The Complicit Text: Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction (Reading Trauma and Memory) 1498598706, 9781498598705

Citation preview

The Complicit Text

The Complicit Text Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction

Ivan Stacy

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-4985-9870-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-4985-9871-2 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1 Complicit Silences: Albert Camus

33

2 The Trap of Totalitarianism: Milan Kundera

61

3 Consolation and Complicity: Kazuo Ishiguro

91

4 Traces of Complicity: W. G. Sebald

119

5 Paranoid Conspiracy: Thomas Pynchon

145

6 Compromised Narratives: Margaret Atwood’s Dystopias

173

Conclusion 199 Bibliography 203 Index 215 About the Author

221

v

Acknowledgments

This book has grown out of my PhD thesis, written at Newcastle University from 2008–2013. I would like to thank Anne Whitehead and John Beck for their excellent supervision at that time, which not only enabled me to produce a thesis of which I am proud but also helped me to balance the demands for work and study without any more stress than necessary. I would also like to thank other friends and colleagues who supported me throughout that period, notably in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle, and at INTO Newcastle University. I am grateful to Lucas Scripter, Christopher Kluz, David Pickus, Jessica Medhurst, and my parents for their feedback on various sections of the book, and I owe special thanks to Richard Sheppard and Arin Keeble for their detailed and generous comments on the Sebald and Pynchon chapters, respectively. I would like to thank my parents for their support throughout and for the fact that I always have a home to go back to in Northumberland—not least during the COVID-19 pandemic, when I was able to finish this book while looking down the valley along the Grasslees burn. Finally, I would like to thank friends, family, students, and colleagues in Newcastle, Daegu, Thimphu, Hong Kong, Hangzhou, Beijing, and elsewhere, for conversations, company, and support over the years as this book has taken shape.

vii

Introduction

Many knew little and few knew everything. No one will ever be able to establish with precision how many, in the Nazi apparatus, could not not know about the frightful atrocities that were being committed; how many knew something but were in a position to pretend they did not know; and, further, how many had the possibility of knowing everything, but chose the more prudent path of keeping their eyes and ears (and above all their mouths) well shut.1

In his preface to The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi describes how the majority of the German population failed to challenge or bear witness to an atrocity that was perpetrated just beyond their field of vision. Yet while Levi never collapses the distinction between victims and perpetrators, he also shows how the Nazi regime created states of complicity across a broad spectrum of roles ranging from ordinary Germans to those who were subjected to its most extreme abuses: in a well-known section on what he calls the “gray zone” in Auschwitz, Levi writes that “the network of human relationships in the Lagers was not simple: it could not be reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors . . . the enemy was all around but also inside, the ‘we’ lost its limits.”2 Levi thus shows how the creation of states of complicity was both an enabling condition of the genocide and a fundamental feature of its operation. Yet despite frequent references to Levi’s gray zone in trauma and memory studies, scholarship in the humanities has tended to concern itself with the experiences of victims and latterly (and to a lesser extent) of perpetrators.3 While detailed theorizations of complicity exist in the spheres of law and philosophy, there remains a relative paucity of studies that examine the relationship between complicity and cultural production, and the gray zone remains something of an excluded middle. This book seeks to address this lack through an examination of the complicity in literary texts. Specifically, 1

2

Introduction

it focuses on fiction published since 1945 in which complicity is a key theme, and the choice of Albert Camus, Milan Kundera, Kazuo Ishiguro, W. G. Sebald, Thomas Pynchon, and Margaret Atwood is primarily informed by what I see as a central concern with complicity in their work. My general argument is indicated by this book’s subtitle: narrative has the capacity to bear witness to wrongdoing, but it may also fail to fulfill that potential. Such failures often result in instances of complicity by omission wherein wrongdoing is enabled by failures to challenge it, and those who could “not not know” nevertheless fail to attest to atrocity. In such failures, the text itself is complicit. I also argue, however, that fiction possesses the formal flexibility at once to enact and reflexively to explore such failures, making complicity visible and thus acting as the basis for non-complicit action. This book examines complicity on three levels in the texts under discussion. The first is thematic and, simply put, I discuss the complicity of the novels’ protagonists together with the options available to them. The second is formal: I argue that the construction of narrative itself can be a complicit act, and as such I discuss how the formal properties of texts may either enact or resist complicity. The third is empathetic and is premised on the notion that literary texts often implicitly induce compassion or fellow feeling toward the characters therein. Where this empathy brings us into moral alignment with those characters, and specifically into a position of accepting or condoning their wrongdoing (or their justifications thereof), the texts create a kind of secondary, readerly complicity. However, insofar as narrative acts as the basis for complicit action, the second formal level in fact draws all three together, and the notion of the complicit text is therefore central to this study. I began this introduction with Levi’s observation regarding the pervasiveness of German connivance as the Holocaust unfolded; in this book, and particularly in the later chapters, I argue that complicity is pervasive but often remains unrecognized. As such, a huge range of fiction could potentially be used to approach these themes. However, the rationale for examining these six particular writers is twofold. First, the Holocaust understandably continues to dominate academic discourse in fields related to this discussion of complicity, such as testimony and witnessing, and representations of victimhood and perpetration. My aim in this book, though, is to develop a generally applicable theory of the relationship between complicity and fiction, and for this reason, I have chosen a selection of writers that enables me to begin with the Holocaust and the events of World War II, acknowledging their continuing importance, but also to move away from these toward more contemporary concerns, such as the environmental crisis and the hegemony of neoliberalism. Secondly, and again as a result of the desire to make fairly general claims, I have chosen these writers because they represent and embody complicity as it occurs in very different political and social milieu, and employ

Introduction

3

varying formal means of exploring complicity in their novels. The range of styles and formal characteristics of these six writers, therefore, permits an examination of a broad range of textual complicities. This book is structured in loosely chronological order, and the general trajectory of this examination moves from individual complicity dilemmas faced by the characters in Camus, Kundera, and Ishiguro toward a sense that complicity is collective and pervasive in Sebald, Pynchon, and Atwood. Moreover, the geographical and temporal locations of these writers begin close to the totalitarian atrocities of the twentieth century as perpetrated by Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes, but move further afield to the more peaceful and politically stable areas of Europe and North America in the later twentieth century. While this schema is slightly simplistic, it does draw attention to the apparent paradox that the further we move from the sites of atrocity, the greater the sense of complicity becomes. This paradox suggests that distance from an event opens up space for reflexivity with regard to the potential for language—and for fiction—to contribute to wrongdoing. However, it also indicates one of the central problems with which the novels discussion in this book grapple: without the benefit of hindsight, it is not always possible to be certain of what should be witnessed, and at what point ignorance becomes a form of complicity. In what follows of this introduction, I begin by outlining theories of complicity in existing academic and legal discourse and then propose a general relationship between narrative, failures of witnessing, and complicity. On this basis, I elaborate a more specific relationship between literary fiction and complicity. Finally, I provide an outline of the book’s structure. STATES OF COMPLICITY The categories of perpetrator, victim, and bystander have dominated postHolocaust academic discourse in the fields of testimony and memory studies. Raul Hilberg’s Perpetrators Victims Bystanders (1992)4 was structured around these, and sought to provide a taxonomy of roles in the Holocaust. As Levi’s use of the term “gray zone” suggests, complicity is difficult, murky terrain and for this reason, of these three, the category of “bystander” comes closest to the middle ground of complicity. The figure of the bystander, however, does not capture the full range of possible complicities, some of which are more active than others. Moreover, by the time that Yehuda Bauer drew on the same tripartite model in his 1998 address to the Bundestag on German Holocaust Memorial Day, this third category had morphed into “passive onlookers,”5 therefore effacing a large degree of agency that might be attributed to those who are neither victims nor perpetrators. In a recent overview,

4

Introduction

Victoria J. Barnett acknowledges that in Hilberg’s work “the category of bystander encompassed an extraordinarily wide range of actors and behaviors.”6 As she also notes, however, the term “bystander” has come to connote “passivity and noninvolvement,”7 and thus fails to address situations in which individuals actively contribute to wrongdoing without being direct perpetrators of harm. Robert Meister arrives at a similar position, albeit on a larger scale, arguing that Human Rights Discourse has created the sense that there exists a global community of bystanders. However, he suggests that regarding bystanders as witnesses to suffering may act as a screen for the fact that they are also beneficiaries of the same systems that have caused that harm.8 Other specific categories of involvement in wrongdoing have begun to emerge, notably Bruce Robbins’s “beneficiary”9 and Michael Rothberg’s notion of the “implicated subject,” and the latter is my starting point for delineating the concept of complicity as I use it in this book. Rothberg begins his discussion with the same victim-perpetrator-bystander triad, and also by acknowledging its limitations. As a result, he posits a fourth category, the implicated subject of the book’s title, who is “neither a victim nor a perpetrator, but rather a participant in histories and social formations that generate the positions of victim or perpetrator, and yet in which most people do not occupy such clear-cut roles.”10 He notes the closeness of the terms “implication” and “complicity,” these being derived from the Latin roots implicare (to be closely entangled or involved with) and complicare (to be folded into), respectively, but argues that the notion of complicity remains “closely tied to legalistic models of responsibility” and that it also struggles to cope with the relationship between the present and the past when there is no clear causal connection between the latter and the former.11 For this reason, he employs implication as “a more capacious and a more fundamental term” than complicity: one may be implicated without being complicit, but complicity necessarily presupposes implication.12 I use Rothberg’s notion of implication throughout this book as a useful point of reference for differentiating between these shades of involvement. The aim of my own work is to address actions that represent a greater degree of culpability than implication. If complicity in Rothberg’s schema is a subcategory of implication, I further suggest that complicity becomes distinct from implication in that it requires agency to be asserted. I also discuss precisely the problems that Rothberg raises when he differentiates implication and complicity: specifically, I seek to detach complicity from a purely legalistic usage, and argue that causality is more complicated than a linear relationship between actions and effects—and I elaborate on both of these points later in this introduction. While Rothberg’s notion of the implicated subject implies an identifiable category, he also implicitly acknowledges the problems that might occur by beginning from a priori subject positions when he writes:

Introduction

5

Implicated subjects nether possess an identity nor arise from a process of identification (“we are all X”). Rather, to be an implicated subject is to occupy a particular type of subject position in a history of injustice or a structure of inequality—a history or structure one may enter, like an immigrant, long after the injustice at issue has been initiated or, like a beneficiary of global capitalism, far from its epicenter of exploitation.13

I concur with Rothberg that beginning from any particular identity-based subject position risks effacing or obfuscating the complexity of forces and pressures acting on any given individual. For this reason, and also as a result of the difficulties inherent in delineating large categories—such as perpetrators, victims and bystanders—I go further than Rothberg in this discussion of complicity and eschew the idea that to be complicit is even a subject position. We may talk of complicit subjects, but attributing complicity to any individual is contingent on their own actions, and the effects of those actions, rather than being a container into which people or groups may be placed. For this reason, in my examinations of literary texts and the subjects represented therein, I begin in medias res, by examining the behavior and narratives present in the literary texts under discussion. Complicity, then, does not fit neatly into the perpetrator-victim-bystander triad, and refers to a more active form of culpability than implication. As noted earlier, the etymological root of complicity is the Latin complicare, to fold together, and as such it inherently contains the notion of joint action. In its modern usage, the term possesses pejorative connotations and this “folding together” often has overtones of criminality. Writing from a legal perspective, Miles Jackson defines complicity as “intentionally helping the principal to commit wrongdoing and intentionally influencing the decision of the principal to commit the wrong.”14 In contrast to the principal wrongdoer, the complicit party makes a secondary contribution to that wrong. For this reason, complicity lies somewhere below full guilt, and indeed below full joint wrongdoing, but above innocence. Chiara Lepora and Robert E. Goodin set out these thresholds in an expanded definition, wherein they state that “voluntarily performing an action that contributes to the wrongdoing of another and knowing that it does so (but without necessarily sharing the other’s wrongful purpose), represent the necessary actus and mens conditions, respectively, that are minimally required for one to be complicit in the wrongdoing of another.”15 In this passage, Lepora and Goodin employ shortened forms of the legal terms “actus reus” and “mens rea,” which refer to the external and internal elements of a crime, that is, the criminal act itself and the guilty mind that lies behind it. Already, then, the nodes of this nexus are multiplying because we are required to deal with (at least) two parties involved with an act of

6

Introduction

wrongdoing, as well as the two concepts of actus reus and mens rea. For this reason, as Stanford H. Kadish notes, the law as it pertains to complicity is “inescapably complex.”16 However, some of the difficulties created by this complexity can be obviated through a more fine-grained use of terminology and through attention to differing types of complicity. Lepora and Goodin provide much of this terminology in their taxonomy of “conceptual cousins” that are related to, but do not necessarily constitute, complicity.17 These include conspiracy, collusion, collaboration, connivance, and condoning, and I elaborate below on how some of these concepts allow us to understand the relationship between narrative and complicity. Moreover, explicitly complicit acts can take a number of forms including, according to Jackson, “aiding, abetting, assisting, facilitating, inciting, inducing, soliciting, encouraging, instigating, and so on.”18 Gregory Mellema offers a slightly different typology by referring to Thomas Aquinas, who identified nine ways in which an individual may be complicit with another’s wrongdoing. These are “by command, by counsel, by consent, by flattery, by receiving, by participation, by silence, by not preventing, and by not denouncing.”19 As the last three items in Aquinas’s list indicate, it is possible to be complicit through omission. The notion of a duty to act in certain circumstances is widely accepted both in legal and moral terms, but this notion has its limits, otherwise the fear of liability for people going about their normal business would become crippling.20 Yet the question remains of when simply “doing nothing” becomes a form of complicity and, to delve deeper into the distinctions that underpin the concept, when ignorance of one’s contribution to wrongdoing is itself a form of culpability. Jackson notes that “somewhere around the line between knowing and reckless participation is the idea of wilful blindness,” which he argues is a “justified extension to the category of legal knowledge.”21 As I argue next, this notion of willful blindness, or culpable ignorance, is central to the relationship between narrative and complicity, and to the forms of complicity explored in the fictions under discussion here. Complicity necessarily and by definition involves joint action, but in many cases, this joint action takes the form not of a limited number of individuals acting together, but of large-scale collective complicity in which whole groups or nations may be implicated. International law has evolved since 1945 to address the notion of collective complicity,22 and Christopher Kutz argues for the importance of this specific problem on the basis that, in his view, “the most important and far-reaching harms and wrongs of contemporary life are the products of collective actions, mediated by social and institutional structures.”23 The fire-bombing of Dresden by the Allies during World War II is one of his central examples, and of this incident, he writes that “individuals found themselves on the verge or in the course of participation in a great wrong through the flow of obedience and circumstance.”24 In

Introduction

7

many situations, and in the examples that I discuss in this volume, complicit parties act under varying degrees of pressure. The way that Kutz’s language here wrestles with the extent of participants’ agency—they “find themselves” in the situation of perpetrating a massacre—attests to the way that complicity often sits on the cusp of structure and agency as determining factors. The question of agency is addressed by Afxentis Afxentiou, Robin Dunford and Michael Neu in their introduction to Exploring Complicity (2017). They note that complicity is generally regarded as intentional or, at best, reckless or negligent, and proceed to argue that this model depends on an assumption that “the accomplice could avoid being complicit and could walk through life never failing to avoid it.” They continue by stating that “we take this atomistic account of complicity to be a dominant understanding of complicity in the liberal, democratic state.”25 Yet the idea that one may “walk through life never failing to avoid” complicity is an ideal that, in reality, is probably rare, and is certainly out of reach for those within totalitarian regimes, and even for many in situations wherein they are subject to significant social pressure. For this reason, Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu attempt to move from the model of a few “bad apples” to the notion of the “rotten barrel,” that is, taking as a basis for discussion “the material and social structures that reproduce complicit individuals and force them to be complicit even when they do not intend to be so.”26 To frame this concept in other terms, Thomas Docherty argues that the notion of compliance is the foundation of mutual bonds that are intended to produce a common good, but he also asks: “When does an act of compliance with something ostensibly neutral or even good make me an accomplice to something that is wrong[?]”27 Docherty’s focus on compliance is important because it shows how the pressures exerted by the social contract in liberal, democratic societies can also produce complicity with wrongdoing. Docherty is not alone in identifying the way that complicity grows out of relationships that are normally viewed in a positive light. For example, Mark Sanders similarly argues that complicity is the “basic folded-together-ness of being, of human being” and “is the condition of possibility of all particular affiliations, loyalties, and commitments.”28 Lepora and Goodin take a slightly different approach by linking complicity with the related notion of compromise. This move is a result of their awareness that both complicity and compromise are necessary in certain situations (Chiara Lepora writes from the perspective of her experience in humanitarian work) and as such they attempt to lessen some of the pejorative connotations of complicity. While acknowledging these valid points, my aim in this volume is to examine complicity in its pejorative sense, that is, as a contribution to wrongdoing. In addition, for the reasons outlined earlier, I attempt to move away from an “atomistic” model that assumes individual agency can always be exercised. As my discussions of the texts will illustrate, complicity is instead usually the

8

Introduction

result of a complex interrelationship between structure and agency. In many cases, the protagonists are subject to what Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu call “complicity dilemmas,” that is, situations in which there is no non-complicit option,29 and as the notion of collective complicity gains momentum in the latter half of my discussion, the sense also emerges that remaining noncomplicit is no longer a realistic option. However, as Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu argue, when complicity is employed in too-broad a sense, it loses its power: if responsibility is distributed between too many, the risk arises that nobody is finally held to account.30 Paul Reynolds goes further, arguing that “the usefulness of complicity as a concept is in its rhetorical power and not in its value as an analytical tool.”31 In doing so, Reynolds recognizes the way in which the concept of complicity may drive and empower politically motivated narrative. These two approaches to complicity need not be mutually exclusive, however, and I do not see why acknowledging the rhetorical power of complicity precludes an analytical understanding of the concept based on the taxonomies and nuances provided by, for example, Lepora and Goodin. In summary, then, my approach to complicity in this book is to examine contributions to wrongdoing in a broader sense than is employed in legal discourse. Moreover, I regard complicity not as a subject position, but as the product of specific actions. These actions tend to be committed as a result of a combination of individual agency and structural forces; and in many cases, the pressure exerted by those forces means that being non-complicit in wrongdoing is no longer an option. This volume, however, is about the ways in which texts can be complicit in wrongdoing, and for this reason in the following sections of the introduction, I elucidate the relationship between narrative and complicity though the notion of failures of witnessing. NARRATIVE, TESTIMONY, AND FAILURES OF WITNESSING To date, there exists no overarching discussion of the relationship between narrative and complicity. In this section, I attempt to sketch a general relationship between the two, and argue that narrative can become a form of complicity when it fails to bear witness to wrongdoing. At this point, I therefore begin by briefly summarizing the treatment of the relationship between narrative and complicity in existing work and then outline existing theories of narrative testimony that have grown out of Holocaust discourse. In the following section, I describe three specific forms of complicity in which failures of narrative to bear witness to wrongdoing can be considered as forms of complicity: these are connivance, condoning, and culpable ignorance.

Introduction

9

A number of the forms of complicity listed by Jackson, and by Mellema in his summary of Aquinas, are clearly related to language and to communication. Although language is not always necessarily present in any attempt to, say, incite, encourage, command, or counsel, it could clearly play a central role in any of these complicit actions. Moreover, while the language involved in these acts may not always take the form of narrative—a command, for example, may be a single word—narrative does have a role to play in persuasion either on an individual level or on a collective level (state propaganda inciting a population to hold racist beliefs being an example of the latter). In this study, however, I am not so much concerned with obvious and direct attempts to influence groups or individuals to contribute to wrongdoing as I am with the way in which complicit forms of language inhere, often unnoticed, in narrative; indeed, the fact that certain values and positions reside hidden in plain sight is often an essential element of complicities of omission. This said, the insistence on causal relationship in the definitions of complicity that I have given from Jackson and from Lepora and Goodin raises an immediate problem in terms of determining a relationship between narrative and complicity. Narrative is generally constructed after the fact, but the causal arrow points forward, so this seems to preclude most forms of narrative from being considered as forms of complicity—although as noted earlier, exceptions might include, for example, narratives used to incite violence. However, in the following paragraphs, I argue that despite this problem of attributing causality to narrative, where events create an ethical duty to bear witness, any failure of narrative to fulfill this duty can be regarded as complicity through omission. Before elaborating on what I mean by “failures of witnessing,” I will first summarize the large body of scholarly work that has emerged since the publication of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s seminal Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992). In this volume, the two authors, literary critic and psychoanalyst, respectively, seek to work out an ethical mode of testimony in light of their involvement with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. Laub does the bulk of the work in positing a model of witnessing prior to the involvement of literature, writing of the “imperative to tell and be heard.”32 This imperative that grows out of the fact that “not only, in effect, did the Nazis try to exterminate the physical witnesses of their crime; but the inherently incomprehensible and deceptive psychological structure of the event precluded its own witnessing, even by its very victims.”33 Despite this central paradox, in Laub’s model, testimony can act as the driver in a process of recuperation and resumption of life for the victim. In this process, the role of the listener is crucial. The difficulty of registering and assimilating traumatic experience means that the listener “is a party to the

10

Introduction

creation of knowledge de novo. The testimony to the trauma thus includes its hearer, who is, so to speak, the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time.”34 The necessary presence of a listener leads Laub to posit three levels of witnessing. These are “the level of being a witness to oneself within the experience; the level of being a witness to the testimonies of others; and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself.”35 At this point, I wish to note three important points about the model of witnessing posited in Testimony. First, both Felman and Laub frame their discussions in terms of trauma. Secondly, they posit the notion that testimony can act as a literal transmission of experience (Laub writes that “re-externalization of the event can occur and take effect only when one can articulate and transmit the story, literally transfer it to another outside oneself.”)36 Thirdly, both assume that acts of witnessing take place in good faith on the part of both the testifier and the listener. Testimony has been the catalyst for a particularly febrile dialogue, and here I outline some of the more important aspects of this conversation as they pertain to this book. Laub’s model has been influential, but has not been accepted unconditionally, and was subject to a notably direct attack by Thomas Trezise, who accused the former of “appropriating” the responses of one particular witness in the chapter of Testimony titled “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening.”37 Laub offered a robust response soon after, in which he argued that “testimony is not a ready-made text. It emerges from a process that is set in motion in a place that provides safety through the presence of the listener (interviewer) for the witness (interviewee).”38 Another important aspect of Laub’s response is his assertion that testimony “does not have to adhere to the rules of evidence relevant to juridical testimony; it does not lay claim to historical factuality and to ‘objectivity’; it is not intended to bring ‘the News’ to the public like a journalistic interview.”39 This comment indicates that the role of the witness is less straightforward than it initially appears to be, and a number of recent critical interventions have elaborated on the nuances of this position. Early in Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben notes that there are two words for “witness” in Latin. The first is testis, from which “testimony” is derived, and which refers to the individual who testifies in a trial. The second is superstes, which refers to “a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it.”40 Remaining for the moment with the first of these, even if the concept of witnessing remains bound up with the framework of a criminal trial, how that testimony is characterized—how it is regarded in terms of its reliability and its verisimilitude—depends on the positions of those who listen to it. This is demonstrated by Kirsten Campbell, who identifies several conceptions of testimony that function simultaneously during criminal trials,

Introduction

11

and that are contingent on the differing perspectives of particular parties. These include the “victim-witness,” for whom “the fact of the event and the claim of the wrong are not separable, for her testimony to the event is also testimony to the wrong done to her.”41 In other words, for a person in this position, bearing witness combines the roles of testis and superstes. However, Campbell also notes that, from the perspective of the defense, testimony is understood as “a labile mental representation, a re-presentation of an image of the event in narrative.” Similarly, the prosecution also treats the testimony as the recollection of an event, and while “it does not characterize that relationship as a reproduction of ‘reality,’” it does treat the testimony as “an accurate account of the event.”42 As Campbell’s analysis indicates, the role and nature of the witness, and the perception of the testimony itself, depend on the positions of those who listen to or read their narratives. Both Laub and Campbell address the nature of direct verbal testimony, but complexities continue to multiply when witnessing takes a written form. Robert Eaglestone argues that “many forms of prose writing encourage identification and while testimony cannot but do this, it at the same time aims to prohibit identification” on epistemological and ethical grounds. He elaborates that “this ‘doubleness’ is central to the genre of testimony: the texts lead to identification and away from it simultaneously,” and that the resulting tension is a fundamental characteristic of the genre of testimony.43 Eaglestone’s observations raise the possibility that identification may not be an appropriate ethical response to testimony, and that the idea of the transference of experience as posited in Laub’s original model may come up against ethical problems with regard to how the recipient of that testimony should position themselves. Shoshana Felman’s thinking has also evolved since the publication of Testimony, notably through the idea of the “alignment of witnesses.” In a paper responding to Cathy Caruth’s tracing of a thread from Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva, through Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, to Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever,44 she argues that “in this chain of readers . . . each picks up on the other’s reading in an innovative and inspired way.”45 Felman thus begins to extend the chain of witnessing beyond the model of a single witness and listener described by Laub in their original volume, and allows for a process that involves multiple acts of mediation. The role of mediation is also alluded to by Aleida Assmann, who notes that in ancient Greek drama, “the martyr dies in the act of witnessing, however, he or she depends on someone to witness the suffering, to identify him or her as a martyr (rather than as a justly persecuted rebel), and to codify the story for future generations.”46 The implication of this observation is that artistic forms may have a role to play in these chains of mediation, and particularly as a way to “codify the story” in a particular way.

12

Introduction

The body of work initiated by Felman and Laub’s Testimony has also paved the way for the extremely productive dialogue between psychology and literature around the concept of trauma, this next stage catalyzed by Cathy Caruth’s edited volume Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) and her monograph Unclaimed Experience (1996).47 Indeed, testimony and trauma remain almost joined at the hip, a fact attested to by Felman’s further exploration of this relationship in her 2002 monograph The Juridical Unconscious,48 and in the overlap in terms of content and contributors in the three related volumes, The Future of Memory (2010),49 The Future of Trauma Theory (2014)50 and The Future of Testimony (2014),51 the last of which featured the paper by Caruth and the response from Felman mentioned before. However, a sense has begun to emerge that trauma theory has perhaps been over-applied, at times in contexts where it is not the most appropriate tool for analysis. For example, in his preface to The Future of Trauma Theory, Rothberg suggests that trauma is “necessary but not sufficient for diagnosing the problems that concern us as scholars and human beings,”52 while later in the same volume, Dominick LaCapra argues that “we may have reached a point where problems can be addressed without always ringing the trauma bell.”53 More direct attacks have come from Eaglestone, who argues that “trauma theory offers not only misapplied science but also an illusory redemption,”54 and Stef Craps, who has drawn attention to some of the specific limitations of Eurocentric trauma theory, arguing that while its foundational texts suggested that the common experience of trauma might create “a bridge between disparate historical experiences,” in practice they “largely fail to live up to this promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement.”55 With this all being said, my approach in this volume is to eschew an emphasis on trauma and victimhood, or to presuppose any connection between witnessing and trauma, for three key reasons. Firstly, complicity sits in the uncertain terrain between neat categorizations of victimhood and perpetration. As such, beginning with any such a priori categorizations would denude the concept of its analytical power in terms of identifying how those at a degree of remove from wrongdoing may nevertheless contribute to it. Secondly, there is no inherent connection between traumatic memory and complicity. While cases of complicity within extreme events may produce trauma—those who Levi describes as having been forced to operate in the gray zone of Auschwitz may be such cases—many small-scale complicities do not result in trauma and may barely even register. In fact, complicities of omission may well take place precisely because the complicit party does not wish to expose themselves to the very distress that produces trauma. The question of affect raises another problem identified by Meister, who argues from the opposite position, and suggests that, when witnesses to wrongdoing experience unpleasant affect, this experience may actually

Introduction

13

replace ethical action. He suggests that “by agonizing over the question of his own potential guilt as a bystander, the witness to human suffering tries to save his soul without necessarily relinquishing his position of advantage.”56 In Meister’s model, then, the affect created by seeing suffering seems to complete the act of witnessing, and therefore actually becomes a form of complicit inaction. Meister writes in the context of Human Rights Discourse, the history of which implies a “progression from bystander to witness” and hence an apparent progression of moral responsibility, which, as his critique makes clear, may in fact be an illusion.57 In my own model, however, witnessing involves both seeing and telling; and the agency asserted in the act of telling may be the very intervention that prevents wrongdoing or at least lessens its effect. The affective dimensions of witnessing lead us to the third point of divergence between Felman and Laub’s model and most cases of complicity: they assume that witnesses will act in good faith, when the opposite may in fact be true. The context in which Felman and Laub write—their involvement with the Fortunoff Archive—means that good faith is almost assured given that the express purpose of the project is to create a collection of testimonial material. Yet such good faith cannot always be assumed and in the fictions under discussion here, memory is often shown to be shaped and twisted in the act of narration. Bradford Vivian notes that victim testimony has attained the status of “the quasi-sacred unsayable,” but argues that, in fact, “authenticity in the act of witnessing is discursively fabricated and strategically communicated.”58 Indeed, it is such fabrications and strategies that become visible in some of the fictions examined in this book: we may think of the trickiness of Camus’s Clamence, of the puffed-up obfuscations of Ishiguro’s Stevens, and of the way Sebald undercuts the apparently documentary function of his narrators through the use of doctored archival material. This notion of bad faith is fundamental to my discussion of literature and complicity. Laub writes that bearing witness involves a “commitment to truth, in a dialogic context and with an authentic listener, which allows for reconciliation with the broken promise, and which makes the resumption of life, in spite of the failed promise, at all possible.”59 My aim here is not to refute Laub, whose model stands as testament in itself to efforts to bear ethical witness to the Holocaust; instead I explain how complicity arises through failures of witnessing, that is, through failures to live up to this ideal. As such, I look at cases where almost all elements of Laub’s formulation are reversed: what happens, I ask, when there is no “commitment to truth”; when the listener is not “authentic”; and when the “failed promise” is not a matter of the ontological impossibility of bearing witness to extremity, but is the result of a more prosaic bad faith on the part of those who testify or of those who listen to testimony?

14

Introduction

With these points in mind, and for the purposes of my discussion in this book, I define “failures of witnessing” as follows. Simply put, a failure of witnessing is a failure to attest, through narrative means, to some form of wrongdoing. For the purposes of my argument, I examine cases where such failures function as contributory factors to said wrongs and in which, therefore, the text becomes complicit. This simple definition, however, contains a number of implicit provisos, which I outline here. Firstly, I seek to move the notion of witnessing away from a purely legalistic sense. I thus regard the speaking or writing subject who bears witness as the superstes rather than as the testis: there is no assumption of a trial, or indeed of any context in which their record of events will be definitely judged. Instead, the witness may be regarded a looser category, simply as one who has “lived through that something” to which they attest. Secondly, that “something” need not necessarily be traumatic, or even an experience of victimhood, and for this reason, parties who speak or write of those experiences may not consciously consider themselves to be witnesses, although their narratives do act as testimonies to that which they experienced. Thirdly, although I do not use “witnessing” in a legalistic sense, the terms of actus reus and mens rea are useful for delineating the relationship between failures of witnessing and complicity. The failures of witnessing that I describe in this book often do not constitute the actus reus component of complicity, the results of these failures being somewhat less than an objectively quantifiable contribution to wrongdoing. They do, however, constitute the mens rea component of complicity, being an important part of the mental state in which complicity occurs. Finally, these failures of witnessing can generally be considered as complicities of omission. Some of the texts that I have cited earlier tend to de-emphasize the role of such omissions in complicity. For example, Mellema states outright that “typically complicity that takes the form of an omission does not warrant the ascription of moral responsibility for the outcome, even when the omission is deliberate,”60 while for Lepora and Goodin, the fact that behaviors such as connivance and condoning take place after the fact means that they cannot, in most cases, be considered as forms of complicity.61 In contrast, I argue that connivance and condoning are both essential features of the way that narrative may produce complicity, and that these behaviors often take the form of failures of witnessing. CONNIVANCE, CONDONING, CULPABLE IGNORANCE, AND THE COMPLICIT TEXT The way that failures of witnessing become forms of complicity can be understood in light of the “conceptual cousins” of complicity listed and

Introduction

15

defined by Lepora and Goodin, and which cover a spectrum that ranges from active and conscious involvement in wrongdoing to complicity through inaction. For example, collaboration (i.e., working with) and conspiracy (planning in secret) can be regarded as relatively active forms of complicity. Connivance and condoning, in contrast, lie toward the more passive end of the spectrum. Lepora and Goodin note that connivance has its etymological root in the Latin nivere, to wink, and its meaning “ranges from ignoring another’s wrongdoing (shutting one’s eyes to it) to tacitly assenting to it (winking, nodding, twinkling).”62 They define condoning as cases where a principal performs a wrongful act and secondary parties “relate to those wrongs by pardoning them.”63 However, they list both as “acts involving non-contributors” because, in general, neither represents a causal contribution to wrongdoing. Similarly, where connivance and condoning take place through narrative, these narratives will necessarily be constructed after the fact, and as such there seems to be little room for narrative to act as a contributory factor. However, Lepora and Goodin make two important provisos with regard to these forms of omission. The first is that an omission is not necessarily the same as “doing nothing”:64 to connive at a wrongdoing may be a minimal act both in appearance and effort, but an act it is. The second is that where omissions form patterns of repeated or ongoing behavior, those omissions may either encourage wrongdoers to act without fear of repercussion, or may be interpreted as tacit approval of the wrongs committed. For example, Lepora and Goodin propose the following scenario: Suppose what is condoned is an ongoing practice of wrongdoing. In condoning a specific act of wrongdoing now past (a particular instance of spousal abuse, for example), the condoner is at the same time condoning an ongoing practice (of domestic violence) and thereby contributing in a causal way to subsequent instances of it.65

They identify a similar potential for connivance, arguing that it may constitute a form of complicity “by making the wrongdoer confident, on the basis of previous experience, that again in the future onlookers will connive rather than intervening to stop the wrong when they see it occurring.”66 In order to relate these concepts to texts, we need only to make the further intuitive step that both condoning and connivance can be enacted through narrative. It is such narratives, and the omissions that they contain—their failures to bear witness to wrongdoing, in short—that I examine in the body of this volume. To give one specific example, Eaglestone interprets the murder of the clones in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as a “public secret,” that is, “something that is widely and publicly known, and yet is the object of a considered and

16

Introduction

collaborative act of secrecy.”67 This type of secrecy, as suggested by Levi’s comments at the beginning of this introduction, takes the form of a tacit agreement not to see, to hear, or to speak—in other words, to forswear the role of the witness. Although in many cases, it would be difficult to prove that any such individual failure represents a causal contribution to a specific death, we can nevertheless agree with Levi that, enacted en masse, such failures did enable the atrocity to take place. While the notion of connivance is central to understanding how and why failures of witnessing occur, further nuance can be added through the concept of culpable ignorance. David Luban defines this concept as “one’s capacity to deny guilty knowledge truthfully.”68 Both he and Holly Smith identify culpable ignorance as possessing a dual structure, whereby an initial “screening action” puts in place a system or structure that blinds an individual or group to the effects of later “unwitting misdeeds.”69 This concept is important because it allows the culpable party to situate themselves at a degree further removed from the wrongful act: someone who connives looks away from the wrongful act itself, but an individual who has put in place a structure of culpable ignorance has foreclosed the need for such a direct disavowal of the role of the witness, and may instead proceed with their life in comfortable ignorance. Again, we can extend this concept to wider and repeated patterns of social interaction, and in doing so, identify a role for narrative as performing the screening action that may blind individuals, or indeed whole populations, to wrongdoing. To recapitulate the stages of my argument, then, I see the relationship between narrative and complicity as follows. Complicity can occur through failures of witnessing, wherein failures to attest to wrongdoing enable the occurrence of that wrongdoing. Narrative contributes to complicity through failures of witnessing that take the form of condoning, connivance, and culpable ignorance, particularly when those omissions are part of patterns of repeated social behavior that enable or encourage wrongdoing. This is not to say that these three concepts are the only forms of complicity in which narrative plays a part, but they are, it seems to me, the enabling conditions of the kind of mass complicity that characterizes the atrocities of the twentieth century, and the forms of wrongdoing with which the six writers discussed here are concerned. If we turn again to Levi’s indictment of ordinary Germans, and his question of how many “could not not know about the frightful atrocities that were being committed,” we might interpret his question as implying that they knew, but failed to bear witness to the atrocity in which they were involved: they made themselves culpably ignorant, or they connived, or they condoned their own actions or those of others.

Introduction

17

FICTION AND COMPLICITY I have outlined earlier what I see as the general relationship between narrative and complicity, focusing so far on the related ideas of witnessing and testimony. Fiction, however, possesses particular and distinct qualities, and I address the ways in which literary texts can hold failures of witnessing up to scrutiny in this section. I suggest that two features of fiction allow it to examine complicity in ways that set it apart from other modes of discourse. These are, firstly, the thickness of its description: fiction is able not only to address its subject matter in great psychological and sociological depth but also to combine and integrate elements of various other discourses.70 The second is fiction’s reflexivity with regard to its own nature. This reflexivity allows it to function at Laub’s third level of witnessing, “the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself,”71 and as such to turn its gaze on complicit failures enacted in and through narrative. In order to expand on the first of these features of fiction, I begin by noting that examples of complicity in legal and philosophical discourse tend to lack any thickness of description. Agents are presented at the moment of the complicit act, and their motivation is presented only as minimally as possible in order to make the legalistic or moral point under discussion. A typical example is Jackson’s discussion of a cleaner who assists a bank robbery by deliberately failing to lock the doors. He describes this as a “paradigmatic case of aiding and abetting by omission,”72 but only addresses the intentions of the cleaner in a minimal way, discussing whether this omission was intentional or careless. Such examples serve their purpose in attributing legal and, to a limited extent, moral responsibility. However, they also always raise further questions that are not addressed by these isolated and abstracted scenarios. Assuming the act described earlier was deliberate, why did the cleaner find it acceptable to assist a group of criminals? Was he or she motivated by money, by resentment, or by fear? How willingly did he or she engage in the action? Complicity has a lifespan that begins before and ends after the complicit act itself, but such abstracted examples do not generally address the antecedents of complicity, that is, the decisions and pressures that lead an individual to commit a complicit act. Owen Thomas argues that what he calls the “judicial style of investigation” is “an unhelpful way to investigate socio-economic or political issues because it depoliticizes the constituents of motive.”73 I agree, and suggest that accounts that are able to provide thicker description of motivation, generally through the provision of detailed background information, will also enable a better understanding of the conditions from which complicity grows. As Cornelia Wächter and Robert Wirth argue, people are not, in

18

Introduction

reality, the “autonomous moral agent” found in moral philosophy but rather are “nonideal agents in nonideal circumstances,”74 and fiction can represent in detail the way that these circumstances develop and bring pressure to bear on individuals and groups. Moreover, as well as antecedents, complicity has an afterlife: it does not necessarily end with a discrete complicit act but may persist as a state of self-identification, as a label imposed by other (presumably non-complicit) parties, or simply in the ongoing nexus of social and material relationships that were created by the complicit act or acts. Fiction is wellplaced to examine the mens rea component of complicity precisely because it can represent and delve into a much longer and more complex lifespan of events, conditions, and motivations than the isolated examples that tend to be presented in judicial discourse and moral philosophy. Fiction is not, of course, the only type of discourse capable of extending and expanding our understanding of complicity. For example, ethnography or other forms of longitudinal academic study could place complicity in this kind of broader context.75 However, the specific properties of fiction, and of literary language more generally, allow it to conduct an examination of areas unreachable or off-limits to other forms of discourse. We need only consider some of the warnings against and prohibitions on fiction as a means of witnessing to see that the literary is regarded as a special use of language. Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel both disavowed literary language as an appropriate mode for testimony,76 and this distrust is echoed in Adorno’s well-known admonition on poetry after Auschwitz.77 Against these warnings, however, we might consider Bradford Vivian’s questioning of the “myth of authenticity” that accompanies the concept of witnessing, and his argument for recognizing the “rhetorically inventive nature of all witnessing.”78 Sue Vice more specifically advocates for the formal features of fiction when she writes that readers of texts that address the Holocaust “may precisely not want to read a polyphonic text, wishing rather for the clear utterance of moral certainties [. . . but] the polyphonic testing of such certainties is just what gives Holocaust fiction its particular representational power.”79 If these debates ask us to consider how acts of witnessing contain literary elements, for the purposes of this study, I ask how literary fiction represents, enacts, and examines failures of witnessing. Let us begin this stage of the discussion with two major literary scholars who have addressed the notion of complicity, albeit briefly. In his short essay “The Aesthetics of Complicity” (1974), Geoffrey Hartman contrasts the Anglo-American novel unfavorably with the French nouveau roman, in part because of the latter’s willingness to interrogate its own properties. He suggests that, if complicity “cannot be helped, it must be recognized as fundamental to the situation of the writer,”80 but his complaint of Anglo-American fiction is

Introduction

19

that it fails to recognize this complicity and, as such, “it needed the Old World once more . . . to remove at last an assumption of innocence: that fictional techniques are clean, impersonal, and beyond the contamination of ideology.”81 Linda Hutcheon pursues a similar line of argument in The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), starting from awareness of the artist’s embeddedness in the systems and structures that they hold up to scrutiny in their work. Thus, for Hutcheon, “complicitous critique” is the central project of postmodern art, in that it “at once inscribes and subverts the conventions and ideologies of the dominant cultural and social forces of the twentiethcentury western world.”82 Both Hartman and Hutcheon recognize how representation itself may be a form of complicity, and Hutcheon’s notion of complicitous critique articulates the potential for forms of artistic representation to examine this complicity in a self-reflexive way. Without wishing to dismiss the possibility of reflexivity in other forms of discourse, I suggest that the flexibility available in literary fiction means that it is capable of conducting this kind of selfcritique. The texts I examine in this book exhibit self-awareness with regard to complicity, and the two features I have discussed in this section—thickness of description and reflexivity—enable them to prompt and challenge their readers with regard to their own embeddedness in systems and ideologies. Insofar as the characters in these fictions are inadequate or dishonest witnesses, they operate at the first of Laub’s levels of witnessing, namely that of bearing witness to one’s own experiences (or, in these cases, failing to do so). Moreover, in the way that these narratives may impel or coax the reader into a position of moral alignment with them, they operate at Laub’s second level, that of bearing witness to the testimonies of others. Yet we also recognize, as readers, the problems of such empathy—consider, for example, how we often sympathize with Ishiguro’s narrators despite their obvious unreliability. The reflexivity created by such tensions, in turn, produces a recognition of the ways that witnessing can fail. This reflexivity is the result of the complex and multifaceted nature of narrative in the novel, and as such it is at Laub’s third level, that of bearing witness to the process of witnessing, that the full potential of fiction is realized. In Hutcheon and Hartman, narrative complicity is a kind of generalized, ontological state resulting from the fact of writers and producers of cultural objects being embedded in the very discourses that they might wish to attack or critique. The same possibility is raised in Olaf Berwald’s more recent argument, in which he asks: “Do noncomplicit texts exist? Are there any literary works of art . . . that successfully outmaneuver systemic violence, resist being instrumentalized by various regimes, and defy being rendered harmless by the market?”83 Berwald is right to identify to pervasive potential for textual complicity, but at the same time, it seems to me that labeling all

20

Introduction

texts as complicit could result in a kind of fatalistic acceptance of contributions to wrongdoing. In the fictions I discuss in this volume, a sense of implication—of inevitable embeddedness—certainly contributes to the presence of complicity, but complicity is also explicitly thematized and examined through the texts’ relationships with specific periods of history, and attending to these specificities avoids universalizing complicity in a way that might itself lead to failures to bear witness to wrongdoing. Some recent articles that have discussed the relationship between literature and complicity in specific social and historical contexts include Cornelia Wächter’s discussion of whether Jackie Kay, in her representation of a transgender protagonist in Trumpet, may also be regarded as “complicit in the very sensationalism her novel accuses the tabloid media of,”84 and Nicolette Barsdorf-Liebchen’s concern, in her discussion of war photography, that photographers may be complicit in a secondary “violation” of victims of war through what is intended as an act of witnessing.85 Notable examples of longer studies of complicity and literature are monographs by Mark Sanders, who explores the role of the intellectual in South Africa during the apartheid era, and Debarati Sanyal and Richard J. Golsan, who discuss the relationship of French writers with the Holocaust. Golsan notes that “the record of the twentieth century proves that a large—indeed shocking—number of intellectuals, artists, and scholars were complicitous with oppressive, authoritarian, racist, and antidemocratic regimes,”86 and Sanyal, Golsan, and Sanders all attempt to work out an ethical role for writers and intellectuals in light of the potential for complicity. Sanyal engages with the notion of “responsibility in complicity,” and specifically how this sense of responsibility may be produced by cultural forms. As such, she examines how “the aesthetic experience of complicity can spur a self-reflexive movement of memory across disparate histories of violence.”87 The term “responsibility in complicity” was employed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a means of calling attention to the widespread potential for complicity in apartheid-era South Africa. As such, she draws on Sanders’s discussion, in which he identifies literature as a site at which complicity, and the responsibility for complicity, may be examined. Sanders states that in South Africa, “the literary work, understood broadly, emerged as the place where intellectuals grappled imaginatively with complicity”88 and that literature “calls upon a reader to assume responsibility for an other in the name of a generalized foldedness in human-being.”89 While these observations generally chime with my own approach, the concept of responsibility in complicity implies that complicity is a kind of blanket condition that may be applied to large groups. Because apartheid was a system of racial segregation, and as such imposed a pregiven status on its citizens, this model is appropriate for the situation in South Africa. However,

Introduction

21

in many cases of complicity, such a priori categories do not necessarily exist, and my own approach is therefore to avoid conflating complicity with any particular subject position, and instead to focus on the specific actions of individuals, the relationship of those actions with larger systems and structures, and the narrative representations of those actions. Moreover, as these examples indicate, the nuances of fiction further complicate any discussion of complicity because we need to account for and differentiate between representations of complicit actions, the way that narrative itself can contribute to complicity, and the way that texts implicate the reader in the wrongdoing represented in the text. In the next section, I set out my own approach to these complexities. APPROACH AND TERMINOLOGY Writing about complicity presents its own particular challenges because, as I have noted earlier, it often sits at a point where it is difficult to determine whether individual agency or larger structures are the determining factor. Moreover, I have written earlier of extending the “lifespan” of complicity, but where a novel represents a gradual slide into complicity, it can be difficult to determine exactly at which point an individual becomes complicit. For example, while Jaromil, the protagonist in Kundera’s Life Is Elsewhere, decisively enters into complicity with the communist regime by betraying his girlfriend to the authorities, in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Stevens presents a knottier problem because he been indoctrinated into his subservient role since childhood to the extent that he is unable to distinguish the provision of service from complicity with his master’s wrongdoing. Linguistically, this poses a problem. If I write that “Stevens’s years of service and the accompanying social and professional expectations result in his complicity with Lord Darlington,” this overstates structural factors and lets him off the hook; but conversely, while the statement “Stevens is complicit with Lord Darlington’s collaboration with the Nazis” is correct, the active voice represents his complicity as a simple fact, effaces the long process of indoctrination by which Stevens comes to play a complicit role, and thus returns us to the kind of thin description that I have used as a point of contrast to the possibilities offered by fiction. For this reason, I have tried to use formulations that acknowledge the role of both structure and agency: as such, for example, we might state that individuals are “impelled” to act in ways complicit with wrongdoing. One of the major challenges in addressing the full lifespan of complicity is the question of when and how the intention to act in a way complicit with wrongdoing emerges. These questions may be difficult to answer simply as a

22

Introduction

result of the many complex decisions that any individual is required to make over the course of their life; moreover, as I have argued earlier, narrative can contribute to complicity not in cases of single, discrete acts, but where it plays a role in repeated or ongoing patterns of social interaction. By way of response to these problems, I employ three specific terms: these are alignment, disposition, and enabling condition. I use “alignment” to describe the way that an individual’s personal, political, or ideological allegiances shape their behavior, often as a result of beliefs or interests shared with other members of that group. These alignments may be explicitly acknowledged or tacitly held. Complicity is usually preceded or accompanied by an alignment that places a degree of pressure on that individual. This pressure is not necessarily coercive, and again to return to Jaromil, he voluntarily aligns himself with the communist regime. In fact, one of the most challenging fictions in this study, Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, shows how care, and the alignment of values and interests with family and friends, produce complicity in a system of mass murder. Rothberg uses similar vocabulary when he writes that “implicated subjects occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without themselves being direct agents of harm,”90 and we are essentially talking about the same thing. However, if implication is a less active a form of culpability than complicity, the distinction between the two depends on actions performed as a result of the particular alignments held by any individual. Such actions result from the ways in which alignments of individuals create specific “dispositions.” My use of this second term is prompted by Larry May’s discussion of genocide, in which he writes that “mass killing cannot normally take place in a region where people have the disposition to act to protect each other.”91 Here, May uses “disposition” to represent something more general than a specific intention, and that functions at a degree of remove from the complicit act itself. In this study, I therefore use the term “disposition” to describe the general inclinations of an individual that make certain types of action possible, and more specifically to their state of mind prior to a specific intention manifesting itself in action. For example, to return to Jaromil, we might say that he is generally disposed to place his loyalty to larger causes above his loyalty to individuals. This disposition is what makes it acceptable for him to betray his girlfriend and to produce a plethora of justifications for doing so. The term “disposition” thus articulates the state of mind wherein a particular type of action moves into the realm of the acceptable, or even simply the thinkable, for a given individual. Dispositions and alignments describe individuals’ personal and relational inclinations, and the term “enabling conditions” places these in their social context. Moreover and more importantly, I use this term to articulate how actions that do not appear to bear a direct cause-and-effect relationship with

Introduction

23

wrongdoing may nevertheless be contributing factors. This term is in part an elaboration on Mellema’s use of the term “enabling harm” to describe how a complicit party’s actions are a necessary condition of another’s wrongdoing.92 More directly, it is an adaptation of Jonathan Long’s use of the term when he writes that, in W. G. Sebald’s work, modernity is represented as an “enabling condition of genocide.”93 I use the term “enabling conditions” in order to articulate the way that repeated or ongoing patterns of behavior create the conditions for wrongdoing to occur, often in collective, social situations. For example, revisiting the example of condoning given earlier in this introduction: if a violent act is repeatedly forgiven or excused, this repeated condoning itself becomes an enabling condition of further violence. This term, then, is an attempt to express how individual acts that, in themselves, may not appear to be causal contributions to wrongdoing in fact enable such behaviors and can therefore be regarded as forms of complicity. To bring all three of these terms together, let us return to the example of Levi’s comments on German complicity: we might say that mass connivance was an enabling condition of the Holocaust, and that the disposition to connive at the atrocity was created by ordinary Germans’ alignment with the Nazi regime. In addition to using the terms described earlier, the other main aspect of note in my approach is to examine complicity in literary texts on three levels. The first of these, and the most straightforward, is the thematic representation of complicity in the novels through protagonists and narrators. For the most part, these characters act at a remove from the center of historical events but nevertheless contribute, often in small ways, to the perpetration of atrocity. More often, the stories that the characters tell and want to believe influence the ways in which they and others act. As such, their behavior contributes to the perpetuation of discourses and systems of thought that help to create enabling conditions for wrongdoing or atrocity. This thematic level is therefore an examination of how not only actions but also discourse may contribute to complicity. This first level examines complicity from an extradiegetic position, but remaining only at this first level implies that we can separate ourselves from complicit acts and place the individuals in question under a moral or legal microscope in order to examine their actions from outside. However, as Hutcheon’s notion of complicit critique suggests, we are all embedded in economic, political, and ideological structures. Not only does this mean that our observations and representations of the world can never be fully objective, but it also means that we ourselves may be complicit with wrongdoing enacted in the name of those structures, or at least enabled by them. The question that follows is of how to identify the blind spots present in the representations that perpetuate these ideologies.

