather than directed toward a single end” (Levine 2015: 113, my emphasis, Y.L.). The different perspectives that are brought together in Let the Great World Spin move in different directions, without however, creating absolute incommensurabilities. To the contrary, they emphasise New York as a “city of multiple life stories and multiple voices, all happening at the same time” (Hones 2015: 113) and connected through invisible threads. Rather than reflecting on a single event from various perspectives, multiperspectivity understood as a network of different perspectives with different focal points allows for a looser understanding of connectivity and linkages which lacks what Levine calls “a single end” (113). Understanding multiperspectivity in this way emphasises that the bringing together of different character perspectives and concomitant world-views is a process that is “realized in the reading process” (Nünning and Nünning 2001: 215). Thus, multiperspectivity creates a literary event in Ilai Rowner’s sense, invoking in the reader “the undefined feeling of an event-

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ness that does not have any literal expression or telos” (Rowner 2015: 2) but which still alerts the reader’s attention. The working of multiperspectivity is indeed not “a finite happening fixed in the text” (Rowner 2015: 22) but an event that happens in the reading process. Multiperspectivity in this regard operates as a literary event which through its network character redirects readers’ attention to multidirectionality and open-endedness of literary forms. Levine argues that narrative forms and political forms are interwoven, as both work through “activities of ordering, patterning, and shaping” (Levine 2015: 3). By recasting the literary form of multiperspectivity as a non-hierarchical network that refuses to limit itself to one central event, the novel reflects on the unruly, uncontainable rest of forms such as the novel and concomitantly on ordering principles more generally, also with regard to memory discourses. As Regina Schober remarks in her analysis of the novel, the novel “rather comments on the idea of the network, suggesting and thus constructing its presence as a perceptional and epistemological notion of contemporary society and culture” (2012: 393). “The network logic”, she goes on, “ascribes individual nodes significance only in relation to others” (395). The network character of different stories which are all connected to different acts of re-membering past violences or structures of violence can thus be considered a formal element that “convey[s] society itself as a network of dynamically unfolding networks” (Levine 2015: 115) which cannot be forced into hierarchical structures that dominate memory discourses, since each memory only obtains its significance as a node in the network. Levine’s claim that “formal constraints might matter politically” (11) can thus also be reversed: The opening up of formal constraints and narrative schemata can also matter politically in that it forces readers to rethink familiar concepts and premises of the field of memory culture, as, for instance, the assumed singularity and universality of the event of 9/11. While multiperspectivity is mainly regarded as the repeated portrayal of “the same event from various different angles” (Hartner 2012: n.pag.; Niederhoff 2011: 390; Nünning and Nünning 2000: 3), multiperspectivity works differently in Let the Great World Spin. The novel does not frame a single event through different perspectives but is a mosaic of glimpses of different lives in New York city in 1974 with an outlook into 2006 in the last chapter. The novel portrays the stories of different lives entwined and focuses on the moments of connection between characters that initially appear to be very different. The novel is organised into 13 chapters, with the first being told with a zero focalisation and the following 12 chapters narrated either through a homodiegetic narration or a heterodiegetic narration with different focalising characters. The styles of the individual homodiegetic narrations or focalisations are “so sharply distinguished that while the New York characters […] are clearly inhabiting the same fictional location at the

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same time […] the dissonance in the chorus” stresses the diversity and complexity of the city (Hones 2015: 113). The narrative sets out with Phillipe Petit’s tightrope walk and returns to this ‘event’ in almost every chapter. The tightrope walk might thus be said to function as a connective element between the different characters, providing a “sense of coherence, balance, and reconciliation within the novel” (Schober 2012: 392). At the same time, however, the ‘event’ is mostly marginal and not central to the individual accounts, not triggering or inhibiting action. What takes centre stage instead are the individual perspectives of the city and the everyday life of the people walking its streets. Not focussing on one single event from different perspectives but rather using multiperspectivity to create a cacophony of different voices and stories that provide the reader with ever new facets of the city, the novel employs multiperspectivity in an unconventional way. In contrast to the theoretical approaches of Hartner and Niederhoff, who focus on the account of one ‘event’ from different perspectives, Matthias Buschmann’s understanding of multiperspectivity stresses a central “point of attention” being portrayed from different points of view (1996: 250), relieving the concept from its focus on one single event. Through the use of multiperspectivity, Let the Great World Spin not only contrasts different perspectives from different social classes but also provides a contrast between the tightrope walker’s view from above with that of what de Certeau calls the “ordinary practitioners of the city […] ‘down below,’ below the threshold at which visibility begins” (2011: 93), thereby bringing to the fore the incompleteness and blind spots of singular perspectives. Similar to Open City (see chapter 4), the novel thus counters the public image of New York as an iconic metropolitan megacity. Let the Great World Spin is the story of immigrants, prostitutes, drug addicts, artists and privileged people alike, focussing on the underlining thread that connects their lives. By juxtaposing the perspectives of very different characters without making them recount the same event, the novel asks the reader for close scrutiny of the text’s gaps and tensions as well as its underlying motifs to find the ‘point of attention’, the connecting thread, that is reiterated in the individual stories. Through the omission of a central event the novel redirects the reader’s focus to other energies and layers of the text that foreground similarities which are more connected to the everyday and specific microcosmoses of New York. This change of perspective puts into focus the otherwise “continually hidden” (Highmore 2011: 4) small events of the everyday, as well as “system[s] of violence that [are] neither sudden nor accidental” (Rothberg 2014: xiv) but rather structural, slow and long-lasting. Our perception of reality, the novel’s form stresses, is ever-dependent on the perspective we choose for looking at the world. As Adelita, the young Guatemalan nurse, metaphorically puts it, referring to the spyholes of her flat: “You can look from one room to the other and the curved glass makes

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it either narrow or wide, depending on what sight you happen to be on. If you look into my kitchen, the world is tiny. If you look out, it stretches” (Spin 278). The novel makes a conscious decision to make it narrow: Instead of opting for the wider picture and narrative tropes that might trigger ideologically inflected readings, it zooms in on the perspective of the tiny kitchen, the rundown apartment in the Bronx, the subway, the payphone, the sidewalk. Although the tightrope walk of course situates the story within a specific context and together with the Vietnam War and New York as the setting positions the novel in a specific political context, the novel cannot be reduced to any overt mission of political meaning-making. The novel is positioned within discourses of 9/11, the Vietnam War and the economic crisis. But it also escapes these discourses, opening them up for different frames of reference. After all, the event of 9/11 is a “vital narrative gap” (Hones 2015: 5) in the novel, taken out of the narrative, not represented, “replace[d] […] with something else” (5). It is this something else that readers are pushed to focus on instead of reading the novel ideologically as many 9/11 or Vietnam novels are triggered to be read (Heberle 2012: 205).³ Thus, the novel, through its formal characteristics, asks the reader for a minor key strategy in reading instead of a major key (Stengers 2005). Reading in a minor key means paying attention to nets of relationality, moments of connection and affect rather than “[i]dentifying a centre stage” (186) of ideological concern that is “defined by an ‘either/or’ disjunction” (186), which would be reading in a major key. Reading in a major key defines “the thinkers task as one of enlightenment, a critical and deconstructive enlightenment aiming to subvert the hegemonic languages and social structures” (187) with the ultimate goal of finding the ‘truth’ of the text (187). Reading in a minor key, by contrast, denies the existence of ‘truth’ and rather aims at ambiguity and situated readings. While reading in a major key, Isabelle Stengers argues, implies thinking on a macro level, reading in the minor key applies a situational ethics that “entertains no general vision or theory, making each case just another case” (192). Although the novel, of course, cannot be totally removed from socio-political questions and implications, the text denies readers ideological appropriation and does not aim at enlightening its readers. Rather, the multiperspective structure invites the reader to pay closer attention to the microcosmoses and the relations between the city and the characters, who

 Mark A. Heberle explains: “For Americans and much of the world outside South East Asia itself, […] [the Vietnam War] is a signifier for the cultural, political, ethical and psychological antecedents and consequences of a catastrophe, seen almost entirely from an American or American-centric point of view, that took place during the Cold War in America and Vietnam […] Fictions that explore this larger context often use the Vietnam War to critique American culture and ideology” (Heberle 2012: 205).

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find their ways to inscribe themselves into the city, like the taggers who are “hitting new frontier[s]” (Spin 168) underneath the city or the tightrope walker with his act of defiance high up in the air. While the novel might implicitly criticise both the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, its composition does not directly invite a political reading. Instead, Let the Great World Spin demands deep attention and focus on the working of form from the reader. The shifts and frictions that the highly multiperspectivic novel presents the reader with demand a reading practice that eschews ideologically motivated readings and unequivocal interpretations. Let the Great World Spin’s departure from established discourses surrounding the remembrance of 9/11, but also the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, is most noticeable due to its refusal to explicitly address these events. 9/11, Hamilton Carroll detects in his analysis of the novel, is only mentioned explicitly once in the novel (2016: 148). Similarly, the Vietnam War is framed in a way very different from how hegemonic western media and pieces of literature usually depict it. As Brenda M. Boyle emphasises in her study on the Vietnam War in North American literature (2015), “[r]eaders will notice that the anguish experienced by the individual American combatant usually is the focus in American Vietnam War literature” (8). Let the Great World Spin abandons this familiar framing and rather focuses on the connecting nature of grief in war’s aftermath. In this sense, Carroll’s observation that “McCann’s novel […] explores questions of cultural memory through a process of omission” (2016: 148) is quite vital, since it lays bare the disruptiveness of the novel’s memory politics. Especially in the context of war and violent conflict, narratives often “premediate memories of an event by enfolding them within recognisable cultural narratives” (Bond 2015: 11; Neumann 2008: 341), serving a given culture’s need for identification in the present. In this way, literature sometimes comes to mirror current political interests, reproducing what Birgit Däwes calls “mainstream discourses of patriotism, heroism, and fear” (2011: 5). After 9/11, numerous novels and films have addressed the events within the framework of trauma (4, Frank and Gruber 2012: 1).⁴ This in itself is a distorted mirroring of reality. As Pieter Vermeulen reminds us, “designating certain events and experiences as traumatic, far from being a mere academic exercise, not only reflects but also shapes contemporary power relations” (2014: 141). Let the Great World Spin devi-

 Frank and Gruber argue: “Like other academic disciplines that contribute to the current research on terrorism, the field of literary studies is still strongly marked by the impact of ‘9/11’, an event that was immediately identified as constituting not only a historical and political, but also a cultural watershed. Before the fires at Ground Zero were extinguished, debates concerning the future of such diverse forms as action movies, satirical TV shows, and the novel appeared in the press” (2012: 1).

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ates from master narratives surrounding 9/11 and its aftermath. On the one hand, the different perspectives do not merge into a unifying account. On the other hand, almost all of the novel’s characters are morally ambiguous (or at least can be seen this way) and therefore cannot serve unified meaning-making processes. Instead, their network of perspectives produces a fragmentary portrayal of the city and the past, employing a multidirectional memory approach to open up the future for latent possibilities.

5.2 Changing Perspectives: Challenging Contemporary Politics of Grievability Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: There are still so many stories to be told (Spin, Author’s Note)

The semantic frictions that the novel’s multiperspectivity brings to the fore are echoed by the characters’ conspicuous differences, showing the created network to be slightly “utopian” but also “transnational, and discursive” (Levine 2015: 114), thriving on affect rather than coercive connections. Almost constructed as direct opposites concerning social standing and ethnic background, the contrast between Claire and Solomon Sonderberg on the one hand and Tillie and Jazzlyn Henderson and Gloria on the other hand might be the most striking. In the following, I will juxtapose their positions and the construction of their perspectives in order to shed light on how the novel uses multiperspectivity to counter linear understandings of history and normative politics of grievability. In his function as a judge, Solomon Sonderberg understands his task as differentiating between right and wrong: “Everyone was in a jam and it was his job to sit at the center of it, to dole out the justice and balance it between right and wrong. Right and wrong. Left and right. Up and down” (Spin 258). The judge tries to make sense of the world by categorising it into binary oppositions, which help him to stay ahead of his everyday business in the courtroom. The case of Tillie and Jazzlyn is just an annoying point on the agenda for the judge, who is eager to dedicate his time to the tightrope walker, who – unlike Tillie and Jazzlyn – fascinates him. While the tightrope walker is special to him, partly because of his courage and apparent confidence and partly because he reminds him of his dead son (265), the two prostitutes are not individuals for him but only types: “He’d seen it all too often. It was like opening a tap” (266). Although he is not a homodiegetic narrator but only the focaliser of his story, his opinion of the two women becomes very apparent as he wonders “why they dug such pits for themselves” (266), “[w]hat sort of

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deep cruelty […] allows a family like that?” (268), and the “love these people could display for each other” surprises him when he sees mother and daughter share a joke right after the sentence for Jazzlyn has been pronounced. Especially the last two comments show that the prostitutes of New York are at best second-class citizens for the judge; they are a part of the city’s everyday business but not an equal part, a part of the city rather left in the dark. For the judge, the prostitutes belong to a part of society removed from himself and incomprehensible to him. Being a judge, Solomon is not only a character but can also be seen to represent what Judith Butler in Precarious Life (2004) calls the “public sphere”, which, as Solomon’s thoughts clearly show, is inevitably also “constituted […] by what cannot be said and what cannot be shown” (Butler 2004: xvii). In Precarious Life, Judith Butler explains how discourse and politics work to annul some human lives which do not count as grievable and valuable in the public sphere. “The limits of the sayable, the limits of what can appear”, she writes, “circumscribe the domain in which political speech operates and certain kinds of subjects appear as viable actors” (xvii). As the focalisation through Solomon makes clear, some lives do not count as viable actors in his mind, which might be said to metonymically represent the frame of mind at the heart of institutions of power, such as the juridical branch of society. However, the humanness that Tillie and Jazzlyn display in the courtroom despite their severe situation challenges Solomon’s preformed ideas about their lives. His account therefore stresses differences in an almost over-emphasised way, over-emphasising and thereby already bringing to the point of breaking the frame of recognition according to which Tillie’s and Jazzlyn’s lives are judged in the public sphere. For the reader, Solomon’s moral judgement of Tillie and Jazzlyn, however, comes as an afterthought. Three chapters before, the reader has already got to know Tillie’s account of her life through her own voice as she is the homodiegetic narrator of her story. This change in narration makes her story even more direct than Solomon’s account, of which he is only the focaliser. The narrative therefore counteracts Solomon’s statement that Tillie “vanished into her own namelessness” (Spin 274) after her sentence has been pronounced and concomitantly also puts to test the ideologically established hierarchy, distributing voice differently and thus balancing out pre-defined hierarchies. Tillie’s chapter is organised into small passages which sometimes only consist of one or two sentences and thus resembles a diary form, making it even more direct for the reader, as her thoughts appear seemingly unfiltered. In contrast to Solomon’s chapter, Tillie’s chapter is very personal as the reader gets to know her most intimate thoughts through the lens of her particular language. Tillie comments on the spelling of her rap sheet, saying that the police officers in the Bronx “write worse than anyone. They get an F in everything except pulling us up on our prop’rties [sic!]” (198). While Tillie uses a

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locally inflected language, her style and eloquence show that she might be intellectually superior to the local policemen who have the executive power to arrest her. While Solomon’s chapter through its use of focalisation instead of homodiegetic narration creates an account that tries to be regarded as objective and all-encompassing, Tillie’s chapter documents the everyday life of a prostitute in the Bronx through a minor key lens that forces the reader to take into account the mundane, the processes below the radar rather than the overall picture. In one passage consisting only of this one line, Tillie informs the reader: “I got a taste for supermarket cakes. You won’t find that on my yellow sheet” (199). By referring to such a trivial detail, Tillie’s account invites the reader to see beyond the image created by society and be affected by the everyday realities of living in the Bronx. The fact that her account comes before that of Solomon in the novel might lead the reader to approach Solomon’s maybe more hegemonic point of view with Tillie’s perspective in mind and change any pre-formed perceptions they might have, now perceiving Solomon’s voice as only one among many instead of normative. More than showing Tillie as an individual and not a type, her chapter also positions her within a long history of societal marginalisation and thus functions as an act of re-membering that connects the present-day scenario in the courtroom with a past that goes a long way back to racial segregation and the Jim Crow era and slavery before that. What shocked Solomon the most was the motherdaughter dynamic between the thirty-eight-year-old Tillie and her eighteen-yearold daughter, who is not only also a prostitute but also a mother. This family dynamic is shocking to Solomon. Yet, Tillie’s perspective opens a historic contingency which sheds a different light on the women’s situation. While Solomon’s pity for Tillie and her daughter is reduced to a platitude (“Truth was, the women were victims of the men, always were, always would be” [270]), Tillie’s account draws on different connections across time: Oh, but what I shoulda done – I shoulda swallowed a pair of handcuffs when Jazzlyn was in my belly. That’s what I shoulda done. Gave her a heads-up about what was coming her way. Say, Here you is, already arrested, you’re your mother and her mother before her, a long line of mothers stretching way back to Eve,french and nigger and dutch and whatever else came before me. (Spin 219)

Tillie reproaches herself for not having been able to keep her daughter off the streets, but she also sees an almost inevitable continuity across time in their story. “You’re your mother”, Tillie says, “and her mother before her, a long line of mothers”. What is happening to Tillie and Jazzlyn is not only a personal choice but connected to a latent heritage which Tillie links to “french and nigger and dutch”. Her wording summons images of the transatlantic slave trade whose effects are still manifested in the present-day New York. Creating a line of continuity,

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the framing of her reality transforms conservative, linear understandings of history and constitutes an act of latent memory. Similar to Solomon, Ciaran – one of the two Irish characters who opens the novel with his homodiegetic account of looking for his brother who is a monk and cares for the prostitutes in the Bronx through small acts of kindness – is appalled when he learns that Tillie and Jazzlyn are related. “Pack your bags, go somewhere you matter”, he tells his brother. “They deserve nothing. They’re not Magdalenes. […] Why don’t you humble yourself at the feet of the rich for once? Or does your God just love useless people?” (39 – 40). Bringing into correlation the lives of the African American prostitutes with Irish Magdalenes is striking, as it might not be an obvious comparison at first. Mentioning the Magdalenes creates a connection between Tillie’s diachronic account of women working the streets and selling their bodies and the institutionalised violence behind the Magdalene laundries which operated from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century in several countries but predominantly Ireland.⁵ In these ‘laundries’, women who had sex outside of marriage or were accused of promiscuous behaviour or just behaved ‘oddly’ according to Catholic standards – for instance by being “sexually aware” (Raftery and O’Sullivan 1999: 27– 28; Hogan 2019: 90) – were forced to work in workhouse conditions with no payment and their individuality and freedom stripped from them. Women were branded as ‘fallen’ if they had a child out of wedlock (Hogan 2019: 10).⁶ The choices the women at the time had were very limited. As they had no access to a social welfare system, many resorted to prostitution or entered these ‘mother and child homes’ or the attached Magdalene Laundries. These ‘mother and child homes’ were led by a policy of terror, suppression and physical and psychological abuse, inflicting both physical and long-term psychological damage on both the women and their children. The connection drawn by Ciaran in this instance thereby connects two different forms of structural and slow violence where victims suffer from institutions, normative societal patterns and the judgment from others who want to make them feel ashamed and less worthy.

 As Caelainn Hogan puts it in her recent study Republic of Shame: Stories from Ireland’s Institutions for ‘Fallen Women’ (2019), “[t]he beliefs and stigmas that underpinned the mother-and-baby homes and the Magdalen laundries all existed in Ireland long before the creation of the independent Irish state. The institutional infrastructure, too, dates back centuries. None of the building blocks of the shame-industrial complex was intrinsically Irish or intrinsically Catholic. But independent Catholic Ireland brought them to a sort of dark perfection” (29).  The Irish politician Enda Kenny remarks: “We gave them [the children] up to what we convinced ourselves was the nuns’ care. We gave them up to spare them the savagery of gossip and because of Irish people’s perverse, morbid relationship with what you call respectability” (Hogan 2019: 45 – 46).

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As the novel incorporates a chapter told exclusively from Tillie’s perspective, the similarities – despite also many differences – between the Magdalenes and the prostitutes of the Bronx become apparent, thus contradicting Ciaran’s claim. As “Magdalene women were hidden from society and written out of Irish history” (Yeager and Culleton 2016: 135), the comparison furthermore implicitly sheds light on the political situation of prostitution in cities such as New York. Living in the shadows of the city, the lives of the prostitutes seem to be relegated to the margins and almost as removed from the public eye as the lives of the irish Magdalenes. The “projects” where the prostitutes live is described like a microcosmos where different rules apply⁷: Hours and hours of insanity and escape. The projects were a victim of theft and wind. The downdrafts made their own weather. Plastic bags caught on the gusts of summer wind. Old domino players sat in the courtyard, playing underneath the flying litter. The sound of the plastic bags was like rifle fire. (Spin 31)

The semantic field of war that is opened up by this description – a “sound” like “rifle fire” – is repeated in all of the different perspectives, stressing the warlike everyday life that the prostitutes have to fight: “The chainlink fences. The whirling litter. The terrible stench. All those young girls outside selling their bodies. Looking like they would fall on their backs and use their spines as mattresses. And the fires in the sky – they should call it Dresden and be finished with it” (Spin 82). This rather unusual comparison establishes a common line between the Vietnam War, which constitutes the background of many of the stories, the Second World War and the lives in the projects, reassessing the value of the prostitutes’ lives and the concomitant policy of grievability. The blind spots of the city, the parts which are invisible to the public eye such as the projects where Tilly, Gloria and Corrigan live, seem to form the centre around which all chapters circulate, displacing one single event with various interlinked stories of small and big sufferings. At the same time that the novel establishes a feeling of suffering as the ‘point of attention’ of the multiperspective structure of the novel, it also deconstructs belonging and memory on the basis of nationality.

 Compare also Lara’s perspective, which also stresses the microcosmic nature of the projects: “I walked toward the projects. A surge of dread. Hard to calm the heart when it leaps so high. As a child I saw horses trying to step into rivers to cool themselves off. You watch them move from the stand of buckeye trees, down the slope, through the mud, swishing off flies, getting deeper and deeper until they either swim for a moment, or turn back. I recognized it as a pattern of fear, that there was something shameful in it – these high-rises were not a country that existed in my youth or art, or anywhere else” (Spin 140, my emphasis, Y.L.).

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While Ciaran tries to construct responsibility and relationality on the grounds of shared nationality – using the Magdalenes as an image of pitiable women in order to appeal to his Irish brother – the novel itself defies national identitarian categories. Ciaran is not only appalled by the prostitutes but also wants his brother to return to Ireland: “You could do something back home. In Ireland. Up north. Belfast. Something for us. Your own people” (Spin 37). The category of ‘his own people’, however, seems to be foreign to Corrigan, whose help goes out to anybody in need, regardless of nationality. Corrigan’s idea of relationality is decidedly different from that of his brother, who sees family “like water – it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream” (57). While this holds true for Ciaran, who ultimately returns to Dublin and re-buys his childhood home, Corrigan’s definition of family is more open and fluid. He feels connected to the prostitutes by the communal feeling of fear and disorientation, a connection that for him is stronger than blood relations.⁸ Ciaran looks everywhere for the connection back home, but Corrigan manages to make a home from new relations that he builds instead of the past. Looking for a connection to Ireland, Ciaran gets a job in a bar in Brooklyn “where most of the customers were from Kerry and Limerick” (Spin 59), their “loneliness pasted upon loneliness” (59). “It struck me”, Ciaran says, “that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from. We bring home with us when we leave” (59). The community of the bar, however, seems to be built on superficial, perceived differences rather than true solidarity. Tellingly, the only anecdote Ciaran tells of the bar is about the mocking of an Irish lawyer who tries to fit in. The category of ‘your own people’ is being deconstructed through Ciaran’s perspective. Although he returns to Dublin, his life there is characterised by “hidden losses, not profits” (343). The Dublin landscapes painted by his wife Lara, “translated as line, shadow, color” (343), stand in for his attempt at authenticity, which likewise is a translation and is complicated by his “distinctly American accent” (342). Identity and memory, the novel stresses, do not need the nation as their basis. Feeling with other people is a form of solidarity that does not need national categories or even premises of sameness. As Michael Rothberg underlines, rethinking the dynamics of violence and injustice rather calls for “‘long-distance solidarity’ – that is solidarity premised on difference rather than logics of sameness and identification” (2019: 12). In this way, the novel asks for ways of rethinking the basic pillars of political solidarity.

 Although he does not have a bad relationship with his brother, Corrigan treats him the same as his other friends, not putting his relationship with him over his relationship with the prostitutes, whom he allows to use his flat’s bathroom regardless of his brother’s protests.

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Not only does the novel destabilise the connection between memory, identity and nationality, but it also thwarts other superficial reasons for feeling with other people which ultimately do not lead to solidarity but only unproductive, condescending pity. The only compassion that the judge shows for Tillie is based on his preformed idea of her as a victim of men and reduced to condescending pity. For Tillie, however, she and her daughter are not victims of men. “Hooking was born in me”, Tillie says, “I never wanted no square job” (Spin 199). Tillie is not ashamed of her profession and her account – while repeatedly stressing that she did not want that line of work for her daughter – portrays prostitution in a very different light than Solomon’s account or Ciaran’s in the beginning of the novel. Tillie is not only a prostitute but one who breaks boundaries. Tillie likes the East Side, where the “girls were whiteys with good teeth” (201), and she “was the first nigger absolute regular on that stroll. They called me Rosa Parks. They used to say I was a chewing-gum spot. Black. And on the Pavement. That’s how it is in the life, word. You joke a lot” (201). By evoking Rosa Parks, Tillie shows that value is a question of perspective, which might counter “certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human” (Butler 2004: xv). In her successive studies Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004) and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), Judith Butler underlines that vulnerability and grievability – that is, the regulation of whose lives count as grievable and would be mourned if lost – are concepts created by the state with its norms and values and are thus highly dependent on power constellations. Only those people who are deemed grievable by the state can ultimately be perceived as human subjects. In this context, Butler emphasises that “when we speak about the ‘subject’ we are not always speaking about an individual: we are speaking about a model for agency and intelligibility” (2004: 45). Those who do not fit this model are not considered to be fully human in the sense of not being considered ‘valuable life’ and are subject to constant violence or the threat of violence: “There are ways of distributing vulnerability, differential forms of allocation that make some populations more subject to arbitrary violence than others” (xii). Though the loss of life might always be mourned by somebody, some population’s losses are not “nationally recognized and amplified” (xiv) and therefore become “unthinkable and ungrievable” (xiv). This unbalanced politics of grievability creates what Debjani Ganguly calls “an economy of vulnerability” (26). Let the Great World Spin “resist[s] an aggregative and abstract approach to the idea of humanitarian suffering” (Ganguly 2016: 27) and rather through its focus on the microcosms of New York underlines “affective scripts that disturb such” (27) normative concepts of grievability. Both the lives of the Magdalenes and the lives of the prostitutes in New York share their state of ungrievability. Both are constructed as subcommunities which

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“are ‘lose-able’, or can be forfeited, precisely because they are framed as being already lost or forfeited; they are cast as threats to human life as we know it rather than as living populations in need of protection from illegitimate state violence, famine, or pandemics” (Butler 2016: 31). By making the frame travel from the context of the Magdalenes to the prostitutes of the Bronx, the novel stresses that “whether and how we respond to the suffering of others, how we formulate moral criticisms […] depends upon a certain field of perceptible reality having already been established” (64). While the suffering of the Magdalenes has by now partly been publicly acknowledged as an act of state violence (Hogan 2019: 163),⁹ prostitution is still not publicly linked to structural forms of violence and trauma.¹⁰ The latent connection that the novel establishes calls for a thinking together of these different instances of violence and thus calls for a different memory policy which includes structural forms of violence, such as the constant de-valorisation by society and the state and its parameters of grievability. Tillie’s perspective destabilises the familiar frames of grievability as reflected, for instance, in judge Solomon’s perspective. Hers is a micro-perspective, dependent on the microcosmos of the ‘stroll’, which destabilises “the familiar as the criterion by which a human life is grievable” (Butler 2004: 38) and portrays Tillie as a subject with agency and a powerful voice, even though she is not recognised as such in the courtroom. Tillie’s account values the small things, the small acts of agency, which transforms notions of the ‘subject’ “often based on notions of sovereign power” (45). While for Solomon Tillie and her daughter do not seem to have any agency at all, being for him the “usual riffraff […], two clapped-out hookers” (Spin 265), Tillie’s account explicitly highlights her agency. Tillie uses the power that her punters give her; triumphantly she declares: “I always recognize my tricks” (205) and concomitantly demands small favours from them. Tillie’s acts of agency are small, but they matter to her, conveyed in the powerful voice of her homodiegetic narration. The novel shows that life is full of unexpected synchronicities. While Solomon harshly judges Tillie and Jazzlyn, his wife befriends another resident of the Bronx who will later adopt Jazzlyn’s children after her death, thereby creating a circle of connections between the characters, showing the characters to be “nodes in more than one different distributed network at a time” (Levine 2015: 125). The connections that the multiperspectival structure of the novel emphasises are likewise “unthinkable” in the public discourse and thus stretch the limits of our understanding  Since 2001, the Irish government has acknowledged that women in the Magdalene laundries were victims of abuse. However, the Irish government has resisted calls for investigation and proposals for compensation.  This is not to say that every act of prostitution is linked to an act of structural or slow violence or trauma.

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of networks and connectivity. The forms of connection that the novel brings to the fore decidedly go beyond forms of connection that are based upon similarities. Although Claire’s and Gloria’s friendship sets off from their similar experience – both having lost one or several children to the Vietnam War – its continuity does not follow a causal logic. In fact, the novel stresses that Gloria’s and Claire’s connection cannot be reduced to the reason they first met, as the connection is shown to be fragile: “we declared we’d see each other at Marcia’s next time – though it felt to me that there’d probably never be another time, that was the heartbreaker, I had a good idea that we’d let it slip away now, we had all had our chance, we’d brought our boys back to life for a little while” (Spin 298). What this quote makes clear is that Let the Great World Spin thrives on a “horizontally structured plot” (Neumann and Baumbach 2019: 5) that promotes openness and possibility to give expression to what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2014) calls “our broad present” (see also Neumann and Baumbach 2019: 5). The broad present emerges from the unpredictable fluidities of embodied subjectivity and the “impression of intransitive ‘mobilization’” (Gumbrecht 2014: xiii). Momentarily freeing itself from the demands of the past and the future, “[s]uch unmoving motion often reveals itself to be stagnant, the end of directed purpose” (xiii). Although initiated by a shared trauma (that of a loss of a child [children] in a war) situated in a past and already haunted from the future (in the form of the tightrope walker), the connection between Gloria and Claire creates a present-ness which emphasises connectivity and a sense of being-with that goes beyond pragmatism and logical explanations and instead stresses latent forms of connection which by their very nature need to stay imprecise. The multiperspectivity of the novel brings to the fore the “dimension of expanding simultaneities” (Gumbrecht 2014: xiii) of contemporary culture and the incommensurabilities between the different voices and the things that slip between the spaces that their accounts do not cover. The novel therefore works through a policy of non-disclosure, keeping its secrets and therefore highlighting the incapability and/or refusal of the novel form to put everything into causal plot sequences, which are often at the heart of fictions of memory. By actively refraining from establishing causality, the novel calls for a different memory policy which is more open to contingency and looser networks of connectivity and remembering. Claire’s account reveals that she primarily perceives Gloria through the parameters that pity allows for: “Dearest Gloria. Up there in her high-rise every night and day. How in the world did she live in such a place? […] Perhaps she could hire Gloria” (Spin 82). Reversely, Gloria perceives Claire not simply as a person but also as being part of a distinct system:

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I had the thought that we didn’t go freedom-riding years ago to clean apartments on Park Avenue, no matter how nice she was, no matter how much she smiled. I had nothing against her. […] I was pretty sure I could’ve just sat down on the sofa and she would’ve served me hand and foot, but we didn’t go marching for that either. (Spin 297)

Claire, who at the start pitied Gloria, soon is at the receiving end of Gloria’s goodwill, practically begging her to stay longer and help her cope with her grief. And indeed, Gloria pities Claire just as much: “maybe the truth is that she was just a lonely white woman living up on Park Avenue” (Spin 301). In the end, after Gloria left Claire’s apartment only to shortly after return again having been robbed on her way home, both women sit in a taxi back to Gloria’s apartment block. Gloria as the homodiegetic narrator remarks: “Something that we knew about each other, that we’d be friends now, there wasn’t much could take it from us, we were on that road” (320). Their differences have apparently stopped to matter, but the reader does not know what has led to this border crossing on both sides. The novel does not explain its policy of networks and relationality and purposefully leaves a gap for the reader. Through its multiperspectivity, the novel advocates a memory policy that goes beyond Aufarbeitung, the working through of painful memories, instead stressing latent memories that cannot be linked to socio-political goals and are rarely directly connected to identity politics. The meeting of the mothers who have lost their children to the Vietnam War illustrates this memory policy on the plot level while the novel’s multiperspectival structure emphasises it on the level of form. Listening to Claire retell the life of her now dead son Joshua, Gloria as the homodiegetic narrator of that chapter confides in the reader: “Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final” (Spin 293). The narrative underlines what Gloria already senses: There is no way of making it “all make sense, logical and final” (293). The polyphony of voices does not allow for the “eventual satisfactions of understanding and order” (Levine 2015: 127). The policy of what Caroline Levine calls “withheld knowledge” (129) which runs through the whole novel allows for a reflection on networking processes more generally. What the novel shows is that at no point can we “grasp crucial pathways between nodes”, and this, according to Levine, “points us to our more generalized ignorance of networks” (129). Instead of explaining the connections between the singular nodes, the novel shows the contingent entanglement of different characters and the overlayering of various temporalities – temporalities generated by the agency of place, contingency and memory which do not come together in “homochronic chronology” (Birth 2017: 72).

