The Future of Text and Image : Collected Essays on Literary and Visual Conjunctures 1443836400, 9781443836401

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The Future of Text and Image

The Future of Text and Image: Collected Essays on Literary and Visual Conjunctures

Edited by

Ofra Amihay and Lauren Walsh

The Future of Text and Image: Collected Essays on Literary and Visual Conjunctures, Edited by Ofra Amihay and Lauren Walsh This book first published 2012 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2012 by Ofra Amihay and Lauren Walsh and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-3640-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3640-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Image X Text W. J. T. Mitchell PART I: TEXT AND IMAGE IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Chapter One............................................................................................... 15 Portrait of a Secret: J. R. Ackerley and Alison Bechdel Molly Pulda Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 39 PostSecret as Imagetext: The Reclamation of Traumatic Experiences and Identity Tanya K. Rodrigue Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 69 Difficult Articulations: Comics Autobiography, Trauma, and Disability Dale Jacobs and Jay Dolmage PART II: TEXT AND IMAGE IN THE NOVEL Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 93 The Madeleine Revisualized: Proustian Memory and Sebaldian Visuality Lauren Walsh Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 131 Immigwriting: Photographs as Migratory Aesthetics in the Modern Hebrew Novel Ofra Amihay

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PART III: TEXT AND IMAGE IN POETRY Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 169 Out of Site: Photography, Writing, and Displacement in Leslie Scalapino’s The Tango Magnus Bremmer Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 199 Orientation, Encounter, and Synaesthesia in Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada Gizem Arslan Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 231 From Avant-Garde to the Digital Age: Reconceptualizing Experimental Catalan Poetry Eduardo Ledesma PART IV: TEXT AND IMAGE IN ART Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 273 Burroughs / Rauschenberg: Text-Image / Image-Text Elise Takehana Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 309 Creating Unity through Disunity: Futurism as Paradoxical Movement Cara Takakjian Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 325 Heterochronic Visions: Imag(in)ing the Present Heike Polster Afterword ................................................................................................ 345 X/And: Close Encounters of the Third Kind Marianne Hirsch Contributors............................................................................................. 349 Index........................................................................................................ 353

PREFACE

In one of the pivotal moments of his book The Future of the Image (2007), Jacques Rancière writes: The mixing of materialities is conceptual before it is real. Doubtless we had to wait until the Cubist and Dadaist age for the appearance of words from newspapers, poems or bus tickets on the canvases of painters […]. But as early as 1830 Balzac could populate his novels with Dutch paintings.1

In other words, before the crossing over between the visual and the textual became an established artistic practice, literature—and more specifically, the novel—was able to bring together the verbal and the visual in a way that challenged the traditional dichotomy between the two, and conceptually heralded, as Rancière notes, the “real” attempts at such crossover to follow. This potential to “[redistribute] the relations between the visible and the sayable,”2 and the cultural challenges it presents, are becoming more and more manifested in the literary realm today, as the visual, once primarily conceptual in scope, frequently occupies equally actualized (“real”) and essential roles alongside the textual, in the novel as in many other forms. As a result, the relation between the visual and the textual in literature is at the heart of an increasing number of scholarly projects and is becoming an independent discipline. Inspired by Rancière’s insightful survey, this volume is an attempt to explore these profound literary shifts through the work of twelve talented, and in some cases emerging, scholars who study text and image relations in diverse forms and contexts. In a talk he gave at New York University (on April 22, 2008) after the publication of the English edition of his book, Rancière pointed out that the translation of the original title—Le destin des images (2003) as The Future of the Image—is somewhat lacking since it does not convey the manifold meanings that the term destin carries. Aware of such limitations, we nevertheless wanted to preserve the sense of homage to that book as it is known in English, hence our own title The Future of Text and Image. 1 2

Rancière 2007, 42. Rancière 2007, 12.

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Yet we hope that by exploring different examples of text and image encounters in the past and in the present, this volume will shed light not only on the future of text and image as an independent discipline. We hope that it will also elucidate this discipline’s role and place—indeed, its destiny—among the many scholarly fields from which it draws, such as art history, literary criticism, culture studies, critical theory, and media studies, to mention just a few. When discussing text and image relations, Rancière coins the term “sentence-image” (phrase-image), which represents not merely the merger of a verbal sequence and a visual form, but rather “the combination of two functions that are to be defined aesthetically—that is, by the way in which they undo the representative relationship between text and image.”3 It is this complex understanding of text and image relations that our subtitle “Literary and Visual Conjunctures” aims to convey. The intermedial conjunctures investigated in this book play with and against the traditional roles of the visual and the verbal. In the spirit of such perception, The Future of Text and Image presents explorations of the incorporation of visual elements into different literary forms, of visual writing modes, and of textuality and literariness of images. Yet while Rancière’s discussion expands into other media such as music and cinema, The Future of Text and Image focuses on the special potential literature offers for the combination of these two functions. Alongside examinations of major forms and genres such as memoirs, novels, and poetry, this volume expands the discussion of text and image relations into more marginal forms of literature, for instance, collage books, the PostSecret collections of anonymous postcards, and digital poetry. Considering the special role that cyberspace plays in the formation and expression of endeavors such as the PostSecret project or digital poetry, these last two examples also mark the particular effort to engage with the most recent text and image conjunctures becoming available in the digital age. In other words, while exploring the destiny of text and image as an independent discipline, this volume simultaneously looks at the very literal future of text and image forms in an ever-changing technological reality. We would like to conclude by acknowledging the many people whose efforts helped this volume to take shape. First and foremost, we thank all those who contributed to this volume their original work, academic and artistic, thus making it the culturally and intellectually diverse mosaic we envisioned when we began this project. We would also like to thank every artist and institute that allowed us to reproduce the many visual elements 3

Rancière 2007, 46; cf. idem 2003, 56.