24

Introduction

The reflexivity of literary fiction provides a potential route out of this bind. The second type of complicity, which I refer to as formal complicity, examines the role of narrative. Many of the texts discussed in this volume foreground the act of writing or of constructing a narrative: Rambert’s testimony in The Plague, the retrospective, self-justifying narratives of Ishiguro’s protagonists, and Sebald’s inclusion of archival material stand out, but all of these writers exhibit an awareness that complicity may inhere in narrative. In the previous section, I noted other critics’ concerns with the potential for narrative to contribute to complicity, and my general claim in this volume is that the creation of narrative can be a form of complicity when it enacts failures of witnessing. Formal complicity occurs when narrative representation embodies a failure of witnessing, and when that failure becomes an enabling condition of wrongdoing, often by allowing that wrong to continue unchecked. In literary fiction, however, the picture is more complicated because there exist numerous levels of narrative, such as those created by characters within the text, as well as the framework of the text itself. These two levels might differ only in terms of interpretation: for example, in Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day, we are not offered anything outside Ono’s and Stevens’s narratives, yet there exists a critical distance between, say, Ono’s failure to bear witness to his own complicity with imperialism and our own interpretative stance as postwar readers. When Elizabeth Gilbert uses the term “narratological complicity” to describe how “the readers’ willing suspension of disbelief is operationalized and exposed,”94 she is describing the critical distance between these two levels: we may instinctively read with empathy, but the texts under discussion here show how that empathy can produce complicit alignments. As such, the interplay between these levels of narrative often prompts us to recognize the blind spots present in narrative representations. In this way, the reflexivity present in literary fiction produces an awareness of a third level of complicity, which I call empathetic complicity. Two examples of concern with the potential for empathetic complicity in recent scholarship can be found in Jenni Adams essay on Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, and in Docherty’s Complicity. In the former, Adams notes that “curiosity and pursuit of the absolute” are often motivating factors in reading about the Holocaust, and she argues that Littell’s novel results in the “implication of the reader herself on an uncomfortable continuum of complicity with genocide as spectacle.”95 Docherty provides a more direct example, arguing that, by the end of The Merchant of Venice, “we have been made complicit with an act of pure vengeance, pure Old Testamentary revenge of an anti-Semitic and racist nature.”96 Adams refers to implication while Docherty evokes complicity, and this distinction raises the question of whether acts of reading or spectatorship can really be regarded as forms of

Introduction

25

complicity, or should be classified as types of implication. When Rothberg writes that “implicated subjects occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without themselves being direct agents of harm,”97 he does not, in this general definition, specify how subjects come to be aligned in that way. Retaining the distinction between implication and complicity that I have posited earlier, wherein the latter occurs where agency is asserted, I suggest that, if such alignments are the result of deliberate acts of reading, interpretation and consumption, we may regard them as acts of empathetic complicity. I therefore use “empathetic complicity” to refer to situations in which reading becomes a form of alignment with characters and ideologies present in the text. In the example earlier, Docherty seems to anticipate the audience’s response to Shylock’s defeat, but such empathetic complicit alignments are not a given. The way that the novels discussed in this book make visible the process of representation prompts us to recognize how both writing and reading are active forms of positioning, and as such are acts by which an individual can enter into complicitous relationships with narrative, or may indeed attempt to resist complicity. In particular, these texts alert us to the ways in which genre and related narrative forms can carry in them certain values and assumptions, which contain their own biases and blind spots, and therefore conduct a reflexive critique of narrative itself and of the act of reading. TRAJECTORY AND TEXTS I dedicate one chapter to each of the authors discussed in this volume, keeping to chronological order as far as possible, although some overlap and different lengths of career mean that it is impossible to follow chronology exactly (Pynchon and Atwood have both been writing for over fifty years while Sebald’s literary works were produced in the space of only thirteen). The general trajectory is from individual complicity dilemmas in Camus, Kundera, and Ishiguro to a concern with the collective nature of complicity in Sebald, Pynchon, and Atwood, although the pressure exerted by individuals’ particular alignments means that the line between the line between individual and collective complicity is not always clear. In each chapter, I address the three forms of complicity—thematic, formal and empathetic—that I have discussed earlier, generally in that order. However, the emphasis placed on each varies from text to text, and the way that the formal properties of texts work to make empathetic claims on the reader means that these often overlap, so the second and third levels are often addressed together. In the first chapter, I discuss Albert Camus’s The Outsider ([1942] 2018), The Plague ([1947] 2004), and The Fall ([1956] 2004). I argue that The Outsider shows how aligning oneself with another individual can create a

26

Introduction

disposition in which killing becomes possible. In my discussion of the two later novels, I use Felman’s two essays on Camus in Testimony as the basis for my discussion of complicity in his work. Felman argues that, in the movement from The Plague to The Fall, Camus shifts from representing the recording of history to its non-recording, and as such from the notion of resistance to the notion of complicity.98 I take up this thread by addressing in greater detail the way in which failures of witnessing in these novels can be regarded as forms of complicity. I do so, in part, by reading the texts against Camus’s own actions, specifically his participation in the French Resistance (an actively anti-complicit position) and contrast this with the representational blind spots regarding colonial oppression and violence. I suggest that in The Plague, despite the novel’s reflexive examination of the nature of testimony, this contradiction remains a puzzle. Camus is aware of the fact that representational omissions may be culpable, but does not propose an ethical solution to this quandary. In contrast, in The Fall, silences and omissions are brought to the foreground, but Camus’s purpose in doing so is to make these silences speak. Through this move, he draws our attention to nature of those omissions and hence to the nature of formal complicity. In the chapter on Milan Kundera, I focus on his novels set in Czechoslovakia and in which the complicity dilemmas for those living under totalitarian rule shape the events and form of the narratives. In three of the novels, The Joke ([1967] 1992), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting ([1979] 1996), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being ([1984] 1999), the protagonists attempt to resist complicity with the communist regime, and suffer significant consequences for doing so. The other novel discussed in this chapter, Life Is Elsewhere ([1973] 2000), differs in that the protagonist actively aligns himself with the regime and is complicit with the persecution that it perpetrates against suspected dissidents. In all four novels, Kundera is concerned with the relationship between artistic creation and complicity, showing how the aesthetic underlies particular dispositions, and how individuals’ efforts to project artistic form onto their lives push them into complicit alignments. In chapter 3, I discuss Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (1986), The Remains of the Day (1989), When We Were Orphans (2000), and Never Let Me Go (2005). Of all the novels included in this volume, the first two of these most explicitly thematize complicity. Masuji Ono and Stevens have both contributed in relatively small ways, but nevertheless palpably, to abhorrent causes during and around World War II, Ono by producing imperialist propaganda and Stevens through his unstinting support for a master who conspires with the Nazis. However, the way that both narrators strive to construct self-condoning narratives invites the reader into empathetic complicity with them, and the tension between these sympathies and our judgment of the characters’ earlier actions are what drive these novels. When We Were

Introduction

27

Orphans and Never Let Me Go begin the transition to complicities in which characters are hopelessly embedded: in the former, the crime with which the Banks family is complicit—the opium trade in China—is not only transnational and systemic, but Banks is implicated in ways that he is not even aware of until relatively late in is life. Never Let Me Go presents a similar form of entanglement, with the clones indoctrinated in their roles from birth, and hence manipulated into complicity with their own deaths as well as those of their friends and peers. In chapter 4, I discuss W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn ([1995] 2002) and Austerlitz (2001). The Rings of Saturn employs its digressive form, in which the narrator relates histories that grow outwards from encounters during his walk around Suffolk, to greatly expand the scale of the systems in which he is embedded—and hence to expand the potential for complicity. In particular, Sebald indicts modernity for many of the catastrophes that accumulate in the narrative, and the text also strives to make connections between advances in civilization and the destruction of the natural environment that inevitably results. As such, Sebald finds a way of dramatizing and giving form to what Rob Nixon has called the “slow violence” of environmental degradation,99 and this is a theme to which I return in the chapter on Atwood. Austerlitz initially appears to be a very different novel, concerned with a single, traumatized protagonist rather than the large-scale ebb and flow of historical forces. However, and reading counter to much of the existing criticism, I argue that the second half of the novel, which describes Jacques Austerlitz’s search for this history of his parents, is concerned with the way that memory is mediated into the present, and therefore also with the formal complicities present in that process of mediation. Chapter 5 examines three of Thomas Pynchon’s novels, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Vineland (1990), and Bleeding Edge (2013). Pynchon’s novels present a different model of complicity from the other works discussed here. Whereas the other authors tend to represent characters or narrators who are complicit with wrongdoing, Pynchon’s complicities take the form of military, industrial, and corporate conspiracies planned and enacted by those in positions of power—circles of influence from which, for the most part, the protagonists are excluded. While these conspiracies largely develop out of view of the main characters, the atrocities and dirty wars perpetrated by the U.S. government are at the same time represented as open secrets that have also secured ongoing American prosperity. This comfortable lifestyle, in other words, works as the screen in ordinary Americans’ culpable ignorance of their government’s actions. The Crying of Lot 49 shows how systems of communication, in this case the postal service, are implicated in the circulation of dirty money. This early novel suggests the possibility of an anti-complicit position through the underground postal organization known as the Tristero,

28

Introduction

but by the time of Vineland’s publication, Pynchon presents the counterculture no longer as the site of resistance, but of complicity. The novel details the betrayals that lead to the implosion of the radical community in California, and it examines how developments in film technology fail to result in the medium being employed as an effective form of witnessing of government repression. Pynchon’s most recent novel, Bleeding Edge, returns to systems of communication, this time in the form of the internet. However, while The Crying of Lot 49 posits the possibility of communication as resistance, Bleeding Edge implies that, by impelling users of the internet to become participants in that system, almost everyone becomes complicit in a new stage of neoliberal development. In the sixth and final chapter, I discuss Margaret Atwood’s dystopias in The Handmaid’s Tale ([1985] 1998) and its sequel The Testaments (2019), and in the MaddAddam Trilogy (2003–2013). In both scenarios, environmental disaster and the collapse of civil society are intertwined, but in the former, the political disaster is emphasized; whereas, in the latter, environmental degradation is the defining feature of the dystopia. The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments draw heavily on European totalitarianism for their imagery. However, from what can be inferred, the regime in Gilead came to power with popular support, that is, with the complicity of the population that it later oppressed. In contrast to the political constraints of the Gilead novels, the MaddAddam Trilogy shows the consequences of neoliberalism having run riot. Technology before the collapse is shown to be capable of delivering almost any desire that human beings may possess, but those desires have no limit and lead to the ever-greater consumption of resources. In other words, the fascistic oppression of The Handmaids Tale has been replaced by a situation in which the very freedom of choice that acts as the economic motor of late capitalism, driving desire, acquisition, and consumption is shown to be complicit with the ultimate destruction of that society. I began this introduction with Primo Levi’s account of his experiences is Auschwitz, and the crime of the Holocaust overhangs the questions of culpability and complicity addressed in this book. Albert Camus’s career spanned the period during which Europe was forced to confront these questions as it emerged from World War II, and it is his fiction to which I turn first. NOTES 1. Levi, Drowned, 4. 2. Levi, Drowned, 23. 3. See Sue Vice and Jenni Adams (eds.), Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film (2013) for an overview of these issues as they pertain to the

Introduction

29

Holocaust. Also relevant are Stuart Taberner and Karina Berger’s introduction to their edited volume Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic, and W. G. Sebald’s essay “Air War and Literature,” which triggered a significant amount of debate on the status of Germans as victims. Notable examples of recent novels addressing German perpetrators include Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader and Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room. Taberner and Berger, “Introduction,” 3–4, 8; Sebald, “Air War”; Schlink, The Reader; Seiffert, The Dark Room. 4. Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders. 5. Bauer’s speech is reproduced in Rethinking the Holocaust (2001), and ends with three “commandments” against becoming victims, perpetrators, or “passive onlookers to mass murder, genocide, or (may it never be repeated) a Holocaust-like tragedy,” 273. 6. Barnett, “Bystander,” 636. 7. Barnett, “Bystander,” 638. 8. Meister, After Evil, viii, 212. 9. Robbins, Beneficiary. 10. Rothberg, Implicated Subject, 1. 11. Rothberg, Implicated Subject, 16. 12. Rothberg, Implicated Subject, 15. 13. Rothberg, Implicated Subject, 48. 14. Jackson, International Law, 11. 15. Lepora and Goodin, Compromise, 82–83. 16. Kadish, “Reckless Complicity,” 369. 17. Lepora and Goodin, Compromise, chapter 3. 18. Jackson, International Law, 32. 19. Mellema, Moral Accountability, chapter 2. As Mellema notes, Aquinas does not use the term “complicity” as he is concerned with the concept of sin. However, insofar as Aquinas is describing how a secondary actor can contribute to a principal’s wrongdoing, he is essentially talking about the same thing. 20. Kadish, “Cause and Blame,” 354. 21. Jackson, International Law, 162. 22. Jackson, International Law, 62–64. 23. Kutz, Collective Age, 113. 24. Kutz, Collective Age, 119. 25. Afxentiou, Dunford and Neu, “Introduction,” 2. 26. Afxentiou, Dunford and Neu, “Introduction,” 4. 27. Docherty, Commitment and Collaboration, 9–10. 28. Sanders, Complicities, 11. 29. Afxentiou, Dunford and Neu, “Introduction,” 2. 30. Afxentiou, Dunford and Neu, “Introduction,” 8–9. 31. Reynolds, “Articulations,” 121. 32. Laub, “Event,” 78. 33. Laub, “Event,” 80. 34. Laub, “Listening,” 57. 35. Laub, “Event,” 75. 36. Laub, “Listening,” 69.

30

Introduction

37. Trezise, “History and Psychoanalysis,” 10–11 and throughout. 38. Laub, “Holocaust Testimony,” 140. The two articles (Laub, “Holocaust Testimony” and Trezise, “History and Psychoanalysis”) were published in History and Memory, in 2008 and 2009, respectively, and unfortunately took on something of a personal tone. This should not obscure the fact that both arguments have merits. Laub shows how testimony must be understood in the context of the interview and the larger framework of the relationship that allows testimony to be narrated and heard. Ironically, Trezise’s focus on the importance of the reception of testimony, and the framework in which that reception takes place, is not a distant position from Laub’s in some respects. Tresize elaborates this position at greater length in his monograph Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony (2013). 39. Laub, “Holocaust Testimony,” 142. 40. Agamben, Remnants, 17. 41. Campbell, “Testimonial Modes,” 88. 42. Campbell, “Testimonial Modes,” 88. 43. Eaglestone, Holocaust and Postmodern, 42–43. 44. Caruth, “After the End.” 45. Felman, “Fire,” 55. 46. Assmann, “Genre,” 268 47. Caruth, Trauma and Caruth, Experience. 48. In it, Felman seeks to examine the “hidden link between trials and traumas.” Felman, Unconscious, 1. 49. Crownshaw, Kilby and Rowland (eds.), The Future of Memory. 50. Beulens, Durrant and Eaglestone (eds.), The Future of Trauma Theory. 51. Kilby and Rowland (eds.), The Future of Testimony. 52. Rothberg, “Preface,” xiii–xiv. Emphasis in original. 53. LaCapra, “Fascism,” 23. 54. Eaglestone, Holocaust and Postmodern, 32. 55. Craps, “Beyond Eurocentrism,” 46. He develops these arguments at length in his 2012 monograph Postcolonial Witnessing. 56. Meister, After Evil, viii. 57. Meister, After Evil, 212. 58. Vivian, Commonplace Witnessing, 79–80. 59. Laub, “Event”, 91. 60. Mellema, Moral Accountability, chapter 2. 61. Lepora and Goodin, Compromise, 43–49. 62. Lepora and Goodin, Compromise, 42. 63. Lepora and Goodin, Compromise, 47. 64. Lepora and Goodin, Compromise, 45. 65. Lepora and Goodin, Compromise, 48. 66. Lepora and Goodin, Compromise, 46. 67. Eaglestone, Broken Voice, 16. 68. Luban, “Contrived Ignorance,” 959. 69. Smith employs the terms “benighting act” and “unwitting wrongful act,” but I use Luban’s terms here and throughout this volume. Smith, “Culpable Ignorance,” 547.

Introduction

31

70. The term “thick description” is associated with the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. He contrasts thin description, which notes only surface behaviors, with thick description, which adds context and interpretation in order to produce a fuller account of the significance of actions. Geertz, “Thick Description.” 71. Laub, “Event”, 75. 72. Jackson, International Law, 109. 73. Thomas, “Blind,” 162, 167. 74. Wächter and Wirth, “The Chapters,” 22. 75. George F. Marcus suggests that complicity is in fact vital to ethnographic fieldwork. He describes how Clifford Geertz’s presence at a cockfight in Bali not only provided him with the material for his famous essay, but also how, in fleeing from a police raid with the other villagers, created a sense of complicity that conferred upon him the insider status that enabled him to conduct his fieldwork. Marcus, “Anthropological Fieldwork,” 85–86. 76. Levi, If, 382; Wiesel, Day, x. 77. Adorno returned to this theme a number of times over the years. In Negative Dialectics, he wrote that “after Auschwitz, our feelings may resist and claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate.” Adorno, Dialectics, 361. 78. Vivian, Commonplace Witnessing, 7. See also White, “Figural Realism” and Young “Literary Testimony.” 79. Vice, Holocaust Fiction, 9. 80. Hartman, “Aesthetics,” 386. Emphasis in original. 81. Hartman, “Aesthetics,” 388. 82. Hutcheon, Politics, 11. 83. Berwald, “Guilt,” 75. 84. Wächter, “Loyalty,” 92. 85. Barsdorf-Liebchen, “Violation,” 206. 86. Golsan, French Writers, 6. 87. Sanyal, Memory, 14–15. 88. Sanders, Complicities, x. 89. Sanders, Complicities, 17. 90. Rothberg, Implicated Subject, 1. 91. May, Genocide, 262. 92. Mellema, Moral Accountability, chapter 4. 93. Long, Image, 1. 94. Gilbert, “Child Protagonist,” 130. 95. Adams, “Violence,” 29–30. 96. Docherty, Commitment and Collaboration, 60. 97. Rothberg, Implicated Subject, 1. 98. Felman, “The Fall,” 168. 99. Nixon, Slow Violence.

Chapter 1

Complicit Silences Albert Camus

Albert Camus’s life and literary career were shaped by his childhood in French Algeria and by the occupation of France during World War II, two situations in which the potential for complicity was present. Camus took great personal risks in writing for the underground newspaper Combat during the occupation, and indeed used its pages to call for retributive justice following France’s liberation. In an editorial written in mid-1945, Camus made a clear moral distinction when he wrote of an “unhappy, war-torn Europe, divided between victims and executioners.”1 However, troubled by what he called a “conspiracy of silence” on the left with regard to Stalin’s atrocities,2 Camus saw parallels between the behavior of his former political allies and those who collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. For this reason, his position became more nuanced, and by the end of 1946, in a series of articles titled “Neither Victims nor Executioners,” he instead drew a distinction between “those who if need be would be willing to commit murder or become accomplices to murder, and those who would refuse to do so with every fiber of their being.”3 In this way, he moved from a straightforward distinction between innocence and guilt toward a position that acknowledged degrees of complicity. Camus’s relationship with the events of World War II led him to represent and explore through formal and narrative experiments the nature of complicity and the difficult choices to be made from a compromised position. In particular, his novels explore the relationship between witnessing and complicity: his narrator in The Plague, the doctor Rieux, confronts the plague directly and as such is an unrivalled eyewitness to the event, whereas in The Fall, the central event is a suicide in the Seine that the narrator, the former lawyer Clamence, fails to see. Yet The Fall’s pointed focus on a failure of witnessing introduces a puzzling paradox with regard to the other formative aspect of Camus’s life, in that his fiction seems to lack same critical 33

34

Chapter 1

awareness with regard to the situation in Algeria. Camus was well aware of the suffering of the native population, and used his journalism to criticize French attitudes toward, and rulership of, Algeria,4 and to advocate on behalf of the Arab and Berber populations.5 In both The Outsider6 and The Plague, however, the Arab and Berber populations are almost entirely effaced and the social injustice addressed in his journalism is conspicuously absent from his fiction. For this reason, Martin Crowley argues that Camus’s work exhibits a “refusal to consider his own class, working-class French Algerians, as structurally complicit in the injustices of colonialism,”7 even though Meursault’s murder of an Arab is the central event of his first novel. Camus’s novels therefore seem to contain precisely the kind of failures of witnessing I have described in the introduction. In his role as a journalist, Camus was a chronicler both of French oppression of the native population in Algeria and later of the French population under German occupation. Sanyal argues that “throughout Camus’s corpus, complicity . . . can serve as the foundation for both totalitarian terror and ethical responsibility”8 and her readings of Camus—to which I refer throughout this chapter—focus on the ways that his novels bring together multiple histories of victimization, and in doing so make productive connections between the Holocaust and colonial Algeria. In my own account, I argue that Camus used all of the formal flexibility available to literature to probe, examine, and problematize the nature of witnessing. Moreover, elisions and silences are central formal properties of The Outsider, The Plague, and The Fall. These omissions are suggestive of culpable ignorance, but I argue that they function to make those silences speak, both of the atrocities that they elide, and of the failures of witnessing contained in the narratives. I begin by discussing The Outsider, and the chain of events leading to Meursault’s murder of an unnamed Arab. This sequence begins with Meursault entering into complicity with Raymond Sintès’s plans for revenge on his mistress. I argue that the contingencies leading to the murder show how complicit dispositions and alignments are created. In contrast, the second half of the novel undertakes an examination of the role of language in creating and perpetuating blind spots by presenting an instance of misdirected testimony. Finally, I note that the reception of the novel is an interesting case of empathetic complicity, because readers of The Outsider—at least initially— displayed a disturbing willingness to hail Meursault as a martyr, and to focus on the metaphysical aspects of the novel at the expense of its colonial politics. In the second part of this chapter, I discuss The Plague. The novel has frequently been read as an allegory either for France under German occupation or for the Holocaust, but it also embodies the tension between Camus’s attempts to bear witness to history as it overtook Europe, and his simultaneous failure to address in his fiction the violence and suffering inflicted by

Complicit Silences

35

France on the native population of Algeria. The difficulties of testifying are embodied in the narrator Rieux, who states his aim to act as a neutral and honest witness to the effect of the plague but finds that these efforts are inevitably compromised. In the third and final section of this chapter, I discuss The Fall. The novel is narrated by Jean-Baptiste Clamence, whose failure to witness a suicide in the Seine results in him creating a self-accusing narrative in which he also seeks to implicate the reader in his guilt. Clamence’s failure of witnessing is highly suggestive of collective, political failures. I argue that the novel is also suggestive of a systemic blindness among the professional classes who may not dominate history, but who are implicated in it, and whose daily perpetuation of values and discourses nevertheless shape the attitudes and dispositions by which society operates. I also argue that The Fall represents Camus’s most sophisticated exploration of the ways in which silence can be made eloquent through the use of literary form. MISDIRECTED TESTIMONY: THE OUTSIDER In the introduction to this book, I have made the claim that complicity often arises from a willingness to look away from wrongdoing and its causes. Culpable ignorance enables individuals to adopt dispositions from which contributing to or condoning wrongdoing become permissible. I begin my examination of the relationship between complicity and literary fiction with a discussion of Camus’s The Outsider, because it is a novel that embodies precisely these tendencies. Enabling Violence In the central event of The Outsider, the protagonist Meursault is unequivocally guilty of, rather than merely complicit with, the murder of the unnamed Arab. The murder itself is represented as almost involuntary, with Meursault describing the first shot as follows: “The sky seemed to split apart from end to end to pour its fire down upon me. My whole body tensed as I gripped the gun more tightly. It set off the trigger.”9 Meursault thus effaces his own agency in the murder, and in fact the whole description of the events leading up to it is rendered in terms of a momentum that he is unable to arrest, as is shown when he walks toward the site of the killing feeling that “an entire beach pulsating with sun pressed me to go on.”10 Meursault states of the first shot that he fires that “it was then, with that sharp, deafening sound, that it all began,”11 but the irony of his comment is that the chain of events that builds in momentum toward the murder begins

36

Chapter 1

much earlier, in his complicity with Raymond Sintès. The latter is a deeply unpleasant misogynist, who plans his revenge against his mistress on the basis of her unproven infidelity. Meursault begins in a position of apathy, responding to Raymond’s narration of his relationship with the woman with a kind of detached intellectual engagement, stating “I told him that I didn’t have any opinion about it, but that I found it interesting.”12 Raymond then asks Meursault what he would do in the same situation. In other words, at this point, Raymond explicitly asks Meursault to empathize with him. However, rather than engaging empathetically—either by recoiling in horror at the thought that he might commit violence or by taking seriously Raymond’s suggestion that he put himself in the latter’s shoes—Meursault continues in a detached vein while munching on his black pudding: “I told him that you can never know for sure, but I could understand that he wanted to punish her.”13 Meursault’s half-hearted engagement becomes complicity, however, when he agrees, apparently without reservations, to write a letter to Raymond’s mistress intended to lure her back. Meursault is therefore culpable when the woman returns and is subjected to physical violence at Raymond’s hands. From his position outside the door, Meursault reports that “we heard a few muffled sounds, followed by the woman screaming so horribly that in a flash everyone rushed out onto the landing,”14 but he neither intervenes nor calls the police. Finally, when Meursault agrees to act as a character witness for Raymond, his only reservation is procedural rather than moral as he is unsure what the latter wants him to say. In the space of several pages, then, Camus shows how an individual can slide from a position of apathy to one of complicity. This transition is enabled by Meursault’s disposition, which is a tendency to align himself with the other party in the absence of any overwhelming reason not to do so. This disposition is suggested by the presence of a pair of double-negatives that book-end this section of the novel: the first occurs when Meursault, despite being aware of Raymond’s reputation, states that “I don’t have any reason not to talk to him”15 and the second when he agrees to write the letter and recalls that “I tried to write it in a way that would make Raymond happy because I had no reason not to make him happy.”16 This apathy enables Meursault’s complicity with Raymond, and is also evident later when he pulls the trigger for want of any restraining principle. Lepora and Goodin set the minimum threshold for complicity at the level of a knowing, causal contribution to wrongdoing, and the implication of this definition is that complicit acts are the exception rather than the rule; yet for one who adopts Meursault’s apathetic disposition, the potential for complicity does not seem to bring any moral weight to bear on his decisions. Patrick McCarthy argues that Meursault’s murder of the Arab has political roots, and “is surely an expression of the violence that lay beneath the surface of

Complicit Silences

37

assimilation.”17 Perhaps, but Meursault’s representation of events is notorious in the way that it frustrates any effort at interpretation by providing very little in terms of his own thoughts. The apparent lack of any internal struggle indicates the point I am making here: aligning oneself with the interests of another without sufficient reflection can quickly become an unquestioned disposition, and this disposition may, in turn, lead to complicity or even to active wrongdoing. Erasing Violence Meursault’s much-noted refusal to reveal his motives is, of course, part of the novel’s aesthetic project: as John Cruickshank argues, “the meaningful world of the first-person narrator, which was at one time accepted without question, is replaced by a world of incoherence.”18 Such readings are evidence of the impact of Camus’s formal innovations. Yet the interpretative brick wall that we come up against when trying to divine Meursault’s motivations is more problematic in political terms because one aspect of the novel’s “incoherence” is its representational erasure of the Arab population of Algeria. As I have noted earlier, Camus was well aware of the situation of the colonized population in Algeria, but in failing to represent the same sections of the population in any detail in The Outsider, Camus seems to exhibit his own representational blind spot. For this reason, as Sanyal notes, “if Camus is regularly taught in classrooms as a figure of Resistance and a critic of totalitarianism, he also stands accused of symbolic collaboration with colonialism.”19 Certainly, in the case of The Outsider, the Arab victim of the murder is never fully developed as an individual, and the description of Meursault’s trial in the second half of the novel also almost entirely ignores him. As a result of omissions such as these, Sanyal also notes that Camus’s allegories produce “mutually exclusive readings” wherein his “readers convert his ambiguous figures into a singular frame of reference and turn to the historical record in support of this or that accusation or defense.”20 Sanyal counters such readings, arguing that Camus’s fictions make connections between these histories of violence. I agree, but focus in this section on the self-reflexivity of his texts with regard to failures of witnessing and resulting complicities. In the way that narrative is constructed around the absent figure of this victim, I suggest, The Outsider conducts a self-reflexive examination of how language and testimony may fail. Specifically, Camus uses juxtaposition in the first half of the novel to gesture toward the characters’ own blind spots, while in the second half, the absurdity of the court’s obsession with Meursault’s mother acts as a commentary on the failings of legal discourse and the social structures that it is supposed to represent and uphold.

38

Chapter 1

Because the novel exclusively comprises Meursault’s limited narrative, we are given very little in the way of an external critical angle on his representation of events. However, Camus uses juxtaposition to provide us with a degree of leverage on Meursault’s account. For example, Meursault’s description of Raymond’s plans for revenge against his mistress is framed by two references to Salamano’s mistreatment of his dog. In the first, before Raymond elaborates his plan, Meursault reports that “once, when we were talking about Salamano, he also said: ‘It’s awful!’”21 Although we might miss the irony of Raymond condemning Salamano’s violence toward a dog moments before unfolding his own plans for a much worse, premeditated act, the second reference (“in Salamano’s room, the dog was whimpering softly”)22 is the aural background to the two men shaking hands on the plan. The disjunction between Raymond’s condemnation of Salamano and his own misogyny alerts us to the blind spots in his own moral framework—and, by extension, in Meursault’s, given the latter’s complicity in Raymond’s scheme. As the novel progresses, it increasingly indicates the potential for discourse to be used in bad faith. It does so by showing how witnessing may fail, and how testimony may be misdirected. This critical process begins with Meursault acting as a witness for Raymond. In contrast to the model of witnessing proposed by Felman and Laub, and discussed in the introduction, Meursault does not testify in good faith. He responds to Raymond’s request by saying, “as far as I was concerned, it didn’t matter in the least but I didn’t know what he wanted me to say,”23 indicating that he is happy to align his testimony with Raymond’s interests rather than attempting to establish the truth. We later learn that he testified to the woman’s being “disrespectful” toward Raymond, and Meursault reports, without further comment, that Raymond “got off with a warning. No one had verified my statement.”24 Meursault’s testimony in this case thus ensures that justice is not done, and cements his complicity with Raymond’s violence. Failures of witnessing, and consequently of justice, are explored more fully, and on a systemic level, in Meursault’s account of the trial. Meursault’s initial complicity with Raymond is performed through language, namely in writing the letter and in acting as a witness. However, because his earlier physical actions are represented (literally re-presented) through language during the trial, and because his incarceration following the murder means that any possibility of physical action is removed, the later stages of the novel perform a more explicit and reflexive examination of the uses of language and rhetoric. Specifically, the absurdity of the way that the trial becomes obsessed with Meursault’s failure to mourn his mother with sufficient aplomb comments on how a privileged section of a population can become structurally blind through being enmeshed with the legal, social, and administrative mechanisms that de-value the lives of other sections of that population.

Complicit Silences

39

This embeddedness turns from implication in those values and systems into active complicity during the co-construction of Meursault’s defense: as Brian T. Fitch argues, in Meursault’s first meeting with his lawyer, “not only is the search for the truth in the form of the accused’s actual motivation not pursued with any diligence, but the truth is systematically and automatically suppressed once it shows signs of emerging and becoming available for public scrutiny.”25 Meursault’s own complicity with this misdirection of his testimony again seems to have its causes in his own apathy rather than in any explicit political agenda. In particular, the way that he repeatedly evokes things being “natural” as a justification for them being as they are indicates a lack of reflection rather than any specific motivation for this self-suppression. For example, he seeks his lawyer’s sympathy “because it was natural to feel that way”26 and when he learns that his sentence cannot be overturned, this also seems “completely natural.”27 Meursault’s comments indicate that he is implicated in these discourses to the extent that he is no longer aware of the ways in which they act on him. The trial, of course, is in no way natural, being an elaborate construction based on social values and a complex legal system. Its absurdity reveals both its social nature, and Meursault’s blindness toward the way that he remains aligned to these norms despite them acting as the framework for the judgment that is being passed upon him. For this reason, while he has been interpreted as a rebel who challenges the hypocrisy of social norms, other than his unwillingness to adopt a false posture of mourning, Meursault actually accepts the implied values of this discourse to a large extent. This acceptance is evident in the way that Meursault and the others present at the trial share a disposition that effaces the victim of the crime from proceedings. This erasure is enacted by the prosecutor framing Meursault’s crime in terms of his unwillingness to mourn his mother, and the forthcoming trial of a parricide. Meursault summarizes the prosecutor’s argument as follows: He believed that a man who had, morally speaking, murdered his mother cut himself off from human society in the same way as someone who had actually laid a murderous hand upon the person who gave him life. In any case, the first crime paved way for the second and, in some respects, even legitimized it.28

Within the logic of the prosecutor’s rhetoric, the murder of the Arab cannot simply stand for itself, but must be valued in terms of equivalences that are meaningful to the non-Arab population. He actually goes further, and when he states that “the man sitting in the dock is just as guilty of murder as the man whom this court will judge [the parricide] tomorrow,”29 the murder of the Arab no longer seems exist: not only does the prosecutor’s “just as guilty”

40

Chapter 1

betray an assumption that the murder of the Arab somehow counts for less than the parricide, but any explicit reference to the Arab has long since been erased from his argument. The court accepts the prosecutor’s logic and, as such, Meursault seems to be found guilty not so much for murder of the Arab as for his failure to adequately display the expected social values and behaviors. For this reason, the trial can be seen as an example of a failed process of witnessing. Campbell writes of criminal trials that “testimony re-presents a social world to the finder of fact by providing knowledge of the social connections that make ‘the totality’ of the facts of the case” and in doing so “describes not a visible world of facts, but rather reveals an invisible world of social relations.”30 In the case of the trial in The Outsider, the question remains as to whether the failure of testimony is sufficient to direct our attention to the victims who have been erased by the discourse of the trial. While the second half of the novel is surely not meant as a mimetic critique of the justice system in Algeria, critical responses indicate that the novel does not always succeed in announcing itself as a self-reflexive examination of how language establishes and enacts the discourse of a dominant group. For example, Conor Cruise O’Brien notes that a court in French Algeria would not have condemned Meursault to death for killing an Arab, and argues that this inaccuracy “implicitly denies the colonial reality and sustains the colonial fiction” on the basis that Camus’s representation of the court erases ethnic difference.31 If O’Brien misses much of the reflexivity of The Outsider, reception of the novel prior to his reading—one of the first readings to really foreground its colonial politics—suggests that many readers in fact share the blind spots of those in the court, and fail to notice that the dead Arab’s existence is effaced through the trial. Perpetuating Violence While a survey of academic work does not necessarily serve as an indication of how most readers interpret any given novel, critical responses to The Outsider do at least indicate the potential for empathetic complicity—in this case manifest in the interpretative effacement of the Arab population—to be present in the act of reading. I have questioned O’Brien’s interpretation of the trial in The Outsider, but his emphasis on the colonial situation formed part of a vital critical intervention in his 1970 survey of Camus’s work. Until that point, colonial politics had been de-emphasized in interpretations of Camus’s fiction. To give two examples of this tendency, Germain Brée described Meursault as a “sacrificial victim,”32 and Roland Barthes wrote of the “innocent” style of The Outsider through which “form as an instrument is no longer at the service of a triumphant ideology.”33 Such elisions mean that The Outsider stands as an intriguing case study into the complicity of readers.

Complicit Silences

41

O’Brien sought to address the critical deficit that he identified, arguing that blindness toward the novel’s colonial politics meant that, in The Outsider, “the actual killing and the sordid transactions that prepare the way for it [are regarded] as irrelevant.”34 He proceeds to argue that The Outsider is an expression of “Western moral conscience,” but one that “also registers the hesitations and limitations of that conscience.”35 Edward Said built on O’Brien’s work but argues that the latter “lets [Camus] off the hook” and that Camus’s fiction “draw[s] on and in fact revive[s] the history of French domination in Algeria.”36 Moreover, he attacks critical responses that identify the perceived “universality and humanism” in Camus’s work and treat this as somehow “detachable from the colonial reality that forms the setting of The Outsider and The Plague.”37 O’Brien’s and Said’s comments are examples of the types of reading identified by Sanyal, in which critics’ interpretations fail to acknowledge the labile nature of Camus’s allegories and instead enlist these features of his texts either to condemn or to exonerate him. O’Brien and Said, of course, want to condemn Camus, but despite Sanyal’s valid reservations regarding this kind of reading, their criticisms are important for an analysis of empathetic complicity, because they are indicative of the potential for readers to exhibit their own interpretative blind spots, or to accept those present in a text. I argue, however, that a distinction must be maintained between formal and empathetic complicity: one of the problems of this passage of Said’s Culture and Imperialism is that he does not specify by whom and by what means this separation of metaphysics and colonial reality is enacted (a shortcoming not helped by the fact that he only quotes from the short story “The Adulterous Woman” from Exile and the Kingdom in any detail). For this reason, Said’s argument does not sufficiently distinguish between the form of Camus’s literary work and interpretations thereof. In other words, it conflates complicity in narrative form with empathetic complicity on the part of the reader, and does not address how the former might produce the latter. By way of addressing this interpretive gap, I suggest that the confessional form of Meursault’s narrative and its resulting appeals to the empathy of the reader are crucial in producing complicit readings. The dissonance between the overblown rhetoric employed by the functionaries of the court (primarily the prosecutor and the judge) and Meursault’s flat incomprehension is jarring. Meursault’s narrative is not just a counter-discourse to the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie present in and represented by the court, but his narrative is also oriented toward a reader whose understanding he seeks: as McCarthy notes, the “reader becomes a confidant who is seduced into believing what the ‘I’ reveals.”38 This seduction is subtle, and arises through Meursault ostensibly reporting the facts of the narrative with a notable lack of interpretation, but actually betraying his need for an approving listener at times. For example, I

42

Chapter 1

have already noted that Meursault justifies befriending Raymond by stating “I don’t have any reason not to talk to him.”39 As well as being indicative of his apathetic disposition, the statement also indicates a defensiveness, and as such reveals the fact that it is oriented toward a reading audience situated outside the events described in the narrative. For this reason, although the narrative appears to be a (flawed) testimony of the facts as Meursault experienced them, it actually serves as a Trojan horse for an appeal to empathy that might elevate the narrator to a heroic position, and at the same time denude the dead Arab of any importance as an individual. Camus thus leaves himself on risky ground in The Outsider: the absurdity of the trial invites a critical stance toward the discourses embodied in the court, yet the reception of the novel indicates that colonial subjects remained a blind spot for its readers. The blankness of The Outsider’s narration— Meursault’s refusal to interpret and explain—itself invites interpretation. Yet this form never quite succeeds in signaling with sufficient urgency toward a need to hold its own form and style to scrutiny. For this reason, the novel remains uncomfortable reading, and this discomfort stems not just from the complicity of its characters but also from the complicities enacted in its narrative form, and from the potential for complicity that it creates in its readers. INNOCENT MURDERERS: THE PLAGUE Two of Shoshana Felman’s essays in Testimony address the relationship between Camus’s fiction and witnessing. The first, “Camus’ The Plague, or a Monument to Witnessing” reads the novel as an allegory for the Holocaust, and the second, “The Betrayal of the Witness: Camus’ The Fall” provides a reading that centers on the notion of a missed event, and the consequent failure of witnessing. Specifically, Felman argues that, in the movement from The Plague to The Fall, Camus shifts his focus from a site of the recording of history to a site of its non-recording, and that The Fall “revisits contemporary history as a story not of resistance but of complicity.”40 Felman quotes Camus’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he argued that the writer “cannot serve today those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it,”41 and she proceeds to examine the role of onlookers and witnesses as those subjects. In The Plague and The Fall, Camus chooses middle-class professionals, a doctor and a lawyer, as his narrators. They are implicated subjects, occupying the intermediate position of being both subject to history, but also its makers: while they do not shape history on a grand scale, they do so in their construction and perpetuation of the discourses and frameworks that dictate the terms of social and civil life. It is in their relationships with these discourses, and in the way that their

Complicit Silences

43

positions involve repeated and structural tendencies to omit and obfuscate, that culpable ignorance and complicity arise. Complicity as Infection While Felman reads The Plague as an allegory for the Holocaust, it has more often been interpreted as an allegory for World War II or, more specifically, for France under German occupation in that period.42 These interpretations are based on the city’s isolation and securitization, and in this schema, the role of those fighting the plague is one of resistance. However, the state of emergency declared in response to the plague creates a situation in which the authorities possess greater-than-usual powers. As such, the city’s inhabitants have little choice but to align themselves with the authorities, even when this involves the use of coercive force against other citizens. This situation, as I argue further, elides the distinction between perpetrators and victims and thus reveals the potential for complicity in such a situation. The novel comments most explicitly on complicity in the case of the character Cottard. Guilty of an unnamed crime—one that he claims would earn him a prison sentence, but not the death penalty—Cottard enjoys the temporary stay of punishment granted by the plague as the energies of the police and other official bodies are directed toward halting its spread. Cottard takes the opportunity to emerge from his self-imposed and paranoid isolation, and when asked to help with medical efforts, he states, “the plague suits me quite well and I see no reason why I should bother about trying to stop it.”43 Jean Tarrou sees through Cottard’s newly found bonhomie, telling Rieux that “this epidemic has done him proud. Of a lonely man who hated loneliness it has made an accomplice. Yes, ‘accomplice’ is the word that fits, and doesn’t he relish his complicity!”44 However, although Tarrou’s indictment of Cottard is suggestive of the potential for collaboration that existed in France under German occupation, as the plague spreads through Oran the distinctions between resistance and complicity become less clear than they appear to be at this point. In this allegorical framework, Cottard is culpable in his refusal to resist the plague, and for this reason, he can be contrasted with the characters who choose the more heroic option of actively fighting it. Yet if Cottard’s actions are morally questionable on a thematic level, this narrative framework itself is open to critique, and Lorraine Markotic takes issue with use of a natural phenomenon to represent human evil, arguing that “whereas the content of the novel condemns complicity, the allegorical idiom is itself complicit in the naturalizing and therefore in the depoliticizing of a political event.”45 She notes that the moral choices faced by members of the French Resistance were muddied by the threat of reprisals, and that the “decision to fight a regime

44

Chapter 1

of murder and torture often made them complicit in murder and torture.”46 Markotic is correct to identify the representational risks of the metaphor, and also to point out the morally messy choices involved in resistance. However, I argue that the figurative flexibility of the plague actually enables the novel to address this gray zone. If we accept the plague as an allegory for occupation, and if we posit the only two options as being resistance or acquiescence, the schema does remain somewhat simplistic. However, the allegorical form of the novel is loose enough to allow other interpretations—Felman’s reading being one notable example—and many of the connotations of the novel’s language work to introduce a moral gray zone into its symbolic structure. Sanyal highlights the adaptability of the figures that populate The Plague noting, for example, how the dying rats in the early stages of the novel carry echoes both of anti-Semitic imagery and of language used to describe the Arab population of Algeria. For this reason, she argues, through the symbolism of vermin, the “flickering interplay in the text’s imagery suggests that neither anti-Semitism nor colonial racism is foreign to the polis, and, further, that these violences are intertwined.”47 In addition to creating connections between histories of violence that might otherwise be regarded as separate, Camus’s imagery also evokes a sense of moral ambiguity that complicates any binary distinction between perpetration and victimhood. This ambiguity is clearest in the plague’s effects on Rieux. In contrast to Cottard, Rieux fights the plague, placing himself in a position of danger and working himself to the point of exhaustion, all while separated from his dying wife. However, as Tony Judt argues, Camus avoided “simple binary divisions of human behavior into ‘collaboration’ or ‘resistance’ but the infinite range of compromises and denials that constituted the business of survival,”48 and it is clear from the first indications of the plague that Rieux’s position is necessarily compromised. Many of his choices involve weighing the welfare of individuals against the common good and, in a time of plague, it is clear normal rights and comforts must often be sacrificed. Felman reads the novel as an allegory for the Holocaust on the basis of the “resonance”49 of some of its imagery, such as when Rieux notes that “a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.”50 Yet we might also consider the resonance of the language employed early in the narrative, when emergency measures have just come into effect, and when Rieux describes how infected individuals are subjected to forced separations from their families: “objurgations, screams, batterings on the door, action by the police and, later, armed force; the patient was taken by storm.”51 The smoke stacks of the Holocaust were preceded by the type of forced evacuations that this description evokes, and as such this imagery problematizes the symbolic association of Rieux and resistance, because at this point, it is with the police, and not with the patient, that he is

Complicit Silences

45

aligned. Indeed, Rieux’s report continues to challenge this schema, notably when he describes the resistance of victims’ families to enforced quarantine, and when he states that “they’d have liked to drag him, drag the whole human race, with them to the grave.”52 To read the novel as an allegory for either the Occupation or the Holocaust is to read the sick as the victims of Nazism; yet at this point, the plague-stricken and their families are instead represented as the guilty parties. The notion of The Plague as a parable of resistance is further complicated when Tarrou posits his own allegory within the framework of the larger narrative. Some time after his identification of Cottard’s complicity, Tarrou elaborates on the notion explicitly and at greater length when he recalls a moment from his childhood when he had watched his father, a director of Public Prosecutions, call for the death penalty against a defendant. He relates his epiphany that “the social order around me was based on the death-sentence, and by fighting the established order I’d be fighting against murder.”53 Moreover, when Tarrou describes how his own associates passed death sentences in the belief that “these few deaths were inevitable for the building up of a new world in which murder would cease to be,”54 he rehearses the position that Camus came to voice more explicitly in The Rebel ([1951] 2013)55 when he attacked the argument of ends justifying means. This formed the basis of Camus’s criticism of the French left’s continued alignment with communism following revelations of Stalin’s atrocities, and led to his quarrel with Sartre. Tarrou develops his own analogy between the plague and the deadly exercise of power in which judges are the “most-eminent of the plaguestricken,”56 but he also acknowledges that “we can’t stir a finger in this world without bringing death to somebody,”57 and in doing so, he figures complicity as almost inevitable and universal. From this basis, he identifies language as a means of resistance to complicity: having condemned his former associates for their willingness to turn away from the effects of their actions, he proceeds to describe an execution by firing squad in detail, but notes that “it would be shockingly bad taste to linger on such details”:58 the implication of his comment is that, most of the time, the evidence of violence is erased from discourse. For Tarrou, then, the root of culpable ignorance lies in “our failure to use plain, clean-cut language.” Connivance and culpable ignorance are therefore the result of failing to create, read, and disseminate accounts that attest to harmful results of collective action. Tarrou thus resolves “to speak— and to act—quite clearly” and to “try, in short, to be an innocent murderer.”59 Complicity, for him at least, is the product of a systemic failure of discourse to bear witness to wrongdoing in explicit terms. Tarrou therefore suggests that bearing witness to violence by speaking in plain terms is the most ethical position that it is possible to adopt. However,

46

Chapter 1

his figurative elaborations on the plague are an allegory within an allegory, which, like other metafictional devices, cause us to hold the device itself up to scrutiny. We are invited, in other words, to examine Tarrou’s own framework as one of number of possible ways of interpreting the plague symbolically. In this case, given that Tarrou’s relatively short section is framed by Rieux’s much longer narrative, the latter’s thoughts act as a point of comparison. Rieux’s narrative appears—at first sight—to be exactly the kind of plainspeaking account that Tarrou calls for, and which does not attempt to avoid or obfuscate suffering. However, Rieux’s narrative also indicates the difficulty of bearing witness, and in particular the problem of bearing witness in a manner timely enough to prevent or intervene in wrongdoing. The Too-Late Witness Felman argues that Rieux is a model witness. He withholds his identity until the end of the novel, and on this basis, she argues that his anonymity “embodies, on the one hand, the narrator’s objectivity (his self-effacement) and, on the other hand, his shared vulnerability to death and to the Plague.”60 In addition, for Felman, the bubonic plague is an apt metaphor for the Holocaust because Camus’s plague is “an event that is historically impossible: an event without a referent.”61 However, when Felman proceeds to argue that “because our perception of reality is molded by frames of reference, what is outside them, however imminent and otherwise conspicuous, remains historically invisible, unreal, and can only be encountered by a systematic disbelief,”62 she has abstracted away from the novel somewhat, and in doing so deemphasizes the protagonists’ culpability in terms of failing to recognize and interpret the evidence of the looming catastrophe. Although Rieux strives to be an informed and faithful witness, the novel in fact describes repeated failures of witnessing, and also shows how these failures exacerbated the tragedy. In the early stages of his narrative, Rieux recalls how he and Tarrou both dismissed the warning sign of rats dying on the streets and inside their own apartment building. If the two men’s unwillingness to consider the full implications of these warning signs is suggestive of the way in which the growing evidence of atrocities such as the Holocaust tend to be ignored or discounted initially, official responses in Oran are also suggestive of patterns of denials and structural blindness. For example, the authorities are accused of “slackness” in their initial responses,63 and when the disease begins to infect humans, “the local Press, so lavish of news about the rats, now had nothing to say.”64 Even when the evidence becomes incontrovertible, and in an obvious contrast to the “plain, clear-cut language” later praised by Tarrou, the doctor Richard suggests the phrase “special type of fever, with inguinial complications”65 in place of calling the plague by its name.

Complicit Silences

47

Felman notes that an extract of The Plague was published in Combat, when France was under German occupation, and argues that the novel was therefore intended as an “actual intervention” in World War II.66 However, even if the novel is read as an allegory of resistance, its content does not mirror this structure of intervention because Rieux’s account is produced after the fact, and therefore too late to influence events in Oran. What can be claimed for Rieux’s testimony, though, is that it is oriented toward the future. In the introduction, I have argued that failures of witnessing and culpable ignorance may be causal contributions to wrongdoing when they form repeated patterns of behavior, and when the expectation of such failures enables wrongdoing without any fear of the consequences. In general, by making visible the failures of witnessing that occurred in Oran, Camus indicates that this act of witnessing comes too late for the victims, but that it may still be early enough for catastrophe to be avoided when the plague re-awakens. The novel makes this suggestion through the threat of a repetition at the end of the novel, with Rieux’s chilling warning when he notes of certain sections of that population that “calmly they denied, in the teeth of the evidence, that we had ever known a crazy world in which men were killed off like flies.”67 His final observation that “the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good”68 suggests that the return of the plague is all too possible, but given the very human tendency to turn away from suffering, and to fail to bear witness to it in plain terms, we suspect that when the plague returns, witnessing will happen too late to prevent its spread. That return perhaps came earlier than Camus anticipated and, in O’Brien’s words, “eight years after the publication of The Plague the rats came up to die in the cities of Algeria.”69 O’Brien refers here to the kind of state-sponsored violence against civilians evoked by some of The Plague’s imagery, discussed earlier, but in this case enacted by the French army against citizens of Algeria as the situation in the colony deteriorated. Camus had written an article titled “Crisis in Algeria” in Combat in 1945, and was thus keenly aware of the parallels between France under German occupation and the situation of the native Algerians. He remarked on the “incredible ignorance” of most French citizens in the metropolis toward Algeria, and reminded his compatriots that the Arabs are not a “wretched, faceless mob.”70 Moreover, in The Plague, the journalist Rambert arrives in Oran intent on producing a report on the conditions of the Arab population in the town—exactly the type of report that Camus himself produced before the war. Yet Rambert fails to write the report as he becomes preoccupied first with escaping from Oran and later with helping Rieux, and the Arab population remains faceless throughout the narrative. As with the omission of Arab voices from The Outsider, this absence has caused critics to censure Camus. Notably, O’Brien claims that the “curiously deserted streets’” are an “artistic

48

Chapter 1

final solution” to the Arab problem.71 If O’Brien’s language is overly provocative, the contradiction between the explicit content of Camus’s journalism and the representational omissions in The Plague is difficult to resolve. Is it the case that, as O’Brien suggests, Camus was “infected” without knowing it? Or is Camus, through Rambert’s failure, itself situated within the framework of a larger, self-reflexive examination of witnessing, directing us to the silences and omissions in his own fictional narrative? It is worth reiterating at this point Sanyal’s argument that the question of how to read Camus need not be either / or, and that his allegories can be read as generative links between different histories. This point noted, I suggest that the testimonial form of the novel has the potential to induce a form of critical witnessing in the reader. In the early part of her essay on The Plague, Felman suggests that the narrator-as-eyewitness guarantees the “correspondence and adherence to each other” of the “happening” of history and the “telling” of narrative.72 She argues that “the specific task of literary testimony is . . . to open up in that belated witness, which the reader now historically becomes, the imaginative capability of perceiving history,” but later adds the proviso that this correspondence if “not a given.”73 In the case of The Plague, the novel’s jarring blind spots transfer a significant load of interpretative work to the reader, who is placed in the position of the belated witness. Perhaps too much work, as the critical responses to Camus’s erasure of the Arab population in Oran suggest: Fitch argues that “the experience of the reader in Camus is by no means a comfortable, reassuring one,”74 and in this case, if Rambert’s silence is supposed to speak of and for an oppressed population, Camus treads a fine line between eloquent silence and a failure of witnessing. Yet if Camus’s fiction places the reader in the position of the belated witness to the atrocities of the twentieth century, perhaps the experience of reading should neither be comfortable nor reassuring and the interpretive burden for such a witness should indeed be heavy. THE MINIMIZATION OF HISTORY: THE FALL In contrast to The Plague, The Fall foregrounds the way in which nonnarrative and ambiguous forms and utterances—including silence—may bear witness to atrocity, and how these may impel the listener or reader to act as a critical interpreter of testimony. The central event of The Fall is a suicide. The narrator, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, misses the event, hearing only a “body striking the water” as he walks across the Pont Royal. Although Clamence is not culpable in the suicide, he fails to bear witness to it, recalling “slowly, in the rain, I went away. I told no one.”75 The delayed recollection of this event

Complicit Silences

49

precipitates Clamence’s fall from being a self-confident lawyer, a “complete man,”76 to a “judge-penitent” wracked by self-accusations, but who ultimately turns his own guilt toward his listeners. In the previous section, I have argued that Rieux’s act of witnessing comes after the event, and hence too late to curtail the plague in Oran. Clamence’s relationship to the suicide is also one of lateness. However, in contrast to Rieux’s warning that the plague may return, at the end of The Fall, Clamence proposes a hypothetical second suicide to his listener so that he “may a second time have the chance of saving both of us.”77 In the introduction, I noted Meister’s questioning of the inherent ethical value of witnessing for those in the position of bystanders on the basis that there is “no historical moment in which bystanders really would have become active resisters if only they had felt more concern for victims.”78 In other words, the empathy created by hypothetical discussions regarding who could and should have intervened in wrongdoing serves no purpose other than acting as a moral salve for those who come after the event. However, Clamence punctures any such moral complacency when he responds to his own thought experiment by saying, “But let’s not worry! It’s too late now. It’ll always be too late. Fortunately!”79 Thus, whereas The Plague concludes with a warning that the epidemic (and whatever it symbolically represents) may return, Clamence seems to explicitly disavow the possibility of the same kind of historical return, and in doing so, he also disavows the idea that witnessing after the fact can be a simple matter of affective alignment rather than concrete noncomplicit action. Given that Camus wrote The Fall as news that the concentrationary universe had returned under Stalin—a fact that placed the French left, hitherto sympathetic to communism, in a difficult position—it seems surprising that Camus seems to abandon the idea of historical return at a moment when totalitarianism was again a pressing concern. My response to this puzzle is that, in The Fall, Camus is addressing the kind of comfortable and complacent disposition that allows those who are not immediately present at an event to ignore it, turn away from it, or fail to attest to it. Felman recognizes that the mediation of history through language contains the potential for omissions and obfuscations, and on this basis she argues that The Fall addresses the form of complicity that allowed the Holocaust to happen by minimizing the event through “systematic deafness, silence and suppression of information.”80 Thus complicity, for those at a spatial and temporal remove from events, is not so much a matter of allowing or enabling the perpetration of events but takes place either in failures to tell, or in failures to find suitable narratives by which events can be witnessed in their fullness.

50

Chapter 1

The Missed Event As with The Plague, Felman reads The Fall as an allegory for the Holocaust. Felman’s argument that The Fall explores complicity in the form of the “minimization of history,” enacted through silence, is an extremely important one. However, her concern with Camus’s biographical details and her focus on the Holocaust mean that while she recognizes the central failure of witnessing in the novel, she does not fully address the causes of this failure. This tendency is most evident in her analysis of Clamence’s description of Amsterdam, which she quotes thus: “Have you noticed that Amsterdam’s concentric canals resemble the circles of hell? . . . When one comes from the outside, as one gradually goes through these circles, life—and hence its crimes—becomes denser, darker.”81 Coming shortly after a reference to the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, Felman identifies Clamence’s words as an attempt to refer to a historical referent that cannot be named, and, in reading this passage against Camus’s quarrel with Sartre (who was at that point sympathetic to Stalin), she argues that this is “not merely a concentric but a concentrationary hell.”82 Yet perhaps the most revealing element of Felman’s quotation is the elision that it contains. The ellipsis after the reference to hell marks where Clamence elaborates on his metaphor, and what he actually says is this: “Have you noticed that Amsterdam’s concentric canals resemble the circles of hell? The middle class hell, of course, peopled with bad dreams.”83 The complicity examined in the novel is not that of those present at the event itself, but is that of those situated at a remove, and for whom bad conscience is the main consequence of atrocity. Camus wrote of the calm “ignorance and indifference” in wealthy neighborhoods of Paris during the occupation,84 and his target in The Fall is those who sought to minimize their knowledge of atrocity in order to avoid the “middle-class hell” of bad conscience. In the introduction, I noted the close relationship between trauma and testimony, and argued that complicity may occur when potential witnesses choose to avoid the negative affect that may result from seeing and acknowledging atrocity. The comfortable middle classes described by Clamence exhibit precisely this tendency. The relationship between culpable ignorance and a steady, middle-class life is made clear at the beginning of the narrative when Clamence asks his listener “‘Do you want a good clean life? Like everyone else?’ You say yes, of course. How can one say no? ‘OK. You’ll be cleaned up. Here’s a job, a family, and organized leisure.’”85 The full implications of Clamence’s imagery become apparent shortly after when he refers to the seventy-five thousand deportations and murders of the Jewish population of Amsterdam as a “clean up.”86 The “clean” middle-class life, with its respectable trappings, is thus represented as an effort to keep the knowledge of atrocity decorously out

Complicit Silences

51

of sight. Clamence’s early admission that “style, like sheer silk, too often hides eczema”87 indicates his awareness that is it precisely the mediation and manipulation of language that produces this sort of minimization. One of the ironies of Clamence’s self-accusing narrative is that he has known a life other than the kind of comfortable existence that he condemns, but in fact minimizes his own experience of the concentrationary universe. From what we learn of his past, Clamence was interned near Tripoli during the war. Of this internment, he recalls: “I drank the water of a dying comrade . . . I drank the water, that’s certain, while convincing myself that the others needed me more than this fellow who was going to die anyway.”88 Clamence reflects on how he constructed a narrative to justify these actions, stating: “I had a duty to keep myself alive for them. Thus, cher, empires and churches are born under the sun of death.”89 Clamence here recognizes how institutions create the narratives that minimize any recognition of their own culpability, and when he asserts that “we cannot assert the innocence of anyone, whereas we can state with certainty the guilt of all,”90 he suggests that atrocity underlies every structure of power. Passages such as this cause Sanyal to voice her concern that “The Fall thus becomes an emblem of Levi’s gray zone, representing a transhistorical condition of wounded complicity that enmeshes victims, executioners, witnesses, survivors, and others in the Shoah’s aftermath.”91 I suggest that the distinction between implication and complicity is useful here, and that while simply being embedded in and employing these discourses represents a state of implication, this only becomes complicity when the active performance of such alignments involve a minimization of history that serves as an enabling condition of atrocity—the silence of the middle classes whom he criticizes being one such example of this type of minimization. Silence, Cries, and Laughter Given that Camus uses Clamence to disavow of any possibility of innocence, and to articulate his suspicion toward testimony, he is left with a dilemma in terms what sort of narrative can attest to history without falling into the traps that his narrator identifies. For this reason, and despite the dominance of Clamence’s loquacious narration, the form of the novel turns on a series of ambiguous and nonnarrative forms of communication, namely silence, cries, and laughter. Clamence, as a middle-class lawyer whose professional role requires the manipulation of language, is well aware of the inherent potential for narrative to fail to act as a faithful form of testimony. For this reason, although he cannot avoid using the same discourses that he condemns, Clamence explores ways to make silence speak of the omissions that these discourses contain.