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5.3 When the Present Was Still the Future of the Past: Latent Memories of 9/11 Do you think references to the sky are a good idea these days (Glass 2007: 557)

The multiperspectival structure of the novel depends on loose, shapeless connections and moments of contingency. However, one point that brings them all together is the tightrope walker, who introduces the temporal dimension of the latent future into the story. The latent temporalities generated by an agency of space and contingency and brought to light through the novel’s multiperspectivity are further underlined through the novel’s engagement with narrative motifs relating to 9/11. The multiperspectivity brings the novel into being as “semantically open-ended” (Ganguly 2016: 3) and “heteroglossic ambit the indeterminacy of the present” (3). This indeterminacy of the present is not only constituted by different past histories that come to interact but also by a latent orientation towards the future. In the only comprehensive study about latency to date, After 1945: Latency as the Origin of the Present (2013), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht identifies the prevailing mood of the post-World War II decade as that of latency: Something influences us, creating a specific mood through the presence of nuances that cannot be translated into evidence. One of the moods of the twenty-first century, for Gumbrecht, is connected to a “retrospective certainty that something neglected or overlooked – or even lost altogether – made a decisive impact on life at a given moment in history and formed part of each subsequent present from that time on” (2013: 31). This certainty, however, cannot be adequately put into language. The inability to translate this certainty into intentions, purposes and epistemological orders produces a disturbing mood of foreboding for the future. Today, the future is perceived a set of converging and threatening inevitabilities: nuclear annihilation, global warming, overpopulation, world-wide displacement. “Today”, he argues, we have grown strangely accustomed to the feeling: numerous symptoms of the ‘end of Man’ have become permanent – almost popular – points of reference; when we speak of them, we look upon them from the outside instead of assuming responsibility and asking how they first came to be or what consequences they hold. (2013: 34)

In his study, Gumbrecht introduces three different configurations of Stimmung after 1945. Interesting for the study at hand is his last configuration: Finally, in the third configuration of topoi that shape the Stimmung after the Second World War, authors and literary personages discover how their present differs from what it had been predicted to be when it was still the future of the past. […] This specific intersection

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of topoi was facilitated by the feeling that the long-awaited (and greatly desired) future had failed to come – a sensation that provoked disorientation and existential malaise. (2013: 36 – 37)

Let the Great World Spin illustrates that these Stimmungen, or at least the last configuration of Stimmung, are not exclusively linkable to the time period after the Second World War but have rather to be considered as an omnipresent Stimmung in the twenty-first century. As our present is positioned between a devastating past and an unthinkable future, Peter Boxall, referring to the French philosopher JeanPaul Sartre, points out that it is nearly impossible to define the present moment: “When we look backwards out of a speeding car, the place we are occupying at any given time is a simple, lateral blur, which resolves itself into a picture only when we have left it behind, as it fades into the distance” (Boxall 2013: 1– 2). In the twenty-first century, “[w]e find ourselves in the midst of a time which is fundamentally removed from the space-time complexes which had determined the passage of history from the seventeenth to the twentieth century” (19). Being removed from long familiar space-time complexes which rely on chronology and orientation, we now live in “a new time in which it is impossible to find one’s bearing” (19), characterised by an omnipresent “disorientation” (19). This feeling of disorientation and existential malaise in connection to the future is amply reflected in contemporary literature. In his 2012 study Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past, Amir Eshel confirms: “Facing a recent, traumatic past or imminent destruction”, people more and more “struggle with the sense of a world deprived of a future” (Eshel 2012: 3). Eshel terms literary works that take on the question of how to confront the past in order to face the future literary works with the capacity of “futurity” (4). These literary works, however, are not fostering false hope. Rather, “many ponder the human capacity to face hopeless individual or sociopolitical circumstances” (5). “Yet”, Eshel explains, “precisely by engaging such circumstances they point to what may prevent our world from closing in on us” (5). An engagement with these circumstances, as Eshel calls them, also includes a diachronic discussion of structural developments. The feeling of disorientation in the twenty-first century stems from latent traces of the past which have not been reckoned with and thus create atmospheres of insecurity for the present. While the aftermath of the Holocaust, described by some scholars as a sui generis event (Rothberg 2009: 9), should have paved the way for “the articulation of other histories of victimization” (6) and “a global memory culture deeply connected to the propagation of human rights” (De Cesari and Rigney 2014: 3), the contemporary era is far from having achieved this goal.¹¹  The same can be claimed for the aftermath of 9/11, as Sabine Schindler points out: “Even though

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Let the Great World Spin hints at latent trajectories of the past as well as the future by evoking a hopeful yet equally desperate Stimmung connected to a past when it was still a promising future. Set in the New York City of the 1970s, “the darkest, bleakest years in New York’s history” (White 2015: n.pag.) but today nevertheless a period looked upon with equally nostalgic feelings, the novel is both “aesthetically and thematically […] marked by a preoccupation with unity” (Cusatis 2011: 175). As the multiperspectivity of the novel, not “privileg[ing] any particular perspective or voice” (Hellman 2016: 67), echoes, the New York of the 1970s might have been, “while at its worst” (White 2015: n.pag.), “also more democratic: a place and a time in which, rich or poor, you were stuck together in the misery (and the freedom) of the place, where not even money could insulate you” (n.pag.). The form of the novel in this sense creates a Stimmung of multivocality and entanglement, which echoes the mood of the era depicted. The novel picks up the feeling of being ‘stuck together’ on various occasions. Gloria and Claire, two women separated by social background and ethnicity, in the end are united by their shared grief and something inarticulable beyond that; Ciaran and Lara, brother of the victim and wife of the indirect perpetrator; Corrigan, Irish monk, and Jazzlyn, African-American prostitute in the third generation. Set in the wake of the Vietnam War, the novel’s centering on the brave act of Phillipe Petit, walking between the Twin Towers, conveys a hopeful Stimmung (Schober 2012: 401), hinting at the possibility to overcome differences and leave war behind. This maybe more democratic version of the west’s mega metropolis is brought into direct interaction with the future: The photograph of the tightrope walker between the towers shows an airplane which seems to be on the verge of hitting one of the towers. In the last chapter, which unlike all the others takes place in 2006 and not 1974, the narrator contemplating the photograph remarks: “A man high in the air while a plane disappears, it seems, into the edge of the building. One small scrap of history meeting a larger one. As if the walking man were somehow anticipating what would come later. The intrusion of time and history. The collusion point of stories” (Spin 326). The narrator’s remark resonates with the construction of time and history of the novel which, although set in the 1970s, uncannily recalls the future on the story level, which for the reader is already the past. The tightrope walker seems to be a ghost from the future, “haunt[ing]” the novel as Hamilton Carroll puts it (2016: 154). The figure of the tightrope walker thus foreshadows the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001, an event that some

the terrorist attacks of 9/11 almost immediately acquired global iconicity, their memory has hardly inspired the spirit of reconciliation so fundamental to any definition of cosmopolitan memory” (2007: 243).

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scholars call “a limit event that shatters the symbolic resources of the culture and defeats the normal processes of meaning making and semiosis” (Versluys 2009: 1). On the morning of the 7 August 1974, the tightrope walker “stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the grey of the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper” (Spin 3). The motif of a jumping and then ultimately falling man is introduced early on in the novel, and the whole preface eerily resonates with accounts of 11 September 2001: Watching the tightrope walker, “rumors began again, a collision of curse and whisper, augmented by an increase of sirens, which got their hearts pumping even more […] down in the foyer of the World Trade Center the cops were sprinting across the marble floor, […] and the fire trucks were pulling into the plaza” (Spin 6). Just like 9/11, the watchers feel united by their status as witnesses to what they anticipate to be of grand consequences: “The watchers below pulled their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly shared” (7). In sharp contrast to 9/11, however, the man does not fall. What appears to be a “body […] sailing out into the middle of the air” (7) turns out to be just a t-shirt and the preface ends with the tightrope walker beginning his stunning walk high above the city. Thriving on notions of “falling” and “witnessing”, the tightrope walker motif situates the novel within the frame of fascination and horror, addressing “the pleasure we take in the outrageous” (Baumbach 2015: 16). However, it also refigures this discourse by linking it to an act of defiance. The “disembodied image of horror” (236) of the falling shirt takes on a new meaning. In the context of the novel, it no longer signals the loss of lives but the beginning of a stunning, courageous act. The crowd that witnesses the tightrope walker’s spectacle grants the reader an inside into the human psyche: While watching the tightrope walker, “many of the watchers realized with a shiver that no matter what they said, they really wanted to witness a great fall” (Spin 6). The “tension between attraction and repulsion” (Baumbach 2015: 236) that the pedestrians feel mirrors our global culture and its politics of instant visibility and spectatorship. If our current age is characterised by us witnessing numerous acts of violence on our TVs or on the Internet, it is not least our demand that is responsible for making a spectacle out of suffering. The novel builds on this Stimmung, this fascination with disaster and misery, but turns it on its head by making the tightrope walker a symbol for joy and risk without having him fall. This kind of Stimmung, which inscribes the future into the narrative present but with a slippage, a variation, captures the reader’s attention and makes them attuned to the latent connection. As Sibylle Baumbach writes in Literature and Fascination (2015),

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In literary texts, the activation of this kind of intense attention which stimulates readers’ imagination and helps captivate their attention does not only arise from the uncertainty of outcome, even though this might help create narrative tension and suspense: it is most frequently initiated by the disruption of familiar categories and the frustration of readers’ expectations insofar as their astonishment felt over incompatibilities and unanticipated divergence from the norm can lead to arrested attention. (Baumbach 2015: 17)

Let the Great World Spin operates through the disruption of familiar categories in its memory politics and though certainly not an eventless novel – the story features several change initiating events – still primarily expounds its fascination for the reader through its literary events (Rowner 2015), that is, the moments where an “unanticipated divergence from the norm” captivates the reader’s attention and makes them read for latent sublayers. As Baumbach points out, fascination in literature works as a trigger of “cognitive disorientation” (2015: 5), deconstructing the “antipodes of good and evil, terror and beauty” (5). The fascination that the image of the tightrope walker evokes while simultaneously disappointing the related expectations creates a feeling of uncertainty about these Manichean divisions. The image of the tightrope walker thus functions as a connecting node which through its using and simultaneous misusing of pre-learned associations that the reader might have introduces latency as a mode of memory in the novel. The Manichean divisions, which are often at the backbone of memory and trauma discourses – most striking in the division between perpetrators and victims (Rothberg 2019: 7)¹² – are inapt at covering human experiences. The use of the tightrope walker and the memory discourse attached to the image makes the reader experience this inadequacy firsthand. After all, although Petit’s walk is remembered as an act of “humaniz[ing] the towers” and positively connoted within cultural memory, Sheila Hones is right in noting that Petit’s walk could also be framed as an “invasion of American space that the French wirewalker performed – an invasion conceived, planned, and initially rehearsed outside the United States” that “was […] like the terrorist attacks of 2001, an illegal surprise assault on the towers” (Hones 2015: 2). The juxtaposition of these two ‘invasions’ of space with vastly different intents and outcomes is a powerful means to open up perpetrator and victim binaries. In this, the text makes a powerful intervention into memory discourse. After all, a “discourse based on clear-cut visions of victims and perpetrators or of innocence and guilt evacuates the political sphere of complexity  As Michael Rothberg explains in his recent study The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (2019), some forms of violence and trauma “demand that we take into account legacies of violence that spread beyond the stable categories of what I call ‘the victim/perpetrator imaginary,’ a conceptual framework that anchors most explorations of traumatic violence” (2019: 7).

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and reduces it to a morality tale” (Rothberg 2019: 138 – 139). In contrast, Let the Great World Spin uses the “resources of literature, which need not obey the logic of noncontradiction” (71) to make room for mnemonic complexity. Besides the tightrope walker, there are also other images reminiscent of 9/11. Although not explicitly a 9/11 novel, the novel is in a way about those “two towering beacons high in the clouds” (Spin 248), the World Trade Centre towers in their infancy, in a more innocent time, when they could be met with bravery, élan and artistry and were still untainted by acts of terrorism. When the pedestrians look up to the buildings’ peaks to see a tightrope walker making his way between them, their eyes cannot believe what they see. Meanwhile, the reader is invited to reflect on the buildings’ more recent history, when their eyes also could not believe what they saw, and when the notion of falling from the sky took on the burden of all those lives lost. Although the tightrope walk definitely takes on notions of hope, courage, dynamism and maybe most of all, the joy of living, the future is already inscribed into the description of a day in the lives of different New Yorkers in 1974. Not only the description of the tightrope walk itself, but also other smaller motifs in the novel link its plot to the events of 9/11. In a conversation between Corrigan, the monk who helps the prostitutes in the Bronx, and his visiting brother Ciaran, Corrigan insists that the prostitutes are good people: ‘Ah, no, they’re good people,’ Corrigan said. ‘They just don’t know what it is they’re doing. Or what is being done to them. It’s about fear. You know? They’re all throbbing with fear. We all are.’ He drank tea without cleaning the lipstick off the rim. ‘Bits of it floating in the air,’ he said. ‘It’s like dust. You walk about and don’t see it, don’t notice it, but it’s there and it’s all coming down, covering everything. You’re breathing it in. You touch it. You drink it. You eat it. But it’s so fine you don’t notice it. But you’re covered in it. It’s everywhere. (Spin 30 – 31)

The usage of dust as an image for an almost invisible fear permeating the city and influencing all of its inhabitants is for many readers instantly reminiscent of the “all-covering toxic dust” (Däwes 2011: 87) filling the streets of Manhattan after the fall of the towers. The use of this imagery challenges “homochronic chronology” (Birth 2017: 72) by inscribing the future (on the story level) into the narrative present, thereby creating an image of “an endlessly extending present” (Scott 2014: 6). The events of 11 September 2001 are therefore brought into different focus, not as an outstanding event but as an event in a chain of other events, circumstances, stories. Especially Corrigan’s wording is conspicuous: He claims the prostitutes “don’t know what they are doing. Or what is being done to them” (Spin 30), claiming that they do what they do motivated by fear. This disorientation, surrendering of agency motivated by fear which Corrigan describes is telling of a certain mood which betrays an essential loss of control and which “exposes the radical vulnerability of being human in our times” (Ganguly 2016: 27). Not only does this disori-

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entation translate into the omnipresent mood in the aftermath of 9/11, but it can also be interpreted to deconstruct the victim/perpetrator binary essential to discourses surrounding the events of 9/11. Not only could the eyes of millions around the world not believe what they saw on the morning of 11 September 2001, but the period right after was characterised by a crisis of language to capture what had happened. Language and the failure of words to capture the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center are at the core of many 9/11 novels (Versluys 2009: 15; Baumbach 2015: 225). Let the Great World Spin also approaches the topic of language in the face of an unprecedented event. In contrast to 9/11 fiction, the novel, however, does not portray language as inadequate or incapable of describing what transpires: “The man above was a word they seemed to know”, the narrator remarks at the end of the preface, “though they had not heard it before” (Spin 7). The watchers are united by a latent presence, a knowledge lying in wait. As illustrated by the ending sentence of the preface, the novel thrives on connectivity rather than a lack of understanding and communication typical of 9/11 novels. Although the multiperspectival structure of the novel evokes forgotten or neglected histories, the novel does more than that: It shows connectivity despite difference and inequality and thereby “acquaint[s] us with the multiplicity of human life and action” (Eshel 2013: 9). Through its networking poetics, the novel appeals for different parameters of grievability and a concomitant “expansion of our given vocabularies” (11) when it comes to the lives of ‘others’. Linking the aftermath of the Vietnam War with the slow violence of slavery and the reality of prostitution in one of the wealthiest cities in the world, the novel remembers not events but a “shared feeling of vulnerability” (Ganguly 2016: 17) and opens up our understanding of vulnerability to also include “persons incommensurable with our generalized systems of exchange” (52). As the dust motif underlines, “the everyday human dimensions of incessant […] insecurity” (52) are at the core of the narrative, appealing for a “radical transformation of sensibilities” (52) towards manifold forms of violence and suffering. At the end of the novel, the last chapter explicitly connects the day in 1974 to the aftermath of 9/11. Set in 2006, the chapter hints at the immigration policy of the direct time of the ‘war on terror’. The last chapter is focalised through Jaslyn, Jazzlyn’s daughter who was adopted by Gloria. While the chapter starts with a reference to a photograph of the tightrope walker reprinted in the novel – “What is it that holds the man so high in the air. What sort of ontological glue?” (Spin 325) –, it soon connects this past event to the aftermath of 9/11: “Up there in his haunted silhouette, a dark thing against the sky, a small stick figure in the vast expanse. The plane on the horizon” (325). Right after the description of the photograph, the heterodiegetic narrator describes a stereotypical airport situation for somebody not matching the standard phenotype of an ‘American’ as defined by he-

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gemonic voices in the wake of 9/11: “when she goes through the metal detector she automatically stretches her arms out to be searched, even though she doesn’t set off the alarm” (Spin 327). Similarly, an Italian man Jaslyn has met moments before is also singled out during the security check, because he made a joke about his hand luggage. Once again, the novel criticises normative identitarian categories: “Not your normal Italian, but what’s a normal Italian anyway? She has grown tired of the people who tell her that she’s not a normal African-American, as if there were only one great big normal box everyone had to pop out of ” (327). Despite this situation, the outlook in the end is optimistic, keeping in line with the motif of the tightrope walker. As Jaslyn points out after she leaves the airport building: “She’s always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing it is yours” (Spin 332). The last chapter seems to purposefully address contrasts, mirroring the overall policy of the novel’s structure: Although she is singled out at the airport, Jaslyn points out the beauty of the city and the way it is appropriated by everyone. In a similar way, although the chapter is about the death of Claire and the life during the ‘war on terror’ – “[b]aseball scores, football scores, another six dead in Iraq” (Spin 340) –, it is also about hope and resilience. In this sense, the novel signals “futurity” as defined by Amir Eshel. “Futurity”, Eshel explains, “is tied to questions of liablitiy and responsibility, to attentiveness to one’s own lingering pains and to the sorrows and agonies of others” (2013: 5) while at the same time “presenting moments of new beginnings” (5). The novel, through latency and the Stimmungen that hint at a situation of latency, connects all three temporal layers by linking back to 9/11 themes in the last chapter, which takes on the image of dust again: She parts the curtains a little more, opens the triangle, lifts the window frame minutely, feels the curl of breeze on her skin: the ash, the dust, the light now pressing the dark out of things. We stumble on, now, we drain the light from the dark, to make it last. She lifts the window higher. Sounds outside, growing clearer in the silence, traffic at first, machine hum, cranework, playgrounds, children, the tree branches down on the avenue slapping each other around. (Spin 349)

While the image of dust before had a negative connotation, representing fear and despair, in this scene dust takes on a power to “press[…] the dark out of things”, to help the narrator to move forward. The future, this scene underlines, “becomes once again an open question” (Bhabha 1994: 314), an “interstitial future that emerges in-between the claims of the past and the needs of the present” (314). Sitting with the dying Claire, Jaslyn ponders:

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Little else to distract attention from the evening, just a clock, in a time not too distant from the present time, yet a time not too distant from the past, the unaccountable unfolding of consequences into tomorrow’s time, the simple things, the grain of bedwood alive in light, the slight argument of dark still left in the old woman’s hair. (Spin 349)

Like the novel as a whole, this paragraph taken from the novel’s last page again stresses the everyday over the ‘event’ lurking in the neglected background of the story. The line between past, present and future is blurred, with the past reaching over into the future with its “unaccountable unfolding of consequences”. The novel stresses that unaccountable consequences of the past latently live on, but it also stresses that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

5.4 Conclusion: Grievability beyond the Victim/Perpetrator Binary The novel foregoes an easy portrayal of victims by giving them strong voices and making them the homodiegetic narrators of their stories, actively going against their portrayal as victims. The novel’s multiperspectivity spins a web of connections that brings to the fore latent stories which not only connect different characters and their individual stories of suffering but also bridge the temporal division of past, present and future. The novel is not a classical 9/11 novel as it consciously does not draw the event or its aftermath into focus, making it “stand[…] outside” of the narrative, “annexed beyond the page” (Carroll 2016: 148). Rather, the novel works through latent histories of violence, suppression and invisibility which cannot claim a single event at their core. Placing the novel within the discourse of 9/11 novels, the novel and the choice of its characters and their stories comments on the discourse of grievability strengthened by the narrativization of 9/11 as a sui generis event (Baumbach 2015: 225, who links this perception to the narrativisation in media). Through its multiperspectivity, Let the Great World Spin connects different instances of slow violence and thus uses the realm of the latent as a place of counter-memory to the memorisation of the events of 9/11. By using the trope of the tightrope walker, the novel challenges “images of spectacular annihilation as the new domain of aesthetic world-making” (Ganguly 2016: 47) and opens the form of the novel again for other forms of suffering which are not incorporated into the dominant poetics of terror. The novel’s use of what I call non-evental multiperspectivity fosters what Rothberg calls “a multidirectional sensibility – a tendency to see history as relational and as woven from similar but not identical fabrics” (2019: 127). The novel’s

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latent approach to memory underlines that the past need not be worked through, analysed into the last detail and pressed into a logical equation of causes and consequences. Rather, the novel’s latent memory politics invites comparisons between different mnemonic constellations, fostering a “border-crossing nature of remembrance” that “alerts us to unexpected layerings of history and indirect forms of responsibility” (26). Establishing a network of at times incompatible voices, the novel shifts focus to acts of slow violence and highlights the unequal politics of grievability at the core of memory discourses. It is through trying to find the connecting node between these different voices that the reader is invited to unearth latent connections and come to understand memory as being made up of uncontainable contingencies and networks of connectivity that strive on a form of solidarity that goes beyond sameness. As the multiperspectival form brings together different voices and perspectives on life, it calls for an “expansion of the moral imagination” (Ganguly 2016: 52) and thus challenges memory discourses that depend on clearcut binaries for their policies of grievability. In this sense, the novel creates a mnemonic archive which follows a minor ethic in stressing the connections and violences of the everyday and thereby counters heavily event-based archives of the past whose recognition of suffering is limited and closed off to new/unknown forms of life.

6 “Places are Ghosts, too”: Yvonne Owuor’s Dust (2014) Hearing echoes of landscape, feeling its shape inside her, how it formed her, its earth soaking up her tears, its dust on her brother’s body. Wuoth Ogik: home (Dust 230) How to say, We’ve been at war since before your birth, when the nature of this war has been its silence? (Dust 302)

Yvonne Owuor’s debut novel Dust (2014) focuses on the peoples, histories and lived realities of Northern Kenya. Reviewing Dust in The New York Times, the writer Taiye Selasi remarks: “In this dazzling novel you will find the entirety of human experience – tearshed, bloodshed, lust, love – in staggering proportions” (2014: n.pag.). However, the novel not only portrays human experiences but decidedly goes beyond a human focus and entangles human experiences with their situatedness in place and the agency of this place. “Echoes of landscape” inform the storyworld of Dust. Echoes across time, shadows, spirits and secrets are at the heart of Dust, a novel equally about history, personal loss and the vibrant agency of planet earth. The novel starts with the murder of one of its central protagonists, Odidi Oganda, and from there traces the events and histories that led to that moment, bringing them together with both the present and the future. It switches between different time periods of colonial and postcolonial Kenya, drawing these different moments into a network of causality and contingency. In a central passage of the novel, Nyipir Oganda, the head of the Oganda family, which is at the heart of the story, reflects on the situation of Kenya after the assassination of Tom Mboya in 1969: A hundred, and then a hundred more, herded into holding houses. Picked up – taken from homes, offloaded from saloon cars, hustled from offices, stopped on their way to somewhere else – prosecuted, and judged at night. Guilty, they were loaded onto the backs of lorries. And afterward, lime-sprinkled corpses were heaped in large holes dug into the grounds of appropriated farms. Washed in acid, covered with soil that became even more crimson, upon which new forests were planted. After Mboya, Kenya’s official languages: English, Kiswahili, and Silence. There was also memory. (Dust 273)

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111067384-007

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The semantic structure of the last two sentences highlights the resisting force of memory, which is a central topic in the novel. Memory is configured in the novel as a persisting energy that cannot be contained and that surfaces time and again, disrupting ‘official languages’ and politics. The novel remembers past events, for instance, the death of Tom Mboya in 1969, the Mau Mau struggle for independence of the 1950s and the ‘post-election violence’ (PEV) of 2006 – 2007, weaving these events into a network of continuity. These events have only lately started to become part of Kenya’s official history, with many stories not yet part of the official discourse. The novel thereby remembers that which has not yet been publicly addressed and thus latently informs socio-political as well as private realities in Kenya. As Nyipir points out, silence characterises Kenya’s handling of its past and shows that Kenya’s history of war and violence cannot be reduced to single events but has to be seen as a continuation of not only prior events but also structures of oppression and violence that are not captured by the category of the event. Wanting to explain the complexity of Kenya to his daughter, Nyipir asks himself: “How to say, / We’ve been at war since before your birth, / when the nature of this war has been its silence?” (Dust 302). Tellingly using the word ‘war’ in the singular, Nyipir shows that Kenya is characterised by structures of violence rather than isolated events. Highlighting that the silence with which this ‘war’ has been treated is the communal factor between the many structures and systems of oppression that contribute to this ‘war’ of which Nyipir speaks. Dust creates a mnemonic policy that highlights the latent connection between these individual instances of Kenyan history and brings them into dialogue. I open with this quote not only to illustrate how Dust addresses a silenced past and highlights latent connections between individual events in Kenyan history, but also to show that Dust’s memory policy connects different ontological realms. As Nyipir points out, the corpses that were silently buried were “covered with soil that became even more crimson, upon which new forests were planted” (Dust 273). The connection between the natural environment and memory is very strong in Dust. The novel not only creates a network between different events but also between different mnemonic agents. Although the novel deals with the Mau Mau struggle for independence, the post-election violence of 2006 – 2007 and other historical events, it is decidedly not a typical war novel, as it follows a different memory politics. The war novel, as Eleni Coundouriotis points out, “has arguably become the dominant literary theme of works about Africa read outside Africa” (2014: 1).¹ “The war novel”, Coundouriotis argues, “attempts a people’s history” and “attempts

 This is, of course, a debatable claim.

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to capture the people’s perspective” (1). Thereby, it “offers important analytical insights on violence and its representation. It addresses the dangers of reinforcing stereotypes by balancing its specifically historical project, located in particular places and conflicts, with the more universalizing discourse of war and humanity rooted in humanitarian discourse” (2). Dust noticeably differs from this description and presents the reader with a very different embedding of war, zooming in on particular microcosmoses without always embedding them in ‘humanitarian discourse’. Although it does address particular places and conflicts, it does not offer analytical insights and in general deploys a representation strategy that opens more mysteries than it solves. In Dust, it is the agency of supposedly inanimate matter that initiates new representational regimes. While “war novels draw a distinct boundary defining the space of this particular environment apart from the time of peace” (9), Dust shows that the boundaries between peace and war are fragile and not clear cut. The greatest difference between what Coundouriotis calls African ‘war novels’ and Owuor’s approach to Kenya’s war-ridden past is that despite the mentioning of events, Dust’s main focus does not lie with events or even mainly people. Despite having a family story at its heart, the novel does not focus on the individual family members as singular characters. Rather, what Dust puts into focus is the human entanglement with its nonhuman environment. Dust does not tell “the people’s perspective”. Indeed, different than other novels written in the context of Kenya’s history,² Dust does not establish ethnic affiliations clearly³ and constantly shows that ‘the people’ are characterised more by hybridity and contact zones than clear-cut differences. Instead of focussing on ‘a people’, the novel shows how different agents work together and influence one another. In Dust, it is not only humans that remember the past, but also the nonhuman environment, which frames historical events in a history that exceeds human existence (Liebermann and Neumann 2020). In Dust, mnemonic practices are decidedly more-thanhuman. Although the Oganda family is at the heart of the story, the novel also tells the story of Wuoth Ogik and the land it was built on, endowing both place and humans with mnemonic power. After the death of the son Odidi in the post-election violence of 2007, the family reunites in the family home Wuoth Ogik. The father,

 See, for instance, the novels of Ngugi wa Thiongo.  It is only late in the novel that the characters speak Luo. See also Neumann, who in her interpretation of the novel explains: “The influx of different ethnicities and peoples has produced all sorts of intersections and translocations, which cut across clearly delimited nations or countries. Nyipir’s name, alluding to the eponymous Luo king, is an evocative reminder of the patterns of migration and collision that have been formative of Kenya and the continent since precolonial times” (2020c: 20).

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Nyipir, who once worked for an English colonial settler-farmer, Akai Lokorijom, Nyipir’s wife and former lover of the colonial settler-farmer, and Arabel Ajany, their daughter and Odidi’s sister. They soon receive a visitor, Isiah Bolton, who is looking for his long-dead father, the colonial settler-farmer Hugh Bolton. It is Wuoth Ogik, where their stories meet and Wuoth Ogik also, it soon becomes apparent, vibrates with a hidden secret. The novel time and again stresses the vitality of matter and brings into focus what Jane Bennett calls “encounters between peoplematerialities and thing-materialities” (2010: x) that strive on “the capacity to feel force before subjective emotion” (Cole, “Affective Literacy” qtd. in Bennett 2010: xiii). Building on affects rather than emotions, the novel brings to the fore a mnemonic “field of forces” that does not “congeal into subjectivity” (xiii). Thereby, the novel contributes to the questioning of humans’ unique position feature (Knittel and Driscoll 2017: 382) that is currently evolving at the intersection of memory studies and posthumanism, new materialism, and ecocriticism. As the novel also shows, this endeavour does not mean abandoning the category of the ‘human’ but rather designates what Knittel and Driscoll call a “critical engagement with the limitations, blind spots, and unacknowledged exclusions at the heart of humanism” (2017: 382). The latent capacities of affect – its refusal to be graspable and definite – that the attribution of agency to space and nonhuman agents generates, I claim, makes Dust a mnemonic novel that makes the entanglement of human and nonhuman actors one of its major concerns. Reading the novel with a focus on this entanglement invites a reflection on the concepts of both the environmental humanities and memory studies. It negotiates both the mnemonic agency of the nonhuman and the role that emplacement plays in acts of memory. The novel decidedly invites this reading, because it time and again makes us aware of the limitations of our categories of interpretation and thus pushes the reader to critically engage with the vibrant energy of the nonhuman and the limitations of us to fully capture this energy. Going beyond the primacy of the ‘human’ in relation to history and memory, the novel brings “natural history and human history together within the same frame” (Rigney 2017: 476). In Dust, places and landscapes are mnemonic agents that archive personal, human memories like that of Hugh Bolton’s death (see also Neumann 2020c). The novel does not, however, project human emotions, empathy and meaning-making strategies on a nonhuman world. The more-thanhuman world is configured as an archive that goes beyond human time tracking and thus hints at the imaginative limits of purely human-based memory studies. Even more, it specifically counters western understandings of both memory and the agency of the land. The land, Isaiah Bolton finds out, “hums an ancient, eerie tune” (Dust 78) and, the reader quickly realises, operates as a nonhuman archive of memories.

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In its depiction of the Northern Kenyan landscape, the novel intentionally moves beyond a vision-centered approach and instead portrays the land as an agent that challenges all senses. The Australian ecofeminist Val Plumwood convincingly illustrates the consequences of the coupling of sight as the primary sense to make sense of the world and the perception of the land as passive: To describe the land as a ‘landscape’ is to privilege the visual over other, more rounded and embodied ways of knowing the land, for example, by walking over it, or by smelling and tasting its life, from the perspective of predator or prey. Landscape concepts put a frame between the viewer and the land, distance from the land, and invite virtual and idealist approaches to the land. (Can you talk or sing to the landscape, for example, as you can to the land?) As many have pointed out, visuality has been privileged in western culture and closely linked with sado-dispassionate rationality because, unlike other senses, sight requires little in the way of symmetry (one can see without being seen), reciprocity, or consent, and allows the seer to be set sharply apart from what is seen. (Plumwood 2006: 123 – 124)

The novel decidedly envisions the land as an active agent that can only be approached through embodied ways of knowing that do not privilege the visual. In this, the novel counters any perceived superiority of the seer over the seen and challenged perceptions of agency that rely on such dualities. When Ajany returns to Kenya upon hearing the news of her dead brother, the description of her arrival is strikingly multisensous: Arrivals. Touchdown at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport against a cliché of a postcard Nairobi sunrise, acacia-in-the-morning scene, the sky red, mauve. An exact sensation of life wafted around the passangers. Kaleidoscope flavors, earth scents, for her a tumble of memories. A mother’s hand sprinkling mixed herbs into water-keeping sheepskin vessels, spicing hair with ghee, cedar body-washes with desiccated acacia bark and leleshwa leaves. A childhood written in aromas. (Dust 49, my emphasis, Y.L.)

Ajany’s arrival in Nairobi takes the reader on a sensuous journey, quickly contrasting the view of the sunset with scents, the movement of everyday activities and these activities’ intricate connection to the earth and the materiality of the land. The novel portrays the characters’ actions as equally relevant as the materiality of their surroundings. “The light of the land” (Dust 61), “the texture of the wind” (63), “all the tongues of the desert” (82) and “the murmur of spring water” (113) are portrayed as equally agentic. The way the novel tells the story of the Oganda and Bolton family highlights that their human presence is only one event in the course of a long history that goes beyond human-time tracking and eshews monolistic concepts of agency. In Dust, the human self is woven into a larger narrative of human and nonhuman history, asking the reader to imagine themselves as “embedded in geologic temporalities” (Yusoff 2013: 785). Replacing a human-centered

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approach to memory with a more inclusive, entangled understanding of memory, the novel reveals that narrative trajectories which focus on a historicity that limits itself to human intentionality and temporality are too narrow and not apt at capturing our being-with-the-world. In this chapter, I will concentrate on the potential of spatial descriptions to bring to the fore latent connections and agencies. I will show that Dust’s memory policy not only resides in its dealing with past events but that the landscape and presumably inanimate matter also remember and have to be taken into account as mnemonic agents. In order to fully grasp the relevance of nonhuman mnemonic agents, I will first of all address the historical context that leads to a situation of historical latency in Kenya. Then, I will show how the country is still haunted by its past, embedding my analysis within the concept of hauntology. In this, my analysis will challenge the admittedly humanistic concept to make room for constellations of haunting that also include nonhuman agents. I will show how the ghosts that have a palpable effect on Kenya’s day to day reality are not figurative ghosts but can also take the shape of landscapes and objects. In this vein, I will connect latency with the concept of animism and thereby widen the horizon of memory studies to encompass the mnemonic agency of nonhuman objects and places. Latency as a mode of memory, this chapter illustrates, can create a memory politics that goes beyond ‘a people’s’ history and instead strive on connectivity that configures events as points of surfacing in a chain of latent violence rather than singular occurrences. Latency is shown to be a favourable literary mode to provide representation to the memory of nonhuman agents without anthropomorphising them. The nonhuman environment is configured in a way that is enigmatic and strives on affects rather than triggering emotions,⁴ thereby doing justice to a nonhuman memory which time and again exceeds human cognition. In this, the novel ties in with the new materialist tradition to question and challenge the prevalence of social constructionism over material and somatic realities. New materialism negates the received notion of matter as inert and passive and instead highlights its agency and formative impetus. While literature is, of course, human-made and not beyond human meaning-making processes, it can help to raise self awareness and at least gesture towards the agency of matter that might exceed human epistemologies. After all, Ursula Heise identifies the origin of humanity’s lack of interest in and respect for the nonhuman agents in “the human stories that frame our perception and relation to endangered nonhumans” (2016b: 5). The stories that we tell thus take on a significant responsibility in shap-

 For a detailed discussion of the interconnection between affect and nonhuman agency, see Liebermann, Burger and Rahn 2021.

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ing how we frame and respond to nonhuman agency. Since questions of memory are intricately connected with questions of storytelling, the way that we remember is also important for how we conceive of the nonhuman. If meaning-making processes for the present rely on how we frame the past, it is important that nonhuman agency is also acknowledged in literature that takes on acts of remembrance. Bringing together questions of storytelling and memory with considerations surrounding the nonhuman, this chapter strives to show interconnections between the field of memory studies and the neighbouring fields of posthumanism, new materialism and object-oriented philosophy and show the role latency as a mode of memory can play in bridging the gap between representation and materiality.

6.1 “There is no purge through mourning, no effective reconciliation, no closure”: Memory Politics in Kenya In his work on Mau Mau memoirs, Mau Mau Memoirs: History Memory, and Politics (1997), Marshall Clough describes the Mau Mau legacy “as a kind of unhealed wound deceptively covered with skin, which one lances periodically without ever completely relieving the pressure or curing the infection for good” (1997: 254). The Mau Mau struggle for independence and its aftermath, Clough claims, have never been sufficiently addressed in the public realm. For Kenyans, “[t]here is no purge through mourning, no effective reconciliation, no closure” (1997: 254). Although more than twenty years have passed since the publication of Mau Mau Memoirs: History Memory, and Politics, the struggle for independence is still an ‘unhealed wound’ in Kenyan society. Indeed, the Mutua settlement of 2013 – a court case between Ndiku Mutua & Others and The Foreign and Commonwealth Office – shows that the wound is still far from closed. This settlement between members of the Mau Mau War Veterans Association and the British government was “supposed to focus on the horrors of detention of millions of Kikuyu or the torture and abuse of many Kenyans – turned into meditations on the alleged horrors perpetrated by the Mau Mau” (Muller and Hasian 2016: 167). As the 2013 Mutua settlement, however, amply demonstrates, while the British government seemed urged to address their wrongdoings in the past, their public ‘apology’ amounts to little more than a poorly conducted façade that shows their refusal to take responsibility for British colonialism and its aftermaths in Kenya. The Mau Mau struggle for independence is widely understood to describe a militant African nationalist movement against colonialism and British domination. The memory of the Mau Mau struggle for independence is, however, not only the memory of a local uprising against colonial power. The Mau Mau struggle for inde-

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pendence, as historian Daniel Branch points out, was not fought by “two easily identifiable adversaries” (2009: 10). Initially a fight against colonialism, the Mau Mau struggle for independence soon developed into a civil war between those Kenyans that supported the British system and those who opposed it.⁵ The Mau Mau struggle for independence describes the period between 1952 and 1960. The conflict stands in direct relation to the aftermath of the Second World War, in which many Kikuyu⁶ fought alongside the British against the Axis powers. Returning home from the war, the Kikuyus had expected to “be treated as dutiful British Commonwealth citizens” (Hasian and Muller 2016: 171). However, the Kikuyus and other indigenous people were not rewarded for their fighting for Britain after the Second World War. Instead, their situation even deteriorated due to increased use of mechanised farming and a general boost in prosperity for the European farmers due to the war. Both together initiated changes in farming politics which in turn led to the forceful ‘repatriation’ of more than 100.000 Kikuyu (Anderson 2006: 26). The Mau Mau, who called themselves the “Land and Freedom Army” (Coundouriotis 2014: 34), rebelled against the colonial political system “that required land-based wealth as a qualification for participation, an economic system devoid of opportunity for acquiring land, and a social system that demanded land as a condition for marriage and thus adulthood” (Branch 2009: 17). The memory of the struggle for independence is a contested one. As Marshall Clough puts it, “Mau Mau memory has been elusive, changing, dependent on who is remembering, and where, and when” (2010: 252). Overall, the period before independence is largely silenced in official discourses. Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of independent Kenya, ruled by a policy of amnesia. His official slogan “Forgive and Forget” (256) demonstrates his government’s wish to leave the past behind unaddressed in order to embrace a unitary transition into independence, constructing the pre-independence struggles as struggles fought by everybody – independent of tribe and political allegiances – equally (Hughes 2017: 346). In this sense, Kenyatta’s government created a version of “a usable past” that was thought to “stabilize post-conflict social order” through an artificial “closure for a traumatic past” (Coundouriotis 2014: 65). This “attempt to silence an inconvenient past” (Branch 2009: xii) has had, however, long lasting consequences. As Daniel Branch convincingly argues, “the manner of Mau Mau’s defeat” and the way it has been

 Indeed, John Lonsdale and Atiendo Odhiambo claim that “[o]ver 90 per cent of the war dead were Kikuyu, in what turned into an internecine civil war between the loyalist Kikuyu Guard, many of whom had earlier taken the oath of unity, and Mau Mau’s combatants, many of whom mistrusted their own comrades in arms” (2010: 3; Anderson 2006: 4).  It was not only the Kikuyus who fought against the colonial rule. However, the majority of Mau Mau were Kikuyu (Anderson 2006: 4, Mwangi 2010: 93).