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illustrating the discussions in the book, without which a volume on text and image relations would not have been complete. We are extremely grateful to both W. J. T. Mitchell and Marianne Hirsch for their willingness to contribute their insights and experience to this volume. As two of the major scholars to lay down the founding bricks for the text and image discipline, their presence was truly inspiring. A special thanks goes to the staff at Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and particularly Carol Koulikourdi, for recognizing the potential of the project from its earliest stages and for patiently and meticulously escorting us through this journey. Last but certainly not least, our personal thanks to those dearest to us, Aryeh, Alex, and Isabelle, for being there beside us with good advice or a reassuring smile. —Ofra Amihay and Lauren Walsh New York, 2011

Works Cited Rancière, Jacques. 2003. Le destin des images. Paris: La Fabrique edition. —. 2007. The Future of the Image. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London; New York: Verso.

INTRODUCTION IMAGE X TEXT W. J. T. MITCHELL

What is the “imagetext”? We might begin not by asking what it means, but how can it be written down. In a footnote to Picture Theory (1994) I took a stab at a notational answer: I will employ the typographic convention of the slash to designate the “image/text” as a problematic gap, cleavage, or rupture in representation. The term “imagetext” designates composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text. “Image-text,” with a hyphen, designates relations of the visual and verbal.1

Rupture, synthesis, relationship. The essays in the present volume range over all three of these possibilities. On the one hand, there are what we might call “literal” manifestations of the imagetext: graphic narratives and comics, photo texts, poetic experiments with voice and picture, collage composition, and typography itself. On the other hand, there are the figurative, displaced versions of the image-text: the formal divisions of narrative and description, the relations of vision and language in memory, the nesting of images (metaphors, symbols, concrete objects) inside discourse, and the obverse, the murmur of discourse and language in graphic and visual media. And then there is a third thing, the traumatic gap of the unrepresentable space between words and images, what I tried to designate with the “/” or slash. It is that third thing that I would like to re-open in this introduction. And I want to do it, again, “literally,” with an exploration of a typographic 1

Mitchell 1994, 89. See also chapter three, “Beyond Comparison: Picture, Text, and Method” (ibid., 83-107), and the concluding chapter, “Some Pictures of Representation” (ibid., 417-25). My other key writings on the concept of the imagetext include Iconology (idem 1986) and “Word and Image,” in Critical Terms for Art History (idem 1996).

2

Introduction

sign that might synthesize the three relationships of texts and images, and suggest further possibilities as well. My chosen sign is the “X,” and I wish to treat it as a Joycean verbo-voco-visual pun that condenses the following meanings and inscriptions: 1) X as the “unknown” or “variable” in algebra, or the “X factor” in vernacular usage; the signature of the illiterate; 2) X as the sign of multiplication, or (even more evocatively) as the “times sign”; also as a slightly tilted or torqued modification of the simplest operation in mathematics, the “plus” sign (+); 3) X as the sign of chiasmus in rhetoric, the trope of changing places and dialectical reversal, as in “the language of images” providing “images of language”; another way to see this is to grasp the ways in which image and text alternately evoke differentials and similarities, a paradox we could inscribe by fusing the relation of image versus text with image as text, a double cross that could be notated with an invented symbol, “VS” overlapped with “AS” to produce a double X in the intersection of A and V; 4) X as an image of crossing, intersection, and encounter, like the iconic sign at a railroad crossing; 5) X as a combination of the two kinds of slashes (/ and \), suggesting opposite directionalities in the portals to the unknown, different ways into the gap or rupture between signs and senses, indicating the difference between an approach to words and images from the side of the unspeakable or the unimaginable, the invisible or the inaudible; 6) X as the phoneme of eXcess, of the eXtra, the unpredictable surplus that will undoubtedly be generated by re-opening the variety of relationships subtended by this peculiar locution, the imagetext. This is the sign of everything that has been left out of my construal of the X. Why is it possible, even necessary, to formulate such an abundance of meaning around a simple relation between two elementary, even primitive terms like “text” and “image”? One scarcely knows where to begin. A simple opening is provided by the innocent little phrase, “visual and verbal representation,” that is often uttered as a kind of alternative to “word and image” or “text and image.” But a moment’s thought reveals a strange discontinuity, a shift of levels of meaning. In order to make anything specific out of the visual-verbal, we must ask, “visual as distinct from what”? “Verbal as opposed to what?” And the obvious candidates are: images or pictures as opposed to verbal signs; visual sensations as opposed to auditory. The visual denotes a specific sensory channel, the verbal designates a specific semiotic register. The difference between the visual and verbal is actually two differences, one grounded in the senses (seeing versus hearing), the other in the nature of signs and meaning (words as arbitrary, conventional symbols, as distinct from images as representations by virtue of likeness or similitude). The phrase “visual-verbal,” then,

Image X Text

3

produces a productive confusion of signs and senses, ways of producing meaning and ways of inhabiting perceptual experience. The following diagram (Fig. [1]) provides a picture of this confusion:

Fig. [1]: ImageText Square of Opposition

The “X” that links and differentiates images and texts is the intersection between signs and senses, semiotics and aesthetics. It becomes evident at a glance, then, that the apparently simple concept of the imagetext opens up a kind of fractal expansion of terms, as is captured in a more fully elaborated version of the diagram (Fig. [2]):

Fig. [2]: ImageText Square of Opposition Elaborated

As the sensory-semiotic dimensions of the word-image difference expand, they begin to demand some essential distinctions. When we talk about “words,” for instance, are we referring to speech or writing? (Let’s leave out, for the moment, gesture, which Rousseau saw as the original form of verbal expression, and which is fully elaborated today in the