52

Chapter 1

When describing his internment near Tripoli, Clamence recalls that “we suffered from thirst and destitution more than brutality,” but then curtails his own narrative, stating “I’ll not describe it to you. We children of this halfcentury don’t need a diagram to imagine such places.”92 In this case, simply gesturing toward the existence of internment camps is sufficient to remind us of similar, and more extreme histories. For this reason, while Felman sees the “making of silence” as a form of culpability, Clamence’s narrative shows that silence may possess positive value as an element of narrative form, alerting us to the fact of absences and allowing those silences to speak for themselves. Moreover, the way that he builds his narrative around his omissions in conjunction with other nonnarrative forms of expression, specifically cries and laughter, works to make the silences in the narrative not so much culpable minimizations as eloquent gestures toward histories of atrocity. Cries, laughter, and silences come together around the novel’s central event, the fall of the unnamed woman into the Seine: he hears her cry after she falls, and hears ambiguous laughter that he associates with the same event two or three years later. Clamence recalls the moments after hearing the woman’s body hit the water in these terms: “Almost at once I heard a cry, repeated several times, which was going downstream; then it abruptly ceased. The silence that followed, as the night suddenly stood still, seemed interminable.”93 This initial silence is followed by the return of the cry much later, prompted by him seeing a black speck on the ocean that reminds him of a drowning person. This structure suggests a kind of haunting whereby the evidence of Clamence’s initial failure of witnessing eventually returns. Moreover, the image of the cry “travel[ing] throughout the world, across the limitless expanse of the ocean”94 is suggestive of the dissemination of the event. It is at once an echo, a repetition of the original event, but is at the same time heard far from its original location. The cry, then, attests to the woman’s fall, and while this event itself can never be repeated and witnessed in the way proposed in Clamence’s thought experiment of the suicide re-occurring, his imagery suggests that it can be witnessed belatedly, at a remove, in its reverberations and continuing mediations. The initial cry is followed by the laughter that Clamence hears “two or three years”95 after the woman’s suicide as he again crosses the Seine: “I felt rising within me a vast feeling of power and—I don’t know how to express it—of completion, which cheered my heart. I straightened up and was about to light a cigarette, the cigarette of satisfaction, when, at that very moment, a laugh burst out behind me.”96 Felman alerts us to the significance of the Jewish quarter in Amsterdam, and the location at which Clamence hears the laughter is also highly suggestive. At this moment, he is not standing on the Pont Royal, the scene of the suicide, but on the Pont des Artes, slightly further upstream, toward the site of the “Island of the Jews” (Île aux Juifs),

Complicit Silences

53

so named because of the number of Jews that were executed there during the Middle Ages. However, while Clamence alludes to the history of the Jews in Amsterdam during World War II, he is silent with regard to the earlier history of the Jews on the Seine, and comments only on the statue of the Vert-Galant, the womanizing king Henry IV, with whom, we suspect, he empathizes. At this point, he has turned away from the direction in which the cry travels, the “downstream” of European history after the Holocaust. Camus’s use of a site where the Jewish population of Paris had been persecuted centuries previously instead gestures toward the fact that the seeds of the Holocaust were sown in the “upstream” of history, but his silence toward this specific episode also suggests that some layers of history may remain unwitnessed or erased by the dominant discourses that have shaped and are celebrated in French culture—represented in this case by a womanizing monarch. The meaning of this laughter is ambiguous in the extreme. He describes the laughter that he hears on the Pont des Arts as “good, hearty, almost friendly laugh, which put everything properly in its place,”97 but when he returns home, he notes that his “reflection was smiling in the mirror, but it seemed to me that my smile was double.”98 I address the political connotations of laughter in more detail in chapter 2, in my discussion of Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but in The Fall, the laughter has the opposite of the effect that he attributes to it, and rather than putting “everything properly in its place,” it instead induces in him a state of nervous self-doubt. The final form of ambiguous expression that shapes the narrative is silence. Felman argues that The Fall “rethinks the ways in which the ‘making’ of a history is tied up with the makings of a silence (faire silence) intent on not knowing and not looking,”99 and she ties this project to what she identifies as the “systematic deafness” of Sartre and others on the left to events in the Soviet Union, and to “censorship both of the victims’ cry and Camus’ own outcry as a witness.”100 Moreover, noting that those responses to initial reports of atrocities were disbelief and claims of exaggeration (also found, as noted earlier, in the official responses described in The Plague), Felman reads the silence of the bystander, Clamence, as an allegory for the “deafness and muteness of the world facing the extermination of the Jews.”101 When silence is a failure to attest to wrongdoing, and that failure leads to the continued perpetration of atrocity, it is a form of complicity. However, in The Fall, silence also performs two other functions. The first is delayed revelation, and the second is a silence that points to the omission of information. In terms of the first, a silence may be a pause rather than a definitive refusal to speak, and the whole form of Clamence’s narrative is shaped by the delayed revelation of key events or facts: he foreshadows the description of the suicide with the episode when he hears the laughter, although the two events took place the other way round; he delays his admission of his complicity in

54

Chapter 1

the theft of the painting The Just Judges; and he delays the revelation of his own profession as a “judge-penitent.” In each case, these silences are not a final refusal to speak but are instead calculated to amplify the effect of each revelation when it finally arrives. The effects of these revelations are amplified because Clamence first establishes the situation in the present before belatedly inducing a realization of how an earlier event is implicated in that situation. For example, to return to Clamence’s image of the woman’s cry traveling out into the sea, an echo ordinarily loses its power and a noise fades as it moves into the distance. However, Clamence first describes the normality of life as a lawyer in Paris—a life which, as described earlier, involves culpable ignorance toward atrocity—only in order to have the woman’s cry puncture that normality. In this way, the past is brought into the present, rather than being buried in the same way as the history embodied in the Isle of the Jews. In terms of the second function of silence, Clamence recalls that Jesus’s cry “Why hast thou forsaken me?” is absent from Luke’s gospel despite being included in Matthew and Mark. On this basis, he argues that “if Luke had suppressed nothing, the matter would hardly have been noticed.. . . Thus the censor shouts what he proscribes.”102 One of the delayed revelations that I have noted earlier, Clamence’s part in the theft of The Just Judges, also indicates how silence may point to a crime rather than simply suppressing knowledge of it. At the very beginning of the narrative, Clamence points out to his listener in the seedy bar called Mexico City the “empty rectangle marking the place where a picture has been taken down.”103 It is not until the end of the narrative that Clamence produces another revelation: the painting that used to hang in this blank space was in fact part of the van Eycks’s Adoration of the Lamb, stolen in 1934. Having by this point made his case that all are guilty, he introduces the painting in its full significance by claiming that, in separating the judges from the original center-piece, the Lamb of God, “justice [is] separated from innocence . . . I have the way clear to work according to my convictions.”104 In the case of the missing painting, then, an absence can gesture toward a historical fact, in this case a crime, while avoiding becoming further implicated in hypocritical discourses. Communiqué and Dialogue These modes of expression discussed earlier, and the form that Clamence’s narrative takes around them, reduce the explicit communicative power of the text but increase its suggestive ambiguity. The reason that Camus foregrounds ambiguous modes of expression can be found near the end of the narrative. “For the dialogue we have substituted the communiqué,” states Clamence. “‘This is the truth,’ we say. ‘You can discuss it as much as you

Complicit Silences

55

want; we aren’t interested. But in a few years there’ll be the police to show you I’m right.’”105 Camus thus connects didactic, monologic forms of communication with totalitarianism, and for this reason, he is prepared to take the representational risks that inhere in ambiguous forms of narrative in order to create a dialogic text that pushes the reader into a greater interpretative role. Camus’s desire for an active reader has its root in a passage that problematizes the model of testimony proposed by Felman and Laub, and specifically in the way that it complicates the notion of agency between those who testify and those who hear that testimony. Clamence describes the medieval torture device known as the “little-ease” as being “not high enough to stand up in nor yet wide enough to lie down in.” Clamence appears to dismiss his interlocutor’s assertion that “one could live in those cells and still be innocent,” and instead suggests that, as a result of this torture, “the condemned man learned that he was guilty and that innocence consists in stretching joyfully.”106 Clamence therefore implies that an individual’s status as a victim or perpetrator is not so much a result of their actions but is a social state created and assigned by discourse. If guilt and innocence are not so much moral states than socially constructed roles enforced by a dominant discourse, this problematizes the idea that testimony acts as a faithful record of events. In Clamence’s model, historical events do not simply exist prior to and independent of the act of testifying; instead, the testimony—or other mediated accounts—becomes the means by which states of guilt and innocence are created, tainted by the sort of self-interest that arises when everyone lives in anticipation of the judgment of others. It is for this reason that Camus attempts to make the reader aware of the need for an active and critical stance toward any testimonial account. He seeks to achieve this through the dialogic nature of Clamence’s narration. Ostensibly, The Fall is a conversation between Clamence and his unnamed listener. We never hear that listener’s responses, however, and Clamence appears to dominate the conversation. For this reason, Cruickshank describes the narrative as “monologue masquerading as dialogue” while Fitch argues that it has the “appearance of a dialogue, [but] it is nevertheless nothing of the kind.”107 Clamence’s narrative may be a monologue in the sense meant by Cruickshank and Fitch, but The Fall is dialogic in the broader meaning of the term as employed by Mikhail Bakhtin, who argues that every instance of speech is “indissolubly merged with the response, with a motivated agreement or disagreement” and, as such, “primacy belongs to the response, as the activating principle.”108 The fact that Clamence anticipates a response, even if any rejoinder remains unheard, makes his narrative dialogic in nature. In fact, like the other silences in The Fall, the omission of these responses draws our attention to their very absence and hence makes us more, rather than less, aware of the possibility of a response.

56

Chapter 1

The final dialogic move in The Fall comes when the reader is implicitly invited to fill the narrative space hitherto occupied by Clamence’s unheard listener. Prior to the end of the novel, Clamence has, as Fitch argues, done “everything in his power to engage the complicity of his listener, constantly seeking his agreement.”109 Clamence, however, turns this empathy against the listener at the end of the novel. He describes how, as a self-described “judge-penitent,” he constructs “a portrait which is the image of all and of no one. . . . When the portrait is finished, as it is this evening, I show it with great sorrow: ‘This, alas, is what I am!’ The prosecutor’s charge is finished. But at the same time the portrait I hold out to my contemporaries becomes a mirror.”110 Clamence concludes this revelation of his methods flippantly, and in stating “when I get to ‘this is what we are,’ the game is over and I can tell them off,”111 he implies that he adopts a didactic tone, closer to the communiqué than to dialogue. However, in contrast to the type of authoritative discourse that, as Bakhtin argues, “demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own,”112 rather than compelling us to accept his discourse, Clamence instead impels us to consider the nature the discourses that we employed and the related systems of values in which we are implicated. Clamence concludes his dialogue with the unnamed listener stating his hope that his “interlocutor will be a policeman and that he will arrest me for the theft of The Just Judges. For the rest—am I right?—no one can arrest me. . . . I have arranged everything so as to make myself an accomplice.”113 Having held up mirror to his reader, it follows that we must also ask to what crimes we are ourselves accomplices. It is at this point, at the very end of the narrative, that Clamence returns to the suicide in the Seine, and in positing its hypothetical recurrence, he also invites the reader to consider how they might react in the same situation. Importantly, he phrases this invitation in the past tense, saying “tell me, please, what happened to you one night on the quays of the Seine and how you managed never to risk your life.”114 By shifting from a hypothetical future to a concrete past, Clamence makes the event of the suicide stand for whatever occasions we may have looked the other way when presented with the opportunity to intervene for the benefit of another. Camus uses Clamence to suggest that our complicity with atrocity lies in our failing to bear witness to our own alignment with discourses that enable atrocity. For individuals not directly subject to violence, that suffering remains hidden in the blind spots of the dominant discourse. It is generally easier and more comfortable to accept the way that such discourses represent the world because it is always easier to look away than to acknowledge one’s own role, and implication, in suffering and wrongdoing. What The Fall ultimately achieves is to impel us to recognize such failures of witnessing.

Complicit Silences

57

Camus’s fictions continue to generate controversy due to the perceived contradiction between their omissions and his political views as stated in his journalism. Through the erasure of the Arab populations in The Outsider and The Plague, these texts appear to enact the kind of complicity through culpable ignorance that I have outlined in the introduction. Yet literary fiction is not of the same nature as witness testimony or journalism, and there is enough in his writing for the gaps and omissions to be suggestive of failures of witnessing, which, in turn, prompt us to recognize and address the blind spots in his representations of Algeria and Europe. I have engaged with Shoshana Felman’s notion that literature may act as a form of testimony, and her argument that an imaginative medium is required to testify to the unimaginable. I would add to this that the literary fiction is more open in terms of its form and its orientation than testimony, which seeks to stand as a record of events. Moreover, the question of how an individual who is not unequivocally a victim might attest to events in which they are involved is one that pervades Camus’s work. Earlier in this chapter, I have quoted Judt’s assertion that Camus addresses the “infinite range of compromises and denials that constituted the business of survival”115 rather than beginning from any a priori subject positions. We might regard Camus himself as attempting to write from a compromised position, particularly with regard to Algeria, but also in terms of his awareness of how those who shape dominant cultural discourses already tend to be heavily implicated in them. As such, while Camus occupies risky ground at times, particularly in his representations of Algeria, his fictions nevertheless succeed in asking us to consider our own complicities, and our own culpable ignorance. While Camus began and ended his career as an outsider, this position gave him some leverage to comment on and critique cultural norms. However, one of the features of complicity that I address elsewhere in this book is the way that individuals are impelled to become part of the systems that they would prefer to critique, and in this way are forced into positions where striking the sort of notes of dissonance found in Camus comes at great cost, both personally and professionally. This is the situation faced by writers in regimes where freedom of expression is not given, and for this reason, the early work of Milan Kundera, written in communist Czechoslovakia, stands in contrast to Camus’s work and as provides fertile ground for discussion of the relationship between fiction, complicity, and what I call the “trap of totalitarianism.” NOTES 1. Camus, “Occupied Germany,” 231. 2. Camus, “Century of Fear,” 258.

58

Chapter 1

3. Camus, “Toward Dialogue,” 275. 4. See, for example, Camus, “Crisis in Algeria,” 198–210. 5. Crowley, “Social Justice,” 94. 6. L’Étranger has been published in English as The Stranger and The Outsider due to a discrepancy between the translations used in the first editions published by the novel’s British and American publishers: for a full explanation, see Kaplan, Looking, 203–209. Throughout this volume, I use Sandra Smith’s translation, which uses the latter title. 7. Crowley, “Social Justice,” 95. 8. Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 91. 9. Camus, Outsider, 54. 10. Camus, Outsider, 53. 11. Camus, Outsider, 54. 12. Camus, Outsider, 29. 13. Camus, Outsider, 29. 14. Camus, Outsider, 32. 15. Camus, Outsider, 26. 16. Camus, Outsider, 30. 17. McCarthy, The Stranger, 9. 18. Cruickshank, Revolt, 152. 19. Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 58. 20. Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 59. 21. Camus, Outsider, 26. 22. Camus, Outsider, 30. 23. Camus, Outsider, 34. 24. Camus, Outsider, 44. 25. Fitch, Narcissistic Text, 52. 26. Camus, Outsider, 59. 27. Camus, Outsider, 96. See also 100, 104, 105. 28. Camus, Outsider, 92. 29. Camus, Outsider, 92–93. 30. Campbell, “Testimonial Modes,” 102–103. 31. O’Brien, Camus, 23. 32. Brée, Camus, 116. 33. Barthes, Degree Zero, 77–78. Barthes also writes that The Outsider “achieves a style of absence which is almost an ideal absence of style; writing is then reduced to a sort of negative mood in which the social or mythical characters of a language are abolished in favour of a neutral and inert state of form,” 77. 34. O’Brien, Camus, 25. 35. O’Brien, Camus, 27. Alice Kaplan offers Cyril Connolly’s introduction to the first edition as evidence that “a political criticism of Camus had been in place from the very beginning” (Kaplan, Looking, 204). However, a five-page introduction is not the same kind of sustained critique performed by O’Brien and Said; moreover, postcolonial critiques of the novel only gained wider traction after these later interventions.

Complicit Silences

59

36. Said, Imperialism, 173. 37. Said, Imperialism, 172. 38. McCarthy, The Stranger, 24. 39. Camus, Outsider, 26. 40. Felman “The Fall,” 168, 192. 41. Quoted in Felman, “The Plague,” 96. 42. See Philip Thody, Camus, 48; O’Brien, Camus, 45; Kaplan, Looking, 195, Markotic, “Literary Complicity,” 61. 43. Camus, Plague, 142. 44. Camus, Plague, 173. 45. Markotic, “Literary Complicity,” 62. 46. Markotic, “Literary Complicity,” 63. 47. Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 68. 48. Judt, Burden, 106. 49. Felman, “The Plague,” 97. 50. Camus, Plague, 37. 51. Camus, Plague, 81. 52. Camus, Plague, 170. 53. Camus, Plague, 221. 54. Camus, Plague, 221. 55. Camus, The Rebel. 56. Camus, Plague, 222. 57. Camus, Plague, 223. 58. Camus, Plague, 22. 59. Camus, Plague, 225. 60. Felman, “The Plague,” 111. 61. Felman, “The Plague,” 102. 62. Felman, “The Plague,” 103. 63. Camus, Plague, 17. 64. Camus, Plague, 34. 65. Camus, Plague, 46. 66. Felman, “The Plague,” 99. 67. Camus, Plague, 262. 68. Camus, Plague, 272. 69. Camus, Plague, 50. 70. Camus, “Crisis in Algeria,” 200. 71. O’Brien, Camus, 48. See also Thody, Camus, 67; Said, Imperialism, 179–80. 72. Felman, “The Plague,” 101 73. Felman, “The Plague,” 108–110. 74. Fitch, Narcissistic Text, xvi. 75. Camus, Fall, 314. 76. Camus, Fall, 305. 77. Camus, Fall, 356. 78. Meister, After Evil, 214. 79. Camus, Fall, 356.

60

Chapter 1

80. Felman “The Fall,” 190. 81. Camus, The Fall, quoted in Felman, “The Fall,” 186. 82. Felman, “The Fall,” 187–88. 83. Camus, Fall, 283. 84. Camus, “December 1, 1944,” 130. 85. Camus, Fall, 279. 86. Camus, Fall, 281. 87. Camus, Fall, 278. 88. Camus, Fall, 344–45. 89. Camus, Fall, 344–45. 90. Camus, Fall, 335. 91. Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 84. 92. Camus, Fall, 343. 93. Camus, Fall, 313–14. 94. Camus, Fall, 334. 95. Camus, Fall, 313. 96. Camus, Fall, 296. 97. Camus, Fall, 297. 98. Camus, Fall, 297. 99. Felman, “Fall”, 184. 100. Felman, “Fall”, 186. 101. Felman, “Fall”, 189. 102. Camus, Fall, 336–37. 103. Camus, Fall, 278. 104. Camus, Fall, 346. 105. Camus, Fall, 300. 106. Camus, Fall, 335. 107. Cruickshank, Revolt, 185; Fitch, Narcissistic Text, 85. 108. Bakhtin, “Discourse,” 282. 109. Fitch, Narcissistic Text, 73. 110. Camus, Fall, 352. 111. Camus, Fall, 352. 112. Bakhtin, “Discourse,” 342. 113. Camus, Fall, 335. 114. Camus, Fall, 356. 115. Judt, Burden, 106.

Chapter 2

The Trap of Totalitarianism Milan Kundera

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera writes of Czechoslovakia that “the Communists took power in February 1948 with neither bloodshed nor violence, but greeted by cheers of about half the nation. And now, please note: the half that did the cheering was the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better.”1 In doing so, he suggests that the Czech intelligentsia were complicit in creating the situation that led to their own oppression and persecution, first under Czech communism and later under the Soviet Union following the invasion of 1968. Kundera, like Camus, is a complex figure, and there are a number of apparent contradictions between the beliefs professed in his writing and his own behavior. For example, Michelle Woods discusses Kundera’s rather authoritarian attitude toward his own writing, and his insistence on absolute “fidelity” in translation while reserving the right to make changes himself.2 More troubling, however, is Kundera’s own relationship with the regime that his novels critique. In 2008, allegations surfaced that, in 1950, he was responsible for the arrest of an acquaintance by informing on them, an episode that bears a marked similarity to the events of Life Is Elsewhere.3 Moreover, Tim West argues that, following the Soviet invasion of 1968, the Union of Czech Writers—of which Kundera was a key member—played its part in creating a “charade of normalcy” as repressive measures were introduced,4 and goes so far as to argue that Kundera’s passivity in 1968–1969 “represents a severe abdication of his moral responsibility as an intellectual in the public sphere and as one who had only recently been a leading advocate of reform within the Communist Party.”5 Kundera’s continued silence on the 1950 episode means that his role has not been definitively resolved, although he has written more generally, and scathingly, of the tendency of “garbage-can scavengers”6 to employ biographical details in order to read a given literary work as a kind 61

62

Chapter 2

of roman à clef. For Kundera, such readings “refuse art its autonomous status . . . and thus deny its raison d’être.”7 The aim of this book is to examine the relationship between literature and complicity, and for this reason, I abstain from any attempt to judge Kundera’s actions beyond his body of work. Yet one of my central claims is that the creation of narrative may itself be a complicit act, and for this reason, the notion of complicity challenges Kundera’s view that art possesses an “autonomous status.” Indeed, the difficulty of achieving autonomy is suggested by the definition provided by Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu of “complicity dilemmas,” which are “situations in which, for contingent reasons beyond one’s control, one cannot help but be complicit in the doing of wrong.”8 When the narrator of The Unbearable Lightness of Being writes of “the trap the world has become,”9 he implies that complicity is unavoidable and in this and two of the other novels under discussion in this chapter—The Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting—the protagonists are dissenters against the political order, but find that a degree of complicity with the totalitarian system is inevitable. Kundera’s novels in the period straddling the Prague Spring of 1968, the subsequent Soviet invasion and return of repression, and his emigration to France in 1975, are an important element in this discussion of complicity for two reasons. Firstly, his novels problematize the notion of innocence as a mere absence of guilt, and instead suggest that innocence itself may be an enabling condition of complicity with wrongdoing. Secondly, they explore the nature of complicity under the conditions of totalitarianism by, as Trevor Cribben Merrill argues, “grasp[ing] totalitarianism from an aesthetic vantage point.”10 Merrill’s point is an important one, and in this chapter, I examine the way that the aesthetic, both manifest as a general disposition and in specific instances of artistic production, is often an antecedent of complicity with totalitarianism. Kundera, however, writes, “Totalitarian Truth excludes relativity, doubt, questioning; it can never accommodate what I would call the spirit of the novel,”11 and each of the novels discussed in this chapter explores different forms of representational resistance to complicity. In this chapter, I first discuss The Joke, and argue that the novel shows how, when a population adopts a particular aesthetic en masse, this may become a disposition in which complicity with an oppression is unavoidable. I then address Life Is Elsewhere, the only novel discussed in this chapter in which the protagonist is enthusiastically rather than reluctantly complicit with totalitarianism. Again, however, and in a similar way to The Joke, this form of alignment is shown to arise from a particular aesthetic disposition, in this case lyricism. Next, I discuss The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and argue that it builds on the critique of innocence found in Life Is Elsewhere, in this case by linking it explicitly to the phenomenon of mass forgetting.

The Trap of Totalitarianism

63

Finally, I examine The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and argue that the novel addresses the issues of condoning and culpable ignorance. “EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM RAISED HIS HAND”: THE JOKE The Joke turns on the decision of the protagonist, Ludvik, to send a jocular note to his girlfriend, Marketa, while she is participating in a summer training course run by the Communist Party. The note reads: “Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik.”12 The note is not politically motivated, but rather is composed as the result of youthful jealously and desperation: Ludvik cannot accept that Marketa is enjoying her time away from him, and faced with her serious enthusiasm for the communist project, humor is one of the few weapons in his meager romantic arsenal. The note, however, becomes public knowledge, and gives rise to novel’s primal scene in which Ludvik’s friends and associates vote to expel him from the Communist Party. He describes the event as follows: No one spoke on my behalf, and finally everyone present (and there were about a hundred of them, including my teachers and closest friends), yes, every last one of them raised his hand to approve my expulsion not only from the Party but (and this I had not expected) from the university as well.13

Everyone from whom Ludvik might expect support is thus complicit in the persecution that derails his academic ambitions and results in him being sent to work in the mines. In response to this reversal, Ludvik baldly states that “I have never voted for anyone’s downfall.”14 He quickly modifies his own sense of exceptionalism, however, describing it as “of questionable merit, since I was deprived of the right to raise my hand” and asking: “Am I the one just man? Alas, I found no guarantee that I would have acted any better.”15 What becomes clear in this situation, and across Kundera’s body of work, is that totalitarian government succeeds in making complicity the norm rather than the exception. However, complicity is not only the result of disciplinary power as enforced by the Party, but also has its roots in aesthetic forms and dispositions. The Joke examines what I will call this “trap of totalitarianism” on the three levels addressed throughout this volume. Thematically, it shows how individuals within a totalitarian system are left with few options other than complicity. However, the forms of disciplinary power that pressurize individuals into complicity with the regime are enabled to a large extent by a groundswell of enthusiasm—or at least the appearance thereof—for the

64

Chapter 2

ideology professed by the Party. It is in this enthusiasm that the role of the aesthetic in complicity, embodied in narrative and other cultural forms (notably folk music in The Joke), becomes visible. Finally, the way that those forms are interpreted may also be a form of complicity. Through its formal properties, The Joke seeks to steer its readers away from complicit interpretations: interweaving the voices of several of its protagonists, it suggests that a polyphonic understanding of the world is preferable to one in which a single voice and ideology is allowed to dominate. The Spirit of the Age The Joke begins with Ludvik returning to his hometown in Moravia after an absence of fifteen years and seeking revenge against his main persecutor, Pavel Zemanek. However, it ends in farce, his plan to seduce Zemanek’s wife Helena having backfired spectacularly. While Ludvik’s intended revenge is enacted on a personal level, and results in petty cruelty, elsewhere The Joke shows how serious consequences are produced by political affiliations that often have their roots in personal jealousy, insecurity and, most importantly, in desire. The way that these mundane emotions result in persecution is shown by an incident described by Ludvik from his time in the mines. He recalls a fellow inmate named Alexej, who retains his enthusiasm for the Party despite his imprisonment, having a bucket of water emptied onto him while still asleep. Ludvik notes that the corporal who administers this “immemorially stupid prank” is egged on by the other prisoners, and recalls that he was “irritated by this pathetic reconciliation between the men and the corporal.”16 Yet in the notion of “reconciliation,” Ludvik identifies what makes complicity seductive: even in a situation where officers and prisoners are clearly demarcated as being on opposite sides of a boundary, when an opportunity to find common cause presents itself, both sides grasp it and align themselves with each other, in this case at the expense of a weaker party. The way that instances of the desire for alignment with another individual or group, when repeated across a society, have the potential to create a situation of mass complicity is shown through the effect of Marketa’s actions. Marketa’s seriousness, itself part of her adherence to Party doctrine, is the result of what Ludvik calls “the spirit of the age.” He elaborates: The seriousness took the form not of a frown but of a smile, yes, what those years said of themselves was that they were the most joyous of years, and anyone who failed to rejoice was immediately suspected of lamenting the victory of the working class or (what was equally sinful) giving way individualistically to inner sorrows.17

The Trap of Totalitarianism

65

In other words, the alignment of the individual with the values of the Party must be absolute. Within such a climate, Ludvik’s joke, a form of expression by nature playful and intended not to be taken literally, is instead read as a direct expression of his political thoughts: as the committee that moves to expel Ludvik from the Party argues, “you could only have written what was inside you.”18 Such absolute conformity is, of course, impossible. Ludvik recalls that, for this reason, it was usual practice to include a few critical remarks on fellow Party members in evaluations, and that such criticisms could later be used in tribunals such as the one to which Ludvik himself is subjected. Any small slips, any idiosyncrasy, or slightly deviant tendency is recorded, and this meant, as Ludvik states, that “each of us carried the first fatal seed with him in the form of his Party record; yes, every one of us.”19 The fear engendered by this knowledge produces a further drive to conform ever more completely to the ideological program of the Party, and it is this need for alignment that traps “every last one” of Ludvik’s acquaintances in a position of complicity with his persecution. The strength of this trap is shown when Ludvik records that he “began to see the sentences on the postcard through the eyes of my interrogators; I myself began to feel outraged by my words and to fear that something serious did in fact lurk behind their comedy.”20 At this juncture, Ludvik is describing what Kundera in an essay on Kafka calls “autoculpabilization,”21 that is, the tendency of individuals to seek out and identify their own guilt. This autoculpablilization, as I argue in the following section, is largely the result of the way that individuals adopt particular aesthetic dispositions. Chloroform Seeping into Art In The Joke, the characters repeatedly impose artistic and narrative form on the events that they recollect and in which they participate. Midway through the novel, Ludvik asks: “Do stories, apart from happening, have something to say?” He answers tentatively in the affirmative, speaking of his conviction that “the stories we live comprise the mythology of our lives.”22 Despite these observations, and despite recognizing the same tendency in himself, Ludvik finds himself “amazed by the incredible human capacity for transforming reality into a likeness of desires or ideals,”23 in other words, the capacity to transform life into a story. Most of the relationships in the novel are defined by this tendency: Helena sees in Ludvik someone whose apparent straightforwardness will act as a salve to the dishonesty of her marriage to Zamenak; Jaroslav sees in his wife Vlasta the folk archetype of “the poor orphan girl”;24 and Ludvik comes to realize of his relationship with Lucie, his lover during

66

Chapter 2

his time in the mines, that “she had never been anything to me but a function of my own situation.”25 The way that artistic form shapes these relationships means that the novel contains a general sense that narrative is the projection of order and meaning onto life. When such projections involve individuals in the political sphere, narrative and art can become forms of complicity—and when the political encompasses all spheres of life, this process becomes unavoidable. The most sustained examination of this process is conducted through the relationship between folk music and communism. Ludvik’s return to Moravia coincides with the annual ritual of the Ride of the Kings, in which his old friend Jaroslav, a folk musician, plays a key part. Although the two men do not meet until late in the novel, the anticipation of this reunion sparks memories of earlier, ideologically charged arguments about the role of folk music. Jaroslav’s own position with regard to Moravian folk music is inconsistent: on one hand, he argues that “the folk song or folk rite is a tunnel beneath history, a tunnel that preserves much of what wars, revolutions, civilizations have long since destroyed aboveground,”26 yet he later celebrates the historically contingent revival of folk music under communism in which its ostensive role was “an original and genuine art of the people,”27 although in reality it is shown to be little more than another clichéd expression of Party ideology. The weakness of his position is shown when an embittered Ludvik challenges him by demanding: “show me one collective farmer who sings your collective farm songs for pleasure.”28 Although Ludvik’s accusation seems to pierce Jaroslav’s complacency in terms of his own role in the Party’s appropriation of folk music, the latter’s complicity is shown to be understandable. At one point, Ludvik speaks of “the chloroform seeping into the clear waters of these folk rituals,”29 and his imagery suggests that the appropriation of folk music is the result of individuals allowing their dispositions to shift gradually over time. Moreover, when Jaroslav says of the folk ritual of marriage that “we were no more than mimes for an age-old text. And the text was beautiful, it was exciting, and everything was true,”30 he reveals the seductiveness of alignment with larger collective bodies. The most powerful reason why the “mythology” created by artistic form has such power—even though the characters recognize that mythology to be an illusion—is shown when Ludvik’s own desired narrative is destroyed late in the novel. Following his failed revenge against Zamenak, he asks himself whether the farce of the previous few days has any significance if “the entire story of my life was conceived in error, through the bad joke of the postcard, that accident, that nonsense?”31 The idea of one’s own life as farce does not offer even the consolation of tragedy, and it is for this reason that the need to impose narrative form on life acts with such strength.

The Trap of Totalitarianism

67

Rust that Corrodes All It Touches At one point, when Ludvik speaks of the need to “decipher” his life,32 he suggests that meaning exists not just in the creation of artistic form and its imposition on events, but also in the interpretation of such forms. For this reason, complicity in The Joke arises not only from the creation of new frameworks of meaning (through art and narrative) but also from the frameworks through which the world is interpreted. As such, the novel raises the question of what, if any, sort of non-complicit critical framework is possible under the conditions of totalitarianism. Of the four of the novel’s narrating voices, that of Kostka, whose Christian beliefs distance him from the ideology of the Party, is the most sober and reflective. He recognizes that “no great movement designed to change the world can bear sarcasm or mockery, because they are a rust that corrodes all it touches,”33 and this is precisely why the Party is unable to tolerate even the slight dissonance of Ludvik’s postcard. Yet Kostka also recognizes the dangers of sarcasm and mockery degenerating into a form of cynicism that offers no positive position, and he argues that such a situation may lead to an “era of mockery, scepticism, and corrosion, a petty era with the ironic intellectual in the limelight, and behind him the mob of youth, coarse, cynical and nasty, without enthusiasm, without ideals, ready to mate or kill on sight.”34 If Kostka seems to posit two opposite poles, with the extreme of ideological belief at one end, and the extreme of cynicism at the other, the conclusion of the novel suggests that these two extremes may join to complete a circle. This suggestion is present through Ludvik’s description of drunken youths at the Ride of the Kings with “their faces covered by masks of cretinous virility and arrogant brutishness,”35 which echoes Kostka’s image, and suggests that the rigidity of the Party’s ideology has become so hollowed out as to create a situation wherein empty cynicism reigns. However, the novel does suggest that an ethical framework for understanding the world exists between the extremes of cynicism and totalitarian ideology. During the Ride of the Kings, Ludvik experiences an epiphanic moment when listening to the heralds’ calls. He describes the interaction of their voices thus: It was sublime and polyphonic: each of the heralds declaimed in a monotone, on the same note throughout, but each on a different pitch, so that the voices combined unwittingly into a chord; moreover, they did not all declaim at once; each started his call at a different moment, at a different house so that the voices came to the ear from here and there, like a canon for several voices.36

The beauty that Ludvik finds in this moment arises from a synthesis of form that has been reified over centuries and the polyphony that injected dynamism into European music and art.37

68

Chapter 2

Polyphony is also Kundera’s solution to the problem of how to create a narrative that neither seduces its reader into ideological alignment nor drives them into alienated cynicism. The form of the novel, as a number of commentators have already noted,38 is polyphonic, comprising seven sections, the first six of which are each narrated by a single character (with the first, third, and fifth narrated by Ludvik) before the voices of the Ludvik, Helena, and Jaroslav narrate in rotation in the final section. As Craig Cravens notes, each of the individual narrators has “reduced, albeit in a different way, the complexity of the world to a single formula or school of thought—mythology, religion, Communism.”39 However, Kundera, for whom “the novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity,”40 uses the polyphonic interaction of these three voices to undermine each character’s simplification of the world. As Cravens argues, “Kundera places the totalizing viewpoints or discourses within the same sphere of existence, and they mutually illuminate and destroy one another.”41 It is this combination of illumination and destruction that allows the novel to find some middle ground between unquestioning, complicit alignment with a given set of values on one hand, and nihilism or cynicism on the other. Success in this project is not a given, and while the consequences of Helena’s humiliation are not explored, it is clear that the destruction of her own narrative has been damaging in the extreme. The relationship between Ludvik and Jaroslav, in contrast, shows how totalizing discourses can be challenged without a resulting collapse in the individuals concerned. Cravens notes that, in Part Four, in Jaroslav’s recollections of his discussions of folk music with a youthful and committed Ludvik, the latter’s voice has succeeded in “embedding itself into Jaroslav’s consciousness; it haunts his narration, influencing him and often displacing Jaroslav’s own voice.”42 As such, in the sixth section of Part Four, when Jaroslav recalls that “folk art had lost its foundations, its reason for being, its function . . . but socialism would liberate people from the yoke of their isolation,”43 we are hearing Ludvik’s voice through Jaroslav. By effacing any distinction between the narrating voice and that of another character, the voices of Jaroslav and Ludvik actually merge. The formal properties of the narrative at this point are thus suggestive of the way in which external ideas may absorbed, but in this case, the characters are not undergoing a process of alignment with a harmful collective ideology, but are instead re-interpreting the narratives of their own lives through a polyphonic meeting of voices. The presence of polyphony guarantees neither non-complicit forms of art nor non-complicit frameworks of interpretation, but it is the prerequisite for a dialogic disposition. While Kundera’s writing betrays an implicit cynicism toward the efficacy of human communication, The Joke nevertheless proposes polyphony as a mindset and as a guiding principle for communication

The Trap of Totalitarianism

69

and for artistic expression that can achieve a degree of concord without complicity. The characters in The Joke (and in Kundera’s other novels set in Czechoslovakia) have no option other than to engage with the discourse of a repressive regime, but a polyphonic frame of interpretation is at least the starting point of a form of narrative that can resist complicity. INNOCENCE WITH ITS BLOODY SMILE: LIFE IS ELSEWHERE In the introduction to this chapter, I argued that one of the most important features of the way that Kundera’s novels examine complicity is through their problematization of the notion of innocence. Although The Joke at times addresses the idea that youth and its innocence may produce the kind of absolutist dispositions that lead to persecution, it is in Life Is Elsewhere that Kundera develops this theme fully for the first time. Moreover, I have made the case in the introduction to this volume that acts of complicity cannot be fully understood in isolation or in abstract terms, and that literature provides the “thick description” by which we can examine the antecedents of complicity, that is, the process by which individuals come to adopt a disposition whereby complicity is acceptable or inevitable. The whole of the kunstlerroman of Life Is Elsewhere describes precisely this process, showing how an individual—in this case an artist—enters into a disposition where complicity becomes (in his view) morally justifiable. These two thematic strands—innocence and Jaromil’s adoption of a complicit disposition—come together in the idea of lyricism, and I begin my discussion of the novel by exploring this concept. The Lyrical Age As in The Joke, the central event of Life Is Elsewhere is a decision regarding whether to be complicit with the communist regime in its persecution of individuals who diverge from its project, or to resist that complicity. However, whereas in The Joke, the main protagonist is the victim of that complicity, in Life Is Elsewhere, it is the protagonist Jaromil who acts an informant on his girlfriend’s brother, and his decision results in both the brother and the girlfriend being sent to prison. Moreover, while Ludvik’s admission that he may have acted no differently to the acquaintances whose condemnation sent him to prison is an acknowledgment of the pressures that they were under, Jaromil acts more or less entirely on his own free will, and would not have suffered any negative consequences had he chosen not to inform on his girlfriend.

70

Chapter 2

Kundera’s original intended title for Life Is Elsewhere was The Lyrical Age, and lyricism is precisely the disposition that Jaromil occupies and exhibits: it is an artistic form associated with the innocence of youth, the narrator informing us that “the genius of lyricism is the genius of inexperience.”44 The dangers of lyricism are that the innocent possess a tendency to accept and exhibit absolutist perspectives on the world. The narrator asserts that “if the absolute of purity and peace does not exist, there does exist an absolute of infinite feeling in which, as in a chemical solution, everything impure and foreign is dissolved.”45 This “infinite feeling” finds expression in lyricism and, like the totalizing discourse of the Communist Party, it cannot tolerate even a single note of disharmony. For this reason, there is a sense of inevitability about Jaromil’s eventual complicity with the communist regime. Jaromil strives to find a means of expressing his own inexperience poetically, but the whole of the novel leading up to his decision to inform on the redheaded girl’s brother show his inexperience to be more prosaic: simply put, he neither has experience of dealing with other men, nor, more pertinently, has he experienced any form of sexual intimacy with women. This lack of experience creates a sense of insecurity that the certainties of his poetry seek to remedy through the way that “the poem’s autonomy provided Jaromil a splendid refuge, the ideal possibility of a second life.”46 For this reason, Jaromil is generally motivated by self-interest rather than any specific aesthetic or political beliefs, and it is personal humiliation that begins to steer him toward a political disposition. This occurs when, as a result of the embarrassment of his mother brushing his hair in front of some guests, “Jaromil swore that he would always be on the side of those who want radically to change the world.”47 Although the beginnings of a political sensibility appear to emerge at this point, Jaromil is actually inconsistent in his views. This initial inconsistency can be explained by the important point made by Merrill that, in Kundera, desire is often imitative: individual desires are not so much manifest in the drive obtain a particular object, but rather in the tendency to imitate an admired “master.”48 The desire to align himself with a particular group, rather than any deeply held beliefs, informs Jaromil’s poetry, and for this reason, he changes allegiance between groups and individuals depending on where he believes he might find something to bolster his sense of self-worth. The inconsistencies that result from this tendency are shown by his shifting attitude toward modernist art, which he initially embraces under the tutelage of a painter, and in doing so places himself in opposition to tastes he identifies as “bourgeois.”49 The imitative aspect of this type of alignment is revealed at a Marxist meeting when Jaromil reports that he “was a bit surprised to notice that the voice coming from his mouth resembled the painter’s, and that this voice also induced his hands to make the painter’s gestures.”50

The Trap of Totalitarianism

71

Yet despite the robust defense of modernism that he offers at this point, he later reverses his position and, still “hearing the painter’s distinctive, authoritative tone in his own voice,”51 disavows modernism—and his own poetry—in the name of the revolution. Yet his motivation for doing so is not political but personal and is a reaction to one of the painter’s female friends having compared him to the young Rimbaud, “a child among men.” Her observation causes him to internalize the fact that “he looked thirteen, that he was a child, that he was a virgin,”52 and to respond by rebelling against the beliefs held by the woman and her circle of friends. The incident shows that Jaromil’s self-image is the main driving force behind his political and artistic positions, and that this self-image is itself a product of how Jaromil sees himself in the eyes of the rest of the world. The explicit content of his poems simply serves the agenda of attempting to shape that image. These tendencies are still in place when Jaromil later aligns himself and his poetry with the communist regime and are evident when the narrator informs us of one of his political poems that he “didn’t much care about the striking workers in Marseilles, but when he wrote a poem about the love he bore them, he was truly moved.”53 The fact that Jaromil finally aligns himself with the communist regime is unsurprising given that both require a totalizing disposition. This concordance allows Jaromil to see his betrayal of his girlfriend as the apex of both his life and artistic career, and he therefore climbs the stairs to the police station “as if he were carrying his entire destiny on his shoulders.”54 In addition, though, the moment of Jaromil’s decision is also the moment at which his alignment ceases to be an abstract position and becomes the cause of complicit action. At one point, the narrator observes that “[lyric] poetry is a domain in which all assertions become true”;55 and this feature of lyricism is what causes it to function as an enabling condition of persecution. The way that lyrical “truth” leads to persecution is shown by Jaromil’s language sliding from the figurative to the literal when he tells his girlfriend “your brother is on the other side of the barricades. He’s my personal enemy. If war broke out, your brother would shoot at me and I at him.”56 As well as reducing their respective positions to a simplistic Manichean schema, his “barricades” initially appear to be a figure of speech, but as he develops his image, they take on a solidity, and by the time he informs on the brother to the police, the image has become concrete and he reports that “this fellow was ready to shoot at Communists.”57 As this summary of Jaromil’s artistic journey shows, although poetry is described as an alternative world, a “second life,” the lyrical disposition that Jaromil occupies produces effects that are all too real, and that can be seen in the imprisonment of the redheaded girl and her brother. In a similar way to The Joke, then, Life Is Elsewhere shows how artistic form can produce complicity. However, also like The Joke, it tentatively suggests that certain formal

72

Chapter 2

properties, and specifically an element of dialogism, may prevent literature from becoming a tool of complicity. Complicit Asides In Life Is Elsewhere, the suggestion that narrative and artistic form are retrospective impositions of meaning onto the world can be seen when Jaromil sends a bag of severed telephone receivers to a famous poet in an effort to attract his attention through “a gesture laden with poetry.”58 However, soon after doing so, Jaromil has a conversation with his former classmate, now a policeman, whom he surmises must have been directly involved in the revolution and “had surely been out with the roaring crowd while Jaromil was home with his grandmother.”59 For this reason, Jaromil immediately alters the meaning that he attributes to his poetic gesture, and “gave his poetic act an opposite meaning: it was no longer a gift, not at all; he was proudly returning to the poet his fruitless wait; the receivers with severed heads were the severed heads of his veneration.”60 The novel shows how such shifting alignments lead Jaromil into a position of complicity. However, Kundera’s exploitation of the flexibility of the novel allows him to propose an ethical role for narrative that resists the trap into which Jaromil has fallen. In Life Is Elsewhere, Kundera dispenses with the polyphonic rotation of narrating characters in favor of a third-person narrator. In five of the seven sections, this narrator addresses the life of Jaromil in detail while part two describes the adventures of his alter-ego, Xavier, and Part Six is a digression describing the meeting of the redheaded girl with her older lover following her release from prison. The narrator employs free indirect discourse, with the consequence that there exists an ambiguity in terms of whose voice we are hearing, particularly in sections of commentary on Jaromil’s actions. For example, in the passage that I have quoted earlier, when the narrator tells us of Jaromil’s gesture that “it was no longer a gift, not at all,” the “not at all” gives us access to a degree of interiority, this slightly redundant insistence revealing a process of self-persuasion in Jaromil’s thought process. Thus, when we continue to read that “he was proudly returning to the poet his fruitless wait; the receivers with severed heads were the severed heads of his veneration” the narrator appears to be speaking in Jaromil’s voice at this point. Free indirect discourse, in other words, provides us with a second voice, that of Jaromil, within the first, that of the narrator. Kundera further developed the polyphonic nature of his novels by introducing in Life Is Elsewhere a formal feature that he retained throughout of body of work. This innovation was his use of narratorial asides delivered in parentheses, often following a section of commentary in free indirect discourse, and these allow him to create a particular type of critical dialogism in

The Trap of Totalitarianism

73

the novel. At times, these parenthetical asides simply deliver provide information above and beyond the characters’ thoughts as represented within free indirect discourse. However, elsewhere they establish a sense of conspiracy between narrator and reader that bypasses the characters’ thought processes, and have the effect of ironizing and undermining the voices of his protagonists. In this case, the reader is complicit with the author revealing, behind his characters’ backs, their own failings. This minor complicity acts as a positive formal counterpoint to Jaromil’s lyricism, and to his more serious complicity with the communist regime. The narrator’s interjections in parentheses interrupt Jaromil’s lyricism not with an explicit challenge, but simply through the insertion of information in a voice that does not dovetail with the lyrical form of expression. Let us look in detail at an example from Jaromil’s visit to the National Police Building, when the janitor’s son recites one of his own poems back to him. With the parenthetical asides removed, this section reads as follows: The janitor’s son gazed deep into his eyes and began to recite the poem he had tacked to the bulletin board; he knew the whole poem by heart and didn’t make a single mistake. Not knowing how to react, Jaromil blushed, but the happy pride he felt was infinitely stronger than his embarrassment: the janitor’s son knew and loved his poem!61

The description here is smooth and straightforward, and we are left only with Jaromil’s transition from embarrassment to pride and with the two men basking in the lyrical mood of the poem. However, with the narrator’s brackets reinserted, the passage reads as follows: The janitor’s son gazed deep into his eyes (his lips were slightly open and smiling stupidly) and began to recite the poem he had tacked to the bulletin board; he knew the whole poem by heart and didn’t make a single mistake. Not knowing how to react (his old friend never took his eyes off him), Jaromil blushed (aware of the ludicrous naïveté of his old friend’s performance), but the happy pride he felt was infinitely stronger than his embarrassment: the janitor’s son knew and loved his poem!62

The narrator’s comments include an implicit suggestion about the quality of Jaromil’s work (his friend smiles “stupidly”) but the more important effect is the way that these interjections interrupt the emotional flow of the passage. Without any direct challenge to the account as rendered by the narrator (which, as free indirect discourse, is actually given in Jaromil’s voice), the irony of the inserted comments is enough to puncture the emotional unity of that voice. If lyric poetry strives for an “absolute of feeling in which . . .

74

Chapter 2

everything impure and foreign is dissolved,”63 these parenthetical interjections insert just such an element of impurity. In this way, in Life Is Elsewhere, Kundera is using dialogic form to challenge the unity of a lyrical voice, exploiting the ambiguity of the authorial voice in third-person narration, and particularly in narration that employs free indirect discourse. Not only is this ambiguity an antidote to the certainty of lyricism—a certainty that results in Jaromil’s complicity with the communist state and its operatives—but it also creates a dialogic form whereby one dominant discourse is not simply overturned and replaced by another claim to absolute truth and certainty, but where the ambiguity created by the presence of multiple voices is permitted to sustain an ethical uncertainty. AIRBRUSHING HISTORY: THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was Kundera’s first major novel following his emigration to France in 1975, and it represents a bridge between the critique of totalitarianism conducted in his earlier novels and the examination of blindness and deafness in western Europe conducted later in his body of work. The two terms of the novel’s title—“laughter” and “forgetting”—are both related to dispositions that serve as the basis for complicity with the regime. The first term is discussed in Part Three (“The Angels”) in which the narrator posits two forms of laughter, namely that of the devil and that of the angels. In the schema of the novel, the second type represents a worldview similar to Jaromil’s lyricism in Life Is Elsewhere: it gives expression to a belief in a harmonious world in which any note of dissent (in this case, expressed in the devil’s laughter) cannot be permitted. Thus, and again in a similar way to Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting suggests that innocence is not a state of being free from guilt, but rather is a state of inexperience that may lead individuals into positions of complicity, or even of perpetration. The second term, forgetting, is initially figured in political terms, specifically as the kind of “airbrushing” of history employed by totalitarian regimes that seek to erase the evidence of their own crimes. However, as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the desire to forget and to revise the past also functions on an individual level, and that the form each character tries to give to the story of their life generally involves some sort of erasure of the past. Lepora and Goodin argue that condoning is not generally a form of complicity as it does not involve a causal contribution to wrongdoing. However, the proviso that I have discussed in the introduction is again crucial here, and the novel suggests that condoning becomes precisely the sort of repeated pattern

The Trap of Totalitarianism

75

of behavior that acts as an enabling condition of atrocity. For this reason, I begin this section by discussing the ways in which condoning is shown to be a culpable position in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Repressive Erasure The Book and Laughter and Forgetting begins with an anecdote that exemplifies the tendencies of totalitarian regimes to attempt to erase memory, and the contradictions and ironies that such efforts produce. The anecdote describes how in 1948 following the communist coup d’état in Czechoslovakia, an image was widely distributed of Klement Gottwald addressing the crowd in the Old Town Square in Prague while flanked by his lieutenant, Vladimír Clementis. However, Clementis was later purged, executed, and erased from the Party’s official history—and, of course, erased from the photograph. Kundera’s narrator adds the fictional detail of Clementis having lent Gottwald his hat just before the photograph was taken, enabling him to conclude the anecdote with the observation that “nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.”64 The artistic license employed here, in other words, serves to make visible the erasure of Clementis. Paul Connerton, in his taxonomy of forgetting, defines “repressive erasure” as the attempt to impose a collective amnesia on a population from above. He associates this form of forgetting with totalitarian regimes, and in fact uses The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as one of his examples.65 Clementis’s erasure from history at the beginning of the novel is shown to be just one instance of a more universal trend, as indicated when the narrator (ostensibly Kundera) later relates a conversation with his friend Hübl, a historian. Hübl claims that “you begin to liquidate a people . . . by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it.”66 The anecdote about Clementis and the model posited by Hübl appear to conform to Connerton’s notion of erasure imposed from the top downward. However, elsewhere the novel suggests that forgetting arises from the bottom upward, creating the sense that the oppressed population may itself be complicit in such erasures. For example, soon after describing the case of Gottwald and Clementis, the narrator launches into a passage in which he describes a series of erasures: The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything.67

76

Chapter 2

Robert Boyers is troubled by the way that this model of history seems to efface individual agency, arguing that “No one is blamed. All are complicit in a ‘forgetting,’ which is to say, in living as if a monstrous violation were not taking place,”68 and this passage certainly posits a model of collective memory that is powerless to sustain itself in the face of the onrush of events. Kundera’s fiction, however, never remains for long with abstract conceptualizations but examines the situations of individuals as seen against this background. The role of individuals in collective memory and forgetting is explored in Part One through the character of Mirek and in particular through the frequently quoted, but too-rarely contextualized line “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”69 Occurring shortly after the story of Gottwald and Clementis, the line is frequently taken at face value, as an assertion of the necessity of memory in challenging repressive power. Yet Mirek’s actions are more complicated than his bald assertion. Expanded, the passage actually reads as follows: It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. With this he is trying to justify what his friends call carelessness: meticulously keeping a diary, preserving his correspondence, compiling the minutes of all the meetings where they discuss the situation and ponder what to do.70

In another example of how the trap of totalitarianism functions, Mirek’s resistance, manifest in his determination to preserve memory, provides the regime with the evidence it needs to imprison he and his friends. Like Kundera’s other characters, Mirek hopes to impose artistic form on his life, as shown when we are told that he “could not imagine a better ending for the novel of his life”71 than to be sent to prison. His wish is granted, but also imposes the same fate on friends who did not share this narrative of martyrdom. Not only is Mirek’s behavior irresponsible, but his intentions are also shown to be more selfinterested and hypocritical because much of Part One is taken up with Mirek’s efforts to persuade a former lover, Zdena, to return the love letters that he had written to her twenty-five years ago, an attempt to erase her from his personal history for the sole reason that he was ashamed of her ugliness. As the narrator notes, “Mirek rewrote history just like the Communist Party, like all political parties, like all peoples, like mankind.”72 If this final observation returns us to the sense of erasure as a universal historical force, the story of Mirek and Zdena locates agency for forgetting specifically with the protagonist. Laughter and Innocence As the novel progresses, the erasure of memory is increasingly connected with innocence, and a key juncture in the elaboration of this critique is

The Trap of Totalitarianism

77

the discussion of laughter in Part Three. Laughter of a specific type is Kundera’s route into a critique of totalizing discourse similar to those already seen in The Joke and Life Is Elsewhere. In Part Three (“The Angels,”) through a description of two schoolgirls and with reference to Annie Leclerc’s Parole de femme (1976), the narrator posits two forms of laughter. The original laughter is the devil’s. It arises from “things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things.”73 The laughter of the angels, in contrast, is a desperate counter-measure, and one that is “meant to rejoice over how well ordered, wisely conceived, good, and meaningful everything here below was.”74 As Merrill notes, the angels’ laughter is imitative,75 and as such is another example of the way that the desire for alignment with a given group causes individuals to adopt certain dispositions, which themselves may lead them into complicit positions. Moreover, when the narrator comments that “all churches, all underwear manufacturers, all generals, all political parties, are in agreement about that kind of laughter, and all of them rush to put the image of the two laughing runners on the billboards advertising their religion, their products, their ideology, their nation, their sex, their dishwashing powder,”76 the political dimension of this form of laughter, and specifically the way that it is a disposition in which totalitarianism may flourish, becomes clear. As this section of the novel develops its theme, angelic laughter is also aligned with innocence. This connection is established through the narrator’s description of a photograph in which a group of protesters “are united not by marching, like soldiers or fascists, but by dancing, like children.”77 Close to the end of this section, the relationship between innocence and complicity is crystallized in the description of Paul Éluard. The narrator indicts Éluard for his approval of the execution of his former friend, Záviš Kalandra. In the novel’s most memorable image, Éluard joins a circle dance, which then rises from the ground and floats above Wenceslas Square, while “below them was Prague with its cafes full of poets and prisons full of betrayers of people, and from the crematorium where they were incinerating a Socialist deputy and a surrealist writer the smoke ascended to the heavens like a good omen.”78 In this representation, Éluard’s complicity is shown to be the result not so much of any specific ideology than his adopting a disposition that proclaims, and is convinced of, its own innocence. The themes of laughter and innocence are synthesized in the novel’s examination of forgetting conducted through the character of Tamina in Part Six. This section moves from a realistic description of her life in exile in western Europe to a fantastic episode in which the lure of forgetting is figured as a journey across water. Tamina is escorted to an island by two young boys, one of whom is called Raphael; as such, when the two laugh for no reason, we

78

Chapter 2

are left in no doubt that this is laughter of the angelic variety. Tamina finds the island to be populated by children who exist in a kind of isolated, suspended state. The island thus represents Tamina’s own forgetting of her past: her dead husband and her earlier life in Czechoslovakia fade into oblivion. However, the children’s own lack of memory is of a different nature because they have little to forget, but exist instead simply without the memoires gained from experience. In one of the novel’s most disturbing passages, this form of innocence is shown to act as the foundation of the perpetration of violence without any apparent malice. Tamina is initially welcomed, but only as a novelty, and the children’s curiosity soon turns to cruelty. This cruelty is not premeditated or malicious, but occurs because Tamina is, as the narrator notes, “outside the children’s law.”79 More disturbingly, their desire to harm an outsider is described as somehow joyful, enacted “only in order to exalt their own world and its law.”80 Thus, in this image, a state of innocence is produced by a lack of memory, and in this state, the children have no sense of the implications or consequences of their actions. In such a context-less world, their rules and games represent, to them, an ideal system that cannot integrate a discordant element such as Tamina. When Tamina finally attempts to escape by swimming away, fatigue overcomes her as she is watched by the children, still innocent of the fact that she is drowning. The image of the children’s island is a fantastic interlude, but it is one that asks us to consider the implications and consequences of innocence. In this book, I make the general argument that narrative may be a form of complicity when it contributes to connivance or produces a state of culpable ignorance. Kundera goes further by indicting innocence itself as a disposition that acts as an enabling condition of atrocity, and of his novels, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting makes this claim most strongly. As with the other authors examined in this book, Kundera is concerned that his own narrative should not be similarly complicit, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, like his other works, employs narrative form in an attempt to avoid the trap of complicity. A Wall of Mirrors The narrator concludes his section on laughter by claiming that “the angels had occupied all positions of authority, all the general staffs, had taken over the left and the right, the Arabs and the Jews, the Russian generals and the Russian dissidents.”81 His despair and pessimism here are not the result of one particular faction or political system having triumphed over another, but of the recurrence of a disposition that has absolute harmony as its goal.