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silenced right after independence “has had, up to the present, profound effects on the politics of Kenya at every level” (206). While the British discourse that framed the struggle for independence as “atavistic, tribalist, racist, anti-Christian, and criminal” (Clough 2010: 254; Anderson 2006: 1) has long dominated discussions of the struggle for independence, the “public grievances of Mau Mau followers were not addressed by Kenyatta’s regime, in particular, those related to land” (Branch 2009: 206). In fact, many positions of power were filled by homeguard loyalists who had fought alongside the British against the Mau Mau (Ogot 2010: 9). Memory politics in Kenya is thus unbalanced and selective. Especially the “killings of Mau Mau suspects by their guards at the Hola detention camp” (Branch 2009: 183) and detention without trial of thousands of Kikuyu supporters on “the basis of accusation or mere suspicion” (Anderson 2006: 5) are unaddressed in memory discourses, leaving their deaths and experiences of violence without justice. Yvonne Owuor’s Dust shows the continuity of violence and war by connecting the so-called emergency years (1952– 1960) with the almost completely unaddressed violence erupting after Tom Mboya’s death in 1969 and the post-election violence of 2006 – 2007, thereby underlining the long-lasting effects of an unbalanced policy of amnesia. While the memory of Tom Mboya, “the pre-eminent non-tribalist of Kenya politics” (Goldsworthy 1982: 283), “stood as a reproach, and was therefore not something to be actively promoted” (288), the novel fills this gap by highlighting similarities between the emergency period and the aftermath of Mboya’s death. A past that is not addressed, the novel stresses, “is persistent” (Dust 24) and will foster ghosts that will haunt the present and – when left unaddressed – hinder a transition into the future.

6.2 “This land, its awful age – here time hums an ancient, eerie tune”: Haunting Death and the effects that an unruly death can have are highlighted as a prominent trope in the novel by its beginning. Alongside “mud-stained, crumpled election posters entangled in rotting foliage” (Dust 7), Odidi Oganda finds his untimely death in the streets of Nairobi amidst the post-election violence of 2007. Right from the beginning, different deaths are juxtaposed, as the prologue, which tells of Odidi’s death, intersperses moments of another death into Odidi’s tale. While the reader’s first entrance into the story is through Odidi as the focaliser of the heterodiegetic narrative, the narration soon switches to a zero focalisation that juxtaposes the entry scene of the violence on the streets of Nairobi on the night of the 2007 election with an episode from Ajany’s and Odidi’s childhood. Right from the beginning, Odidi’s and Ajany’s world is presented as a world as much gov-

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erned by the seen as by the unseen. Looking for the hidden origin of a stream they can hear but not see, Odidi and Ajany enter “the forbidden, damask-stone cave” (12). Next to “thick shadows that clung” and the “imprint of the world’s first record of laughter – open mouthed toothiness carved into ancient rock” (12), Odidi and Ajany find the remains of a human body. This body, the reader learns as the story progresses, is that of Hugh Bolton, a colonial farmer-settler who lived at Wuoth Ogik during the times of the Mau Mau struggle for independence. The make-up of the narrative right from the start brings into dialogue memories of the nation, memories of the family and memories carved into “ancient rock”. Odidi’s death brings his sister Ajany back from Brazil, where she has been studying art. Ajany’s return is twofold: She returns to shed light on her brother’s death, whose spirit she senses as soon as she enters the country. But Ajany also returns to Kenya, the country of her birth with which she never felt truly connected. As Eva Rask Knudsen and Ulla Rahbek point out in their reading of the novel, “[o]ne of the anxieties that Ajany in Dust has to battle with is homelessness – a homelessness that Odidi, who never left Kenya, had set in motion himself and which affects Ajany’s sense of self profoundly. […] Odidi embodies a rootedness she herself does not feel – thus he can talk about home in a way that she cannot” (2017: 123). The characters of Ajany and Odidi are – despite their close relationship growing up – vastly different characters. While Odidi stays in Kenya and tries to better the country working for a company as a water engineer and risking and finally losing his job when he finds out that the company is corrupt and betrays the people of Kenya (Dust 160 f.), Ajany leaves the country and the secret buried in ‘the forbidden cave’ behind and moves to Brazil. In Brazil, Ajany lives in a district called “Saudade”, a “crossroads peopled by remnants of the colonized. Portugal-infused Africans, vagabond refugees, wounded immigrants, all in-betweeners, representatives of nations’ detritus” (138). Saudade shares a history of colonisation with Kenya,⁷ and the fact that Ajany is drawn to this place shows that the past – a past that reaches back long before her birth – latently informs her journeys. Although the novel focuses on Kenya, its memory politics is thus not predominantly one of national identity. The novel combines personal with communal histories but also highlights latent connections across the ocean. Returning home, Ajany soon feels that the “past’s beckon is persistent” (Dust 24). Odidi’s death has triggered a return of the repressed past in the Oganda family that for the reader coincides with an emerging of Kenya’s repressed history. Thinking about the change that Odidi’s death has brought for the family, Ajany remarks:

 Of course, these histories are vastly different. However, what the novel underlines is what these places despite their differences share.

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“Before-now was four hours and forty-three minutes ago. […] But-now is icy eternity” (21). Odidi’s death marks the moment for the family to address their secrets as the time of the “[n]ow is when forgotten ghosts return to claim beginnings” (21). These ghosts are linked to the family secrets but also to the nation’s unaddressed past. As the 2007 election violence has shown, Kenyatta’s policy of amnesia did not dispose of an ‘unusable past’ but just temporarily buried it out of sight. From this realm of the latent, the past returns to haunt the present and claim acknowledgement. In this, “phantoms of the British Empire” (27) join the “deliberately suppressed phantom” that “now bounds into Wuoth Ogik” (71). Nyipir, the head of the household at Wuoth Ogik, too understands that the past does not rest buried forever. When Isaiah Bolton arrives at Wuoth Ogik, Nyipir realises that he has to address his past. After admitting to his daughter that he knew Hugh Bolton and that they “shared … trouble” (Dust 68), he elaborates: Baba’s voice is as parched as the Chalbi Desert. ‘The thing … Mau Mau …’ Ajany shifts, brows puckering. What? Creaky-voiced: ‘And if I should speak, may the oath kill me …’ ‘What?’ she asks again. Silence’s oaths, slow-dripping venom with their seductive promise of memory loss. Erasure of secrets, as long as the oath was fed in intermittent seasons with spilled human blood. […] Nyipir adds, fingers gesturing, ‘Even if you plant another story into silence, see, the buried thing returns to ask for its blood from the living.’ (Dust 69)

Nyipir, who worked for the British during the Mau Mau struggle for independence here refers to the taking of an oath that was actually part of the initiation process of the Mau Mau (Branch 2009: 2). The oath taking of the Mau Mau, which was often taken by the British as a sign of savagery and a lack of civilisation, is here contrasted with “[s]ilence’s oath”, a contract to stay silent which might not include animal blood and a ceremony as it is said of the Mau Mau oaths, but an oath nevertheless, which might even have further reaching consequences than the oath of loyalty of the Mau Mau. While the Mau Mau oath aimed at securing people’s loyalty, the novel addresses another kind of oath which asks for forgetting in order to secure an undisrupted transgression from the past into the present. Thus, while oath taking is mostly associated with the Mau Mau, the novel also sheds light on the oath of silence that Kenyans were supposed to take after 1969 and the death of Tom Mboya, “[f ]or the father of your nation”, meaning Jomo Kenyatta. Silence’s oath, asked for “so that a freshly haunted people would never ask why” (Dust 123), Nyipir makes clear, disrupts the present and makes ghosts return from the past. Democracy cannot be built on the premise of forgetting without first paying tribute to the deaths of those who fought for that democracy. All the dead, who were buried at night, “heaped in large holes dug into the grounds of appropriated farms” (273),

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the “[d]isplaced ghosts, now-in-between people” (272) still inhabit the country, not resting because their names have been forgotten and silently and secretly buried. Ghosts are ever-present in Dust and inhabit the same ontological realm as the protagonists. Their existence is not marked upon with surprise and not perceived as an abnormality but accepted as a part of the everyday reality. For Nyipir, “[m] emories are solitary ghosts” which he lets in, “traveling with them” (Dust 24). Their presence is perceived as an inevitability and stoically accepted. In Dust, “this-beingwith specters” as Derrida calls it in his Spectres of Marx (1993), is “a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations” (2006 [1993]: xviii). Haunting, Derrida underlines, “is historical, to be sure, but it is not dated, it is never docilely given a date in the chain of presents, day after day, according to the instituted order of a calendar” (3). Although haunting surely is connected to evental peaks in the flow of time, its force cannot be reduced to these events. In his work on hauntology, Derrida’s focus is Marx’s legacy in Europe, but his ideas prove to be transferable to different contexts, proving that a being-with-spectres is a memory politics that connects us beyond national or cultural confines and, as I will show, that connects human and nonhuman haunting agencies. The novel entangles the concept of haunting with ideas of agentic space. Haunting is neither bound to one specific moment in time nor to one person being visited by a revenge-seeking ghost. Rather, haunting is the vibrant energy of a space that registers this space’s history. “Untimely”, Derrida writes, haunting “does not come to, it does not happen to, it does not befall, one day, Europe, as if the latter, at a certain moment of its history, had begun to suffer from a certain evil, to let itself be inhabited in its inside, that is, haunted by a foreign guest” (2006 [1993]: 3). Dust similarly stresses a continuity without beginnings or endings. Ajany, haunted by the ghost of her dead brother, unconsciously follows her father’s example. Being haunted is a legacy that seems to be inherited, as Nyipir’s life was also heavily influenced by a haunting of lost family members. Nyipir’s role in the Mau Mau struggle for independence, being an informant for the British and burying the bones of dead rebels under the secrecy of night, cannot be connected to a loyalist bond with the British. Nyipir shows that the motivations to choose sides in such a conflict as the Mau Mau struggle for independence can often not be reduced to a binary logic. His actions were neither solely motivated by his need for money and a lack of different opportunities in rural Kenya. Nyipir’s role in the struggle for independence is a result of his desire to travel to Burma to “retrieve family ghosts” (Dust 271) of his brother and father who “[w]ent for King George’s war” and “[d] idn’t come back” (69). His decision was not political but simply a means to an end. This circular development in which the past is mirrored in the present shows that “[g]hosts are a problem for historicism precisely because they disrupt our sense of a linear teleology in which the consecutive movement of history pass-

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es untroubled through the generations” (Buse and Scott 1999: 14). Remembering, the novel underlines, is an ongoing process which does not end with the commencement of a new generation; it is transgenerational and embedded in space. As Neumann shows in her analysis of the novel, Wuoth Ogik plays a central role in the novel’s portrayal of haunting, as the estate “deeply enmeshes the characters into the place’s repressed history of violence” (2020c: 21). The ghosts which bring the past back to life are thus not human but nonhuman and intricately connected to the space: The wind, the water and the earth upon which humans have built. The novel contrasts the protagonists’ lives and perceptions with the politics of memory of the state, which it shows to be insufficient. The politics of memory that the latent persistence of spectres from the past introduces is quite different from the chronology underlying the logic of policy makers who demand forgetting in order for progress to be possible. Haunting disrupts chronological temporal structures since it shows time to be “disarticulated, dislocated, dislodged, time is run down, on the run and run down” (Derrida 2006 [1993]: 20). The spectres that haunt the lives of the protagonists cannot be directly linked to specific events but are rather the summation of different times, overlayered in a specific place. In this, the novel “troubles the dualism of time and space that structures Western epistemes, inviting readers to consider space and history ad interlocking forces” (Neumann, 2020c: 25). The novel’s configuration of haunting brings to the fore a diachronic tradition of the state to neglect important memory work. In this, the novel levels socio-cultural criticism at the way Kenyan regimes used to overgo memory work in their endeavour to create modern democracies. The presence of spectres dislocates time, breaking open its alleged finality of a chronological flow from past to present to future. The certainty with which we inhabit the present is called into question, highlighting “an essential unknowing which underlies and may undermine what we think we know” (Davis 2005: 377). As Derrida points out, “[i]f there is something like spectrality, there are reasons to doubt this reassuring order of presents and, especially, the border between the present, the actual or present reality of the present, and everything that can be opposed to it: absence, non-presence, non-effectivity, inactuality, virtuality” (2006 [1993]: 48). The border between the actual and the virtual is dissolved by the presence of something other than a concrete here-and-now. The presence of spectres has an influence on chronotopes, the “temporality of place is altered, and things cease to be ‘of the past’ and instead disembark on their own timescale” (Trigg 2012: 310). In Dust, different moments in time are entangled “so that what one might have thought of as distinct moments in time and space are recomposed to create a different spatio-temporal configuration (Silverman 2013: 3, see also Neumann 2020c). The fact that both Nyipir and Ajany want to travel to the places where their brother or father died, well aware of not finding them alive, hints

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at a memory politics that is intricately connected to place. Nyipir is aware that he will not find his brother and father in Burma, but he still has the strong desire to travel to the place where they died. This desire attests to the spectral vibrancy of place, disentangling the concept of haunting from exclusively human agency. The novel tellingly comes full circle, when Nyipir leaves Wuoth Ogik half a century after the Second World War, to finally travel to Burma (Dust 360), the soil that devoured his family. In this sense, the novel links the materiality of space to time: “What endures? Spaces in the heart that accommodate the absent. […] What endures? The hard earth: her limits” (354). The novel thus establishes the “hard earth”, the adjective underlining its physical materiality, as a mnemonic archive. The haunting alerts the reader to the fact that space in Dust is overlayered with different temporalities, making them co-exist alongside each other. This haunting is thus linked to the space and not so much to individual memories. Haunting does not describe the visible presence of a human-like ghost but goes beyond this anthropomorphic understanding. Haunting is related to atmospheres and moods rather than visible presences. Isaiah, for instance, feels watched in Wuoth Ogik, but he cannot pinpoint by whom or what. It is an unnameable presence that disturbs him more than an actual revenant. In the words of Amy Rushton, “[t]he physicality and tactility of Wuoth Ogik embody” the absent – an intentionally broad category – who are “both there and not there, part of the landscape” (2017: 58). As Derrida also underlines in his work on hauntology, spirits or spectres are not to be understood as fantastical revenants that take on human form and haunt individual subjects, but they are rather to be understood as generators of specific moods “of vague disquiet” (Trigg 2012: 305). This mood is “a manifestation of the transcendence of our being-in-the-world” (303) that connects us to our material environment. It operates as a disturbance to the present time, disrupting its ‘now’. And although moods “elude[…] conscious perception” (Schwab 1997: 115), they are still peceptible in a latent feeling of perturbance and with-ness with an unidentifiable other. This mood of vague disquiet asks to be addressed and reckoned with; it cannot be ignored and triggers the protagonists’ actions, marking it as an important narrative element that disrupts the plot. As Derrida puts it, “one must reckon with them [the spirits]. One cannot not have to, one must not not be able to reckon with them, which are more than one: the more than one / no more one [le plus d’un]” (2006 [1993]: xx). Spirits are entangled in Dust: The characters, no matter their differences, are all similarly affected by a non-definable presence that is not connected to a singular event or person but transcendent of singular experiences. The act of being haunted is not an individual experience in Dust but rather a point of convergence where the different characters meet. As Avery Gordon points out, “haunting is a shared structure of feeling, a shared possession, a specific type

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of sociality” (2008 [1997]: 201). This “shared structure of feeling” is deeply connected to the environment of Kenya, entangling sociality with the materiality of the space the characters inhabit. Silence’s oath does not only bind the characters to a life of secrecy but to a “convulted silence” that also “warps the landscape. Nothing seems stable, not even the aged acacias” (Dust 46). Landscape and humans are entangled in a network of latent histories that find their way to the surface. Through specific moods the latent past makes itself felt. When Isaiah first comes to Kenya to look for his dead father, he feels the impact of the landscape’s “vibrant matter” (Bennett 2010) pressing on him. He soon realises that Wuoth Ogik is a space of “no boundaries” (Dust 78): No boundaries between life and death, past and present or human and nonhuman agency. Feeling the presence of his environment, Isaiah remarks: “This land, its awful age – here time hums an ancient, eerie tune” (78). This eerie, ancient tune is not connected to a singularity; the landscape’s spectres are “a productive opening of meaning rather than a determinate content to be uncovered” (Davis 2005: 377). Spectres in the sense of “more than one” are “an unnameable or almost unnameable thing: something, between something and someone, anyone or anything, some thing, ‘this thing,’ but this thing and not any other, this thing that looks at us, that concerns us [qui nous regarde], comes to defy semantics as much as ontology” (Derrida 2006 [1993]: 5). While ghosts are often discussed as decidedly human revenants (even if they might not take on the actual form of a human being), Derrida uses the word “thing” to describe the ghost, thus detaching it from human semantics. Indeed, while the protagonists of Dust feel haunted by memories of dead humans – Odidi, Hugh Bolton – the novel stresses even more the presence of something undefinable which affects them without them being able to pinpoint its origin. Ghosts, which are both concrete and abstract in Dust, are not only linked to specific people but also to the place itself, its materiality and its manifold nonhuman agents.

6.3 The Memory of Space: Animism, Wuoth Ogik and the Northern Kenyan Landscape Places can be palimpsests. When they take on palimpsestic quality, there is a side that is visible and a side underneath that which is withdrawn from direct decipherment. “There is phantasmal quality to place”, writes Christina Lee in her analysis of Spectral Spaces and Hauntings (2017), “that exceeds cognition and the senses, and challenges the quotidian understanding of time as linear” (2017: 2). Dust addresses this ‘phantasmal quality of place’ and mobilises “more complex spatial metaphors than that of the simple storage space” (Hodgkin and Radstone

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2003: 16). Instead, the novel emphasises the meaning-making quality of spatial descriptions. The configuration of space, so Mieke Bal, is often tied to the “focalizing subject” or the “external focalizer” who “represents particular characters’ visions” (2009: 134– 135). Dust focalises the storyworld through different characters, through various repetitions thematising space itself. In Dust, space thereby becomes “an object of presentation itself, for its own sake” (Bal 2009: 139). Through the narrative means, “[s]pace thus becomes an acting place rather than the place of action. It influences the fabula, and the fabula becomes subordinate to the presentation of space” (139). The space in Dust is intricately linked with its plot. As Mieke Bal points out, a “dynamically functioning space is a factor which allows for the movement of characters” (139). In Dust, I claim, space becomes the inhibiting factor for the movement of the characters. Because the space is inhabited by the spectres of the past which have not yet been addressed, movement turns into circularity. In the storyworld of Dust, the experience of being haunted and of sensing absent presences or ghosts is a normal manner of being-in-the-world rather than an abnormal deviation. Despite the focalisation through different characters as, for instance, Isaiah, Ajany and Nyipir, space is always perceived as agentic independent from perspective, thus removing this depiction from individual and singular perceptions. The mood that the novel establishes juxtaposes different fields of energy and establishes agency as shared between humans and nonhumans. The fact that entanglements with the nonhuman world are not limited to the natives underscores that the agency of matter to disrupt normative temporalities and ontologies is not specific to local cultures but a reality which has a “cross-cultural dimension” (Rooney 2000: 20), configuring it as communal, transnational and transcultural. The landscape’s agency is enigmatic, made up of “an array of unseen dimensions whose reality we can sense yet whose enigmatic invisibility simply cannot be overcome” (Abram 2013: 127). As a newcomer to the place, Isaiah is especially sensible towards the environment’s agency. The force of his environment exceeds Isaiah’s categories to make sense of the way the environment presses on his being. “When do the bloody winds end their garbled groaning?”, he asks. “Too much life; everything breathes here, even the damn stones. Too much space. But being in the house is like being crammed into a too-slow metal lift with no light. He hates the startling creaks of many unseen things here” (Dust 78). The spectres, the “many unseen things”, entangle Isaiah in a complex alliance between his own materiality, the environment surrounding him and the perceived absent presences that inform that environment. This means that Isaiah feels touched by something that takes up space without this something being actualised and visible. The space is described as a “space of no boundaries” with a “throbbing, dense menace to it” (78). This feeling or mood that the space generates troubles an easy di-

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chotomy between absences and presences, suggesting the possibility of an in-between state: neither fully present nor completely absent. In this, the novel introduces its readers to a different ontology. While “in the West being is thought of in opposition to non-being, and being/nonbeing are thought in terms of presence/ absence” (Rooney 2000: 20),⁸ Dust troubles these dichotomies. Dust not only tells the story of a family tragedy entangled with the history of a nation but also stresses a being-with an environment which carries markers of history and remembers them in its own right. Spirits that are always more than one, as Derrida proclaims, touch everybody and are not necessarily attached to culture, but rather to places. Dust is firmly connected to Kenya as its setting, but the novel does not link its storyworld-reality to one specific culture. Although the reader might detect that the Oganda family belongs to the tribe of the Luo,⁹ the novel – in contrast to history writing in relation to Kenya – does not overly stress tribal allegiances. The belief in spirits is not linked to cultural practices that performatively bring these spirits to reality. Rather, the spiritual world pre-exceeds the human subject and entangles it in communal processes of world-making and perceiving. Isaiah notices the network of agency which operates alongside him: Things unseen, matter that is “quite real and powerful” yet “intrinsically resistant to representation” (Bennett 2010: xvi), surround him once he enters Kenya. Portraying the environment as powerful yet enigmatic, Dust strengthens an understanding of place that removes it from discourses of possession: In Northern Kenya, “land is not a possession, but that subject with which one is in relation” (Jolly and Fyfe 2018: 300). For the Oganda family, the presence of spirits is part of their everyday life. However, Isaiah and Selene who both only spent a little amount of time in Kenya also feel the influence of the land. “Things unseen” watch and influence their life in Northern Kenya: “Wuoth Ogik: Journey’s End. / Sensation of being watched” (Dust 113). Endowing the nonhuman world with the power of ‘seeing’, the novel destabilises the notion of a knowing subject as the sole source of agency and stages the nonhuman world as a co-agency. Both Isaiah and Selene do not perceive ghosts because they have been told that they exist. Rather, they are touched by a mood of co-presence that might not fit their preformed understanding of the world but which they have to concede. In its configuration of space, the novel decidedly counters imperial discourses of land as possession. Not only configuring Wuoth Ogik as a vibrant agent but as a  Claiming that this is true for “the West” is a broad claim which is debatable. However, it is true that the attribution of agency to nonhumans is fairly new in European and North American philosophies.  Nyipir addresses Petrus in Luo (Dust 308). Moreover, the belief that twins are the result of evil spirits voiced by Akai’s mother upon the birth of Ewoi and Etir is also anchored in Luo beliefs.

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vibrant agent capable of seeing and watching, the novel instrumentalises the gaze which in colonial discourse figured as “an active instrument of construction” which was supposed to convey “a sense of mastery over the unknown” (Spurr 1993: 14). In colonial discourse, the penetrating gaze of the knowledgeable, educated colonialist makes a “passive space” (Nayar 2012: 33) and the people living in it transparent, subjecting them to discourses of negation. Dust turns this rhetoric around, the Kenyan landscape remains a mystery “before the discerning gaze of the Englishman” (33) and the Englishman is instead the object of the gaze. The text thereby establishes a relationality in which “the ‘knower’ does not stand in a relation of absolute externality to the natural world being investigated – there is no such exterior observational point” (Barad 2000: 146). In Dust, the landscape time and again is closed off to the knowing gaze: “The land’s rocks cannot decide what color to be” (Dust 135) and Isaiah has to recognise that “here, the moon was the other way round. He had lost his north” (136) in this “hard land with neither beginning nor end” (146), in which the “landscape unfurls into eternity, shimmering past origins” (334). Human and nonhuman agents are seen in relation to each other, challenging the “Cartesian belief in the inherent distinction between subject and object, and knower and known” (Barad 2000: 131). In this, the text deconstructs and latently remembers the colonial practice of epistemological mastery over the nonhuman environment, connecting the haunting of the content level with a different form of haunting: the haunting of established epistemologies and textual practices on the discourse level. In this sense, Dust’s memory politics is not only reflected in its story, which gives agency to the nonhuman to remember and act on its human co-agents, but also in the way the story is composed. The novel’s re-membering of the colonial discourse of appropriation of the natural world demonstrates that literature’s memory is not only concerned with which stories we tell but also with the way in which we tell stories. Memory studies are often focused on what is being told, whose stories are heard. Equally important is however the tradition and the language policy in which we tell stories and thus re-member. Dust metafictionally remembers through its use of colonial discourse and of language more generally. Dust’s use of language has been commented on by scholars repeatedly. Eva Rask Knudsen and Ulla Rahbek call it a “mode of writing that is elliptical and fragmentary” (2017: 115), Taiye Selasi calls it a “raw, fragmented, dense” and “opaque” prose (2014: n.pag.). Birgit Neumann comments on the novel’s “creative use of spatialisation” (2019: 101), “performatively undo[ing] the notion of a blank space” (101). Especially Owuor’s use of spatialisation which Neumann links to the negotiation of the concept of the ‘blank space’, which is intricately connected with colonial discourse, gestures towards the novel’s meaningmaking policy. In the context of Australian indigenous stories, Warren Cariou points out that

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land is described as the originator of stories and language, respectively. This is fundamentally different from colonial understandings, which generally place humans or a human-like God as the originators of both language and stories, with the land being simply one of many ‘things’ that can be gestured toward using language. These Indigenous philosophies of language and belonging reverse the trajectory of Western mimesis, starting with the land as the source of not only sustenance but also of knowledge (Cariou 2018: 340 – 341)

Land as the originator of stories is an idea that Owuor herself has voiced in her essay “O-Swahili – Language and Liminality”. In this essay, she quotes the East African writer David Kaiza, who argued that “the Luo attitude and rhythm in language have been forged by the landscapes through which they pass, and to which they belong” (Owuor 2015: 150). Owuor’s language use in Dust constantly blurs the distinction between the “what system” and the “where system” of human cognition (Herman 2004: 284),¹⁰ refusing her readers to construct typical mental models of places, characters and action. The colonial ideology connected to space is represented through Hugh, who clearly displays the typical “doctrine of appropriation” (Spurr 1993: 28), calling Kenya the land his “people” “built”, “named” and “died for”. In colonial discourse, natural resources of colonised lands were seen as belonging “to ‘civilization’ and ‘mankind’ rather than to the indigenous people who inhabited those lands” (Spurr 1993: 29). In Dust, however, Kenya is actively framed as a “Not-England African space” (Dust 27), marking its reality as removed from European epistemologies. The novel maps the resistance of land at colonisation, endowing it with the agency to disrupt human intentionality. The character of Hugh Bolton allegorically represents the typical colonial settler-farmer who takes it as his birth right as a British citizen to inhabit and mark as his own the African landscape. Hugh hunts animals for fun, displaying “a parade of slaughtered creatures – heads, skins, tusks” (96) in his house, clearly showing disrespect for the Kenyan environment and its nonhuman inhabitants. When Hugh and Selene first arrive in Naivasha, today a small market town Northwest of Nairobi, the narrative consciously draws the reader’s attention to their self-centredness:

 Basing his ideas on the research on spatial language by Landau and Jackendoff, Herman explains that there is a firm distinction between the “what and where systems of human cognition, the what system being concerned with objects (object shapes, names, and kinds), the where system concerned with places” (2004: 284). While we have “a rich what system”, the “where systems” “preserve[s] much coarser geometric properties of objects” (284). This discrepancy, Herman finds, often leads to a “resistance to modes of perceiving and inferencing based on standard parameters for spatial cognition” (293).

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They smelled roasting calves at parties to which they had not yet been invited. They reveled in the sight of a lake of myriad moods around which assorted species gathered, with seasonal pastoralists bringing livestock down to drink. Vestiges of paradise. There was much to do. They needed a home. They needed to make money. They started by camping out, and laughed and danced, and made love under starlight next to lemon-green thorn trees within earshot of moaning hyenas. They built a temporary shelter and were found by the right kind of servants, who bowed at every turn of phrase. (Dust 92, my emphasis, Y.L.)

Selene’s and Hugh’s agency, here underlined by the repetitious use of the third personal pronoun, is contrasted with bowing servants and a marvellous, but impassive landscape. The lemon-green thorn tree apparently only serves as the setting for their love making, the lake a source of enjoyment for the settlers. The reader, however, soon realises that this account focalised through Selene is only her initial perception of the space and not its reality. Soon, the tone changes: “Kenya was seeping into Hugh”, manifesting itself in his sunken cheeks, “contoured, scarred, tinged with heat, his skin mottled” (Dust 93). Although Hugh sees the landscape as merely a means to entertain him and satisfy his own desires for power and position, the land resists his appropriation. Soon, an unexpected storm destroys their vines, and Selene more and more senses “the footfall of advancing predatory shadows” (100). Reflecting on her husband’s stubbornness to acknowledge forces beyond his control, she reflects: “This is my country. Foolish Hughie. The country chose its prey. Seduced them, made them believe they owned it, and then it gobbled them down, often in the most tender of ways – like a python” (100). The place here is endowed with a counter-agency that resists attempts at domination. The construction of the narrative and its politics of focalisation, moreover, stresses the fallacy of assuming the passivity of landscape. The landscape, which has witnessed not only colonialism but also times long before human time tracking, is configured as animate in Dust. As the place is configured as agentic, it is also part of processes of remembering. Remembering with spirits, which are always more than one, transforms memory from a singular and human experience to a collective endeavour shared by humans and nonhumans alike. Thus, conceptual ideas about the memory of place are connected to the philosophical ideas of animism (see also Neumann 2019). Animism is “a term broadly used to designate non-Cartesian modes of thought, and specifically the attribution of agency to nonhuman beings” (Jolly and Fyfe 2018: 296). Animism as a philosophy invites us to abandon binary dichotomies which favour human intentionality over other fields of energy. Human and nonhuman agencies are subsumed under the category of ‘being’ instead, a category that they share equally. In her work African Literature: Animism and Politics (2000), Caroline Rooney points out that in the philosophy of animism, “[b]eing is thus variously considered in terms of energy, force, vitality where such terms are not necessarily opposed to non-being and absence”

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(2000: 20). In this definition, humans become “absolutely co-extensive with the being of the world, not transcendentally detached from it” (4). In this sense, animism forms a counterpoint to western epistemologies, precisely because it emphasises the gaps of our knowledges and challenges the binary of presence and absence. Animism makes clear that “despite all our accumulated knowledge regarding the workings of the world, we are in continual, felt relationship with unseen realms” (Abram 2013: 125). In this sense, animism calls for what Karen Barad defines as a “relational ontology” (132), that is, an understanding of our being-in-the-world in which “agency is cut loose from its traditional humanist orbit” (144). The novel makes this relationality most clear in its configuration of Wuoth Ogik. Wuoth Ogik, “a self-contained, haunted compound with its lone, misshapen grevillea tree, upon which a purple-blue bird tweets, and where death prowls at half past three” (Dust 19), is at the centre of the narrative, making possible and inhibiting human actions. The house, built by Hugh Bolton’s servants, taken by Nyipir and now visited by Hugh’s supposed son Isaiah, is not merely the setting for their actions to unfold but a regulator of the possibilities of action. The compound is a mnemonic agent that influences how the human characters remember. As Neumann points out, “Wuoth Ogik, literally meaning ‘journey’s end’ deeply enmeshes the characters into the place’s repressed history of violence” (2020c: 21). Time and again, the place exerts pressure on the characters to confront the past. The agentic spatial descriptions of Wuoth Ogik confront the reader with a nonhuman network: “Wuoth Ogik. / Forces converged here” (Dust 240). Wuoth Ogik itself is part of the natural environment, being subject to its position in a “wind-wailing blot of landscape” (207) and the whims of the natural environment, at times “wrap[ing] [it] in a rare white mist of dust” (203). Wuoth Ogik is one agent among many, interacting with the human world, but also only a temporal agent.¹¹ After the family has addressed its past, acknowledging their role in it and forgiving those that have wronged them, “create[ing] room for trying again” (361), the house is symbolically burned down. But even this act of destruction, human-induced fire is still presented as an agent co-active in the action: “But then, seduced by the fire’s frenzied freedom, they had danced before it giddy as children, and in their dancing there was fire and the spirit in the fire found bodies stripped bare to weave into replete landscapes, into which untiring desire roared in visceral rites of exorcism” (363). The wording leaves it open whose desire roared  Amy Rushton claims that “Dust ends with a reversal of power between Wuoth Ogik and its inhabitants”, as Wuoth Ogik is “physically transformed, releasing memory into the elements” (2017: 60). I rather read the flooding of the land and the fire at Wuoth Ogik as an encompassing circle of which Wuoth Ogik forms a part. Ajany and Isaiah have not regained power but have come to realise their entanglement with nonhuman forces outside of their control.

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and how exactly which bodies are woven into the landscape as Ajany and Isaiah do not die in the fire. In this, the novel once more transgresses the boundary between actuality and virtuality, showing that the characters’ being-in-the-world is multiple. Their bodies ‘woven into replete landscape’, Ajany and Isaiah become an invisible presence in place, even when they will have moved on from there. This merging with place is initiated through dance. Dance, in this scene, is introduced as a form to connect with this virtuality and the spirits and spectres of place. The motif of dance underlines that the connection between humans and nonhumans is initiated first and foremost through the materiality of the body. As this coming-into-being through dance highlights, “[m]aterial conditions matter, not because they ‘support’ particular discourses that are the actual generative factors in the formation of bodies, but rather because matter comes to matter through the iterative intra-activity of the world in its becoming” (Barad 2000: 140). In this, Dust brings forth an understanding of memory which sees memory as a collective effort between human and nonhuman forces and thus goes beyond the centrality of a remembering human subject. The human body in Dust is integrated into the environment, “departed from the centrality of the ‘I’” (Trigg 2012: 281). For Ajany, it is the nonhuman materiality of music that connects her to her environment from which she is estranged. Ajany does not have a straightforward relationship with Kenya, having left it for Brazil, not wanting to engage with the country’s complicated political situation and her own position within it. Although others perceive that Ajany “is not of this place” (Dust 247), while dancing “Ajany [herself ] is unconscious of her complete otherness” (247). It is while dancing that Ajany “experiences temporary relief from ontological anxieties of belonging” (Knudsen and Rahbek 2017: 123). As both a “kinetic medium and cultural practice” (Marcsek-Fuchs 2015: 562), dance establishes Ajany’s position in an environment from which she has consciously removed herself. Especially through the kinetic energy that movement through dance builds up, the text indicates that our being is always in becoming and in relation to nonhuman forces that we cannot fully control. Ajany’s being is not fixed in ontological preconceptions but rather is constituted through her movement in space. Music and dance operate as transnational actants in that they establish a feeling of rootedness in Ajany that goes beyond national discourses and histories from which she feels removed. From all the characters, she is the one who is least able and least willing to connect to the political discourse related to her brother’s death. Wanting to escape the politicised discourse, it is music that establishes a moment outside of the present (Dust 248) for her, an in-between moment that establishes connectivity: “Hearing melodies that had been played in Bahia, wanting to throw off the weight of her world and its realities, she dissolves like wax into the music, feels it become her body. Now she is simply Arabel, and the other side

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of the song is silence, and its roots are in eternity” (Dust 248, my emphasis, Y.L.). In the moment of dancing, Ajany’s body is part of a nonhuman network. Watching Isaiah watch Ajany, Justina remarks: “But you can’t dance with her. […] You are just a human being” (Dust 248), thereby stressing that in dance Ajany has left the centrality of her human subjectivity behind, being “swallowed by the warmth, noise, and rhythm” (247). In this network, the music transports her beyond her immediate reality, connecting her to Bahia and a shared past manifested in the music and its rhythms, but removed from Kenya’s immediate political reality. The roots of the song are not in the past as we use to think of ‘roots’ but “in eternity” (247), underlining the time transgressing potentialities of music as an actant that operates on our bodies, attuning them to a virtual net of connectivity. As Ajany’s coming-into-being through dance shows, Dust prefigures agency as what Karen Barad in her essay “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of how Matter Comes to Matter” (2008) calls “intra-action” (132). Building on ideas by physicist Niels Bohr, Barad sees action as communal efforts of human and nonhuman agents who come into being through acting. As Barad points out, “relata do not pre-exist relations; rather, relata-within-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions” (133). This idea of our coming to be through intra-action challenges the unified subject that Cartesian thought positions at the basis of epistemology and action. In this sense, Barad’s model refigures causality, making action – similarly to Latour (see Latour 2005) – a joint product between different agents or actants. In this model, “‘[h]umans’ are neither pure cause nor pure effect, but part of the world in its open-ended becoming” (Barad 2008: 139). This model of relational ontology has, in turn, consequences for epistemology and memory practices. Barad points out: There is an important sense in which practices of knowing cannot be fully claimed as human practices, not simply because we use nonhuman elements in our practices, but because knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part. Practices of knowing and being are not isolatable, but rather, they are mutually implicated. (Barad 2008: 147)

Realising that ‘knowing’ is not an activity solely controlled by human beings bears significance for reflecting on processes of memory. Dust shows that latent connections and knowledges in the way described above might linger under the surface, removed from our immediate assessment. In this, the novel asks us to keep remembering, understanding memory as an open process, constantly “in the works” (Rigney 2010: 345).