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Introduction

languages of the Deaf).2 Does the “imagetext” concept automatically rule out orality? On the side of the image, are we talking about visual images— e.g., drawings, photographs, paintings, sculpture? Or auditory images, as in poetry and music? And what happens when we include the notion of “verbal imagery” (metaphor, description, etc.), which has not yet found a place in my diagram? Is this the “X” factor as an excess that overflows the boundary of any conceivable graphic diagram? Any systematic analysis of the relation of images and texts, then, leads inevitably into a wider field of reflection on aesthetics, semiotics, and the whole concept of representation itself as a heterogeneous fabric of sights and sounds, spectacle and speech, pictures and inscriptions.3 Is this not a mulitply articulated fabric, in which the warp and woof are constantly shifting not only from sensory channels (the eye and the ear) to semiotic functions (iconic likenesses and arbitrary symbols), but also to modalities of cognition (space and time) to operational codes (the analog and the digital)? The fractal picture of the imagetext has scarcely begun with the “visual-verbal.” And will we not then have to add the “thirds” that inevitably spring up between our binary oppositions, sometimes as compromise formations (could the “ana-lytical” itself be a demand for fusion or interplay between analog and digital codes?) and sometimes as blank spaces in which something unpredictable and monstrous might emerge? The gap between the Lacanian registers of the Symbolic and Imaginary is the black hole of the Real, the site of trauma and the unrepresentable (but clearly not an unnameable place, since there it is, the name of “the Real”). Could it be the “beach” or margin between sea and land that Foucault names as the frontier between the words and images in Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe?4 Is it a contested zone in which, as Foucault puts it, “between the figure and the text a whole series of intersections—or rather attacks” are “launched by one against the other”?5 Could we then see our “X” as crossed lances (/ \) or “arrows shot at the enemy target, enterprises of subversion and destruction, lance blows and wounds, a battle”?6 Leonardo da Vinci called the encounter of painting and poetry a paragone or contest, and Lessing described their relation as 2

See Mitchell 2006. See “Some Pictures of Representation,” the conclusion to Picture Theory (Mitchell 1994, 417-25). 4 The oficial title of this work is La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images—see Magritte 1929). 5 Foucault 1983, 26. Foucault also refers to the blank space between the pipe and its caption as a “crevasse—an uncertain foggy region” (ibid., 28). 6 Foucault 1983, 26. 3

Image X Text

5

the frontier between two countries, normally friendly and peaceful, but sometimes launching invasions into their neighbors’ territory. There are, then, normal and normative relations between texts and images. One illustrates or explains or names or describes or ornaments the other. They complement and supplement one another, simultaneously completing and extending. That is why Foucault focuses on the “common frontier” between Magritte’s words and images, the “calm sand of the page,” on which “are established all the relations of designation, nomination, description, classification”—in short the whole order of the “seeable and sayable,” the “visible and articulable,” that lays down the archaeological layers of knowledge itself.7 Word and image are woven together to create a reality. The tear in that fabric is the Real. Foucault makes the space between images and texts even more radical when he denies it the status of a space at all: “it is too much to claim that there is a blank or lacuna: instead, it is an absence of space, an effacement of the ‘common place’ between the signs of writing and the lines of the image.”8 X becomes, in this sense, the erasure or “effacement,” not just of something inscribed, but of the very space in which the inscription might appear, as if the X signified a pair of slashes, like the tearing of a page, or cuts in a canvas left by a militant iconoclast—or an artist like Lucio Fontana. Let’s say, then, that the normal relation of text and image is complementary or supplementary, and that together they make up a third thing, or open a space where that third thing appears. If we take comics as our example, the third thing that appears is just the composite art form known as comics, combining text and image in a highly specific medium. But there is also a third thing in the medium of graphic narration that is neither text nor image, but which simultaneously links and separates them, namely, the gutter. These unobtrusive framing lines, as is well known, are neither words nor images, but indicators of relationships, of temporal sequence or simultaneity, or of notional camera movements in space from panorama to close-up. Avant garde comics, from Smokey Stover to Art Spiegelman to Chris Ware, have often played with the gutter, cutting across it, treating it as a window that can be opened to hang out the laundry. So the third thing, the X between text and image certainly does not have to be an absence. In fact, we might argue that there is always 7

For an account of the way Foucault’s playful reflections on Magritte’s imagetext composition serve as a basis for his whole archaeological method, see Deleuze 1988, 80. 8 Foucault 1983, 28-29.

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Introduction

something positive, even in the blank space of the Real, the slash of the canvas, or the non-space beyond blankness. Something rushes in to fill the emptiness, some “X” to suggest the presence of an absence, the appearance of something neither text nor image. In Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986), I identified this third thing as my subtitle indicated, in the ideological framework that invariably suffuses the field of imagetext relationships: the difference between the “natural” and “conventional” sign; the distinction between an illiterate viewer who can see what images represent, and a literate reader who can see through the image to something else (typically, a text). In the polemic of Lessing’s Laocoön (1766) the difference between image and text is not only figured in the relation of different nations, but rendered literal in his characterization of French culture as obsessed with effeminate “bright eyes” and spectacle, while German (and English) culture are described as manly cultures of the word. And if we survey the history of semiotics and aesthetics, we find the positive presence of the third element everywhere. The locus classicus is, of course, Aristotle’s Poetics, which divides the “means” or “medium” of tragedy into three parts: opsis, melos, lexis (spectacle, music, words). Or, as Roland Barthes would have it, Image, Music, Text (1977). The X-factor in the imagetext problematic is music, or more generally, sound, which may be why “imagetext” has always struck me as slightly impoverished in that it confines words to the realm of writing and printing, and neglects the sphere of orality and speech, not to mention gesture.9 Sometimes this silencing of the third dimension becomes explicit, most famously in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820), where the text not only conjures up the sight and image of its titular subject, but further attributes to it a silent music and speech—“a leafy tale” told “more sweetly than our rhyme,” accompanied by an “unheard” music. The radio comedians Bob and Ray used to pose the riddle, why is radio superior to television? The answer: because the images we see while listening to the radio are better, more vivid, dynamic, and vital. The image/music/text triad must be the most durable and deeply grounded taxonomy of the arts and media that we possess, because it recurs constantly in the most disparate contexts, defining the elements of the Wagnerian Gesamstkunstwerk, the components of cinema, radio, and television, and even the order of technical media that constitute modernity. I am thinking here of Friedrich Kittler’s masterpiece, Gramophone, Film, 9