The Trap of Totalitarianism

79

However, in Part Four (“Lost Letters”), the potential for narrative to create another type of formal complicity—in this case, one specific to democratic rather than totalitarian contexts—is examined through the concept of “graphomania.” The concept is introduced through the character of Bibi, who intends to write what we can surmise is a self-absorbed and mostly autobiographical novel. The narrator uses Bibi to introduce the general phenomenon of graphomania, which he defines as the mania for writing books, and which occurs in stable, developed environments—such as France, the site of Kundera’s exile.82 Thus, and in contrast to the model of repressive erasure discussed earlier, graphomania occurs in societies where individuals have the freedom to give voice to their memories as part of a more general right to open discussion. Yet graphomania produces its own form of erasure. The narrator states that graphomania results in a situation where “everyone is surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside”83 and, extrapolating from this image, suggests that “one morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.”84 In other words, if the lack of freedom under the conditions of totalitarianism produces repressive erasure, the other extreme, an excess of freedom, may produce an analogous situation in which stories remain unheard not as a result of hard power or oppression, but from the way that self-interest creates self-sustaining bubbles of representation from which discordant voices are excluded. The narrator elaborates a variation on the theme of deafness late in the novel when he (at this point closely identified with Kundera) describes his final exchanges with his dying father, a musician. These prompt him to consider how Schoenberg developed his twelve-tone system in a situation of liberty and when “music was richer than ever and intoxicated with its freedom.” Yet, he also notes that meaning was lost in this form of music, or more precisely, that listeners whose ears were accustomed to traditional keys and melodies were simply unable to hear meaning in it, and therefore that “the history of music had ended in a flowering of audacity and desire.”85 These examples indicate that democratic societies, by giving free rein to human desires, produce their own form of deafness, and thus potentially their own failures of witnessing. As such, while his early novels deal with the wrongs of the communist regimes in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting onward, Kundera also examines the potential for wrongdoing and complicity among those who identify themselves as liberal or progressive, and this critique is developed more fully in his bestknown work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

80

Chapter 2

“SECRET SMILES OF CONSPIRATORIAL CONSENT”: THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING The central ethical dilemma of The Unbearable Lightness of Being arises when the protagonist, Tomas, compares the Czechs who collaborated with the communist regime to Oedipus. He notes that those who did so tended to defend their actions on the grounds of ignorance. For Tomas, this defense is inadequate: As a result of your “not knowing,” this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt? How can you stand the sight of what you have done? How is it you aren’t horrified? Have you no eyes to see? If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes!86

Although Tomas indicts his compatriots for condoning themselves through a form of willed ignorance, he is forced to confront his own potential complicity when he is pressured to retract his article. He describes how colleagues who had themselves retracted articles and who had therefore made “public peace” with the regime “began to smile a curious smile at him, a smile he had never seen before: the secret smile of conspiratorial consent”;87 by contrast, those who had resisted such pressures began to smile “the smile of smug moral superiority.”88 The trap of totalitarianism leaves Tomas with no good option, but again this trap is the result of complicity that grows from within the oppressed population as much as it is created by top-down disciplinary power. In particular, the novel examines complicity through condoning. It does so, firstly, in the way that self-condoning can act as an enabling condition of atrocity. Secondly, it shows how the accumulation of evidence intended to frustrate the kind of blanket condoning achieved by repressive erasure can nevertheless be appropriated and used for repressive ends. Finally, in a critique that echoes the one established by the premise of “angelic” laughter in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera uses the concept of kitsch to show how particular aesthetic dispositions lead to formal complicities with totalitarianism. The Trap the World has Become If Tomas’s decision regarding whether to retract his article is the central ethical dilemma of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the novel’s central philosophical premise, introduced at the outset, is the question of the relationship between lightness and weight. “Weight” is associated with the idea of eternal return, under the condition of which an event “will become a solid mass,

The Trap of Totalitarianism

81

permanently protuberant, its inanity irreparable.”89 “Lightness,” in contrast, results in “a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight.”90 This philosophical exercise is an oblique approach to the issue of condoning, as becomes apparent when the narrator argues that “if the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one.”91 Condoning is at this point associated with lightness, and simply seems to be the result of historical distance. However, the picture becomes more complex when the narrator turns to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. The narrator describes how “criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise” but notes that these good intentions resulted in atrocity when “they defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people.” In this case, it is those acting in the moment who exculpate themselves in advance, convinced as they are of the coming paradise, and it is only with the passage of time that this condoning is replaced by a recognition of guilt because “later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.”92 In Lepora and Goodin’s model of complicity, the act of condoning is rarely a causal contribution to wrongdoing because it necessarily takes place after the fact. Yet the narrator’s description here shows is that the temporal structure of condoning may be more complex than it initially appears to be. Specifically, the teleological narrative into which these zealots have bought means that they anticipate in advance the fact that history will condone them for their actions once their “paradise” has been built. The anticipation and expectation of being condoned therefore produces a disposition that allows perpetrators—and those who collaborate with them—to believe in the rightness of their actions. For those who are subject to oppression, documentary evidence has the potential to ensure that the perpetrators of atrocity will not be condoned in the way that they envisage. This position, however, is revealed to be ingenuous in the description of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, following the Prague Spring. The narrator writes that “all previous crimes of the Russian empire had been committed under the cover of a discreet shadow,” noting that the lack of photographic documentation of its atrocities meant that the liquidation of various groups could always be denied.93 In contrast, though, the 1968 invasion is photographed by Czechs motivated by a desire to “preserve the face of violence for the distant future,”94 in other words, to lend the event a degree of weight. Photography also initially appears

82

Chapter 2

to work as a limited form of resistance, and Tereza, Tomas’s lover, finds that the Russians, who “had been carefully briefed about how to behave if someone fired at them or threw stones,” were clueless as to how to respond if photographed.95 This photographic evidence, like narrative forms of testimony, is intended to avert both the possibility of perpetrators and their collaborators later being condoned, and the possibility of repressive erasure, as evoked by the image of the “discrete shadow” under which the Russians acted. However, photography fails to achieve this aim for two reasons. Firstly, Tereza later learns that photographs such as those she took were used by the Russians, and remarks on their naivety in “thinking they were risking their lives for their country when in fact they were helping the Russian police.”96 For this reason, as Hana Píchová notes, “these documents of violence against a helpless people now serve to implicate not those who committed the violence but those who were its victims.”97 If this appropriation of documentary evidence by the regime initially comes as a shock, later in the novel, Tomas is shown to have internalized this situation. As such, when his estranged son asks him to sign a petition calling for the release of political prisoners, he realizes that any publicity garnered by the petition would be, for the regime, “manna from heaven, the perfect start and justification for a new wave of persecution.” Finding himself in this impasse, he is left to ask, “Is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower death?”98 and finds himself unable to offer a good answer: he is trapped between complicity in the form of silence that fails to bear witness to the regime’s imprisonment of political dissenters, and the complicity of providing the evidence by which the regime can further erode what little privacy remains. The second reason why photographic evidence fails as a resistant form of testimony is that, as Tereza finds, it has only a limited lifespan in the market economies of the countries to whom she appeals for help. When she tries to publish some of her photographs in Switzerland, she is told that this will be impossible “because a certain time had elapsed since the events,”99 and they are rejected in favor of a series of photographs of a nudist beach. The notion of graphomania introduced in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting suggests how the cacophony of information in democratic societies can produce a kind of deafness, and in this case the presence of other, more salacious stories causes those situated outside the event fail in their role as witnesses. Assembling the documentary evidence of the regime’s crimes is not, therefore, a simple answer to the problem of repression. However, even developing the disposition to act as a witness to the wrongs committed by the regime is difficult because, as the novel repeatedly makes clear, the state of ignorance is seductive. The Unbearable Lightness of Being returns to the critique of innocence begun in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but does so by

The Trap of Totalitarianism

83

showing the insidious way that innocence, held up as a virtue, is smuggled into a dominant discourse through the medium of kitsch. Complicity and Kitsch When Tomas, following his refusal to retract his article, is forced to leave his job as a surgeon and instead work as a window cleaner, he finds this change of circumstances to be a blessing in disguise, a “long holiday” during which he has the opportunity to engage in numerous erotic encounters with his customers. More importantly, he also finds himself in a state of “blissful ignorance,” freed at least temporarily from the weighty moral decisions that he was previously required to make.100 As is often the case in Kundera, the narrative moves between the specific (the situations of his characters) to discussions of general human tendencies, and in doing so reveals the political ramifications of small-scale actions. So it is with the desire for ignorance, and when the narrator describes how “we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments,”101 he shows how ignorance is a basic aesthetic principle governing the organization of modern life; and when he connects this form of ignorance with the aesthetic of kitsch, a further important aspect of the relationship between ignorance, artistic form, and complicity becomes clear. The narrator of The Unbearable Lightness of Being defines kitsch as “the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being in a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist.”102 Like the angelic laughter described earlier, the kitsch aesthetic produces a disposition wherein wrongdoing must necessarily be elided. These similarities can be seen when Sabrina, another of Tomas’s lovers, reflects on how parades embody kitsch. She describes how groups would march past the viewing stand with rigid smiles, “as if trying to prove they were properly joyful or, to be more precise, in proper agreement” not only with communism but “with being as such.”103 However, when kitsch becomes a political tool, it necessarily involves a form of culpable ignorance enacted through the erasure of any dissenting voices, as suggested by the narrator’s comment that “we can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.”104 Kitsch, however, goes beyond simply looking away from specific crimes or instances of wrongdoing because, in a kitschified world, the possibility of any impurity cannot be entertained in the first place. Thus, when the narrator comments that “in the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions,”105 he describes the same temporal structure that I have sketched earlier, wherein any act of complicity or perpetration is justified due to it being condoned even before its occurrence.

84

Chapter 2

Just as Tomas is lured by the seductiveness of ignorance, Sabrina herself eventually feels the siren call of kitsch. In her desire for stability and finally to bring to an end the series of betrayals that have defined her life, she finds herself longing for idyll. Recognizing this inconsistency, she reflects: “All her life she had proclaimed kitsch her enemy. But hadn’t she in fact been carrying it with her? Her kitsch was her image of home, all peace, quiet, and harmony, and ruled by a loving mother and wise father.”106 Kitsch is thus represented as one manifestation of a basic human desire for harmony, and the universality of its appeal means that the kind of disposition that enables individuals to participate in and contribute to totalitarian regimes is also present in political systems that, at first sight, appear to be radically different. The novel makes this point on an individual level when Sabrina, having emigrated to America, finds herself in conversation with a senator who, observing a group of children at play, comments: “Now, that’s what I call happiness.”107 His presumptions are ironized when the narrator, employing free indirect discourse to give us Sabrina’s sarcastic mental response, comments that “behind his words there was more than joy at seeing children run and grass grow; there was a deep understanding of the plight of a refugee from a Communist country where, the senator was convinced, no grass grew or children ran.”108 As with the laughter of angels, kitsch is not limited to the totalitarian state (although the all-encompassing demands of the totalitarian project means that it tends to dominate in such societies) and she realizes that the smile on the face of the senator “was the smile Communist statesmen beamed from the height of their reviewing stand to the identically smiling citizens in the parade below.”109 The senator’s disposition is therefore shown to be almost identical to those held by the proponents of totalitarian kitsch, and the form of the novel works to counteract the possibility of empathetic complicity in the form of the reader imposing a kitsch interpretation onto the narrative of central European dissidents. It does so by referring to the deaths of Tomas and Tereza in Part Six, and following this with a description of the final part of their lives in Part Seven, meaning that the story of their relationship with the communist regime does not follow an arc of rebellion and escape that might itself provide a comforting and coherent view of the world. Kitsch interpretations are also discouraged through the critique of non-Czech characters in the novel who tend to want to hear a narrative that follows such an arc. Sabrina has to push back against the expectations of such a narrative in Part Three (“Words Misunderstood”) when she feels that she has to justify her unwillingness to take part in an anti-Soviet protest march in Paris. Her reluctance to participate is a result of the fact that, as she sees it, “behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and

The Trap of Totalitarianism

85

. . . the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.”110 This image is expanded upon in Part Six, “The Grand March,” in which Kundera shows how a self-satisfied liberal disposition, ostensibly oriented against oppressive forms of government, can become its own form of blindness. His target here is the left, or those who identify as progressives, and their kitsch is manifest in the image of the Grand March. This is “the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.”111 In this section of the novel, the Grand March takes the form of a mission to the border to Cambodia, at the time terrorized by the Khymer Rouge, to deliver medical aid. The mission descends into factionalism and farce, and this section therefore shows how actions that might appear outwardly to be heroic are the manifestations of a sense of mission that itself has its roots in human vanity. More importantly, those who buy into the myth of the Grand March demonstrate a similar disposition, in the end, as the oppressors that they claim to oppose. The only determining factors as to whether this disposition ultimately results in complicity, or even in perpetration, are the historical and political conditions in which the individuals who adopt these dispositions live. The rather pessimistic conclusion that a reader may draw from Kundera’s novels in this phase of his career is that, while art and narrative may resist such dispositions, the routes into complicity are failings so common as to be almost universal. As is the case in all of the novels discussed in this chapter, then, Kundera shows the aesthetic basis of the dispositions that enable totalitarianism. Also in a similar way to his other novels, polyphony in The Unbearable Lightness of Being offers a possible route out of this artistic and ethical bind. The narrator writes that “those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition.”112 In other words, the presence of other voices, and a resulting dialogic outlook on the world, are the antidotes to the kitsch aesthetic. The possibility of resistance is thematized in Sabrina’s paintings, in which an accident gives rise to a technique in which she trickles paint over realist images, and wherein “the trickle looked like a crack; it turned the building site into a battered old backdrop, a backdrop with a building site painted on it . . . on the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.”113 The form of the novel itself is also designed to counteract any possibility of kitsch. Its seven parts interact dialogically rather than producing narrative drive toward an ending that might provide the novel with a sense of unity and completion. In addition, the narrating “I” inserts an ironic distance

86

Chapter 2

between the narrator and the characters, and thus discourages the reader from entering into any kind of kitsch over-identification with them. In particular, Kundera’s metafictional tendency to describe how his fictional characters are “born” acts to dispel such a possibility. In the case of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tomas is born from the image of his struggling with a weighty decision, “standing at the window of his flat and looking across the courtyard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to do.”114 The character of Tomas, and hence the whole fiction, grows from this imagined image and, through the decisions that he is required to make, is tied to the opposition between lightness and weight introduced at the beginning of the novel. Importantly, this opposition is unlike others (such as darkness and light, warmth and cold) because of its ambiguity: it is unclear which of the two is the positive term. Ambiguity such as this is alien to the world of kitsch, and as such the central philosophical question that frames the novel and frames the actions of its characters, resists the kitschification that totalitarianism employs. These observations on the form of The Unbearable Lightness of Being return us to Kundera’s assertion that “Totalitarian Truth excludes relativity, doubt, questioning; it can never accommodate what I would call the spirit of the novel.”115 His work in this period exhibits a keen and self-reflexive sense of the potential for artistic forms to enter into positions of complicity with harmful political movements; but thematically and formally, it can be seen as trying to resist this possibility. Kundera’s work has retained this reflexivity up to the present day, but since his emigration to Paris, totalitarianism is less of a presence in his work, and for this reason, I end my discussion with The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The importance of Kundera’s work to this examination of complicity lies in the way that it shows how the aesthetic can create dispositions whereby individuals align themselves with totalizing modes of thought. In addition, his work is important because, although totalitarianism is his main target, he also addresses the existence and nature of the complicity of progressives—and this is a theme to which I return throughout this volume, most notably in my discussion of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland in chapter 5. I have argued that Kundera’s novels in this phase, in that they are largely concerned with the political situation in Czechoslovakia, primarily examine the ethical options available to those acting within totalitarian systems. By contrast, the focus in following chapters shifts to the complicity of those situated at a remove from the site of wrongdoing. Despite the difference in settings, the complicities present in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels share some similarities with those in Kundera, notably in the way that condoning acts as form of complicity, and it is to Ishiguro that I turn in chapter 3.

The Trap of Totalitarianism

87

NOTES 1. Kundera, Laughter, 10. 2. Woods, Translating, 4. 3. In October 2008, on the basis of a newly discovered police report, the Czech newspaper Respekt made the allegation that Kundera had, in 1950, informed on a defector named Miroslav Dvořáček who had at that point returned to Czechoslovakia. Dvořáček was lucky to escape execution, and spent fourteen years in a labor camp as a result of the accusation. The documentary evidence (i.e., the police report) does not comprehensively establish Kundera’s role as an informant, so the question of his culpability remains unresolved. He has, however, received the support of a number of high-profile authors, notably J. M. Coetzee. Hradilek and Třešňák, “Denunciation”; Cotzee, “Support.” 4. West, “Destiny,” 424. 5. West, “Destiny,” 428. 6. Kundera, Testaments, 267. 7. Kundera, Testaments, 268. 8. Afxentiou, Dunford and Neu, “Introducing Complicity,” 11. 9. Kundera, Lightness, 218. 10. Merrill, Imitation, 137. 11. Kundera, Novel, 14. Emphasis in original. 12. Kundera, Joke, 34. 13. Kundera, Joke, 46–47. 14. Kundera, Joke, 77. 15. Kundera, Joke, 77. 16. Kundera, Joke, 113. 17. Kundera, Joke, 31. 18. Kundera, Joke, 38. 19. Kundera, Joke, 32. 20. Kundera, Joke, 45. 21. Kundera, “Kafka’s World,” 91. 22. Kundera, Joke, 164. 23. Kundera, Joke, 181. 24. Kundera, Joke, 145. 25. Kundera, Joke, 250. 26. Kundera, Joke, 133. 27. Kundera, Joke, 138. 28. Kundera, Joke, 155. 29. Kundera, Joke, 47. 30. Kundera, Joke, 148. 31. Kundera, Joke, 288. 32. Kundera, Joke, 164. 33. Kundera, Joke, 242. 34. Kundera, Joke, 225. 35. Kundera, Joke, 314.

88

Chapter 2

36. Kundera, Joke, 263, emphasis in original. 37. In one of his frequent comparisons of musical and literary composition, Kundera writes that “one of the great fundamental principles of the polyphonic composers was the equality of voices: no one voice should dominate, none should serve as mere accompaniment.” Kundera, Novel, 75, emphasis in original. 38. See, for example, Chitnis, “Idea,” 420 and Ricard, Agnes, 145. 39. Cravens, “Consciousness,” 104. 40. Kundera, Novel, 18. 41. Cravens, “Consciousness,” 105. 42. Cravens, “Consciousness,” 102. 43. Kundera, Joke, 141. 44. Kundera, Life, 180. 45. Kundera, Life, 178. 46. Kundera, Life, 50. 47. Kundera, Life, 96. 48. Merrill, Imitation, 3. 49. Kundera, Life, 29. 50. Kundera, Life, 97. 51. Kundera, Life, 125. 52. Kundera, Life, 122–23. 53. Kundera, Life, 180. 54. Kundera, Life, 220. 55. Kundera, Life, 179. 56. Kundera, Life, 216. 57. Kundera, Life, 221. 58. Kundera, Life, 129. 59. Kundera, Life, 130. 60. Kundera, Life, 131. 61. Kundera, Life, 185. 62. Kundera, Life, 185. 63. Kundera, Life, 178. 64. Kundera, Laughter, 3–4. See Píchová, Memory, 102 for a discussion of Kundera’s fictional addition of the hat episode. 65. Connerton, Mourning, 41. 66. Kundera, Laughter, 218. 67. Kundera, Laughter, 9–10. 68. Boyers, Atrocity, 227. 69. Kundera, Laughter, 4. 70. Kundera, Laughter, 4. 71. Kundera, Laughter, 33. 72. Kundera, Laughter, 30. 73. Kundera, Laughter, 86. 74. Kundera, Laughter, 87. 75. Merrill, Imitation, 138. 76. Kundera, Laughter, 81.

The Trap of Totalitarianism

77. Kundera, Laughter, 88. 78. Kundera, Laughter, 94–95. 79. Kundera, Laughter, 255. 80. Kundera, Laughter, 255. 81. Kundera, Laughter, 99–100. 82. Kundera, Laughter, 127. 83. Kundera, Laughter, 128. 84. Kundera, Laughter, 147. 85. Kundera, Laughter, 246–47. 86. Kundera, Lightness, 173. 87. Kundera, Lightness, 176–77. 88. Kundera, Lightness, 177. 89. Kundera, Lightness, 3. 90. Kundera, Lightness, 3. 91. Kundera, Lightness, 3. 92. Kundera, Lightness, 171–72. 93. Kundera, Lightness, 65. 94. Kundera, Lightness, 65. 95. Kundera, Lightness, 65. 96. Kundera, Lightness, 139. 97. Píchová, Memory, 101. 98. Kundera, Lightness, 219. 99. Kundera, Lightness, 66. 100. Kundera, Lightness, 193. 101. Kundera, Lightness, 153. 102. Kundera, Lightness, 246. 103. Kundera, Lightness, 246–47. 104. Kundera, Lightness, 249. 105. Kundera, Lightness, 251. 106. Kundera, Lightness, 252. 107. Kundera, Lightness, 247. 108. Kundera, Lightness, 247. 109. Kundera, Lightness, 247–48. 110. Kundera, Lightness, 99. 111. Kundera, Lightness, 254. 112. Kundera, Lightness, 248. 113. Kundera, Lightness, 61–62. 114. Kundera, Lightness, 5. 115. Kundera, Novel, 14. Emphasis in original.

89

Chapter 3

Consolation and Complicity Kazuo Ishiguro

In Ishiguro’s novels, his typical style (from which he has only deviated in The Buried Giant, 2015) is to employ unreliable first-person narrators. These narrators’ omissions and half-truths are attempts to retrospectively minimize the extent of their complicity with wrongdoing, and at the same time to console themselves that their lives have not been wasted in the service of abhorrent or misguided causes. These tendencies are particularly evident in An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go, and for this reason, I examine these four texts in this chapter. Each of the narrators of these four novels attempts to console themselves through the construction of an autobiographical narrative, and these efforts at self-consolation are similar to condoning in that they seek to justify their own actions even as the emerging historical consensus (in An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day) or growing self-awareness (in When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go) reveals those actions to have been morally or politically culpable. In the introduction, I have argued that condoning can be a form of complicity if it contributes to wider patterns of social behavior. Ishiguro’s narrators, however, write from positions of declining influence, with this reduced state itself being the reason for their need for consolation. For this reason, these acts of consolation are, in themselves, minimal forms of complicity, but their narrative form reveals a great deal about how individuals come to accept, adopt, and justify complicit dispositions and alignments. Moreover, the narrators all fail as witnesses to their own complicity, and as such, more than any of the other writers discussed this volume, Ishiguro reveals how the minimization of history described by Felman occurs through self-interested manipulation of narrative. 91

92

Chapter 3

THE CONSOLED: AN ARTIST OF THE FLOATING WORLD AND THE REMAINS OF THE DAY The protagonists of Ishiguro’s second and third novels An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day are palpably on the wrong side of history. In the former, Masuji Ono’s paintings help to create the imperialist climate in which the Japanese invasion of China and entry into World War II take place, while in the latter, the butler Stevens provides unstinting service to Lord Darlington, a Nazi sympathizer. However, if the protagonists’ moral culpability is clear, the extent and effects of their complicity are less certain. The question of Japanese artists’ responsibility remains the subject of debate in Japan,1 and the unreliability of Ono’s narrative further obfuscates the issue in terms of his own contribution to the climate of nationalism described in the novel. Similarly, while Stevens insists on the importance of his own role in Darlington’s attempts to facilitate behind-the-scenes diplomacy between the British establishment and the Nazi regime, the importance of well-polished silver to these machinations remains questionable. Meera Tamaya writes that “for the majority of us who do not play leading roles on the world’s stage, history is not experienced as ‘history,’ but as it affects the fabric and texture of personal relationships.”2 Both novels are narrated at the moment when Ono and Stevens find themselves having to reevaluate their own personal relationships and decisions as this sense of history emerges in the form of a crystallizing postwar consensus. The response of both narrators is to construct narratives that admit a degree of culpability, but that primarily serve to justify and condone their own actions. The Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day thus consist of narrative justifications in which the protagonists push against the weight of history while attempting to shape their memories into meaningful stories. This process causes the three layers of complicity examined in this book to become visible. The first such layer, which is relatively easy to identify, consists of the contributions made by Ono and Stevens to abhorrent causes, through their art and service, respectively. The second layer of complicity consists of the denial of culpability, that is, of their attempts to condone their own actions as well as those of their associates. Finally, the temporal gap between the construction of the narratives and the time at which we read them (Ono writes between 1948 and 1950; Stevens in 1956) creates the potential for a third, empathetic, layer of complicity to emerge: accepting the narrators’ resolutions to adapt to the world that emerged out of World War II may itself be a form of complacent blindness to wrongdoing in that postwar democratic order.

Consolation and Complicity

93

Ritual and Complicity An Artist of the Floating World centers on Ono’s attempts to reckon with his own legacy. Most importantly, he describes his decision to abandon the “floating world” school of the novel’s title, which is concerned with depicting the ephemeral pleasures of the night, and instead to paint imperialist propaganda. This final stage of Ono’s career coincides with the Japanese invasions of large parts of Asia before and during World War II. In this climate, the National Mobilization Law, passed in 1938, coerced the population into support for the war effort. However, Ono aligns himself willingly and wholeheartedly with this imperialistic climate and, from this point on, he produces paintings, which, from the descriptions he gives, appear to be crass expressions of militaristic sentiments. For example, his “Eyes to the Horizon” shows three timid politicians juxtaposed with three soldiers who are determinedly striding westward, toward the Asian continent, against the backdrop of the military flag, and bounded by the coastline of Japan. The text down the right- and left-hand margins of the painting reads “Eyes to the Horizon!” and “No time for cowardly talking. Japan must go forward.”3 Despite being forced to confront the consequences of Japanese imperialism, Ono always emphasizes his own agency in adopting this direction, boasting, for example, of “the ability to think and judge for myself, even if it meant going against the sway of those around me.”4 His willingness to challenge his peers in fact defines a number of critical junctures in his life and career. However, his insistence on his own agency obscures the way in which institutions and group identities work to produce complicity in their members. Ono’s narrative is marked by repeated, ritualistic instances of the persecution of individuals who fail to demonstrate that they are sufficiently aligned with the group of which they are members. For example, while still part of the “floating world” school, the villa of Ono’s master, Mori-san, functions as a home and place of work for the artists, where they can paint unburdened by external constraints. However, the apparent artistic freedom granted by this separation from the rest of society is only sustainable through an adherence to Mori-san’s aesthetic project. For example, Ono recalls how mentioning the name of Sasaki, an artist branded as a “traitor” to this school of thought, would lead to fist-fights in the yard of the compound.5 The symbolic and aesthetic boundaries of Mori-san’s enclave are thus defined and enforced from within. Victor Sage interprets the representation of Sasaki’s departure as following a “ritual structure,”6 and it is in the ritualistic forms of language employed by the protagonists that agency is at once exercised and constrained, and through which the artists affirm or disavow their alignment with structures of power. Where language takes frozen, ritualized forms, this is usually an indicator of

94

Chapter 3

established forms of power being asserted at the expense of individualistic expression. This sense is reinforced by the fact that Ono confuses the speakers of such utterances on a number of occasions. For example, his accusation that Kuroda is “exploring curious avenues”7 is the same formulation that Mori-san directs at him on the occasion of their schism, and he also expresses uncertainty as to whether the words “no man will make me believe that I’ve wasted my time” were his own or Mori-san’s. Elsewhere, he becomes confused as to whether the source of a particular phrase was Jiro Miyake, a suitor of his youngest daughter Noriko, or Suichi, the husband of the older Setsuko.8 The way that role dictates the form of verbal expression in these ritualistic exchanges means that, while the cast changes, the words uttered do not: as John Rothfork has it, “one perceives that the performance is the same” in all of these episodes.9 This tendency is exemplified by the use of the label “traitor,” which is applied to Ono, Sasaki, and Kuroda at various times in the narrative. In each case, the role of the persecutor is dictated by the need to assert the authority of the dominant group, and individual agency is exercised in, but limited to, the decision to maintain alignment with the group or break with it. The protagonists thus enter into complicit relationships with structures of power through rigid linguistic structures, because where no deviation from the accepted script is possible, the members of a group are forced to accept all of its tenets or none. Where these structures remain small-scale, the possibility of transgression and escape remains and when Ono leaves Mori-san’s villa, he is not rebelling against the whole of society, but one small enclave. However, by the time the situation is repeated with Ono in a position of power, the climate of nationalism to which he has contributed has produced a totalitarianism in which the dominant group is identified with the nation. Consequently, Kuroda’s rejection of Ono’s values is seen as a rejection of the nation-state, and there is no enclave to which Kuroda can turn for refuge. The result is that, instead of having to endure the bullying of a handful of loyal artists, as were the fates of Sasaki and Ono, the state’s apparatus of power, in the form of the Committee of Unpatriotic Activities, is brought to bear in disciplining Kuroda’s “treachery,” and his punishment is imprisonment. The role of language in complicity is not, however, limited to the ritualistic restriction of agency described earlier. Ono’s representation of his own actions, and specifically the way that he attempts to construct a narrative of consolation regarding his own actions before and during the war, is a form of condoning. In this act of self-condoning, he conducts the kind of minimization of events described by Felman, largely by emphasizing continuity and de-emphasizing the traumatic ruptures caused by the war. This tendency can be seen in Ono ending his narrative by attempting to dovetail his personal past with a collective future, particularly in the later sections of his narrative.

Consolation and Complicity

95

Ono omits a number of ruptures in his personal life, the most glaring of which are the deaths of his wife, Michiko, and his son, Kenji. Both are mentioned only a handful of times, and when they are included they are always incidental to another, more pressing line of recollection. The way that Ono shapes his narrative to condone his own actions can be seen most clearly in his failure to address his own role in Kuroda’s persecution. In his account of his return to Mori-san’s villa in 1938, sixteen years after having left and at that point at the height of his influence, Ono recalls looking down on the compound, and feeling “a profound sense of happiness deriving from the conviction that one’s efforts have been justified . . . that one has achieved something of real value and distinction.”10 During this description, however, he recalls in passing that “a chief of police I had never met before came to pay his respects.”11 This detail indicates Ono’s complicity with Kuroda’s persecution by the police, but he fails to make this connection explicit. The failure of his narrative to address his culpability in Kuroda’s mistreatment is also evident in his attempt to shoehorn Kuroda’s rehabilitation after the end of the war into his narrative, but when he states that “I haven’t been in touch with him since . . . since the war,”12 the ellipsis marks the point at which Ono is unwilling or unable to name the event of Kuroda’s imprisonment and torture. If Ono’s narrative labors to paper over the cracks left by these personal omissions, it also minimizes larger historical events of the war. Signifiers that have fundamentally shaped Japan—and indeed the postwar world— are absent from his narrative: there is no mention of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, as Chu-chueh Cheng notes, the Tokyo war crimes trials were contemporaneous with Ono’s first entry in An Artist of the Floating World, but these are likewise omitted.13 Ono thus remolds national disaster into national rebirth in his account, and shortly after his recollection of returning to Mori-san’s villa, he describes how the former pleasure district is now populated with commercial buildings and with young office workers exuding “optimism and enthusiasm.” He ends his narrative with the assertion that “our nation, it seems, whatever mistakes it may have made in the past, has now another chance to make a better go of things.”14 By disingenuously attributing the “mistakes” of the past to the “nation,” Ono elides the specifics of his own contribution to Japan’s calamitous imperialism and instead inserts his own actions into a national narrative of recovery. Ono was clearly complicit with Japanese imperialism through his actions before and during the war but his narrative, being a retrospective reconstruction of events, falls short of Lepora and Goodin’s “minimum threshold” of causal contribution. Moreover, given Ono’s waning influence and Japan’s transition to democracy following its defeat, neither can his narrative be seen as contributing to repeated patterns of social behavior. Yet tensions and debates regarding the memorialization of World War II continue to exist,

96

Chapter 3

and the official visits of Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi to the Yasukuni Shrine (at which the remains of fourteen Class-A war criminals are interred) between 2001 and 2006, against a background of rising nationalism,15 show how the kind of denial of history performed by Ono may be repeated on a larger scale even after a period of latency. For this reason, condoning may be a form of complicity when it enables the denial of history, which itself contributes to the shaping of nationalist narratives, across generations. For Ishiguro’s English-speaking audience, this same period of latency may, however, create a form of empathetic complicity. The main reason why Ono’s attempts to narratively reshape his own past are so unconvincing is that he is attempting to bring his actions into alignment with a present that holds very different values to those that he previously espoused. Indeed, this dissonance is what makes the narrative work as a novel, and we read not so much for the plot as to identify a reality behind Ono’s tissue of consoling half-truths and omissions. In other words, we are invited to pass judgment on Ono. Yet such a judgment has the potential to become another form of consolation, in this case on the part of the reader. Our judgment on Ono is enabled, and perhaps implicitly encouraged, by the oppositions between pre- and postwar Japan present in An Artist of the Floating World. These oppositions are present in the contrasts before and after the war in terms of political beliefs, social norms, and the material landscape of Japan. We might condemn Ono for his reactionary tendencies, such as when he speaks nebulously and disapprovingly of “the new ways,” and for the inadequacy of his admission that “Eyes to the Horizon” is a painting “whose sentiments are now outdated.”16 Yet the ease with which later readers can identify Ono’s failings also creates the possibility of reading becoming an act of consolation: if the principal failing of Ono’s narrative is his inability to acknowledge the extent of his own culpability, our own reading after the fact may itself involve an uncritical acceptance of the postwar, democratic values that Ono belatedly (if somewhat unconvincingly) comes to accept. Moreover, such an acceptance may involve a turning away from the continuing need to remain attentive to the process of reading as a form of witnessing. The consolation that Ono’s narrative offers through the professed optimism of its conclusion may, in other words, become our own blind spot. There is no critique of this new, democratic order—the order that we inhabit—and our position of judgment is secure. Too secure, perhaps, as a degree of discomfort would encourage the reflexivity required by Laub’s third level of witnessing. Service and Complicity In terms of how it addresses the three forms of complicity examined in this book, The Remains of the Day works in a similar way to An Artist of the

Consolation and Complicity

97

Floating World, in that it invites us to read past the obfuscations and omissions of a consoling narrative. However, for Ishiguro’s English-speaking audience, The Remains of the Day takes place much closer to home than the Japan of An Artist of the Floating World, and for this reason, the later novel perhaps more pointedly addresses the way that complicity with wrongdoing occurs in ostensibly democratic societies. As in An Artist of the Floating World, the protagonist-narrator is shown grappling with his complicity in the events of World War II. In this case, the butler Stevens struggles with the fact that he provided unstinting service for a master, Lord Darlington, who was actively sympathetic with the Nazis. While Stevens is culpable in his sacking of two Jewish maids from their jobs at Darlington Hall at one point, for the most part, his complicity takes the form of service that allows Darlington to carry out his political maneuvers smoothly. These involve arranging clandestine meetings between members of the British elite and high-ranking Nazis between the wars and result in a visit by the German ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to Darlington Hall with the aim of setting up a meeting between Hitler and the King. Stevens describes von Ribbentrop’s visit as “a sort of summary of all that I had come to achieve thus far in my life,”17 seeing it as the high point of his professional career. However, as he is forced to concede that these professional efforts were misguided, he seeks consolation in the personal aspect of his life—neglected through his career—by trying to rekindle his relationship with Miss Kenton, now Mrs. Benn. The narrative describes his journey to see her, and combines his recollections of how he squandered his one opportunity for intimacy with details of his contribution to Darlington’s political projects. Stevens’s complicity with Darlington’s politics is one of connivance, itself enabled by a disposition of unquestioning loyalty. In a similar way to An Artist of the Floating World, ritualistic language plays an important role in creating complicit alignments. The rigidity of Stevens’s professional language under Lord Darlington becomes visible when contrasted with the propensity of Stevens’s new employer, the American Mr. Farraday, to engage in “banter,” a form of extemporization that leaves Stevens “rather unsure” of how to respond.18 Notably, following Mr. Farraday’s offer to “foot the bill for the gas” for Stevens’s trip to visit Mrs. Benn, the latter repeats the offer to himself a further three times while considering it, retaining the original formulation and reproducing it in quotation marks each time:19 he is, in other words, entirely incapable of synthesizing this alien register into his own speech. Stevens is much more comfortable with the ritualistic structures demanded by his professional role. On one occasion, he accepts this rigidity to the point that his use of language also means an acceptance of his own humiliation. Mr. Spencer, one of Darlington’s friends, seeks to make an antidemocratic point

98

Chapter 3

about the ignorance of the general populace, and quizzes Stevens on a number of technical matters of foreign policy. In each case, Stevens’s response is: “I’m sorry, sir, but I am unable to assist in this matter.”20 Sage interprets the exchange as a “ritual of humiliation,” in which Stevens’s response, designed to meet the expectations of Darlington, “reasserts the theatre of service as a benign conspiracy between master and servant.”21 Stevens does not disclose whether he would be capable of answering Spencer’s questions, but in choosing to adhere to a fixed and ritualistic response, he effaces his own agency in his provision of service and in doing so becomes complicit in the antidemocratic politics of Darlington and his clique. Stevens writes in 1956 and, like Ono, the tension in his narrative arises from a need to justify his actions in the face of a growing realization he contributed to the wrong side of history. His account also seeks to de-emphasize his own alignment with, and contribution to, objectionable causes. His narrative omits entirely the years of the war itself, during which the extent of Darlington’s misguidedness would finally have become clear. Moreover, the pre-war visits of Ribbentrop to Darlington Hall are presented as part of a general whirl of activity during that period, and when Stevens reflects on them, he does so in terms of justifying Darlington’s actions (and, by proxy, his own), claiming that many were taken in by Ribbentrop’s charm.22 However, Stevens fails to mention Ribbentrop’s implication in the Holocaust, or his execution as a war criminal in 1946, an event of which he cannot have been unaware. To say that Stevens connives with Darlington, and to indict his narrative on the basis of its minimization of history is perhaps the most sympathetic verdict that we can pass on him, because is it also possible that his omission of key signifiers is less a product of his naivety than it is of the active and cynical manipulation of his own narrative. The sequential entries into Stevens’s travelogue as his journey progresses provide the appearance of relative spontaneity, within which revisions and digressions inevitably take place. However, Christine Berberich argues that close examination of the information that Stevens chooses to disclose reveals that his protestation of ingenuousness with regard to the political affairs taking place around him are false and that “he knows and always knew what was going on around him.”23 Moreover, while the narrative initially appears to be structured according to the associations prompted by Stevens’s recollections as he travels, he seems to delay the inclusion of emotive (and damning) signifiers until late enough in the narrative that some of their shock is diminished: Nazis, Nuremburg, Mosley, and the British Union of Fascists are only referred to by name past the half-way point of the novel.24 The suspicion that Stevens is actually shaping his narrative to evoke sympathy on the reader’s part is heightened by his representations of its emotional peaks, namely his father’s death and his reunion with

Consolation and Complicity

99

Mrs. Benn. Meghan Marie Hammond argues that, in his representation of his father’s death, Stevens “is cognizant of his story’s emotional weight, and he aims to convey it . . . he carefully narrates this scene to defend himself precisely as the kind of butler who is able to maintain his dignity in any situation, despite being a caring son underneath.”25 Her reading is supported by Stevens’s representation of the incident. He reports Lord Darlington’s reaction to seeing him is to say “you look as though you’re crying” before reporting his own reaction: “I laughed and taking out a handkerchief, quickly wiped my face. ‘I’m very sorry, sir. The strains of a hard day.’”26 Stevens’s lack of commentary on the reported speech produces the illusion of its direct transcription. However, this is stylistically untypical given Stevens’s tendency to indulge in extensive elaboration, and for this reason, his use of direct speech at this point can be seen as a piece of skillful editing on his part, designed to elicit the greatest degree of empathy from the reader. As these examples show, Stevens is guilty of a twofold act of minimization: not only does he edit out key episodes of his complicity with Darlington, but he also obscures the agency by which these omissions take place. While An Artist of the Floating World takes place in a period of reconfiguration following Japan’s defeat, the fact that The Remains of the Day is set in the aftermath of victory means that England is represented as being more or less certain of its democratic values, and this certainty rests in part on these values being defined in terms of difference from Nazism. However, Nazism is not the only force responsible for atrocity in The Remains of the Day, and Stevens’s insular and conservative portrait of England fails to recognize British atrocities abroad and contains a number of instances of minimization of history. For example, he represents the empire as an abstract and benevolent entity despite his brother having been implicated in atrocities during an action against Boer civilians. Moreover, and again like Ono, Stevens omits references to significant historical events taking place as he writes and he continues to celebrate the empire even as the Suez crisis unfolds. Stevens ends his narrative with a renewed determination to “look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically”27 and hence to remold himself not as a servant bound by ritualistic structures of service, but as an individual capable of extemporization. As such, Stevens appears to align himself with the democratic values and freedoms of the postwar West. Yet that same alignment, combined with the empathetic claims that his account makes on the reader, again raises the possibility of reading becoming a form of complicity. If we accept a conclusion that celebrates this personal resolution, this form of closure also results in the political elements of the other, contributory strands of the narrative being de-emphasized. As such, the problematic aspects of Stevens’s discourse on British “greatness” and the glaring omissions that his account of the interwar years contain are in danger

100

Chapter 3

of being forgotten as a result of the narrative offering consolation in personal terms. Bo G. Ekelund indicts the novel on these terms, arguing that whatever reflexivity is present in The Remains of the Day is not enough to save it from a somewhat smug historical perspective that functions as a minimization of history.28 While acknowledging the risk of self-satisfied and complicit alignment between the reader and Stevens, I suggest that the novel does enough to prompt a reflexive awareness of the flawed process of witnessing that Stevens’s account represents. It achieves this through Stevens’s own inconsistencies, and in particular through the way that he rereads and reinterprets the letter from Mrs. Benn that initially prompted his journey. Stevens initially claims that the letter contains “distinct hints of her desire to return”29 to Darlington Hall, but is later forced to admit that “she does not at any point in her letter state explicitly her desire to return.”30 At this point, the ironic distance that has always existed between the reader and Stevens widens, allowing us to see Stevens’s narrative manipulation of the past precisely as an act of flawed and unreliable interpretation. The performative act of bearing witness, a process that takes place in dialogue with the past and that becomes manifest in the creation of a narrative account, becomes visible. That Stevens does not bear witness in good faith invites us to read his account critically and reflexively, and with an awareness of the ways in which the past can be manipulated in narrative. Yet this implicit invitation to read reflexively may not necessarily produce a critical disposition toward the ideological order of the postwar on the part of the reader. Ishiguro’s later works, in contrast, prompt such a critical stance more directly. Both When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go display a much greater sense of unease with democratic systems and structures, and shift from exploring complicities with ideologies now accepted as abhorrent (Japanese imperialism and Nazism) to exploring complicities within, and obscured by, democratic systems. MYOPIA AND BLINDNESS: WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS When We Were Orphans is narrated by the detective Christopher Banks, who describes his childhood in Shanghai’s International Settlement, his parents’ disappearance, and his return to the city in 1937 in order to find them, just as the invading Japanese forces step up their incursions into the city. However, he fails to locate his parents, and he ends his account struggling to find the same degree of consolation as achieved by Ono and Stevens. Lee Horsley describes how, in classic detective fiction, the detective is engaged in a rational “interpretive quest,” during which his skills of problem solving are tested, and usually win out, as a result of which the identity of

Consolation and Complicity

101

the perpetrator and the manner of the crime are identified. Such stories rely on the detective’s absence from the crime itself, with the task of detection being one of reading indices of events as clues.31 Furthermore, as Tobias Döring argues, classic detective fiction is ideologically conservative: the role of the detective is primarily “restorative,” and the restoration of order can only be seen as a positive thing if that order is presented as benevolent.32 Finally, and significantly for the role of the detective as witness and testifier, Döring argues that “the classic detective is . . . a master story teller,” with the revelatory climax of the tale itself being the detective’s story of how he was able to piece together the trail of evidence, which led to the perpetrator.33 In the classic mold, then, the detective can be seen as a belated witness to a crime, situated at a remove from events. As a witness, the detective interprets the indexical traces of a crime rather than bearing witness to his or her own experience of it. Banks’s failure in this role subverts the genre, and in doing so shows how his own blind spots are the result of his ideological alignment. Moreover, such blindness, repeated en masse, is shown to be an enabling condition of the British exploitation of the Chinese population. The Magnifying Glass Banks’s professional failings are the result of his reliance on an outdated mode of detection, namely the archetypal magnifying glass. While this tool may be suitable for cases involving “stolen jewels [and] aristocrats murdered for their inheritance,”34 it is entirely inadequate as a means of approaching the crime responsible for his parents’ disappearance, that is, the opium trade, which is systemic, transnational, and economic in nature. Despite a tendency to self-aggrandizement, Banks actually provides few details of the cases that make his name. For example, despite referring to the “self-evident brilliance” of his investigation of “the Mannering case,”35 he fails to elaborate on the nature of this investigation. Similarly, he mentions the “Trevor Richardson affair,” the “Roger Parker case” and “the Studley Grange business”36 without providing any further specifics. The use of names as metonymies for these crimes—as well as for the whole process of detection and, presumably, judicial trial—is indicative of how Banks sees these crimes in relation to the world. By reducing the crimes to names and places, they seem to exist in isolation, and as blemishes on an otherwise ordered world. A rare passage of description of the Studley Grange case is particularly revealing: he relates finding the body of the victim in a pond in a walled garden, which he describes as being so enclosed as to resemble “a roofless prison cell,” and he conducts his investigations on his hands and knees, employing his magnifying glass in order to examine the slabs around the pond in microscopic detail.37 This scene embodies how Banks would like to view the crimes

102

Chapter 3

that he investigates: in accordance with the classic detective mode, he sees them as isolated aberrations, almost hermetically sealed off from the rest of society (their impact on the surrounding community notwithstanding), and detectable and solvable as discrete units in time and space. However, despite Banks’s success in the Studley Grange case, from this point onward this atomistic model of crime is repeatedly called into question and is eventually dismantled by the nature of the wrong in which the Banks family is involved, namely opium trading. Although the trade is not a crime in name, it has been imposed on the Chinese through military force, and Banks’s mother Diana recognizes that “the British in general, and the company of Morganbrook and Byatt especially, by importing Indian opium into China in such massive quantities had brought untold misery and degradation to a whole nation.”38 Diana is helped in her crusade by Banks’s uncle Philip, who describes how financial and colonial interests outweighed any sort of moral argument because “the country could be run virtually like a colony, but with none of the usual obligations.”39 If Diana’s and Philip’s moral positions with regard to the opium trade are straightforward enough, the locus of the perpetration of this wrong is much more slippery, to the point that it always recedes from being definitively identified. For example, Philip describes how the British turned to Chinese warlords in control of the territories through which the opium traveled and how some of these began to seize the opium shipments for themselves. He also notes that the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek also sought to profit from the trade: as he states, “The trade had simply passed into different hands.”40 Indeed, the messiness of the alliances and complicities involved in the opium trade becomes evident at the end of the novel, when Philip is revealed to be the infamous “Yellow Snake,” a double agent acting on behalf of the communists. While this revelation ties up a number of loose ends, Philip’s insider knowledge only serves to show how extensive and insidious the opium trade is, and how the complexity of alliances involved in the trade means that finding a route out of complicity is all but impossible. At one point, Banks overhears his father saying “without the firm, we’re simply stranded,”41 showing how the family is effectively trapped in Shanghai because their house and the majority of their possessions belong to the company. As Alyn Webley notes, this is one of a number of double-binds present in the novel,42 and Banks himself is subject to the strongest of these, in the sense that his education, which he believes to have been funded by an aunt’s legacy, was in fact paid for by the warlord Wang Ku in return for his mother’s “compliance” in acting as his concubine.43 Banks, in other words, unwittingly profits from his mother’s captivity and abuse and occupies a similar role to the “beneficiary,” defined by Rothberg as someone who “benefits from the historical suffering

Consolation and Complicity

103

of others as well as from contemporary inequality in an age of global, neoliberal capitalism.”44 While this definition refers to neoliberalism, Banks has clearly profited in a similar way from an earlier form of capitalism. Moreover, although he cannot be regarded as culpable in his ignorance of the particulars of his personal situation given that he was shielded from this knowledge by his family, this ignorance is in fact symptomatic of his blindness toward his family’s implication in larger structures of power and exploitation. If Banks’s failure to solve his parents’ disappearance is the result of his adherence to an outmoded and inadequate method of detection, this failure of seeing also points more broadly to how particular dispositions—in this case accustomed and ingrained modes of interacting with the world—result in culpable ignorance. When Banks moves from London back to Shanghai in 1937, his blindness is suggested by a number of instances in which his vision is obstructed, and he complains at one point that people there “seem determined at every opportunity to block one’s view.”45 At other times, Banks is more actively culpable in his failures to see and interpret the events around him, and a number of revealing moments show how implication shifts into more active failures of witnessing. This tendency is evident when the Japanese begin shelling Shanghai and a group of expatriates move onto a hotel balcony to catch a glimpse of the warship responsible. Having been presented with a pair of opera glasses, Banks focuses not on the conflict, but on a lone boatman who “like me was utterly absorbed by the fate of his cargo and oblivious of the war not sixty yards to his right.”46 At this point, Banks acknowledges his failure to look at the bigger picture, but he also fails to apply this recognition reflexively and to adjust his focus. The result is an interpretative failure, with him concluding “so that’s the war,” without having looked at the shelling or its effects. This episode is indicative of the way in which Banks satisfies himself with a simplistic picture of events that he has often failed to witness genuinely. This tends to result in a secondary failure to make connections between local events and the global structures and movements from which these have arisen and in which he is implicated. Such failures are evident in the climactic section of the novel, during which Banks’s search for his parents leads him to enter a slum known as “the warren” just as fighting between the invading Japanese forces and the Chinese defenders intensifies. Throughout this section, Banks’s single-minded quest for his parents leads to him become all but blind to the larger-scale events taking place around him. Amid the fighting, Banks encounters and speaks to antagonists belonging to all sides. As such, he possesses a unique opportunity to bear witness not only to the conflict itself, but to its wider causes. Yet he utterly fails to do so, seeing no connection between the Japanese invasion and the colonialism that brought him to Shanghai in the first place, or between the poverty in the warren and the

104

Chapter 3

politics of exploitation in which his family is involved. In fact, he does not even fully acknowledge the immediate and manifest suffering caused by the fighting as it takes place. When Banks finally locates the house where he believes his parents to be held, he finds it destroyed, probably by a shell. He initially brandishes his magnifying glass at the young Chinese girl who is the only survivor, assuring her “I’m just the person you want,” before adding: “I’ll see to it they don’t get away.”47 His statement is, of course, absurd: the shell has been fired anonymously, from a distance, so when Banks proceeds to examine one of the corpses through his magnifying glass, his myopia at this point renders his search of a grotesque parody of his previously rational investigations. Horsley notes that crime fiction has moved away from the tropes of classic detective fiction and that late twentieth-century “trauma culture” has resulted in a greater concern with bodies of victims,48 but the presence of the body in this case only serves to highlight how Banks’s selective mode of seeing results in him overlooking the humanity of the dead Chinese in the house. “Many Things Aren’t as I Supposed” Patricia Waugh contrasts the “more conventional realist detail of the unreliable narrators” of An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day with the “emotionally projected and expressionist and strangely hyperreflexive landscapes of the later novels.”49 Certainly, following his return to Shanghai, Banks’s desires seem to be projected onto the world of the story with such power as to shape that world: in a number of instances, the local members of the expatriate and Chinese populations express their belief in the possibility and importance of his parents’ safe recovery and help him in ways that stretch credulity, even as war encroaches on the city. This tendency reaches its height when Banks identifies an opportune moment to announce his return to the assembled expatriate community in Shanghai, and just as he concludes his brief and optimistic statement, a jazz orchestra serendipitously strikes up and a troupe of Eurasian dancing girls then takes to the floor. However, if other characters’ desire to align themselves with Banks’s interests inflates the fantastic bubble that he occupies for most of the novel, this is punctured by his failure to find his parents. His manic search among the wreckage of the house, at which point he states that “the atmosphere had become fairly overwrought,” is soon followed by an admission that “I’m beginning to see now, many things aren’t as I supposed.”50 If this marks the point at which Banks’s distorted vision begins to adjust itself in the face of overwhelming evidence, it is his later conversation with Philip, who is revealed to be the infamous double agent known as the “Yellow Snake,” and

Consolation and Complicity

105

who provides the truth of his parents’ disappearance, that irrevocably punctures his fantasies. In an interview conducted shortly after the novel’s publication, Ishiguro suggested that detective stories are consoling fictions. While acknowledging that the postwar generation (in which classic detective fiction flourished) “knew better than we do today what the real nature of evil and suffering was,” he also suggests that the genre was a kind of “facile escapism” from the effects of World War I.51 Yet by denying Banks his success, he also denies him the consolation of restoring order. Moreover, the classic detective dénouement, at which point the protagonist unfolds the story of his interpretative quest, is given instead to the double agent: the supposed objectivity and privileged perspective of the detective is shown to be hopelessly detached from the reality of the situation, and the only witness with sufficient knowledge to produce the narrative of the crime is one whose betrayals grant him access to all sides of the complex story. Banks’s delusions are understandable to a degree given that his mother and Philip have colluded to create a fiction for him to inhabit. This fiction, and the detective fictions that he has consumed and modeled his behavior on, has, in turn, shaped the way in which Banks has interpreted his whole life. Thus, while Banks’s blindness to his own situation does not constitute a knowing, causal contribution to wrongdoing, it does indicate how dispositions are adopted through a focus on, and acceptance of, certain dominant narratives. In that this myopic focus also results in ignoring other narratives, such dispositions can result in complicit failures to see and act. At first sight, When We Were Orphans interpellates its readers in a similar way to An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day, with the narrator finding himself left behind as the world moves on. As such, a critical distance emerges between his position and that of the implied reader, and this distance that allows us to pass judgment on him, and on the blind spots in his narrative. However, When We Were Orphans differs from the earlier novels in the sharp disjunction between the consoling narrative that the Banks tells himself and his final realization of his errors. The fantastic elements of Banks’s narrative are finally subsumed back into a realist framework with the revelation that Grayson, whom Banks has taken throughout to be an inconsequential bureaucrat, is in fact revealed to be an intelligence officer, and that his constant pestering of Banks regarding his progress has simply functioned as his excuse to remain close to him in order to ensure that his investigations did not inadvertently “do anything to cause a big stink with the other Powers.”52 This disjunction has two effects. Firstly, it makes visible to a greater extent the way in which Banks projects a desired form onto his life as a result of his alignment with a certain type of narrative (namely classic detective fiction)

106

Chapter 3

and the ideology that it carries with it. Secondly, it makes visible the relationship between colonial arrogance and the assumption that world should function according to the narrative of the “Powers.” Banks begins with the assumptions that the Chinese and Japanese he encounters are simply the minor characters in a story of Western heroism and brilliance; but it transpires that he is only a bit part player in world-shaping events. Grayson’s reference to the “Powers” indicates that European hubris remains firmly in place, but the collapse of Banks’s narrative pushes us away from the kind of identification and consolation that we find in An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day, and acts as a reminder that the democratic postwar world celebrated in the earlier novels in fact grew out of colonial arrogance and exploitation. For this reason, and in contrast to the earlier novels, When We Were Orphans can be seen as a challenge to recognize the complicities of those working within purportedly democratic systems. EMBODIED COMPLICITY: NEVER LET ME GO If When We Were Orphans addresses the complicities involved in the hypocritical failure to apply democratic values abroad, Never Let Me Go turns its gaze inward by describing a fictional version of England in which institutionalized mass murder is enabled by a collective disposition to regard the clones as what Agamben has called “bare life,” that is, life that can “be eliminated without punishment.”53 Yet for all the cruelty of this system, it is able to operate despite a marked lack of coercion. The novel is disturbing precisely for this reason, with a disposition that enables this atrocity arising not as a result of dystopian disciplinary power, but instead emerging from within a system that, as Bruce Robbins notes, resembles the welfare state of postwar Britain.54 A defining feature of the disposition that underpins this atrocity is the way the violence done to the clones has become normalized. Indeed, while the novel is narrated by a clone, and while Kathy’s account of her upbringing in this system is punctuated by moments of horror, it lacks the sense of outrage that we might expect. Instead, Kathy’s description of her childhood at Hailsham is characterized by affection and nostalgia. As such, while Never Let Me Go differs from the three novels discussed earlier by representing a group who are victims, albeit in an imagined and dystopian world, a surprising feature of the novel is that the society in which the organ donation program operates also seems to have successfully obviated any need for coercion in terms of securing the clones’ own acquiescence to—and ultimately their complicity in—their subordinate role. Throughout this book, I have used the term “alignment” to refer to the way in which individuals identify themselves with larger social groups and

Consolation and Complicity

107

movements, and have claimed that such alignments can act as a form of soft power that impel individuals into complicit dispositions and actions. Never Let Me Go, perhaps more than any other text examined in this study, examines the power of empathy in creating these alignments. Part of the reason why the novel is so troubling and powerful is that, as Anne Whitehead has argued, care and empathy underpin a system in which one section of the population is reduced to bare life for the benefit of another.55 Moreover, while I have emphasized the role of narrative in creating the dispositions and alignments that precede full complicity, in Never Let Me Go, the role of the body is absolutely central to understanding how and why the clones are complicit with the system that kills them. In what follows, I argue that empathy, and the complicit alignment that empathy produces, is very much embodied. By this I mean that empathy and alignment are physically performed rather than intellectually developed through the consumption and reproduction of narratives. The Performance of Empathy In Ishiguro’s dystopia, the clones’ bodies are the basis both of their value to the system and of their status as its victims (and in this regard, there are clear parallels with Margaret Atwood’s Gilead novels, discussed in chapter 6). What defines and differentiates the clones from the “normals” (i.e., noncloned humans) is, of course, the fact that they are copies. Copies, however, possess ambiguous value, and Rebecca Walkowitz is correct that “likeness is both the apex and nadir of value” in the novel.56 In examining the values attached to works of art in Never Let Me Go, Walkowitz utilizes a distinction between “tokens” and “types,” a “token” being an individual instance of a work (e.g., an individual copy of a novel), and “type” referring to the reproducible content.57 She suggests that the clones initially value tokens, and in the “Sales” and “Exchanges,” at which they exchange both cast-offs from the outside world and their own art, they prize uniqueness and the artist’s skill. For example, Kathy is triumphant when she is able to secure a calendar drawn by Patricia C., which has “a stunning little pencil sketch of a scene from Hailsham life” for each month, and which she describes as a “real catch.”58 This suggests that value is exclusive: the uniqueness of the calendar, and Kathy’s success in obtaining it at the expense of others, is part of its value. However, as Mark Jerng notes, Never Let Me Go can be contrasted with other clone narratives, which tend to involve assertions of individuality and difference, because the Hailsham students’ quest for identity is instead an attempt to find someone who is the same as them.59 As the novel progresses and the clones develop greater awareness of themselves and their roles, the clones begin to value types over tokens. This transition can be seen in process when Ruth replaces Kathy’s lost cassette of Songs after Dark with Twenty

108

Chapter 3

Classic Dance Tunes. Kathy states that her initial disappointment (of the tape not being of the same type as her original) is replaced by “real happiness”; she does not play it often because the new tape does not contain the song Never Let Me Go, but she values it as “an object, like a brooch or a ring.”60 At this point, then, she values the tape for its significance as a gift and thus as an individual object. Yet the uniqueness of the tape for Kathy is not the result of its content (which “has nothing to do with anything”) but from its shared significance in a symbolic exchange between the two. The clones’ conception of value continues to shift, and after Kathy and her peers leave Hailsham, they begin to articulate a conception of value rooted to a greater extent in shared meaning and circulation. This is evident in their forlorn attempts to definitively verify their status as copies by finding their “possibles,” the genetic models from whom they were cloned. By the end of the novel, shared purpose and significance have almost entirely replaced uniqueness as a source of value, as shown when Tommy has begun the process of donations that will lead to his death, and he returns to drawing the type of animals that he did at Hailsham, in the hope of producing the evidence that will secure a deferral for him and Kathy. As a result, Kathy feels “relief, gratitude, sheer delight,” but not so much because of their potential as evidence for securing their deferral, but because it signals that “this was Tommy’s way of putting everything behind us everything that had happened around his drawings back at the Cottages.”61 That the real value of Tommy’s drawings lies in the way that they can be shared is reinforced by Kathy’s hurt at Tommy’s final withdrawal from her, at which point he continues to draw, but does so in private.62 In seeing themselves part of a system of circulation and exchange, however, the clones also attach value to this process to the extent that they accept, and even celebrate, the use of their own bodies and organs in such a system. As a result of conceiving themselves as part of a system of exchange, the clones perform their complicity in their roles as carers and donors. It is in this way that care and empathy, through the desire for shared meaning, become the basis of their complicity. The importance of the body in the clones’ alignment with the system that victimizes them can be seen in a number of acts of mimicry performed by the clones. Shameem Black suggests that motor mimicry serves as the basis for more sophisticated forms of empathy63 and throughout Never Let Me Go, the potential for mimicry to produce empathy exists in tension with the sense that it also results in the clones’ alignment with the system that exploits them. This process is visible in the use of role plays at Hailsham to educate the clones how to act appropriately once in the outside world. These instances of institutionalized mimicry indicate that acting in the right way, in the system of values presented to the clones, is less about acting ethically