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6.4 Conclusion: Linking Memory Studies and the Environmental Humanities In his work on Multidirectional Memory, Michael Rothberg asks his readers to “think of the public sphere as a malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being through their dialogical interactions with others; both the subjects and spaces of the public are open to continual reconstruction” (2009: 5). Dust does exactly this: It invites readers to think space as a ‘malleable discursive space’ in which human and nonhuman actants form a dialogue on the one hand and one in which on the other hand nonhumans are also portrayed as an enigmatic, agentic force that cannot be subsumed under human epistemologies. Spatial practices, this chapter has shown, can highlight the latent memories of landscapes and nonhuman agents. By construing the Northern Kenyan landscape as haunted, the novel introduces haunting as a historical force tied to specific places that forces the reader to engage with absences and negations as much as with what is made explicit on the story level. Negotiating concepts of memory and haunting by tying them firmly to concepts of space, the novel meets what Ursula Heise calls the “defining challenge for the environmental humanities – that of rethinking time, memory, and narrative” (2016a: 6). While “narratives of decline and extinction or, conversely, of resilience and improvement in nature always intertwine ecological facts with cultural histories and value judgments” (6), Dust tells a story of haunting that is detached from the meaning-making human subject. Rather, stressing the agency of nonhuman geohistorical forces, the novel as a form can put emphasis on the limitedness of human-centred memory practices. Haunting especially eludes the limitedness of linearity or its straightforward negation and shows that the well-known practice of overcoming trauma by working through it (Caruth) is not an activity that can be performed by humans alone. The latent agency of spatial descriptions lies exactly at the intersection between actuality and virtuality: Creating a disquieting mood not only for the characters but also for the readers, the text calls into question whether a coming to terms with the past can ever be an exclusively human act. In its agency, space also fulfils a mnemonic function on a generic level by remembering colonial discourse and the passive role that it attributed to allegedly inanimate landscapes. In this, the text’s spatial prefiguration also plays a role in the memory of literature, that is the potential of literary works to refer back to other literary works or generic traditions. The text thereby preserves and archives the memory of aesthetic forms, ascribing memory “a memory of its own” (Erll and Nünning 2006: 13). Dust however does not do this directly but rather below the surface. Just like the characters Isaiah and Selene, the reader might be affected by an

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agency before they have cognitively assessed it. The text uses latency and the concomitant concepts of affect and mood to bring into focus an agency that might exceed human cognition and thus human value judgements. Space becomes agentic without it being anthropomorphised. It becomes an actant on the textual level without becoming a humanised character. Rather than animating inanimate matter, the text refuses to deanimate matter. Their agency is not a result of textual strategies like metaphors or personifications. Instead, the text uses literary strategies – such as the notion of the blank space – to make visible as agentic what has always been agentic. In this, Dust intervenes in a normativity of memory studies where matter and objects “are often marginalized and viewed from an anthropocentric perspective” (Zirra 2017: 458 – 459). It brings once more to the fore that storytelling, which is the backbone of memory studies, “is not just a property of human language, but one of the many consequences of being thrown in a world that is, by itself, fully articulated and active” (Latour 2014: 13). By countering the utilitarian approach to the nonhuman that is often encountered in memory studies (Zirra 2017: 460), Dust underlines the necessity to interlink memory studies and the environmental humanities. With the flourishing of academic fields such as posthumanism, new materialism and object-oriented philosophy, academia across disciplines is more and more inclined to consider the self as woven into a larger fabric of both human and nonhuman history. The novel asks its readers to perceive being as a “trans-species flow of becoming” (Groes 2017: 974). Thereby, it troubles dichotomies that are based on a firm differentiation of absence and presence. Opening up memory studies for different conceptions of being-with the environment could mean starting to analyse human cultures and societies in their relations with nonhuman species, natural processes, ecological systems and inanimate landscapes and forces. Embracing other conceptions of ‘being’ could then foster a new ethics of cultural memory that acknowledges the entanglement of agency between different actants and rekindle an awareness for the material construction of memory. Such a conception is useful in today’s memory studies since a materially-aware memory studies might, in a next step, provide the basis for a more general deconstruction of hierarchies within the field.

7 Re-Membering Modernism: Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018) So yes, flags were emotional. Primevally so. At least here (Milkman 27)

In 2018, Anna Burns was the first writer from Northern Ireland to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize. As the consequences of the Brexit vote of 2016 are looming large, her novel Milkman comes across as a warning. Though a retrospective story about growing up in Northern Ireland in the times of the so-called Irish Troubles that officially lasted from 1969 to 1998, the novel feels eerily contemporary. In the novel, the narrator-protagonist retrospectively says about what the reader assumes to be the 1970s in Northern Ireland: “So yes, flags were emotional. Primevally so. At least here” (Milkman 27). Now, over 20 years after the Northern Ireland conflict has officially ended, this commentary is as topical as ever. The Brexit referendum of 2016 rekindled an old conflict between unionists and nationalists in Northern Ireland, people bringing back out their flags (if they ever put them away), now, for some, including the flags of the European Union. “Nearly a decade since the Good Friday Agreement”, the Agreement that should have ended the violent conflict in 1998, “the political accord for which it paved the way remains fraught and uncertain” (272), writes Neal Alexander in 2009. If anything, this has worsened since 2016. The peace deal, it turns out, has not erased the deep fractures within Northern Ireland and now Brexit – the result of the UK’s majority vote to leave the European Union – is threatening to unravel the fragile peace in Northern Ireland and rekindle old conflicts. The problem is visibly manifested by the 310mile Irish border, the land boundary that separates Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, from the Republic of Ireland, which is an independent country and also a member of the European Union. That border was heavily militarised during the so-called ‘Troubles’, both a symbol of the strife and a very real target for nationalist paramilitary groups. The fact that in May 2018 a novel that deals with the Northern Ireland conflict is published and wins the Man Booker Prize should thus not necessarily come as a surprise, as the conflict has risen again in people’s consciousness because of Brexit. What might come as a surprise, though, is the form in which Burns decides to return to the 1970s and the Irish Troubles. The conflict is only present in a very allusive manner, never taking centre stage, and the style Burns uses is heavily reminiscent of twentieth-century modernist techniques.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111067384-008

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Milkman is not Burns’ first take on Ireland’s past. In 2001, Anna Burns wrote her first novel, No Bones. No Bones is a very chronological novel that very explicitly and in the style of realism deals with the so-called ‘Troubles’. The novel’s subject matter is clear from the first lines: “The Troubles started on a Thursday. At six o’clock at night. At least that’s how Amelia remembered it” (Burns 2002: 1). The novel therefore sets out with a clear time frame – stressed by the periodisation of each chapter –, a distinct location (Ardoyne is named as the setting on the second page) and a defined perspective. In 2018, Anna Burns turns once more to Irish history in her Booker Prize winning novel Milkman. The latter, however, could not be more different from her first novelistic take on the historical period. In contrast to No Bones, Milkman refrains from directly addressing the conflict, positioning it in the background rather than the foreground, thereby weakening direct historical links and ideological allegiances. Early on in the novel, the unnamed narrator-protagonist, who looks back upon her time growing up (catholic) in Northern Ireland as an 18-year-old girl, notes: As regards the psycho-political atmosphere, with its rules of allegiance, of tribal identification, of what was allowed and not allowed, matters didn’t stop at ‘their names’ and at ‘our names’, at ‘us’ and ‘them’, at ‘our community’ and ‘their community’, at ‘over the road’, ‘over the water’ and ‘over the border’. Other issues had similar directives attaching as well. […] There was food and drink. The right butter. The wrong butter. The tea of allegiance. The tea of betrayal. (Milkman 24– 25)

Directly addressing the importance of names, brands, place names, accents and dialects, it is particularly striking that Milkman – in conspicuous difference to Burns’ first novel – eschews naming anybody or anything, making it as some reviewers put it an “eccentric”, “odd”, “difficult” and “willfully demanding and opaque” novel (Devers 2019: n.pag.; Garner 2018: n.pag; Charles 2018: n.pag.). It is only through tracing the odd reference or allusion that the reader can construct a rough storyworld for themselves. While the novel is not very concrete regarding names and references to the extra-textual world, it is very detailed when it comes to what Jesse Matz in his study on the modern novel calls the “texture of dailiness” (2004: 42). Similar to Coetzee’s Childhood of Jesus (see chapter 3), in which the reader never gets to know about the actual process of migration or the causes for it, the ‘events’ of conflict in the form of deaths, bombings, killings and violent confrontations are almost absent from the narrative – again in strong contrast to Burns’ first take on the Irish Troubles in No Bones. In concurrence with the other novels analysed in this study, Milkman’s memory politics supersedes event-based forms of remembering with other focal points. Although the narrative time and again alludes to the violence of the everyday, in the storyworld of Milkman this violence always stays in the background. Violent

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killings and everything that might be extraordinary to the reader are presented alongside ordinary acts like “children to be fed, nappies to be changed, housework to be done, shopping to be got in” (Milkman 159), while “political problems, best as could be managed, [are] skirted around or in some other way accommodated” (159). By normalising the ‘events’ of a deadly and violent conflict, the novel excavates the “continually hidden” (Highmore 2011: 4) of the everyday, shifting the readerly focus away from the ‘sensational’ and towards the latent structures of the everyday, the ideologies governing it and the societal expectations that steer it. It is this zooming in on the seemingly banal, together with a use of modernist mode of writing – manifest in the novel’s employment of readerly disorientation, eschewing of linearity and its focus on a microcosm rather than a macrocosm – that inflects Milkman’s latent critique of concepts connected to Modernism, such as cosmopolitanism, flânerie and city writing more generally. In this chapter, I will again focus on the latent energies that literature’s engagement with the everyday can unleash, paying special attention to the way a novel can put its style centre stage by refraining from a heavily event-loaded narrative. Decentring the narratological concept of the event, the narrative emphasises the novel’s formal and stylistic affiliations and deviations, making them the reader’s main point of attention. What is at the core of my analysis are the qualities that distinguish Anna Burns’ novel from so-called “post-Troubles fiction” (Alexander 2009: 272) which takes the historical events of the time period of 1969 – 1998 as its centre. In order to do so, I will analyse the novel’s style together with the depictions of everyday life and the “ordinary affects” (Stewart 2007) that these descriptions portray and release. In what follows, I will show that Milkman is a novel that is intricately linked to the contemporary. It is my argument that the novel produces the contemporary through its use of Modernism as a latent critique of cosmopolitanism and concomitant traditions of writing the city and the exploring and observing subject. Employing a modernist style in conjunction with a plot that is centred on a narrator-protagonist whose flâneusing in the city is decidedly limited as well as on a society where the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are firmly held in place, the novel employs a modernist mode of writing to critically engage with concomitant concepts such as cosmopolitanism. It does not situate narrative as “a form of political intervention” (Chakrabarty 2002: 114) but rather aims for more subtle minor ethical commitments. In this, the novel does not work through opposition but rather re-members, that is, modifies and recharges, the literary style of Modernism without subscribing to an ideological agenda, thereby making it speak afresh to the challenges of the present. In its close temporal proximity to the First World War, Modernism is often connected to a sincere belief in the possibility of departure from the past and its deficiencies (van den Akker and Vermeulen 2015: n.pag) and a “a modern desire for sens” (n.pag). Milk-

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man employs the style of Modernism, without, however, subscribing to these ideals. Rather, the novel uses modernist styles to latently connect to the past while at the same time initiating change and new trajectories for novel writing in the twenty-first century. In this, the novel’s use of latency generates a temporal ‘togetherwith’ that decidedly counters ideas of literary linearity.

7.1 Approaching the Contemporary In his 2013 study Twenty-first-century Fiction: A Critical Introduction, Peter Boxall asks: “Has our century come into sharp enough focus for us to ascribe to its cultural practices a character, a mood a structure of feeling?” (2013: 1). This question derives from Boxall’s conviction that the paradigm of postmodernism no longer adequately responds to our contemporary age (15 – 16). As Boxall attests, “with the new century, we have seen a large scale waning of the explanatory power of postmodern critical language” (16). Concomitantly, “our conception of late culture comes into a difficult contact with the apprehension of a youthful time, a dawning era for which we do not yet have a terminology” (12). Hence, although many critics (Boxall 2013; van den Akker and Vermeulen 2017; Nealon 2012; Felski 2000: 5 f.) emphasise the end of postmodernism as a useful paradigm to articulate the twentyfirst-century structure of feeling, they also emphasise the difficulty of defining the present. The present, scholars mostly agree, is illegible (Boxall 2013: 2, 17; Agamben 2020: 44) and “lacks clear contours” (Gumbrecht 2014: xiii, 23). When trying to approach the present, it is helpful to gain an understanding of contemporaneity. Engaging with the contemporary means, according to Giorgio Agamben, to “see the obscurity” (2020: 44) and accept that the contemporary must be at once close and distant. In his study Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present (2017), Theodore Martin articulates a similar understanding of the contemporary. For him, as for Agamben, the contemporary does not demarcate a historical period; it cannot be periodised. In this, their method to approach the contemporary decidedly differs from Boxall’s approach, who links the contemporary to the twenty-first century. For Martin, the contemporary is “a critical concept” (2017: 5), a “strategy of mediation: a means of negotiating between experience and retrospection, immersion and explanation, closeness and distance” (5). This strategy of mediation compels us to investigate our methods of coming to terms with and trying to categorise the contemporary. “The contours and currents of our current moment – its temporal boundaries, its historical significance, its deeper social logics”, writes Martin, “are inseparable from the historically determined and politically motivated ways we choose to divide the present from the past” (5).

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While Boxall tries to accentuate the contemporary by describing current trends in literature – which he summarises under four categories: the novel’s emergence from “a global cultural matrix” (2013: 7), a “shifted temporality” (9), new attention to “the nature of our reality” and its materiality (10) and a “certain estrangement at work in the ways that we experience our own bodies” (11) – Martin follows a diachronic approach. For Martin, the contemporary “emerges out of a constant negotiation between” what is old and what is new (2017: 7). Martin’s method to highlight this negotiation is to look at genre developments. “Genres”, he states, “lead distinctly double lives, with one foot in the past and the other in the present; they contain the entire abridged history of an aesthetic form while also staking a claim to the form’s contemporary relevance” (6). I claim that what Martin attests regarding the travelling potential of genres is equally true for modes of writing. Employing a specific mode of writing can be seen as a conscious act of remembering. “[S]tyle” writes Susan Sontag, “has a specific, historical meaning” (1964a: 18). “It is not only that style belongs to a time and a place; and that our perception of the style of a given work of art is always charged with an awareness of the work’s historicity, its place in a chronology. Further: the visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness” (18). In this, a novel’s style can be regarded as a “mnemonic device” (35), remembering the work’s historicity, making the reader consider it diachronically. This means that the choice of a style that a novelist uses is in itself already a choice of memory: The novel thereby remembers the historical embeddedness of the style as well as its socio-cultural connotations. James and Seshagiri highlight the relevance of style in current twenty-first-century fiction: A “growing number of contemporary novelists […] place a conception of modernism as revolution at the heart of their fictions, styling their twenty-firstcentury literary innovations as explicit engagements with the innovations of early-twentieth-century writing” (James and Seshagiri 2014: 87). Style is thus not only to be considered as an aesthetic choice but also a conscious act of both literary and socio-cultural re-membering. Bearing in mind the recent “powerful revival of modernist sensibilities” (Mao and Walkowitz 2006: 1), it seems legitimate to claim that Modernism as evoked by fiction that purposefully makes use of its style is part of the negotiation of the contemporary. As “[r]edefining the modern means rethinking our sense of history and time, continuity and rupture, revolution and tradition” (Felski 2000: 61), I claim that a consideration of stylistic mnemonic affiliation might similarly to a consideration of genre developments help to articulate a contemporary structure of feeling. In the following, I will highlight Milkman’s modernist allegiances and how the novel uses Modernism as a latent critique of cosmopolitanism to articulate the contemporary.

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7.2 Modernist Allegiances Milkman is told by an unnamed homodiegetic narrator, a woman recalling a year sometime in the 1970s when she was 18 years old, living in an unnamed city that for many critics resembles Belfast (Charles 2018; McKinty 2018; O’Connell 2018) but is never explicitly named as such. The narrative traces approximately eight weeks in the life of the narrator-protagonist, starting with the first contact she has to an approximately 40-year-old paramilitary man called ‘Milkman’ until his eventual death. The narrative is, however, not told chronologically but jumps back and forth in time, often disorienting the reader as to the sequence of events. Thereby, the narrative neglects the small ‘events’ that do happen in the narrative – the encounters with the Milkman, for instance – and instead emphasises the general feeling and mood of living in an oppressive society. Being stalked and threatened by the Milkman, the narrative focuses on the protagonist’s feeling of helplessness in a society where stalking does not count as violence and where rumours are taken at face value. The narrator-protagonist is a misfit in her society, because she deviates from the silently agreed-upon code of behaviour in her neighbourhood. Early in the narrative, she informs the reader: “I liked walking – walking and reading, walking and thinking” (Milkman 3). This is unusual in the narrator’s storyworld, counting as one more thing “to be added as further proof against [her]” (3). For the narrator-protagonist, this ‘unusual’ behaviour – inhabiting a public space while enjoying a private activity – is a means of escape from her surroundings: “Every weekday, rain or shine, gunplay or bombs, stand-off or riots, I preferred to walk home reading my latest book. This would be a nineteenth-century book because I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century” (5). Within one sentence, the narrator-protagonist juxtaposes two seemingly unrelated information: First, her everyday life is marked by terrorism, bombs and riots. Second, she does not like the twentieth century. This latter remark is never put into context or explained further, therefore oddly sticking out. An immediate connection between the two statements is, of course, that the twentieth century is marked by two world wars and for the narrator-protagonist personally by a civil war. However, as the remark also links her dislike for the twentieth century with her reading escapism, the reader is further enticed to consider the literary tradition that the protagonist shuns. The twentieth century encompasses both Modernism as a response to the First World War and Postmodernism as a development away from Modernism after the Second World War. For this study, the connection between Modernism and the narrative style of Milkman is of interest. Despite the protagonist’s dislike on the level of content, the narrative’s style actually employs several stylistic devices connected to twentieth-century Modernism.

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Milkman’s style is reminiscent of modernist techniques. While movements of modernism were diverse in their practices, there are some central concerns that are recurrent and can be considered as typical of a modernist style. The emergence of Modernism is intricately connected to the disillusionment that resulted from the First World War. Modernist narrative can thus in its origin be seen as a response to “particular and varied situations of economic, social, and cultural modernity worldwide” and is shaped by the “ethical and political demands of those situations” (Berman 2001: 7). Modernist literature typically depicts modern life and often zooms in on urban life while showing an ambivalent attitude to towards it (Whitworth 2007: 11). Moreover, modernist literature focuses on the individual and stresses the individual’s subjective point of view, putting centre stage “the complexity of the mind and the self ” (Whitworth 2007: 13; Butler 2010: 51– 55; Ga̧siorek 2015: 32). Lastly, modernist literature experiments with time (Whitworth 2007: 12) and questions linearity. Milkman is focussed on the consciousness and inner life of the narrator-protagonist and does not present the reader with extensive representations of society, centring on a “micro- rather than macrocosm” (Childs 2000: 18). The story is told in a digressive and ruminative style, blending passages of memory with apparently random associations, forcing the reader to accept the unique logic and incoherence this point of view offers. The reader is consciously made aware that they are following a limited point of view that zooms in on this particular character’s story and what happened to her while she was stalked for a few months in the 1970s. In its telling of these few months, Milkman eschews linearity and creates a difficult mental landscape for the reader which does not try to depict any extra-textual world realistically. Indeed, modernist techniques are conspicuously present from the novel’s very beginning. Milkman’s beginning fits Barthes’ description of a writerly text so perfectly that its stylistic affiliation almost seems ironic. The novel sets off in medias res, presenting the reader with a beginning which will only make sense 300 pages into the novel: “The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died” (Milkman 1). This opening sentence sets out both the style of the novel and its limited storyline. By alluding to the modernist literary technique of readerly disorientation in the very first lines of the novel, Milkman clearly establishes Modernism as a stylistic intertext. As Renate Lachmann points out, “[i]n addition to manifest traces of other texts and obvious forms of transformation, all [texts] contain cryptic elements. All texts are stamped by the doubling of manifest and latent” (2008: 305). Modernism latently informs Milkman from the very beginning. Another main feature of Modernism is that it breaks with existing literary traditions and conventions, attempting to extend and challenge them (Ga̧siorek 2015: 3). Milkman does so by simultaneously evoking a specific historical period but re-

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fusing to actually represent it, thus challenging a realist tradition of war novels.¹ Milkman does not present a coherent story or a realistic depiction of the historic period known as ‘The Irish Troubles’, escheweing the literary form of traditional realism. Instead, the novel offers insights into “a reeling present” that is “composed out of heterogenous and noncoherent singularities” (Stewart 2007: 4). Although the novel is set within a historic period that might count as a significant ‘event’ in Irish and European history, it refuses to acknowledge the ‘eventfulness’ of the Irish Civil War. Instead of falling back on pre-learned associations with war that readers might have, the text sets a different focus. Although bombings and deaths related to the political situation are time and again mentioned, they are positioned at the margins of the narrative, which makes Anna Burns’ approach to the Northern Ireland conflict stand out among the tradition of post-Troubles fiction. As Sana Goyal puts it in her review of the novel, “[Burns] doesn’t take the overtly political avenue” (2018: n.pag.), her approach is more subtle. Although she describes a “psycho-political atmosphere”, the violence lives on the peripheries of the pages, often even off them. The novel rather “slow[s] down experienced time by magnifying its smallest units: the day, the moment” (Banfield 2007: 55). This decidedly modern style dominates Milkman. “Every style”, as Susan Sontag reminds us, “is a means of insisting on something” (1964a: 35). What the style of Milkman puts into focus is what Kathleen Stewart calls “ordinary affects”. For Stewart, “[o]rdinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences” (2007: 1– 2). Aiming for relationality, sensations and the immanent, they are “more directly compelling than ideologies, as well as more fractious, multiplicitous, and unpredictable than symbolic meanings” (2007: 3). Focussing on ordinary affects instead of events, the narrative removes itself from pre-learned ideological meanings and recalibrates how we approach literature that has a connection to a historical period, reading for these affects instead of classical ‘events’.

 Theodor Adorno’s proclamation that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric demonstrates what is at stake here. In The Cambridge Companion to War Writing (2009), Kate McLoughlin explains: “Revisiting [his, Adorno’s, Y.L.] point in 1965, he [Adorno, Y.L.] ‘felt no wish to soften the saying.’ But he used the word Gedicht (poem) in his 1949 formulation of the thought (in his essay ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’), while in 1965 (in his ‘Commitment’ essay) he substituted the word Lyrik (lyric poem). The substitution created a new sense: that it was barbaric to write anything other than protest literature after Auschwitz” (McLoughlin 2009: 16). While Adorno talks specifically about poetry, his idea has widely been adapted to novelist traditions of writing about war. Of course, especially with the advent of postmodernism, other forms of writing about war have also proliferated.

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Milkman puts this negotiation of the category of the event centre stage by using an eventful historical period as its narrative backdrop without putting it into focus. The narrative underlines that the “history of the present is not confined to the actual dates of its exemplary events. […] It is as nonlocal as it is transhistorical” (Massumi 2016: 221). This is underlined not only by the fact that the narrative refrains from alluding to actual events but also by its no-naming policy. Intentionally not mentioning place names, the narrative can be read in a wider, transhistorical frame that connects present and past in a network of co-present relations. For Clare Hutton, Burns’ choice to remove character and place names has two results: “For readers familiar with the Northern Irish context, Burns is making it strange in order to force a reconsideration. For others, to whom the book is less obviously about the ‘Troubles’, the work speaks a more universal truth, and is applicable beyond the Irish context” (2019: 361). The novel’s level of abstraction thus allows it to resonate with different cultural contexts, producing multidirectional memories of conflict and concomitant psychological effects that are the result of living in a repressive, militarised, violent and surveilled environment. At the same time, however, the novel makes use of the Belfast vernacular and Hiberno-English to remember the specificities of this cultural context. The Hibernicism of the novel – meaning the inclusion of “words, phrases, and formations which derive from the Irish language” (Hutton 2019: 363) – is an important part of the characters’ identity. “Though a first-person narrative”, Hutton points out in her analysis of the novel, “Milkman contains a good deal of reported speech, and Burns has an acute ear for differentiating character and gender through the judicious placing of appropriate and authentic phrasing” (2019: 363), often using Hiberno-English to this effect. It is thus important to stress that while Milkman invites multidirectional memory, it neither completely glosses over local specifities nor encourages entirely decontextualised readings. Through its ordinary affects, the novel negotiates the small moments that arise in politically tense historical moments like the Irish Troubles, the fine lines that are challenged in the everyday life. In Northern Ireland, with the war between the loyalists and the nationalists infiltrating the public and the private sphere equally, other occurrences fail to be noticed as violence: At the time, age eighteen, having been brought up in a hair-trigger society where the ground rule were – if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn’t there? (Milkman 6)

The stalking by the so-called Milkman that the narrator-protagonist suffers from occupies a large amount of space in the novel, but, as this quotation highlights,

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does not count as a ‘happening’, an ‘event’ in the storyworld. Instead of classic ‘events’, it is ordinary affects that drive the narrative forward, small moments of connections and confrontation instead of big, spectacular scenes. Sitting in a classroom “containing people who really did have the names Nigel and Jason” (Milkman 71) – meaning that they are protestants – for her adult evening French class, the narrator-protagonist over a long passage of time gives a detailed account of the class debating the possibility of the sky having a different colour than blue. The discussion of the colour of the sky also takes up far more space than any direct description of the conflicts,² thereby stressing the confinement of thought created through living in an area of violent conflict. In metaphorical fashion, the narratorprotagonist remarks: If what she was saying was true, that the sky – out there – not out there – whatever – could be any colour, that meant anything could be any colour, that anything could be anything, that anything could happen, at any time, in any place, in the whole world, and to anybody – probably had too, only we just hadn’t noticed. So no. After generation upon generation, fathers upon forefathers, mothers upon foremothers, centuries and millennia of being one colour officially and three colours unofficially, a colourful sky, just like that, could not be allowed to be. (Milkman 73)

What she will later call “the subversiveness of a sunset” (77) seems at first unacceptable and affects the narrator-protagonist in its opening up of her frame of mind, representing the typically modernist moment of “epiphanic experience” (Butler 2010: 55) that brings the experiencing subject to a revelation through discursive thinking. This ordinary affect, more than any violence ever could, leaves a lasting impression on the class: “The majority of the class […] remained subdued, also worried, for along with me, they knew that that sky that evening had been an initiation” (Milkman 79). “The first thing”, Stewart says, “in thinking about the force of things is the open question of what counts as an event, a movement, an impact, a reason to react” (16). In this scene, the ‘event’ is an act of recognition, of widening one’s horizon and questioning deadlocked old assumptions. In this, Milkman is again very modernist. “Modernist innovation”, writes Andrzej Ga̧siorek, “was not a goal in itself but served a wider cultural project: the substantiation of the conviction that social renewal was impossible without the reflections, critiques, and visions offered by the arts when they were left free to explore the world to which they belonged” (2015: 34). This means that Modernism was intricately connected to ‘the world’ to which its writers belonged, thus historicising the style. While most modernist writers

 For a discussion of digression as a marker of latency, see chapter 3.

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wrote as a reaction to modernity (Whitworth 2007: 5), almost as an immediate reaction, Milkman uses the modernist style to react to a period of social upheaval in the past. As I want to show in the following, Milkman’s marked use of modernist style as a conscious employment of a historically placed style is a means of criticising and thus actualising concepts connected to Modernism. The novel’s detachment of Modernism and cosmopolitanism, I claim, forces us to re-think the concept of cosmopolitanism (Pollard 2004; Vermeulen 2015: 83). Through its memory and rethinking of Modernism, Milkman latently interrogates concepts such as cosmopolitanism and the figure of the flâneur and reflects them on the background of the contemporary, that is, regarding their development and travel through time and space. In this, it engages in a form of critical cosmopolitanism that uses latency as a means to actualise past styles and their related concepts in order to critically reflect their validity for the present.

7.3 Modernist Entanglements: Cosmopolitanism Making use of a modernist style, being basically an (unnamed) city-novel as well as featuring a flâneusing narrator-protagonist, the novel not only re-members a modernist writing technique but also the intricately connected concept of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is a term that has its origins in European Enlightenment but has gained new momentum at the turn of the twenty-first century. Highly interdisciplinary, the concept is epistemologically elusive (McCluskey 2015). Deriving from the Ancient Greek word kosmopolitês, meaning “citizen of the world”, cosmopolitanism broadly speaking aims “to break out of the self-centred narcissism of the national outlook and the dull incomprehension with which it infects thought and action” (Beck 2008: 2). Cosmopolitanism as a concept aims to describe the experience of people who no longer consider themselves citizens of nations first, but rather ‘citizens of the world’, widening their feelings of allegiance beyond those of the nation. Departing from the nation as the main identity marker, cosmopolitanism tries to foster a sense of solidarity for ‘others’ (Appiah 2007; Stanton 2006: 3). This solidarity with ‘others’, however, often means deflating their cultural differences. According to Ulrich Beck, for instance, cosmopolitanism “must do its best to demonstrate that in a world of global crisis and dangers produced by civilization, the old differentiations between internal and external, national and international, us and them, lose their validity and a new cosmopolitan realism becomes essential to survival” (Beck 2008: 14). His assumptions that there is no longer a differentiation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ betrays a universalism that strives for equal values that inevitably override particular localisms and which does not adequately acknowledge unequal power structures. Similarly, his assumption begs the question

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who is going to decide on these equal values that will make national and cultural differentiations unnecessary. In a similar vein, Berthold Schoene claims that cosmopolitanism means “opening oneself up to a radical unlearning of all definitive modes of identification” (2009: 21) and that “[i]t involves stepping out of narrow self-incarcerating traditions of belonging” (21). What these assumptions about cosmopolitanism demonstrate is a sometimes latent, sometimes manifest belief in universal values and a difficult celebration of local detachment. As Paul Gilroy criticises, these universalist tendencies run the danger of being “the mainspring of a violent ethnocentrism, which wants to make everybody […] ‘western’” (2005: 63). Despite its important intervention into nationalistic and exclusivist conceptions of being and community, “the concept was the target of serious criticism already in the second half of the twentieth century” due to its “pretentious universalism” (Braidotti et al. 2013: 1) and its perception as a “badge of privilege” (Robbins and Horta 2017: 3; Kurasawa 2016: 281). As Braidotti et al. outline, the rise of global terror has “rendered the ideal of belonging to a harmonious global community of cosmopolitan citizens naïve at best, at worst simple futile” (2013: 1). Given that cosmopolitanism enables a detached, free-of-true-responsibility, “mere aesthetic spectatorship” (Robbins 1998: 4) in world history, it seems that “cosmopolitan identification with the human race serves as the thin, abstract, undesirable antithesis to a red-blooded, politically engaged nationalism” (4).³ In its perception as ‘mere aesthetic’, the concept is thus perceived as too unpolitical to have a worthy influence upon specific socio-political challenges. “Common humanity”, critics as Robbins attest, “is too weak a force to generate sufficient solidarity” (4) or political purchase (see also Harvey 2009: 79). Therefore, the concept needed to undergo a serious relocalisation to claim any validity in the twenty-first century. While cosmopolitanism has often been condemned to be “a luxuriously freefloating view from above” (Robbins 1998: 1), cosmopolitanisms are now more and more configured as “plural and particular” (2; Robbins and Horta 2017: 1). In what Bruce Robbins calls “a shift from normative to descriptive cosmopolitanism” (2012: 12), cosmopolitanism is now “instead of a single, definitive criterion” seen more and more as concerned with “a variety of social borders, a variety of crossings, a variety of attachments newly acquired and transformed as well as attachments broken. There was suddenly perceived to be a variety of cosmopolitanisms” (11– 12). The concept has broken lose from its rather rigid understanding as a necessarily transnational or transcultural concept and now also allows for ‘minor’

 Robbins does not plead for a return of this ‘red-blooded’ nationalism. His argument is merely that cosmopolitanism in many instances lacks political power.

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forms of crossing to count as cosmopolitan in scope and intent. Now, Robbins and Horta underline, “cosmopolitanism can be defined as any one of many possible modes of life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and overlapping” (2017: 3). In this, the concept has become detached from necessary physical movement and now also makes room for mental cosmopolitan practices that produce border crossings in the way we understand the world and forms of diversity around us, thus becoming grounded in “ordinary ways of thinking and acting” (Kurasawa 2016: 281). Thus, the concept has been loosened from grand gestures and now allows a focus on everyday acts of cosmopolitanism that are also available to precarious cosmopolitan subjects that lack the actual means of travel and international movement. Lately, cosmopolitanism – what David Hollinger calls the ‘new cosmopolitanism’ (2001) – is to relegate to the background the idea of a “an overriding loyalty to and concern with the welfare of humanity as a whole” (Robbins and Horta 2017: 1) and instead focus on more local, rooted, vernacular cosmopolitanisms. Under these new terms, critics such as Homi K. Bhabha (1996), Sheldon Pollock (1998), Anthony Appiah (2007) and others have started localising the concept and applying a minor perspective, emphasising smaller communities and their social and geographical particularities, rather than focussing on “an ethos of macro-interdependencies” (Rabinow 1986: 258). However, despite its evolvement and plurality, the concept is still widely criticised. Critics ask, for instance, for the common factor of all these different variations of plural cosmopolitanisms. Rebecca Walkowitz therefore suggests abandoning all normative and descriptive variations of the concept and instead instrumentalising cosmopolitanism as a tool for criticism. Instead of functioning as a descriptive concept that describes different and varied forms of border crossings, she sees cosmopolitanism as a critical tool. She calls her understanding of cosmopolitanism as a tool “critical cosmopolitanism”.

7.4 Critical Cosmopolitanism As cosmopolitanism still does not seem to have entirely overcome its universalising, elitist tendencies, Rebecca Walkowitz calls for a ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ to address the shortcoming of the concept without breaking with it completely. For Walkowitz, “[c]ritical cosmopolitanism thus means reflecting on the history, uses, and interests of cosmopolitanism in the past – how, for example, cosmopoli-

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tanism has been used to support or tolerate imperialism” (2006: 4).⁴ In accord with Walkowitz, Walter D. Mignolo also understands critical cosmopolitanism as the intersection of the concept with hitherto marginalised connections and entanglements. For him, for instance, critical cosmopolitanism is the endeavour to “reconceive cosmopolitanism from the perspective of coloniality” (Mignolo 2002: 159). In this sense, critical cosmopolitanism is a form of meta-commentary on meaningmaking processes and their ethical complications. It seeks out the blind spots of the theoretical concept and critically addresses the epistemologies that it has brought to the fore. Tackling the shortcomings of the concept, a critical cosmopolitanism tries to shed light upon what does not fit the concept’s premises, that is, where the concept reaches its limits. Critical cosmopolitanism is intricately connected to the renewed turn towards modernist techniques of representation. The act of re-membering Modernism through a modernist mode of writing puts Modernism and entangled concepts and ideas under scrutiny. Modernism, writes Rita Felski, “is back with a vengeance. People are reflecting anew on the protean meanings of the modern, on its ambiguous legacies and current realities […] Yet this return is also a beginning, as scholars tackle well-worn ideas and calcified debates from new angles” (2000: 55). The use of Modernism indeed invites reflections about the concept of cosmopolitanism, since especially more recent understandings of cosmopolitanism (e. g. vernacular cosmopolitanism) “restate[…] and reorient[…] the modernist ideal, an ideal that recognizes the fragmentation and diversity of any contemporary culture” (Pollard 2004: 8). “Modernism”, writes Charles W. Pollard, is “a way to perceive and represent cosmopolitanism” (2004: 9) and might be a tool to “offer writers a better way to perceive and represent their experience of discrepant cosmopolitanism” (9). With a resurgence of modernist technique in the twenty-first century, connected concepts are subjected to scrutiny. Tackling established concepts and ideas such as cosmopolitanism, the return of modernist writing techniques initiates a critical cosmopolitanism that “keeps alive the contradictions in the field, affirming that this tension is dynamic and open to productive interrogation” (Friedman 2018:

 In this, Walkowitz’ connects to other critics. David Harvey, for instance, warns that cosmopolitanism runs the risk of becoming “an ethical mask for hegemonic neoliberal practices of class domination and financial and militaristic imperialism” (Harvey 2009: 84). Similarly, Paul Gilroy criticises the connection between cosmopolitanism and human rights, attesting that “the foundational investment that the West has made in the idea of rights is not itself a neutral or universal gesture” (Gilroy 2005: 59). “In the names of cosmopolitanism and humanitarianism, these particular moral sensibilities can promote and justify intervention in other people’s sovereign territory on the grounds that their ailing or incompetent national state has failed to measure up to the levels of good practice that merit recognition as civilized” (Gilroy 2005: 59 – 60).