A version of the Aristotelian and Barthesian triad was institutionalized some years ago in the University of Chicago’s common core as a year long course sequence in “Media Aesthetics” entitled “Image/Sound/Text.”

Image X Text

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Typewriter (1986), which is, on the one hand, an updating of the old Aristotelian categories, and on the other, a trio of inventions subject to a new technical synthesis in the master platform of the computer. Finally, we must turn to the role of the imagetext in the constitutive elements of semiotics, the fundamental theory of signs and meaning. There we encounter Saussure’s famous diagram (Fig. [3]) of the linguistic sign as a bifurcated oval with an image of a tree in the upper compartment and the word “arbor” in the lower.

Fig. [3]: From Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1915)

It is as if Saussure were forced to admit that even words, speech, and language itself cannot be adequately represented by a purely linguistic notation.10 The image, which stands here not just for a tree but for the signified or mental image conjured by the verbal signifier, actually stands above and prior to the word in the model of language itself. Saussure is building upon a picture of language that could be traced back into the psychology of empiricism, in which mental images are the content named by words, or all the way to Plato’s discussion of natural and conventional signs in the Cratylus. But we also have to notice that the imagetext is not all there is to the sign, and there is a surplus of “third elements”: the oval, which is presumably a graphic rendering of the wholeness of the sign, despite its binary structure; the arrows, which stand for the bi-directionality of meaning, a kind of circuit of alternating current between spoken words and ideas in the mind; and (most important) the bar between signifier and signified, the index of the fundamental duality of language and thought. But this mention of the index must bring to mind immediately the most comprehensive analysis of the sign to date, the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, who identified three elements or sign-functions that make 10

Since Saussure’s text was a compilation of lecture notes by himself and his students, it is not possible to be certain that this diagram was actually drawn by the great linguist. Nevertheless, it has become a canonical picture of his understanding of the linguistic sign.

Introduction

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meaning possible. These are the elements he calls “icon/index/symbol,” a triad that describes (very roughly) the distinctions between images (pictures, but also any sign by resemblance, including metaphors), indexical signs (arrows and bars, for instance, but also pronouns and other deictic words that depend upon context), and symbols (signs by “law” or convention). The relation of image and symbol, we must note, is merely analogous to and at a quite different level from the image-text relation, because Peirce is not interested in classifying signs by their singular manifestations such as “words and images,” but by their sign function, which depends upon the way in which they make meaning. The category of the icon includes pictures and other visual, graphic images, but it is not exhausted by those things. Icons can appear in language as metaphor and in logic in the form of analogy. They are signs by resemblance or likeness. Similarly, indices may be exemplified by arrows and bars, but they also include elements of language such as deictic terms (this, that, there, then) and pronouns such as I, we, and you. Indices are “shifters” or existential signs that take their meaning from context. They are also signs by cause and effect (tracks in the snow indicating where someone has walked; smoke as an indicator of fire). And finally, symbols are signs that take their meaning from arbitrary conventions (we will let the word “arbor” stand for this vertical object sprouting with leaves). From Peirce’s standpoint, then, the image/text is simply a figure for two-thirds of the semiotic field, awaiting only the recognition of its third element, the “/” as the index of a slash or relational sign in the concrete thing (a text, a work of art) that is being decoded. All these triads of aesthetics and semiotics can be seen at a glance in the following table (Table [1]), to which I want to add one final layer that will, as it were, bring us back to the surface of these reflections, and the original question of how to write these things down. I’m thinking here of Nelson Goodman’s theory of notation, which examines the way marks themselves can produce meaning, and which relies heavily on categories such as “density” and “repleteness” (where every difference in a mark is potentially significant), and “differentiated” and “articulate” (where marks belong to a finite set of characters that have definite meaning, as in an alphabet, in which the letter “a” still means “a,” regardless of whether it is written or typed or printed in Gothic or Times New Roman).11 Goodman’s categories, in contrast to Peirce’s, take us back to the surface of inscription. His triad of sketch, score, and script reinscribes the image/ music/text triad, but this time at the level of notation. 11

Goodman 1976.

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Aristotle Barthes Lacan Kittler Goodman Peirce Foucault

Opsis Image Imaginary Film Sketch Icon Seeable

Melos Music Real Gramophone Score Index [X]