Consolation and Complicity

109

according to some transcendent framework than it is about alignment with perceived norms. However, despite the apparently liberal aims of Hailsham— it is contrasted favorably with much less humane centers elsewhere in the country—this aspect of their education represents appalling bad faith on the part of their guardians because, in asking the clones to role-play “waiters in cafés, policemen and so on,”64 they are asking the students to empathize with identities that they will never have the opportunity to develop and inhabit. In providing clones with a liberal education, Hailsham wants to have it all ways: by encouraging them to write, for example, about Victorian novels (the topic of Kathy’s essay), the system appears to offer the clones a form of political, participatory life; but this is shown to be an illusion concealing their ultimate reduction to bare life while preparing them for that very fate. While Hailsham exploits the relationship between mimicry and empathy in this way, the clones also actively tend to adopt physical behaviors that secure their own complicity in the system without being explicitly encouraged to do so by any particular authority. In these instances, there is often a self-consciousness about the clones’ mimicry, as is the case when Kathy comments of Ruth’s attempts to impress the older students at the Cottages by copying their behavior that it was “as if I was in the front row of the audience when she was performing on stage.” Yet Kathy also suggests that Ruth is performing for the benefit of the other new students, as part of an attempt to help the whole group adjust to their new surroundings.65 This self-consciousness does not, therefore, necessarily denude the act of mimicry of value, and Patricia Waugh argues that Ishiguro shows how the aesthetic can lead us to “empathize with other minds through imaginative projection.”66 Ruth’s act of mimicry can be seen as such an act of projection, and if the clones learn to value physical objects for their similarities and for their place in a system of exchange, performances such as Ruth’s can be seen as deliberate and calculated acts of alignment with the group. However, in other incidents, group alignments produced by mimicry also act as the basis for persecution. In an early passage, Tommy’s victimization is shown to be the result of his not being a sufficiently competent mimic: in contrast to the rest of the boys who are “moving around the field in that deliberately languorous way they have when they’re warming up,” Tommy is already “going full pelt.”67 Kathy describes how Tommy is excluded during a game of football, and how Laura widens the circle of complicity with that exclusion through an act of mimicry: “we were all laughing at Laura—the big clown in our group—mimicking one after the other the expressions that appeared on Tommy’s face as he ran, waved, called, tackled.” As it becomes clear that the other boys are deliberately passing over Tommy while picking teams, Laura continues to mimic “the hurt and panic as it began to dawn on him what was really going on.”68 Both Laura and her audience in fact exhibit

110

Chapter 3

a degree of empathy with Tommy here, as the girls’ amusement is derived from them recognizing of the various emotions that Tommy is experiencing. However, acting with greater force on the girls is the desire for alignment with the dominant group. The way in which the logic of mimicry contributes to the clones’ complicity with the organ donation program as they approach adulthood begins to become evident when Kathy, through frustration born out of care, lectures Tommy on his behavior. Irritated by his habit of accompanying his verbal expressions of feeling with over-the-top facial expressions, Kathy explodes: “if you want to pretend you’re happy, you don’t do it that way!” Her concern here is that Tommy’s inability to mimic expected behaviors showed “how easily you could take advantage of him.”69 The irony here is that, while Kathy is aware of the implications of Tommy’s naivety on an immediate level, it is the clones’ success in adopting to their expected roles that also secures their compliance with those roles and precludes any form of rebellion. Dead Metaphors I have discussed the role of the body and mimicry in securing the clones’ complicity with the system responsible for their persecution, but language does have an important role to play as a screening mechanism that hides the horror of the fate that awaits them. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan note that, in most dystopian fiction, the protagonists’ rebellion against the dominant system begins with their discovery of a counternarrative.70 In typical dystopian narratives, heavy censorship is used to obviate such a discovery, but in contrast to this model, the clones in Never Let Me Go seem to have more or less free access to information. The only censorship that Kathy describes at Hailsham is where passages of literature that might glamourize smoking or other habits that would harm their internal organs are torn out of books. Eaglestone reads Never Let Me Go as a post-Holocaust novel, drawing explicit parallels between the “public secret” of the murder of the European Jews and the unwillingness of the general population to attest to a reality that is in fact widely known. He therefore makes a connection between the novel and the kind of failures of witnessing described by Levi that I have cited at the beginning of this book. Eaglestone argues that the public secret of the organ donation program has the effect of making the clones actively complicit in their own victimization and that “unlike a shared collective memory . . . the public secret creates not a community but an ‘un-community,’ binding people in shame and secrecy.”71 The idea of the public secret employed by Eaglestone is a powerful tool for understanding the clones’ behavior, and more broadly for understanding a certain type of collective complicity. In

Consolation and Complicity

111

the case of Never Let Me Go, however, the denial of knowledge, particularly on the part of the clones, is not so much an active refusal as it a tacit performance of evasion and as such they never fully recognize their own failures of witnessing. An enabling condition of the organ donation program is the fact that it has normalized its own existence to the extent that the clones fail to bear witness to their own situation, and the lack of censorship means that at no point do the clones experience any revelation with regard to their role in the organ donation program, and hence no shock that might spur them into taking action against that system. As Mark Currie argues, the steady trickle of minor revelations in the narrative means: The temporality that it creates—the slow acquisition of a privileged deprivation, the diminishing gap between delusion and truth—acts as an explanation for why we sometimes accept the unacceptable, or why we sometimes not only accept but actually beseech our own confinement: because relative deprivation causes us to misapprehend social injustice as privilege.72

Central to this process of normalization are the stories that the clones tell each other, and which generally define and reinforce the boundaries of acceptable behavior, thus precluding any form of rebellion. Such narratives, however, are actually relatively rare, and it is much more common for the clones to eschew developed narratives in favor of more stunted forms of communication in which value is carried implicitly rather than explicitly, and wherein repetition of formulaic expressions acts as tacit acceptance of—and performance of—the values that permit the clones’ victimization. Throughout Kathy’s narrative, there are a striking number of instances in which she is presented with the opportunity to raise or discuss a sensitive topic with her peers, but evades doing so. For example, early in the novel, Kathy and another girl, Moira, find themselves excluded from one of Ruth’s childhood fantasies. When Moira suggests to Kathy that Ruth’s game is a fiction, Kathy reacts with anger and chooses to perpetuate the fantasy, thus aligning herself with Ruth. She later rationalizes this choice on the basis that “Moira was suggesting she and I cross some line together, and I wasn’t prepared for that yet. I think I sensed how beyond that line, there was something harder and darker and I didn’t want that. Not for me, not for any of us.”73 At this point, Kathy values a particular alignment over truth, and the novel shows this tendency repeatedly, with Kathy avoiding the uncomfortable hermeneutic work of deciphering the clones’ role in the world in favor of maintaining empathetic alignment. The clones are not unaware of their future roles, and neither do they actively deny these, but a collective and empathetic sense of propriety instead causes them to circumvent any explicit

112

Chapter 3

acknowledgment of the future that awaits them. This balance can be seen when Kathy says of the Hailsham joke about the possibility of the body “unzipping” and spilling out its organs that “by that time in our lives, we no longer shrank from the subject of donations as we’d have done a year or two earlier; but neither did we think about it very seriously, or discuss it.”74 Similarly, on the topic of possibles, she remarks that “we’d all sense we were near territory we didn’t want to enter, and the arguments would fizzle out.”75 To give one further example, when Tommy is approaching his death and mentions the rumor that life may somehow persist beyond the fourth organ donation—the point beyond which it is tacitly understood that death is inevitable—Kathy recalls that “I dismissed it as rubbish, we both shrank back from the whole territory.”76 In some cases, when the clones close down narrative in this way, they turn instead to physical actions that re-assert their alignment with the people to whom they are speaking. For example, Kathy states of one conversation with Tommy that “I didn’t want to talk any more about Madame, the Gallery or any of the rest of it, so I got the Judy Bridgewater tape out from its little bag and gave it a good look-over”:77 by turning their attention to the tape he has just bought for her to replace the lost original, she chooses to express empathy through an action that does not require her to explicitly articulate any particular values or beliefs. Another example of the way that the clones’ diminished and transfigured lexicon enacts a preference for similarity over difference and for alignment with established norms—namely the norms that support the program—is the euphemisms that they adopt and employ to describe organ donation. The most frequently encountered are “donation” for the process of organ harvesting and “completion” for the clones’ deaths as a result of these donations. The euphemisms have positive connotations, “donation” usually referring to a voluntary act of giving, but also in the past few decades having come to mean the granting of permission for internal organs to be used after death. Likewise, “completion” grants a sense of closure and teleological purpose to the clones’ deaths, seeming to lend their life meaning, when in fact the same deaths are the direct result of that very purpose. In this way, the associations present in these widely used terms at once obscure and justify the violence done to the clones. To return to Walkowitz’s terminology, these euphemisms are types: they are not unique or original instances of language, but are recognizable, interchangeable signifiers. Instead of opting for original or striking linguistic tokens that would bear witness to the brutality of organ harvesting, and as such might jolt them out of their apathy, the clones’ preference for sameness, here manifest in the use of these dead metaphors, presents no challenge to their accustomed modes of thinking and hence cements them into their

Consolation and Complicity

113

continued acquiescence. In a similar way, the narrative about deferrals that gives Kathy and Tommy hope is itself a copy, as shown when Miss Emily attributes its recurrence to the fact that it is “not just a single rumour . . . it’s one that gets created from scratch over and over.”78 In this case, the recurrence of the rumor indicates that behavior may be repeated and mimicked not as the result of a conscious process (in contrast, for example, to Ruth’s and Laura’s performances), but through the reproduction of internalized values. This reproduction is neither fully conscious nor fully automatic, and the language that the clones employ, like their own bodies, lies between token and type, between original and copy. Thus, while the clones certainly do not eschew their own individuality, their desire not just to feel empathy, but also to demonstrate and physically embody their chosen alignments, results in their complicity with their own deaths. If Stevens and Ono are unreliable narrators, Kathy is simply inadequate, her language stunted and her perspective blinkered. Where her narrative does provoke a critical stance toward the idiom in which she narrates, this tends to be unwitting rather than a deliberate strategy. For example, Currie notes that in Kathy’s disingenuous interpretation of the lyrics of Never Let Me Go, which she takes to be about literally not wanting to relinquish a baby, “the song’s dead metaphor is brought back to life.”79 In this case, it is actually her own interpretative limitations that make the workings of figurative language visible. In other cases, she does attempt some descriptive flourishes at times, but these do not seem to come naturally to her, and sit uneasily with the bland description and reportage that form the rest of the narrative. The few instances of figurative language that she does employ stand out, partly because they are unusual, but also due to their marked ungainliness. For example, she makes quite deliberate use of simile to evoke the experience of realizing that events have overtaken her. In the first instance, Kathy approaches Ruth’s group, realizing a moment too late that she is about to be excluded, recalling that “it was like the split second before you step into a puddle, you realise it’s there, but there’s nothing you can do about it.”80 She tries to evoke a similar structure of emotion when describing an argument with Ruth at the Cottages when she allowed her dominant position in the conversation to slip, saying “it was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake that you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of the disaster you’ve left yourself open to.”81 It is notable that these rather clumsy attempts to move away from inert euphemisms and to create live metaphors are both about lateness. While Kathy lacks the reflexivity to recognize this shift in her own narrative, she does notice a quality of Tommy’s drawings that parallels both the ideas that she is trying to express, and the form in which she is trying to express them. When, as a donor, he begins to draw again in the hope of providing artwork,

114

Chapter 3

which will secure a deferral for him and Kathy, she feels that Tommy’s drawings “weren’t as fresh now . . . they looked laboured, almost like they’d been copied.”82 As I have noted earlier, copying gains importance for the clones as they grow older, and the pictures do act as a touchstone of shared meaning for Kathy and Tommy, but at the same time his pictures seem to have lost the individuality to prove not only that the clones possess souls, but also that his and Kathy’s souls are somehow uniquely matched. She concludes by returning to the sense of lateness present in the two similes quoted earlier, saying that they are “doing all of this too late; that there’d once been a time for it, but we’d let that go by, and there was something ridiculous, reprehensible even, about the way we were now thinking and planning.”83 This moment is the closest that Kathy comes to recognize her own complicity with the situation in which she and her friends find themselves, but she fails to develop this nagging sense of culpability into a full and explicit testimony of her own victimhood. This sense of lateness evoked by Kathy draws attention to the temporal point at which she constructs her narrative. The reader is invited to share this mood empathically, and as Eaglestone argues, Kathy’s direct mode of address means that “there is a secret which is both known and not known—a public secret—with which we, the addressed and implied reader, are complicit.”84 However, the novel being set in the late 1990s also means that the events described in the fictional world were necessarily in the past by the date of its publication in 2005. Currie notes that the temporal structure on the novel, in which we often read Kathy recalling other acts of recollection, means that the novel “constantly projects backwards to remember what Kathy did and did not know about the future, and if it is difficult to remember what one did know, it is much more difficult to remember what one did not.”85 Just as Kathy tells her story too late, we read too late, and find ourselves helpless spectators to the events of a world that closely resembles our own. This is a world in which we might now have forgotten things that we once sought not to know, and might have justified our own culpable ignorance towards atrocities taking place in plain sight. For this reason, the way that the novel interpellates the reader is uncanny in its mixture of the familiar and unfamiliar. This uncanniness presents the reader with a critical choice: In empathizing with Kathy, do we also accept the familiarity with which she employs the neutered and euphemistic language of the organ donation program, or disavow empathy and read past the content of her narrative with a view to examining the implications of the omissions and obfuscations embodied in it? In one sense, this choice reproduces that faced by the reader when confronted with the narratives of Ono and Stevens; yet in the earlier novels, the narrators’ complicit actions are visible through the tissue of their narratives thanks to the presence of the solid, historical signifiers of Japanese

Consolation and Complicity

115

imperialism and Nazism, and so passing judgment on these characters is, in the end, rather easy. By contrast, not only is Kathy closer to the position of the victim than the perpetrator, but the novel also refuses to offer the certainty that such historical signifiers can provide. As such, reading past her narrative to pass judgment on her complicity is more difficult than in the earlier texts. This uncertainty is combined with the difficult task of recognizing that the empathy that creates social bonds and that elevates existence above bare life is the same empathy that can impel individuals into positions of alignment and complicity with systems that themselves reduce humans (and human clones) to bare life, and ultimately make that form of life killable. By placing us in this uncertain ethical territory, Ishiguro asks us to balance these demands, and to read with a critical form of empathy; this balance, I suggest, is what makes Never Let Me Go a brilliant and troubling fiction of complicity. By creating a world in which atrocity arises from within an apparently democratic system predicated on the notion of a benevolent state, Never Let Me Go gestures toward the role that systems and structures play in impelling individuals into positions of complicity. However, like Camus and Kundera, Ishiguro remains primarily concerned with the situations of individuals and the complicity dilemmas that they face. The second half of this volume, in contrast, is concerned with shifting the emphasis toward the systems themselves, and I begin this examination with a discussion of W. G. Sebald’s prose fictions in chapter 4.

NOTES 1. Sugano, “Convictions,” 75. 2. Tamaya, “Empire,” 54. 3. Ishiguro, Floating World, 169. 4. Ishiguro, Floating World, 69. 5. Ishiguro, Floating World, 144. 6. Sage, “Liminality,” 35. 7. Ishiguro, Floating World, 177. 8. Ishiguro, Floating World, 56. 9. Rothfork, “Zen,” 29. 10. Ishiguro, Floating World, 204. 11. Ishiguro, Floating World, 202. 12. Ishiguro, Floating World, 95. 13. Cheng, Margin, 107. 14. Ishiguro, Floating World, 205–206. 15. Fukuoka, “Memory,” 27–30. 16. Ishiguro, Floating World, 169.

116

Chapter 3

17. Ishiguro, Remains, 238–39. 18. Ishiguro, Remains, 15. 19. Ishiguro, Remains, 10, 13, 20. 20. Ishiguro, Remains, 205–206. 21. Sage, “Liminality,” 41. 22. Ishiguro, Remains, 144–45. 23. Berberich, “Traumatic Past,” 124. 24. Ishiguro, Remains, 145–46. 25. Hammond, “Ethics of Genre,” 101. 26. Ishiguro, Remains, 110. 27. Ishiguro, Remains, 258. 28. Ekelund, “History,” para. 47. 29. Ishiguro, Remains, 10. 30. Ishiguro, Remains, 46. 31. Horsley, Crime Fiction, 4, 13. 32. Döring, “Sherlock Holmes,” 61. 33. Döring, “Sherlock Holmes,” 60. 34. Ishiguro, Orphans, 294. 35. Ishiguro, Orphans, 20. 36. Ishiguro, Orphans, 9, 29, 31. 37. Ishiguro, Orphans, 31. 38. Ishiguro, Orphans, 60. 39. Ishiguro, Orphans, 288. 40. Ishiguro, Orphans, 293. 41. Ishiguro, Orphans, 86. 42. Webley, “Shanghai’d,” 198. 43. Ishiguro, Orphans, 291–93. 44. Rothberg, Implicated Subject, 14. 45. Ishiguro, Orphans, 153; also 234, 283. 46. Ishiguro, Orphans, 160–61. 47. Ishiguro, Orphans, 272. 48. Horsley, Crime Fiction, 118. 49. Waugh, “Not-Too-Late Modernism,” 26–27. 50. Ishiguro, Orphans, 272, 277. 51. Mudge, “Detective Novel.” 52. Ishiguro, Orphans, 282. 53. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 139. 54. Robbins, “Cruelty,” 291. 55. Whitehead, “Care,” 77. 56. Walkowitz, “Largeness,” 225. 57. Walkowitz, “Largeness,” 222. 58. Ishiguro, Never, 91–92. 59. Jerng, “Giving Form,” 386. 60. Ishiguro, Never, 75. 61. Ishiguro, Never, 237.

Consolation and Complicity

117

62. Ishiguro, Never, 271. 63. Black, “Aesthetics,” 786. 64. Ishiguro, Never, 108. 65. Ishiguro, Never, 128. 66. Waugh, “Not-Too-Late Modernism,” 26–27. 67. Ishiguro, Never, 8. 68. Ishiguro, Never, 8–9. 69. Ishiguro, Never, 104. 70. Baccolini and Moylan, Horizons, 6. 71. Eaglestone, Broken Voice, 24, 26. 72. Currie, “Controlling Time,” 103. Currie’s argument accords with my own in Stacy, “Dystopia.” 73. Ishiguro, Never, 55. 74. Ishiguro, Never, 86–87. 75. Ishiguro, Never, 137. 76. Ishiguro, Never, 274. 77. Ishiguro, Never, 177. 78. Ishiguro, Never, 252. 79. Currie, “Controlling Time,” 91. 80. Ishiguro, Never, 53. 81. Ishiguro, Never, 122. 82. Ishiguro, Never, 237. 83. Ishiguro, Never, 237. 84. Eaglestone, Broken Voice, 18. 85. Currie, “Controlling Time,” 98.

Chapter 4

Traces of Complicity W. G. Sebald

The previous three chapters have discussed the complicities of individuals in the fiction of Camus, Kundera, and Ishiguro. The willingness or otherwise of these protagonists to act ethically in response to the pivotal events of those narratives are the questions on which the novels turn. In contrast, W. G. Sebald occupies the position of the belated witness. As a German born in May 1944, he was keenly aware of the involvement of his parents’ generation with Nazism, but was in no position to bear witness directly to the events of that time. For this reason, his prose fictions are concerned with the traces of atrocity: they consist of documents, photographs, and stories gathered by Sebald’s narrators, and by which these narrators reconstruct the past. The narrators’ role, then, is partly to bear witness to the testimonies of others, that is, to operate at Laub’s second level of witnessing. However, because memory is transmitted, mediated, and distorted through the material forms in which it is preserved, Sebald’s fictions also examine Laub’s third level of witnessing, namely bearing witness to the process of witnessing itself. It is through the examination of how memory is mediated that Sebald’s work addresses complicity. Specifically, complicity tends to occur in two aspects of the mediation of memory, and the representational forms through which that mediation takes place. The first is the inherent flaws and blind spots involved in any form of representation. As I have argued in the introduction to this volume, elisions in representation may not meet the “minimum threshold” of complicity as defined by Lepora and Goodin, that is, as a knowing, causal contribution to wrongdoing.1 However, where silences and blind spots contribute to repeated patterns of social behavior, they become a disposition that may ultimately create an enabling condition whereby violence toward a section of the population becomes first thinkable, then permissible. Sebald’s prose fictions exhibit an acute awareness of the potential for elisions 119

120

Chapter 4

and omissions in writing and other media. For example, the highly reflexive Vertigo ([1990] 1999) posits representation as a kind of overwriting of memory, and the narrator’s description of his return to his home town “W” in the final section of the text suggests a conspiracy of secrets and silence around the persecution of a local gypsy population and the villagers’ involvement in the war. In a similar way, Sebald’s second prose fiction, The Emigrants ([1992] 1996), figures silence as a strategy for avoiding the need to address traumatic pasts. The second aspect of the mediation of memory addressed in Sebald’s work is the archival logic that dominates and defines modernity. As I have noted in the introduction, I have adopted the term “enabling condition of atrocity” from Jonathan Long’s observation that modernity itself is presented as the “enabling condition of genocide” in Sebald.2 As my use of Long’s term indicates, I see Sebald as a pivotal author in terms of any discussion of complicity due to the way that he shows the systems, disciplinary structures, and material sites and artifacts of modernity as being implicated in the atrocities around which his narratives circle. In this chapter, I discuss The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz because, of Sebald’s body of work, these are most directly concerned with complicity. Through their foregrounding of modernity, both of these texts seek to make visible the traces of complicity present in the mediation of memory, and in doing so they expand complicity from an issue concerning individuals working within larger structures to one inhering in those structures themselves. The texts at first sight actually appear to differ significantly in scope: The Rings of Saturn consists of digressive narratives that roam as far afield as China and the Congo—and even into outer space with a reference to the Voyager II mission—and as far back in time as far as the Middle Ages, while Austerlitz focuses on a single traumatized protagonist. However, both texts are concerned with the centrifugal energies by which the traces of atrocity are disseminated outward from the original event, and it is in this process of dissemination, and specifically in the forms of mediation of memory that this dissemination involves, that representation emerges as a form of complicity. CYCLES OF ATROCITY: THE RINGS OF SATURN One of The Rings of Saturn’s epigraphs is a reference to the Roche limit, the distance from a planetary body within which orbiting objects will disintegrate. Its inclusion suggests a concern with gravitational equilibrium, a balancing of centrifugal forces with centripetal pull. In the text, this equilibrium is achieved by the text’s form: the narrator’s walk through Suffolk holds the narrative together, but also prompts the digressions in which the narrator

Traces of Complicity

121

relates and explores disparate historical episodes. The formal properties of the text therefore allow Sebald to examine cycles of creation and destruction on global, systemic and generational levels. The implication for this volume is that The Rings of Saturn addresses complicity on a scale vastly expanded from that present in Camus, Kundera, and Ishiguro, and also on a scale much larger than that addressed in the models usually employed in legal and philosophical discourse. One exception is Christopher Kutz’s Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age, in which he argues, “Try as we might to live well, we find ourselves connected to harms and wrongs that fall outside the paradigm of individual, intentional wrongdoing.”3 He goes on to list examples of complicities that involve collective action, including buying products from regions being stripped of their resources, interacting with negligent bureaucracies, or simply being citizens of countries that perpetrate violence. The Rings of Saturn addresses collective complicity by creating a sense that individuals are always already implicated in, participating in, or profiting from circulatory systems that have grown out of atrocity. The text is therefore not so much about who was complicit in atrocity at the time of it being perpetrated, but about how those who come after such events remain implicated in, and hence potentially complicit with them through the continuing circulation of discourse, values, capital, and material. For this reason, Walter Benjamin’s dictum that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”4 encapsulates the double bind in which The Rings of Saturn’s narrator finds himself: as a belated witness, his only means of access to the past is through material forms, but those same forms are tainted by atrocity. The distinction between implication and complicity given in the introduction is therefore crucial in this chapter: these comments may suggest that the individuals caught up in these legacies of suffering are merely implicated rather than complicit. However, Sebald repeatedly shows that the process of belated witnessing involves the assertion of agency in the creation of representations, and that this process of creation perpetuates values and discourses that may themselves act as the enabling conditions of atrocity. For this reason, acts of representation may be complicit with the systems out of which they grow. In this sense, The Rings of Saturn is a pessimistic text, but Sebald does not surrender entirely to a sense of hopelessness and, in the final part of my discussion, I argue that some of its narrative traits act as a form of representational resistance to the complicities discussed. Spoils and Traces During his walk through Suffolk, Sebald’s narrator finds himself in conversation with a Cornelius de Jong, who describes how the British and Dutch sugar

122

Chapter 4

dynasties patronized the arts as a way of legitimizing their wealth. De Jong explains that “the capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation . . . still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew,”5 and concludes these observations by musing that it is “as if all works of art were coated with a sugar glaze or indeed made completely of sugar.”6 This important episode posits the two notable features of complicity in The Rings of Saturn: firstly, it spans generations and follows global routes of capital, labor, and human migration, and secondly, it implicates art and representation in atrocity. The expansive scope of The Rings of Saturn is achieved, in part, by the narrator’s digressions. However, it is also created by moments of reflection in which the narrator explicitly describes the temporal and spatial scale of human activity, as when he represents human civilization as “no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.”7 In this image, he presents creation and destruction as opposite sides of the same processes, with humanity’s drive for development and illumination inevitably resulting in the evisceration or withering away of the parts of the world that find themselves benighted. This relationship means that complicity is often represented as a kind of inherited entanglement and, this being the case, the role of the belated witness is to identify the evidence of atrocity in material artifacts, narratives, and physical sites that testify to these processes. The narrator performs this role in several visits to country houses, the inhabitants of which belong to a social group who have profited from their ancestors’ exploitation of other groups. In his discussion of beneficiaries, Robbins describes how Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy posits a form of looking that sees the legacy of colonial exploitation as it persists into the present day, often in material objects and traces.8 In The Rings of Saturn, the roles of those who inhabit the country houses range from perpetrators and exploiters to beneficiaries, but the perspective of the narrator is that of someone who actively seeks to identify the ongoing consequences historical wrongs in the sites that he encounters. For example, in providing a history of Boulge Hall and its occupants, the FitzGeralds, the narrator notes that the Anglo-Norman family’s wealth is the result of the “ruthless subjugation” of the local populations, first in Ireland and later in England.9 Edward FitzGerald, whose life the narrator describes, bemoans the ruling class’s “ruthless exploitation of the land, the obsession with private property, which was pursued by means increasingly dubious, and the ever more radical restriction of common rights,”10 but he nevertheless finds himself embedded in this situation and is unable to oppose it directly, spending his time instead translating Omar Khayyam and escaping on his yacht, the Scandal. Similarly, Mrs. Ashbury, the occupant of a country

Traces of Complicity

123

house near the Slieve Bloom Mountains in Ireland, finds herself implicated in a larger history to which she has not directly contributed, stating that, when her family inherited the estate, “she had had not the slightest notion of Ireland’s Troubles, and to this day they remained alien to her.”11 Mrs. Ashbury might be regarded as culpably ignorant with regard to the actions of her own social stratum, but The Rings of Saturn also often emphasizes the difficulty of knowing how to look in order to detect and decipher the evidence of atrocity. This difficulty can be seen in the sections of the text that address the exploitation of Britain’s more distant colonies. In contrast to the section on Edward FitzGerald, in which colonial exploitation is mentioned directly, in other places similar histories of exploitation are suggested only indirectly, through the narrator’s description of the colonial booty still present in the country houses that he visits. For example, while the list of “copper kettles, bedpans, hussars’ sabres, African masks, spears, safari trophies, handcoloured engravings of Boer War battles”12 in Somerleyton falls short of any explicit narrative description of the presumably violent and exploitative means of their acquisition, the indexical evidence of this theft is present in such a description. Moreover, the narrator’s inclusion of suggestive parallels and juxtapositions belatedly attributes greater significance to these details— this significance being the knowledge of colonial atrocity. For example, the solitary Chinese quail encountered by the narrator, which is “evidently in a state of dementia”13 acts as an disturbing memento of the colonization of parts of Asia, but this only gains its full significance later in the text, through the passage describing the destruction of the palace of Yuan Ming Yuan by British and French forces in 1860, during which “much of the removable ornaments and the jewellery left behind by the fleeing court, everything made of jade or gold, silver or silk, fell into the hands of the looters.”14 For Long, this episode exemplifies the way that collections of artifacts served to “bring home” the colony,15 but for those in the position of the belated witness, such as the narrator, these items act as evidence of the occurrence of such instances of imperialist looting. For this reason, an ethical relationship with such artifacts must be one of interrogation and interpretation, otherwise they would simply stand mute and would not necessarily attest to their colonial history. Weaving, Reading, and Writing Artifacts, ruins, and scraps of narrative are the evidence by which the narrator is able to assemble a story of the past, and in doing so to identify the extent of previous generations’ implication in atrocity. This process of assembly and narrativization, then, and the consequent making-visible of complicity, seems to be what Sebald envisages as an ethical role for the belated witness. In The Rings of Saturn, the narrator interacts with and describes various writers and

124

Chapter 4

scholars whose endeavors are generally presented in a positive light. Yet, the text also repeatedly shows the difficulty of the belated witness writing from a position outside the systems and structures that they would seek to critique. For this reason, the construction of narrative is fraught with ethical risks, and the text repeatedly shows that any creative act holds the potential for complicity: any contribution to the construction or perpetuation of the dominant discourses of modernity is also a contribution to a system that inevitably produces atrocity. The narrator describes the entwinement of consumption and production when he notes that “increase of light and increase of labour have always gone hand in hand,”16 and goes on to observe that, like the silk weavers of Norwich upon whom he reflects, “we are able to maintain ourselves on this earth only by being harnessed to the machines we have invented.”17 Unlike the causal contribution to a criminal or wrongful act as envisaged by Lepora and Goodin, the contributions that interest Sebald are those that are motivated by development and by the furthering of civilization—by the “increase of light”—yet the mutual dependence between humanity and the mechanisms that humanity has created mean that suffering and the seemingly inevitable atrocities that grow out of these systems are by-products rather than the intended goal. While this relationship is presented as a feature of all of human striving, Sebald’s narrator explicitly suggests that the systems of order created in writing are an important element in this relationship when he likens the weavers who spend their lives strapped to their looms to scholars and writers who “sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created” and who are haunted “by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread.”18 The sense that writers inadvertently contribute to the systems that produce atrocity is present in his descriptions of various scholarly friends and colleagues. For example, he represents the work of two colleagues at the University of East Anglia (the narrating persona and the “real” Sebald almost coincide at this point) in positive terms, describing Michael Parkinson as “one of the most innocent people” he had ever met, for whom “nothing was ever further from his thoughts than self-interest,”19 while Janine Dakyns’s research into the novel is “wholly free from intellectual vanity.”20 Yet the blind spots inherent in any form of representation are suggested in conversations with two other friends: Michael Hamburger ponders that “perhaps we lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work,”21 and Stanley Kerry suggests that “one of the chief difficulties of writing consisted of thinking, with the tip of the pen, solely of the word to be written, whilst banishing from one’s mind the reality of what one intends to describe.”22 In addition to the acknowledgment in both of these descriptions of how any form of representation inevitably results in its own elisions, the potential

Traces of Complicity

125

for writing to proliferate is also shown to be dangerous. For example, there is something almost demonic about the way Dakyns’s work expands in her study, the narrator tells us, to the extent that it has colonized other tables, the floor, walls, and even the door frame in a “process of accretion” that has resulted in the creation of a “paper universe.”23 This description, combined with the narrator’s later reference to Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in which the imaginary universe and language of Tlön has expanded to the extent that it is “on the point of blotting out the known world,”24 suggests that textual production may create a world, but that this world may grow in a fractal manner, spiraling out of the author’s control and producing consequences unintended and unimagined. Even those who attempt to eschew such representational excesses cannot escape from the circulatory systems described in the text. For example, the Sailors’ Reading Room in Southwold is one of the narrator’s “favorite haunts,” where the silence of the few old sailors is rarely interrupted and which, for this reason, is “better than anywhere else for reading, writing letters, following one’s thoughts, or in the long winter months simply looking out at the stormy sea as it crashes on the promenade.”25 However, the notion that reading may act as a form of retreat from the world is undermined by the way that the narrator browses his way back to an encounter with atrocity, first through a photographic history of World War I, and then by his making a connection the following day between his reading on the Balkans and the atrocities committed by Austrian and German soldiers in the region during World War II. The section concludes with the observation that one of the soldiers stationed there was Kurt Waldheim (not mentioned by name in the text), who later rose through the diplomatic ranks before finally being elected as Secretary General of the United Nations, in which capacity he recorded a greeting for the Voyager II mission for the benefit of any extra-terrestrials that the mission may have encountered.26 Even the discourses created by humans and broadcast beyond the horizons of their existence, then, are tainted by the implication of their authors in atrocity. If my comments on the narrator’s references to Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” seem to suggest that The Rings of Saturn posits a postmodern “world-as-text” ontology, the role of other forms of art and memory mean that we never escape from the material into a purely textual world. This grounding in the material is achieved, in part, by the numerous passages in which the narrator describes paintings, sculptures, and other forms of art. For example, the narrator’s comments on a picture in Somerleyton indicate that he sees painting as being implicated in wrongdoing in a similar way to textual forms. Amid the collection of African masks and other exotica, he notices “a number of family portraits painted perhaps some time between 1920 and 1960 by an artist not untouched by Modernism, the plaster-coloured faces of

126

Chapter 4

the sitters mottled with scarlet and purple blotches.”27 The narrator’s verdict on the artist’s technique aside, the presence of these portraits shows how even modernism, in spite of its purported radicalism, has been subsumed by the dominant structures of power and, in this case, put to use in a form of portraiture that in fact perpetuates the system of primogeniture that keeps wealth and power in the hands of a small elite. Moreover and more importantly, the narrator’s use of expansive scales of time functions to alter the significance of art, with the narrator undermining their intended, explicit symbolic and semiotic content, and interpreting them not as touchstones of cultural memory, but showing them instead to be part of a process of the transformation of matter. As Stephanie Bird argues, the “haptic” qualities of the photographs in Sebald’s texts emphasize “the centrality of the depicted object over and above the generation of particular meaning” and for this reason, “the texture, density, and consistency of the objects become almost tangible.”28 In addition, the narrator’s textual commentary on the objects that he encounters shifts the focus away from their intended rhetorical orientation to situating them in a longer continuum of atrocity and suffering. This re-contextualization, which involves tracing the transmission of values and patterns of thought that have acted as the enabling conditions of atrocity, is illustrated by the role that silk plays throughout the text, in that it appears in a number of guises in different locations and times. When the narrator writes of Thomas Browne that he “scrutinises that which escaped annihilation for any sign of the mysterious capacity for transmigration he has so often observed in caterpillars and moths,” the narrator is not so much interested in transmigration as a theological concept, the “indestructibility of the human soul as assured by scripture,”29 as he is in identifying the nature of the survival and transformation of matter across space and time, and in tracing patterns of complicity in the creation and destruction of form. The final section of the text gives a brief history of silk cultivation, which begins with a description of how caterpillars produce silk from proteins extracted from the foods they ingest, spinning these threads into cocoons.30 He describes how this physical process, once harnessed by the Chinese, proved to be an almost inexhaustible source of wealth,31 and how the process eventually migrated to Byzantium, and then to France, where it became caught up in the political machinations of the French court. Later, in England, silk is part of the burgeoning industrialization of the economy, and this brief history ends with its implication in the industrial processes of the Third Reich.32 As the narrator’s historical tour of silk cultivation shows, the significance of silk passes continuously back and forth between its nature as raw matter (from the innards of a caterpillar and the brute fact of the silkworms’ inability to survive in the German climate), and its employment in discourse (where it is employed rhetorically by the Duc de Scully as a corrupting substance,

Traces of Complicity

127

and one that would promote in the French “laziness, effeminacy, lechery and extravagance”).33 Any act of creation that harnesses physical matter for rhetorical use in the sphere of discourse is, then, only a momentary arrest of matter and form within a continuous and endless process of weaving and unweaving, making and unmaking of patterns of order. Unpicking the threads of these patterns, as the narrators’ research shows, in this case through his reference to the cultivation of silk by the Third Reich, inevitably leads to the atrocities created by the same systems of order. The narrator’s commentary on the migration of silk shows that representation does not posit an alternative world that replaces our reality—an alternative that might in fact be preferable to the history that we have—but instead binds us ever more tightly to this reality, with its interrelationships of machines and matter, progress and suffering. The ethical creation of art cannot, therefore, be predicated on a view of representation as existing in a realm somehow separate from nature, industry, and the physical processes through which silk (and all substances) transmigrate, and representation cannot simply sidestep the issue of complicity in this way. For this reason, the narrative form of The Rings of Saturn (as with all of Sebald’s texts), and particularly its construction from other material traces and narratives, is an attempt to acknowledge and work with this symbiosis between—and complicities present in—representation, systems of order, and the sufferings that those systems of order produce. Remnants and Resistance Cornelius de Jong’s evocation of sugar-glazed works of art is a counterfactual and counterintuitive image but is one that produces a reading of these artworks against the grain of their intended symbolism, and which reveals the traces of barbarity in their creation and circulation. De Jong’s stance toward these works of art is the result of knowing how to look in a way that allows him to identify their existence within networks of implication and complicity. The same can be said of the narrator’s readings and interpretations throughout The Rings of Saturn: he is concerned to make visible the connections and causalities by which individuals are implicated in atrocities outside their ken. John Beck argues that “the interrogation of the authority of constructed worlds and how representations shape, influence and legitimate material facts and events—how narratives make and unmake the world—is a direct confrontation with the technology of linguistic power in the modern world”34 and in this final section, I describe two ways in which the figure of the narrator is crucial to this interrogation. Firstly, he attempts to situate himself temporarily outside systems of order as a way of adopting a perspective from which the presence of atrocity and its ongoing effects—often hidden in the

128

Chapter 4

blind spots of representation—are made visible. Secondly, and more radically, the narrator regularly inserts falsifications into the narrative, wherein apparently genuine traces of the histories described are in fact faked. I suggest that through these, the text encourages the reader to interrogate authority in the way described by Beck. The narrator’s skepticism toward systems of order is evident in his interest in people and objects that sit outside or have been removed from the dominant discourse. These include people such as the academics and eccentrics he describes as leading solitary and scholarly lives. They also include objects such as Thomas Browne’s skull, which has somehow survived in the depths of the Norfolk and Norwich hospital; the collection of colonial items at Somerleyton; the train that he claims (falsely) to have once served the Chinese court and which now finds itself marooned in Suffolk; and Orfordness, a military testing site built on the detritus of a river and now surplus to requirements. If these people and objects are remnants, items that now finds themselves extraneous to hegemonic systems of order, the narrator himself adopts and employs a similar status as a form of resistance. Long argues that the narrator’s walk (and hence the digressive form of the narrative) is “deliberately inefficient and, one might say, anti-disciplinary.”35 In entering Somerleyton over a wall and a pig field over a fence, the narrator has, Christian Moser argues, removed himself from the circulation of value and exchange.36 However, the text repeatedly makes the point that individuals are embedded in this process of circulation to the extent that removing oneself from this system can only be temporary. The narrator’s walk seems to allow him to remove himself from society and thus to make visible the structures of power in which he finds himself implicated. The passage on Dunwich Heath, however, in which the narrator finds that he has inadvertently walked in a circle, suggests that escape is not so straightforward. John Zilcosky offers a psychoanalytical reading of this section to argue that The Rings of Saturn, like Vertigo, is about the impossibility of getting lost.37 However, in describing a walk through Suffolk in the 1990s, the narrator is unlikely to enter entirely uncharted territory, and as if to prove the point, his later description of his visit to Orfordness is accompanied by a map of the area. The map of Orfordness itself is a product of the Ordnance Survey’s disciplining of the landscape. Long draws attention to the “political aspects of cartographic rhetoric” of which the grid on the map is a part, and which contributes to this rationalization of space.38 To unmoor oneself from this disciplinary structure requires a willed effort and can, it seems, be achieved only in a state of nearisolation. Such states, moreover, are more likely to produce disorientation than epiphany, as is the case on Dunwich Heath and later on Orfordness when the narrator experiences a feeling of profound emptiness.39

Traces of Complicity

129

As Long notes, the usual features of maps have become “naturalised conventions of Western cartography,”40 and as such go unnoticed due to our accustomed expectation of a correlation between cartographic features, the landscape itself, and textual description. For this reason, the narrator’s mode of inscribing his own experience of Orfordness within his narrative represents an attempt to avoid it becoming subsumed in the dominant discourses that shape representation by making the nature of those discourses visible. His knowledge of the site is gleaned from the careful study of material representations and other narratives, such as the Ministry of Defence file on Shingle Street, rumors spread by locals, and perhaps most importantly, his physical presence there.41 However, he employs this knowledge within his textual description in such a way as to create a disjunction between the disciplinary structures that the map both embodies and creates, and the lived experience of those who experience the location firsthand. He achieves this by including some of the locals’ folklore of Orfordness, which is populated with grisly images of military experiments involving petroleum infernos in the sea, and of “charred bodies, contorted with pain, lying on the beach.”42 His own experience of this site is, as Long argues, invested with “symbolic power”43 through his descriptions of the strange buildings as resembling “a penal colony in the far East,” prehistoric tumuli and a “mysterious isle of the dead.”44 Moreover, the narrator draws attention to the blind spots inherent in rationalist forms of representation through his own addition to the (barely legible) image of the map, namely an arrow pointing toward an apparently empty section of the map, which he labels “Orfordness,” thus indicating that correlation between visual representation and landscape depends on structures of power from which certain sites may be excluded. The narrator also employs strategies that ask the reader to interrogate the values carried in narrative and other forms of representation. For example, in a frequently cited passage, the narrator provides a commentary on Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolaes Tulp, together with a reproduction of the painting, in which he argues that the new discipline of anatomy was “a way of making the reprobate body invisible.”45 He goes on to note that the realism of the painting is apparent rather than actual, however, and that Kindt’s “grotesquely out of proportion” hand at “the exact centre point of [the painting’s] meaning”46 is intended to draw our attention to the dead thief: It is with him, the victim, and not the Guild that gave Rembrandt his commission, that the painter identifies. His gaze alone is free of Cartesian rigidity. He alone sees that greenish annihilated body, and he alone sees the shadow in the half-open mouth and over the dead man’s eyes.47

130

Chapter 4

Most critics have taken the narrator’s gloss at face value and accept the his critique of “Cartesian rigidity.”48 However, as Adrian Nathan West points out, the narrator’s comments on Kindt’s hand are “nonsense” and that the painting was in fact long considered “a source of wonder to medical experts” on account of its accuracy.49 Moreover, critical responses generally attend to the narrator’s textual commentary, and neglect the second, partial reproduction of the painting on the page following the full image. Even as the narrator criticizes the dehumanizing logic of Cartesian thinking through his reading of Rembrandt, his selective reproduction of the image effaces those who overlook the dead body of Kindt, and thus erases the audience upon which his own interpretation of the painting’s dynamics of visibility and spectatorship relies. Any straightforward schematization of Sebald’s representational ethics on the basis of this passage is, moreover, undermined by its context within the narrative as a whole. The commentary on Rembrandt is immediately followed by the narrator’s description of his own suffering body in the Norfolk and Norwich hospital. However, where Rembrandt’s surgeons are the manifestation of the dehumanizing forces of modernity, the narrator’s own body is subjected to no such schematization or erasure. His nurses, Katy and Lizzie, are rendered in warm and very human terms, and despite the euphoric state he experiences while under the “wonderful influence” of the prescribed painkillers, he is able to retain snatches of their conversation, such as an anecdote about a holiday in Malta.50 The implication here is that a critique of modernity can itself become reductive and dehumanizing: if we are willing to erase the surgeons on page sixteen, or at least reduce them to mute stooges of Cartesian logic, Sebald seems to ask us, would we also erase Katy and Lizzy on page eighteen? The disjunction between the explicit content of the narrator’s textual representation and his acting, physical body reveals the partiality of such schematizations. In this case, this disjunction indicates that our focus here should not simply be the surgeons whom Rembrandt painted, but our own willingness to align ourselves with a certain gaze and the blind spots that inhere therein. The most radical means by which Sebald asks his readers to question the dispositions and alignment created by the act of reading is through his use of faked material.51 Bird dissents from the overwhelming weight of critical work that reads Sebald through a melancholic lens by making the important argument that the mode of his narrators is often comic. She in fact sees the two aspects as being related, and is right to state that much of the comedy arises from the narrators undermining their own exaggerated sense of melancholy. In The Rings of Saturn, comic moments of monstrous exaggeration often point toward the implication of particular individuals and sites in atrocity and, as Bird argues, “those who appear grotesque are complicit in the cruelty of

Traces of Complicity

131

colonial exploitation.”52 In addition, the ethically risky move of faking apparently documentary material undercuts readerly expectations of correlation between evidence and historical fact. As Bird notes, these jokes on the reader, in the way that they “interweave fact and fiction with no indication of when one finishes and the other starts, is the textual equivalent of a ‘completely straight face.’”53 I suggest, moreover, that this “straight face” is not only a symptom of the narrator’s ludic tendencies, or that these jokes serve as ends in themselves, but that the narrator’s bare-faced inclusion of such counterfactual elements is an important part of his response to the problem of complicity and to the difficulty of producing writing in a form that does not contribute to systems that Sebald saw as flawed and culpable. The two most striking examples of this tendency are when he includes images of Roger Casement’s diary54 and of a newspaper clipping about the death of Major George Wyndham Le Strange from the Eastern Daily Press.55 As with the section on Rembrandt, these images are accompanied by the narrator’s textual commentary. However, in contrast to the Rembrandt passage, in these cases, the narrator refrains from editorializing, and instead limits himself to relating the facts—or at least what he presents as the facts—of these histories. However, the cutting from the Eastern Daily Press is faked56 and the pages supposedly from Casement’s diary are actually those of Conrad, while the signature on the following page is in Sebald’s handwriting.57 With the benefit of this knowledge, then, the more unlikely aspects of Le Strange’s life, such as him ending his days surrounded by exotic birds, and the rumor that after his death his skin turned olive green and his hair from gray to “raven-black,”58 appear to be Sebald indulging some imaginative fancies. On the basis of such episodes, Richard Sheppard argues that Sebald combines elements of “post-modernist ludicity” with “a high-modernist seriousness,”59 but the question remains as to what ends this fakery serves. These instances cannot simply be dismissed, given that they occur at moments of ethical importance: Le Strange, at least according to the narrator, was present at the liberation Bergen-Belsen, while Casement was responsible for a crucial humanitarian report into the Belgian exploitation of the Congo before being executed by the British for treason as a result of his role in the 1916 Easter Rising. The effect of these falsifications is a more radical refusal to take part in circulation of discourse than his “deliberately inefficient” wanderings because they impel the reader enter into a kind of hermeneutic detective game, and hence to read more attentively than they otherwise would. In the introduction to this chapter, I have argued that complicity is present in the meditation of memory and in the transmission of values that such mediation involves, and the narrator’s falsifications serve to reveal the ontological cracks and faultlines in the narrative, making visible the processes by which the narrator has

132

Chapter 4

assembled historical traces into a narrative. As the narrator’s commentary on Rembrandt and Kindt shows, even dispositions that ostensibly seek to challenge an oppressive orthodoxy themselves contain blind spots that, in turn, can produce dispositions that act as enabling conditions of violence. These blind spots occur, The Rings of Saturn suggests, as a result of our desire to regard the artifacts that we encounter as documents of civilization rather than of barbarism. Yet by disrupting the smooth mediation of the meaning of these documents, by committing a representational violence of his own, Sebald asks us to attempt to detect the traces of atrocity in the artifacts produced by civilization. As my earlier discussion has attempted to show, The Rings of Saturn is an important text because it greatly expands the scale on which complicity is represented, and on which it demands that we trace the complicities present in representational forms. As I argue in the next section, Austerlitz, despite initial appearances to the contrary, is also concerned with tracing complicity in processes of mediation, albeit with a greater focus on the ways that the material traces of memory are disseminated. BOUND TO THE ARCHIVE: AUSTERLITZ Austerlitz, Sebald’s final full prose fiction, is more novelistic than his other works in that it tells the story of a single protagonist. For this reason, much critical work on the novel identifies a centripetal drive toward the foundational trauma that shapes Jacques Austerlitz’s life. However, in this section, I argue that, like The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz is in fact driven by a centrifugal energy. At around the mid-point of the text, Austerlitz begins to recover his memory, and from that point onward he is occupied with tracing the movements of his parents during World War II. For this reason, Austerlitz is required to engage with archives, sites, and other physical traces of the Holocaust, and the centrifugal diffusion of the evidence of atrocity creates the pathways that he must follow. Moreover, it is in this process of the outward mediation of memory that the complicities present in forms of representation and in bureaucratic and archival structures become visible. In addition, and in contrast to most critical interpretations of Austerlitz, I argue that the narrator is as important a presence in the text as Jacques Austerlitz, and that recognizing the role of the narrator allows the novel to be read as a metafictional commentary on how the representation of the Holocaust has coalesced into a relatively small number of recognizable sites and images—sites and images that perpetuate the memory of the atrocity while also perpetuating some of the blind spots encountered by those of us who occupy the position of belated witnesses.

Traces of Complicity

133

Bureaucratic Complicity Because the narrative of Austerlitz details its protagonist’s attempts to trace his own roots, a quest prompted by an absence in his own memory, complicity initially appears to be less of a presence in Austerlitz than in The Rings of Saturn. These attempts produce a centripetal drive that culminates in Austerlitz’s breakdown, because the more he is impelled to examine his own mental make-up, the more his encounter with a fundamental void in his memory becomes inevitable. Time, identity, and even language finally collapse for Austerlitz, and he describes himself, on entering the Ladies’ Waiting-Room at Liverpool Street—the site of his arrival in England—as being “like an actor who, upon making his entrance, has completely forgotten not only the lines he knew by heart but the very part he has so often played.”60 The resurfacing of the memory of his childhood radically disrupts the adult identity to which he has become accustomed, and as such his childhood self is presented in extradiegetic terms, as a boy sitting on the bench, and whom the adult Austerlitz would not have recognized if it was not for the rucksack that he was carrying. For this reason, Austerlitz has been read as exemplifying the tendency of literary fiction to mimic, in formal terms, the characteristics of trauma. Roger Luckhurst criticizes it on these grounds, arguing that all of Sebald’s works “hold to a model of history that coincides exactly with the idea of traumatic occlusion and the belated recovery of memory” and that it “takes a kind of perverse delight in the repetition or abject assumption of a collapsed trauma subjectivity,”61 Austerlitz being the culmination of these tendencies. However, Austerlitz’s mental collapses (the initial incident described above is followed by another following his return from Bohemia) cause the interpretive direction the narrative to change from centripetal to centrifugal, so the second half of the novel is less about traumatized subjectivity than it is with tracing the mediation of memory and making visible the complicities involved in that mediation. The beginnings of an outward-oriented desire to understand and express his experiences are evident in Austerlitz likening language to the tentacles of sea creatures, which “grope blindly through the darkness enveloping us.”62 This desire can be satisfied only by finding some form of external corrective to the central lack in his memory, and from this point onward, he searches for evidence of his parents’ movements following his emigration to Britain. The evidence that Austerlitz begins to assemble also reveals the complicity of Czech and French populations in the Holocaust. Austerlitz hears the story of the departure of his father, Maximilian, to Paris, and his mother’s deportation to Theresienstadt from Věra Ryšanová, the family’s former neighbor. In Věra’s narrative, this persecution is predicated on a logic that combines the

134

Chapter 4

extremity of totalitarianism with a warped rationalism. For example, Věra recalls Maximilian speaking with foreboding of “the corporate bodies and other human swarms endlessly proliferating under the new regime,”63 and of Agáta’s despair as she and others “had to watch as the SS pervaded the economy of the entire country.”64 If these passages suggest that the Holocaust required widespread, systemic complicity from most strata of society, this fact is further emphasized in later passages that describe the confiscation of Jewish property in Paris in 1942. Austerlitz’s interlocutor, a librarian called Henri Lemoine describes the involvement of an army of no fewer than fifteen hundred removal men . . . the banks and insurance agencies, the police, the transport firms, the landlords and caretakers of the apartment buildings . . . over five hundred art historians, antique dealers, restorers, joiners, clockmakers, furriers and couturiers brought in from Drancy and guarded by a contingent of Indo-Chinese soldiers.65

These roles represent a spectrum of complicities ranging from those who, it is implied, are coerced into performing their task of sorting these spoils to bureaucratic functionaries and manual workers whose day-to-day employment became part of a process of atrocity. When Lemoine comments that all involved “must undoubtedly have known that scarcely any of those interned in Drancy would come back,”66 he points to the way that simply performing one’s professional role without question can be a disposition by which individuals contribute to atrocity. However, the Indo-Chinese soldiers, who it seems likely are at once colonized subjects and the enforcers of state power, are an example of what Rothberg calls “complex implication,” that is the situation of “occupying positions that align one both to histories of victimization and to histories of perpetration.”67 In a less obvious but nevertheless very important way, Austerlitz’s relationship with the Holocaust is also one of complex implication, in that his family’s history is one of victimization, but in order to engage with that history, he has no choice but to align himself with the bureaucratic logic on which the atrocity was predicated. Genocide and the Archive If the descriptions of Prague and Drancy indicate the complicity of bureaucrats, manual workers, and the general public, these appear at first sight to form part of a historical event that is now over. However, a nexus of archival practices, state power, and atrocity becomes visible in the passages quoted earlier, and the logic of classification and preservation involved in the creation of archives is shown to have contributed to the perpetration of atrocity.

Traces of Complicity

135

It is on this basis that Long describes as an “enabling condition of genocide”68 the same archival practices and logic that allow Austerlitz to trace his own history. In other words, although the Holocaust may be over, not only do some of the structures, corporate bodies, and institutions involved still exist, but the logic and practices of behavior and representation out of which the atrocity grew also persist. Austerlitz is doubly implicated in his relationship with these archival and disciplinary structures. Firstly, his personal circumstances are such that he has no choice but to engage with them, precluding any form of subversion or resistance. Secondly, it is also suggested that Austerlitz’s own system of thought is a product of the same lineage of thinking that has produced those archives. Long argues that an archival lack is the foundational element of the narrative of Austerlitz’s life, noting several instances in which he and others are unable to find any information whatsoever about his past,69 but he possesses no remedy for this lack other than to furnish himself with whatever mediated forms of memory have been preserved. Austerlitz therefore finds himself in a position that is similar to the narrators of Sebald’s other texts, bound to the same logic that produced the conditions for his parents’ murders, and having no option other than to engage with and employ the same discourses that he knows to be implicated in atrocity. The bind in which he finds himself is particularly evident in his description of the new Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, which stresses the way that the building disciplines both memory and the spaces in which memory may be accessed. This awareness produces in Austerlitz moments of wistfulness in which he imagines escaping from these systems, such as when he pictures the readers in the library as “members of a wandering tribe encamped here on their way through the Sahara or the Sinai.”70 For Austerlitz, however, no such escape is possible and he instead seeks visceral, essential connections with the past. For example, his search for his mother results in him locating a video of the Theresienstadt ghetto, produced by the Germans in order to hoodwink the Red Cross into believing it to be humanely administered. However, his minute examination of the video does not reveal any trace of his mother and when, with behavior bordering on obsession, Austerlitz hits upon the idea of slowing down the video to better see the pictures, they seem only “to dissolve even as they appeared”71 while the audio track warps into “grotesque” and “nightmarish” incomprehensibility. Austerlitz seeks a direct encounter with the past, and it is perhaps for this reason that the text has been taken as indulging in a kind of traumatophilia, but what this passage in fact reveals is that no such direct encounter is possible and, moreover, that any experience of the past will be shaped by the physical limitations of mediated forms of memory: the double-page spread of the video footage reproduced in the text, in which the physical imperfections

136

Chapter 4

of the tape become visible, reveals only the materiality of the medium rather than any truth that it might have been thought to contain.72 In showing Jacques Austerlitz as having no alternative other than to use the archives whose logic and structure he sees as being implicated in the Holocaust, and in having his protagonist’s search grind to a halt in France before passing the material traces that he has so painstakingly assembled to the narrator, Sebald seems to suggest that there is simply no alternative to engaging with these systems, and to remaining implicated in them. However, in the following section, I counter this suspicion by arguing that Sebald inserts an element of resistance into the narrative. In a similar way to The Rings of Saturn, an ethically risky move enacts a kind of jarring representational violence on his own text that causes us to question, in this case profoundly, the nature of what it is that we are reading. Does Jacques Austerlitz Exist? I begin with this question as a way of challenging the bulk of critical work on Austerlitz that has focused on the eponymous protagonist and has, as a consequence, regarded the figure of the narrator as of secondary importance. Luckhurst, for example, argues that this narrator is “virtually effaced, becoming only an invisible repository, an archive for collected information.”73 Others attribute a slightly greater degree of agency to the narrator, but still emphasize a receptive rather than an active function. For example, Brad Prager sees his role as being similar to that of a psychoanalyst, giving others the opportunity to tell their stories to him, and to “make room for testimony, or to allow the victims to speak for themselves.”74 Similarly, Philip Schlesinger argues that the narrator’s role is record others’ testimonies, to bear witness to ongoing suffering and to take on the responsibility of mourning or, in his words, “to accept the burden of Jewish remembrance as enacted through the exilic figure of Austerlitz.”75 I have argued that the narrator of The Rings of Saturn is crucial to the text’s representational strategies. I also claim that, despite initial appearances to the contrary, the same may be said of the narrator of Austerlitz. A number of moments in the narrative suggest this narrator is a more active and disruptive presence than he appears at first. For example, Sebald seems to insert himself assertively into the text when he includes a photograph ostensibly taken by Austerlitz in Terezín, but in which his own reflection is visible,76 and when he mentions the graffiti described in Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom on the wall of Fort IX at Kaunas in Lithuania and which, by coincidence, was written on the date of Sebald’s birth by a prisoner who shares his initials.77 If these moments act as a reminder that the text consists of the narrative of a fictional character, itself relayed through a narrator, other elements alert

Traces of Complicity

137

us to Sebald engaging in forms of narrative mischief similar to those found in his earlier texts. For example, when the narrator records that, on his reacquaintance with Austerlitz after twenty years without contact, the latter states that “contrary to all statistical probability . . . there was an astonishing, positively imperative internal logic”78 to their meeting, just how suspicious should we be? Eaglestone ascribes greater importance to the narrator when he argues that the novel “contrasts two different ways of facing the Holocaust: Austerlitz’s engagement and the narrator’s stasis”79 as part of a broader argument based on the distinction between “working through” and “stasis-as-resistance.” Eaglestone’s key terms here evoke trauma, but I suggest that the roles of these two characters also highlight important aspects of the relationship between representation and complicity. Eaglestone suggests that this relationship becomes visible in the exchange of knowledge between the two characters, and that “as Austerlitz tells his story to the narrator, at intervals of years, he reveals not a sort of mutual complicity or shared darkness . . . but the narrator’s unintentional guilt and complicity.”80 I go further than Eaglestone to the extent of reversing the structure of this relationship, and argue that it is in the narrator’s construction of the character Austerlitz that the complicity of the belated witness becomes visible. A critical moment in terms of identifying the narrator’s role occurs when he is given access to Austerlitz’s house on Alderney Street in London’s East End. As Amir Eshel observes, this moment enables the inclusion of the photographs and, more importantly, “it becomes clear that the plot is not simply the result of Austerlitz’s narration, but in addition, if not more so, the product of the narrator’s emplotment.”81 The notion of emplotment brings the narrator to the foreground as an active presence in the text rather than a passive recipient of Austerlitz’s story. If the text at first sight seems to offer us a contract whereby we read Jacques Austerlitz as a fully developed character, as soon as we begin to attend to the narrator as a character in himself, a second type of contract for reading the text emerges. This contract disposes of the tacit acceptance of the character of Austerlitz as a coherent, albeit fictional, entity, and instead sees the Austerlitz of the text as a construction of the narrator. In such a reading, the interior life of Austerlitz becomes secondary to the means by which the narrator constructs this character, and hence to the processes of inscription and mediation that he employs to this end. It is not, in this case, the narrator who is effaced, but Austerlitz who begins to flicker and become indistinct in the same way as the ghosts that he describes. This shift in focus has the consequence of inviting readings that interpret the text not as an attempt to bear witness to the trauma produced by the Holocaust, at Laub’s first level of witnessing, but instead functions at Laub’s third level, as a commentary on the types of stories that we, the belated witnesses, are able to tell.