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2). Keeping alive the contradictions in the field, critical cosmopolitanism functions as a “transformative potential within the present” (Delanty 2012: 41) that actualises from the past in order to contour the present. In this, critical cosmopolitanism can be a means to bridge past and present and thus produce the contemporary by bringing to the fore what has survived from past ideas but how it needs to be transformed to fit the present moment. Milkman evokes cosmopolitanism through its use of modernist techniques, its composition as a novel about a girl walking and experiencing the city as a public space and the latent themes of border crossing (in terms of religion, sexuality and gender roles). It is, however, the temporal distance that Milkman’s employing of Modernism as a literary mode of writing allows for that makes possible its latent critical cosmopolitanism. Employing a modernist mode of writing and referring to modernist tropes such as the urban novel and the flâneur, the novel latently critiques the concept of cosmopolitanism and acts out a critical cosmopolitanism that emphasises the limitations of the concept.

7.5 Re-membering Modernism: The Flâneuse No one perhaps has ever felt passionately toward a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; Moments when we are set upon having an object; a purpose; an excuse for walking across London between tea and dinner. (Virginia Woolf 2014 [1927]: 225; my emphasis, Y.L.)

The novel picks up on the trope of the urban novel and the famous figure of theflâneur to articulate its critical cosmopolitanism. By using the figure of the flâneur – or more precisely the flâneuse – the novel clearly positions itself within modernist aesthetics as the flâneur, as Deborah Parsons points out, “has become an icon of the architextual aesthetics of the modern urban novel” (2003: 4). The novel’s narrator-protagonist loves reading-while-walking and normally explores the city by foot. Her movements in the city are, however, very limited. The city with its “nogo area” (Milkman 80), the “red-light street” as the only place that allows unmarried couples and couples from different religions to live together, its “‘I’m male and you’re female’ territory” (8) and thus gendered limitations on where a woman can go, guide the narrator-protagonist’s movements.⁵ In society’s frowning upon her

 For a discussion of space and gender, see Doreen Massey’s Space, Place and Gender (2005). For her, “[t]he limitation of women’s mobility, in terms of both identity and space, has been in some

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walking through the city seemingly ‘unnecessarily’, the novel refers back to the movements of women during the heyday of Modernism, like Virginia Woolf, who needed a ‘purpose’ to walk the city alone without attracting unwanted attention. The flâneur has its origin in nineteenth-century city writing and was first explored, at length, in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. The flâneur is predominantly a male, dandy like figure that comments on urbanisation and explores the impact of modern city life upon the human psyche. He is a “leisurely wanderer” (Vermeulen 2015: 83; Elkin 2017: 7; Parsons 2003: 4) who walks around “without any aim” (Nuvolati 2016: 21). He walks the city just to observe, seemingly without purpose, enjoying his privilege to interpret the city from his position of apparent authority over it (Johansen 2016: 44; Nuvolati 2016: 24). In her 2016 book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, Lauren Elkin reflects on the male-centeredness of the concept and inscribes women into it. While Janet Wolff claims that a female flâneuse “was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century” (1989: 154; Pollock 2003: 71), Elkin shows in her work how women have repeatedly claimed space against the odds since the rise of Modernism. Drawing on Georges Sand, Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf to make her point, Elkin illustrates how the flâneuse is not merely a female flâneur, but a figure to be reckoned with, and inspired by, all on her own. She voyages out, and goes where she’s not supposed to; she forces us to confront the ways in which words like home and belonging are used against women. She is a determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk. (Elkin 2017: 22– 23)

In a similar fashion, Milkman also underlines the domestic discourse surrounding women in 1970s Ireland, where their main task was to find a husband and make him a home (Milkman 45 – 46). The narrator-protagonist rebels against this conception, but, similar to Nazneen, the protagonist of Monica Ali’s award-winning novel Brick Lane (2003), Milkman also ties its flâneuse to minor forms of spatial intervention. “These narrative moments”, as Emily Johansen points out in her analysis of Brick Lane, “point to the smaller movements that might make up everyday forms of cosmopolitanism” (2016: 44). Just like Nazneen, Milkman’s narrator-protagonist also only tentatively inscribes her presence into the city. Reading while walking, she always makes sure to do her “mental ticking-off of landmarks” (Milkman 36), thus staying aware of her surroundings at all times. Claiming that she does

cultural contexts a crucial means of subordination. Moreover the two things – the limitation on mobility in space, the attempted consignment/confinement to particular places on the one hand, and the limitation of identity on the other – have been crucially related” (2005: 179).

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her reading-while-walking to tune out of the political problems (65), this is only one reason for her habitual walking of the city. In her walking practice, the narratorprotagonist also constructs the space as overlayered, endowing it with a presentpast that is removed from the political problems: So we packed up and left and they headed to the bar and I headed home towards my no-go area. After a bit of walking and thinking – about colour, about transformation, about upheavals of inner landscapes – I came out of my thoughts to give attention to my surroundings which was when I noticed I’d reached the ten-minute area on the outskirts of downtown. This ten-minute are wasn’t officially called the ten-minute area. It was that it took ten minutes to walk through it. This would be hurrying, no dawdling, though no one in their right mind would think of dawdling here. Not that it was a politically hazardous place, that apart from the possibility of one of its dilapidated churches accidentally falling on you that something awful might happen to you in this spot because of the political problems. No. The political problems, for the duration of these minutes, seemed in comparison with this area to be naïve, clumsy, hardly of consequence. It was that the ten-minute area was, and always had been, some bleak, eerie, Mary Celeste little place. (Milkman 80 – 81, my emphasis, Y.L.)

The first thing to notice is that the narrator-protagonist calls this area ‘her’ area, thereby inscribing herself into it and even claiming authority over it. The second important aspect of this ‘no go area’ is the fact that the act of going there by itself constitutes a subversive act, an act against societal rules and expectations, thereby making walking a subversive practice. Thirdly, the narrator-protagonist actively seeks out a place that is removed from the political problems, that even makes them look “naïve” and “hardly of consequence”, as she says. Her walking the city thereby also constitutes an act of re-historicising, contextualising the Troubles in a time frame that exceeds them and thus allows for the imagination of other temporalities: a time before the Troubles and thus also possibly a time after the Troubles. Through her walking, the narrator-protagonist establishes the ten-minute or no-go area as what Michel Foucault calls a ‘heterotopia’. Heterotopias, according to Foucault, are rare places that are in relation to all other places in the environment, but “in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (1998: 231). Heterotopias, so Foucault, act as mirrors (231 f.), as means to situate the present between reality and absence: From the standpoint of the mirror, I discover my absence from the place where I am, since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am (Foucault 1998: 232).

The ten-minute area becomes a heterotopia through its inversion of spatial connections and the Northern Ireland conflict where space is thought of as either belong-

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ing to the one party of the conflict or the other. The fact that an old “Nazi bomb” (Milkman 83) exploded in the area confirms this act of ‘neutralising’ existing relations, this establishing of anachronous relations. “The historical and inexplicable desolation” of the area constitutes a future-image of the many sites of the Troubles that in the future might be remembered in a similar fashion, stressing the unpredictable loops of historical events. After all, in 1970s Ireland, “the soldiers killed the dogs, and the locals killed the cats, and now cats were also being killed by the Luftwaffe” (Milkman 100). The act of inscribing her presence into the city that the narrator-protagonist’s walks allow her are thus a minor intervention in the city’s official memory politics. Her acts of reading the city stress temporal entanglement in wider forms of violence that go beyond the nation or her particular situation at that particular point in time. Despite prominently positioning its protagonist as a flâneuse and thus inviting cosmopolitan associations, the novel does not follow the tradition to celebrate the unnamed city’s cosmopolitanism.⁶ While the traditional flâneur is “expressing more aesthetic than ethical concerns” (Nuvolati 2016: 24), the narrator-protagonist’s walking predominantly serves as social critique. For one, the narrator-protagonist’s walking allows her to latently critique the official topography of the city through her choice of path. As “peace movements”, those “all-inclusive marches” (Milkman 113) are “being infiltrated by one faction or the other faction” (114), the narrator-protagonist embarks on her own walks of remembering history. However, her walking lacks the typical, acknowledged authority of the traditional flâneur. The novel’s configuration of walking as a trope, therefore, serves as a latent critique of the concept of flânerie itself, since her subversive walking only goes so far. Tellingly, it is in the ten-minute-area, the area that the narrator-protagonist had claimed for herself, that the Milkman waylays her to exercise his power over her. Having followed her, the milkman surprises her and automatically dominates her: “As on the last two occasions of our meeting, that is, of his orchestrating of our meeting, this time too, mostly he asked questions […] Not sincere requests for information […] These were statements of assertion, rhetorical power comments” (103 – 104). Similarly, their first encounter took place in the parks where the narrator-protagonist regularly goes jogging. Suddenly appearing next to her, the Milkman by means of his masculinity has the power to force the narrator-protagonist to adapt her movements to his (7– 8). Once having decided that she was to be his,  As Kevin McNamara puts it, “modern cities are regarded as concentrators of diversity and proving grounds for rights and freedoms” (McNamara 2014: 2). They are, Caroline Herbert argues, “the stage for debate and dialogue, where ideas of national identity, culture, and citizenship are challenged and reimagined” (Herbert 2014: 200). Likewise, Catherine Nesci describes flânerie and city writing as “symbolizing a heroic potential of urban civilization” (Nesci 2014: 72).

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the Milkman dominates the space, leaving no space for the narrator-protagonist: “I’d pop to the local shops, he’d be there. I’d go into town, he’d be there. I’d come out of work, he’d be there. I’d visit the library, he’d be there” (166). Space, the Milkman’s acts of stalking make clear, cannot simply be appropriated or subverted. The novel thus both enacts the contemporary Irish flâneuse while simultaneously highlighting her limitations. As the narrator-protagonist’s helplessness in face of her stalker suggests, not everybody is equally free to walk the city. If the “flâneur’s activitiy is mainly strolling and loitering, looking around and observing modernity from a critical point of view” (Nuvolati 2016: 22; Nesci 2014: 72), Milkman complicates this notion of “critical view”, emphasising that not everybody historically has always had the privilege of an untainted ‘critical view’. By focussing on the singular perspective of one marginalised walker, the novel underlines that in 1970s Ireland, society’s ingrained gender roles, understanding of violence and sexual harassment, for instance, partly inhibited a ‘critical view’. While Mary Gluck argues that the flâneur accomplishes “to render legible and transparent the bewildering heterogeneity of urban life” (2003: 65), Milkman emphasises that this is an elitist and non-universal assumption. The figure of the flâneur, the novel emphasises, is not “a universally available subject position” (Herbert 2014: 203). Not only is the narrator-protagonist’s walking the city tabooed by society, but she is also the intense object of scrutiny, not only by society and her stalker but also by the authorities. The state forces, the narrator-protagonist knows, are hiding in the park photographing “renouncers’ known and unknown associates” (Milkman 7). Being unwillingly followed by the Milkman, the narrator-protagonist is photographed together with him, thus counting as his ‘associate’: “So now I was to be on file somewhere, in a photograph somewhere, as a once unknown, but now certainly known associate” (7). In the storyworld, it is not possible to be a detached observer and retain one’s anonymity as is the habit of the traditional flâneur. It is only in retrospective that the narrator-protagonist can look back upon that time and try to make sense of society’s rules and her place within them. In this, the novel articulates that being a cosmopolitan flaneur, to take one example, is a rather different experience for those who have full access to the city than it is for those – women, migrants, colonial subjects – who do not, not only because some observers can move and observe more easily than others but also because some are themselves the objects of intense or hostile scrutiny. (Walkowitz 2006: 16)

Through its exclusive focus on the narrator-protagonist’s perspective, the novel puts centre stage individual consciousness and the tensions that arise when these individual experiences are conflated in abstract categories. The flâneur as

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a concept, the novel makes clear, cannot claim ubiquitous universality. Milkman demonstrates that the concept does not fit suppressive societies like 1970s societies in border cities governed by anti-liberal ideologies and colonial structures. Moreover, it underlines the inadequacy of the concept’s traditional allocations to adequately express female experiences.⁷ The narrator-protagonist’s subversive walking ultimately does not manage to cross from a private activity into a publicly subversive act. As Helen Scalway puts it in an essay about the contemporary flâneuse: I associate these sensuous moments with something I mentioned earlier, the attempt to construct paths of significance through places where there are no pre-existing ones for me to follow. Paths made out of scraps, sensory rubbles of all sorts, pointers and markers for private negotiation. But the scraps and details, though they come from the public space of the street, denote still only a private and guarded existence within it. They are all small and incomplete, private pleasures that exist away from the public meaning of what contained them, often in spite of these public meanings. […] they cannot – yet – build into symbols with shared meanings. (Scalway 2006: 169)

While Milkman puts centre stage a woman who walks the city, trying to inscribe herself into it, it also makes it painstakingly clear that she does not puncture the public meanings attached to these places. Her resistance therefore stays private, marking herself as ‘other’ to her community but without truly changing the existing power relations in the city. In this, “[f ]lânerie […] then, paradoxically serves to make visible the impossibility of flânerie as a straightforward and repeatable form of emancipatory cosmopolitics” (Johansen 2016: 53). Although the narrator-protagonist retrospectively tries to endow her youth with sense and interpret the city she observed, the irregular use of deictics shows that she is still not completely in power to analyse and interpret the city, demonstrating that a lack of power to interpret the past is inherently part of a contemporary structure of feeling.

7.6 “At this time, in this place”: Contouring the Contemporary Milkman’s use of deictics marks a departure from other Northern Irish fiction. In an essay on Northern Irish fiction after the Troubles, Neal Alexander points out that “many post-Agreement novels are better described as retrospective because  For a discussion of cosmopolitanism as a decidedly male concept, see also Maila Stivens’ article “Gender, Rights, and Cosmopolitanisms” (2008).

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of their tendency towards recreating a particular moment in the past in an effort to illuminate the North’s contemporary predicament” (2009: 274). Milkman employs a different approach, as it neither concretely ‘recreates a particular moment’ nor concretely illuminates a present moment in Northern Ireland. First of all, the novel does not specify its setting, thus making a direct commentary on a present situation in a particular place impossible. Secondly, the novel uses deictics unconventionally, sometimes creating effects of immediacy instead of retrospection. The novel’s use of deictics, I claim, thereby complicates the whole notion of retrospection, blurring the line between now and then, thus positioning the contemporary as exactly that moment in which past and present meet. The novel intentionally destabilises a traditionally stabilising literary device to catch readers’ attention and bind present, past and future into loops of relation, “challeng[ing] our conventional habits of interpreting, periodizing, or historicizing” (Martin 2017: 19) and thus how we understand the ‘now’. Deictics, as Paul Werth points out, together with “frame knowledge and inferencing combine […] to give the reader a very rich mental representation of the setting of a novel or story” (2008: 155). They are thus conventionally seen as aiding devices that help readers orient themselves within the text. Readers, notes Agnieszka Lyons, “place themselves, to some extent within the narrated situation and from that vantage point construct a situation model: a mental representation of, among other things, locations, objects characters, and events in the story” (2015: 128). Milkman’s use of deictics seems to aim for the opposite: It complicates the reader’s attempts to establish such a situation model. From the beginning of the narrative, the reader is attuned to a homodiegetic narration which retrospectively narrates the events of the 1970s in what the reader deduces to be Northern Ireland, probably Belfast. The narrative is told in the past tense, foregrounding the storynow, that is, the character’s ‘now’, and backgrounding the discourse-now, that is the narrator’s ‘now’ (see Jahn 2017). The reader thus only gets to know the narrator-protagonist’s past without being able to contrast it with her present from where she tells the story. We do not clearly know from where the narrator is speaking and precisely when she is telling her story. The act of narration is therefore never fully visible, although the reader is aware that the story is told in retrospection, as the narrator-protagonist at times uses the literary device of foreshadowing. Despite being a retrospective narration, the story unfolds with a sense of immediacy. Although the reader knows that the story has been ordered by the narrator in the narrative present, the story often emerges in the typically modern form of stream-of-consciousness, as an “unmediated discourse of the mind itself ” (Matz 2004: 54) instead of a carefully arranged narrative. Right from the beginning, the novel makes use of a number of strategies to evoke a sense of immediacy and ‘unmediated discourse’. Without the reader yet

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having any knowledge about the Milkman and his relationship to the narrator-protagonist, she informs them: “It had been my fault too, it seemed, this affair with the milkman. But I had not been having an affair with the milkman” (Milkman 1). While the first sentence still semantically seems to confirm the existence of said affair, the second sentence makes it clear that the affair is only an alleged affair. It thus seems as if the narrator-protagonist makes sense of her story while telling it, creating the impression of a direct dialogue with the reader. This impression is further intensified through oral speech markers, such as “see”, which directly address an interlocutor: “See? Stalker-type behaviour” (Milkman 117). The retrospection is continuously disturbed by moments of seemingly instant-reflection as demonstrated in the example above or sometimes even by moments of transgression, in which the narrator-protagonist seems to forget that she is telling a story of the past. Commenting on the popularity of her brother-in-law, she remarks at one point: “Of beneficial significance also – I mean for me with my current problem with the milkman – was that all the women of the area viewed brother-in-law this way” (Milkman 12, my emphasis, Y.L.). Again, pointing to moments of instant-reflection, the narration is fortified with numerous dashes that interrupt the narrative, giving it almost the quality of an immediate, oral narrative. Secondly, although the narrator-protagonist uses the past tense and markedly talks about the past as past, she uses the word ‘current’ to describe the problems with the Milkman as if she had, for a moment, forgotten that the problems are no longer current but already concluded. Breaking with the conventions of written narrative, Milkman thereby invites reflection on how we tell stories and how we order them chronologically, thereby putting centre stage a reflection on how we define and produce our contemporary as a result from past moment, positioning the ‘present’ as continuously in the making, the result of “expanding simultaneities” (Gumbrecht 2014: xiii). Similarly, the narrative not only blurs story-now and discourse-now, but also story-here and discourse-here. The use of space deictics changes often, sometimes even within one sentence: “Impossible it would be – in those days, those extreme, awful crowd days, and on those streets too, which were the battlefield which were the streets – to live here and not have a view about it” (Milkman 112, my emphasis, Y.L.). While the first part of the sentence clearly marks a difference between the story-now and the discourse-now, marking the former by the determiner ‘those’, the last sentence again blurs this clear differentiation by using the deictic ‘here’, which suggests that ‘those’ streets and ‘here’ are actually one and the same thing. The use of deictics therefore signals a spatial policy that conflates past and present, constructing the present space as a palimpsest that is still latently influenced by the past. The latent power of the past over the present seems to fixate space in an ever-ongoing loop which it cannot escape and which makes the future

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almost impossible. The textual city that Milkman depicts embodies space and time: the present, the past and the implied, though impossible-seeming future. Through its use of deictics, the novel thereby extends its critical cosmopolitanism into the present and future, showing that the inability of the concept to capture the narrator-protagonist’s experiences is not a thing of the past. The deictic slippages demonstrate that the narrator-protagonist does not draw a clear line between the narrative time and the narrated time, blending them at times and constructing space as multilayered. The deictic centre is therefore neither positioned between a clear here and there nor a clear now and then. While these slippages might be unconscious for the narrator-protagonist, they are not for the construction of the narrative. The use of deictics seems to be a conscious means to underline temporal overlaps – ‘those days’ and ‘those streets’ are a thing of the past but simultaneously still part of the present, a latent stowaway. Through its use of deictics, the novel departs from a linear conceptualisation of temporality and concomitantly a perception of our time as ‘post’. The novel’s use of deictics introduces what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls the notion of Our Broad Present (2014). Gumbrecht argues that “[b]etween pasts that engulf us and the menacing future, the present has turned into a dimension of expanding simultaneities” (2014: xiii). While time used to be perceived as a principal “agent of transformation” (xii), where the past provided guidance to pick from the vast, “open horizon of available possibilities” that the future offered with the present as simply the “moment of transition” (55) between these two, the present is now perceived as a “spreading present” (xiii).⁸ As the future is no longer the realm of endless possibilities, but rather “seems to draw near as a menace” (xiii), it can no longer act as the basis of agency (xiii). It is thus, Gumbrecht argues, that we have stopped living in ‘historical time’ – in which “‘historically conscious’ mankind imagines itself on a linear path moving through time” (xii) – and instead inhabit the ‘broad present’, which “lacks clear contours” (xiii). “Today”, he argues, “we increasingly feel that our present has broadened, as it is now surrounded by a future we can no longer see, access, or choose and a past that we are not able to leave behind” (20). As Milkman’s use of deictics makes clear, “the border between the past and the present seems to have become porous” (31). The narrator-protagonist’s difficulties to clearly differentiate past and present demonstrate a loss of direction and at the same time question the “validity of definitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of Western modernity” (Craps 2013: 2). While retrospective narrations empha-

 Rita Felski articulates a similar understanding of the present: “We are no longer propelled into the future by the purposeful forward march of events. Instead, we find ourselves adrift, floating aimlessly in a sea of temporal fragments and random moments” (2000: 2).

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sise a firm centre in the present from where the narrator can contemplate the past and possible traumata that they have since overcome, Milkman shows the contemporary as lacking this centre and as being constantly co-constituted by the past. In bridging past and present and showing how inheritances from the past still dwell in our present and make a novel such as Milkman feel as a novel “for now” (Charles 2018: n.pag.), Milkman establishes the present as a continuity of the past. “Despite taking place 40 years ago”, writes Ron Charles in his review of the book, “Milkman vibrates with the anxieties of our own era” (2018: n.pag.), thematising the dangers of borders, society’s complicity in sexual harassment (an omnipresent topic at least since the #MeToo movement) and the impossibility to strictly differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. In its latent critique of cosmopolitanism, the novel presents local action as the major means of tackling this anxiety, emphasising the political futility of singular, detached attempts at inscribing oneself into the city. On the content level, the novel’s cosmopolitanism is decidedly local. Solidarity for ‘others’ is here configured as solidarity with society’s outcasts, to people from the ‘wrong’ religion or, in this specific case, women.⁹ The novel enacts a cosmopolitanism that is concerned with “a variety of crossings” (Robbins 2012: 11), highlighting the crossings within a community more than those across communities. After all, the narrator-protagonist defies “traditional, tribal divisions into ‘us’ and ‘them’” (Drong 2019: 8) and constantly questions her own community, to which the Milkman, the novel’s main antagonist, also belongs. In zooming in on the everyday and the little fractures within the narrator-protagonist’s community, the novel ultimately criticises more traditional, homogenising narratives of the Troubles which focus on the antagonism between different communities. In times of social and gender oppression, the novel makes clear, more general cosmopolitan feelings of attachment to ‘wider humanity’ are not constructive. In its depiction of the microcosmos of the protagonist’s neighbourhood, Burns aligns itself with “[p]ostcolonial writers and thinkers” who “have a vivid capacity to speak truth to global power. And they do so because they speak neither for the nation nor the globe; their purview is the colony, the city, the neighbourhood, the region” (Appiah and Bhabha

 While the novel on the one hand centres around the protagonist’s harassment by the Milkman and her feeling of powerlessness about it, it also stresses the power of female solidarity. After all, it is women who oppose the system and enact their own justice system, breaking curfews (Milkman 159), preventing the paramilitary killings of the real milkman (320 – 322), or attacking Somebody McSomebody “for being a man and coming into the Ladies unannounced” (310). The so-called “issue women” (151) are another point in case. These ‘issue women’ regularly meet, “having tea and buns and discussing in chintz earnestness the ramifications of the massacre of the women and children by the yeomanry at the nineteenth-century Battle of Peterloo” (157). They are a group of progressive thinkers who directly question gender politics in a clearly masculinised space.

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2018: 189). Focussing on the neighbourhood and the family but still making the novel a novel that resonates widely and beyond the national borders of Ireland and the city borders of a fictional Belfast, the novel is still cosmopolitan in its scope, thus showing how literature can bridge gaps that reality does not allow to be bridged yet.

7.7 Conclusion: The Cosmopolitanism of Form Do we live in the same time or different times? (Felski 2000: 1)

Pnina Werbner rightly points out that if everybody is considered a cosmopolitan, the concept loses its ethical validity (2008: 17). Despite the fact that the narratorprotagonist undergoes “particular experiences of border crossing” (Robbins 2012: 13) in her social environment and thus might be said to engage in a minor form of cosmopolitanism, I do not want to claim her as a cosmopolitan subject. Instead, what I have shown is that the text employs modernist tropes to latently critique the concepts of cosmopolitanism and flânerie and show their limitations. In this, it criticises the narrative of the contemporary ‘western city’ as a site of movement and freedom for all. This criticism is enacted on a transcultural and transnational scale which in turn makes the novel cosmopolitan in its scope. If we understand cosmopolitanism as “thinking and acting beyond the local” (Walkowitz 2006: 8), then the novel’s no-naming policy makes it a cosmopolitan novel which shows a certain universality of suppressive societies driven by narrow ideologies. As Adrian McKinty puts it in his review of the novel, “Milkman is both a story of Belfast and its particular sins but it is also a story of anywhere. It reminded me of China Mieville’s The City and the City where identity, names and seeing the Other are contentious acts. Milkman shares this level of ambition” (McKinty 2018: n.pag.). Similarly, Burns herself declares: “Although it is recognisable as this skewed form of Belfast, it’s not really Belfast in the 70s. I would like to think it could be seen as any sort of totalitarian, closed society existing in similarly oppressive conditions” (Burns and Allardice 2018: n.pag.). While the novel thus criticises cosmopolitanism on the level of content, in its focus on “thinking and acting beyond the local” (Walkowitz 2006: 8), it enacts it on the level of form. It thereby at once shows the shortcomings of cosmopolitanism as a concept while still underlining the importance of its central premises. It is important to highlight similarities between cultures and nations, recognising globally spread phenomena of oppression, domination and militarised violence. But at the same time, it is also important to see that the attempts at solving these inequalities, concepts that strive for universal solutions

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and celebrate freedom and mobility on the basis of limited applicability of these very concepts are inapt at representing everybody everywhere at the same time. What Milkman illustrates is that we first of all need to tackle the “challenge of being in the same present” (Gilroy 2005: 67) and acknowledge that the ‘present’ as an act of bridging the past and the future is not universally the same everywhere. In this, the novel is decidedly contextualised as “Northern Ireland remains, politically and culturally, in a state of suspension, between the ‘bad,’ dark notoriety of the past, and the precarious and tentative visions of an infinitely abortive future” (Brannigan 2010: 142) – a state that is definitely reflected in the novel and should be read in its Northern Irish context. The novel encourages this contextualised reading through the use of Hiberno-English. Moreover, through the use of deictics, the novel suggests that this is not a problem of the past, of 1970s Ireland, but very much part of the contemporary. History, as Rita Felski rightly points out, “is not one broad river, but a number of distinct and separate streams, each moving at its own pace and tempo” (2000: 3). Concomitantly, the contemporary as a strategy of mediation between past and present can also not be conceived of as a universality. Hence, as not everybody inhabits the same ‘now’, our vocabulary to address the present needs to stay singular and local but in constant dialogue with the global. In the novel’s oscillation between closeness – after all, we experience the story through the confined perspective of one character who is intricately interwoven in the depicted society, directly living through its oppressive qualities – and a certain distance created by the no-naming policy, the novel is at once “confined in location but capacious in implication” (James 2014: 58). If Modernism’s ideological agenda was to show “that social renewal was impossible without […] reflections, critiques” (Ga̧siorek 2015: 34), then Milkman re-members Modernism as a warning. Repressed memories will return if past and present are not bridged. Being fully in the present can only work if this needed act of bridging is contextualised and first of all local before it is translated into global contexts. A conflict that had its origins in British colonialism (McKittrick 2002) and the concomitant partition of Ireland is made to resonate with a possible resurrection of this conflict due to a decision taken in England without the consent of the entirety of the Irish people.¹⁰ It is in this act of bridging that Milkman articulates the contemporary. Despite its modernist style, the novel consciously does not celebrate cosmopolitan ideals. Although the narrator-protagonist learns French for no given reason, the novel’s characters are all local and none of them seem to have a migratory

 56 % of voters in Northern Ireland opted to remain in the EU (https://www.bbc.com/news/uknorthern-ireland-3661444). People living on the South side of the border, the Republic of Ireland, did not have the possibility to decide on a decision that will affect their everyday lives.

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background or travelling ambitions. Still, the novel puts centre stage and negotiates difference. The difference of religion, of gender and for many readers possibly also of class. In its latent cosmopolitan critique, the novel is “a commitment to the singular and the contingent – to the specific demands and possibilities of the person or the situation”, and in this, it “may, in fact, sharpen a political program, insisting on the testing and reaffirmation, not necessarily the rejection, of assumptions, predictions, generalizations, and laws” (Stanton 2006: 4). Tellingly, a novel that has won the Man Booker Prize and thus gained global acknowledgement and visibility remembers in gratitude the local food bank and housing and tax benefit system in its acknowledgements section. Being able to be a cosmopolitan walker, writer or just citizen is a privilege that should be studied in its minor elements and not instantly in its “macro-interdependencies” (Rabinow 1986: 258). Similar to Burns’ act of memory in her acknowledgments, the novel itself also works on a mnemonic micro level. The memory work that the novel does is removed from the Irish Civil War and the macro structures of war, even though the war constitutes the novel’s background. As the novel’s memory of modernist techniques is more evident than its memory of the Irish Civil War, the novel decidedly stands out against so-called post-trouble fiction. While event-based memory discourses often draw on specific “repetitive, affective, recognisable framing patterns” (Dillane 2017: 145) in order to achieve “emotional power” (145), the novel withdraws from these framing mechanisms by employing a cosmopolitan form of writing that through its distance blurs historical accuracies and thus creates a wider resonance for its memory work. As Fionnuala Dillane points out, many fictions of memory fall back upon “empathic identification as a substitute for more difficult considerations about the structural conditions that produce and continue to reproduce inequity and discrimination” (2017: 151). A latent form of criticism, this chapter has shown, is intricately connected to memory work by highlighting exactly those structural conditions that event-based, historically situated works of memory often neglect. By re-membering Modernism, cosmopolitanism and flânerie, the novel picks up on structural inequalities that result in different modernities at different points in time around the world and that are then subsumed under allegedly universal categories of interpretation. In its employment of latent criticism, the novel “use[s] traditions of realism to represent everyday life and experience in ways that are affectively powerful without being sensationalizing, so much so that the lack of dramatic focal points or readily intelligible characters or events prevents easy readings of class or politics” (Staiger et al. 2010: 8). The narrator-protagonist does not attempt to be a ‘citizen of the world’. Rather, she embodies the basic impossibility of a major cosmopolitan frame of mind in a suppressive environment. All her attempts to cross borders remain localised and minor in their scope. In this, Milkman is the attempt to, as Felski puts it, “reframe the mod-

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ern through […] the histories of those who have not been recognized as full political subjects” (2000: 61). Through focussing on ordinary affects instead of realist depictions of violence, the novel forces its readers to engage with a memory politics that operates on a different level. It is this prevention of easy readings which endows latency as a mode of remembering affective potential in that it confronts readers with experiences that do not easily fit into preformed discourses or emotional categories. In this, latency as a mode of memory invites a rethinking of literary traditions and the forms of knowledge and experiencing the world they allow for and which experiences they traditionally exclude.

8 Remembering Britain’s Lost Children: The Myth of Filiation in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child (2015) I could see the people, but they couldn’t see me, and I can’t say it was a happy time (Monica, Lost Child 215) As a family we had nothing (Ben, Lost Child 189)

Caryl Phillips is a very prolific writer who at the time of writing has published eleven novels, five books of non-fiction, four stage plays and two screenplays. Phillips was born in St Kitts but moved to Leeds, England, at four years old. Given his family connection to the Caribbean, it might not be surprising that his work often turns to the histories and stories of the so-called Black Atlantic and life in the diaspora. The condition of exile, experiences with racism and exclusion and feelings of unbelonging – experiences which Phillips shares with many of his characters – is a recurring motif in his literary oeuvre (Ledent 2002: 1; Eckstein 2006: 65). Since Phillips often puts into focus the relations between Britain and the African diaspora, Jeffery Renard Allen even calls him “the father of Afro-British fiction” (2015: n.pag.).¹ While the condition of exile and diaspora is a very prominent aspect of Phillips’ fiction and non-fiction (The European Tribe [1987], Colour Me English [2011], The Atlantic Sound [2000]), his work is also characterised by more opaque meaning-making strategies. As Phillips has developed as a writer, his works have become ever more multi-layered and multidirectional. Beside Phillips’ obvious affiliations to postcolonial topics and discourses – his first novel The Final Passage (1985), for instance, openly participates in the tradition of post-war migration stories – Phillips’ novels also often work through latency as a mode of memory to foreground affiliations and invite comparisons. His novel Cambridge (1991), for instance, evokes latency as a mode of memory to layer the story of the English woman Emily Cartwright and the Bible-reading slave Cambridge with preceding literary texts, thereby “writ[ing] back to the early slave nar-

 Scholars regularly engage with Phillips in this framework; see, for instance, Abigail Ward’s Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar: Representations of Slavery (2011), Fatim Boutros’ Facing Diasporic Trauma: Self-Representation in the Writings of John Hearne, Caryl Phillips, and Fred D’Aguiar (2015), Lars Eckstein’s Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory (2006) or Jopi Nyman’s Home, Identity, and Mobility in Contemporary Diasporic Fiction (2009). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111067384-009

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ratives of the eighteenth century” (Eckstein 2006: 69) but also incorporating and challenging intertextual references to imperial travelogues, such as Janet Schaw’s Journal of a Lady of Quality among others (75). As Lars Eckstein points out, this remembering of the earlier literary tradition takes the form of a palimpsest which does not lay bare its memory policy openly. Still, critics read Cambridge’s latent intertextuality as an attempt at “rewrit[ing] the European record of the West Indies” (O’Callaghan 1993: 34 f.). His later novel The Nature of Blood (1997) similarly evokes latency as a mode of memory, though to a different end. In this novel, Phillips uses means of juxtaposition in order to explore the latent common ground of marginalisation that might be shared by different experiences of societal exclusion and ethnic discrimination. Phillips never explicitly compares different historical situations. His novels, however, implicitly invite the latent analogy of the experience of Jewish ghettoization in the fifteenth century, the Holocaust and the experiences of Black Jews in Israel today. They thereby also latently entangle different spaces of history, namely Poland, England, Venice, Cyprus and Israel. While the latency of these earlier works might be a weak form of latency in that the connections that the latent mode of memory brings to the fore are still well discernible for the reader,² Phillips later work employs a more opaque form of latency. His latest novel, A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018), constructs latent connections to the literary figure Jean Rhys, without granting the reader any clue as to the aims of this literary homage. Similarly, Phillips’ pen-ultimate novel, The Lost Child (2015), also evokes latency as a mode of memory and thereby creates multidirectional memories. The Lost Child remembers through latency on two different levels. First, the novel more or less explicitly addresses an English classic. As its blurb already indicates, the novel builds a connection to Emily Brontë’s classic novel Wuthering Heights (1847) and its enigmatic foundling Heathcliff. In this chapter I claim that as this connection is far from obvious, the literary intertextuality complicates the traditional notions of rewriting. Second, the novel latently entangles questions of race with questions of class through the orphan figure. While Caryl Phillips is best known for his role as a diasporic author who aims to give voices to hitherto silenced subjects, he is also a writer who grew up with working-class parents in a working-class town in the north of England, attending university and coming of age during Thatcherism. While class already played a recognisable role in his novels Crossing the River (1993), In the Falling Snow (2000) and A Distant Shore (2003), The Lost Child makes class once again a central concern. Unlike his earlier novels,

 Petra Tournay, for instance, reads The Nature of Blood as an instance of ‘writing back’ and an example of “re-staging Shakespeare from a Black British perspective” (2004: 208).