Lexis Text Symbolic Typewriter Script Symbol Sayable

Hume

Similarity

Cause and Effect

Convention

Bar

Arbor

Saussure

Table [1] I hope it is clear that this table does not postulate some kind of uniformity or even translatability down the columns. The rows are the strong elements, teasing out concepts of semiotics and aesthetics that happen to fall into these precise terms. The columns are merely iconic: they suggest a structural analogy between the ideas of radically different kinds of thinkers. Why, for instance, should we want to link music with the Lacanian Real? Kittler provides a technical answer based in recording apparatuses and the physical structure of the ear. Nevertheless, the whole point of this table is to produce a set of diagonal, X-shaped reflections that would slash across the rigid order of the columns: the arrows in Saussure’s picture of the sign are indices, for sure. But are they not also icons in that they resemble arrows, and symbols in that we have to know the convention of pointing? Point at an object to the average dog, and he will sniff your finger. We still have not addressed the most fundamental question, which is why the image/text rupture, the image-text relation, and the imagetext synthesis should be so fundamental to aesthetics and semiotics. Why do disciplines like art, history, and literary criticism find themselves inexorably converging around encounters of visual and verbal media? Why does the theory of representation itself seem to converge on this primitive binary opposition? My claim is that the imagetext is the convergence point of semiotics, the theory of signs and aesthetics, the theory of the senses. It is the place where the eye and the ear encounter the logical, analogical, and cognitive relations that give rise to meaning in the first place. David Hume understood the laws of “association of ideas” as a triad very close to Peirce’s analysis of the sign. Similarity, cause-effect, and convention are his three laws, corresponding quite precisely to

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Introduction

Peirce’s icon, index, and symbol. The imagetext, then, is a principle of thought, feeling, and meaning as fundamental to human beings as distinctions (and the accompanying indistinctions) of gender and sexuality. Blake glimpsed this when he asserted that the great Kantian modes of intuition—space and time—are gendered as female and male respectively. And Lacan revised the Saussurean picture of the sign by portraying it as a pair of adjacent doors labeled “Men” and “Women,” as if the gendered binary (and urinary segregation) was the foundation of semiosis itself. Of course, some will say that we have transcended all these binary oppositions in the digital age, when images have all been absorbed into the flow of information. They forget that the dense, sensuous world of the analog doesn’t disappear in the field of ones and zeros: it re-surfaces in the eye and ear ravished by new forms of music and spectacle, and in the hand itself, where digits are literalized in the keyboard interface and game controller. Hardly surprising then, that the imagetext can play such a productive role in the range of essays included in this volume, embracing poetry and photography, painting and typography, blogs and comics.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. Selected and translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana. Deleuze, Gilles. (1986) 1988. Foucault. Translated and edited by Seán Hand; foreword by Paul Bové. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel. (1973) 1983. This Is Not a Pipe. Translated by James Harkness. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goodman, Nelson. 1976. The Languages of Art. Indianapolis: Hackett. Keats, John. (1820) 2003. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” In The Poems of John Keats: A Routledge Study Guide and Sourcebook (Routledge Guides to Literature), edited by John Strachan, 150-56. London and New York: Routledge. Kittler, Friedrich. (1986) 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated, with an introduction, by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. (1766) 1984. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Translated by Edward Allen McCormick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Magritte, René. 1929. La trahison des images. Oil on canvas, 25 3/8 x 37 in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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Mitchell, W. J. T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1996. “Word and Image.” In Critical Terms for Art History, edited by Robert Nelson and Richard Schiff, 51-61. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 2006. “Utopian Gestures: The Poetics of Sign Language.” Preface to Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature, edited by H. Dirksen Bauman, Jennifer L. Nelson, and Heidi M. Rose, xv-xxiii. Berkeley: University of California Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de. (1915) 1960. Course in General Linguistics. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Reidlinger. Translated by Wade Baskin. London: P. Owen.

PART I: TEXT AND IMAGE IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER ONE PORTRAIT OF A SECRET: J. R. ACKERLEY AND ALISON BECHDEL MOLLY PULDA

“Comics have finally joined the mainstream,” The New York Times announced in March 2009, heralding the addition of a “Graphic Books” category to its best seller lists.1 The Times graphic list is divided into hardcover, softcover, and manga—fiction and nonfiction share these categories, unlike on the other best seller lists, which are separated by genre. However, leading comics scholar Hillary Chute contends that nonfiction remains the “strongest genre in the field.”2 As critical attention to the medium of comics increases, Chute and other critics are mainly occupied with asking how the graphic narrative differs from the kinds of narratives with which we have more typically been engaged.3 I would like to argue that an equally important question should be: how is the graphic narrative the same as other narratives? In other words, what formal and thematic elements provide productive comparisons between graphic and nongraphic narratives?4 W. J. T. Mitchell memorably argues, “all media are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous; there are no ‘purely’ visual or verbal arts.”5 What can the medium of comics tell us about the verbal and visual possibilities of narratives in all media? Graphic memoirs—autobiographies in the medium of comics—have led the wave of literary comics for the past twenty five years, since Art

1

Gustines 2009. Chute 2008a, 452. 3 Chute and DeKoven 2006, 768. 4 See Chute 2008b for an exemplary analysis of how graphic narratives and contemporary fiction intersect, “investigating different ways to present and express history” (idem 268). 5 Mitchell 1994, 5. 2

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Chapter One

Spiegelman published Maus to critical clamor in 1986.6 That clamor has nearly been matched by Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, a literary graphic memoir that officially hit the mainstream as Time magazine’s best book of 2006. Although graphic memoirs are certainly innovative in their hybrid, word-and-image depictions of the self, it is also important to consider what graphic memoirs have in common with text memoirs, in order to analyze what the graphic medium contributes to narrative studies. For one, the use of images in autobiography is not new; authors often publish photographs of their younger selves and their families, usually as photo inserts near the middle of the volume. In this paper I put two verbal/visual memoirs in dialogue: a graphic memoir and a text memoir with a photo insert. By doing so I wish to interrogate some of the possibilities and limitations of visual representation in literature that represents the self. What does an author attempt to reveal to the reader, through text, image, and their combination? Can the reader “see” a secret in a portrait? As Mitchell puts it, “[h]ow do we say what we see, and how can we make the reader see?”7 What are the uses of a family photograph within a memoir of any medium? Where does the reader fit into a “familial gaze” when a writer produces an image of a lost parent?8 In order to examine what the graphic and nongraphic do similarly, I will compare two memoirs about a father’s sexual secrets: J. R. Ackerley’s memoir My Father and Myself (1968) and Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home (2006). Both authors, separated by gender, two generations, and the Atlantic Ocean, write about quests to claim secretive fathers through photographs. In these works, Ackerley and Bechdel put desire, death, and heredity into visual and sexual terms. Both texts are necessarily biography, autobiography, and family albums of secrets. In My Father and Myself, British author Ackerley strains to glimpse a core of homosexuality in his father’s youthful photographs. Ackerley (18961967), the long-standing editor of the BBC magazine The Listener and close friend of E. M. Forster, lived in a period of British history that was bookended by Oscar Wilde’s indecency conviction and the decriminalization of homosexual activity in the Sexual Offences Act of 1967.9 Reeling from the revelation of one secret—that his loving, wealthy 6