138

Chapter 4

In identifying how the text might invite us to undertake this move, let us begin with the sheer implausibility of the meetings between Austerlitz and the narrator. Following their initial chance encounter in Brussels’ Centraal Station in 1967, their relationship continues not through any attempt to maintain contact, but through a series of coincidences. The narrator describes their meetings in 1967 as follows: Our paths kept crossing in a way that I still find hard to understand, on all my Belgian excursions at that time, none of them planned in advance . . . on all subsequent occasions, we simply went on with our conversation, wasting no time on commenting on the improbability of our meeting again.82

If such meetings are unlikely, even more remarkable is their chance reunion, following a loss of contact for nearly twenty years, when they run into each other at the Great Eastern Hotel in London, and where they simply recommence their conversation at the point at which it had been left off at the end of their previous meeting.83 These coincidences stretch the fictional contract offered by the text—in which we accept the text as the narrator’s reproduction of his meetings with Austerlitz’s narrative in good faith—to breaking point. Yet these implausible elements of the plot sit much more comfortably if we conceive of the narrator as a character actively emplotting these events through the character of Jacques Austerlitz. Approaching the text in this way, we can regard their encounter in London is not so much an unlikely plot twist as the narrator’s means of expressing and engaging with his growing awareness of the history of the Holocaust. Accepting this contract, and reading the whole narrative in these terms, the narrator’s relationship with Austerlitz can be interpreted as follows. He begins in a state of ignorance, a symptom of his education at the hands of the academics whose careers had begun under National Socialism and who “still nurtured delusions of power.”84 However, his first meeting with Austerlitz can be read as his first encounter with the history of the European Jewry, one that he has stumbled upon by accident while occupied with other research. Nevertheless, this encounter prompts his interest in Austerlitz’s history to the extent that he visits Breendonk. The meetings between the two in Belgium are followed by twenty years without contact, a period of latency that suggests a belated cultural and collective response to the Holocaust that ends when Austerlitz provides a fuller narrative of his past during their unlikely reunion in London. Reading the text in this way does not so much illuminate Jacques Austerlitz as a figure of postwar Jewish identity as it brings the narrator into relief as a synecdoche of postwar consciousness of the Holocaust for those not directly involved, the belated witnesses of a generation later.

Traces of Complicity

139

Within such a reading, the moment at which Austerlitz entrusts the narrator with his photographs in Alderney Street becomes the moment at which the concept of a character named “Jacques Austerlitz” emerges, and Austerlitz’s game of “patience,” in which he repeatedly shuffles and deals his photographs in different configurations, now becomes a metafictional moment at which the narrator weighs up the possibilities for creating a narrative from the materials that he has available to him. Moreover, when the narrator falls asleep in Alderney Street listening to a mysterious radio from which can be heard “voices moving through the air after the onset of darkness, only a few of which we could catch,”85 the narrator has, at this point, become attuned to the frequencies on which these ephemeral stories can be heard. Taking this reading to its extreme, Austerlitz’s research in the archives of Prague and Paris in the later parts of the narrative can instead be attributed to the narrator, and Austerlitz’s invitation to the narrator to meet him during the next phase of his search may be read as the compunction to gather further information acting with such force that it impels the narrator to travel overseas. As the narrator writes his story, the text suggests that this history continues to exert such a fascination that he returns to Breendonk, now run as a museum, and begins to read Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom, which itself follows attempts of the Jewish diaspora to trace its European roots. While the trajectory of the narrator’s research can be taken as representative of the work undertaken by professional historians, the presence of second-generation memoirs from the Jewish diaspora combined with official forms of memorialization in these late passages are suggestive of the way that postwar consciousness of the Holocaust has latterly moved into the public sphere. Luckhurst suggests that Sebald “overloads Austerlitz’s condensation of the history of trauma—a recovered memory ‘survivor’ in the 1990s, with a traumatic secret from the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s, who breaks down in Paris and is admitted to the Salpêtrière, home to the elaboration of traumatic neurosis in the 1880s.”86 To accept a contract in which Austerlitz is taken as a coherent character, he is, as Luckhurst argues, implausibly overloaded with the signifiers of trauma. However, reading this character instead as the inscription of a second-generation narrator who has not himself experienced any of the events that the history of Austerlitz touches upon, this overloading takes on a different logic, indicating the tendency of those who come after to understand the past in terms of the symbols by which it is recognized. The “astonishing, positively imperative internal logic”87 that Austerlitz ascribes to his meetings with the narrator is, in this schema, the internal logic of narrative coherence; it is the logic of the narrator, absent from the events about which he writes, and knowing what does through the mediation of memory into the present, telling the only story about the Holocaust that he is able to tell.

140

Chapter 4

Laub writes of “the imperative to tell and be heard”88 for those who experienced the events of the Holocaust firsthand, but Vivian notes that the rhetoric of witnessing is now pervasive to the point of being near-ubiquitous. For this reason, he argues that witnessing continues to signify “a frequently invoked social, political, and moral imperative.” However, he proceeds to argue that “many groups and individuals adopt the language of witnessing for such diverse ends that one may legitimately wonder whether any definitional or instrumental center holds among multifarious acts of witnessing in modern public culture.”89 Austerlitz addresses this still-felt imperative from a generational distance, and suggests it continues to act as knowledge of the Holocaust proliferates and circulates through memoirs, archives, photographic records, and other forms of memory. However, while this imperative might impel those at a generation’s remove from those events to adopt the role of the belated witness, the question remains as to how this role can be fulfilled faithfully and ethically, given that the same discourses that enable witnessing to take place are shown to be implicated in atrocity. Sebald’s use of a narrator not only as a repository for memory but also as an active presence who constructs a narrative to bear witness to events he has not directly experienced can be seen as his response to this dilemma. Because he constructs a narrative on the basis of an archival logic, the narrator is implicated in the same systems that acted as an enabling condition of the genocide. As in The Rings of Saturn, the text also points to the potential for implication to become complicity when those in the position of the belated witness exercise their agency to construct representations that perpetuate the discourses that are also shown to be enabling conditions of genocide. However, if we step back from the two characters discussed earlier, it becomes clear that Austerlitz avoids reproducing the archival logic that it condemns: once the text’s metafictional maneuvers are acknowledged, our relationship, as readers, with those archives and with the logic that sustains them also becomes visible. This relationship, Austerlitz suggests, must be one of sustained and critical awareness of the sources of memory, of the means of its mediation into the present, and of the implication of particular material forms of memory in the same atrocities to which these forms testify. Trauma discourse has held to the notion that the voice of the past can somehow be “released through the wound.”90 In the introduction, I argued that academic discourse on testimony would benefit from distancing itself from trauma theory. Ironically, I find strong support for this claim in Austerlitz, a work often regarded as a paradigmatic trauma text. While the material traces of the past in Austerlitz do at times evoke a visceral and immediate form of affect suggestive of the trauma paradigm, the protagonists’ attempts to experience the past directly are almost always frustrated, and instead create an interpretive drive that brings them into contact with mediated forms of memory. In

Traces of Complicity

141

this way, the text addresses the ethics and politics of witnessing at a distance. The narrator’s situation is typical of the belated witness: the only possible encounter with the past is through its mediation in material traces; and those traces are implicated in the systems that have given rise to atrocity. The role of the ethical belated witness is to read and interpret mindful of the potential for those acts of interpretation to become forms of complicity. In this chapter, I have argued that Sebald expands the scale of complicity from the individual dilemmas presented in Camus, Kundera, and Ishiguro to an examination of the role of systems, discourses, and modes of representation associated with and produced by modernity. While discussions of complicity that begin with an examination of individual agency in relatively isolated situations remain useful, the way that Sebald’s texts repeatedly gesture toward circulation and mediation acknowledges how individuals, and the representations that those individuals create, are always already embedded in systems and structures. As such, his texts are an important pivot toward a focus on complicity as a collective and pervasive phenomenon, and it is on this basis that I attempt to address complicity in the global, informationdriven world of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the chapters to come. The two remaining authors addressed in this volume, Pynchon and Atwood, also address complicity on these wider, systemic scales, and are particularly concerned with how governmental and extra-governmental bodies, as well as new technologies, impel individuals and groups into positions of complicity. I address Pynchon’s fiction first because, for all its fantastic inventiveness, it looks back on specific historical periods. As such, it permits an examination of the kinds of systems seen in Sebald—albeit through a very different lens—and to trace their evolution into the military-industrial-governmental conspiracies of the 1960s, 1980s, and early 2000s in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Vineland (1990), and Bleeding Edge (2013), respectively. NOTES 1. Lepora and Goodin, Compromise, 6. 2. Long, Image, 1. 3. Kutz, Collective Age, 1. 4. Benjamin, “Theses,” 256. 5. Sebald, Saturn, 194. Susie O’Brien notes that the Booker Prize, itself instrumental in Ishiguro’s success, was originally sponsored by Booker McConnell, a company responsible for the exploitation of sugar plantation workers in Guyana. O’Brien, “New World Order,” 799. 6. Sebald, Saturn, 194.

142

Chapter 4

7. Sebald, Saturn, 170. 8. Robbins, Beneficiary, 4. 9. Sebald, Saturn, 197. 10. Sebald, Saturn, 202–203. 11. Sebald, Saturn, 214. 12. Sebald, Saturn, 35. 13. Sebald, Saturn, 36. 14. Sebald, Saturn, 144–45. 15. Long, Image, 42–43. 16. Sebald, Saturn, 281–82. 17. Sebald, Saturn, 283. 18. Sebald, Saturn, 283. 19. Sebald, Saturn, 6. 20. Sebald, Saturn, 7. 21. Sebald, Saturn, 182. 22. Sebald, Saturn, 186. 23. Sebald, Saturn, 8. 24. Sebald, Saturn, 70. 25. Sebald, Saturn, 92–93. 26. Sebald, Saturn, 98–99. 27. Sebald, Saturn, 35–36. 28. Bird, Comedy, 104. 29. Sebald, Saturn, 26. 30. Sebald, Saturn, 275. 31. Sebald, Saturn, 276. 32. Sebald, Saturn, 292–93. 33. Sebald, Saturn, 280. 34. Beck, “Reading Room,” 80. 35. Long, Image, 140. 36. Moser, “Liminality,” 45. 37. Zilcosky, “Uncanny Travels,” 109–10. 38. Long, Image, 130–31. 39. Sebald, Saturn, 234. 40. Long, Image, 131. 41. Sebald, Saturn, 231–33. 42. Sebald, Saturn, 231. 43. Long, Image, 135. 44. Sebald, Saturn, 233–37. 45. Sebald, Saturn, 13. 46. Sebald, Saturn, 16. 47. Sebald, Saturn, 17. 48. See Long, Image, 133; Moser, “Liminality,” 50–52; Kilbourn, “Catastrophe,” 143. 49. West, “Nostalgia,” 293. 50. Sebald, Saturn, 17–18.

Traces of Complicity

143

51. See Sheppard, “Dexter-Sinister,” 428–29 and “Woods,” 111 for a summary of similar instances of fakery across Sebald’s body of work. 52. Bird, Comedy, 91. 53. Bird, Comedy, 94. 54. Sebald, Saturn, 132–33. 55. Sebald, Saturn, 63. 56. Sheppard, “Dexter-Sinister,” 428–29. 57. Sheppard, “Woods,” 111. 58. Sebald, Saturn, 64. 59. Sheppard, “Woods,” 112. 60. Sebald, Austerlitz, 189. 61. Luckhurst, Trauma, 111. 62. Sebald, Austerlitz, 175. 63. Sebald, Austerlitz, 236. 64. Sebald, Austerlitz, 249. 65. Sebald, Austerlitz, 401–402. 66. Sebald, Austerlitz, 401–402. 67. Rothberg, Implicated Subject, 91. 68. Long, Image, 158–59. 69. Long, Image, 152. 70. Sebald, Austerlitz, 390. 71. Sebald, Austerlitz, 345. 72. Sebald, Austerlitz, 346–49. 73. Luckhurst, Trauma, 112. 74. Prager, “Good German,” 92. 75. Schlesinger, “Exile,” 55. 76. Sebald, Austerlitz, 276. 77. Sebald, Austerlitz, 415. The inscription reads: “Max Stern, Paris, 18.5.1944” (Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom, 161). Sebald went by Max in his personal life. 78. Sebald, Austerlitz, 60. 79. Eaglestone, Broken Voice, 89. 80. Eaglestone, Broken Voice, 88. 81. Eshel, “Time,” 79–80. 82. Sebald, Austerlitz, 36–37. 83. Sebald, Austerlitz, 54–57. 84. Sebald, Austerlitz, 43. 85. Sebald, Austerlitz, 234. 86. Luckhurst, Trauma, 114. 87. Sebald, Austerlitz, 60. 88. Laub, “Event”, 78. 89. Vivian, Commonplace Witnessing, 2. 90. Caruth, Experience, 15.

Chapter 5

Paranoid Conspiracy Thomas Pynchon

Given the vast, fantastic, and often baffling entanglements that drive Thomas Pynchon’s novels, it is perhaps unsurprising that the notion of complicity appears with relative frequency in the critical literature on his fiction. Steven Weisenburger suggests that Pynchon’s administrative work for Boeing just before the Cuban missile crisis meant that “his work—his gift with writing itself—had left Pynchon inescapably complicit with the bureaucracy of mass destruction and terror,”1 and certainly these concerns can be seen in the recurring tropes and character types present in his novels. However, these references to complicity are often made in passing, with conspiracy much more often cited explicitly as a central theme in Pynchon’s work, often in conjunction with paranoia. As Mitchum Huehls notes, Pynchon’s body of work now covers the period from the eighteenth century (in Mason & Dixon, 1997) to 9/11 (in Bleeding Edge), and “in each place and at every time, Pynchon sees potential conspiracy, always accompanied by paranoid individuals who may or may not be enmeshed in webs of corrupt power.”2 Lepora and Goodin state that “the object of conspiracy is to produce a plan of wrongdoing designed and agreed jointly by different co-planners,”3 and since his first novel, V (1963), Pynchon has been concerned with the possibility of secret knowledge connecting locations across the globe and linking the defining conflicts of successive generations. The aspect of this conspiracy that remains consistent across Pynchon’s body of work is the sense that the American way of life is the product of wealth accumulated through a form of military-industrial capitalism, and which continues to grow thanks to a hegemony secured by dirty wars abroad and a quasi-fascistic repression of dissent at home. American democracy, in Pynchon’s work, has thoroughly dirty hands. Because capitalist ideology and modes of exchange have attained global dominance, particularly from the second half of the twentieth century 145

146

Chapter 5

into the contemporary moment, for the sake of brevity, I refer to this intersection of financial and political interests (and the actions taken to further them) as the “neoliberal conspiracy” throughout this chapter.4 My primary concern is with the issue of complicity in these novels, and I agree with Erik Dussere when he writes that “for Pynchon, the American Way is a loose-limbed conspiracy in which political and commercial entities have colluded to create the hegemonic postwar America from which his characters are alienated.”5 Yet Pynchon’s characters tend not to be as alienated as they perhaps should be: his typical mode is to have his protagonists become embroiled in events whereby some form of conspiracy is suggested, although hard evidence with regard to the exact nature of the conspiracy remains elusive. The characters’ complicity therefore occurs when they are offered glimpses into the workings of the conspiracy, but fail to challenge it, or even find themselves drawn into it. The characters’ failure to challenge the neoliberal conspiracy is, often, a failure to see: they are aware of the conspiracy, and are often aware that they are implicated in it, but struggle to identify its nature fully. John Beck frames his discussion of the militarization of the American West with a summary of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” in which the criminal famously succeeds in frustrating the police by hiding the letter in question not in the drawers and cupboards that they predictably turn inside-out, but in plain sight. Beck uses Poe’s story as an analogy for the American landscape, arguing that “the open secret of the American West, then, is that its open landscapes, so often the overdetermined signifiers of American liberty, screen off its military uses and their environmental and human consequences.”6 On this basis, he argues that seeing this landscape as empty is a form of “selective blindness,” and argues that fiction has the potential to perform a type of “unveiling,” wherein both the nature of the landscape and our own benighted positions become apparent.7 In this way, Beck identifies a particular form of collective culpable ignorance, and we might extend his comment to Pynchon’s America as a whole, with the liberties enjoyed by his free-wheeling protagonists allowing them to blind themselves to the workings of the neoliberal conspiracy in which they are embedded. Conspiracy in Pynchon is not just a description of how American power functions, but is also a way of seeing and interpreting the world. As Timothy Melley notes, Americans seek to explain a wide range of political and social phenomena through conspiracy, and that it is “a way of understanding power that appeals to both marginalized groups and the power elite.”8 He explains the appeal of conspiracy theories as a response to what he calls growing “agency panic,” a sense of loss of control that results from the fact that, in the information age, the “new model of ‘conspiracy’ no longer simply suggests that dangerous agents are secretly plotting against us from some remote location”

Paranoid Conspiracy

147

but instead holds that “whole populations are being openly manipulated without their knowledge.”9 Yet, as Melley also notes, conspiracy theories are generally impossible to verify. This means that, although the conspiracy may exist, the pervasiveness of conspiracy theories paradoxically de-values the very discourses that might serve to unveil it. This phenomenon therefore acts as another barrier to Pynchon’s characters adopting anti-complicit positions. As elsewhere in this book, I have selected novels that I regard as being most relevant to the theme of complicity, and more specifically because they exhibit most of the general characteristics noted earlier; moreover, in this case, they also represent three distinct stages of Pynchon’s career. In The Crying of Lot 49, the way that Oedipa Maas’s comfortable suburban lifestyle might be underwritten by military-industrial capitalism is suggested by the presence of the Yoyodyne corporation, while the existence of Tristero raises the possibility of other, non-complicit, modes of life in America that it never occurred to her might be necessary or desirable. Vineland was published in 1990, after a pause of seventeen years following Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). In the second phase of Pynchon’s career, the hazy and often semi-magical coincidences and connections of his earlier work have largely been replaced by conspiracies that have their roots in what we recognize as the historical reality of postwar America. Thomas Hill Schaub reads The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice (2009) as a loose California trilogy, and argues that the latter two are “reflective novels, looking backward from within or under the impact of the reactionary politics of the Nixon and Reagan years.”10 I focus in this chapter on Vineland because the novel’s pathos is generated by the knowledge of the defeat of open, progressive politics at the hands of neoliberalism—and by the knowledge that the progressives were complicit in that defeat. Finally, if the conspiracies of Pynchon’s early novels suggest that a truth exists somewhere behind layers of collusion, only for that truth always to recede from view, in Bleeding Edge a hard, physical reality reasserts itself through the 9/11 attacks on New York. Yet the cause of this reality remains subject to speculation, and the growth of the internet exacerbates the tendencies noted earlier, wherein an excess of information takes us not toward the truth but into ever-increasing suspicion. Pynchon’s most recent novel, in other words, asserts the idea of truth, but is pessimistic about the possibility of ever unveiling it. THE W.A.S.T.E. LAND: THE CRYING OF LOT 49 As Oedipa Maas’s efforts to execute the will of the real estate mogul Pierce Inverarity bring her into ever-closer proximity with the Tristero, she comes

148

Chapter 5

to realize the extent of its reach and of the alternative communication system known as W.A.S.T.E., and concludes: Here were God knew how many citizens, deliberately choosing not to communicate by U. S. Mail. It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery.11

Oedipa acknowledges and appears to admire this exercise of agency, this form of anti-complicity, on the part of the individuals who have created and embedded themselves in an alternative circulatory system. In contrast, Oedipa’s own condition at the beginning of the novel is one of apathy, and she is described as being lost in “a fat deckful of days,”12 her life in Kinneret-among-the-Pines defined by Tupperware parties, muzak, ricotta, and whiskey sours.13 When Pierce’s death impels her to overcome this inertia, her movements up and down the California coast are represented as taking place within a network of transportation, communications, and capital, and her embeddedness in this network also reveals that her own comfortable lifestyle is a product of the neoliberal conspiracy. Dirty Money, Open Secrets As she approaches San Narcisco in the early stages of her investigations, Oedipa observes the similarity between “the ordered swirl of houses and streets” and a printed circuit card, and feels that “there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.”14 Yet if this “sense of concealed meaning” foreshadows the revelations that lead her to Tristero, the irony of her description lies in the fact that one of the central nodes of this network is present in plain sight. The Yoyodyne Corporation is housed in a prolonged scatter of wide, pink buildings, surrounded by miles of fence topped with barbed wire and interrupted now and then by guard towers: soon an entrance whizzed by, two sixty-foot missiles on either side and the name YOYODYNE lettered conservatively on each nose.15

In general, these forms of dirty capital are alluded to more obliquely in The Crying of Lot 49 than in many of Pynchon’s later novels, but the early reference to Yoyodyne, combined with Oedipa’s growing awareness of how Pierce’s wealth permeates the landscape, notably through real estate, is enough to suggest that the soporific comfort of life in suburban California is underwritten by the open secret of the military-industrial complex.

Paranoid Conspiracy

149

Oedipa is thus implicated in the neoliberal conspiracy at the start of the novel, while being passive toward it, as is shown when she likens herself to the subjects of Remedios Varo’s painting Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle, which depicts a group of women in a tower weaving “a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.”16 As Kostas Kaltsas notes, Oedipa misreads the painting, failing to recognize that the women in it create the world by weaving it rather than being passively trapped.17 Her disposition is therefore initially one of acceptance of suburban boredom in which she fails to recognize the potential for her own agency to move her out of this position. Pierce’s death jolts her out of this stasis, and if her embeddedness in the network of dirty money is suggested by the image of the circuit card, her role as “executrix” of Pierce’s estate impels her to become a more active participant in it: her job from this point on is to keep capital moving—and to keep it moving where Pierce wanted it to go. Oedipa begins in this role daunted by “her deep ignorance of law, of investment, of real estate, ultimately of the dead man himself,”18 and it is only her steady acquisition of knowledge in these spheres—the same spheres that allow Pierce’s dirty money to circulate—that enables her to carry out her detective work. In other words, she must become more deeply embedded in this system in order to understand it. Her growing awareness of the system in which she is embedded does not, however, automatically result in a desire to challenge it. She states of the users of W.A.S.T.E. that “whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private.”19 However, she never quite bridges the gap between her previously comfortable existence and the sense of alienation embodied by Tristero. Her journey into the San Francisco night, in which she sees and hears traces of Tristero in shop windows, all-night diners and laundromats, scratched onto bus seats, and in children’s rhymes, seems to promise such an escape into another world. She does not, however, accept this opportunity. Oedipa in fact retains a reluctance to align herself with any movement that challenges the dominant discourses to which she is accustomed. This is evident in her visit to the University of California, Berkeley. She contrasts her own university education, undertaken at a time of “blandness and retreat,” with the campus “teeming with corduroy, denim, bare legs . . . long paper petitions dangling to earth, posters for undechipherable FSM’s, YAF’s, VDC’s.”20 Joanna Freer argues that this passage “contains an energy, a forward momentum” and as such “should be read as an enthusiastic judgement on the vibrancy of the [countercultural] movement.”21 However, while Oedipa

150

Chapter 5

finds herself “attracted . . . wanting to feel relevant,” she is also “unsure, a stranger” and does not fully align herself with the students’ politics. Although the campus of U.C. Berkeley is saturated with the signifiers of resistance, it is surely significant that her first face-to-face encounter with individuals using the W.A.S.T.E. system occurs in a bar frequented by Yoyodyne employees. This fact suggests that resistance to a pervasive conspiracy cannot be one of direct opposition, but can only be achieved by those embedded within the system. To return to Oedipa’s early description of the Yoyodyne compound, clearly it is not hidden, but is tucked away in a part of the network that ordinary citizens would normally have no need to visit, and if one misses its presence this is because the cars that are “motorized extensions” of people22 might “whiz by” as the addresses climb into “the 70 and then 80,000’s.”23 Any failure of witnessing in this case, in other words, is likely to be the result of the network impelling the individual onward at somewhere above fifty miles per hour toward another intersection of its vectors. The reason why Tristero prospers as a form of resistance is because it recognizes and in fact mimics the characteristics of the hegemonic conspiracy, particularly in the way that it succeeds in hiding in plain sight. In tracing the organization’s conflict with the Thurn and Taxis postal monopoly as far back as the Renaissance, Oedipa comes across the play The Courier’s Tragedy. Toward the end of the play, Tristero itself is alluded to through meaningful silences, its existence an open secret at the time: “every flunky in the court . . . exchanging Significant Looks, knows. It is all a big in-joke. The audiences of the time knew.”24 Moreover, when we learn of the Tristero’s migration to the United States, they move further underground, with “their entire emphasis now toward silence, impersonation, opposition masquerading as allegiance.”25 Implicit in Oedipa’s description of this mode of operation is the opposite formulation, the idea of allegiance masquerading as opposition, and this describes why more direct forms of challenge to the neoliberal conspiracy fail: the system permits the appearance of democratic opposition (in the form of Berkeley students with their horn-rimmed glasses and petitions) only in order to mask the lack of an alternative and to encourage allegiance in the form of a lifestyle that perpetuates the continued circulation of capital along the desired routes. Reading for the Plot The difficulties of seeing and identifying the conspiracy are exacerbated by the fact that its nature is a network of communication, and as such it is constructed from systems of representation. For this reason, adopting an anti-complicit stance cannot simply be a matter of “unveiling,” that is, of recognizing the truth that lies somehow behind representation. Echoing Linda Hutcheon’s

Paranoid Conspiracy

151

framing of the concept of “complicitous critique,”26 Huehls argues that, in the contemporary moment, “most every way a given political question might be represented, framed, described, or debated ultimately reinforces the neoliberal status quo.” As such, he maintains, contemporary authors tend to “conclude that representation itself—the use of language and other sign systems to make meaningful, referential claims about the world—might be too compromised for politics.”27 In the four-phase schema of neoliberalism proposed by Huehls and Greenwald Smith, The Crying of Lot 49 was written in the first, economic phase, that is, before neoliberalism fully secured its dominance over American politics, economics, and cultural life.28 However, while Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman and Brian McHale argue that the novel “is forwardlooking, bursting with subcultural alternatives and subversive energies,”29 in this orientation toward the future, Pynchon is also aware of neoliberalism’s growing momentum, and of the way that this language and representation are implicated—and indeed complicit—in this economic and political order. Joanna Freer argues that “Pynchon offers up the written word as trigger for thought, fantasy, and debate towards increased understanding and awareness.”30 In the case of The Crying of Lot 49, if systems of representation are a fabric woven by those who use them, they must also contain the thread that can unravel the conspiracy, and the possibility exists that, for Oedipa, the evidence of Tristero’s existence is just this thread. However, as I have stated in this introduction to this chapter, and as these comments on the nature of representation suggest, conspiracy is not just the object to be identified but also informs any individual’s subjective basis for interpreting the world. For this reason, and to reuse an image discussed in the chapter on Sebald, Oedipa is constantly threatened by the possibility that she might have gotten hold of the wrong thread. Representation, in the form of narrative, is connected with conspiracy through the notion of plot in The Crying of Lot 49. Early in Oedipa’s relationship with Tristero, and prompted by the coincidence of the lawyer and former child actor Metzger (assigned to help her execute Pierce’s will) appearing on television at the same time that they meet in person, Oedipa mulls over two possibilities: “Either he made up the whole thing . . . or he bribed the engineer over at the local station to run this, it’s all part of a plot, an elaborate, seduction, plot.”31 The episode takes place while Oedipa and Metzger watch a film, Cashiered, in which he appeared, but the various sections of which have been mixed up so as to confuse the order of the narrative. In other words, the novel alerts us to the possibility of narrative coherence being deliberately distorted, creating multiple possible interpretations, at precisely the moment that Oedipa seeks coherence and closure. Oedipa’s initial uncertainty and discomfort can, however, be seen as the necessary first steps toward a recognition of her own complicity. In beginning

152

Chapter 5

to recognize plot, Oedipa exhibits what Melley calls “reasonable paranoia” in response to “agency panic.”32 Specifically, as Amy J. Elias argues, the paranoia that drives and enables an individual to perceive plot, that is, to pick out a pattern from the chaos of twentieth-century America, is productive in two ways, both as “a hermeneutic that unmasks totalitarian control that wishes to remain invisible” and also as “an open, polyvocal approach to the world that allows one to see connections, associations and creative difference.”33 The sense of paranoid disorientation that Oedipa initially experiences when watching Cashiered, and that grows as she becomes increasingly involved with Tristero, can therefore be seen as the necessary foundation of a critical disposition by which the neoliberal conspiracy may be interrogated. In The Crying of Lot 49 (and in fact most of Pynchon’s work) while conspiracy is a threat, the characters also tend to exhibit a desire to enter into it. In the quotation earlier, “seduction” is used as an adjective to modify the noun “plot,” but the way that the commas are used to evoke Oedipa’s mental unfolding of her theory also allows the term to stand on its own as a noun, evoking the idea that conspiracy may be a form of hermeneutic seduction in itself. Indeed, for Oedipa, the political ramifications of the American machine remain a lesser concern than her desire to find significance in the clues left by Pierce, a desire that centers on her own drive to resolve ontological uncertainty. The fact that she remains at the center of her own plot is suggested when, early in the novel, she ponders whether her role should be to act as “the dark machine in the centre of the planetarium, to bring the estate into pulsing stelliferous Meaning, all in a soaring dome around her?” and asks herself “Shall I project a world?”34 Her hermeneutic quest, and the reflections on the nature of language and reality that it involves, finally leads Oedipa to a degree of recognition of her own complacent relationship with the America in which she lives: San Narcisco was a name; an incident among our climactic records of dreams and what dreams became among our accumulated daylight, a moment’s squallline or tornado’s touchdown among the higher, more continental solemnities— storm-systems of group suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence. There was the true continuity, San Narcisco had no boundaries. No one knew yet how to draw them. She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that his legacy was America.35

In this passage, the act of naming—specifically in this case, the act of naming San Narcisco—ceases to be a matter of habit, an unquestioned and unquestioning act that perpetuates the flow of information and capital in which she is embedded. Yet the “meaning” that she is able to discern is only that “San Narcisco” is not an identifiable site but merely a signifier attributed

Paranoid Conspiracy

153

to a particular and provisional confluence of capital, population, and communications. She gets as far as recognizing “storm-systems of group suffering and need,” but no further, and as such Oedipa’s quest remains ontological rather than political in nature. For this reason, her reflections lie toward the aesthetically (rather than politically) oriented end of the postmodern spectrum wherein the world is constructed of representations, and in which communication produces an infinite regress of meaning. Schaub argues that “the text itself is a kind of plot perpetrated upon the reader, containing a secret meaning known only to the author” and that the “textual paranoia induced within and energizing the reader, constitutes the affective politics of the novel.”36 Yet I suggest that this affective thrust is not, finally, as political as it might be: The Crying of Lot 49’s plot is one of seduction rather than of politically driven paranoia. The novel invites us into a hermeneutic game whose mechanics are constructed from the history of communications in an increasingly capitalist Euro-American history, and a paranoid disposition may enable to reader to trace their own complicity with that system; but ultimately the game is played more for its own sake rather than to dismantle those same mechanics. However, in the latter part of his career, Pynchon has injected greater political urgency into his writing, and I detail his more explicit examinations of complicity with the American military-industrial system in the remainder of this chapter. COUNTERCULTURE AND COMPLICITY: VINELAND During the hiatus between Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland, as David Cowart notes, “the counterculture retreated as the forces of reaction, complacency, and materialism took over.” He continues by speculating that “perhaps it was this frightening and disheartening development that was behind Pynchon’s long silence.”37 Certainly, whereas The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow contain a fantastic openness, albeit played out against a dark background, in Vineland those unpleasant details are brought into sharp relief through the characters’ recollections of their participation in the 1960s counterculture. The question debated near the end of the novel by members of the radical Traverse and Becker clans is “whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist twilight, or whether the darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago,”38 but the retrospective form of the narrative, which recalls the collapse of the counterculture in the late 1960s from the perspective of the Reaganite 1980s, reveals the characters’ complicity in their own repression. In recalling the implosion of the counterculture, the protagonists in fact generally acknowledge their own culpability with, and complicity in, the neoliberal surge. As such, and in contrast to complicity in the form of culpable

154

Chapter 5

ignorance and failures of witnessing addressed elsewhere in this volume, Vineland examines more direct complicities in the form of collaboration and betrayal. “Everyone’s a Squealer” In Pynchon’s early novels, the violence generated and perpetrated by the military-industrial machinery of the American state and global capitalism tends to be either rendered in fantastic, cartoonish, and sexual terms, or to remain largely offstage and alluded to rather than represented explicitly. This changes in Vineland, wherein the repression of the counterculture from the late 1960s onward is described in stark detail. For example, in a passage describing the eviction of members of a commune in Texas, we are told of state troopers “beating the boys with slapjacks, grabbing handcuffed girls by the pussy, smacking little kids around, and killing the stock.”39 Similarly, following the clearance of a radical California enclave known as the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll, or PR3, by morning there were scores of injuries, hundreds of arrests, no reported deaths but a handful of persons unaccounted for. In those days it was still unthinkable that any North American agency would kill its own civilians then lie about it. So the mystery abided, frozen in time, somewhere beyond the youthful absences surely bound to be temporary, yet short of planned atrocity.40

If the open secret of how American political power operates remains at arm’s length in The Crying of Lot 49, a matter of conjecture and rumor and thus still subject to denial and culpable ignorance, in this passage from Vineland, the brutality of this system is witnessed directly by members of the counterculture. Yet while the novel focuses on and generally sympathizes with members of this counterculture, they are shown to be complicit with their own repression and with much of the brutality manifest therein. This form of complicity is explored through the central character, Frenesi Gates, and her abandonment of her family and friends to begin a new life as a professional snitch and as the lover of the Federal enforcer Brock Vond. However, while Frenesi’s actions seem to precipitate the collapse of the whole radical community, most of the novel’s cast of progressives are also repeatedly indicted for their weakness and complicity with the Nixonian repression. For example, Frenesi’s mother Sasha, a veteran of radical politics, recalls the lack of solidarity among her “sisters in the struggle” who were “having affairs while the husbands were overseas, trying to handle the kids and the mother-in-law.”41 Similarly, Darryl Louise (“DL”) Chastain, a former friend of Frenesi from the 24fps days,

Paranoid Conspiracy

155

recalls how the members of the counterculture were “full of playin’ makebelieve, acting on faiths in things that sound crazy now, lying, turning each other in.”42 In other words, despite the novel’s apparent political sympathies with the left and with American counterculture, it describes a history of longstanding and pervasive complicity, in the form of collaboration, between members of that countercultural group and the conspiracy of American military-industrial capitalism that they ostensibly resist. The reasons why these individuals are impelled to collaborate in this way are, however, not always immediately clear. At times, the novel suggests that a combination of economic and technological factors influence these alignments. For example, the first sentence of the novel dates it as taking place in 1984, the year of Reagan’s reelection, and hence deep into the period of growing neoliberal dominance. This date also creates unavoidable associations with Orwell’s dystopia, and these are amplified by a number of references to techniques of electronic surveillance. Indeed, Frenesi’s current partner and fellow snitch Flash exhibits a form of paranoid agency panic induced by the widespread use of computers in Federal bureaucracy. He uses this as a blanket excuse for complicity with the state, claiming that “Everybody’s a squealer. We’re in th’ Info Revolution here. Anytime you use a credit card you’re tellin’ the Man more than you meant to. Don’t matter if it’s big or small, he can use it all.”43 Flash, in other words, represents complicity in the form of snitching or squealing as an almost-inevitable feature of life in the neoliberal and technological state of 1980s America. However, Flash’s self-justifications do not provide a convincing explanation for the double-dealing among the protagonists in the 1960s, at a time when pervasive digitization had yet to occur and when there was still a strong countercultural current in the United States. The novel instead suggests that complicity is driven by deep-seated desires for alignment with larger forces, a point it makes by repeatedly drawing parallels between parties with opposing political views. For example, early in the novel, Zoyd recalls the similarities between “beer riders” (i.e., drunk drivers) and surfers, and how “members of both subcultures, whether up on a board or behind a 409, shared the terrors and ecstasies of the passive, taken rider, as if a car engine held encapsulated something likewise oceanic and mighty.”44 Such parallels are revisited in more political terms when Frenesi reflects on Brock’s attempts to create his Political Re-Education Program, essentially a vastly expanded network of snitches. She concludes that Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep—if only he’d allowed himself to feel

156

Chapter 5

it, the sometimes touching—need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family.45

There are echoes here, then, of the way that Kundera closes the circle between totalitarianism and progressive politics through the trope of the Grand March, although in the case of Vineland, the betrayals on the left involve an active and painful change of alignments from the counterculture to their authoritarian enemies. This evocation of universal traits across the spectrum of political and social identities de-emphasizes individual agency. This sense is further strengthened by Frenesi’s use of a natural metaphor to describe how she came to abandon the counterculture and to align herself with Brock, recalling that “time was rushing all around her, these were rapids, and as far ahead as she could see it looked like Brock’s stretch of the river, another stage, like sex, children, surgery, further into adulthood perilous and real.”46 In Pynchon’s model, then, agency seems to be exercised almost fatalistically once a character has adopted a particular disposition, and the movement toward those dispositions is represented overwhelmingly as the result of the desire for belonging— although this is often manifest in sexual desire. Perhaps this should not be as surprising as it seems: as Rachel Greenwald Smith notes, liberalism sells self-realization as a goal that is attained through individual agency, but she also notes that self-realization “exists within a range of preliberal and antiliberal political and religious practices, many of which see the self as most thoroughly actualized through submission to extreme forms of ritual and constraint.”47 Frenesi rationalizes her sexual submission to Brock in terms that closely mirror Greenwald Smith’s framework, as shown when we are told that “she understood her own particular servitude as the freedom, granted to a few, to act outside warrants and charters, to ignore history and the dead, to imagine no future.”48 There is, then, a double irony to Frenesi’s actions: without realizing it, she has bought into the neoliberal meta-narrative of self-realization, but she seeks this goal through behavior that is neither left-liberal nor neoliberal, but which involves her unquestioning alignment with a figure of authority. The Camera as Weapon By representing such complicit alignments as the result of basic and universal drives, the novel, to an extent, de-politicizes the repression of the counterculture in the late 1960s. This move risks denuding the brutal details quoted at the beginning of this section of much of their power. However, the fact remains that these events are witnessed directly by Frenesi, DL, and others. These are not, then, the rumored, shadowy, or fantastic hints of conspiracy

Paranoid Conspiracy

157

glimpsed in V, The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow, but are hard evidence of the neoliberal repression. In the representation of these events, and in the representation of the way that the characters bear witness to them, Vineland re-inserts a form of political critique into the novel. Vineland begins with Frenesi’s ex-husband, Zoyd Wheeler, jumping through the window of a bar named The Cucumber Lounge in order to continue receiving his annual mental disability check. This is the price for Zoyd’s complicity, his window jump, and the money that follows allowing him to live unmolested by the authorities on the understanding that he will reciprocate by causing no trouble for them. This opening scene also alerts us to the prevalence of the moving image in 1980s America, with an early reference to The Return of the Jedi having been filmed in the area, before Zoyd arrives at his chosen location for the window jump to find TV crews at the ready. It does not take long for Zoyd to become aware of how the footage of his jump is subject to manipulation, and when he watches a replay at home on the Tube (as it is almost universally referred to in the novel), he realizes that sound effects have been dubbed in and sees that “the videotape was being repeated in slow motion, the million crystal trajectories smooth as fountain-drops, Zoyd in midair with time to rotate into a number of positions he didn’t remember being in, many of which, freeze-framed, could have won photo awards someplace.”49 While this opening may lead us to believe that we are in the zany territory familiar from earlier Pynchon novels, the scene in fact sets up an extended examination of the nature of witnessing and its relationship with complicity. This critical aspect of the novel emerges in Zoyd’s recollection of his and Frenesi’s wedding: It would be easy to remember the day as a soft-focus shot, the kind to be seen on “sensitivity” greeting cards in another few years. Everything in nature, every living being on the hillside that day, strange as it sounded later whenever Zoyd tried to tell about it, was gentle, at peace—the visible world was a sunlit sheep farm. War in Vietnam, murder as an instrument of American politics, black neighborhoods torched to ashes and death, all must have been off on some other planet.50

Freer argues of this passage that “in depicting the unconflicted coming together of wedding guests, Hell’s Angels, acidheads, and even the local authorities . . . the passage asserts that the utopian dream was attained,” but she also argues that the details of “harsh realities” at the end of the passage prevent Zoyd’s nostalgia from being “naïve, free-floating, or escapist idealism.”51 I agree that this description does not represent a form of escapism, but I suggest that, in contrasting the apparent idyll of the “visible world” with brutality elsewhere, Zoyd partially acknowledges his own culpable ignorance.

158

Chapter 5

Yet this suggestion of culpable ignorance is surprising given that the film collective 24fps was created precisely to bear witness to injustice, and it is through the actions of the group that the novel conducts its most critical examination of failures of countercultural witnessing. As Jeeshan Gazi notes, the collective’s members “aspire to the ideals of the direct cinema movement” of the early 1960s,52 and DL’s memory of the collective is that “they went looking for trouble, they found it, they filmed it, and then quickly got the record of their witness someplace safe.”53 In other words, their intention is an ethical form of witnessing, but their methods can be contrasted with Laub’s model in in two ways. Firstly, by inserting themselves into risky situations, theirs is a much more interventionist model of witnessing. Secondly, it is one that seeks to bear witness to the event as it happens, rather than after the fact. For these reasons, 24fps seem to pursue a much more active, and potentially anti-complicit, form of witnessing than a retrospective recording of testimony. What is revealed, however, is that this active form of witnessing leads the collective into a position of unwitting complicity with neoliberalism, and this sows the seeds of its eventual collapse. DL expands on 24fps’s methods, recalling that “they particularly believed in the ability of close-ups to reveal and devastate.”54 In other words, this seems to be a primarily visual form of witnessing, with the affect revealed by close-ups replacing narrative testimony as a means of access to the truth. Without fully realizing it, the members of 24fps ascribe to what Greenwald Smith calls the “affective hypothesis,” that is, the notion that literature (and, by extension I would suggest any other form of representation) “is at its most meaningful when it represents and transmits the emotional specificity of personal experience.”55 She elaborates that, within a neoliberal system, “feelings frequently become yet another material foundation for market-oriented behavior: emotions are acquired, invested, traded, and speculated upon.”56 24fps can be seen pursuing affect in this way, as shown by DL’s assertion that “when power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face.”57 Yet in chasing the “money shot” of the facial close-up, the actions of 24fps are much more closely aligned with the neoliberal project than they would imagine. The irony of DL asking of 24fps’s direct methods, “who could withstand the light?” is that, as a result of their form of witnessing, the collective begins to turns on itself. Their emphasis on visuality means that witnessing is stripped of the ethical and interpretative anchor of narrative testimony, and affect begins to replace rather than to reveal the truth. In the novel’s central scene, Frenesi attempts persuade others involved with PR3 to turn against its de facto (and accidental) leader, Weed Atman. The camera first bears witness to the characters’ betrayal of each other, and captures the moment of Weed’s collapse, when “what he was slowly understanding spread to his

Paranoid Conspiracy

159

body, a long, stunned cringe, a loss of spirit that could almost be seen on the film.”58 Here, affect is being recorded not as an act of witnessing intended to influence political discourse beyond the collective, but the camera is instead being used as a weapon in itself, to send the message to Weed that the other members of the collective have passed their judgment on him. In other words, rather than objective witnessing enabling understanding of an event (as Laub envisages), the members of 24fps have already made their judgment, and use the framework of witnessing to impose their punishment. In addition to this affective drive, there is also a reflexivity to the scene in the way that Frenesi recognizes how “Ditzah took the close-ups while Howie kept further back, framing the three of them” even amid the chaos.59 Again, we might contrast this scene with Laub’s model, and in particular with his notion of bearing witness to the process of witnessing itself. In this case, reflexivity does not produce a more ethical or rigorous form of witnessing, or indeed any realization of how the act of witnessing has become distorted. Such reflections are instead left to Prairie who, a generation later, recognizes the way that witnessing employed by 24fps lacked any real ethical foundation when she watches the footage of Weed’s murder at the hands of Rex, another member of the collective. The shot ends in “a close-up of one of Rex’s eyeballs, with the light [Frenesi] was holding reflected on it round and bright, and in the back scatter—if Prairie only looked closely enough she would have to see her—Frenesi herself, dark on dark, face in wide-angle distortion, with an expression that might, Prairie admitted, prove unbearable.”60 The act of witnessing is simply deferred to Frenesi’s daughter, and achieves little other than transmitting the pain of the mutual betrayals in 24fps on to the next generation. The story of 24fps therefore shows how they are creating and trading in an economy of emotions, participating in and complicit with a circulation of neoliberal values that they thought they were opposing. The fate suffered by 24fps is suggestive of the forces that might impel those who would otherwise resist conservative repression to become complicit with it. In this way, Vineland speaks to a historical reality that has unfolded during Pynchon’s career. Schaub elaborates on how Pynchon’s fiction has evolved from the 1960s onward, arguing that “both Vineland and Inherent Vice contain abundant fantasy—but it is just fantasy, lacking the subversive implications it has for Oedipa and the reader in Lot 49.”61 I agree that the fantastic elements of Vineland are less subversive in terms of creating the kind of ontological uncertainty that we see in The Crying of Lot 49, but would add that, in Vineland, the fantastic (present, for example, in episodes such as DL’s mastery of the ninja Vibrating Palm technique) serves to bring the real into sharper relief. While the fantastic has featured heavily in other of Pynchon’s post-Vineland novels (such as Against the Day), the real reasserts forcefully into Pynchon’s most recent novel, Bleeding Edge. It does so

160

Chapter 5

through the impact of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, and this intrusion precipitates a further stage in the relationship between conspiracy and complicity in Pynchon’s work. NETWORKS OF COMPLICITY: BLEEDING EDGE Early in Bleeding Edge, the protagonist Maxine Tarnow describes Times Square, following Rudolph Giuliani’s clean-up, as having produced “some stupefied consensus about what life is to be . . . multiplexes and malls and big-box stores it only makes sense to shop at if you have a car and a driveway and a garage next to a house out in the burbs.”62 This indictment indicates that the conservative repression of leftist counterculture described in Vineland has continued into the early 2000s. Moreover, this repression seems to have straightjacketed the population into conforming to a particular mode of life that supports that system. The birth of the internet does at least appear to offer one possibility of resistance, but the novel suggests that this new technology also impels individuals into new forms of complicity. Specifically, in this section, I argue that, by vastly expanding networks of communication, the internet has also expanded the potential for complicity. The relationship between conspiracy and complicity becomes more politically charged and more troubling than in Pynchon’s previous novels due to the pervasive nature of the internet, which itself is represented as a further extension of the neoliberal project, and as one that infiltrates the lives of citizens to the extent that they find themselves participating in this very extension. Hacker Ethic or Neoliberal Terror? Maxine’s investigations put her on the trail of the youthful but malign internet entrepreneur Gabriel Ice and the neoliberal hitman Nicholas Windust, as well as Justin McElmo and his partner Lucas, who fit the now-familiar narrative of computer geeks riding the wave of the dotcom boom. These pairs of characters represent the opposing possibilities offered by the internet, with Lucas and Justin extolling the democratic potential of the new technology and Windust and Ice embodying its more sinister side. The extremity of the discrepancy between these positions is recognized by Maxine’s friend, the radical blogger March Kelleher, who states: I haven’t seen anything like it since the sixties. These kids are out to change the world. “Information has to be free”—they really mean it. At the same time,

Paranoid Conspiracy

161

here’s all these greedy fuckin dotcommers make real estate developers look like Bambi and Thumper.63

The subversiveness and promise of the early internet is suggested by Lucas’s first meeting with Maxine: he arrives late, having been unable to locate his drug dealer, and wears a t-shirt bearing the slogan “UTSL” (“Use the Source, Luke”).64 He and Justin have developed a piece of software called DeepArcher, which acts as a kind of anonymous enclave of the internet in which no trace of a user’s identity is left. As they explain, it works with the user “dowsing for transparent links, each measuring one pixel by one, each link vanishing and relocating as soon as it’s clicked on . . . an invisible selfrecoding pathway, no chance of retracing it.”65 Moreover, Justin suggests that DeepArcher is the manifestation of an explicit ideological position: “The visuals you think you’re seeing are being contributed by users all over the world. All for free. Hacker ethic. Each one doing their piece of it, then vanishing uncredited.”66 The parallels between DeepArcher and the Tristero are striking in that both offer an alternative form of communication for those who wish to remain outside the dominant network of communication and capital. As Lucas and Justin explain it, DeepArcher and the hacker ethic in general are a more extreme form of resistance than the W.A.S.T.E. system in that they actively involve their users in the construction of these networks. The internet, at least as represented by DeepArcher, is a manifestation of a democratic form of communication wherein power is placed in the hands of its users and hence relocated away from the usual nodes of the neoliberal conspiracy. Yet the very effort required to achieve this degree of anonymity implies the existence of another extreme, namely the internet’s potential to provide a complete record of every communication and transaction conducted through it, and to do so at the bidding of governments, corporations, or less well-defined bodies. This potential is represented in the novel by the “Promis” software use by Mossad, and which Maxine learns can secretly harvest information without users knowing that it is even present in a piece of hardware. Moreover, as Maxine’s investigations take her deeper into the world of cyberspace, the idealism exhibited by Lucas and Justin increasingly appears to on the verge of being overwhelmed by neoliberal encroachment into this new form of communication. This encroachment is represented as the continuation of nefarious neoliberal tactics designed to perpetuate the hegemony of this system at all costs. Such maneuvers are personified by Windust who, we learn, was a protagonist in the United States’s dirty wars in Latin America during the Reagan presidency, and is now apparently involved in the conspiracies centering on the internet. It is he who tells Maxine about the Promis software, although the precise nature of his current role, as Maxine notes, is

162

Chapter 5

unclear: “Windust does not after all seem to be FBI. Something worse, if possible. If there is a brother- or God forbid sisterhood of neoliberal terrorists, Windust has been there from the jump.”67 Gabriel Ice also represents governmental involvement in the corruption of the internet. March tells Maxine that Hashslingrz, Ice’s company, “is as tight as it gets with the U.S. security apparatus . . . crypto work, countermeasures, heaven knows what-all” and proceeds to describe Ice’s involvement with the rumored Montauk Project, which is “the terminal truth about the U.S. government, worse than anything you can imagine . . . every horrible suspicion you’ve ever had since World War II.”68 Although the Montauk Project is initially presented as a rumor or urban legend, Maxine succeeds in finding Ice’s house on Long Island, and in locating a secret door that takes her into an underground corridor that she describes as “a confidential space, unaccounted for, resisting analysis.”69 She does not progress far before she is confronted by “something alive yet too small to be a security person . . . something in a child-size fatigue uniform, approaching her now with wary and lethal grace, rising as if on wings, its eyes too visible in the gloom, too pale, almost white”70 and turns back. In Pynchon’s other novels, the neoliberal conspiracy generally hovers out of sight, always just receding from view, but here Maxine actually comes face-to-face with its sinister gatekeeper. The novel thus suggests that the internet has the potential both to open up new and democratic forms of communication, or to be used as a tool of oppression and for the obfuscation of governmental and extra-governmental conspiracy. Beck talks about the open secret of the military-industrial complex being hidden in plain sight in the landscape of America’s west, but in Bleeding Edge, the way that the internet to brings information to the surface makes this secret more open still. Huehls refers to this as the “great flattening,” arguing that the “the vertical structure of Pynchon’s earlier conspiracies—generally organized around the distinction between surface and depth, overt and covert, zero and one—has been flattened.”71 Indeed, the sense that the internet now means that dirty wars are being waged in plain sight is made explicit when the freelancer Driscoll Padgett tells Maxine that “every day civilians walk around, no clue, even when it’s filling up screens right next to them at Starbucks, cyberspace warfare without mercy, 24/7, hacker on hacker, DOS attacks, Trojan horses, viruses, worms.”72 These dirty wars, then, are no longer situated at a spatial remove, but are present in and pervade everyday life as it is shaped and driven by the internet. It is through this sense of pervasiveness that Bleeding Edge revises Pynchon’s take on the relationship between conspiracy and complicity: in The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa is afforded brief glimpses into workings that take place behind the screen of Californian prosperity. In Bleeding Edge, however, the participatory nature of the internet—the very ethic celebrated by Lucas and Justin—also holds the

Paranoid Conspiracy

163

potential for a form of complicity that it dispersed among the population, who become a global network of participant “netizens” and whose activity feeds into and constructs, with varying degrees of awareness and reflexivity, a network that implicates them ever more insidiously in the neoliberal conspiracy. “Mardi Gras for Paranoids” In Bleeding Edge, the relationship between narrative and conspiracy evolves due to the way that the internet enables more individuals than ever to create and contribute their own views to a global conversation. Paradoxically, this broadening of access to information neither produces the democratic form of discourse that might be expected, and nor does this heightened level of participation lead us closer to the truth. The nature of the relationship between citizen-participants and the neoliberal conspiracy is thrown into sharp relief with the occurrence of the 9/11 attacks late in the novel. Specifically, it shows how the internet allows narrative to proliferate from the ground up, but rather than producing a kind of democratic challenge to the (dubious) narratives produced by those in positions of power, these instead muddy the waters and in fact only serve to obfuscate the workings of the neoliberal conspiracy. Even before the 9/11 attacks, Maxine’s friend Heidi, an academic who attends Comic-Con and publishes in the Journal of Memespace Cartography, discusses the nature of conspiracy theory when Maxine first mentions the Montauk Project. Heidi states: Urban myths can be attractors, they pick up little fragments of strangeness from everywhere, after a while nobody can look at the whole thing and believe it all, it’s too unstructured. But somehow we’ll still cherry-pick for the intriguing pieces, God forbid we’ll be taken in of course, we’re too hip for that, and yet there’s no final proof that some of it isn’t true. Pros and cons, it all degenerates into arguments on the Internet, flaming, trolling, threads that only lead deeper into the labyrinth.73

This reference to a lack of “final proof” might seem at first sight to reassert the postmodern position that history is both accessed through and constructed by textual means, with the internet acting as the perfect driver for the proliferation of such texts in the form of conspiracy theories. However, as Peter Boxall argues in Twenty-First Century Fiction (also published in 2013), in recent fiction, “there has emerged a new commitment to the materiality of history, a fresh awareness of the reality of the past, and of our ethical obligation to bear witness to it.”74 In Bleeding Edge, the 9/11 attacks stand as an exemplar of this materiality. An early review in The New

164

Chapter 5

York Times stated that “the only reason Bleeding Edge couldn’t have been published in 1973 is that the Internet, the Giuliani/Disney version of Times Square and the war on terror hadn’t come along yet,”75 but I suggest that the historical moment does in fact create its own particular mood, and we cannot imagine the protagonists of this novel asking, like Oedipa, if they should “project a world” in the face of such a brutally irrefutable event. Yet if the attacks shatter the smugness of the postmodern “world-asnarrative” view, the novel also critiques the retrenchment that takes place in political discourse as a result. Heidi describes the prevailing sentiment as being that “somehow irony, as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious—weakening its grip on ‘reality’” and complains that “everything has to be literal now.”76 Pynchon in fact shows that any retreat into a purely objective, material world is impossible (and here he again strikes a similar note to Boxall, who argues that fiction has not simply retreated into “post-theoretical reassertion of history as truth”)77 because, while the material effects of the 9/11 attacks are undeniable, the motivation behind them and the question of guilt remains subject to intense debate. These speculations, and their relative power as claims to truth, occupy much of the latter part of the novel, and for this reason, Bleeding Edge can be seen as attempting to balance the presence of objective, material truth with the postmodern view that all knowledge of the past is necessarily mediated and is therefore subject to doubt. Don DeLillo wrote shortly after the attacks that “the writer begins in the towers, trying to imagine the moment, desperately. Before politics, before history and religion, there is the primal terror.” He thus identified the writer’s role as affective, and when he proceeds to claim that such affective descriptions are “part of the counternarrative,”78 he implies, firstly, that the official narrative should be challenged, and, secondly, that the affect of which he writes can be turned to political ends. The affect that DeLillo evokes is born from rupture, but as Arin Keeble points out, many other 9/11 novels explore the other end of the affective spectrum by representing a sense of continuity.79 Bleeding Edge in fact sits somewhere between these two poles, with the attacks themselves initially described only in minimal terms, and almost in passing: Maxine simply hears from a shopkeeper that “a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center,”80 and while her concern for her loved ones is shown in the hours immediately following the attacks, there is no attempt to recreate affectively the “primal terror” of the attacks themselves. The closest Maxine comes to engaging in an affective form of witnessing is when she visits Ground Zero near the end of the novel, where she notes that people “gather in silent witness.” However, the question of what exactly they hope to bear witness to remains unresolved, at least in Maxine’s commentary. She states:

Paranoid Conspiracy

165

There’s something waiting out there, latent, maybe it’s geometric, maybe begging like geometry to be contradicted in some equally terrible way, maybe a sacred city all in pixels waiting to be reassembled, as if disasters could be run in reverse, the towers rise out of the black ruin, the bits and pieces and lives, no matter how finely vaporized, become whole again.81

The image of the towers somehow being “reassembled” is, of course, an impossible fantasy. Yet Maxine suggests that this might be achieved in “pixels,” as if the virtual could replace the real. Indeed, while the physical reconstruction of the towers remains out of reach, it is precisely the reconstruction of the event itself through textual means for which the characters strive in the later sections of the novel. Witnessing is not, therefore, immediate, firsthand, or even affectively powerful. Instead, it takes place belatedly, and generally through highly mediated forms of information. In short, rather than attempting to represent the event itself (as envisaged by DeLillo), the narrative instead focuses on a process of witnessing through narrative reconstruction that attends to the “how,” the “why,” and most importantly, the “who” of the attacks. Those who contribute to this reconstruction are all experts in their various fields of expertise: Heidi offers her insights into the nature of conspiracy and urban myth; March presents extensively researched counternarratives to the official, government version of events; and Windust has the inside line on the inner workings of the neoliberal conspiracy. Yet none of these is able to stand alone as an authoritative source of knowledge, and Maxine is unable to sift through this combination of voices to identify nuggets of truth—a difficulty that mirrors the wider situation, in which the internet has “erupted into a Mardi Gras for paranoids and trolls, a pandemonium of commentary there may not be time in the projected age of the universe to read all the way through.”82 The uncertain status of knowledge is most clearly shown through unverifiable rumors surrounding the attacks. Diane E. Goldstein notes that urban legends and other narratives based on unofficial sources tend to circulate at times of crisis, and in particular when official sources of knowledge are perceived to be inadequate or unreliable.83 This seems to explain the situation in Bleeding Edge, where every piece of evidence is capable of generating multiple and often conflicting interpretations. Heidi herself expresses such skepticism when, after the attacks, she finds a dollar bill scrawled with messages implicating the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the conspiracy. As a result of this prompt, she argues that “no matter how the official narrative of this turns out, these are the places we should be looking, not in newspapers or television but at the margins, graffiti, uncontrolled utterances, and dreamers who sleep in public and scream in their sleep.”84 In this assertion, Heidi implies that a counternarrative can puncture official lies, but the novel shows

166

Chapter 5

that even drawing a clear distinction between official and counternarratives to be impossible—and in fact to be part of the problem of ascertaining truth in the age of the internet. The troubled relationship between narrative and truth is particularly evident in suggestions that certain parties possessed foreknowledge of the attacks. Some days before September 11th, Maxine is anonymously sent video footage that appears to show a group of men on a New York rooftop with a Stinger missile launcher, apparently training to shoot at an incoming airplane. March speculates that the video may show “somebody who wants to nail Bush’s ass, assuming ‘Bush’ and ‘ass’ is a distinction you make? Or maybe it’s one of Bush’s people playing the victim card, trying to nail somebody who wants to nail Bush.”85 In other words, even before the crisis of knowledge precipitated by the attacks, a single piece of footage can generate two opposing interpretations, both tenuous, but both also potentially valid. The second suggestion of foreknowledge, which itself is linked to another possible theory regarding the perpetration of the attacks, comes when Maxine and her husband Horst take a taxi back from a party hosted by Ice two days before the attacks. The driver, “Mohammed somebody” according to his ID, is listening to what Maxine initially takes to be phone-in show, but which she then realizes may something more sinister. She describes it as “like hearing a party from another room, though Maxine notices there’s no music, no laughing. High emotion all right, but closer to tears or anger.” And when the driver turns toward her, she recalls that “what she sees there will keep her from getting to sleep right away. Or that’s how she’ll remember it.”86 Through these two suggestions of foreknowledge, then, the novel posits the two opposing possibilities with regard to the 9/11 attacks, namely either that it was perpetrated by Islamist terrorists (perhaps with the connivance of Muslims living in the United States) or that it was an inside job by the U.S. government. The point that the novel makes, though, is not that one or the other of these possibilities is the truth, but that the proliferation of information has created a situation in which all knowledge is devalued. When Heidi speaks of looking “at the margins” for the truth, as if some sort of twentyfirst-century Tristero might somehow possess unmediated access to the facts of the attacks, she is, despite her academic credentials, naïve with regard to the way that information of any sort can be manipulated. This foregrounding of the manipulation of information is not a retreat into the postmodern worldas-text position because, as noted earlier, the attacks themselves assert an undeniable, physical reality; and the evidence of foreknowledge that Maxine encounters, in the form of the Stinger video and the taxi driver’s radio, have more weight to them than mere rumors. Instead, the novel suggests that the idea of the world as textual projection may have been a luxury bought by American dirty money, and that the intrusion of a physical reality into a city

Paranoid Conspiracy

167

previously obsessed with the virtual and textual suggests that U.S. hegemony is beginning to waver. The characters, however, are unable to find their way back out of the textual labyrinth that they have created in order to identify the nature of reality that now asserts itself. Indeed, the process of trying to escape through the construction of new truth-seeking narratives only causes the labyrinth to grow ever more complex. The 9/11 attacks themselves, and the governmental and extra-governmental organizations associated with them, are shown to possess power way beyond the means of the likes of Maxine, March, and Heidi to challenge. In other words, these characters seem to be subject to larger historical forces rather than complicit with them. The novel also suggests, though, that participation in the circulation of discourse is itself a form of complicity with the devaluation of truth. This argument is made thought the fate of DeepArcher, which initially has the potential to act as a kind of updated W.A.S.T.E. system, but which by the end of the novel has been infiltrated by the usual corporate interests. Maxine’s father Ernie suggests that this fate is unexceptional, and that the internet was this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there’s no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible.87

In identifying how the internet was always in thrall to corporate and governmental interests, Ernie punctures the idealism of the “hacker ethic” described by Lucas, and for the same reason, March is more convincing than Heidi when she argues that a “vacuum of accountability” has opened following the attacks. In contrast to the days of “hippie simplicity,” in which “the CIA” could comfortably be blamed, there now exists “a new enemy, unnameable, locatable on no organization chart or budget line.”88 March thus recognizes how the internet has dispersed the sites of conspiracy, but in continuing to evoke the shadowy neoliberal “enemy,” she fails to recognize the larger point that the novel makes, which is that the general population is complicit in the neoliberal conspiracy, firstly, by participating in it through widespread use of a corporatized internet, and, secondly, by contributing to the devaluation of truth that the internet has engendered. The novel ends with a focus on the domestic as Maxine reestablishes her relationship with Horst. However, Keeble notes that, in contrast to other 9/11 narratives that focus on the restoration of domestic stability, “Maxine feels ‘discombobulated,’ and this is explicitly tied to feelings of complicity with the forces of neo-liberalism that the novel’s network of conspiring reveals.”89 This sense of unease is present because the lifestyle that they readopt cannot

168

Chapter 5

be separated from “the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes,” the domestic details that, as Ernie recognizes, the internet now pervades. In his anti-internet rant, Ernie states that “they get us, all right, we’re all lonely, needy, disrespected, desperate to believe in any sorry imitation of belonging they want to sell us.”90 In doing so, he identifies that way that the internet has insidiously impelled individuals to become participants in the neoliberal conspiracy. The warning contained in Bleeding Edge is that the “flattening” of information enabled and performed by this new technology, which appears to be egalitarian and democratic, with participant-citizens bringing the hidden out into the open, paradoxically fails to perform an “unveiling” of the truth of the neoliberal conspiracy. The verticality that appeared to be inherently and structurally connected to an undesirable hierarchy is removed when all information rises to the surface; but also lost are the reference points by which information can be evaluated. Moreover, when everyone is a participant in this process of flattening, and when the need to state one’s own truth is more important than the concept of truth itself, the narratives produced by the general population become complicit in the devaluation of truth. It is this devaluation that allows the neoliberal conspiracy to continue, more visible than ever, but also ever more elusive a target. While the three novels examined in this chapter are situated in America, other of Pynchon’s works—notably V, Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day—are much broader in geographical scope and hence suggest that the neoliberal conspiracy exists across the planet, even if the United States is the principal nexus. Late in the novel, however, Maxine’s therapist Shawn argues that what the attacks have actually shown is that “we”—Americans, but also those in the developed world—have been “living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs . . . planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering.”91 Shawn’s reference to “a yard in the burbs” recalls Maxine’s complaint, quoted at the beginning of this section, about Giuliani’s clean-up of Times Square. For Maxine, the suburbs are a signifier of a particular way of living, one that accords with consumerist norms in the twenty-first century. However, her focus remains local, and it is not until Shawn reframes the suburbs in a larger, global context that the real cost of the American lifestyle is suggested: to be a participant in the neoliberal order is to be what Rothberg terms a “beneficiary” or “perpetuator” of a harmful mode of existence that perpetuates destructive inequalities.92 In doing so, material reality in the form of the environment, and the people “starving somewhere else all jammed together,” enters the picture. Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novels

Paranoid Conspiracy

169

also examine the costs of neoliberal hegemony on a global scale, addressing individual and social culpability in the degradation of the environment in the age of the Anthropocene, and this form of complicity is the subject of this volume’s final chapter. NOTES 1. Weisenburger, “Rainbow,” 46. Katie Muth goes so far as to argue that this period influenced the form of Pynchon’s writing and that, in his fiction, “Pynchon turns the grammar of systems integration in on itself, redeploying the deadpan prose of the company man to critique twentieth-century genocide and impending total war.” Muth, “Boeing,” 478. 2. Huehls, “Flattening,” 864. 3. Lepora and Goodin, Compromise, 37. 4. I do so while acknowledging that the term “neoliberalism” is problematically broad, and remains contested. See Huehls and Greenwald Smith, “Four Phases,” 1; Kennedy and Shapiro, “Introduction,” 1; and Deckard and Shapiro, “World-Culture,” 2 for contrasting histories and definitions of neoliberalism. 5. Dussere, “Flirters,” 576. 6. Beck, Wars, 21. 7. Beck, Wars, 6; 23. 8. Melley, Empire, Introduction. 9. Melley, Empire, Introduction. 10. Schaub, “California,” 30. 11. Pynchon, Lot 49, 101. 12. Pynchon, Lot 49, 2. 13. Pynchon, Lot 49, 1–2. 14. Pynchon, Lot 49, 14. 15. Pynchon, Lot 49, 15. 16. Pynchon, Lot 49, 11. 17. Kaltsas, “Maidens,” 47–48. 18. Pynchon, Lot 49, 64. 19. Pynchon, Lot 49, 101. 20. Pynchon, Lot 49, 82–83. 21. Freer, Counterculture, 42. 22. Pynchon, Lot 49, 4. 23. Pynchon, Lot 49, 15. 24. Pynchon, Lot 49, 55. 25. Pynchon, Lot 49, 143. 26. Hutcheon, Politics, 2. 27. Huehls, Critique, xi. 28. Huehls and Greenwald Smith, “Four Phases,” 6. This model has been contested, notably by Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro, who define the period from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s as a “hinge” phase between two major periods, and

170

Chapter 5

which “can be essentially characterized as the great unwiring of the advances and conditions that the American working class secured during the New Deal and postwar military Keynesianism” (Kennedy and Shapiro, “Introduction,” 6–7, 12.) 29. Dalsgaard, Herman and McHale, “Introduction,” 4. 30. Freer, Counterculture, 163. 31. Pynchon, Lot 49, 20. 32. Melley, Empire, Chapter 1. 33. Elias, “History,” 126. 34. Pynchon, Lot 49, 64. Emphasis in original. 35. Pynchon, Lot 49, 147. 36. Schaub, “California,” 32. 37. Cowart, Passages, 13. 38. Pynchon, Vineland, 372. 39. Pynchon, Vineland, 199. 40. Pynchon, Vineland, 248. 41. Pynchon, Vineland, 77. 42. Pynchon, Vineland, 101. 43. Pynchon, Vineland, 74. 44. Pynchon, Vineland, 37. 45. Pynchon, Vineland, 269. 46. Pynchon, Vineland, 216. 47. Smith, Affect, 80. 48. Pynchon, Vineland, 72–73. 49. Pynchon, Vineland, 15. 50. Pynchon, Vineland, 38. 51. Freer, Counterculture, 157–58. 52. Gazi, “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” 52. 53. Pynchon, Vineland, 195. 54. Pynchon, Vineland, 195. 55. Greenwald Smith, Affect, 1. 56. Greenwald Smith, Affect, 6. 57. Pynchon, Vineland, 195. 58. Pynchon, Vineland, 245–46. 59. Pynchon, Vineland, 246. 60. Pynchon, Vineland, 247. 61. Schaub, “California,” 40–41. 62. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 51. 63. Pynchon, Vineland, 116. 64. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 69. 65. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 79. 66. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 69. 67. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 108. 68. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 117. 69. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 193. 70. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 194.

Paranoid Conspiracy

71. Huehls, “Flattening,” 864. 72. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 47. 73. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 197. 74. Boxall, Twenty-First-Century, 12. 75. Lethem, “Pynchonopolis.” 76. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 335. 77. Boxall, Twenty-First-Century, 42. 78. DeLillo, “Ruins.” 79. Keeble, 9/11 Novel, Introduction. 80. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 316. 81. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 446. 82. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 388–89. 83. Goldstein, “Silence,” 236, 244. 84. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 322. 85. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 268. 86. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 312–13. 87. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 420. 88. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 399. 89. Keeble, “Bleeding Edge,” 14. 90. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 432. 91. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 340. 92. Rothberg, Implicated Subject, 13.

171

Chapter 6

Compromised Narratives Margaret Atwood’s Dystopias

This chapter examines Margaret Atwood’s dystopias in her novels set in Gilead, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, and in the MaddAddam trilogy (consisting of Oryx and Crake, 2003, The Year of the Flood, 2009, and MaddAddam, 2013), which is set in a North America devastated by environmental degradation, itself the result of unchecked neoliberalism. Coral Ann Howells identifies a key distinction between the two worlds, noting that the former, defined by its fundamentalist oppression of women, “is entirely social and political in its agenda,” while the latter “projects a world defamiliarized not through military or state power but through the abuse of scientific knowledge.”1 However, there is significant overlap between the social and the material spheres in both cases. The environmental disaster described in the MaddAddam trilogy is the result of a society in which disavowing material consumption is difficult when all aspects of human life have come to be monetized and valued in economic terms. By contrast, social and political oppression in Gilead has its roots in a rapidly falling birth rate, itself caused by environmental damage, so disavowing the political order is far from straightforward when its ideology rests on the material value of the female body as a childbearing vessel. The difficulty of negotiating the overlaps between these spheres makes avoiding complicity almost impossible for the characters in these worlds. Indeed, a notable point of difference between Atwood’s scenarios and those presented in other twentieth-century dystopian novels is the paucity of the ideological challenges to the oppressive systems that serve as the framework for these stories. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan note that, in the structure of classic dystopian fiction, resistance to the regime often begins with the discovery of a counternarrative that contradicts the regime’s master narrative,2 and for this reason prohibition on reading features in Brave New 173

174

Chapter 6

World (1932), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Fahrenheit 451 (1953). By contrast, however, Atwood’s dystopias lack a coherent counternarrative, and even in the Gilead novels, where a resistance movement is shown to exist, no alternative ideology emerges from within the regime. For this reason, one of the defining characteristics of Atwood’s dystopias is the fact that they explore the possibilities for compromise in situations where there is an absence of non-complicit options. Lepora and Goodin note that the notion of compromise has both intra- and interpersonal aspects, and that “the former is a matter of ‘being compromised’” while the latter “is a matter of ‘compromising with.’”3 The former holds negative connotations, while the latter is generally (but not necessarily) seen as positive. In this chapter, I argue that Atwood seeks to identify, through the notion of compromise, positive and constructive modes of action in situations where avoidance of complicity with wrongdoing may simply not be possible. She does so in both dystopias by having her characters move from a state of being compromised toward actively finding forms of compromise with their situation. In Gilead, the characters seek to find some leverage from the limited sources of value they have available to them, whether these be material goods, their own bodies, or information. In the MaddAddam trilogy, the notion of compromise is elevated to an ontological principle, with new ways of being that might avoid the behaviors that produced environmental catastrophe figured through posthuman hybrids. None of these transitions are easy, or free of material or ethical costs, but Atwood nevertheless, and to a greater extent than the other authors discussed in this volume, explores potential forms of constructive behavior in conditions where complicity is unavoidable. DIRTY HANDS: THE HANDMAID’S TALE AND THE TESTAMENTS One of the defining features of Gilead is the system of “handmaids,” in which women who have fallen foul of retrospectively applied laws on divorce and abortion are compelled to act as the chattels of the high-ranking Commanders in the hope of giving birth. Through this situation, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments comment on complicity in two ways. Firstly, because the role of women is so constrained in Gilead, most of what limited agency they have available to them is exercised through language and communication. For this reason, and in contrast to my approach to most of the texts in this volume, I address formal and empathetic complicity first, arguing that because no single counternarrative unites those who would oppose the regime, language is not only a site of complicity but also of delicate negotiation and compromise with the values and inconsistencies of a new social and political order. Secondly,

Compromised Narratives

175

in terms of how the novels address complicity on a thematic level, the way that members of the oppressed population in Gilead leverage the very limited options available to them suggests that compromise is necessary for survival in a situation where complicity is unavoidable. These compromises generally take two forms. The first is accepting the state of being compromised, and Offred and Lydia both exemplify this type of behavior in their initial responses to the new political order, having little choice other than to submit to their reduced roles. However, the novels also show the characters learning to negotiate the political and social constraints to which they are subject by means of more productive compromises. These tend to be represented as growing out of simple forms of material exchange into more complex machinations that may not be outright forms of rebellion, and that may necessarily involve ongoing complicity with the regime, but that nevertheless begin to create dispositions in which the ideology of the ruling body is implicitly critiqued. The Flag of an Unknown Country Toward the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred attends a “Salvaging,” during which she watches the execution of a woman for an unspecified crime. She describes her participation in this event as follows: “I’ve leaned forward to touch the rope in front of me, in time with the others, both hands on it, sticky with tar in the hot sun, then placed my hand on my heart to show my unity with the Salvagers and my consent, and my complicity in the death of this woman.”4 Offred is an intelligent and reflective narrator, and in this description she identifies precisely how complicity functions as a central mechanism in the machinery of Gilead, with the oppressed parties—women in general, and the handmaids in particular—given license to participate in the perpetration of violence in certain carefully delineated and stage-managed situations. In the case of the Salvaging, the handmaids’ symbolic alignment with the regime, as enacted through the ritual, becomes active participation in the regime’s violence, when they later kick to death a man accused of rape. This episode recalls descriptions of Dionysian revels from the Greek tragedies during which, as Atwood notes in “Dire Cartographies,” the Maenads “were said to go into frenzies during which they dismembered people with their hands. (If everyone participates, no one individual is responsible.)”5 Similarly, Lydia also describes in The Testaments how, following the initial round-ups of educated women, she is presented with a clear choice between acting as part of a firing squad directed to execute other women who had chosen not to comply, or being killed herself. She states that “this was Commander Judd’s test: fail it, and your commitment to the one true way would be voided. Pass it, and blood was on your hands.”6 Rituals such as these thus act to disperse

176

Chapter 6

responsibility, and hence to universalize complicity, as a means of securing the compliance of the female population with the system that oppresses them. While Offred’s comments on the Salvaging address the complicity of the handmaids in the timespan of the novel, the fact remains that, at this point, Gilead is still a relatively new regime. As such, the transition from the normality of life in the U.S. pre-Gilead and Offred’s new situation has been rapid. In this volume, I have addressed the question of how individuals come to be complicit with wrongdoing by first adopting certain dispositions and then more definite alignments with particular groups or ideologies, and the backstory of Gilead’s creation describes precisely this process, detailing the stages by which the majority of the population becomes complicit with an oppressive regime. From the information provided by Offred and Aunt Lydia, Gilead’s formation represents a process of culpable ignorance sliding into acquiescence, which, in turn, becomes full complicity with the oppression of women. Language plays an important role in this process. Offred’s description of the wary exchanges with her neighbors in the first few days, at which point new regime had not yet revealed its nature, shows that language had nevertheless already begun to close down. She recalls that “we were careful to exchange nothing more than the ordinary greetings. Nobody wanted to be reported, for disloyalty.”7 Language continues to atrophy rapidly, and Moira describes how she was able to escape from the center in which the handmaids were held by being able to bluff her way past the guards because “already they’d stopped asking questions.”8 Soon reading is prohibited for all but the highest-ranking members of the regime. As noted earlier, prohibition on reading is a common trope in dystopian fiction, but in The Handmaid’s Tale, we are shown how this prohibition is partly enabled by self-censorship on the part of the general population: their anticipation of the coming repression begins to create silence even before that silence is enforced. Once the regime has established itself, and these prohibitions on communication are enforced, it might be expected that reading represents an act of rebellion. However, the act of reading actually possesses only equivocal value as a form of resistance. Howells argues that, in The Handmaid’s Tale, the use of female protagonist-narrator “reverses the structural relations between public and private worlds of the dystopia, allowing Atwood to reclaim a feminine space of personal emotions and individual identity.”9 This focus on the personal, however, limits the possibilities of broader communal action. Language is presented as having potential as a form of resistance when, in the early days of the regime, the handmaids discover graffiti in their detention center that Offred describes as “naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling,” and as being “like a flag waved from a hilltop in rebellion.”10 Yet language does not develop into any such rebellion, or even into a coherent counternarrative,

Compromised Narratives

177

largely because reading is carried out in private. For this reason, neither the graffiti in the detention center nor the other fragment of illicit writing that Offred finds written on the wall in her own room—“nolite te bastardes carborundorum” (approximately “don’t let the bastards grind you down”)11—acts as the glue capable of binding together a community of resistance. In fact, Offred is able to decipher the Latin only with the help of the Commander, and it transpires that the message never resulted in any interpersonal connection, the previous handmaid having hung herself in the wardrobe. When Offred and Moira do find a way of communicating verbally in the detention center, the latter repeatedly articulates her plans for escape, but Offred never seriously considers participating in these. Barbara Hill Rigney argues that “Offred idealizes Moira, who speaks the unspeakable that Offred is afraid even to think.”12 Rigney thus seems to imply that Offred has internalized the regime’s constraints on language to the extent that her capacity even for non-complicit thought is stifled, but I suggest that her passivity is less the product of her unwillingness to think than it is of her difficulty to mentally and verbally negotiate the extreme ambiguity of language, and indeed of all processes of signification, under the regime. The way the initial uncertainty around language following the coup persists even after the regime has strengthened its hold on power is shown by Offred’s continual struggles to negotiate a world of signs whose meaning is unclear to her, and wherein misinterpretation has potentially severe consequences. For example, early in the novel, Nick winks at her and although she does not respond, she mentally assesses the potential meanings of this gesture, which include flirtation, simple friendliness, or an attempt to initiate covert communication.13 Similarly, when the Commander pauses next to her in the corridor of his house as a precursor to their meetings, she again struggles to interpret this action, stating that “something has been shown to me, but what it is? Like the flag of an unknown country, seen for an instant above the curve of a hill.”14 It is only with Offred’s first contact with the Mayday resistance that an act of interpretation results in any sort of definitive meaning: when Ofglen asks her if she thinks God hears the prayers being read out by the automated “Soul Scrolls,” Offred recognizes the weight of her partner’s question, stating that “it’s treason . . . subversion, sedition, blasphemy, heresy, all rolled into one.”15 By opting for the risky answer, “no,” Offred and Ofglen finally achieve mutual recognition of a signifier of resistance. However, Offred plays little role in the resistance even after becoming aware of its existence. At first sight, by reusing the image of a flag waved from the hill, employed earlier to express her uncertainty with regard to the Commander’s intentions, it seems that Offred has reached a position of greater assurance with regard to her position. However, in terms of the chronology of the events that she describes, the more certain image of “a flag

178

Chapter 6

waved from a hilltop in rebellion” precedes that of a “flag of an unknown country.” As such, while Offred is able to retrospectively attribute rebellious symbolism onto the graffiti about Lydia, her actual progression between the two events is toward less, rather than more, certainty with regard to the value of language. It is largely for this reason that, even after she becomes aware of the resistance movement, she does little to actively align herself with it, and generally remains passive and reactionary in the face of events, responding to the actions and suggestions of the Commander and his wife, Serena Joy. One of the reasons that language possesses limited potential as a catalyst for rebellion in The Handmaid’s Tale is that the regime places such great pressure on individuals to conform that everyone is concerned to perform this role visibly. However, because this need for conformity has also invaded private spheres, the performance must be maintained at all times, and for this reason, the distinction between performance and reality becomes blurred. This ambiguity can be seen in Offred’s initial uncertainty toward Ofglen, who she regards as “a woman for whom every act is done for show, is acting rather than a real act,” but of whom she acknowledges this judgment may be mistaken (which, of course, it is) because “that is what I must look like to her, as well.”16 While it is necessary for those in precarious positions at the bottom of the Gilead food chain to maintain such pretenses, even those with greater degrees of power also seem to be performing: Offred describes how the Commander’s pose when she enters his study for the first time seems to be rehearsed, as he leans against the mantelpiece as if in a photoshoot from a “glossy men’s mag”;17 and when Lydia harangues the handmaids, the physical details of “the clasped hands . . . the breathy voice . . . the raised finger, wagging at us,”18 suggest that she is also acting in her role. So pervasive is this sense of performance that it removes any depth between surface act and underlying reality. In some cases, the performance of one’s alignment with the regime may be a necessary screen for rebellious behavior, but because the lack of privacy erodes the possibility of the performance of any other identity, acting in this way also becomes a form of complicity with repression. If Offred’s story in The Handmaid’s Tale provides only a claustrophobic view of Gilead, the three strands of narrative in The Testaments offer different perspectives on the regime. Lydia is the ultimate insider, with detailed knowledge of corruption and hypocrisy within Gilead; Nicole’s view is that of a hostile outsider; and Agnes is initially ingenuous, having been subjected to the Aunts’ indoctrination, but is required to confront the nature of that indoctrination when she later meets Nicole and is given access to some of the secrets previously known only to Lydia. Given the interweaving of these three perspectives, it might be expected that the novel describes the process of counternarratives challenging a dystopian master narrative. However, within

Compromised Narratives

179

the timespan of the novel, these narratives do not collide in a way that presents any such direct challenge. The closest that the novel comes to the structure described by Baccolini and Moylan comes when, after many years of second-hand education in the Scriptures, Becka and Agnes are granted access to the Bible itself. When they read it, they discover that the Old Testament story of the concubine cut into twelve pieces, used as part of girls’ education in Gilead to justify the restrictions placed on women, does not contain the message that they were always told that it did.19 As a result, the two young women recognize the falsity of Gilead’s master narrative. At this point, however, this realization is restricted to the very small community of Becka and Agnes (and Lydia, who has been feeding them information) and as such their reading of the story from Judges does not, at this point, prompt the formation of any larger community of resistance. In addition, we might expect the two worlds (Gilead and the outside) to collide most spectacularly when the half-sisters Agnes and Nicole are reunited, but when they do interact, it is not simply a case of the latter bringing freedom and sunshine from the democratic world into the darkness of Gilead. This is partly because Lydia has prepared the ground by steadily and selectively feeding Agnes information about the corruption within Gilead and so avoiding the shock of sudden revelation (this parallels the drip-feeding of information to the clones in Never Let Me Go). More noticeable in the representation of their interactions, though, is the fact that it is Nicole who comes across as blinkered in her assumption of superiority, and Agnes who possesses a more nuanced and balanced take on the relative merits of the two systems. Lydia’s own testimony might be regarded as contradicting my claim that no challenge to Gilead’s master narrative can be found in the two novels. In fact, given that it is intended to precipitate the collapse of Gilead by documenting its atrocities, her testimony might be regarded as the ultimate counternarrative. Yet the reason that it cannot be regarded as a counternarrative in the model proposed by Baccolini and Moylan is that, at the moment of its writing, Lydia remains unsure as to whether it will achieve her aims, and at this point, it does not yet have a readership; in addition, the fact that she smuggles her testimony to Canada indicates that she realizes that her narrative will not be effective in constructing a community of resistance within Gilead itself. What is clear, however, is that Lydia’s narrative only possesses its destructive potential as a result of her thoroughgoing complicity with the Gilead regime. Unlike most of the women described in the Gilead novels, her status means that she is in a position to initiate and enact policy, and as such she actually perpetrates wrongdoing in many cases rather than merely being complicit: these wrongs include, for example, her routine procurement of child brides for Commander Judd in the full knowledge that he will murder them as they

180

Chapter 6

grow older and if they fail to bear children. However, and despite her influence, the female sphere that she dominates remains subservient to the male, so her role can be seen as complicit in structural terms. Ultimately, the compromises that Lydia makes allow her to acquire the knowledge and power to damage Gilead from within. For this reason, despite her complicity with some of Gilead’s worst features, Lydia elicits our sympathy. Yet readerly empathy for Lydia is not just a product of her act of resistance, but is also produced by some of the formal properties of her narrative. These include the way that she addresses the reader directly (“I am well aware of how you must be judging me, my reader”)20 and a dry wit that she often employs at the regime’s expense, such as when she describes the lyrics of a Gileadean hymn as “banal and without charm” before adding “I can say that, since I wrote them myself.”21 These characteristics appeal to our empathy and impel us, as readers, to align ourselves with her. We might contrast this invitation to empathize with Lydia with one of the more uncomfortable passages in The Handmaid’s Tale. In Offred’s description of the Ceremony—the occasion on which the Commander has sex with her in place of Serena Joy—she states that the event is not rape, and that there is “nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for. There wasn’t a lot of choice but there was some, and this is what I chose.”22 Whatever we make of Offred’s assertion here, the passage is troubling and alienating. In other words, it is easier to empathize with Lydia, who is more culpable in her complicity with the regime, than it is with Offred, who suffers to a greater extent in her role as a handmaid. I make this comparison to highlight a particular paradox of literature and complicity that has been present in the background of many of the preceding discussions, but which comes to the fore in the Gilead novels: the more that a text thematizes complicity, and strategies of non-complicity, the more blind we are likely to be to our own empathetic complicity. In the introduction to this volume, I made another counterintuitive claim, namely that the greater the distance from wrongdoing, the greater the sense of complicity becomes. The two points are perhaps related: distance provides the perspective from which the dispositions and alignments that act as enabling conditions of complicity become visible; yet that same perspective is one from which we feel ourselves to be removed from events, and hence above complicity. By presenting these kinds of conflicting claims of empathy and ethical awareness in a character such as Lydia—a conflict created by her compromised position— literary texts can, however, both thematize and embody complicity dilemmas. “We Lived, As Usual, by Ignoring” The complicity dilemmas faced by women in Gilead allow them very little room for maneuver. However, the fragmentary backstory of the disintegration

Compromised Narratives

181

of the United States and the creation of Gilead describes how initial passivity and acquiescence can morph into more active complicity, how the desire for alignment pushes individuals toward extremist movements, and how perpetrating violence on behalf of such movements becomes thinkable through a process of dehumanization. This process is the result of a combination of culpable ignorance and a desire for alignment with a dominant group. Although the constraints that Gilead places on women are presented in dystopian terms, the two novels also suggest that a lack of agency may sometimes be welcomed by those subject to such constraints. Alan Weiss notes that early critical responses to The Handmaid’s Tale were largely concerned with whether Offred can be seen as a “valiant rebel” or “powerless victim” before offering his own position somewhere between these two extremes, arguing that dystopian regimes are “kept in place by the acquiescence of a complacent citizenry that accepts and may even enjoy its comforting oppression.”23 He identifies Offred’s complicity with the regime both in her initial passivity and her later acceptance of the controls that Gilead places on her. Indeed, both Offred and Lydia are conflicted with regard to their own roles, chafing against its constraints while accepting some of the advantages that it offers them. Both women chastise themselves for their culpability in enabling the conditions for Gilead’s inception. Their reflections center on their previous complacency, with Offred noting that warning signs were present, but recalling that “we lived, as usual, by ignoring” and goes on to acknowledge her own culpability when she states that “ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”24 Similarly, Lydia recalls that “I’d believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I’d soaked up at law school. These were the eternal verities and we would always defend them. I’d depended on that, as if on a magic charm.”25 Offred’s description of the slide into totalitarianism acknowledges a general failure to resist, but she also notes the difficulty of doing so, stating that “nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it”26 and that, after the Constitution was suspended, “there wasn’t any rioting in the streets . . . there wasn’t even an enemy to put your finger on.”27 However, this acquiescence begins to look more like complicity when, as Offred recalls, the general population accepts the imposition of roadblocks and Identipasses “since you couldn’t be too careful,”28 and it transpires that the same security measures are used to limit movement and to control the population once the regime has established itself as the government. As Offred’s comments indicate, the line between acquiescence and alignment is a thin one in the face of an overwhelming power. As much as resistance and rebellion, alignment and (by extension) complicity are also key elements of dystopian fiction. Weiss traces the roots of the

182

Chapter 6

dystopian tradition back to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karazamov (1880), through Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), to the well-known twentiethcentury dystopian novels noted in the introduction to this chapter. He argues that Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor posits a choice between happiness (in the form of general satisfaction rather than profound joy) and freedom, and that “Zamyatin creates a world embodying the results of choosing the ‘happiness’ that comes with surrendering moral and political freedom to a community and an authority.”29 This choice, he goes on to suggest, is what allows each dystopia to function, and he provides a number of examples of how Offred, despite her “disdain” for its ideology, actually “accepts Gilead’s protective embrace.”30 While both of these narrators participate in acts of fanatical violence under extreme duress, the novels also show how the potential for such fanaticism has its seeds in the dispositions of ostensibly liberal groups and individuals prior to the rise of the regime. The Handmaid’s Tale draws parallels between the behavior of Offred’s crusading, feminist mother, and the fanaticism manifest in Gilead. The former is described as burning pornography with her friends, at which time “their faces were happy, ecstatic almost.”31 This event is clearly echoed by the “Manhattan Cleanup,” which takes place in the lead up to the coup, and in which skimpy clothes are publicly burnt, and those who profited from them shamed in public.32 As Lois Feuer notes, in the case of the extreme traditionalists whose ideology underpins Gilead’s power structure and the feminists who oppose them, as represented by Offred’s mother, “each sees its opponents as ‘the Other,’ abstracting so that it may dehumanize.”33 The Handmaid’s Tale also describes a continuum between the dehumanization that allows a group of handmaids to kick a man to death and more prosaic, quotidian acts. Before their doomed attempt to escape to Canada, Offred and her partner Luke realize that they will have to kill their cat. In response to Luke’s assurance that “I’ll take care of it,” Offred reflects “that is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real.”34 In this case, Offred describes how a disposition of willingness to kill can appear to be perfectly reasonable, but she shows how such acceptance can produce atrocity when repeated en masse when she re-uses this language in her description of how she and the other handmaids kick to death a man accused of rape at a Salvaging, and commenting that “he has become an it.”35 Although this kind communal alignment is an enabling condition of violence in Gilead, Lydia’s testimony reveals the extent to which outward fanaticism may mask internal conflict. For example, she asks herself, “Did I hate the structure we were concocting?” and answers her own question by stating: “On some level, yes: it was a betrayal of everything we’d been taught in our

Compromised Narratives

183

former lives, and of all that we’d achieved. Was I proud of what we’d managed to accomplish, despite the limitations? Also, on some level, yes. Things are never simple.”36 Her reflections here suggest that it may the desire for alignment itself, for identification with a movement larger than the individual, as much as the content of the ideology, that acts as the enabling condition of violence. This sense of conflict arises from the fact that the pressure that the regime exerts on the two women means that non-complicity is simply not an option. For this reason, both novels take seriously the idea that, in a situation where non-complicity is impossible, compromises that preserve life may be the least bad form of action. Better in the Absence of Best In The Testaments, when Aunt Lydia writes that “I am a great proponent of better. In the absence of best”37 she suggests that, under a regime that sustains itself through the pervasive complicity of all strata of the population, compromise may be the only realistic means of negotiating the system. There are striking parallels in the way that Offred and Lydia reflect on the choices that led them to occupy the situations from which they narrate their experiences, in that both recognize that they made a decision to align themselves with the regime. Although these decisions seem to further embed them in a system that denies agency to women, once this initial choice has been made, Offred and Lydia in fact move from a passive state of being compromised to actively seeking compromise in ways that will allow them to improve at least their own situations, and potentially those of others. Early in The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred exhibits a determination to survive through her deliberate submission to the regime, as evident in her assertion that “thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last.”38 Lydia is more hard-nosed, stating that “I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.”39 These may simply be the least bad choices in nonideal situations, but a survey of the novels reveals that active decisions to compromise are shown in a more positive light than unrealistic attempts to avoid complicity. David Staines notes that, in Bodily Harm, Atwood criticizes the easy “security of non-involvement,”40 and similar sentiments are evident in The Testaments, in two instances where different characters make specific reference to getting their hands dirty. The first comes as Nicole’s mentor in the anti-Gilead Mayday organization, Ada, responds to her reticence to practice self-defense techniques by telling her: “Yuck won’t change the world. You need to get your hands dirty.”41 The same image is used by two of the Marthas (low-status domestic workers) who by remarking

184

Chapter 6

in passing that the Aunts “get their hands dirty . . . so we don’t have to”42 suggest that compromise may have ethical value in the way that it obviates the need for others to inflict harm. Moreover, any apparent security offered by attempts at non-complicity is shown to be illusory in Gilead. This is demonstrated by Becka’s refusal in The Testaments to testify against her father and abuser, Dr. Grove. She acts in the knowledge that “he’d be ripped apart by the Handmaids at a Particicution, and it would be my fault. I couldn’t live with that. It would be like murder,”43 but her refusal to testify does not isolate her from involvement with the political machinations in Gilead, and she is ultimately sacrificed by Lydia in order to enable the escape to Canada of Nicole and Agnes. Moreover, not only is effort at non-involvement unsuccessful but the blamelessness of such a position is also called into question when placed next to the compromises made by other characters. In The Handmaid’s Tale, it initially appears that Offred has very few genuine choices available following her decision to become a handmaid. For example, she describes how the handmaids walk in pairs because “this is supposed to be our protection, though the notion is absurd: we are well protected already. The truth is that she is my spy, and I am hers.”44 Such mechanisms appear to support Pilar Somacarrera’s claim that Gilead is “the quintessential disciplinary society where power is brought to the most minute and distant elements, [and] Foucault’s model can be applied to almost all of its aspects.”45 However, if the prevalence of surveillance and of the technologies employed to enact this panoptic control suggests a mechanistic society, it quickly becomes clear that human desires have the potential to throw a spanner into these disciplinary works by acting as the basis for interpersonal compromises. Early in the novel, Offred notes that the reasons individuals inform on each other are not necessarily those of neat ideological alignment with Gilead’s goals, but may also stem from self-preservation, from settling of scores, and may also occur almost at random out of desperation and fear.46 For this reason, she also intuitively senses that, within a system of pervasive complicity, exchange and compromise are the tools that might enable her to gain at least a measure of control over her own situation. For example, at the beginning of the novel, as she passes a group of Guardians she says, “if only they would look. If only we could talk to them. Something could be exchanged, we thought, some deal made, some tradeoff, we still had our bodies.”47 Her intuitions are shown to be correct as the novel progresses, and she enters into illicit agreements with those in positions of power around her. In some cases, these exchanges are determined by the great material and symbolic value placed on childbirth, and it is for this goal that Serena Joy facilitates her liaisons with the driver, Nick. However, the first crack in the ideological façade of the family is created by the Commander himself as a result his

Compromised Narratives

185

simple desire for human contact, a desire that Offred concludes is born from the fact that “his wife didn’t understand him. . . . The same old thing. It was too banal to be true.”48 While those in power around Offred initiate the exchanges cited earlier, it is also true that, as Madeleine Davies argues, in Atwood’s novels “repeated examples are offered of how women learn to see themselves and other women through men’s eyes, thereby becoming accidental policemen of the very power structure that excludes them.”49 She is correct to note the complicity of women in maintaining the power structure, although in the Gilead novels, this complicity is not entirely “accidental,” and arises instead from their efforts to negotiate an oppressive and dangerous situation. Moreover, the limited satisfactions and pleasures available to women often motivate their efforts at compromise. For example, Offred actively exploits—and enjoys—the power her body has over men, which she describes as like “teasing a dog with a bone held out of reach.”50 She later utilizes this power more actively during her meetings with the Commander, realizing that emotions are part of the black market exchange economy that flourishes beneath the ideological veneer: as she recalls, “there are things he wants to prove to me, gifts he wants to bestow, services he wants to render, tenderness he wants to inspire.”51 In their compromised and constrained positions, then, the female protagonists are complicit with the perpetuation of Gilead’s power structure, but at the same time manipulate that same structure to make their own oppression as tolerable as possible. While others have to learn to negotiate this system through trial and potentially fatal error, Lydia’s position of power grants her unrivalled access to the different spheres of influence within Gilead and as such she possesses a superior grasp of the gray areas of Gileadean society in which exchange and compromise are possible. Moreover, as she plots the downfall of the system, it becomes clear that the same principles the regime uses to secure its subjects’ complicity are a structural flaw that she intends to exploit in order to cause its collapse. She states that the “dirt” she has on others is part of a system of “checks and balances”52 that initially allow her to play her rivals off against each other and hence to maintain her own position. Ultimately, though, it is in Gilead’s rigidity that lie the seeds of its own downfall: so extreme is its ideology that almost any such exchange is proscribed, and these proscriptions are so all-encompassing that it is almost impossible to avoid transgressing them. For this reason, because the population is supposed to align itself with Gilead’s professed ideological purity, the regime also makes the population complicit in the double-standards that will, by the end of The Testaments, begin to emerge into the open. Ultimately, through their complicit compromises, both women begin to feel out the cracks and fault lines that provide the potential for a torturous

186

Chapter 6

route out of what at first appears to be a hopeless and hermetically sealed situation. As my discussion earlier has indicated, the two Gilead novels are driven by how the protagonists respond to a situation in which their choices are limited. The Handmaid’s Tale explicitly addresses this change in female agency when Offred walks past a repurposed movie theater. She begins to reminisce about the female leads in the films that used to be screened there, stating “they seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We are a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.”53 The totalitarian regime in Gilead is a response to a falling birth rate that appears to have been caused at least partially by environmental change, and it responds to the crisis by removing choice. In contrast, the MaddAddam trilogy presents a world in which almost unlimited choice, coupled with an unfettered market economy, has created an environmental disaster. As such, desire, choice, and consumption—the drivers of our present economic and social order—are represented as forms of complicity with the degradation of the planet. DYING OF TOO MUCH CHOICE: THE MADDADDAM TRILOGY In MaddAddam, Zeb describes the North American landscape as follows: Gated communities like the one they’d just fled, fields of soybeans, frackware installations, windfarms, piles of gigantic truck tires, heaps of gravel, pyramids of discarded ceramic toilets. Mountains of garbage with dozens of people picking through it; pleebland shanty towns, the shacks made of discarded everything. . . . The odd camera drone drifted overhead, purporting to be scanning traffic, logging the comings and goings of who-knew-who.54

The trilogy presents us with the possible consequences of the continuation of an economic system built on, and driven by, desire and consumption. The result is a story world that is, as Greenwald Smith has it, a “startlingly reasonable projection of what the total neoliberalization of politics and nature through genetic manipulation of plants and animals could look like.”55 Up to this point, I have avoided the platitude that we are “all complicit” in any given event, but in the dystopia of the MaddAddam trilogy, the way in which the most basic human wants feed into a system that is destroying itself mean that this truism has become manifestly and catastrophically true. The earlier given passage describes the world before the event known as the “Waterless Flood” comes close to wiping out humanity, and large portions of the narrative provide the backstory to this disaster, in which various

Compromised Narratives

187

characters describe how rampant neoliberalism had already created the dystopic society that enabled Crake to unleash the Flood. In the first part of this section, I discuss the nature of the pre-Flood world as recalled by the various narrators. So dominant is the neoliberal system that, as in the Gilead novels, the characters are left with no good choices to make. This trap is not so much the result of a political order imposed from above (although various parties employ violence liberally to advance their own interests), but of the fact that desire itself has become a form of complicity in a world where everything— from material goods to health, sex, and emotions—has become monetarized and is exploited for maximum profit. In the second part, I describe how culpable ignorance becomes what I call “structured ignorance” in creating this system. In the final part, I discuss the nature of the post-Flood world, and argue that Atwood explores how compromises, in the form of hybridity, might represent a viable alternative to the neoliberal dystopia. “Selling Hope” The enabling condition of the stage of capitalism represented in the novels is an economic and political system based on boundless consumption characterized by the lack of any restraint or compunction. The trilogy provides numerous examples of this situation, but the way that the system is driven by human desire is best demonstrated in the representations of how sex is sold and consumed: child pornography is available online without apparent censure (legal, political or moral); we learn in Oryx and Crake that “gender, sexual orientation, height, colour of skin and eyes” can all be modified, at a cost;56 and late in the novel, Jimmy and Oryx watch “some copulation Web site with an animal component, a couple of well-trained German shepherds and a double-jointed ultra-shaved albino tattooed all over with lizards.”57 Robbins uses the term “commodity recognition scenes” to refer to “a sort of mild epiphany in which some familiar consumer good is suddenly recognized as coming from a distant place of origin and from the labor of the distant inhabitants—potentially, at least, their coerced or otherwise unpleasant labor.”58 Atwood, in contrast to this model, eschews any “mildness” in favor of a shock delivered by the extremity of the defamiliarized story world, itself enabled by the speculative framework of the fiction. In addition, the situations of many of the characters indicate that the all-encompassing nature of neoliberalism means that the unpleasant labor of “distant inhabitants” has been brought home to North America. In their four-phase model of neoliberalism, Huehls and Greenwald Smith argue that, in the third, sociocultural phase, “culture absorbs and diffuses neoliberalism’s bottom-line values, saturating our daily lives with for-profit rationalities of commerce and consumerism, eventually shifting

188

Chapter 6

neoliberalism from political ideology to normative common sense,” while in the fourth, ontological phase, “neoliberalism becomes what we are, a mode of existence defined by individual self-responsibility, entrepreneurial action, and the maximization of human capital.”59 The MaddAddam trilogy shows this transition and its effects. In addition, the environmental degradation caused by this system means that we are invited to recognize that simply acting on these desires is a form of complicity with that degradation. Adam One, as the founder and voice of the God’s Gardeners, is one of the few characters to articulate an anti-complicit position within this system, and it is brutally simple: “All we can do in this world, now, is to learn what to avoid.”60 The unpopularity of this view, and the fact that the God’s Gardeners are seen as cranks and eccentrics, speaks of the way that consumption is a source of meaning that has become normalized in the neoliberal system. This tendency is evident in the monetarization of the desire for self-improvement, as can be seen in Toby’s description of marketing materials in the spa where she works at one point: “We’re not selling only beauty, the AnooYoo Corp said in their staff instructionals. We’re selling hope.” The glib cynicism of this marketing material is easy enough to critique, but Toby recognizes how and why such a message is seductive, asking “why take it out on the ladies? They only wanted to feel good and be happy, like everything else on the planet.”61 Toby’s comment indicates that complicity with destructive neoliberalism, in the form of unrestrained consumption, is the result of desire more than it is of fear or coercion. The inhabitants of this world are therefore victimized by a system to which they contribute. The way in which they trapped in this system, impelled to contribute to it despite their knowledge of its malign nature, is indicated when Jay Sanderson links the decreasing value of life to its “extreme commodification” in Oryx and Crake, noting that the creation of a surplus of life paradoxically devalues that life.62 This negative correlation between the ability to create and modify life, and the value accorded to that life, is a defining factor of the pre-Flood dystopia. In some cases, this negative correlation is the result of purely material factors. For example, the dire financial situation of her family causes Toby to sell her own hair before the market is killed off by a superior product harvested from the genetically modified “Mo’Hairs,”63 and as a result, she is forced to resort to selling her ovaries, an operation that leaves her infertile. In other cases, compliance is enforced by more violent means, as is the case with Crake’s father, whose car plunges off an overpass shortly after he leaves the HelthWyzer Corporation having learnt of their unethical practices.64 However, while these observations explain how human worth is reduced by over-production and over-consumption, they do not fully explain the characters’ responses to them, and specifically the characters’ tendency to buy into a system that they recognize as destructive both

Compromised Narratives

189

to themselves and to the planet. This contradiction can be explained by the fact that consumption is the result of not only material necessity but also the result of a human desire to create meaningful life. In other words, a vicious circle exists in which the devaluation of life causes individuals to strive to create meaning through further consumption, which, in turn, secures their ever-decreasing significance. I have argued that the organ donation program in Never Let Me Go reduces the clones to what Agamben has called “bare life,” that is, simple, biological life, as opposed to the “qualified life” of contemplation, pleasure, and politics.65 In the MaddAddam trilogy, fear of this state comes into view periodically, for example, in Adam’s description of humanity as an “experiment animal protein has been doing on itself,” in Crake’s references to the human mind as a “meat computer,”66 and in Jimmy’s feeling that he is “jerked around by his own dick, as if the rest of him was merely an inconsequential knob that happened to be attached to one end of it.”67 These images raise the possibility that humanity is not particularly far removed from the genetically modified chickens that consist of a cluster of breasts and a “mouth” orifice into which the nutrients are dumped.68 Yet despite these momentary insights, the characters seem to be blind any option for boosting their self-worth other than consuming more. Agamben’s discussion of bare life is rooted in the horrors of the twentieth century, and for him, the Nazi death camps are the culmination of a process of “the radical transformation of politics into the realm of bare life.”69 However, if Western democracies would like to see themselves as the antithesis of this form of politics, in the MaddAddam novels, new forms of oppression arise from within a situation that is predicated on the free exchange of capital and goods. So overwhelming is the importance of capital that participation no longer takes the form of a fully lived, political life, but is reduced to consumption. However, the reason that the characters fail to challenge this situation is that compliance—and the political passivity involved in such a compliance—is barely visible, so normalized has it become. In the following section, I explain this lack of visibility through the idea of “structured ignorance” raised by Jimmy. Structured Ignorance Rob Nixon notes that “slow violence,” that is, the “violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space,”70 tends to remain unseen due to the gradual nature of its effects. In the setting of the MaddAddam novels, however, the exaggeration employed by Atwood means that this process is made cartoonishly visible. Although the speculative and exaggerated nature of this landscape creates an ironic distance between the reader and

190

Chapter 6

the narrators, these characters are nevertheless aware of the consequences of the system that they inhabit, and that a collapse of some form would inevitably occur at some point. For example, Toby recalls that “everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing.”71 Similarly, following the Flood, Jimmy berates himself for his own connivance, recalling himself as “carefree, thickskinned, skipping light-footed over the surfaces, whistling in the dark, able to get through anything. Turning a blind eye. Now he found himself wincing away.”72 As these examples show, Jimmy and Toby, the two main narrators across the three novels, belatedly acknowledge their own culpable ignorance. The way that this pattern of culpable ignorance is repeated on a global scale is represented though the Happicuppa coffee brand that appears throughout the trilogy. Happicuppa is brewed from a strain of efficient, genetically modified coffee beans that has pushed traditional growers out of the coffee market, leading to their financial ruin and consequent widespread unrest. However, when Crake’s father asserts that “everybody wants a cheaper cup of coffee—you can’t fight that,”73 he suggests that people are generally willing to place pleasure and convenience over any ethical concerns regarding the products they consume, despite their awareness of these issues. His assertion in borne out by the behavior of many of the characters, with Ren, for example—a character generally represented in sympathetic terms—drinking a Happicappuchino and remarking that “it tasted delicious, and soon I wasn’t thinking too much about the evilness of it.”74 Jimmy’s own complacency toward the Happicuppa wars would likely have continued if he had not caught a glimpse of his mother in a news report on one of the protests. He recalls that, “love jolted through him, abrupt and painful, followed by anger,”75 and this moment of affect punctures Jimmy’s general indifference and prompts the reflection that “there had been something willed” about his ignorance. However, he then modifies his own formulation: “not willed, exactly: structured. He’d grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become one.”76 Jimmy thus seems to accuse himself of a form of culpable ignorance similar to that discussed throughout this volume, but even as he chastises himself, his revision suggests that individual agency is constrained or shaped by larger forces. The definitions of culpable ignorance that I have used in the introduction refer to a dual structure in which a “screening action” results in “unwitting misdeeds” that can be truthfully denied. The notion of structured ignorance suggests that there are situations in which such structures are pervasive, and are the rule rather than the exception, with regard to how individuals deal with their own knowledge of complicity. While Jimmy does not elaborate in any detail on these comments, the feature of the pre-Flood dystopia that allows structure to shape agency is that any distinction between politics and business has been erased, with everything

Compromised Narratives

191

subsumed under the all-powerful CorpSeCorps. As a result, the corporations control both the content and flow of information. The depth, pervasiveness, and ethical bankruptcy of this control are indicated by the advice offered by Pilar, one of the senior God’s Gardeners, to Toby never to accept medication from HelthWyzer, one of the largest medical corporations. She tells her: “They’ll produce data and scientists; they’ll produce doctors—worthless, they’ve all been bought.”77 Ultimately, it is these same corporate mechanisms that Crake is able to tap into in order to produce and then distribute the disease that nearly causes the extinction of humanity, and in this way, the trilogy warns of the consequences of this type of monetarization of information. The corporations’ control of information is more sophisticated than simply buying all stakeholders in a particular product, and they demonstrate a keen grasp of the way that certain behaviors can be impelled rather than compelled through the manipulation of images and messages. For example, when Amanda tells Ren that, at what are ostensibly farmers’ markets, “guys in farmer drag bought stuff from warehouses and tossed it into ethnic baskets and marked up the prices, so even if it said Organic you couldn’t trust it.”78 The corporations, in other words, have succeeded in appropriating the signifiers of ethical consumption, a point reinforced by Zeb when he states that “the Corps have to sell, but they can’t force people to buy. . . . Not yet. So the clean image is still seen as a must.” As these examples show, CorpSeCorps ensures that it controls the terms of discourse both through coercive and more subtly persuasive means. For this reason, and despite moments of explicit dissent, no coherent counternarrative exists in the novels. However, in the aftermath of the Flood, and with the few remaining humans trying to eke out their survival in harness with the Crakers—the genetically engineered humanoids created by Crake—narrative takes on a new value and is used to explore the possibility of a future based on hybridity and compromise. Hybrid Narratives Crake is one of the few characters with the will and capability to directly contest the pervasive complicity with neoliberalism, but even he is unable to see a constructive way out of the bind that humanity finds itself in, and instead opts to destroy the old world and to begin again with responsibility for the new world in the hands of the Crakers. Atwood’s essay “Dire Cartographies” is subtitled “The Roads to Ustopia,” and in it, she argues that both utopia and dystopia contain “a latent version of the other.”79 The postFlood world can be regarded in this light: from a human perspective, the world is close to uninhabitable; but the novels suggest that, given humanity’s track record, it might be no bad thing for the world to be administered

192

Chapter 6

by other life forms. For this reason, as Gerry Canavan notes, this premise reverses “the typical affective coordinates of post-apocalyptic fiction, in which the post-apocalyptic landscape is a horror and the pre-apocalyptic landscape the longed-for object of nostalgia.”80 Indeed, because the Crakers have completely sustainable needs and are free from many of the negative psychological traits possessed by humans, the post-Flood world seems to represent the utopian possibilities of a completely new political and economic order. However, in the final sections of MaddAddam, indications begin to appear that human-Craker interaction may corrupt the Crakers, and for this reason, the trilogy concludes with the suggestion that a state of utopian perfection may be unrealistic, but that humanity may feel its way toward a better future by means of ontological compromise, here figured through the presence of hybridity. Crake attempts, but fails, to remove symbolic thought from his creations, and for this reason, the question of what sort of world the Crakers will create cannot be separated from questions regarding the nature and value of art. Specifically, the trilogy asks, first, whether art possesses any fundamental value, and secondly, whether and how art can find an ethical role for itself in a system that monetarizes and appropriates every form of production—cultural production included—for the sake of its own furtherance. When Crake and Jimmy debate the value of art, the latter defends it on the basis that “when any civilization is dust and ashes . . . art is all that’s left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them.” Crake, however, responds with a sexual analogy, describing how female frogs are attracted to male frogs with the loudest and deepest voices, and goes on to note that smaller male frogs have developed a technique of using empty drainpipes to amplify their voices and hence to attract sexual partners. “That’s what art is, for the artist,” he concludes. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.”81 However, against the notion that all human artistic endeavor is ultimately of the same order as the vocal legerdemain of amorous amphibians, the fact that Crake tries and fails to remove the potential for symbolic thought from the Crakers suggests that this trait is inherent to meaningful life. His attempt is understandable, however, given the uses to which symbolic thought is put prior to the Waterless Flood and when language and art have become subsumed into the economic-political system. Jimmy’s education is indicative of the state of what were once known as the humanities: during his studies at the Martha Graham Academy, “theatrical events had dwindled into versions of the singalong or the tomato bombardment or the wet T-shirt contest” while, despite the vast possibilities offered by technology, he uses his digital skills to create naked versions of Pride and Prejudice and To the Lighthouse.82 After he graduates, he finds himself working for AnooYoo where he tweaks

Compromised Narratives

193

adjectives and invents new words in order to sell the type of products and services that are rapidly hastening the end of human civilization. One of the few characters who produces a form of art that seems to offer a counternarrative to the dominant neoliberal ideology is Amanda. She leads a bohemian lifestyle, and creates “Vulture Sculptures” by arranging animal carcasses in the shapes of words, waiting for vultures to descend on these, then photographing the scene from above. The idea is striking and so too, presumably, the images that she produces, but the concept in its execution flirts with the banal when it is revealed that the words she has “vulturized” are “PAIN,” “WHOM,” and “GUTS.”83 Moreover, and regardless of her art and edgy lifestyle, Amanda is also shown to be reliant upon and embedded in the economic system, being able to create her sculptures only thanks to the patronage of someone who has made their money through GM farming, and who is “under the illusion that what she was doing was razor-sharp cutting-edge.”84 The Crakers are the only characters whose art and narratives can be seen as non-complicit with the economic system, and the contrast between their innocence and the corruption and degeneracy of the recently destroyed world becomes clear when the few survivors of that world interact with them. Howells argues that “Snowman, champion of the values of art and literature, degraded to ‘wordserf’ in his former life as writer of advertising copy, takes up his word warrior role again when there is nobody to listen,”85 and it is true that, in his isolation, language from his earlier life echoes pointlessly in Jimmy’s mind. However, it is also the case that he does find an audience in the form of the Crakers, and it is in this situation that he finds a meaningful role for narrative, albeit more by accident than by design. For all that the Crakers’ strangeness increases Jimmy’s sense of isolation, he must at the same time engage with them as a means of preserving his own life and theirs: he relies on them for his weekly fish, while the Crakers’ innocence would leave them helpless in a hostile world without his guidance. On a basic level, then, the purpose of the narratives that Jimmy tells to the Crakers is initially to preserve bare life when that life is in a position of great precarity. Yet what also becomes clear very quickly is that his narrative cannot function without the symbolic structures that elevate existence to a level above bare life and simple material survival. In some cases, these symbols are created accidentally as Crake struggles to stay a step ahead of the Crakers’ interpretations of his stories, papering over his own inconsistencies. In this way, his red hat and broken wristwatch accidentally provide the symbolic basis of his status as the prophet of Crake. In addition, though, Jimmy and Toby only manage to fashion narratives through which they can communicate in a meaningful way by molding their own assumptions and values to those of the Crakers’ symbolic order. As such, the Crakers’ innocence acts as a

194

Chapter 6

screen onto which human failings are projected in harsh relief in the second two novels. This process of projection, however, does not just make visible the degenerate values of the pre-Flood world, but also begins to shape both the tellers and listeners of these stories. This process of finding common ground between two very different sets of beliefs can be seen as the creation of narrative hybridity. Up to this point, the various hybrids that have been described, such as the Pigoons, Wolvogs, Rakunks, and Mo’Hairs, are usually the physical products of untamed capitalism. However, hybridity as a more general, ontological principle becomes the predominant theme toward the end of the trilogy. The latter parts of MaddAddam strongly suggest that any future for the survivors will be one of posthuman hybridity, both in the sense of the biological mixing of species, and also in the sense of species compromising and adapting to each other’s modes of thought. This view is most evident in the way that the remaining God’s Gardeners defeat the painballers (armed, hardened criminals) thanks to an alliance with the pigoons, and it is a combination of the pig hybrids’ sense of smell and the humans’ mobility and tools that allow them to remove this threat (albeit at significant cost—Jimmy and Adam are killed in the firefight). Moreover, the trilogy ends in anticipation of the birth of human-Craker hybrids, Amanda, Swift Fox, and Ren all being pregnant by the Crakers. In When Species Meet, Donna Haraway writes that a great deal is at stake in inter-species interactions, but notes that “outcomes are not guaranteed. There is no assured happy or unhappy ending—socially, ecologically, or scientifically. There is only the chance for getting on together with some grace.”86 The trilogy ends on a similarly ambivalent note, and it is not clear what sort of future awaits the first generation of hybrids to be born after the Flood. The possibilities and dangers of hybridity are explored in the character of Blackbeard, the young Craker whose interest in Toby’s journal results in her teaching him to write. By the end of MaddAddam, there are indications that Blackbeard’s affinity with the human survivors may be the precursor to the corruption of the Crakers’ non-complicit way of life. When Toby says that Blackbeard’s shoes “have appliquéd green wings on them and lights that flash with every step he takes—the batteries haven’t run down yet—and he is now perhaps a little too delighted with them,”87 his behavior at this point indicates that the desires that Crake worked to eliminate can in fact be learnt. For this reason, prolonged contact with the humans may inevitably result in the Crakers mimicking and eventually internalizing the same faults that lead to the collapse of the earlier civilization. Blackbeard is also the first Craker to fully lose his innocence when he sees the dead bodies of Oryx and Crake, an event that shatters the whole narrative that underpins their spiritual beliefs. When he protests that “Oryx and Crake must be beautiful! Like the stories!”88 he shows an instinctive awareness of

Compromised Narratives

195

the role of narrative in creating systems of belief. It is not clear what will result from this unhappy epiphany, but by the end of MaddAddam, Toby has disappeared and, by teaching Blackbeard how to write, has bequeathed the job of chronicling the new, post-Flood civilization to him. Blackbeard records some of the theories regarding her disappearance before concluding as follows: Others say that she went to find Zeb, and that he is in the form of a Bear, and that she too is in the form of a Bear, and is with him today. That is the best answer, because it is the happiest; and I have written it down. I have written down the other answers too. But I made them in smaller writing.89

All the familiar failings of narrative representation are present here, and Blackbeard creates a symbolic structure shaped by his own biases, desires, and fears. However, he concludes his account with the words “now we will sing,”90 indicating that he has not abandoned the Crakers’ original cultural forms in favor of narrative, but seems to be living a life in which both have a role to play. We do not hear the song that the Crakers sing at this point, but it is clear that Blackbeard, who now fills the role of historian previously performed by Jimmy and Toby, now has to find a form of narrative compromise in the same way that they did, mediating between his own knowledge and the beliefs of his fellow Crakers. Blackbeard’s narrative, then, is not just a record of the first months of the post-Flood world, but will also, it seems likely, play an important role in shaping the hybrid society that emerges out of the wreckage. I began this volume by grappling with the problem of the extent to which narrative and literature can be considered as forms of complicity if they are constructed after the fact and therefore do not act as causal contributions to wrongdoing. Clearly, in the case of narratives told by Jimmy and Toby, and in Blackbeard’s journal, narrative plays a performative role, molding society through the act of storytelling. The same sort of role can also be attributed to Atwood’s speculative fictions themselves, which Ashley Winstead likens to the “scenario plans” drawn up and used by political and corporate bodies to speculate on the future in which they envisage playing a leading role. Importantly, however, because they shape policy, “these speculative narratives work to actually produce, and not just describe, the future.”91 Winstead argues that Crake is shown to be mistaken in his dismissal of the value of art. While he “conceives of humanities and science as belonging to different, mutually exclusive spheres,” it transpires that his own speculative narrative “has a powerful performative power, making the very world it suggests.”92 Winstead proceeds to argue that the same may be said of Atwood’s novels themselves and that “a far cry from opposing fiction and art to science

196

Chapter 6

and biotechnology, as critics of Oryx and Crake have argued, Atwood actually recasts narratives as biotechnologies.”93 In other words, by imagining new hybridities, Atwood not only speculates on a posthuman future but also suggests possible directions that the future might take. The positive directions are those in which compromise can be found between different forms of life, different conceptions of value, and the different modes of communication that carry these systems of thought. It may be the case that we cannot help but be complicit with the ideologies in which we are embedded, but the compromises required for survival, her novels suggest, can be recast as imaginative possibilities that can not only describe but also shape a more enlightened future. At first reading, Atwood’s dystopias offer a pessimistic view of the options available to individuals within nonideal situations. Those who wish to thrive, or simply to survive, will inevitably find themselves compromised under the pressure of all-encompassing ideologies. However, as noted earlier, compromise is explored through the notion of hybridity in the later sections of the MaddAddam trilogy, and in these imagined new formulations, new possibilities emerge. Attributing a performative function to narrative complicates its role in complicity, indicating that this is not necessarily limited to condoning, or to creating the screening action in a structure of culpable ignorance. For this reason, while remaining non-complicit is sometimes impossible, and finding anti-complicit positions remains difficult, the potential for fiction to imagine, negotiate, and create compromise may be a productive way of transforming the pervasiveness of complicity into the basis for positive new figurations of language and of being in the world.