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however, the interconnection between class and race works more latently in The Lost Child novel, which will be the subject of this chapter. Entangling class and race through latency, I claim, allows this novel to remember the lost children of Britain – children who due to different sociological, cultural or economic circumstances ‘lost’ their childhood – in a more intersectional way, inviting readers to see how different forms of marginalisation – due to class, race and gender – follow similar mechanisms and often work alongside one another. Moreover, the novel’s transtextualisation – a concept which will be elaborated on in chapter 8.2. – allows the novel to draw diachronic comparisons and to foreshadow the narrative future, thereby highlighting a diachronic centrality of the so-called ‘myth of filiation’. The Lost Child eschews conventional plot lines and does not subscribe to normative notions of development, suspense and emotional investment. According to its blurb, the novel deals “[a]t its heart” with the story of “Monica, cut off from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner, and her bitter struggle to raise her sons in the shadow of the wild Yorkshire moors” (Lost Child n.pag.). Readers are thus led to see Monica as the centre of the novel. However, Monica’s story is framed by and thus juxtaposed to the stories of other women, namely a slave woman and her young son at the beginning and a fictionalised Emily Brontë in the middle. Moreover, the novel works through polyphony to make several voices interact. It introduces her son Ben’s perspective in various chapters that are framed by the titles of famous British pop songs of the 1970s, it includes a chapter giving Ronald Johnson’s – Monica’s father’s – perspective and ends with an ambiguous chapter that might deal with Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff ’s introduction into the Earnshaw family or Tommy’s abduction by Derek Evans, respectively. In their work on Framing and Interpretation, Gale MacLachlan and Ian Reid explain that “[t]he frame may act as a means of leading the eye into the picture, and the reader into the text, thus presenting itself as the key to a solipsistic world” (1994: 273). The novel’s choice to lead the reader into a novel about a white woman struggling with mental illness while raising her black sons in 1970s Britain by framing her experience with that of a slave woman during the times of the transatlantic slave trade needs to be closely analysed. Moreover, the literary frame “is […] an absence insofar as it is a purely relational moment, the point of crystallization of metadiscursive instructions” (Frow 1986: 224). The reader of The Lost Child is thus asked to pay attention to the relations established by the act of framing as well as what metadiscursive ideas it may offer the reader. Maybe due to the plot’s unconventional play with the category of the event, character development and framing, the novel was received with mixed feelings. Lucasta Miller, in her review for The Guardian, for instance, remarks that while “[t]he prose is as sleek as you would expect from a writer as accomplished as Phillips”, the “line between spuriousness and subtlety seems to waver when it comes to

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the interrelation of Monica’s story with that of Heathcliff and Brontë” (Miller 2015: n.pag.). She furthermore remarks that Monica’s development is enigmatic since it cannot be “related to wider social factors arising from her impoverished and liminal situation as a single mother on a council estate. Depressingly, the message seems to be that some people are born outcasts, regardless of circumstances” (Miller 2015: n.pag.). Jeffery Renard Allen calls the novel “a riff on ‘Wuthering Heights’” (2015: n.pag.) and Ellen Prentiss Campbell finds the novel’s take on the Victorian classic both strange and interesting (2015: n.pag.). Similar to the reviews in newspapers, scholars up until now have also mainly focussed on the connection between the novel and Wuthering Heights. Bénédicte Ledent and Evelyn O’Callaghan, for instance, point out the “similarity between the figures of Antoinette/Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea, Emily in Cambridge, and Monica in The Lost Child” (2017: 237– 238). “Like Phillips’ historical fiction of Cambridge (1991)”, they claim, “The Lost Child is deeply invested in literary parenthood: the narrative reclamation/adoption of absent stories” (2017: 231). Susan Gillman in her essay “Remembering Slavery, Again” (2015) also focuses on the novel’s function as a prequel to Wuthering Heights and the ways the novel provides Brontë’s Heathcliff with a backstory, commenting on how “Wuthering Heights is the perfect example of how the traces of slavery are not new news, the case of a seemingly unusual source that has been, for years, both read as a literary classic and overlooked as a literary source of the history of slavery” (2015: 5). Two other scholars rather focus on the novel’s choice of setting. Sarah Brophy makes “the eerie northern geographies of The Lost Child” (159) her main focus of analysis. Applying a spatial lens to the novel, Brophy finds that the novel is an act of “[i]magining location as multi-layered and multitemporal” (2018: 165), thereby opening up the possibility to “see[…] and encounter[…] the inherited world differently” (2018: 168). While Brophy also acknowledges the intertextual connection to Wuthering Heights, she prioritises drawing connections to the “contemporary ‘Yorkshire Noir’”, “remembering the infamous crimes, scandals, and suffering of the postwar period differently, beyond the limits of heritage culture” (161). Kasia Boddy similarly puts her focus on the rural north of England as the setting of the novel. In her article, Boddy examines the intersection of race and class, intending to show how “class is the modality in which race, and race relations, are experienced and articulated” (2019: 4). Boddy connects several of Phillips’ works to Thatcherism and its aftermath, drawing attention to the fact that Phillips “often identifies himself as ‘somebody who came of age in the years of Thatcher” and was thus “on the losing side three times” (Phillips qtd. in Boddy 2019: 6), which she also sees as a central concern in his works. This chapter builds on the insights offered by Kasia Boddy and her reading of class and race as entangled in The Lost Child. Despite being read predominantly

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within the context of its connection to Wuthering Heights, the novel actually invites intersectional readings, entangling class, race and gender. In an interview, Phillips claims that “if I wanted to write a book about Heathcliff, I had the idea of his origins 13 years ago. But I wasn’t interested in just doing a book which might sit as a kind of companion piece to Wide Sargasso Sea” (qtd. in Clingman 2018: 595). The novel does more than remember Heathcliff and provide the foundling with a backstory that makes him Mr Earnshaw’s illegitimate child. In this chapter, I will trace the novel’s multidirectional memory politics.³ First, I will portray the literary traditions of ‘rewriting’ and ‘writing back’, two paradigms that are often related to writers from the diaspora engaging with the English literary canon. In a next step, I will approach ‘rewriting’ as an instance of translation and argue that it is a more apt way of contouring Phillips’ engagement with the literary tradition. Instead of reading The Lost Child as an instance of ‘rewriting’, I will use the concept of ‘transtextualisation’ (using Haroldo de Campo’s term) to highlight a different dynamic between the interacting texts. In the following, I will analyse how the orphan figure of Heathcliff is translated into the 1960s working-class context of Leeds and London before turning to more opaquely latent intertexts that entangle the experiences of Monica, the slave woman of the opening chapter, Emily Brontë and Selina Davis, a character invented by Jean Rhys. Ultimately, I will turn to the intertextual references to 1970s pop songs and their latent foreshadowings of the narrative future.

8.1 Literature’s Memory: Rewriting and Writing Back The literary theorist Renate Lachmann connects the praxis of intertextuality with the trope of memory. “Literature”, she claims, “is culture’s memory” (2008: 301). It is in texts that a culture records – albeit not always in any comprehensive, essentialist and direct manner – its major events and memories, making texts memory sites (305). In their function as memory sites, texts also work self-reflexively, remembering each other and thus their tradition of memory through intertextuality: “The mnemonic function of literature provokes intertextual procedures; or: the other way around, intertextuality produces and sustains literature’s memory” (309). Through intertextuality, texts refer back to their cultural as well as global predecessors and position themselves toward them in different ways. Lachmann distinguishes three different relations that are possible between “mnemonics

 See the introduction to this study for a discussion of multidirectional memory.

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and culture”, namely “participation, troping, and transformation” (304). She elaborates: Participation is the dialogical sharing in the texts of a culture that occurs in writing. I understand troping […] as a turning away from the precursor text, a tragic struggle against those other texts that necessarily write themselves into the author’s own text, and an attempt to surpass, defend against, and eradicate traces of a precursor’s text. In contrast, I take transformation to involve the appropriation of other texts through a process of distancing them, through a sovereign and indeed usurpatory exertion of control over them. This appropriation conceals the other texts, veils them, plays with them, renders them unrecognizable, irreverently overturns their oppositions, mixes a plethora of texts together, and demonstrates a tendency toward the esoteric and the cryptic on the one hand, and the ludic, the syncretic, and the carnivalesque on the other. (Lachmann 2008: 305)

For the study at hand, Lachmann’s last two interrelations are of special interest. While ‘participation’ speaks “of the profound joy of recurrence” (307), the other two express a rather ambiguous relationship between a text and the texts it remembers. While troping has confrontational overtones (“surpass, defend against”), the concept of “transformation” is fruitful for an understanding of latent memory. Transformation which works through appropriation constitutes an act of memory, albeit one that “conceals the other texts, veils them, plays with them”. It is through this latent intertextuality that texts can remember and position themselves within a wider cultural memory context without falling back on antagonistic and binary understandings of different cultural, racial or class-related contexts. In this, an understanding of latent intertextual memories working through transformation is a clear contrast to the paradigms of ‘writing back’ and ‘rewriting’, which up until now have dominated the understanding of postcolonial mnemonic intertextuality. Rewriting and ‘writing back’ are central postcolonial writing strategies to displace the former centre and provide more nuanced histories of the former colonies. Given Caryl Phillips’ reception as a ‘diasporic’ (Ledent 2017: 3) writer, who is engaged with concomitant questions of belonging, exile and cultural difference, it is no surprise that The Lost Child might be read first and foremost as an instance of rewriting a canonical English classic. Both the ‘writing back’ paradigm as well as the ‘rewriting’ paradigm are based on the felt need to inscribe marginalised voices from the former colonies into the canon. Despite the colonies being a central component of, for instance, Britain’s wealth, the “sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea”, as cultural critic Stuart Hall phrases it (1991: 48), they were rarely actively represented in literature. Edward Said makes a compelling point in his seminal study Culture and Imperialism (1993). The Empire’s ‘others’, Said points out, are only latently present in the English canon and have to be extracted through contrapuntal reading strategies. Since some histories are only latent in the canon, lit-

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erary scholars have to develop “a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts” (1994 [1993]: 51). In his book, Said emphasises the presence of the British colonies within the British literary canon, providing many examples of how the major influence and agency of the colonies is made opaque in these texts. “In Mansfield Park”, for instance, “which within Jane Austen’s work carefully defines the moral and social values informing her other novels, references to Sir Thomas Bertram’s overseas possessions are threaded through; they give him his wealth, occasion his absences, fix his social status at home and abroad, and make possible his values” (1994 [1993]: 62). Still, the colonies are nothing more than mere background against which the main story unfolds. The same holds true for other major English literary works, as for instance Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens Hard Times (1854) or Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four (1890). This oversight of the colonies as a place of agency and innovation has been the focal point of many postcolonial writers who engage in acts of ‘writing back’ or ‘rewriting’. Despite the unquestionable need to inscribe absent voices into the canon, an understanding of textual memory that reduces itself to this endeavour does not reflect the complexity of intertextual memory. Already in 1977, Roland Barthes in “From Word to Text” configures texts as being intrinsically about their connection to other texts. For him, “[t]he logic regulating the Text is not comprehensive (define ‘what the work means’) but metonymic” (1977: 158). The text needs to be seen in its relations to other texts, as always already participating in a larger system of representation. While Barthes defines texts through their intrinsic implicit or explicit intertextuality, he goes on to articulate a fallacy at the heart of intertextuality – the basic concept of the ‘rewriting’ and ‘writing back’ paradigm – which is the “myth of filiation”. The text, he asserts, is […] woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?) antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the ‘sources,’ the ‘influences’ of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation. (Barthes 1977 160, my emphasis, Y.L.)

The text, even though it might establish an explicit reference to a preceding text, is still always already plural and interwoven with the presence of other texts. What Barthes calls the “myth of filiation” establishes a relationship that works through hierarchies of succession and influence. Such an understanding of textual relation is at the basis of the ‘writing back’ paradigm and it is from this premise that my critique of the ‘rewriting’ or ‘writing back’ paradigm sets out.

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In 1989, the Australian critics Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffins and Helen Tiffin published a volume with the title The Empire Writes Back, adapting the title from Salman Rushdie, who, playing on the title of the Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), entitled a newspaper article on British racism, ‘The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance’. Under the telling rubric title of “hegemony”, the authors tackle the question of “[w]hy should post-colonial societies continue to engage with the imperial experience?” despite having achieved political independence (2002 [1989]: 6). They explain that political independence notwithstanding, the “cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonical assumptions about literary activity, and through attitudes to postcolonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shoots of English literature” (7). The writing back paradigm understands the work of postcolonial authors as an endeavour to counter this hegemony and, as the Kenyan author and academic Ngugi wa Thiong’o, famously put it, “decolonize the mind” (1986), challenging learned representations and discourses. As the term already suggests, this practice however follows a basic idea of succession, situating postcolonial literature as a belated practice, and runs the risk of reducing literature from the former colonies to a political agenda. Ankhi Mukherjee therefore convincingly claims that the “‘empire writes back’ formulation is fundamentally flawed in the way it relates all contestations of modernity in the non-western world to what is perceived as the primal trauma of colonization” (2014: 116). The ‘writing back’ paradigm is closely connected to the ‘rewriting’ paradigm, which follows similar premises. ‘Rewriting’ mainly refers to the explicit act of addressing another literary work by way of allusion or direct intertextuality, aiming at filling a perceived gap of the addressed literary work. As Georges Letissier puts it, “[i]t has become generally accepted that in most post-colonial literature, rewriting implies lending a voice to silenced characters, or developing some marginal aspects of the initial plot of the colonial hypotext” (2009: 15). In contrast to the ‘writing back’ paradigm, it no longer overtly administers what John Thieme calls a merely “oppositional” (2001: 3) position to the texts that are worked through in ‘rewritings’, or, as he calls them, “postcolonial con-texts”. Rather, they are to be seen as “counter-discourses that write back to the canon in a multiplicity of ways” (3). According to Thieme, [t]he extent to which postcolonial con-texts are indebted to their English pretexts varies considerably and the relationship is virtually always complicated by the introduction of other intertexts that unsettle the supposedly direct line of descent from the canonical ‘original’. Thus, to borrow Edward Said’s terminology, filiative relationships are replaced by affiliative identifications (1991: 174), straightforward lines of descent, such as one, at least supposedly, finds in canonical English literature, are replaced by literary genealogies that reject colonial

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parent figures, or at least only allow such figures to exist as members of an extended, and usually hybrid, ancestral family. (Thieme 2001: 7)

Although Thieme advocates a more complex understanding of postcolonial texts’ relationship towards the “English pretexts”, his elaboration shows that while no longer ‘merely oppositional’, the paradigm of rewriting still follows the idea of temporary succession and topical response. Thieme’s text, after all, still works with the dichotomy between “postcolonial con-text and canonical pre-text” (2001: 2), the prefixes indicating the perceived belatedness of postcolonial rewritings. The postcolonial text still comes after the colonial text and – what is even more striking – it is a con-text, the prefix indicating that the text is a supplement, an addition rather than a fully-fledged work of art in its own right. While the new terms ‘rewriting’ and ‘postcolonial con-texts’ might on the surface forego the oppositional, confrontational connotation that the ‘writing back’ paradigm had, they still work with similar premises of counter-discourse and the act of “responding” (Thieme 2001: 4). Returning to Renate Lachmann’s claim that “[l]iterature is culture’s memory” (2008: 301), it becomes apparent that such an understanding of postcolonial literature hinders an understanding of memory as multidirectional and dynamic.

8.2 Latent Anachronic Entanglements: Transtextualisation The Lost Child’s intertextual memory practice intentionally refuses to participate in this literary tradition from the former colonies. Despite establishing a directly visible connection to the canonical English classic in its blurb, Phillips’ novel does not engage with Wuthering Heights on an explicit level of address.⁴ On the level of content, the connection to Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff is never made entirely explicit. Rather, it is the result of The Lost Child’s montage-like form: Only the combination of Liverpool as the setting of the first scene, the later chapter on the Brontë sisters, and finally the penultimate chapter that features a man named Earnshaw, who travels to Liverpool and returns home with his illicit son (Lost Child 246), make it probable that the young boy from the opening scene is indeed young Heathcliff. Similarly, in opposition to prior acts of postcolonial rewritings, The Lost Child only features the link to Wuthering Heights in its frame stories, that is, at its margins. In what follows, I want to understand the connection be-

 The act of naming Wuthering Heights on the novel’s blurb is probably due to marketing decisions.

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tween The Lost Child and Wuthering Heights as one of “transformation”, involving “the appropriation of other texts through a process of distancing them”, as Renate Lachmann puts it (2008: 305). I further aim to understand this act of distancing, playing and veiling (Lachmann 2008) as an act of translation rather than rewriting. The Lost Child’s engagement with former texts appropriates and transforms them but also translates them into the twentieth-century context as well as into a network of relationality that makes different topical concerns interact. In his study Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-Translation Studies (2017), Edwin Gentzler considers rewriting from a translational perspective. He claims that “many texts that are not referred to as translations but instead are often called rewritings, adaptations, or furtherings contain translational elements” (2017: 2). Bringing together the concepts of translation and rewriting allows Gentzler to conceive of so-called rewritings as transgressive approaches to their socalled pre-texts that deny these texts their status as ‘originals’. Challenging the traditional relationship between so-called original works and their rewritings is especially relevant in a postcolonial context, since the conventional “Manichean schema between colonial and postcolonial texts […] reduces postcolonial literature to little more than counterreadings of master plots” (Mukherjee 2014: 18). In his study at the intersection of rewriting and translation, Gentzler makes use of Haroldo de Campo’s neologism “transtextualization” to frame this transgressive approach. The concept of rewriting as translation is more dynamic than the traditional understanding and helps to uncover the latent entanglements between different places and cultures. Translation envisions complex textual and contextual, as well as cultural and intercultural, relationships. Translation as a concept leans on the cultural premediation of knowledge, tradition and expectation that the reader brings to the text. At the same time, however, translation targets this premediation and opens it up for change, demarcating possibilities of transcultural dialogue. In the words of the literary theorist Ottmar Ette, “translation is mediation” (2016: 169). Understanding rewriting as translation should similarly build on an understanding of translation as mediation, which is “not a one-way street from one language to another, from one culture to another, but has to be understood as a space onto itself, as a discrete place of writing that, in a paradoxical sense, writes into being interWorlds” (2016: 169). The act of rewriting as translation is thus to be understood as an act of intervention that opens up a third space which questions concepts of linearity and one-way directed heritage. Analysing Phillips’ novel, the neologism of transtextualisation is very fruitful in that it allows the text to be perceived as more than an afterthought or the attempt to add voices to an already told story. It transgresses the boundaries of fixed fictions, highlighting a latent multidirectionality that dissolves temporal lines of succession. In this sense, distancing oneself from the ‘rewriting’ paradigm

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and instead approaching texts through the concept of transtextualisation does important cultural work. As Homi K. Bhabha puts it in his groundbreaking study The Location of Culture (1994): “What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural difference” (1994: 2). Bhabha suggests abandoning the “singularities of ‘class’ or ‘gender’” (2) and to think identity more intersectionally. The Lost Child engages in this endeavour through transtextualisation. It does not ‘answer’ to a textual ideology or provide voice for a silenced character but rather brings to the fore the intersectional mechanisms that are at work both in the so-called pretext as well as in the transtextually rewritten novel, thus endowing them with renewed urgency.

8.3 Entangling Race and Class through Latent Juxtapositional Memory Instead of ‘writing back’ to a canonical English classic, The Lost Child uses Wuthering Heights as a framing device, building its poetics through juxtaposition. In her seminal study Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-century Critical Readings (2018), postcolonial critic Elleke Boehmer investigates how we read so-called postcolonial literature today and how the writing techniques guide our reading experiences. She points out that juxtaposition is a useful tool to direct readerly attention: “Through the joining of opposites, oddities, and incommensurabilities, […] the device of juxtaposition can work to jolt the reader, pushing them back in shock or dismay or (at times) wonder, encouraging them to imagine or infer what till now has been silenced or suppressed” (2018: 41), or, in other words, latent. In its capacity to redirect readerly attention away from the plot’s central events and unto the novel’s formal aesthetics and politics, devices such as juxtaposition can draw attention to “subtler meanings and covertly disruptive effects” (42). The framing of The Lost Child together with its transtextual strategies creates many such juxtapositions which alert the reader to latent contents and comparisons and thus invite what Boehmer calls “inferential reading” (2018: 43). The Lost Child’s poetics of juxtaposition and transtextualisation works through lose connections and opaque relationalities; the text’s “gaps, uncertainties, and discontinuities […] cannot be immediately resolved into an overarching geo-historical trope” and thus invite its readers to “forg[e] unlikely intersections and associations” (2018: 43). For Boehmer, it is this potentiality of literature which makes postcolonial texts powerful in working with and against dominant discourses. Juxtapositions, so her argument, incite different reading strategies, strategies that go

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beyond the reading of the ‘event’ and rather explore the often-unexplicable affects released by bringing together different textual elements in unconventional ways. “It is by reading otherwise”, she claims, “directed by nonsynchronous and juxtaposed effects, that meanings which cannot yet be articulated in so many words might be subtly and also subversively inferred” (2018: 43). The same holds true for memories that are subtly interwoven by means of juxtaposition, making the device of juxtapositional transtextuality a means of latent memory that works through gaps and silences instead of overt counter-discourses. The reader is thus activated to find out for themselves which memories are brought to the fore through the juxtapositions and which structural similarities between the different memories give weight to their analogical juxtaposition. In contrast to overt counter-discourses this form of memory is more powerful in that it makes the reader take an active part in making sense of the mnemonic juxtaposition, which might make them more involved and attentive. The Lost Child makes juxtaposition its central organising principle, employing a frame narrative to start the story. The story begins with an unnamed focalising character sitting at the docks in Liverpool. One of the first things that we learn about this person is that “[s]he is a woman in debt who can no longer find anyone willing to employ her at the loom; she is a diminished woman who, before her time, has yielded reluctantly to age and infirmity” (Lost Child 3). After the first page it becomes clear that this is a woman who survived the transatlantic slave trade and who now tries to make a living for herself and her seven-year-old son, the child of a brief affair with an English gentleman. The first chapter focalised through this woman’s perspective ends when she is dying, her last thoughts centring around her son: “She taught the boy how to walk, and now she must walk away from him. She must go. A skeleton hung wih rags. Another journey, another crossing” (Lost Child 12). While the first enigmatic chapter does not yet establish a clear intertextual connection, the chapter “The Journey” (241 ff.) picks this narrative strand up again. In this chapter, Mr Earnshaw (246) travels to Liverpool to collect his illicit child that he conceived with a slave woman (251). “The blackhaired child is asleep”, we learn, but even while sleeping and even “at this tender age his sombre aspect suggests an abundance of pride” (252), a comment which connects the boy to the boy of the first chapter (in whom his mother detects “a strong and tenacious heart” [6]). Prefixing the main narrative with another story completely unrelated to the main text establishes transtextualisation between the different storylines without subordinating one to the other. Although the novel is framed by and thus introduced by the textual allusions to an earlier canonical text, these allusions are at the same time positioned at the text’s margins and not at its centre. The remembered text is therefore simultaneously a form of template as well as a marginalised

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part of the text. The marginalisation highlights that what is at stake in Phillips’ poetics of juxtaposition is the so-called ‘pre-text’s’ authority. The text’s transtextualisation renegotiates the two texts’ relationship. It not only makes the different stories interact but also invites the reader to establish links and find similarities between what at first sight seems to be unconnected without contemplating these connections and similarities in terms of ‘rewriting’. It is up to the reader to translate the novel’s juxtapositions and thus create an understanding of the texts’ entanglement. While the framing of the main text by a different story strives for entanglement and connectivity, the text’s title seemingly follows a different premise. With regard to the text’s overall juxtapositional structure, The Lost Child’s title is at first sight misleading. The direct article conveys the impression of a unified subject at the centre of the story. Soon, however, the reader realises that the novel works against its title, as it does not deal with the lost child, but with lost children, making them a topical concern. The allegedly lost child of the title, Tommy, is juxtaposed to an equally though differently lost child: Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff. Although the novel might invite a comparison between these two children of different times and different backgrounds, it does not fulfil the classical function of a postcolonial furnishing of a voice for a subaltern character. As the ambiguity of the first chapter already underlines, The Lost Child distances itself from the postcolonial ‘writing back’ paradigm. Its poetics of opaqueness and ambiguity clearly complicate the function of confrontationally countering a hegemonic western discourse. Although the novel invites reading the boy of the first chapter as Heathcliff, this assumption is never confirmed. Thus, The Lost Child does not provide Heathcliff with a voice but only alludes to this figure of canonised fiction. What then is the function of this opaque intertextuality, if it seems neither to aim at “restructuring European ‘realities’ in post-colonial terms” (Mukherjee 2014: 116) nor sets out to directly “contest […] the authority of the canon of English literature” (Thieme 2001: 1)? Though the novel reimagines Heathcliff as Mr Earnshaw’s illegitimate son with a slave woman and thus reimagines his story and background, this extension of the canonical text is hardly the main focus of the novel. Instead of providing an extensive backstory for Brontë’s character, the young boy of the frame story serves as a mirror figure for Tommy, Monica’s youngest son. Despite its misleading title, the novel’s juxtapositional composition invites the reader to read the two children as one, thereby making the lost child metonymically stand in for lost children as a trope, stressing their common fate rather than their manifold differences. Still, Tommy is not Heathcliff and vice versa, and this is an important assessment, since it highlights that the novel does not aim to gloss over difference and is sensitive towards the singularity of experience. The two children who get lost in different ways do not seem to share many char-

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acteristics. The novel is composed in a way that mirrors these two children – though in a distorted way, applying transtextualisation as a foreignising translation technique that does not aim at reducing differences. What the two boys share is a connection to the diaspora: Tommy’s father is from the Caribbean and Heathcliff is described “as dark almost as if [he] came from the devil” (Brontë 2000 [1847]: 36). Whereas Heathcliff ’s physical appearance plays a huge role in making him the ‘other’ in Wuthering Heights, that is, an outcast, who is associated with a lack of civilisation, which makes him wish for “light hair and fair skin” (Brontë 2000 [1847]: 57), Tommy’s skin colour is hardly ever mentioned in The Lost Child. What Tommy and Heathcliff share is their victimisation: Both are subject to psychological as well as physical abuse. However, they differ regarding their way of dealing with this victimisation. Though both children express a wish to belong and to be accepted, Heathcliff ’s being continuously rejected makes him fight for himself whereas Tommy seems to lack the strength of standing up for himself. Whereas Heathcliff right from the beginning appears independent and fearless, Tommy relies on his elder brother for comfort and companionship. While Heathcliff is more resilient and anxious to stand his ground – “I shall not stand to be laughed at, I shall not bear it” (Brontë 2000 [1847]: 54) – Tommy cannot stand up against being bullied, and after summer camp, “where he’d had a particularly tough time” (Lost Child 137), he shuts down and becomes even more reclusive than before. While Heathcliff is described as “a sullen, patient child; hardened, perhaps, to illtreatment” (Brontë 2000 [1847]: 38), Tommy is also a quiet child though for different reasons. He has not hardened to ill treatment nor patiently waits for things to change. Rather, he seems to have surrendered to his desolate situation, as statements such as “he wished he was an orphan” (Lost Child 159) or his general lack of enthusiasm for anything other than football demonstrate. Although the two boys seem to adapt very differently to their roles as outsiders, the novel makes their stories not only comparable but also at one point blurs them to an extent of indistinguishability. The last chapter, titled ‘Going Home’, seems to be the extension of the previous chapter and might describe Heathcliff and Mr Earnshaw returning to Wuthering Heights. However, the ending scene could just as well depict Tommy’s abduction by Derek Evans, which is underlined by the remark that “[t]he boy stares […] at the man in whose company he has suffered his long ordeal” (Lost Child 260). As it is likely that Derek Evans abused Tommy for some time before abducting him (159), this narrative commentary would better fit their relationship than that of young Heathcliff and Mr Earnshaw whom – at least in Wuthering Heights – Heathcliff comes to see as a father figure. The ending scene could fit both characters: Either it describes the last moments of Tommy’s life, who until then had lived under a shadow for quite some time, or it describes the moment Heathcliff ’s life changes when he gets introduced into the

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Earnshaw family as the “dirty, ragged, black-haired child” (Brontë 2000 [1847]: 36) that Mr Earnshaw found “starving, and houseless” (2000 [1847]: 36) in the streets of Liverpool. What this juxtaposition produced by the narrative framing does is not primarily to rewrite a character of canonised fiction but to compare two children whose lives are very different but who still – for partly different reasons – both end up miserable. From different times and different backgrounds, both boys feel abandoned by their respective families, who could not care for them. What is emphasised is the common experience of neglect that can be as much a part of children’s lives in the twentieth century as it used to be for children in Heathcliff ’s Victorian England. As Tommy’s brother Ben reminds the reader towards the end of the narrative, “[a]s a family we had nothing, so of course it was straightforward enough for somebody to turn our Tommy’s head” (Lost Child 189).⁵ The novel’s transtextualisation stresses the widespread and ever-present abuse of children and the importance of a feeling of belonging – thereby inviting a juxtapositional reading of orphans and outcasts on the one hand and children growing up with their own mother and therefore seemingly more sheltered on the other hand. While one might be inclined to criticise Phillips for at least partly inviting a decontextualised reading, the juxtapositional transtextualisation brings to the fore sufficient structural similarities between the boys’ situation to give some weight to the analogy. The resonances among the different lost children of The Lost Child foster a reading of the postcolonial at its edges, that is, where it intersects and resonates with other frames of experience of exclusion, abandonment and trauma. In this, The Lost Child, in the words of Stephen Clingman, fosters “a way of understanding the world we inhabit in the time and space of this moment, our chronotope. It indicates that such a ‘we’ is both fragmented and asymmetric, and yet intrinsically linked” (2018: 358). What the juxtapositional poetics thus highlights is the universality of the orphan figure. While Heathcliff is an outcast because of his outer appearance and unidentifiable origins (as the servant Nelly Dean remarks: “Who knows, but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen” [Brontë 2000 [1847]: 58]), Tommy’s and similarly his brother’s status as outcasts results from their class rather than their race. While racial discrimination is definitely latently present in The Lost Child, I do not read Tommy or Ben as the ‘racial other’ (as, for instance, Ledent and O’Callaghan do, 2017: 236). The only time that the reader might deduce that Tommy is bullied because of his skin colour is when his school comrades laugh at him: “‘And where are you from, Thomas?’ ‘I’m from Eng-

 Bénédicte Ledent and Evelyn O’Callaghan offer an intriguing reading of the family trope in The Lost Child, connecting it to the dysfunctional ‘family’ of Empire (2017: 236).

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land.’ His fellow pupils release a volley of scornful cackling that threatens to swell into hysteria” (Lost Child 117). However, it is not made explicit whether they laugh because they do not consider him to be ‘truly English’ or whether they only laugh because Tommy might have misunderstood the teacher’s question, as the teacher explains: “Well, Thomas, we were hoping for something a little more specific” (117). What makes Tommy and Ben stand out is their ‘not being from the area’ as well as their lack of money: But every one of the thirty boys, who continue to stifle their laughter, feels sure that the queer apparition standing behind the desk has nothing whatsoever to do with their world, where despite the evidence of their brand-new modern school, people continue to live in back-toback houses and washing is strung out across cobbled streets to dry on the breeze. They all know that the church is at the top of the hill, and the butcher, the baker, and the post office are at the foot of the hill, and the pub is somewhere in between, and it’s blatantly obvious to each of them that this Tommy Wilson is most definitely a stranger. (Lost Child 117)

Tommy’s ‘queerness’ is never once associated with his probably darker skin colour or the fact that his father is from the Caribbean. The closest the text comes to mentioning Tommy’s skin colour is the headmaster referring to Tommy in his mind as the “curly-haired Wilson boy” (119), which one can but does not have to read in relation to race. In fact, the headmaster Mr Hedge explicitly does not read Tommy’s status as an outsider related to race: “Thomas Wilson is not part of the group, nor does it look as if he’ll be invited to join in. In fact, he suspects that timidity has most likely been introduced into the lad’s soul by a neglectful upbringing” (119). It is a “neglectful upbringing” rather than a phenotypical difference that makes Tommy stick out. Indeed, what is mentioned time and again are allusions to the boys’ poverty: They have to wear school uniforms that are too large for them and have to search for “the line […] for those who have free school dinners” (118), Ben wishes he had a bike (146) and steals in order to afford records to listen to, Tommy is the best football player in the school but the only one without the right equipment (146). Finally, and probably most tellingly, when Ben tries to get a job as a newspaper courier, the newsagent discriminates against him not based on his skin colour but because of his class status: “You’re an estate lad, and it’s a scab of a place. […] I always have to keep an extra bloody eye open with you lot” (159). The novel’s poetics of juxtaposition invites the reader to consider the boys as neglected orphans, since Monica does not seem to be able to balance their lack in material possessions with motherly attention.⁶ Although Tommy and Ben only ef-

 When Monica sends her boys to summer camp, Ben drily remarks: “Mam tried to act all upbeat

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fectively become motherless (and are never ‘truly’ orphans as their father is not dead) towards the last part of the novel, they might be perceived as such from an earlier point on. Indeed, the “fictional orphan”, as Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz phrases it, is not to be taken literally and rather “functions as a cultural signifier filled with variable meanings” (2018: 161), also including “representations of the silenced and marginalised individuals whom the symbolic order has remained largely unaware of ” (143). With regard to The Lost Child, she is right in noting that an “analogy between the orphans of colonisation and those of social alienation or exclusion becomes visible” (149). The latent connection that is created through the text’s transtextualisation thus highlights a complex family ideal that none of the characters can live up to. As Edward Said puts it in his discussion of Empire and the difficulty of the concept of filiation: “Childless couples, orphaned children, aborted childbirths, and unregenerately celibate men and women […] all of them suggest[…] the difficulties of filiation” (1991: 17). The novel emphasises the difficulties of filiation on two different levels. For one, all characters – those of the frame story, those intertextually alluded to as well as the ‘main’ characters – feel that they are unseen members of a ‘family’ – literally and metaphorically – that does not want them. On another level, the novel through its transtextual poetics of juxtaposition that works through translation rather than ‘rewriting’ withdraws from unidirectional affiliations with the English canon, “both seek[ing] and den[ying] its own affiliation to familiar writing” (Döring 2006: 83).⁷ In fact, the figure of the orphan is omnipresent in the novel, since one can also read Monica, whose difficult relationship to her parents and especially her father is stressed from the beginning, and the fictional Emily Brontë, who grew up without a mother and whose father only regarded her as the replacement for the lost son, as orphan figures.

8.4 Forgotten and Unseen: Remembering the Female Subaltern While the intertextual reference to Wuthering Heights creates a common ground between the experiences of Ben and Tommy on the one hand and Heathcliff on the other, The Lost Child also juxtaposes different female experiences. Apart from its various framings, the novel traces the development – though not in the while we waited for the coach, but there was no getting around the fact that she was letting us go again” (Lost Child 164).  In his essay “Sherlock Holmes – He Dead: Disenchanting the English Detective in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans”, Tobias Döring portrays how Kazuo Ishiguro employs this technique to rewrite the figure of the English detective.

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typical way, omitting the explicit depiction of meaningful events that trigger perceptible change (see Liebermann 2019) – of Monica Wilson, born Johnson. Monica, Stephen Clingman assesses, “is the woman as outsider – if not the homo sacer, then in some ways the femina sacra who is on the inside and outside the cultural regime that simultaneously includes and excludes her” (2018: 354). Monica is born into a middle-class family. Her father is a teacher at a grammar school, her mother was a shopkeeper before becoming a housewife. Monica’s upbringing is shaped by the authority of her father. Because of a “teenage bout of pneumonia” (Lost Child 19), Ronald Johnson “was able to continue to exercise a benevolent patriarchal authority over his household and therefore take a keen interest in the development of his daughter” (19). Monica is described as an independent child who is “singleminded” (21) and follows her own intuition more than any obligations or expectations family or society might impose on her. Despite her school advising her against applying to Oxford or Cambridge University as the school has “no history with either university” (21) – a well-placed hint at the importance of class standing in 1950s Britain – Monica applies and gets a place at Oxford University by herself. At Oxford, Monica approaches and builds a relationship with a doctorate student, Julius, who is in Oxford on an “island scholarship”, being originally from an unnamed Caribbean Island (30). Later on, they marry and have two children together. The marriage fails and Julius returns to his island, leaving Monica and their two sons, Tommy and Ben, behind. Monica moves back to the north, starting a job at a library and living on a council estate with little money. From there on, Monica’s life slides into a downhill spiral. She dates Derek Evans, the man, who later will sexually abuse and kill her younger son, she suffers from depression and is hospitalised and ultimately also loses her second son, who is given into foster care. Finally, Monica dies by suicide. The framing of the novel invites the comparison between Monica and the slave woman (see Liebermann 2019). The ambiguity of the last chapter, leaving open who is speaking and which child is being led ‘home’, further triggers this comparison. The focaliser of this chapter – who could either be Derek Evans or Mr Earnshaw – remarks about the unnamed boy’s mother: “Despite her headstrong nature, it was evident to him that the woman was ill-suited to be a mother. It wasn’t her fault, but life had ushered her down a perilous course and delivered her into a place of vulnerability” (Lost Child 257). Tellingly, this description fits both the vulnerable slave woman of the frame story and the headstrong Monica, who both – for very different reasons – have been “ushered down a perilous course”. Despite their very different lives and privileges (or lacks thereof ), both women, the reader has to realise, have met the same fate – both lose their child(ren), both are ultimately unseen by society (Lost Child 6, 215) and both die at a young age (Liebermann 2019).