Although Whitlock (2006, 965) coined the term “autographics” for autobiographical works in the medium of comics (as many booksellers and critics are still misnaming the genre “graphic novel”), I employ the more popular term “graphic memoir.” 7 Mitchell 1994, 114. 8 Hirsch 1997, 10. 9 McHugh 2000, 21.

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father raised a second family with a mistress—Ackerley searches for another secret that will draw his father’s life in closer parallel with his own. He begins that imaginative quest with his father’s death, and tries to link his father’s fatal case of syphilis to a secret history of homosexual encounters. Similarly, Bechdel tries to connect her father’s violent death— he was hit by a truck, which she believes was a suicidal act—to two sexual revelations: her recent discovery of her own homosexuality, and her father’s secret history of affairs with young men. Like Ackerley, Bechdel compares her father’s era of secrets to her own era of “out” sexuality. As Bechdel states in an interview, “our two stories form a kind of longitudinal sociological study. He graduated from college a dozen years before Stonewall. I graduated a dozen years after.”10 Bechdel’s theory of her father’s suicide bridges the generational gap; she inserts her own sexuality and coming-out into the causal narrative of her father’s death, weaving what she calls “that last, tenuous bond” between father and daughter.11 Guardians of their dead fathers’ depictions, Bechdel and Ackerley attempt to build a visual archive that recasts an absent father in the author’s own image. As Marianne Hirsch demonstrates in her influential Family Frames (1997), family photographs are uniquely “perched between life and death.”12 Inspired by Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus, Hirsch introduced the concept of “postmemory,” which she describes as: the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.13

In other words, in instances of postmemory, the parent’s past overshadows the progeny’s present, and even unspoken trauma is passed on intergenerationally. In my reading of My Father and Myself and Fun Home’s visual secrets, I draw upon what Hirsch terms the “imaginative investment and creation” of postmemory. The writer recreates the parent’s experience imaginatively, especially when studying old family photographs. Ackerley and Bechdel’s memoirs demonstrate the reverse inheritance of the postmemorial imagination: its powers of creative generation flow from the present to the past, from the writer to the lost father. Although postmemory relies on patterns of generational inheritance, 10

Bechdel 2006a. Bechdel 2006c, 85. 12 Hirsch 1997, 23. 13 Hirsch 1997, 22. 11

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Chapter One

its workings of “imaginative investment and creation” resist what Michael Warner terms “repro-narrativity” or “the notion that our lives are somehow made more meaningful by being embedded in a narrative of generational succession.”14 Through acts of looking and interpretation, the writer can reverse the “repro-narrative”: she can fill in the parent’s inaccessible story with a narrative from her own identity and life. But what are the stakes of casting the lost parent in one’s own image? Ackerley declares that in researching his dead father’s past, he was “hoping still to drag him captive into the homosexual fold.”15 Similarly Bechdel writes that “perhaps my eagerness to claim him as ‘gay’ in the way I am ‘gay,’ as opposed to bisexual or some other category, is just a way of keeping him to myself—a sort of inverted Oedipal complex.”16 By placing homosexuality within the chain of lineage, within two generations of the family story, these authors attempt to locate themselves within their fathers’ mortal secrets. I argue that the autobiographical act, in any work of text, comics, or other “mixed media,” builds a narrative bridge between generations separated by death and secrecy, serving as a gesture of familial reparation. For these authors, a sexual confession requires an investigation of heredity, an envisioning of hypothetical circumstances in which they would never have been born. As Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida (1980), “I am the reference of every photograph, and this is what generates my astonishment in addressing myself to the fundamental question: why is it that I am alive here and now?”17 A father’s secret history of homosexuality, however, troubles the progression of lineage. As she looks up “father” and “beget” in Webster’s dictionary, Bechdel writes: “If my father had ‘come out’ in his youth, if he had not met and married my mother, where does that leave me?”18 Gazing at the father’s photograph, the author wavers between yearning to resurrect him through identification, and keeping a secret essential to the author’s own birth.