NOTES 1. Howells, “Dystopian,” 163. 2. Baccolini and Moylan, Horizons, 6. 3. Lepora and Goodin, Compromise, 18–19. 4. Atwood, Handmaid, 276. 5. Atwood, “Cartographies.” 6. Atwood, Testaments, 172. 7. Atwood, Handmaid, 180. 8. Atwood, Handmaid, 246. 9. Howells, “Dystopian,” 164. 10. Atwood, Handmaid, 222. 11. The phrase is actually pig Latin, a made-up joke from Atwood’s Latin classes at school. Dockterman, “Urgency.” 12. Rigney, “Alias,” 65.

Compromised Narratives

13. Atwood, Handmaid, 18. 14. Atwood, Handmaid, 49. 15. Atwood, Handmaid, 168. 16. Atwood, Handmaid, 31. 17. Atwood, Handmaid, 137. 18. Atwood, Handmaid, 163. 19. Atwood, Testaments, 303. 20. Atwood, Testaments, 32. 21. Atwood, Testaments, 34. 22. Atwood, Handmaid, 94. 23. Weiss, “Offred,” 120, 128. 24. Atwood, Handmaid, 56. 25. Atwood, Testaments, 116. 26. Atwood, Handmaid, 56. 27. Atwood, Handmaid, 174. 28. Atwood, Handmaid, 174. 29. Weiss, “Offred,” 125. 30. Weiss, “Offred,” 133. 31. Atwood, Handmaid, 38. 32. Atwood, Handmaid, 230. 33. Feuer, “Calculus,” 88. 34. Atwood, Handmaid, 192–93. 35. Atwood, Handmaid, 280. 36. Atwood, Testaments, 178. 37. Atwood, Testaments, 215. 38. Atwood, Handmaid, 8. 39. Atwood, Testaments, 66. 40. Staines, “Canadian Context,” 20. 41. Atwood, Testaments, 201. 42. Atwood, Testaments, 238. 43. Atwood, Testaments, 253. 44. Atwood, Handmaid, 19. 45. Somacarrera, “Power,” 53. 46. Atwood, Handmaid, 33. 47. Atwood, Handmaid, 4. 48. Atwood, Handmaid, 158. 49. Davies, “Female Bodies,” 62. 50. Atwood, Handmaid, 22. 51. Atwood, Handmaid, 210. 52. Atwood, Testaments, 62. 53. Atwood, Handmaid, 25. 54. Atwood, MaddAddam, 126. 55. Greenwald Smith, Affect, 123. 56. Atwood, Oryx, 289. 57. Atwood, Oryx, 315. 58. Robbins, Beneficiary, 56.

197

198

Chapter 6

59. Huehls and Greenwald Smith, “Four Phases,” 8–9. 60. Atwood, MaddAddam, 255. 61. Atwood, Flood, 265. 62. Sanderson, “Pigoons,” 222. Sanderson draws heavily on Melinda E. Cooper’s Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Cooper, Surplus. 63. Atwood, Flood, 32. 64. Atwood, Oryx, 211–12. 65. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1. 66. Atwood, Flood, 316. 67. Atwood, Oryx, 253. 68. Atwood, Oryx, 202. 69. Agamben Homo Sacer, 120. 70. Nixon, Violence, 2. 71. Atwood, Flood, 239. 72. Atwood, Oryx, 260. 73. Atwood, Oryx, 180. 74. Atwood, Flood, 221. 75. Atwood, Oryx, 181. 76. Atwood, Oryx, 184. 77. Atwood, Flood, 105. 78. Atwood, Flood, 141. 79. Atwood, “Cartographies.” 80. Canavan, “Hope,” 141. 81. Atwood, Oryx, 168. 82. Atwood, Oryx, 187. 83. Atwood, Oryx, 245. 84. Atwood, Oryx, 244. 85. Howells, “Dystopian,” 172. 86. Haraway, Species, 15. 87. Atwood, MaddAddam, 347. 88. Atwood, MaddAddam, 356. 89. Atwood, MaddAddam, 390. 90. Atwood, MaddAddam, 390. 91. Winstead, “Beyond Persuasion,” 229. 92. Winstead, “Beyond Persuasion,” 243. 93. Winstead, “Beyond Persuasion,” 245.

Conclusion

In this volume, I have attempted to elucidate a general relationship between narrative and complicity, and to conduct an exploration of the relationship between literature and complicity based on a relatively small number of writers. As such, this book represents a preliminary thrust into this territory and one on which, I hope, others will be able to build. I have taken a particular approach to complicity that focuses on narrative failures of witnessing and that emphasizes the roles of connivance, condoning, and culpable ignorance. In this brief concluding section, I identify several further areas for exploration of the relationship between literature and complicity. OVERLAP WITH EXISTING FIELDS OF STUDY There exists great potential for productive dialogue between complicity and any existing fields of study that examine the causes and nature of oppression. Most obviously, the forms of complicity discussed in this book could certainly be applied to postcolonial studies, although race, class, and gender studies could also be enriched and developed in some of the directions suggested by the discussions in the preceding chapters. However, I have been careful to avoid assigning a priori categories to particular groups. Larry May provides the rationale for this avoidance when he argues that “group memberships do not necessarily match the victim and perpetrator groups. If people can come to see that in many atrocities victims and perpetrators typically come from both groups, then one of the chief obstacles to reconciliation can be overcome.”1 For this reason, one proviso that I would add in terms of connecting complicity to these other fields is that, as I have suggested in my introduction, complicity loses much of its analytical power if it is forced to 199

200

Conclusion

negotiate such categories rather than attending to the specific actions of those individuals or groups in question. IMPURE SUBJECTHOOD My avoidance of clearly defined categories outlined earlier in the paragraph is not simply a defensive move but can, I suggest, lead to a more productive way of describing the complex relationships within which complicity occurs. Michael Rothberg’s notion of the implicated subject has been a key touchstone for thinking about complicity throughout this book, and in his conclusion, he argues that “in the face of complex implication, a multidirectional politics of differentiated, long-distance solidarity has greater purchase than a politics premised on identification, purity, or the absolute separation between locations and histories.”2 I agree, and further suggest that impurity and the connectedness of apparently disparate locations and histories should be the very basis for identifying and analyzing complicity. Some of Rothberg’s language echoes that of Bruno Latour, whose thinking has become increasingly influential in the humanities in recent years. Latour begins his seminal We Have Never Been Modern by discussing the proliferation of hybrids, phenomena that that he describes as “imbroglios of science, politics, economy, law, religion, technology, fiction.”3 On this basis, he has developed actor-network-theory, in which stable groups and pure identities fade into the background, and instead “connections, vehicles, and attachments are brought into the foreground.”4 Attending to such connections and attachments seems to me to be a sound basis for approaching complicity, and one that would permit and examination not only of how texts represent the world but how they circulate within it, shaping dispositions and alignments as they do so. EMPATHETIC COMPLICITY AND AFFECT I addressed three levels of complicity in this book, and of the three, I theorized and examined empathetic complicity in the least amount of detail. The principal reason for this is that it is not always possible to anticipate the response of any given reader. Of course, reader-response criticism seeks to address this process of interpretation. While detailed engagement with reader-response criticism was beyond the scope of this book, notions such as Stanley Fish’s “interpretive communities” could provide a more concrete bridge between formal and empathetic complicity.5 Moreover, affect can produce many more effects than just empathy. I have addressed complicities of omission, but the way that narrative seeks to create particular types of affect in readers could

Conclusion

201

result in individuals or groups being maneuvered more actively into complicit positions. For example, a body of empirical research exists that links particular affective states to political outlooks. To give one notable example, sensitivity to disgust generally indicates a more conservative political disposition.6 Clearly, this evidence indicates that affect can be manipulated to induce certain responses, and for this reason, any narrative form used in this way could represent a more active or aggressive form of complicity than the failures of witnessing addressed in this book. Again, while we might not be able to anticipate every reader’s response in every case, empirical research such as the paper cited earlier can point us in the right direction.

BUILDING ON COMPLICITY If these comments suggest ways in which complicity can be built upon in terms of further academic research, I wish to conclude by arguing that the notion of complicity can be put to constructive uses. If the nagging sense that “we are all complicit,” particularly strong in the later chapters, might induce a degree of pessimism, the relationship between complicity and compromise can, conversely, offer a route out of the binds in which we find ourselves as the twenty-first-century progresses. As Kutz argues, “The hidden promise of complicity is the conception of community upon which it draws: a world where individuals shape their lives with others.”7 I have focused on the blind spots present in narrative and the way that these produce or contribute to complicity in the form of connivance, condoning, and culpable ignorance. The corollary of Kutz’s observation, however, is that the negative connotations of complicity may mean that potential for community, or at least for common cause, may reside unseen in any analysis wherein the focus rests primarily on wrongdoing. As I have argued in my discussion of Atwood’s dystopias, a movement from passively being compromised to actively seeking new forms of compromise often represents the least bad option in nonideal situations. Atwood’s speculative fictions indicate that complicity may occur as world-shaping narratives are constructed, but this observation also raises the more optimistic possibility that narrative can forge compromises between aspects of language, thought, technology, and economics that are yet to come into being. A promising direction for studies in literature and complicity, then, would be to examine the ways in which fiction can play a role in forging such compromises. NOTES 1. May, Genocide, 268. 2. Rothberg, Implicated Subject, 203.

202

Conclusion

3. Latour, Modern, 2. 4. Latour, Social, 220. 5. Fish, Text, 167–73. 6. Inbar et al., “Disgust Sensitivity.” 7. Kutz, Collective Age, 259.

Bibliography

Adams, Jenni. “Reading (as) Violence in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 17, nos. 2–3 (2011): 27–50. https​:/​/do​​i​.org​​/10​.1​​080​/1​​75049​​02​.20​​11​​.11​​08729​​0. Adams, Jenni, and Sue Vice, eds. Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film. London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2013. Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Afxentiou, Afxentis, Robin Dunford and Michael Neu. “Introducing Complicity.” In Exploring Complicity: Concepts, Cases and Critique, edited by Afxentis Afxentiou, Robin Dunford and Michael Neu, 1–15. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 1999. Assmann, Aleida. “History, Memory and the Genre of Testimony.” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (2006): 261–73. https​:/​/do​​i​.org​​/10​.1​​215​/0​​33353​​72​-2​0​​05​-00​​3. Atwood, Margaret. Dire Cartographies: The Roads to Ustopia – The Handmaid’s Tale and The MaddAddam Trilogy. New York: Anchor, 2011. Epub. ———. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Anchor Books, 1998. ———. MaddAddam. New York: Anchor Books, 2014. ———. Oryx and Crake. New York: Anchor Books, 2004. ———. The Testaments. London: Chatto and Windus, 2019. ———. The Year of the Flood. New York: Anchor Books, 2010. Baccolini, Raffaella and Tom Moylan. Introduction to Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination, edited by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, 1–12. New York: Routledge, 2003.

203

204

Bibliography

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, 259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Barnett, Victoria J. “The Changing View of the ‘Bystander’ in Holocaust Scholarship: Historical, Ethical, and Political Implications.” Utah Law Review 4, no. 1 (2017): 633–47. http:​/​/dc.​​law​.u​​tah​.e​​du​/ul​​r​/vol​​2017​/​​iss4/​​1. Barsdorf-Liebchen, Nicolette. “Complicity in Violation: The Photographic Witnessing of War and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century.” In Exploring Complicity: Concepts, Cases and Critique, edited by Afxentis Afxentiou, Robin Dunford and Michael Neu, 203–23. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Beacon, 1970. Bauer, Yehuda. Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. Beck, John. Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. ———. “Reading Room: Erosion and Sedimentation in Sebald’s Suffolk.” In W.G. Sebald: A Critical Companion, edited by J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead, 75–88. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 253–64. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Berberich, Christine. “Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day: Working through England’s Traumatic Past as a Critique of Thatcherism.” In Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels, edited by Sebastian Groes and Barry Lewis, 118–30. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Berwald, Olaf. “Guilt and Autonomy in Hermann Broch’s and Geoffrey Hill’s Works.” In Complicity and the Politics of Representation, edited by Cornelia Wächter and Robert Wirth, 75–88. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. Bird, Stephanie. Comedy and Trauma in Germany and Austria after 1945: The Inner Side of Mourning. Cambridge: Legenda, MHRA, 2016. Black, Shameem. “Ishiguro’s Inhuman Aesthetics.” Modern Fiction Studies 55, no. 4 (2009): 785–807. https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/mfs​.0​.1637. Blight, David. “The Memory Boom: Why and Why Now?” In Memory in Mind and Culture, edited by Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch, 238–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Boyers, Robert. Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel since 1945. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012. Brée, Germaine. Camus. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1961. Buelens, Gert, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone, eds. The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014.

Bibliography

205

Camus, Albert. “The Century of Fear.” In Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–1947, edited by Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, 257–60. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. ———. “Crisis in Algeria.” In Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–1947, edited by Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, 198–201. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. ———. “December 1, 1944.” In Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–1947, edited by Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, 130–31. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. ———. The Fall. Translated by Justin O’Brien. In The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays, 273–356. New York, London and Toronto: Everyman’s Library, 2004. ———. “Images of Occupied Germany.” In Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–1947, edited by Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, 229–33. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. ———. The Outsider. Translated by Sandra Smith. London: Penguin, 2018. ———. The Plague. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. In The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays, 1–272. New York, London and Toronto: Everyman’s Library, 2004. ———. The Rebel. Translated by Anthony Bower. London: Penguin, 2013. ———. “Toward Dialogue.” In Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–1947, edited by Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, 274–76. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Canavan, Gerry. “Hope, But Not for Us: Ecological Science Fiction and the End of the World in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.” Literature, Interpretation, Theory 23, no. 2 (2012): 138–59. https​:/​/do​​i​.org​​/10​.1​​ 080​/1​​04369​​28​.20​​​12​.67​​6914. Caruth, Cathy. “After the End: Psychoanalysis in the Ashes of History.” In The Future of Testimony: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Witnessing, edited by Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland, 31–47. New York and London: Routledge, 2014. ———. Introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. ———. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996. Cheng, Chu-chueh. The Margin Without Centre: Kazuo Ishiguro. Bern: Peter Lang, 2011. Chitnis, Rajendra A. “Milan Kundera (1929 –): The Idea of the Novel.” In The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists, edited by Michael Bell, 410–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Coetzee, J.M., “Support Milan Kundera.” The Guardian, November 4, 2008. https​ :/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/co​​mment​​isfre​​e​/200​​8​/nov​​/04​/m​​ilank​​under​​a​-nob​​el​​-pr​​ize​-l​​ itera​​ture. Connerton, Paul. The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

206

Bibliography

Cooper, Melinda E. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Cowart, David. Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2011. Craps, Stef. “Beyond Eurocentrism: Trauma Theory in the Global Age.” In The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, edited by Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone, 45–61. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014. ———. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. Cravens, Craig. “Faulty Consciousness: Milan Kundera’s The Joke.” The Slavic and East European Journal 44, no. 1 (2000): 92–108. https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​ /309630. Crowley, Martin. “Camus and Social Justice.” In The Cambridge Companion to Camus, edited by Edward J. Hughes, 93–105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Crownshaw, Richard, Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland, eds. The Future of Memory. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010. Cruickshank, John. Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt. London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. Currie, Mark. “Controlling Time: Never Let Me Go.” In Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Sean Matthews and Sebastian Groes, 91–103. London and New York: Continuum, 2009. Dalsgaard, Inger H., Luc Herman and Brian McHale, Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, 1–8. Edited by Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman and Brian McHale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Davies, Madeleine. “Margaret Atwood’s Female Bodies.” In The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, edited by Coral Ann Howells, 58–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Deckard, Sharae and Stephen Shapiro. “World-Culture and the Neoliberal WorldSystem: An Introduction.” In World Literature, Neoliberalism and the Culture of Discontent, edited by Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro, 1–48. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. DeLillo, Don. “In the Ruins of the Future.” Guardian, December 22, 2001. https​:/​/ww​​ w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/bo​​oks​/2​​001​/d​​ec​/22​​/fict​​i​on​.d​​ondel​​illo. Docherty, Thomas. Complicity: Between Collaboration and Commitment. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Dockterman, Eliana. “Margaret Atwood and Elizabeth Moss on the Urgency of The Handmaid’s Tale.” Time, April 12, 2017. https​:/​/ti​​me​.co​​m​/473​​4904/​​marga​​ret​-a​​ twood​​-elis​​abeth​​-moss​​-hand​​​maids​​-tale​/. Döring, Tobias. “Sherlock Holmes - He Dead: Disenchanting the English Detective in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans.” In Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective, edited by Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen, 59–96. New York: Rodopi, 2006.

Bibliography

207

Dussere, Erik. “Flirters, Deserters, Wimps and Pimps: Thomas Pynchon’s Two Americas.” Contemporary Literature 51, no. 3 (2010): 565–95. https://www​.jstor​ .org​/stable​/40983539. Eaglestone, Robert. The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. ———. The Holocaust and the Postmodern. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ekelund, Bo G. “Misrecognising History: Complicitous Genres in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.” The International Fiction Review 32, nos. 1–2 (2005): 70–90. https​:/​/jo​​urnal​​s​.lib​​.unb.​​ca​/in​​dex​.p​​hp​/IF​​R​/art​​icl​e/​​view/​​7801. Elias, Amy J. “History.” In The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, edited by Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman and Brian McHale, 123–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Eshel, Amir. “Against the Power of Time: The Poetics of Suspension in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” New German Critique 88 (2003): 71–96. http://www​.jstor​ .org​/stable​/3211159. Felman, Shoshana. “Camus’ The Fall, or the Betrayal of the Witness.” In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 165–203. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. ———. “Camus’ The Plague, or A Monument to Witnessing.” In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 93–119. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. ———. “Fire in the Archive: The Alignment of Witnesses.” In The Future of Testimony: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Witnessing, edited by Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland, 48–68. New York and London: Routledge, 2014. ———. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. London: Routledge, 1992. Feuer, Lois. “The Calculus of Love and Nightmare: The Handmaid’s Tale and the Dystopian Tradition.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38, no. 2 (1997): 83–95. https​:/​/do​​i​.org​​/10​.1​​080​/0​​01116​​19​.19​​97​​.10​​54316​​7. Fitch, Brian T. The Narcissistic Text: A Reading of Camus’ Fiction. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1982. Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1980. Freer, Joanna. Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Fukuoka, Kazuya. “Memory, Nation, and National Commemoration of War Dead: A Study of Japanese Public Opinion on the Yasukuni Controversy.” Asian Politics and Policy 5, no. 1 (2013): 27–49. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/aspp​.12015. Gazi, Jeeshan. “Pynchon’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: Vineland, Film, and the Tragedy of American Activism in the 1960s.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 10, no. 1 (2016): 27–62. https​:/​/ww​​w​.jst​​or​.or​​g​/sta​​ble​/1​​0​.143​​21​/js​​tudra​​​di​.10​​.1​.00​​27.

208

Bibliography

Geertz, Clifford. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation of Cultures, 310–23. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Gilbert, Elizabeth. “‘…to understand everything that came her way’: Complicity and the Child Protagonist.” In Complicity and the Politics of Representation, edited by Cornelia Wächter and Robert Wirth, 229–43. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. Goldstein, Diane E. “The Sounds of Silence: Foreknowledge, Miracles, Suppressed Narratives, and Terrorism – What Not Telling Might Tell Us.” Western Folklore 68, no. 2/3 (2009): 235–55. https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/40600537. Golsan, Richard J. French Writers and the Politics of Complicity. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Greenwald Smith, Rachel. Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Hammond, Meghan Marie. ‘“I Can’t Even Say I Made My Own Mistakes’: The Ethics of Genre in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.” In Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels, edited by Sebastian Groes and Barry Lewis, 95–105. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hartman, Geoffrey. “The Aesthetics of Complicity.” The Georgia Review 28, no. 3 (1974): 384–88. https​:/​/ww​​w​.jst​​or​.or​​g​/sta​​ble​/p​​df​/41​​3​9712​​4​.pdf​. Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933– 1945. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Howells, Coral Ann. “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake.” In The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, edited by Coral Ann Howells, 161–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Hradilek, Adam and Petr Třešňák, “Milan Kundera’s Denunciation.” Respekt, October 13, 2008. http:​/​/eng​​lish.​​respe​​kt​.cz​​/Mila​​n​-Kun​​deras​​-denu​​nciat​​ion​​-2​​742​.h​​ tml. Huehls, Mitchum. After Critique: Twenty-First-Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. ———. “The Great Flattening.” Contemporary Literature 54, no. 4 (2013): 861–71. www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/10​.2307​/43297940. Huehls, Mitchum and Rachel Greenwald Smith. “Four Phases of Neoliberalism and Literature: An Introduction.” In Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literature, edited by Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith, 1–18. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism, 2nd Edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. London: Vintage, 2007. Inbar, Yoel, David Pizarro, Ravi Iyer and Jonathan Haidt. “Disgust Sensitivity, Political Conservatism, and Voting.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 3, no. 5 (2011): 537–44. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/1948550611429024.

Bibliography

209

Ishiguro, Kazuo. An Artist of the Floating World. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. ———. The Buried Giant. London: Faber and Faber, 2015. ———. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. ———. The Remains of the Day. London: Faber and Faber, 1989. ———. When We Were Orphans. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Jackson, Miles. Complicity in International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015 Jacobson, Dan. Heshel’s Kingdom. London: Penguin, 1999. Jerng, Mark. “Giving Form to Life: Cloning and Narrative Expectations of the Human.” Partial Answers 6, no 2 (2008): 369–93. https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/pan​.0​ .0014. Judt, Tony. The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and the Twentieth Century. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Kadish, Stanford H. “Complicity, Cause and Blame: A Study in the Interpretation of Doctrine.” California Law Review 73, no. 2 (1985): 323–409. ———. “Reckless Complicity.” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 87, no. 2 (1997): 369–94. Kaltsas, Kostas. “Of ‘Maidens’ and Towers: Oedipa Maas, Maxine Tarnow, and the Possibility of Resistance.” In Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender, edited by Ali Chetwynd, Joanna Freer and Georgios Maragos, 36–51. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2018. Kaplan, Alice. Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. Keeble, Arin. The 9/11 Novel: Trauma, Politics and Identity. Jefferson: McFarland, 2014. Kindle. ———. “Bleeding Edge, Neo-Liberalism, and the 9/11 Novel.” Canadian Review of American Studies 49, no. 3 (2019): 249–70. https://doi​.org​/10​.3138​/cras​.2017​.028. Kennedy, Liam and Stephen Shapiro. Introduction to Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature, edited by Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro, 1–21. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth University Press, 2019. Kilbourn, Russell J.A. “Catastrophe with Spectator: Subjectivity, Intertextuality and the Representation of History in Die Ringe des Saturn.” In W. G. Sebald and the Writing of History, edited by Anne Fuchs and J.J. Long, 139–61. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2007. Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. Translated by Linda Asher. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. ———. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Translated by Aaron Asher. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. ———. The Joke. Translated by Aaron Asher. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. ———. “Kafka’s World.” Wilson Quarterly 12, no. 5 (1988): 88–99. https://www​ .jstor​.org​/stable​/40257735. ———. Life Is Elsewhere. Translated by Aaron Asher. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. ———. Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts. Translated by Linda Asher. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.

210

Bibliography

———. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. Kutz, Christopher. Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. LaCapra, Dominick. “Fascism and the Sacred: Sites of Inquiry after (or Along With) Trauma.” In The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, edited by Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone, 23–43. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Laub, Dori. “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival.” In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 75–92. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. ———. “On Holocaust Testimony and Its ‘Reception’ within Its Own Frame, as a Process in Its Own Right: A Response to ‘Between History and Psychoanalysis’ by Thomas Trezise.” History and Memory 21, no. 1 (2009): 127–50. https​:/​/do​​i​.org​​ /10​.2​​979​/h​​is​.20​​09​.​21​​.1​.12​​7. Lepora, Chiara and Robert E. Goodin. On Complicity and Compromise. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Lethem, Jonathan. “Pynchonopolis.” The New York Times, September 12, 2013. https​ :/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​013​/0​​9​/15/​​books​​/revi​​ew​/bl​​eedin​​g​-edg​​e​-by-​​tho​ma​​s​-pyn​​ chon.​​html. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. London: Abacus Books, 1988. ———. If This Is a Man / The Truce. Translated by Stuart Woolf. London: Abacus Books, 1987. Lévi-Valensi, Jacqueline, ed. Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–1947. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Long, J.J. W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Luban, David. 1999. “Contrived Ignorance.” Georgetown Law Journal 87 (1999): 957–80. http:​/​/sch​​olars​​hip​.l​​aw​.ge​​orget​​own​.e​​du​/fa​​​cpub/​​1751. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2008. Madsen, Deborah L. “Alterity.” In The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, edited by Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman and Brian McHale, 146–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Marcus, George F. “The Uses of Complicity in the Changing Mise-en-Scène of Anthropological Fieldwork.” Representations 59 (1997): 85–108. Markotic, Lorraine. “Literary Complicity and the Differend: Naturalizing, Ontologizing, and Self-Referential Representations of National Socialist Persecution.” In Complicity and the Politics of Representation, edited by Cornelia Wächter and Robert Wirth, 57–74. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.

Bibliography

211

May, Larry. Genocide: A Normative Account. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. McCarthy, Patrick. Camus: The Stranger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Meister, Robert. After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Mellema, Gregory. Complicity and Moral Accountability. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. Melley, Timothy. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000. Kindle. Merrill, Trevor Cribben, The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with René Girard. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Moser, Christian. “Peripatetic Liminality: Sebald and the Tradition of the Literary Walk.” In The Undiscover’d Country: W. G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel, edited by Markus Zisselberger, 37–63. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. Mudge, Alden. “Ishiguro Takes a Literary Approach to the Detective Novel.” Bookpage, September, 2000. http:​/​/boo​​kpage​​.com/​​inter​​view/​​ishig​​uro​-t​​akes-​​a​-lit​​ erary​​-appr​​oach-​​to​-th​​e​-d​et​​ectiv​​e​-nov​​el. Muth, Katie. “The Grammars of the System: Thomas Pynchon at Boeing.” Textual Practice 33, no. 3 (2019): 473–93. https​:/​/do​​i​.org​​/10​.1​​080​/0​​95023​​6X​.20​​19​​.15​​80514​. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2011. O’Brien, Conor Cruise. Camus. Glasgow: Fontana, 1970. O’Brien, Susie. “Serving a New World Order: Postcolonial Politics in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.” Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 4 (1996): 787–806. https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/mfs​.1995​.0178. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin, 2009. Píchová, Hana. The Art of Memory in Exile: Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. Prager, Brad. “The Good German as Narrator: W. G. Sebald and the Risks of Holocaust Writing.” New German Critique 96 (2005): 75–102. http://www​.jstor​ .org​/stable​/30040979. Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. London: Vintage, 2007. ———. Bleeding Edge. London: Vintage, 2014. ———. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. ———. Gravity’s Rainbow. London: Vintage, 2013. ———. Inherent Vice. London: Vintage, 2010. ———. Mason & Dixon. London: Vintage, 1998. ———. V. London: Vintage, 2000. ———. Vineland. London: Vintage, 2000. Reynolds, Paul. “Narratives, Articulations, and the Politics of Representation.” In Complicity and the Politics of Representation, edited by Cornelia Wächter and Robert Wirth, 121–38. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. Ricard, François, Agnes’s Final Afternoon. Translated by Aaron Asher. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

212

Bibliography

Rigney, Barbara Hill. “Alias Atwood: Narrative Games and Gender Politics.” In Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Margaret Atwood, edited by Harold Bloom, 59–66. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009. Robbins, Bruce. The Beneficiary. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017. ———. “Cruelty Is Bad: Banality and Proximity in Never Let Me Go.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 40, no. 3 (2007): 289–302. https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​ /40267704. Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. ———. “Preface: Beyond Tancred and Clorinda – Trauma Studies for Implicated Subjects.” In The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, edited by Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone, xi–xviii. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014. Rothfork, John. “Zen Comedy in Postcolonial Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.” Mosaic 29, no. 1 (1996): 79–102. https://www​.jstor​.org​/ stable​/44029839. Sage, Victor. “The Pedagogics of Liminality: Rites of Passage in the Work of Kazuo Ishiguro.” In Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels, edited by Sebastian Groes and Barry Lewis, 31–45. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994. Sanders, Mark. Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. Sanderson, Jay. “Pigoons, Rakunks and Crakers: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Genetically Engineered Animals in a (Latourian) Hybrid World.” Law and Humanities 7, no. 2 (2013): 218–239. http:​/​/dx.​​doi​.o​​rg​/10​​.5235​​/1752​​1483.​​​7​.2​.2​​18. Sanyal, Debarati. Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Schaub, Thomas Hill. “The Crying of Lot 49 and other California Novels.” In The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, edited by Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman and Brian McHale, 30–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Schlesinger, Philip. “W. G. Sebald and the Condition of Exile.” Theory, Culture and Society, 21, no. 2 (2004): 43–67. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/0263276404042134. Sebald, W.G. “Air War and Literature.” In On the Natural History of Destruction, by W.G. Sebald, translated by Anthea Bell, 1–105. London: Random House, 2004. ———. Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. London: Penguin, 2001. ———. The Emigrants. Translated by Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002. ———. The Rings of Saturn. Translated by Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002. ———. Vertigo. Translated by Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002. Sheppard, Richard. “Dexter-Sinister: Some Observations on Decrypting the Mors Code in the Work of W. G. Sebald.” Journal of European Studies 35, no. 4 (2005): 419–63. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/0047244105059168. ———. “‘Woods, Trees, and the Spaces in Between’: A Report on Work Published on W. G. Sebald 2005–2008.” Journal of European Studies 39, no. 1 (2009): 79–128. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/0047244108100808.

Bibliography

213

Smith, Holly. “Culpable Ignorance.” The Philosophical Review 92, no. 4 (1983): 543–71. http://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/2184880. Somacarrera, Pilar. “Power Politics: Power and Identity.” In The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, edited by Coral Ann Howells, 43–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Stacy, Ivan. “Complicity in Dystopia: Failures of Witnessing in China Mieville’s The City and the City and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.” Partial Answers 13, no. 2 (2015): 225–50. https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/pan​.2015​.0021. Staines, David. “Margaret Atwood in Her Canadian Context.” In The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, edited by Coral Ann Howells, 12–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Sugano, Motoko, “‘Putting One’s Convictions to the Test’: Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World in Japan.” In Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels, edited by Sebastian Groes and Barry Lewis, 69–81. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Taberner, Stuart and Karina Berger. Introduction to Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic, edited by Stuart Taberner and Karina Berger, 1–14. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009. Tamaya, Meera. “Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day: The Empire Strikes Back.” Modern Language Studies 22, no. 2 (1992): 45–56. https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​ /3195017. Thody, Philip. Albert Camus. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989. Thomas, Owen. “Blind to Complicity? Official Truth and the Hidden Role of Methods.” In Exploring Complicity: Concepts, Cases and Critique, edited by Afxentis Afxentiou, Robin Dunford and Michael Neu, 161–78. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. Trezise, Thomas. “Between History and Psychoanalysis: A Case Study in the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony.” History and Memory 20, no. 1 (2008): 7–47. https​:/​/do​​i​.org​​/10​.2​​979​/h​​is​.20​​09​.​21​​.1​.12​​7. ———. Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Vice, Sue. Holocaust Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Vivian, Bradford. Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Wächter, Cornelia. “Loyalty or Complicity? The Moral Assessment of Transgender ‘Passing’ in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet.” In Exploring Complicity: Concepts, Cases and Critique, edited by Afxentis Afxentiou, Robin Dunford and Michael Neu, 83–97. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. Wächter, Cornelia and Robert Wirth. “The Chapters.” In Complicity and the Politics of Representation, edited by Cornelia Wächter and Robert Wirth, 9–23. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. Walkowitz, Rebecca. “Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation and the New World Literature.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 40, no. 3 (2007): 216–39. https://jstor​.org​/i40010478.

214

Bibliography

Waugh, Patricia. “Kazuo Ishiguro’s Not-Too-Late Modernism.” In Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels, edited by Sebastian Groes and Barry Lewis, 13–30. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Webley, Alyn. “‘Shanghaid’ into Service: Double Binds in When We Were Orphans.” In Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels, edited by Sebastian Groes and Barry Lewis, 184–95. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Weisenburger, Steven. “Gravity’s Rainbow.” In The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, edited by Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman and Brian McHale, 44–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Weiss, Allan. “Offred’s Complicity and the Dystopian Tradition in The Handmaid’s Tale.” Studies in Canadian Literature / Études En Littérature Canadienne 34, no. 1 (2009), 120–41. https​:/​/jo​​urnal​​s​.lib​​.unb.​​ca​/in​​dex​.p​​hp​/SC​​L​/art​​icle/​​​view/​​12383​. West, Adrian Nathan. “Nostalgia for Probity in the Era of the Selfie: W. G. Sebald’s American Imitators.” In Über W.G. Sebald Beiträge zu einem anderen Bild des Autors, edited by Uwe Schütte. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017. West, Tim. “Destiny as Alibi: Milan Kundera, Václav Havel and the ‘Czech Question’ after 1968.” The Slavonic and East European Review 87, no. 3 (2009): 401–28. https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/40650406. White, Hayden. “Figural Realism in Witness Literature.” Parallax 10, no. 1 (2004): 113–24. https​:/​/do​​i​.org​​/10​.1​​080​/1​​35346​​40320​​​00171​​145. Whitehead, Anne. “Writing with Care: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.” Contemporary Literature 52, no. 1 (2011): 54–83. http://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​ /41261825. Wiesel, Elie. Day. Translated by Anne Borchardt. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. Wilson, Sharon R. “Blindness and Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Major Novels.” In The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, edited by Coral Ann Howells, 176–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Winstead, Ashley. “Beyond Persuasion: Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Politics.” Studies in the Novel 49, no. 2 (2017): 228–49. https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/sdn​.2017​ .0018. Woods, Michelle, Translating Milan Kundera. Clevedon, Buffalo and Toronto: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Young, James. “Interpreting Literary Testimony: A Preface to Rereading Holocaust Diaries and Memoirs.” New Literary History 18, no. 2 (1987): 403–23. https:// www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/468737. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. Translated by Clarence Brown. New York: Penguin, 1993. Zilcosky, John. “Sebald’s Uncanny Travels: The Impossibility of Getting Lost.” In W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion, edited by J.J. Long and Anne Whitehead, 102–20. Edniburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.

Index

9/11, 145, 147, 163–64, 166–67 accomplice, 7, 33, 43, 56 actus reus, 5–6, 14 Against the Day, 159, 168 Algeria, 33–35, 40, 47, 57 alignment, 2, 11, 19, 22–26, 34, 36–39, 43, 45, 49, 51, 56, 62, 64–66, 68, 70–72, 77, 86, 91, 93–94, 96–101, 104–13, 115, 130, 134, 149–50, 155–56, 158, 175–76, 178, 180–85, 188, 200; definition of, 22 allegory, 34, 37, 41–48, 50, 53 America. See United States, the apartheid, 20 archive, 9, 11, 13, 132, 134–36, 139–40 An Artist of the Floating World, 24, 26, 91–97, 99, 104–6 Asia, 93, 123 atrocity, 1–3, 16, 23, 48, 50–54, 56, 75, 78, 80–81, 99, 106, 115, 119–27, 130, 132, 134–35, 140–41, 154, 182 Atwood, Margaret, 2, 3, 26, 27–28, 107, 141, 168, 173–76, 183, 185, 187, 189, 191, 195–96, 201 Austerlitz, 27, 120, 132–41 bare life, 106–7, 109, 115, 189, 193 beneficiary, 4–5, 102, 122, 168

Bleeding Edge, 27–28, 141, 145, 147, 159–68 blindness/blind spots, 6, 16, 23–26, 34–35, 37–42, 46, 48, 56–57, 74, 85, 92, 96, 100–101, 103, 105, 119, 124, 128–30, 132–33, 146, 180, 189, 190, 201 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 26, 53, 61–62, 74–80, 82 Britain, 92, 97, 99, 101–2, 106, 121, 123, 133; British imperialism, 101–2, 121–23 The Buried Giant, 91 bystander, 3–5, 13, 49, 53 Camus, Albert, 2–3, 13, 25–26, 28, 33–38, 40–42, 44–51, 53–57; and Algeria, 33–35, 37, 41, 44, 47, 57; journalism, 33–34, 47–48, 57; relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, 45, 50, 53 capitalism, 5, 28, 103, 145, 147, 153– 55, 187, 194. See also neoliberalism censorship, 53–54, 110–11, 176 China, 27, 92, 101–4, 106, 120, 123, 126, 128 collaboration, 6, 15–16, 21, 33, 37, 43–44, 80–82, 154–55 collusion, 6, 147 215

216

Index

colonialism, 26, 34, 37, 40–42, 44, 102– 3, 106, 122–23, 128–31, 199 Combat, 33, 47 communism, 21–22, 26, 45, 49, 57, 61, 63, 66, 68–71, 73–76, 79–80, 83–84, 102 complicity: collective, 3, 6, 8–9, 23, 25, 106, 110, 121, 141, 146; “conceptual cousins” of, 6, 14; definitions of, 5; dilemmas, 3, 8, 25–26, 51, 62, 80, 115, 141, 180; empathetic, 2, 24–26, 34, 40–41, 84, 92, 96, 99, 174, 180, 200; formal, 2–3, 24–27, 41, 79–80, 86, 174, 180, 200; minimum threshold of, 36, 95, 119; thematic, 2, 23, 25–26, 43, 69, 86, 175, 180. See also accomplice; collaboration; collusion; condoning; connivance; conspiracy; culpable ignorance compromise, 7, 44, 57, 174–75, 180, 183–85, 187, 191–92, 194–96, 201; being compromised, 33, 35, 44, 57, 151, 174–75, 180, 183, 185, 196, 201 condoning, 2, 6, 8, 14–16, 23, 26, 35, 63, 74–75, 80–82, 86, 91–92, 94–96, 196, 199, 201 connivance, 2, 6, 8, 14–16, 23, 45, 78, 97–98, 166, 190, 199, 201 conspiracy, 6, 15, 33, 73, 98, 120, 145– 52, 155–56, 160–63, 165, 167–68; conspiracy theories, 146–47, 163. See also paranoia counterculture, 28, 149, 153–56, 158, 160 The Crying of Lot 49, 27–28, 141, 147– 54, 157, 159, 162 culpable ignorance, 6, 8, 14, 16, 27, 34– 35, 43, 45, 47, 50, 54, 57, 63, 78, 83, 103, 146, 153–54, 157–58, 176, 181, 187, 190, 196, 199, 201; definitions of, 16, 30n69 Czechoslovakia, 26, 57, 61, 69, 75, 78–79, 81, 86, 87n3; communist coup d’état, 75; Prague Spring, 62, 81; Soviet invasion of, 68, 81

death penalty, 43, 45. See also executions democracy, 7, 79, 82, 92, 95–100, 106, 115, 145, 150, 160–63, 168, 179, 181, 189 detective fiction, 100–102, 104–5 dialogue, 10, 12–13, 54–56, 68, 72, 74, 85, 100, 199 dirty hands, 145, 174–75, 183–84 dirty wars, 27, 145, 161–62 disposition, 22–23, 26, 34–37, 39, 42, 49, 62–63, 65–66, 68–71, 74, 77–78, 80–86, 91, 97, 100, 103, 105–7, 119, 130, 132, 134, 137, 149, 152–53, 156, 175–76, 180, 182, 200–201; definition of, 22 dissent, 62, 74, 82–83, 145, 191 dystopia, 28, 106–7, 110, 155, 168, 173–74, 176, 178, 181–82, 186–88, 190–91, 196, 201 Easter Rising, The, 131 The Emigrants, 120 enabling condition, 1, 16, 22–24, 51, 62, 71, 75, 78, 80, 101, 111, 119–21, 126, 132, 135, 140, 180, 182–83, 187; definition of, 22–23 environment, destruction of, 2, 27–28, 169, 173–74, 186, 188 erased/erasure, 37, 39–40, 45, 48, 53, 57, 74–76, 79–80, 82–83, 130, 190. See also forgetting Europe, 3, 28, 33–34, 53, 57, 67, 74, 77, 84, 106, 110, 138–39 executions, 45, 77, 87n3, 98, 175–76, 182 exile, 77, 79, 136 The Fall, 25–26, 33–35, 42, 48–57 fascism, 28, 77, 84, 98, 145, 153 Felman, Shoshana, 9–13, 26, 38, 42– 44, 46–50, 52–53, 55, 57, 91, 94 feminism, 182 film, 28, 151, 157–59, 186 forgetting, 62, 74–78; repressive erasure, 75

Index

France, 20, 33–35, 43, 47, 53, 62, 74, 79, 81, 123, 126–27, 136; colonization of Algeria, 33–35, 40–41, 47–48; German occupation of, 33–34, 43–45, 47, 50; and the Holocaust, 20, 45, 133–34. See also French Resistance French Resistance, 26, 43 genocide, 1, 22–24, 29n5, 120, 134–35, 140, 169n1 Germany, 1–2, 16, 23, 28–29n3, 97, 119, 125–26. See also Nazism Gilead, 28, 107, 173–76, 178–87 Gravity’s Rainbow, 147, 153, 157, 168 gray zone, the, 1, 3, 12, 44, 51 guilt, 5, 13, 16, 33, 35, 39–40, 43, 45, 49, 51, 54–55, 62, 65, 74, 80–81, 99, 137, 164 The Handmaid’s Tale, 28, 173–86 Hitler, Adolph, 3, 97 Holocaust, the, 2–3, 8–9, 13, 18, 20, 23–24, 28, 28–29n3, 29n5, 34, 42– 46, 49–51, 53, 98, 110, 132–40 human rights, 4, 13 hybrid/hybridity, 174, 187, 191–92, 194–96, 200 imperialism, 24, 26, 41, 92–93, 95, 100, 115, 123. See also Britain; Japan implicated subject, 4–5, 22, 25, 42, 200 Inherent Vice, 147, 159 innocence, 5, 19, 33, 40, 42, 45, 51, 54–55, 62, 69–70, 74, 76–78, 124, 167, 193–94 internet, the, 28, 147, 160–64, 166–68 Ireland, 122–23 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 2–3, 13, 15, 19, 21–22, 24–26, 86, 91–92, 96–97, 100, 105, 107, 109, 115, 119, 121, 141 Japan, 92–93, 95–97, 99–100, 103, 114; Japanese imperialism, 92–93, 95, 100, 103, 115

217

Jews/Jewry, 50–54, 78, 97, 110, 134, 136, 138–39. See also Holocaust, the The Joke, 26, 62–69, 71, 77 judges, 41, 45, 49, 54, 56 kitsch, 80, 83–86 Kundera, Milan, 2–3, 21, 25–26, 53, 57, 61–63, 68–70, 72, 74–80, 83, 85–86, 115, 119, 121, 141, 156; allegations against, 61–62, 87n3; emigration to France, 62, 74, 79 Latin America, 161 Laub, Dori, 9–13, 17, 19, 30n38, 38, 55, 96, 119, 137, 140, 158–59. See also witness/witnessing, levels of laughter, 51–53, 74–80, 83–84, 99, 109, 166 law, 1, 6, 78, 93, 121, 149, 174, 181, 200; international, 6; legal discourse, 3–6, 8, 14, 17, 37, 121. See also judges; lawyers lawyers, 33, 39, 42, 49, 51, 54, 151 left, the (political orientation), 33, 45, 49, 53, 78, 85, 155–56, 160 Levi, Primo, 1–3, 12, 16, 18, 23, 28, 110. See also gray zone, the Life is Elsewhere, 21, 26, 61–62, 69–74, 77 London, 103, 137–38 lyricism, 62, 69–71, 73–74 MaddAddam (novel), 173, 186, 188, 192, 194–96 MaddAddam trilogy, The, 28, 173–74, 186–92, 194, 196 Mason & Dixon, 145 memory, 1, 3, 12–13, 20, 27, 75–76, 78, 110, 119–20, 125–26, 131–33, 135, 139–40, 158; collective, 76, 110, 126. See also trauma mens rea, 5–6, 14, 18 middle class, 42, 50–51

218

Index

military, 27, 93, 102, 128–29, 146, 169– 70n28, 173; military-industrial, 27, 141, 145, 147–48, 153–55, 162 narrator, 13, 19, 23, 26–27, 33, 35, 37, 42, 46, 51, 62, 68, 70–71, 73–79, 81, 83–86, 91–92, 97, 104–5, 113–14, 119–32, 135–41, 175–76, 182, 187, 190; first-person, 37, 91; thirdperson, 72; unreliable, 91, 104, 113, 128, 130–31; as witness, 48, 119, 122–23, 136, 138–39, 141 Nazism, 1, 9, 21, 23, 26, 33, 45, 92, 97–100, 115, 119, 189 neoliberalism, 2, 28, 103, 146–69; history of, 151, 169n2, 169–70n28 Never Let Me Go, 15, 22, 26–27, 91, 100, 106–15 New York, 147, 166 Nixon, Richard, 147, 154 North America, 3, 154, 173, 186–87 open secret, 146, 148, 150, 154, 162 Oryx and Crake, 187–90, 192–93, 196 The Outsider, 25, 34–42, 47, 57; alternative title (The Stranger), 58n6 paranoia, 43, 145, 152–53, 155, 163, 165 Paris, 48, 50, 52–54, 84, 86, 133–35, 139 perpetrator/perpetration, 1–5, 7, 12, 23, 26–27, 28n3, 29nn4–5, 43–44, 49, 53, 55, 74, 78, 81–83, 85, 101–2, 115, 121–22, 134, 153–54, 166, 175, 179, 181, 199 The Plague, 24–26, 33–34, 41, 42–50, 53, 57 plain sight, in, 9, 114, 146, 148, 150, 162 polyphony, 18, 64, 67–69, 72, 85, 88n37 posthuman, 174, 194, 196 power, 8, 18, 22, 27–28, 45, 51–52, 54, 56, 61, 63, 66, 76, 79–80, 93–94, 103–4, 106–7, 126–29, 134, 138,

145–46, 149, 154, 156, 158, 161, 162–64, 167, 173, 177–78, 180, 181–82, 184–85, 195; disciplinary, 63, 80, 106; state, 134, 173; structures of, 93–94, 103, 126, 128–29, 182, 185 Prague Spring. See Czechoslovakia progressive (political orientation), 79, 85–86, 147, 154, 156 Pynchon, Thomas, 2–3, 25, 27–28, 86, 141, 145–48, 151, 153–54, 156–57, 159–60, 162, 164, 168; at Boeing, 145, 169n1; literary career, 25, 147, 153, 159 Reagan, Ronald, 147, 153, 155, 161 Resistance (French). See French Resistance The Remains of the Day, 21, 24, 26, 91–92, 96–100, 104–6 The Rings of Saturn, 27, 120–33, 136, 140 Rothberg, Michael, 4–5, 12, 22, 25, 102, 134, 168, 200. See also implicated subject Russia, 75, 78, 81–2. See also Soviet Union, the Sebald, W. G., 2–3, 13, 23–25, 27, 115, 119–21, 123–24, 126–27, 130–33, 135–37, 139–41; faked material, 128, 130–31, 143n51 Shanghai, 100, 102–4 Shoah, the. See Holocaust, the silence, 6, 26, 33–35, 48–55, 61, 82, 119–20, 125, 153, 176; conspiracy of, 33, 120 slow violence, 27, 189 social contract, 7 South Africa, 20 Soviet Union, the, 53, 61–62, 79, 81, 84. See also Russia speculative fiction, 187, 195, 201 Stalin, Joseph, 3, 33, 45, 49–50 The Stranger. See The Outsider

Index

The Testaments, 28, 173, 175, 178–86 testimony, 2–3, 8–14, 17–19, 24, 26, 30n38, 34–35, 37–40, 42, 47–48, 50–51, 55, 57, 82, 101, 114, 119, 122, 136, 140, 158, 179, 182, 184 Tokyo, 95 torture, 44, 55, 95 totalitarianism, 3, 7, 26, 28, 34, 37, 39, 55, 57, 61–63, 67, 74–77, 79–81, 83–86, 94, 134, 152, 156, 181, 186 trauma, 1, 9–10, 12, 14, 27, 50, 94, 104, 120, 132–33, 135, 137, 139–40 twentieth century, 3, 16, 19–20, 48, 81, 104, 141, 145, 152, 169n1, 173, 182, 189 twenty-first century, 141, 163, 168, 201 The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 26, 62–63, 79–86 United States, the, 27, 84, 145–48, 150– 55, 157, 161–62, 166–68, 176, 181 Ustopia, 191 utopia/utopian, 157, 191–92 V, 145, 157, 168 Vertigo, 120, 128 victim/victimhood, 1–5, 9, 11–14, 20, 28–29n3, 29n5, 31n77, 33–34, 37, 39–40, 43–45, 47, 49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 69, 82, 101, 104, 106–11, 114–15, 129, 134, 136, 166, 181, 188, 199

219

Vineland, 27–28, 86, 141, 147, 153–60 violence, 9, 15, 19–20, 23, 26, 34–38, 40, 44–45, 47, 56, 61, 78, 81–82, 106, 112, 119, 121, 132, 136, 154, 175, 181–83, 187, 189. See also slow violence witness/witnessing, 1–4, 8–20, 24, 26, 28, 33–38, 40, 42, 45–53, 56–57, 82, 91, 96, 100–101, 103, 105, 110–12, 119, 121–24, 132, 136–38, 140–41, 150, 154, 157–59, 163–65, 199, 201; alignment of, 11; belated, 46–48, 52, 101, 119, 121–24, 132, 137–38, 140–41, 165; ethics of, 9, 13, 49, 140–41, 158–59, 163; etymology of, 10–11; failures of, 3, 8–9, 14–17, 24, 26, 34, 35, 37–38, 40, 42, 47–50, 52–53, 56–57, 82, 91, 100, 103, 110–11, 150, 154, 158–59, 199, 201; levels of, 10, 17, 19, 96, 119, 137; listening as, 10; and writing, 11. See also testimony When We Were Orphans, 26, 91, 100–106 working class, 34, 64 World War I, 105, 125 World War II, 2, 6, 26, 28, 33, 43, 47, 53, 92–93, 95, 97, 125, 132, 162 The Year of the Flood, 173, 188–91

About the Author

Ivan Stacy is associate professor in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Beijing Normal University. His main research interests are complicity in postwar fiction, the carnivalesque, and the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. He has taught in the UK, China, Thailand, South Korea, Libya, and Bhutan.

221