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Monica is not only juxtaposed to the slave woman of the frame narrative but also to another fictional character. The novel, it turns out, also works through other intertextual references that are overlooked in the habitual framing of the novel as a rewriting of the Victorian classic. While Caryl Phillips makes it quite explicit that he does not see his work following the same endeavour as Jean Rhys’ famous Wide Sargasso Sea (Clingman 2018: 594), Jean Rhys has become a figure associated with Phillips since his last novel A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018), which tells the story of Gwen Williams’ (which is Jean Rhys’ birth name) arrival in England and her difficult coming of age. Jean Rhys is also present in The Lost Child. As Giovanna Buonnano remarks (2017: 102), Rhys’ short story “Let Them Call It Jazz” (1960) is a very clear pretext for the chapter entitled “Alone” (Lost Child 213 – 237). In contrast to Wuthering Heights, this pretext is not marked at all, so that only readers already familiar with Rhys’ work will recognise the latent, implicit connection. The story takes the form of a homodiegetic narration, told by Selina Davis, a mixed-race woman, who struggles to pay the rent in London’s Notting Hill (Rhys 1995: 1). After her landlady unexpectedly changes the terms of their arrangement, Selina is forced to move out. Promptly, she meets a man in a café, Mr Sims, who offers her to stay at one of his flats, seemingly without any form of compensation. The flat is dilapidated and Selina soon gets into trouble with the conservative neighbours, who “stare as if [she was] wild animal” (sic! 1995: 6). Selina, it soon transpires, struggles with alcohol addiction and depression. She wants to leave the flat and find a job but seems unable to. Ultimately, after her dancing in the garden, her neighbours call the police on her (a second time), and she is put into jail. The story’s plot is unmistakably the template for the chapter describing Monica’s time in London shortly before her suicide. Phillips’ transtextualisation incorporates Rhys’ story but changes the identity of its protagonist: While Selina is a woman whose father is white and whose mother is a “fair coloured woman” (Rhys 1995: 11) from Martinique, Monica is a white woman from a fairly privileged background. In contrast to Monica, Selina’s experiences of marginalisation also include racism,⁸ an experience that Monica does not share. Despite this difference in the women’s experience, the novel mirrors their situation in life, thereby putting the emphasis more on the similarities of their situation than on their differences. Despite the racism that Selina faces, she herself frames her problem similar to Monica’s when she claims: “I’m nuisance to you because I have no money that’s all” (Rhys 1995: 22). Both women feel they are not seen (Lost Child 215, Rhys 1995: 1), both women feel tired and cannot get

 Selina’s neighbour, for instance, complains: “At least the other tarts that crook installed here were white girls” (Rhys 1995: 17).

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themselves to leave the apartment (Lost Child 217, Rhys 1995: 3) and both women end in prison (Selina) and a mental institution that “is like prison” (Monica [Lost Child 233]), respectively. As these two instances of latent transtextualisation show, the marginalisation of women is a central concern of the novel. This impression is further enhanced by a chapter entitled “The Family”. The chapter is focalised through a woman tied to her bed due to illness. It soon transpires that this woman is the fictionalised Emily Brontë, the author of Wuthering Heights. Like Selina and the slave woman, Emily shares many characteristics with Monica and thus serves as a further mirror figure. Roughly in the middle of The Lost Child, the chapter starts in medias res with Emily Brontë observing her sister Charlotte from her sickbed. Although the chapter at first seems to be disconnected from Monica’s story, a closer look brings several similarities between the fictional character Monica and the fictionalised historical persona of Emily Brontë to the fore (Liebermann 2019). Most of the chapter retells Emily’s illness shortly before her death, but the narrative also portrays Emily as “dwelling in another place” (Lost Child 110) already four years before her illness. Descriptions of Emily, such as: “Emily retreated into an implacable silence that hinted at shyness, although her lustreless eyes invariably betrayed boredom, and her general demeanour indicated that she cared little for anyone else’s opinion” (Lost Child 101– 102) resonate with comments about Monica, who “had a lethargic, expressionless gaze that was a little off-putting” (Lost Child 25). Both Emily and Monica start out getting an education and both then “find contentment in cooking and cleaning” (Lost Child 105, 26), much to the astonishment of their surroundings, and they both devote their time to Julius and Branwell, respectively, without claiming recognition (Lost Child 27, 107). Both women have one last thing in common: They are both influenced by (and suffer because of ) men who were not accepted by society due to their origins. Julius, who is from an unnamed Caribbean Island and wants to make “the most of this opportunity [to study in England]” (25), is subject to racialised violence (48) and ultimately realises “that he had no real interest in giving anything to this country that had now been his home for over a dozen years” (49). In juxtaposition, Emily tries to live up to her father’s expectations and to make up for the disappointments that he had to endure when coming to England: “His transformation from Patrick Brunty to Patrick Brontë fooled no one, and his attempts to scour the Irish brogue from his tongue and his halfhearted endeavour to dress above his station provoked ill-suppressed laughter” (99). Patrick Brontë’s situation, being from a dire Irish working-class background and not being accepted due to his accent, is here put into direct comparison to Julius’ situation. Both men are not accepted by society – for different reasons and in the context of different eras, but still on the same grounds.

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The transtextual juxtaposition of these stories, which makes the reader “reflect on what it is that unites them” (Craps 2008: 193),⁹ might inspire a different form of empathy than we conventionally take away from engagements with literary texts. In her article “Reading Stories, Reading (Others’) Lives: Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and Narrative Understanding” (2016), Andreea Ritivoi summarises the common understanding of empathy in literature based on Suzanne Keen, the author of Empathy and the Novel (2010) and one of the leading scholars in the field of empathy and literature, that literature creates empathy through “the creation of commonality, even mutuality, between the reader and the protagonists of the story” (Ritivoi 2016: 54). Andreea Ritivoi, however, rightly claims that this understanding of literary empathy is limited. According to her, “[b]esides being shallow, an understanding derived from the assumption of similarity is ethnocentric […;] it is an understanding centered on our own point of view and shaped by only those realities that it reveals, while inevitably being closed to others” (Ritivoi 2016: 62– 63). The transtextualisation of The Lost Child supports this assessment. The novel does not strive to create ultimate commonality – it does not try to undo the singularities of the specific contexts of the characters it translates, and it does not make it easy for the reader to identify with Monica, since her motivations and desires remain opaque. Rather, it aims for an understanding of similarities despite differences. In The Lost Child, “[u]nderstanding involves the adjustment of our familiar frame of reference – assumptions and expectations – to the frame of reference proposed by or contained in the object of interpretation” (Ritivoi 2016: 60). Although the juxtaposed women are separated in time, family background and position in society, the narrative structure still invites the reader to read the stories of these women alongside one other. After all, all of these women feel that they are invisible and neglected by the society they live in. Similarly, the men also share experiences of exclusion and unbelonging and a desperate wish for acknowledgment. It is this concept of understanding that goes beyond the assumption of total similarity that marks the novel’s memory policy as one of translation – both between the different stories and for the reader. Through transtextualisation, the novel re-members Wuthering Heights and Rhys’ short story and reframes the conventional approach to these text’s relation to one another. This translation of different instances of unbelonging and marginalisation inevitably charts the texts’ relation as dynamic. As translation theorist Susan Bassnett claims, “[t]ranslation implies movement; it is transformation in

 In his article “Linking Legacies of Loss: Traumatic Histories and Cross-Cultural Empathy in Caryl Phillips’ Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood”, Stef Craps analyses Phillips’ technique of fragmented narratives to generate empathy.

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so far as it involves the recreation of a text elsewhere, in another context, where it will become another text altogether” (2013: 341). It is this dynamic potential that the latency of the memory of Wuthering Heights and Rhys’ short story makes possible, which a traditional rewriting or writing back endeavour cannot achieve.

8.5 Conclusion: The Latent Future Well, Billy rapped all night about his suicide How he’d kick it in the head when he was twenty-five Speed jive, don’t want to stay alive When you’re twenty-five And Wendy’s stealing clothes from Marks & Sparks And Freddy’s got spots from ripping off the stars from his face Funky little boat race Television man is crazy saying we’re juvenile delinquent wrecks (“All the Young Dudes”, Mott the Hoople) I’m just a poor boy and nobody loves me. He’s just a poor boy from a poor family, Spare him his life from this monstrousity. (“Bohemian Rhapsody”, Queen)

The text’s memory policy not only dissolves the hierarchical tradition of ‘original’ and ‘rewriting’ but also questions the temporality of memory in a different way: by using transtextualisation as a way of foreshadowing the future. The text’s politics of transtextualisation becomes apparent in its intentional play with various intertexts which it juxtaposes in unconventional ways, employing strategies of concealing, veiling and playing with them, to return to Lachmann’s conceptualization (2008: 305). As already established, it is not a unidirectional ‘rewriting’ or ‘writing back’ but rather entangles various texts in a net of a permanent criss-crossing of different threads of ideas and themes. Next to references to Emily Brontë’s and Jean Rhys’ work, the text also transtextually remembers through referencing various songs that were popular in 1970s Britain. In part six, entitled “Childhood” (Lost Child 137– 192), the reader revisits the narrative from Ben’s perspective as well as progresses further in time until after Monica’s death, concluding with Ben’s departure to university. We follow Ben’s perspective chronologically and in every subchapter are introduced to another song which is in some way related to Ben’s life. The first subchapter, for instance, is preceded by the reference “‘Leading on a Lamp Post’ – George Formby” (137). Other referenced songs include “‘All the Young Dudes’ – Mott the Hopple” (170) and “‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ – Queen” (185), the last chapter concluding with “‘Dancing Queen’ – Abba” (187). The musical

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references serve to situate Ben’s coming of age within a specific context: the 1970s in Britain, and they introduce the idea of rebellion, awakening and alternative ways of belonging that are often associated with British popsongs of that time (Mullen 2017: 1).¹⁰ During that time in Britain, music played a central role in providing a sense of belonging, as David Bowie explained in 1972: In just about every country except England and America there are strangely strong family ties. Very few countries need rock’n’roll. It’s America and England that need it, and probably Germany. But France and Italy, no way. They don’t need it. Rock provides a family life that is missing in America and England. It provides a sense of community. (qtd. in Kallioniemi 2016: 143 – 144, my emphasis, Y.L.)

On a thematical level, this mirrors the development of the novel: Despite Monica’s and Tommy’s deaths, Ben seems to shape up well – contrary to society’s expectations – and music plays a huge role in his finding a way to feel he belongs. At the end of “Childhood”, he visits the moors and “for the first time in ages […] began to feel close to [his] brother” (Lost Child 189), indicating a possibility for him to find some form of closure in the future. The next chapter focalised by Ronald Johnson then shows Ben having found his place in society. He is accepted into his girlfriend’s family (195),¹¹ he is about to graduate and is planning a trip abroad (206). He does not need his grandfather’s attempts to build a relationship with him – a man whom he has nothing to say to (208). Clearly, Ben choses his affiliative relations over his filiative relations, once more putting into focus the myth of filiation which is latently present throughout the novel. While the text strives to foster a joined solidarity for different characters of literature based on a common – though each time singular – experience of marginalisation, the novel simultaneously also remembers the textual future. While Ben seems to finally have found his way out of the margins of society, the reader knows that the lightheartedness of songs such as “My Boy Lollipop” (141) and “Dancing Queen” (187) will soon be over in the narrative future. Ben’s part, which closely follows the pattern of a coming-of-age narrative, ends in the year 1976, and the following chapter, describing Ronald Johnson’s visit of Ben when he is in his third year at university in 1979, concludes the Wilson part of the narrative. I claim that the act of remembering the 1970s through musical references is

 As Mullen puts it: “The Seventies saw a continuous rise in the amount of music in most people’s lives, with the generalization of all-music radio, and increasing cultural freedom and spending power among teenagers” (2017: 11).  In passing, the novel brings in Ireland again: Mandy’s “older brother was away in the army in Northern Ireland, and her father reminded him [Ben] that while Michael was fighting the good fight, they had plenty of room in the house” (Lost Child 195).

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a strategy to keep the reader aware of the novel’s time frame. As the British sociomusicologist Simon Frith also claims, it is one vital function of music to “organize our sense of time” (2004: 40). Music helps to ground us in the present moment, but it also has a strong mnemonic function, since “music in itself provides our most vivid experience of time passing” (40). This focus on time allows the chapter to also provide a latent outlook into the future, the Wilson narrative ending precisely in 1979 not being a coincidence. The year that the Wilson narrative ends is also the year that starts Margaret Thatcher’s term of office as Britain’s prime minister. This knowledge makes Ben’s coming-of-age narrative appear in a different light, adding a gloomy foreshadowing. While Monica Johnson’s narrative centres on the unpredictability of life’s ways and turns and puts focus on a woman who has difficulties to cope and find her rightful place in society, ultimately having to abandon her child and committing suicide, the transtextualisation of Ben’s chapter makes sure that the reader also remembers what came after this period in Britain’s history. As Stuart Hall explains, with Thatcherite populism, ‘Being British’ became once again identified with the restoration of competition and profitability; with tight money and sound finance – the national economy projected on the model of the household budget. The essence of the British people was identified with self-reliance and personal responsibility, as against the image of the over-taxed individual, enervated by welfare-state ‘coddling.’ (1988: 56)

Latently foreshadowing Thatcherism¹² on the textual level and thus for the reader latently remembering Thatcherism – a time of social conservatism, in which “the image of Britain as a fragmenting society, not recognizing its diversity, was heightened […] making visible racial divisions, encouraging the rise of separatism in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland […] and increasing the North-South divide by the aggressive confrontation of the miners’ strike” (Kallioniemi 2016: 125) – widens the text’s transtextualisation even further. It might make it interact with other works such as Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (1987), which explicitly thematises the metaphorical loss of childhood due to Thatcherist policies and reflects on academics (future Bens) who cannot find jobs due to Thatcher’s policy of austerity. According to Dominic Dean, the trope of the missing child which gives Phil-

 Thatcherism is a term used to describe the effects of the politics of Britain’s former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. As Eric Evans puts it, Marxists see Thatcherism as “a malign campaign to further the interests of the capitalist rich and powerful, consolidating and then extending forms of political and cultural domination over the under-privileged” (2013: 3). More neutrally, one could say that “‘Thatcherism’ refers to the programme combining free-market economics and social conservatism pursued by Margaret Thatcher from 1979 to 1990” (Dean 2017: 233).

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lips’ novel its title is a prominent trope of British novels of the 1980s and “the persistence of the disappearing – abducted, exiled, or killed – child in literary representations of Thatcherism queries whether Thatcher’s children have any future at all” (2017: 232). In this sense, the novel’s memory politics also draws attention to a historical circularity: As the reader remembers suffering throughout time and into the as yet untold future (for the narrative), they might come to question what it is that these different times share and that makes them work through similar forms of marginalisation despite their different historical contexts. Ultimately, what the intermedial references to music together with the general centrality of the orphan figure highlight is a continuity of social difference and stigmatisation which, as the reader knows, will intensify again with Thatcherism. In this sense, The Lost Child “work[s] toward cultural and historical connections” (Ledent and O’Callaghan 2017: 235) that blur identity categories such as race or nationality. The established universality of the metaphorical orphan figure challenges the concept of filiation and shows its historic fragility. When Laura Peters, in relation to the orphan figure in Victorian England, claims that “[t]he family and all it came to represent – legitimacy, race and national belonging – was in crisis: it was at best an unsustainable ideal. In order to reaffirm itself the family needed a scapegoat. It found one in the orphan figure” (2000: 1), the novel shows this idea of filiation to be not only a prominent trope of Victorian England but a myth with diachronic validity. The novel’s memory politics through latent transtextualisation thus opens up a wider dialogue about belonging, one that does not put race or gender centre stage but which sees them as always already entangled with class. In a chapter called “Sampling, Collating, and Counting” in her latest book Born Translated (2015), Rebecca Walkowitz claims with regard to Phillips’ novels: Creating anthologies of limited belonging, Phillips tests the distinction between container and object. His books may seem like objects, but they are full of containers: comparative frameworks that impose new classifications and ask us to question what we know about the location of literature. Instead of suggesting that books by new arrivals simply expand literary histories based on the nation, Phillips suggests that these works can help us imagine new literary histories, ones whose scale includes the town, the region, and the housing development. (Walkowitz 2015: 136)

The novel at hand, The Lost Child, uses comparative frameworks to show that literature’s memory politics is always plural and never unidirectional. Although Phillips is often read primarily through his diasporic affiliations, this novel is decidedly centred in the region and makes class central, consciously making race only a latent parameter in the story. By focussing on different shapes of the orphan figure, the novel remembers different ways in which filiation was thought to work – on the level of the characters and idealised ideas of the family and the nation on the

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one hand and on a meta-level as filiation to the canon on the other hand – only to discredit both and show that belonging should not be solely a question of filiative heritage. At the same time, through its latent generation of circularity, the novel shows that there is still a long way to go.

9 Conclusion one might say that memory seems to be self-evident in its immediacy, yet, when asked what it is, memory appears to evade definition and requires much effort for its understanding (Nikulin 2015: 1)

In 2020, Sarah Gensburger and Sandrine Lefranc published a volume with the enticing title Beyond Memory: Can We Really Learn from the Past? in the memory studies series by Palgrave Macmillan. In their study, the two social scientists ask the question “[w]hy should memory be promoted and transmitted at school, through museums, on television, through monuments, commemoratives ceremonies, ‘memory’ trials, or even during truth commissions?” and instantly answer it with: “So that members of the public know the facts, understand the issues of the present, and adapt their behavior accordingly, now and in the future” (2020: 5). They then, however, quickly go on to challenge the assumption that acts of remembering the past are “liable to have an impact on social behavior, both now and in the future” (3). The question ‘why remember’ is often raised and the truism of ‘remember the past or else be condemned to repeat it’ is frequently offered as the standard answer. However, the real socio-cultural impact of acts of remembering the past is often questioned, especially with an eye to the wide-spread rise of populism that the world is currently witnessing. In an article in The Guardian, David Rieff even talks about “the cult of memory” and reflects upon the harm that cultural remembrance can do. “Today”, he explains, “most societies all but venerate the imperative to remember. We have been taught to believe that the remembering of the past and its corollary, the memorialising of collective historical memory, has become one of humanity’s highest moral obligations” (Rieff 2016: n.pag.). However, referring to the French right-wing politician Marine Le Pen delivering a speech at the Front National’s annual celebration of Joan of Arc in Paris as his example, Rieff makes the claim that memory work today is far more complex than this straightforward “imperative”.¹ Dmitri Nikulin is certainly right when he draws attention to the fact that while we think that memory is a straightforward concept, it actual See also Bond’s and Craps’ assessment that in “mainstream political culture”, “groups at both ends of the spectrum have used the rhetoric of trauma to frame their demans for recognition and rights” (2018: 3). “More recently”, they elaborate, “the narrative of victimhood has taken a surprising ideological turn, as alt-right groups in Europe and America have sought to emphasize their own sense of disenfranchisement” (2018: 3). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111067384-010

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ly “evade[s] definition and requires much effort for its understanding” (2015: 1). Literature, this study has shown, is a medium of memory that can put the complexity of memory centre stage. Indeed, cultural acts of remembrance are not as straightforward and goal-oriented as public memory policies with their endeavour to “express history, and rewrite it, by recasting the roles of the good and the bad, appeasing feelings of injustice, and reaffirming shared values and narratives” (Gensburger and Lefranc 2020: 15). Literature can act as a counter-force to such public understandings of the working of memory. Literary texts, after all, “fulfil a multitude of mnemonic functions, such as the imaginative creation of past lifeworlds, the transmission of images of history, the negotiation of competing memories, and the reflection about processes and problems of cultural memory” (Erll 2011: 144). While it might be problematic to reduce literature to a medium that fulfils clearly demarcated functions in memory culture, it is right to acknowledge that literature can intervene in memory culture on many different levels. Literature concerned with memory can go beyond dualistic understanding of victims and perpetrators, clear demarcations between past and present and the absent and the present. In the words of the literary scholar Ottmar Ette, [l]iterature is a playing field of multiple meanings, of polysemousness, insofar as it can, indeed must, employ a variety of different logics at the same time. Through its fundamental polysemy unfold polylogical structures and constructions oriented not toward securing stable ground, in the sense of a single, fixed location, but toward identifying the movements of comprehension in all their permutations. Is not this ability more valuable for us today, in our present world of contradictory socio-globalization, than it has been for any of the generations that have preceded us? (Ette 2016: xxii)

While Ette’s concept of travelling literature needs to be read critically with regard to its neglect to acknowledge the unevenness of the world literary market, its premise of literature as a polysemous medium is still fruitful for a discussion of the socio-cultural relevance of literature. This study has taken as its objective to expand the intersection between memory and literature and has paid special attention to novels that refuse to “secure stable ground”, as Ette puts it. Memory, as the renowned memory scholar Ann Rigney puts it, is constantly “in the works” (2010: 345). Literature whose appeal to remember cannot be pinned down to or framed within common discourses related to the nation, specific identity politics or even exclusively the human, this study has shown, can make room for memories being “in the works”, ambiguously inconsistent and open to potentially endless interpretation. In the twenty-first century, frameworks for cultural acts of remembering have significantly changed: It is no longer predominantly the framework of the nation, the family or the religious group that influences

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the premediation², that is, the “process by which images and narratives recalled from representations circulating in media culture turn into powerful schemata and preform imagination, experience, memory, storytelling, and action” (Erll 2019: 229), of memory. Rather, memories have been proven to be ever more perceived in transcultural and transnational frameworks, at the intersection of different remembering groups (see chapter 2.2). Concomitantly, modes of memory need to be adapted to make room for these unruly forms of collective remembrance, and conventional models of memory and literature must be rethought and extended. Analysing latency as a mode of memory in contemporary literature has been shown to be a step towards building on and thinking ahead established understandings of both memory and literature. The preceding literary analyses convey a comprehensive insight into the broad range of latency as a literary mode of memory and the intersections of memory with ecological, historical and socio-policitial concerns that latency as a mode of memory allows for. The intervention of this study at the intersection of literary studies and memory studies is mainly based on a rethinking of what is remembered in literature and how. Theories of eventfulness have formed the basis to rethink the connection between memory and literature and the mutual interaction of socio-political aspects of remembering and the potential of literary forms. Latency as a mode of memory, this study has shown, opens up a space in literature to challenge the ‘event-led’ tradition of acts of remembering and instead remember non-events as, for instance, forms of slow or structural violence. Literary events, that is, passages of the text characterised by “the undefined feeling of an eventness that does not have any literal expression or telos” (Rowner 2015: 2), alert the reader to latent trajectories in the text and thus replace conventional understandings of the ‘event’ in literature, transposing it from being simply textually represented to the level of being enacted by both the text and the reader. J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus and Anna Burns’ Milkman use a deliberate non-disclosure of the central event of the narrative – the reason why the protagonists had to leave their home country and be washed clean of their memories in The Childhood of Jesus and the reason for and context of the bombings and killings in Milkman – in order to situate their memory policy on a transcultural level. Both novels defy the event as formative narratological category as they almost feature no events in the classical sense and instead are dominated by digressions. Similarly, Teju Cole’s Open City, whose plot spans one year in the life of the protagonist without revealing meaningful events or triggering character development, uses a form of

 See Erll 2019 and Richard Grusin’s Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 for a detailed discussion of the idea of ‘premediation’.

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rhythm that works through dissonances that disturb the reading process to connect history with the everyday. Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child challenges the priorities of the ‘event-led’ narrative and instead makes the text’s juxtapositional transtextuality its main focus. While there are events in the traditional sense in Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, it still negotiates the concept of the event by employing a form of non-evental multiperspectivity which is a form of multiperspectivity that does not focus on one single event. Yvonne Owuor’s Dust remembers colonial violence alongside violence done to the planet, thus forging connections between event-centred acts of memory, such as remembering specific uprisings against colonialism and acts of memory that defy the category of the event because neither their causes nor their effects can be captured by this category. By refusing its readers to activate typical mental models of the narratological categories place, character and action, the novel subverts their traditional human focus. It is hard to say what either of the novels discussed in this study are about; i. e. Dust is not about Kenya’s colonial past, Milkman is not about the Irish Troubles, Let the Great World Spin is not about 9/11. Rather, the novels discussed in this study make it their business to place the literary event at their centre: the joined event created by the text and its reader, the moments in which the narrative challenges the reader to depart from learned ways of reading and thus opens itself up to latent memories. Second, in order to situate the intervention that fiction that remembers through latency offers within the socio-cultural discourses of cultural memory, this study has mapped the development of memory studies from identitarian agendas in the early days of memory studies to today’s transnational and transcultural ramifications. Mapping this development has formed the text-external basis for understanding not only the possibility of bringing together six novels from entirely different cultural backgrounds but is also crucial for understanding text-internal instances of transnational remembering. While it is not the only affordance that latency as a mode of memory offers, there is a strong connection between a multidirectional understanding of memory and latency as a mode of memory. The Childhood of Jesus does not thematise a specific memory and cannot be connected to one specific historical context directly (though it can be read within the context of South Africa, Southern Europe, South America, Australia and more generally colonialism). Rather, it opens up a meta-discussion about what memory actually means in socio-cultural terms. It uses its passages of digression to reflect upon the possibility of transcultural memories, ultimately criticising the traditional cosmopolitan model of memory. By framing memories as embodied, the text stresses that memories come from specific places and cultures from where they then can travel and become “glocal memories” (Neumann 2020a) that are to be situated between the global and the local. While not stressing embodiment, Milkman still em-

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ploys a similar understanding of memories as simultaneously local and global. Through its no-naming policy, the story of Milkman resonates beyond its Irish context while the use of Hiberno-English (though scarce) simultaneously situates the story within the local context. In contrast, The Lost Child is explicitly situated in 1970s Britain, focussing on the Yorkshire moors. However, through its use of a frame narrative as well as the orphan figure as a challenge to the concept of filiation, the novel engages in a memory politics that can travel into different contexts. Teju Cole’s Open City also zooms in on specific locations – namely the streets of Brussels and New York – to show how their histories are entangled and also connected to structural forms of violence and conflict, such as European histories of colonial exploitation as well as current day xenophobia, the transatlantic slave trade as well as the structural violence of immigration procedures, the Second World War as well as the Ruandan genocide and the internment of Japanese Americans – forms of event as well as non-event-based violence that are made to resonate with each other. Similar to Open City, Let the Great World Spin is set in New York. The novel, however, brings together characters so different from one another that the novel’s non-evental multiperspectivity fosters a remembrance of forms of slow and structural violence that are brought to the fore through the alternating characters’ perspectives. The novel invites comparisons between the Magdalene laundries of Ireland and the everyday violence that prostitutes in New York, one of the wealthiest cities of the world, have to endure and juxtaposes contemporary forms of economic injustice and social exclusion to the legacy of slavery in the American South, using its memory policy to negotiate different forms of grievability. In contrast to these novels which juxtapose different localities either directly or indirectly, Yvonne Owuor’s Dust is almost exclusively located in the Northern Kenyan drylands. However, while the novel certainly evokes specific extra-literary events, it focuses on highlighting structures of violence rather than isolated events. These structures of violence are not only violence done to people but more poignantly to the environment. It is in its focus on human and nonhuman entanglements that the novel unfolds its transcultural memory work. The destruction of the environment, this novel makes clear, is always to be firstly captured in its localness. However, in a second step, structures of violence done to the planet clearly transgress national, cultural and geographical boundaries and must therefore also be remembered on a translocal level. In each of the novels discussed in this study different textual strategies – beside the subversion of the classical narratological category of the event – are at work which draw the reader’s attention to the realm of the latent. The analyses, however, have shown that the novels also share some textual strategies. In The Childhood of Jesus, for instance, the main marker for latency is digression, a literary device that can also be found in Milkman, Open City and The Lost Child. An-

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other feature is the highlighted non-disclosure of character depth, a narratological choice that can also be found in The Childhood of Jesus, The Lost Child and Open City. The literary semantisation of space also plays a decisive role in the configuration of latency as a mode of memory. While Open City and Let the Great World Spin use space descriptions to slow the narrative down and focus the reader’s attention on the palimpsestic qualities of the spaces described, Milkman explores the relation of its female narrator-protagonist to the space she inhabits and uses space descriptions to criticise and highlight the limitedness of cosmopolitan ideals. All three novels in their own right negotiate the trope of the urban novel in order to inscribe latency as a mode of memory into their poetics. Creating an analogy between the city as a text and the novel as a text, the novels negotiate practices of seeing and reading alongside one another, thereby inviting comparisons between reading practices and other socio-cultural ways of meaning-making. Dust on the other hand uses space descriptions to evoke the colonial discourse of negation and thereby remembers colonial discourses on a formal level. Another overlapping that the analyses have brought to the fore is that of latency as a mode of memory and the text’s refusal to meet readerly expectations. The Childhood of Jesus starts as a narrative promising adventure and development through its fast beginning only to quickly merge into a non-eventful slow poetics. Open City might raise expectations of character development only to finally present the reader with a narrator-protagonist who seems unable to forge meaningful connections with other people or react empathetically to the stories of others.³ The Lost Child, similarly, refuses its main protagonist psychological depth and plays with the generic conventions of the Yorkshire Noir. Let the Great World Spin through its focus on the tightrope walk between the Twin towers might invite readers to read it as post 9/11 fiction but ultimately never directly engages with the events of 9/11. Milkman and Dust both play with the generic conventions of war novels. This practice of raising readerly expectations only to then disappoint them leads to a questioning of pre-formed schemata to interpret the past in literature, motivating readers not only to reflect on what is remembered of the past but also how literature as a medium of memory operates in negotiating possible mnemonic premediations. This means that the reader is motivated by the novels’ latent memory politics to question how they remember and how society influences processes of remembrance.

 I am mentioning this to underline in which way Open City disappoints readerly expectations. For a detailed discussion on the narrator-protagonist’s inability to meaningfully connect with the people he encounters see Vermeulen’s analysis of the novel in Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form.

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While latency as a mode of memory has many benefits to re-think how and what literature can remember, there are also limitations to this mode of memory that demand further attention. Focussing on latent connections between different memories and their specific socio-cultural embeddings might risk blurring their singularities for the sake of comparison. Reading for latent modes of memory is a form of reading which looks for entanglements that the text invites through its latent memories, which might cause the reader to neglect mnemonic historical specificities. Reading with an eye to latent modes of memory should thus incorporate a double gaze: Recognising the multidirectionality of latent memories while at the same time analysing the text in its historical embeddedness. The concept of latency as a mode of memory should not be equated with the notion of a cosmopolitan or global memory. While Levy and Sznaider claim that globalisation impacts national memories to a degree that “different national memories are subjected to a common patterning” (2002: 89) that coalesces around “the memory of a shared past” (103)⁴ and Stepnisky argues that “global memory cuts across religious, national, and ethnic boundaries” (2005: 1384), encouraging people to “think of and remember themselves as members of the civilization of humanity” (1385), this study does not want to declare void specific cultural contexts.⁵ The novels discussed in this study share certain thematic and formal concerns that are inevitably conditioned by their shared connection to colonialism and the aftereffects of Empire (see introduction). However, while latency as a mode of memory might occur more probably within contexts where memory is contested, suppressed or negotiated, the memories that are negotiated within the literary works must of course be analysed with an eye to their cultural specificities. Despite our living in a global risk society in which we as a species seem to be unitedly exposed to the threat of looming ecological collapse, another financial crash not least due to the

 While I agree with Levy’s and Sznaider’s claim that “the sovereignty of states remains intact, their autonomy to determine the scope of solidarities in purely national terms is diminished. New transnational solidarities have the potential to emerge”, I find conclusions such as “[t]he decontextualized memory of the Holocaust facilitates this. In its ‘universalized’ and ‘Americanized’ form, it provides Europeans with a new sense of ‘common memory’” (2002: 100) problematic and too limited.  In fact, the concluding sentences of Stepnisky’s article show perfectly what is at stake here: “As we argue about which memories are memories of the world, we enrich the tools that can be used to engage intercultural conflict and understanding. Regarded as such, the articulation of global memory is not merely an expression of globality but also an opportunity to better understand and develop the communicative and expressive tools required for negotiating difference in the global age” (Stepnisky 2005: 1399). Who, one is inclined to ask, is this ‘we’ that decides upon which memories are memories of the world and what are the characteristics that determine this choice?

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Covid-19 crisis and various political crises in face of world-wide rising right-wing populism, it is vital to recognise different levels of precarity and let this be reflected in the way we remember the past. Latency as a category for literary analysis should thus not be understood as an endeavour to simply replace national conceptions of memory with cosmopolitan principles or support an artificial antagonism between the two in which cosmopolitan memory functions as a remedy for the evils of nationalism. Analysing latency as a mode of memory that specifically works towards multidirectional understandings of memory, as this study has done, benefits the study of cultural memory. However, in order to start to map out different forms of latency as a mode of memory as well as different textual strategies used to evoke this form of literary memory work, future research might endorse a localised focus on specific contexts instead of a comparative reading. Introducing latency as a mode of memory in a comparative framework, this study has aimed to provide a broad overview over different forms that latency as a mode of memory can take to different effects, be it to raise awareness for slow and structural forms of violence, reflect upon memory on a meta-level or create the ground for intersectional memory work. However, investigations into how latency as a mode of memory works, for instance, in Irish literature after the Peace Process or literature from the Global South in the context of the climate crisis might highlight further entanglements between literary forms and specific historic contexts that this study has not considered. In the very recently published study Mnemonic Solidarity: Global Interventions (2021), Jie-Hyun Lim and Eve Rosenhaft claim that the global South tends to create its own mnemoscape through the dynamics of comparison, cross-referencing, juxtaposition to and repulsion from the Holocaust in the global North. Many memory activists in the global South have adopted these practices as a deliberate tactic for marking out their own position in the global memory formation. (Lim and Rosenhaft 2021: 4)

Along the same lines, examining the cases of Ethiopia and South Africa, Lauren van der Rede and Aidan Erasmus characterise “Africa as a ‘disobedient object’ of memory studies, posing a series of radical challenges to the terms and methods of the field. At the empirical level, they point out how these cases inflect our Europe-centered models of trauma and memory” (qtd. in Lim and Rosenhaft 2021: 9). While it is questionable to position Africa as a continent as a whole as a ‘disobedient subject’ to westernised memory studies, it is certainly fruitful to zoom in on specific cultural contexts from the Global South when investigating a new mode of memory. Taking a look at specific cultural contexts might help to further nuance the analysis of latency as a mode of memory.

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Another point of criticism might be that reading for latency might make readers feel that they need to act as detectives that try to uncover hidden depths of literary works. As Martin Paul Eve puts it, “the paradigm of the reader as literary detective, encouraged to go ‘against the grain’ or ‘beneath the surface’ in the search of an underlying ideological truth, plundering the depths of the text to show what the work cannot itself know, can feel exhausted or even routinely paranoid” (Eve 2019: 330). Eve’s assessment is based on thoughts articulated in Rita Felski’s 2015 study The Limits of Critique in which she investigates the advantages but also the pitfalls of reading literature with the help of critical theory. “What intellectual and imaginative alternatives”, she asks, “does it overshadow, obscure, or overrule? And what are the costs of such ubiquitous criticality?” (2015: 5). What Felski criticises is not critique as such and in its entirety, but the “intellectual shortcuts and rabbit-out-of-a-hat analogies that can sustain the logics of critique” (11). Often, Felski laments, a text “is deciphered as a symptom, mirror, index, or antithesis of some larger social structure – as if there were an essential system of correspondences knotting a text into an overarching canopy of domination, akin to those medieval cosmologies in which everything is connected to everything else” (11). “Where”, Felski asks, “is the evidence for causal connections?” (11). As an alternative, she proposes “postcritical reading” (12). “Rather than looking behind the text – for its hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious motives”, she suggests “we might place ourselves in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible” (12). Reading literature with a focus on latency as a mode of memory might sound like encouraging readers to, as Eve puts it, “act as detectives that try to uncover hidden depths of literary works” (2019: 330), especially since Fredric Jameson, the advocate for “symptomatic reading” (Best and Marcus 2009: 1), encourages readers to literally “seek a latent meaning behind a manifest one” (2009: 60, my emphasis, Y.L.). However, this study has shown that reading for latency is a critical tool that readers can bring to a text without it being in any way considered the only way of reading the work or grasping it in its entirety. Reading for latency is a form of reading that a text can incite when the reader knows where to look without ever being the text’s defining feature or the hidden truth that the reader must uncover. Actually, what this study has underlined is that latency as a mode of memory frees the reader from said ‘detective work’. Rather, literary works which remember through latency put centre stage literature’s various potentialities that may or may not be actualised in the reader. Moreover, this study has paid great attention to the form of the individual literary works, thus going against a firm separation of the so-called ‘surface’ of the text on the one hand and underlying, deep structures on the other hand. Rather, this study – though looking for latent modes of memory – has undermined what Best and Marcus define as typical of

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“symptomatic reading”, that is, the conflation of “present/absent, manifest/latent, and surface/depth” (2009: 3 – 4). Instead of understanding readers as “detectives who look past the surface in order to root out what is underneath” (18), this study understands the reader as somebody who can be lured to see the literary work as a complex entanglement of latent meanings and affective literary forms, paying special attention to how the so-called surface is the place where the literary work unfolds its depth. This study has focussed on six Anglophone novels and their potential to evoke latency as a mode of memory. It is probable that Anglophone literature is conducive to latent memories due to its connection to cultures of colonialism and numerous instances of unaddressed past violences. However, colonialism is not only part of Anglophone cultures and, thus, latency as a mode of memory might also be found in Francophone and Hispanic literature. Moreover, literature from nations that underwent partition, such as Ireland, Israel, Palestine or India and Pakistan might also be prone to latent mode of memories in their literature. Generally, it is an educated suspicion that literature that can be situated within the context of civil wars, especially those that have not yet been adequately integrated into a country’s or a global mnemonic landscape, is prone to latent forms of remembering. While all these examples are linked to specific events – colonial conquests, partition, civil wars – their inadequate integration into national (which translates to institutionally supported and advanced) or globally acknowledged memories can translate into long-term forms of suffering, such as, for instance, forms of political repression both on the micro and the macro level and thus become detached from these specific events. Another future focus for the study of latency as a mode of memory should be the remembrance of the so-called Anthropocene and the climate crisis. As the chapter on Yvonne Owuor’s Dust has already introduced, the slow violence caused to the planet and vulnerable peoples especially in the Global South demands forms of memory detached from event-centred and exclusively human-centred concepts of memory. In his recent study on Literature and the Anthropocene (2020), Pieter Vermeulen rightly points out that “the present is marked by the persistence of histories of domination, of engrained inequalities, and of legacies of environmental injustice” (2020: 110). One way to acknowledge these engrained inequalities and centuries-old legacies of environmental injustice is to remember them as they need to be remembered: Latently entangled with both human and nonhuman histories and non-eventful forms of violence and exploitation. In her recent study The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature (2020), Jennifer Wenzel puts it this way:

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The urgent task, then, is not to look to literature as a ‘solution’ but to understand its role in calculating what counts as ‘nature,’ ‘environment,’ ‘crisis,’ or even ‘human’: the social dynamics and cultural logics that not only cause crises but also inflect how crises are experienced and recognized as such, by whom. (Wenzel 2020: 17)

The chapter on Dust has probed interconnections between the field of memory studies and the neighbouring fields of posthumanism, new materialism and actor-network theory. It has shown the role latency as a mode of memory can play in bridging the gap between representation and materiality, contributing to the question of what we remember as a crisis and which life as grievable. The vast field of so-called Anthropocene fiction invites further studies that concentrate on latency as a mode of memory entangled with negotiations of human-nonhuman relations. The novels discussed in this study have all been published between 2009 and 2018. Future work in the field of latency as a mode of memory in literature could concentrate on works published prior to 1989, a year which marked the beginning of changing memory politics worldwide and arguably also a different form of literary aesthetic with a “global fictional form” and a “worldoriented sensibility” (see Ganguly 2016: 2; 1– 16). According to Debjani Ganguly, the autumn of 1989 marked the beginning of a “new kind of novel as a global literary form” (1) as a result of “our ‘compulsion’ to be world-oriented in the aftermath of the cold war and the geopolitics of violence that we have been witness to” (1) and “the radical spatiotemporal shifts generated by the information age” that “produce the global novel that helps imagine the new chronotope ‘world’” (2).⁶ Latency as a mode of memory be-

 Ganguly is aware that it is not unproblematic to claim one year as the catalyst for aesthetic change in novel writing. She explains: “I do mean it [the phase around 1989, YL] to signal a significant shift in the evolution of the novel. I evoke the period around 1989 as a critical threshold of the ‘contemporary’ that contains within its intensified temporality developments from the 196os to the present. These include an accelerated growth in information and communication technologies, globalization of a human rights culture, the rise of new forms of warfare and insurgencies, and their increasing visibility in new media forms, culminating in the spectacle of 9/ 11. In conceiving of the period around 1989 in this manner, I draw on the force of recent theorizations of the contemporary not as an epochal term in the sense of being fixated on ideas of the ‘new’ and the ‘revolutionary’ like the term modernity, but rather as a structure of temporality that illuminates the present through a remediation of the recent past and that conceives of modernity itself as already becoming historical” (Ganguly 2016: 5 – 6). While there may certainly be limitations to conceiving the “contemporary world novel” (Ganguly 2016: 1) with such strong focus on “the evolution of capitalist lifeworlds” (Ganguly 2016: 3) and the consequences of these lifeworlds, as well as Ganguly’s own warning of “the dangers of an Anglo-globalism flattening out and remaking the world in its own image” (Ganguly 2016: 32), Ganguly’s arguments definitely hold for the analyses conducted in this study.