Memoirs of family secrets “Private life is almost always a co-property,” writes the autobiography theorist Philippe Lejeune.19 Who is more exposed in these works of family confession: the author or the father? Following Mary G. Mason’s 14

Warner 1991, 7. Ackerley 1999, 259. 16 Bechdel 2006c, 230. 17 Barthes 1982, 84 (emphasis in original). 18 Bechdel 2006c, 197. 19 Quoted in Eakin 2008, 40. 15

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groundbreaking observation about the inherent relationality of autobiography, which teases out the author’s “delineation of identity by way of alterity,”20 it can be said that every autobiography is, in a sense, also a biography. That is, a life story unfolds in relation to the significant others who help shape it. In the subgenre of the memoir of family secrets, the story centers not on the author’s indiscretions, but on the parent’s sins of omission, the secrets that marred and protected the intimacy between parent and writer. And indeed, both Ackerley and Bechdel have complicated histories of autobiographical revelation. Ackerley’s other works of fiction and drama all draw upon personal experience. In a review of My Father and Myself, W. H. Auden writes of Ackerley’s autobiographical impulse: He says that he went to work for the BBC because he felt he had failed in his ambition to become a writer himself. […] He discovered that he could not create imaginary characters and situations: all his books were based on journals, whether written down or kept in his head.21

Nevertheless, Ackerley insists that My Father and Myself “is not an autobiography, its intention is narrower and is stated in the title and the text, it is no more than an investigation of the relationship between my father and myself.”22 Similarly, Bechdel’s long-running comic strip, Dykes To Watch Out For, features a community of lesbians with Mo, Bechdel’s cartoon avatar, as a central character. Yet Bechdel is more forthright than Ackerley regarding what she defines as “my own compulsive propensity to autobiography.”23 In Fun Home, a ten-year-old Bechdel begins her first diary and has an “epistemological crisis” that perhaps leads her toward the graphic medium.24 She worries about “the troubling gap between word and meaning,” signifier and signified—and possibly, by extension, photograph and subject.25 As Bechdel states in an interview about a trove of family photographs she found: “those photos were really my primary source for the book. Poring over them, recreating them painstakingly in pen and ink, trying to discern their hidden messages.”26 Fun Home is all about the family archive; each chapter opens with a recreated photograph that appears pasted into a family photo album. By drawing family photographs, 20

Mason 1980, 231. Auden 1969. 22 Ackerley 1999, 271 (emphasis in original). 23 Bechdel 2006c, 140. 24 Bechdel 2006c, 141. 25 Bechdel 2006c, 143. 26 Bechdel 2006a. 21

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Chapter One

Bechdel asserts the artist’s hand in her father’s representation, making the autobiographical act all the more visible. Between each of these two authors’ fathers and the depiction of his sexuality lies an intervening “I,” a writing daughter or son whose queer identity and mourning process color every line of the father’s portrait.

Digging for truth The themes of death, secrecy, and heredity adopt a similar structure in both memoirs. Bechdel and Ackerley begin their investigations with their fathers’ causes of death, inquiring how they as progeny are scripted into these deaths. Bechdel spirals back repeatedly to a cluster of related scenes, mainly the moment, which occurs in her college bookstore, when she discovers she is a lesbian, and the moment her mother tells her on the phone, in response to her announcement of sexual identity in a typewritten letter sent home, “Your father has had affairs. With other men”27 (and underage boys, as Bechdel soon discovers). “And with my father’s death following hard on the heels of this doleful coming-out party,” Bechdel ruminates, “I could not help but assume a cause-and-effect relationship.”28 All of Fun Home is awash with death. The title itself is a nickname for the funeral home her father owned and ran part-time (when he was not teaching English to local high school students, including his daughter and the teen-aged boys he propositioned). Furthermore, conjoined scenes of coming out and suicide lie at the heart of the narrative. Bechdel prefigures this circling structure, the continual revelation of sexual identities, in a series of frames about lawn-mowing. She depicts her younger self learning how to ride a lawn mower with her father. First the father and daughter ride the mower together; then her father shows her how to operate the equipment herself. The last frame shows young Bechdel circling the lawn alone, as though spiraling through a narrative that centers on her father, but necessarily excludes him. The text above the last frame reads: “but I ached as if he were already gone.”29 Bruce Bechdel has set the circling narrative in motion, but at its core lies his absence, the empty lawn that signals the continuous loss and regrowth of the mourning cycle, as well as the continuous effort he put into maintaining the appearances of normalcy in his lifetime.

27

Bechdel 2006c, 58. Bechdel 2006c, 59. 29 Bechdel 2006c, 23. 28

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Ackerley uses a similar structural metaphor for My Father and Myself. Like Bechdel, who mows around her and her father’s story in search of a common center, Ackerley claims to “plough” over his father’s past methodically to unearth his secrets. “The excuse, I fear, is Art,” he apologizes at the opening of his memoir, adding that “artistically shocks should never be bunched, they need spacing for maximum individual effect.”30 His method, then, rather than a chronology, consists of “ploughing to and fro over my father’s life and my own, turning up a little more subsoil each time as the plough turned.”31 Both Ackerley and Bechdel employ earthy metaphors—mowing grass, turning soil—to gesture toward the stakes of regrowth, regeneration, and artistic procreation within their family narratives. But for Ackerley, image and text are arranged in opposition. The photographic portraits within My Father and Myself are as “bunched” as the text’s “shocks” are spaced; every image but one appears within the photographic insert, printed about a quarter of the way through the book. Here, one advantage of the graphic medium over the text-andphoto-insert convention becomes clear: a graphic memoirist like Bechdel can expand, contract, and layer her narrative at will, signaling a fractured family chronology. Not just the pacing but the spacing of a self-narrative are at play in a story of the mourning process. While Bechdel presents and represents the evidence of her father’s secrets, Ackerley’s readers must flip back and forth between text and image to take in the full portrait of his father’s secrets. In other words, Ackerley’s to-and-fro “ploughing” evolves into Bechdel’s multidimensional spiraling in the calculation of affective distance between child and father and between writer and reader. In the first photograph appearing in My Father and Myself (Fig. [1]), hands and eyes indicate the simultaneous entanglement and estrangement of father and son.32 The father’s hands are hidden, and only one of Ackerley’s is shown, its fingers folded in, looking more self-protective than affectionate. Intimacy between father and son is implied in the bodily contact, but refuted by the curled position of young Ackerley’s hand and the disjointed gazes of the two subjects. The son looks just to the side of the camera, while his father, head erect but partially shadowed, seems to be looking in two different directions, neither toward the camera. Ackerley explains his father’s divided gaze: “In one of his eyes, which were wide and blue and greatly magnified by his horn-rimmed spectacles, he had a 30

Ackerley 1999, 5. Ackerley 1999, 5. 32 All images From My Father and Myself (Ackerley 1999) are reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates. Copyright © 1968 The Executors of the Estate of J. R. Ackerley. 31

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Chapter One

pronounced cast.”33 Ackerley then reveals, “my father held decided views, often stated, of where eyes should be placed and what they ought to do.”34 In light of these statements, gestures and the location of hands and eyes become a key to unraveling this son’s verbal and visual portrait of his father, and the troubled relation the memoir cannot quite heal.