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fore this date might be different than the forms of latency that I have discussed in this study. Analysing literary works written prior to 1989 might not only offer insights regarding the changed aesthetics and cosmopolitan endeavours with which novels have been written since then but also with regard to the ways societies remembered at that time. In his insightful essay “Postcolonial Reflections on the Mnemonic Confluence of the Holocaust, Stalinist Crimes, and Colonialism” (2021), the Korean historian Jie-Hyun Lim understands 1990 as an important date in relation to collective cultural memory, as “official memories frozen by the Cold War ideology began to thaw” (2021: 18) after 1990. Many cultures around the world were affected by this ‘freezing’ of memories: This thaw released suppressed memories all over the world. In the former Soviet bloc, the official myths of anti-fascist struggle lost their power as screen memories, and vernacular remembrance of the Stalinist terror erupted into the public sphere. At the same time, there emerged previously unspoken memories of Nazi collaboration in Eastern Europe, triggering an East European version of the Historikerstreit which had convulsed West Germany in the decade before the Wall came down. In the tri-continent of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the fall of communism also signaled the release of memories of the atrocities committed by Western colonialisms. Memories of colonial genocide and anti-communist political atrocities could no longer be marginalized, because the propaganda imperative to defend Western civilization against Soviet barbarism lost its power. The colonial scars sutured by the worldwide anti-communist alliance became porous, and it became possible to articulate the hurts of colonial occupation and economic imperialism as such before a global public. (Lim 2021: 18)

Lim’s evaluation that many memories of atrocities will have been ‘frozen’ due to the felt need to “defend Western civilization against Soviet barbarism” as he puts it, might also translate into the way literature mediated them. The fact that these memories were purposefully and politically suppressed before makes it highly likely that latency as a mode of memory will be present in literary works from that era. Literary forms are complex, innovative and constantly developing. While this study has focussed on the affordances of the novel as a form, other literary forms offer different ways to address latent pasts. As the sociologist Robin Wagner-Pacifici puts it in an essay on reconceptualising memory as event, “[t]he work of genre is critical. Genres such as narrative, drama, poetry, and pictorial images differentially contain and construe time, space and causality” (2016: 25). Forms work through “an arrangement of elements, an ordering, patterning, or shaping” (Levine 2015: 3) which differs greatly between different literary forms. After all, “[l]iterature is not made of the material world it describes or invokes but of language, which lays claim to its own forms – syntactical, narrative, rhythmic, rhetorical – and its own materiality – the spoken word, the printed page” (Levine 2015: 10).

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Conclusively, latent memories and the patterning of time and space that this mode of memory enables will find different manifestations in drama or poetry than in the novel. Future research on latency as a mode of memory should therefore branch out to other literary forms and take into account their specificities. Poetry, for instance, has a different relationship to the so-called blank space – the literal blank space on the page – than the novel. The American poet and translator Heather McHugh puts it like this in her essay collection Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (1993): “All poetry is fragment: it is shaped by its breakages, at every turn. It is the very art of turnings, toward the white frame of the page, toward the unsung, toward the vacancy made visible, that wordlessness in which our words are couched” (75). Especially prose poetry with its tendency to open-endedness both in form and content might be interesting with regard to latency as a mode of memory. In their recently published study Prose Poetry: An Introduction (2020), Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton explain: prose poetry’s capacity to articulate poetic ideas […] are conspicuously different from contemporary lineated lyric poetry – now usually defined as short, sometimes musical forms of poetry that appear to address personal emotions and feelings, often using the first-person voice. However, while poetry generally continues to be recognized as a literary genre highly suited to expressing intense emotion, grappling with the ineffable and the intimate, and while lineated lyric poetry is widely admired for its rhythms and musicality, the main scholarship written about English-language prose poetry to date defines the form as problematic, paradoxical, ambiguous, unresolved, or contradictory. (Hetherington and Atherton 2020: 3)

In an attempt to define a literary form which is hard to capture, Hetherington and Atherton formulate a cautious definition: Prose poems “are never entirely driven by narrative and are always trying to point to something about their language or their subject that sits outside of any narrative gestures they make (and frequently outside of the work itself )” (2020: 14). Consequently, they claim, “prose poems may be understood as fragments – they never give the whole story and resist closure” (14). Moreover, “[p]rose poems frequently suggest that powerful unseen and unconscious forces are at work in human experience, as well as in language”, and “when prose poems work analogically, their compressed texts speak sideways, or point laterally to additional understandings, implicitly indicating issues and topics other than those they directly address” (15). Especially this last quality makes prose poetry interesting with regard to latency as a mode of memory. In comparison to novels, poems might make latency more topical and point readers more directly to latent stowaways of the text while at the same time resisting even more from defining this latent stowaway. An extreme case is erasure poetry, which takes as its central concern the fact that something has been erased and is no longer manifest but latent and thus makes absence as a concept topical.

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In the following, I would like to demonstrate the potential of latency as a mode of memory in poetry by briefly addressing the poetry collection The MS of my Kin (2009) by Janet Holmes and Voyager by Srikanth Reddy (2011). Both The MS of my Kin and Voyager are examples of what is called ‘erasure poetry’. Erasure poetry is a “new form of reductive poetics” that concerns itself with “the deliberate removal (or covering over) of words on the page rather than their traditionally direct application thereto” (MacDonald 2009: n.pag.). What is special about erasure poetry in the context of this study is that it experiments with the conventions of the so-called ‘blank space’ and concomitant connotations of ‘silence’ as ‘absence’. The “imposition of blank space” over and through the original work, MacDonald explains, “should be read between and alongside the words that remain” (2009: n.pag.). In this, the poet, according to MacDonald, “intends this imposed silence not as absence, but rather as a definite beat and measure that must not be overlooked or underestimated” (2009: n.pag.).⁷ Acts of latent remembering in erasure poetry actively work against an understanding of silence as absence. Silences, absences and – quite literally – erasures are at the core of erasure poetry. Erasure in this case not only describes the practice with which the poem came into being but can simultaneously be understood in light of its socio-cultural implications. In his essay “Poetry under Erasure”, the American literary theorist Brian McHale draws a connection between erasure poetry, postmodernism and what he terms “post-Holocaust poetry” (2005: 280): “Written in the aftermath of the Holocaust and within its penumbra, and in the shadow of nuclear holocaust, postmodernist poetry of erasure seems to resonate with the greater historical erasure, that of the European Jews, and the threatened erasure of us all” (2005: 279). While this study distances itself from the particularly western understanding of trauma that privileges the Holocaust over non-European genocides and sees it as “a memory template for traumas everywhere” (Lim 2021: 16; Crownshaw 2017: 246),⁸ it is still noteworthy to take a closer look at the implica-

 Brian C. Cooney criticises MacDonald’s text for its broadness: “As it has been used in the past, the rubric ‘Erasure poetics’ is too vague. While serviceable as an umbrella term for a technique, it tends to elide essential differences among a number of the distinctive works to which it is applied. Indeed, Macdonald ends his essay by pointing to examples of recent erasure poems without any significant examination of the profound differences that mark them, from the selection of source material to the treatment of that material on the page” (2014: 17). Indeed, erasure poetry is a field of research that is undertheorised. Future research in the field should definitely zoom in on different forms of erasure poetry and concomitantly map out differences in their evocation of latency as a mode of memory.  I do agree that “the Holocaust has enabled the articulation of other histories of victimization” (Rothberg 2009: 6), but I do not want to continue the tradition of universalising Holocaust repre-

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tions of the concept of ‘erasure’ in its specific contexts. In his reading of postmodernist poetry as “post-Holocaust poetry” (2005: 280), McHale explains: “even apparently frivolous or playful gestures of erasure acquire extra seriousness from their historical situation” (2005: 280). Translating this thesis to the poetry briefly examined in the following, it becomes clear that the latent memories that these poems enable are not only reflected on the level of content but are also an intricate part of their composition and thus reflected on a metalevel. In contrast to palimpsestic strategies in novels, erasure poetry makes latent memories more striking focal points of the text. However, reading for latency in erasure poetry does not mean simply tracing the erased parts and making them manifest in an analysis. Mostly, the ‘original’ texts are clearly marked, as is the case with both The MS of my Kin and Voyager. What is latent in these poems are manifold connections throughout time that go beyond the clearly marked intertextual relationship. As Brian McHale puts it in his theorisation of erasure poetry: “When the semantic building-blocks of the poem fall under erasure, its world oscillates or flickers – between one state of affairs and another, even between being and non-being, something and nothing” (2005: 290). It is within this state of inbetweenness that the poems offer readers a multitude of different reading trajectories, one of which is to read for latent memories. In The MS of my Kin, Janet Holmes creates an image of war and conflict that works through overlayerings and erasure from the past. She approaches a wellknown body of work, namely Emily Dickinson’s poetry written at the beginning of the American Civil War (1861/1862), to reflect, among other things, on the current wars in the Middle East. At the end of her poetry collection, Holmes adds a ‘Notes Section’ in which she underlines this connection, clearly stating that [p]eople and events referenced in the poems, and occasional speakers of the poems, include those piloting aircraft on 9/11; U.S. President George W. Bush; Osama bin Laden; U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney; […] soldiers, terrorists, occupiers, insurgents, and combatants on both sides of both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraw […]. (Holmes 2009: 169)

The list goes on extensively. It is thus clear that Holmes’ poems are intended to be read with an eye to American history and contemporary politics. However, the indication of possible references is only given at the end of the collection, thus leaving it open which poem correlates with which historical figure or perspective. It might be already noted at this point that Holmes’ memory work in her collection is one of blurring conceptual boundaries. The voices that her poems conjure up besentations. For a detailed discussion of the Holocaust and its influence on memory studies globally, see chapter 2 of this study.

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long to both victims and perpetrators alike with no clear boundary drawn between them. The memory work that the collection thus does is one which from its very conception builds on latent entanglements that question clear-cut conceptualisation with which history is often approached. Within the collection, certain semantic fields pop up time and again. First of all, memory and the act of remembering are central [“Memorial” (Holmes 2009: 9), “Ghosts” (9), “Forget” (29, 109, 168), “remembrance” (33), “remember” (86, 108), “silence” (101), “Haunted” (118), “You’ve seen / it before” (128), “recollect / their / names” (139), “Memory / didn’t come” (166)]. As underlined in this study, latency as a mode of memory highlights the everyday aspect of memory instead of exclusively focussing on single events. An early poem in the collection reads: Give A Memorial – no Granite an Organ no word – breath what was done to me one cannot transport Ghosts in Cages (1861.5 (209 – 212), Holmes 2009: 9)

This poem can be read alongside the discussion of Teju Cole’s and Derek Walcott’s respective understandings of memory as fluid and immaterial, especially when connected to subalterity, which I discussed in the introduction of this study. The poem might remind the reader of Derek Walcott’s famous question “[w]here, in which stones of the Abbey, are incised our names?” (1990: 196). This poem similarly turns away from the traditional understanding of attributing value to a memory in form of a memorial and advocates a more fluid, flexible understanding of memory, one which remembers through “breath”, since certain memories cannot be contained in stone and would only result in “[g]hosts in cages” (Holmes 2009: 9). The way the poem is arranged on the page implicitly connects the words “Memorial”, “Granite” and “Cages” on the one hand and “Organ”, “breath” and “Ghosts” on the other. Its lack of direct reference – who is the “me” of the poem, who are

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the “Ghosts in Cages” – makes the poem resonate with different possible scenarios, both of the past and the future. Other semantic fields that run through the collection are the semantic fields of the nation [“Flag” (Holmes 2009: 1, 122, 165), “Country” (1), “Britain” (30), “America” (30), “nation” (119)], war [“Victory” (1, 4), “Glory” (52, 131), “Guns” (56), “Death” (65), “Bomb” (90), “Prison” (147), “Occupation” (153)], capitalism [“Company” (28, 86), “Owner” (88)] and religion [“Prayer” (1), “God” (4, 57), “Heaven” (58, 72, 96), “Paradise” (58), “Candle” (65), “Faith” (98, 164), “Eden” (101)]. They all support the connection that reviewers of the collection have drawn to the wars in the Middle East. However, other semantic fields mobilise the collection for other latent memories, as, for instance, the semantic field of colonisation and Empire [“Wilderness” (16), “Empire” (26, 99), “Dominions” (36, 124), “Civilization” (41), “the Camp” (66), “Kingdoms” (70), “we / occupy / another / One / not / meant / For / us / again” (110 – 111), “possession – / in the land –” (161)] and Enlightenment rhetoric. In the poem relating to Dickinson’s 1861.4 (198 – 209) poem, it reads: Transporting the fire burn the Centuries men fumbled

Till those two troubled the Desert With a fine invention Emergency more distinctly seen – the surge (Holmes 2009: 6 – 7)

The ideologically loaded term “invention” here brought into correlation with the word “surge” underlines what is at stake here, reminding readers that not all inventions fostered only progress but also the surge on and colonisation of what the poetic persona names “the Desert” but which might easily stand in for many different places in many different times – places that are allegedly deserted but in reality never are. Thus, a closer look at the collection evokes latent memories not only of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars but also of colonialism, the making

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of Empires and the expulsion of Native Americans. As this study has shown, latency as a mode of memory is a mode of memory that is particularly suited to highlight temporal overlayerings that blur the definitions of past, present and future and instead conceive of time as an overlayering and interlacing of different temporalities. The MS of my Kin demonstrates how latency as a mode of memory can operate in poetry. As the title already indicates, analysing the poetry collection with an eye to latent connections is also the first step towards redefining what is meant by “kin” and how a latent memory politics can redefine who we see as our kin. Srikanth Reddy’s 2011 poetry collection Voyager (2011) is equally politically loaded. It takes as its template the memoir In the Eye of the Storm (1985) by former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim. The collection by ways of using the memoir of a former Nazi who held a very important role in international politics despite his past while only explicitly engaging with this individual’s past in the last part of the collection establishes a frame of remembering the Holocaust in relation to many other atrocities and forms of slow and structural violence. The first part of the book is a reworking of Waldheim’s eighth’s chapter “The New Majority”. In this chapter, Waldheim describes his time in office as the Secretary General in the 1970s, a time in which, according to Waldheim, “world attention focused mainly on wars, conflicts and international crises and on how these were dealt with by the United Nations” (Reddy 2011: 111). He focuses on various conflicts resulting from “the deep-seated difference between North and South” (Waldheim 1985: 119) or, put differently, “industrialized nations” and “developing countries” (1985: 119) that the UN had to face during Waldheim’s time in office. Waldheim breaks the problem down to: “the industrialized countries were reluctant to accept blanket liability for the alleged evils of colonialism and imperialism” (1985: 113). In order to sketch the act of latent remembering that this poetry collection fulfils, I would like to briefly engage with Book One of the collection. Further studies in the area of latency as a mode of memory should definitely analyse the collection as a whole since the space I can dedicate to the collection in this conclusion cannot in any way be sufficient to do justice to the many historical entanglements that are latently present in this collection. While Waldheim’s chapter casually references the world as a spectator to world politics and the UN especially, Reddy’s poetry collection starts the first book with putting ‘the world’ centre stage – “The world is the world” (Reddy 2011: 3) – and ending the poem with “To believe in the world, a person has to quiet thinking. / The dead do not cease in the grave. / The world is water falling on a stone” (2011: 3). Already the first poem in the collection establishes a relational frame of thinking. The world, this poem underlines, is made up of a multitude of realities (“[t]he world is the world”), constantly in flow and part of a bigger whole

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(“[t]he world is water falling on a stone”). At the same time, the poem establishes a connection between these two realities: “The dead”. The dead seem to form a connecting piece between the micro perspective – perceiving the world in all its multitudes – and the macro perspective – perceiving the world as part of a stream of worlds that are ultimately absorbed by a stone. Positioning the dead who “do not cease in the grave” (Reddy 2011: 3) as a central connecting piece in the first poem sets the tone for reading the poems that follow and establishes memory as an organising principle. The collection, whose title alludes to the American robotic Interstellar probe Voyager, frequently also considers the position of an extra-terrestrial studying planet earth and humanity. In Book Two, the poetic persona wonders: Perhaps an observer far in outer space might study this information in days to come. He would have to weigh carefully in his heart the words of a man who by some quirk of fate had become a spokesman for humanity, who could give voice to all the nations and peoples of the world, and, so to speak, the conscience of mankind. (Reddy 2011: 20)

Rather than remembering Waldheim’s position as an SS officer, the poetry collection zooms out and envisions acts of future remembrance. It asks the question: How will humanity be remembered in the future? The answer, this poem underlines, will not be a catalogue of all the terrible events that shape world politics and history, but also the structural forms of violence that not only made Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi SS officer, a “spokesman for humanity”. As the poetic persona makes clear a few poems later, “I do not wish to judge here the person of Dr. Waldheim. The dead do not cease in the grave. The world is water falling on a stone” (Reddy 2011: 23). It is not the person and his deeds that the collection remembers but the structures that made this person’s career possible. What both Holmes’ and Reddy’s instances of erasure poetry indicate is that the narrative of a history can always be made to resonate in different contexts, thus at some level staying the same while at the same time always adding difference to the way we remember the past. Both collections underline that political events can be retold – and in this way be made meaningful – very differently several generations later in a way that departs from event-led forms of memory to ways of multidirectional remembering of structures and entanglements. What Holmes’ poetry achieves is to create a link between the American Civil War and its intricate interconnection with different – yet at their heart very similar – wars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well as with the founding myth of the United States of America of an untouched land and the act of colonisation. Reddy similarly removes specific contexts in great parts of the collection in order to shift focus from the individual to the systems that made the individual possible in order to broaden the

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perspective with which we look back on the past and foster different ways to remember it. I want to close this conclusion by coming back to the beginning. In one of the basic works of narratology, Wolf Schmid remarks that “[g]enres and movements are characterized by certain concepts of what is eventful” (2010: 15). This study has underlined that contemporary Anglophone literature negotiates the concept of the event in the context of acts of remembering. Turning Schmid’s assessment around, this would mean that an analysis of what is deemed and negotiated as eventful allows for conclusions about the nature of current movements, or – to put it differently – how we understand the present and our position within it. Latency as a mode of memory that turns away from the classical ‘event’ as a central pillar of meaning-making opens the way to understand the present as an open playing field that makes room for different, contrasting and ever new developing ways to interpret the past and its impact on the present. The novels discussed in this study have offered various approaches to the challenges that cultural memory studies face in this time of transnational, transcultural but still firmly hierarchised and institutionalised memory cultures. They have used various formal aesthetics to negotiate the interrelation of memories, eventfulness, grievability and visibility. In this, this study has demonstrated that literature as a medium that enables latency as a mode of memory should not be underestimated in its capacity to make us approach both the past and the present and negotiate concomitant questions of responsibility, implicatedness and futurity.

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Index 9/11

3, 6, 18, 25, 54, 58, 70, 104, 110, 116, 123 f., 131 f., 136, 138 – 140, 150 – 153, 155 – 158, 241 f., 244, 253

affect 10, 13, 16, 19, 27, 31 f., 65, 69, 71 – 73, 81 f., 114, 117, 138, 140, 163, 165, 169, 174, 184, 187, 192 – 194, 210, 212, 224, 241, 244 agency 13, 41, 43, 51, 57, 63, 69, 111 f., 131, 146 f., 149 f., 155, 160, 162 – 165, 173, 175 – 180, 182 – 184, 207, 219 Anglophone 14 – 17, 62, 73, 101, 248, 258 animism 165, 174, 179 f. Assmann, Aleida 46, 58, 70 Assmann, Jan 39, 41 atmosphere 10, 65, 71, 85, 100, 128, 151, 173, 186, 192 Attridge, Derek 8 f., 75 Barad, Karen 177, 180 – 182 Barthes, Roland 23, 105, 115 f., 191, 219 Black Atlantic 54, 213 Bond, Lucy 6, 12, 37, 41 f., 44, 52, 55, 57, 62, 70, 98, 123, 139, 239 broad present 148, 207 Burns, Anna 16, 19, 185 – 187, 192 f., 208 f., 211, 241 Butler, Judith 5, 7, 9, 11, 15, 48 f., 52, 62, 70, 141, 146 f., 191, 194 canon 2 f., 20, 217 – 220, 225, 229, 238 class 20, 42, 72, 88, 137, 141, 194, 198, 211, 214 – 218, 223, 227 f., 230, 232, 237 classic 20, 50, 67, 124, 194, 214, 216, 218, 221, 223, 231 Coetzee, J.M. 16 f., 25, 73 – 77, 79, 82, 84, 86, 186, 241 Cole, Teju 1 f., 16 – 18, 29, 103 f., 109, 119, 163, 241, 243, 254 colonialism 17, 45, 68, 99, 166 f., 179, 210, 242, 245, 248, 250, 255 f. comparative 15 f., 237, 246 contemporary 3, 6 f., 15 f., 18, 45, 52, 57, 59, 67, 69, 81, 101, 106, 110, 124, 132, 136, 139 f., https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111067384-012

148, 151, 185, 187 – 189, 195, 198 f., 203 – 206, 208 – 210, 213, 216, 219, 241, 243 f., 249, 251, 253, 258 cosmopolitan 47 f., 78, 101, 116 f., 122 f., 125 f., 130, 152, 195 – 197, 202 f., 208 – 211, 242, 244 – 246, 250 cosmopolitanism 19 f., 47, 119, 126, 187, 189, 195 – 200, 202, 204, 208 f., 211 – Critical cosmopolitanism 195, 197 – 199, 207 Craps, Stef 9, 37, 45 f., 49 – 52, 207, 233, 239 Crownshaw, Rick 41, 43 – 45, 48 – 51, 57, 252 deictic 204 – 207, 210 Deleuze, Gilles 26, 28 f., 32, 50 Derrida, Jacques 26 – 30, 50, 67 – 69, 72, 92 f., 171 – 174, 176 diaspora 3, 43, 49, 67, 213, 217, 226 diasporic 42 f., 213 f., 218, 237 digression 14, 17 f., 32, 74 – 77, 83 – 85, 117, 120, 194, 241 – 243 discourse 2, 4 – 11, 16, 18, 21, 24, 32 – 36, 39 – 41, 44 – 49, 54 – 63, 65 – 70, 72 f., 75, 77 f., 83, 85 – 87, 89 f., 98, 110, 112 f., 116, 120, 123, 127, 129, 131 f., 136, 138 f., 141, 147, 153 f., 156, 158 f., 161 f., 167 f., 176 – 178, 181, 183, 200, 205 f., 211 – 213, 219 – 221, 223 – 225, 240, 242, 244 displacement 43, 94, 98, 125 f., 150 Dust 17, 19, 155 – 157, 160 – 165, 168 – 184, 242 – 244, 248 f. emotion 19, 27, 32, 69 – 72, 81, 100, 163, 165, 251 empathy 45, 110, 163, 233 Empire 82, 170, 214, 218, 220, 227, 229, 231, 245, 255 f. environment 19, 38, 43, 85, 87, 94 f., 101, 103, 117, 161 f., 165, 173 – 178, 180 f., 184, 193, 201, 209, 211, 243, 249 erasure poetry 251 – 253, 257 Erll, Astrid 3 f., 7, 10, 12, 37 – 42, 44, 46, 51, 54 f., 60 f., 66, 129, 183, 240 f.

Index

event 2 – 4, 6 – 8, 14 f., 17 – 19, 21 – 39, 44, 47, 50 – 66, 68 – 70, 72 – 80, 82 f., 85, 87, 89, 92, 94, 98, 103 f., 109 – 111, 113, 116, 124, 128, 131 – 133, 135 – 139, 144, 151 – 156, 158 – 162, 164 f., 171 – 173, 186 f., 190, 192 – 194, 202, 205, 207, 211, 215, 217, 223 f., 230, 241 – 244, 248, 250, 253 f., 257 f. everyday 2, 9, 18 f., 24, 26, 33 – 36, 39, 50 f., 63, 65, 71 f., 79, 91, 95, 101, 104, 113 f., 120, 130, 132 f., 137, 140 – 142, 144, 156, 158 f., 164, 171, 176, 186 f., 190, 192 f., 197, 200, 208, 210 f., 242 f., 254 filiation 20, 213, 215, 219, 229, 235, 237 f., 243 flânerie 19, 187, 202, 204, 209, 211 flâneuse 199 f., 202 – 204 Foucault, Michel 1 f., 34 f., 201 frame 6, 9, 18, 27, 31, 38, 41, 46 – 48, 52, 55, 59, 61, 70 f., 87, 107, 136, 138, 141, 146 f., 153, 157, 162 – 166, 186, 193 f., 201, 205, 211, 215, 221 f., 224 f., 227, 229 – 231, 233, 236, 239, 243, 251, 256 Friedman, Susan 15 f., 198 gender 20, 94, 193, 199, 203 f., 208, 211, 215, 217, 223, 237 ghost 19, 67 – 69, 152, 160, 165, 168, 170 – 176, 254 f. Gilroy, Paul 43, 99, 196, 198, 210 global 12, 17, 35, 43 f., 46 – 49, 52, 55, 58, 68, 77 f., 90, 101 f., 114, 123, 126 f., 150 – 153, 189, 195 f., 208, 210 f., 217, 242 f., 245 f., 248 – 250 glocal 46, 101 f., 242 grievability 18, 49, 52, 57, 60, 132, 140, 144, 146 f., 156, 158 f., 243, 258 Gumbrecht, Hans 4 f., 10 f., 65, 71 f., 114, 118, 123, 127, 148, 150, 188, 206 f. Halbwachs, Maurice 38, 41, 61, 66, 87 haunting 37, 68, 125, 165, 168, 171 – 174, 177, 183 hauntology 67 – 69, 165, 171, 173 Haverkamp, Anselm 4, 11, 16, 30, 128 heterotopia 2, 201 hierarchisation of memory 110 history 2 – 4, 6, 8, 11, 19, 28, 34 f., 40, 45, 49, 52 f., 56, 60, 66 f., 74, 77, 85, 88 f., 93, 97,

281

103, 107, 117 – 120, 123, 125 – 127, 129 – 131, 133, 140, 142 – 144, 150 – 152, 155, 158 – 166, 169, 171 f., 176, 180, 184, 186, 189, 192 f., 196 f., 202, 210, 214, 216, 219, 230, 236, 240, 242, 253 f., 257 Holmes, Janet 252 – 255, 257 Holocaust 3, 6, 12, 25, 45, 47 – 49, 53 f., 57 – 59, 151, 214, 245 f., 250, 252 f., 256 idiorrhythm 18, 103, 105, 113, 116 intermedial 237 intertextual 3, 214, 216 – 219, 221, 224, 229, 231, 253 intertextuality 20, 112, 214, 217 – 220, 225 juxtaposition 45, 116, 122, 127, 154, 214, 223 – 225, 227 – 229, 232 f., 246 landscape 5, 43, 49, 94, 120, 145, 160, 163 – 165, 173 – 175, 177 – 181, 183 f., 191, 201, 248 Let the Great World Spin 18, 25, 29, 124, 130, 132 – 137, 139, 146, 148, 151 f., 154 – 156, 158, 242 – 244 Levine, Caroline 111 f., 116, 135 f., 140, 147, 149, 250 linearity 15, 19, 31, 36, 69, 183, 187 f., 191, 222 literary event 8 – 10, 14, 26, 28, 30 – 34, 63, 85, 135 f., 154, 241 – 243 local 2, 9, 12, 14 f., 17, 43 f., 46, 49, 55, 58, 78, 86, 101 f., 114, 120, 142, 166, 175, 193, 196 f., 202 f., 208 – 211, 242 f. Lotman, Jurij 22 – 26, 29, 31, 33 Magdalene 143 – 147 – Magdalene laundries 143, 147, 243 Massumi, Brian 11, 27 f., 31 – 33, 70 – 72, 85, 105, 116 – 118, 193 Mau Mau 19, 161, 166 – 171 McCann, Colum 16, 18, 29, 130, 133, 139, 242 memory market 7, 51, 53 f., 62 migrant 17, 74, 89 – 93, 99 f., 203 Milkman 17, 19, 35, 51, 185 – 195, 199 – 211, 241 – 244 Modernism 19 f., 113, 185, 187 – 191, 194 f., 198 – 200, 210 f. mood 10 f., 19, 65, 71, 150, 152, 155 f., 173 – 176, 179, 183 f., 188, 190

282

Index

multidirectional memory 7, 11 f., 44 f., 77, 134, 140, 183, 193, 217 multiperspectivity 18, 25, 130 – 140, 144, 147 – 159, 242 – 243 network 4, 11, 17, 19, 42 – 46, 49, 57, 67 f., 77, 89, 111, 113, 121, 124, 130 f., 133, 135 f., 140, 147 – 149, 159 – 161, 174, 176, 180, 182, 193, 222, 249 Neumann, Birgit 7, 38, 41, 44, 46, 61 f., 75, 101 f., 105, 115, 119, 125, 139, 148, 162 f., 172, 177, 179 f., 242 Nixon, Rob 6 f., 50 f., 131 f. non-events 7, 24, 33, 241 nonhuman agency 165 f., 174 Nora, Pierre 38 – 40 Northern Ireland conflict 185, 192, 201 Omeros 2 Open City 18, 29, 103 – 111, 114 – 130, 134, 137, 241, 243 f. ordinary 1, 24, 27, 33 – 35, 57, 59, 120, 130, 137, 187, 192 – 194, 197, 212 orphan 20, 214, 217, 226 – 229, 237, 243 Owuor, Yvonne 16, 19, 160, 162, 168, 177 f., 242 f., 248 perpetrator 70, 80, 124, 152, 154, 156, 158, 240, 254 Phillips, Caryl 16, 20, 43, 213 – 218, 221 f., 225, 227, 231, 233, 237, 242 postcolonial 16, 49 f., 67, 75, 115, 160, 213, 218 – 223, 225, 227, 250 race

13, 20, 119, 196, 214 – 217, 223, 227 f., 231, 234, 237 Rapson, Jessica 12, 37, 41 f., 44, 98, 123 recognisability 8, 49, 52, 54, 56 f., 70 Reddy, Srikanth 252, 256 f. refugee 74, 77, 85 f., 89 – 93, 169 rewriting 20, 214, 217 – 222, 225, 229, 231, 234 rhythm 10 f., 17 f., 33, 35, 63, 105 f., 110 – 123, 125 – 128, 178, 182, 242, 251 Rigney, Ann 6, 41, 44, 46 f., 151, 163, 182, 240 Rothberg, Michael 4, 7, 12 – 14, 16, 36, 42, 44 – 46, 50, 55 – 59, 77, 102, 133 f., 137, 145, 151, 154 f., 158, 183, 252

Rowner, Ilai 8 – 10, 14, 26, 30 – 32, 34, 50, 135 f., 154, 241 Said, Edward 45, 53, 110, 218 – 220, 229 sanctioned memory 41, 106, 115 Serpell, Carla Namwali 13 f. silence 6, 113, 120, 157, 160 f., 167, 170, 174, 182, 224, 232, 252, 254 slow violence 6 f., 18, 131, 134, 143, 147, 156, 158 f., 248 solidarity 42, 45, 134, 145 f., 159, 195 f., 208, 235, 246 Sontag, Susan 10, 189, 192 space 1, 5, 7 f., 11 f., 14 f., 18, 21, 27, 29, 49 f., 55, 65 – 67, 71, 76, 83, 85, 93 – 95, 98 f., 106 f., 109 f., 112 – 114, 119 – 125, 127 – 129, 131 f., 134, 148, 150 f., 154, 162 f., 171 – 179, 181, 183 f., 190, 193 – 195, 199 – 201, 203 f., 206 – 208, 214, 222, 227, 241, 244, 250 – 252, 256 f. spectre 69, 171 – 175, 181 Stimmung 65, 114, 117 f., 122, 126 f., 150 – 153, 157 Thatcherism 214, 216, 236 f. The Childhood of Jesus 17, 24 f., 73 – 75, 77 – 82, 84 – 88, 90, 93, 96, 98 – 100, 102, 241 – 244 The Lost Child 20, 51, 213 – 218, 221 – 227, 229, 231 – 233, 237, 242 – 244 The MS of my Kin 252 f., 256 transatlantic slave trade 43, 105, 142, 215, 224, 243 transcultural memory 41, 45 – 47, 243 transcultural turn 11, 37, 41 f. translation 7, 25, 30, 39, 95, 99, 145, 217, 222, 226, 229, 233 transnational 41, 43 f., 47, 89, 140, 175, 181, 196, 209, 241 f., 245, 258 transtextualisation 215, 217, 221 – 227, 229, 231 – 234, 236 f. trauma 3 f., 6, 9, 11, 25, 35 f., 46, 49 – 52, 57 f., 61, 63 – 68, 70, 131, 139, 147 f., 154, 183, 207, 213, 220, 227, 239, 246, 252 troubles 44, 65, 72, 98, 172, 175 f., 184 – 187, 192 f., 201 f., 204, 208 – Irish Troubles 19, 185 f., 192 f., 242 urban novel

119, 199, 244

Index

Vermeulen, Pieter 4, 37, 52, 57 f., 69, 71, 81 – 83, 104, 118 f., 128, 139, 187 f., 200, 244, 248 victim 40, 45, 54, 68, 70, 124, 142 – 144, 146 f., 152, 154, 156, 158, 240, 254 vietnam War 3, 134, 138 f., 144, 148 f., 152, 156 Voyager 252 f., 256 f.

Walkowitz, Rebecca 25, 75, 77, 91, 98, 189, 197 f., 203, 209, 237 writing back 214, 217 – 221, 223, 225, 234 Wuthering Heights 20, 214, 216 f., 221 – 223, 226, 229, 231 – 234 Žižek, Slavoj

Walcott, Derek

2, 56, 254

283

5, 26 – 30, 35