Fig. [1]

Like Ackerley, Bechdel also turns to formal portraits to examine her relationship with her father. In Fun Home, Bechdel replicates several photographs as drawings, filtering the purportedly objective record of photography through her eye, hand, and heart. One panel of Fun Home, showing a set of school portraits (Fig. [2]), reveals the emotional effort of Bechdel’s search for meaning in her father’s official image.35 The prints she reproduces are uncut from a sheet of duplicates. The even spacing of the prints recalls the gutter-and-frame format of comics panels, but the duplication refutes the artificial construction of time—of linear progress— on which the comics form relies. As a static “comic strip,” these panels 33

Ackerley 1999, 112. Ackerley 1999, 113. 35 All images from Fun Home (Bechdel 2006c) are reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © 2006 by Alison Bechdel. All rights reserved. 34

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point to the lack of narrative advancement in Fun Home, or what Ann Cvetkovich terms the memoir’s “queer temporality, one that refuses narratives of progress.”36 As Bechdel points out, “if you don’t count the subplot of my own coming out story, the sole dramatic incident in the book is that my dad dies. Everything else is this extremely involuted introspection about it all.”37 Like a subject of an Andy Warhol portrait, Bruce Bechdel’s wide-open eyes and pinched smile appear all the more duplicitous in duplication. In Bechdel’s unusual cropping, the top of the father’s head is cut off, and the exact excision is preserved in the two bottom frames. The father is essentially scalped, with the top of his head floating beneath him, as if Bechdel hopes to extract secrets from his skull. The text narrates, “but he was more attractive than the photographic record reveals.”38 Bechdel’s careful replication of her father’s portrait vents the frustrations of an incomplete archive: though her hand works to duplicate her father’s image faithfully, her unusual cropping enacts the emotional force of her search for an image of her father’s secrets.

Fig. [2]

If Bechdel opens her father’s head to the reader to the best of her ability, Ackerley holds back visually, acknowledging that his interpretations of his father are more revealing than the photographs he can display. After his father’s death, Ackerley revisits an 1885 photograph of twenty-twoyear-old Roger Ackerley among three friends at a summer home in New Brighton. Now that he suspects his father of youthful homosexual affairs, 36

Cvetkovich 2008, 124. Quoted in Bechdel 2006b, 1008. 38 Bechdel 2006c, 64. 37

Chapter One

24

he deems the photograph “an innocent-looking affair, if only because there was safety in numbers.”39 In a group portrait taken just outside the house, four friends lounge with a dog on a lion-skin rug. Two of the friends (and possible lovers) face the camera straight on, and even the dog and lion skin at their feet seem to face forward. Ackerley’s father, by contrast, sits in a cross-legged, closed-off position, eyes averted. In an interesting case of visual withholding, Ackerley calls Dudley Sykes, one of the men in the picture, “bold and roving-eyed,” though, he writes in a footnote, “in the one [photograph] I have selected Mr. Sykes’s eyes are invisible.”40 Ackerley has chosen this shot from two photos of the same group, and his choice withholds Sykes’s eyes, as if this possible suitor of the elder Ackerley might charm the viewer, too. In My Father and Myself, Ackerley keeps his father—and his reader—to himself by withholding this competitor’s “bold” gaze. Ackerley narrates the image: Behind them, along the sill of an open window, potted plants are ranged. Would that I had been able to peep and eavesdrop through that window and discover their secrets, if any. But I was not yet born.41

Yet in the photograph Ackerley chose to print, just a corner of the windowsill is visible; the site of eavesdropping is outside the photograph’s frame. This doubly secretive position—hidden from the portrait’s subjects as well as the reader—troubles what Philippe Lejeune calls “the autobiographical pact,” or the implicit agreement between autobiographer and reader that testifies to the truth of the narrative.42 Ackerley leaves the reader out of the picture. He limits the reader’s visual access to the tenuous bond between his father and himself, and the “peeping” methods he uses to form that bond. The truncated relation between Ackerley and his father is translated into a selective flow of secret-sharing and withholding with the reader.

Visual recognition Nevertheless, even within this structure of withholding, Ackerley does share with his reader the portrait of his father as a guardsman (Fig. [3]) that inspired his epiphany of his father’s sexuality. “This old photograph made me sit up,” Ackerley writes and continues: 39

Ackerley 1999, 250. Ackerley 1999, 31. 41 Ackerley 1999, 32. 42 Lejeune 1989, 3-30. 40

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The inherent absurdity of envisaging my father in the arms of another man had never really faded; it faded now. It is true that, studying the photograph of him in uniform, I decided that I would not have picked him up myself; but the picture was said not to do him justice, and the better one Uncle Denton claimed to have never managed to find.43

Fig. [3]

Although the photographic archive is again incomplete, it is sufficient to make Ackerley, a lover of men in uniform, “sit up” in interest and recognition. But what is visible to a reader/viewer outside the family circle? “My father as a guardsman” is a full-body shot, but the father’s erect posture competes for attention with the busy background. A dated air of artificiality reigns here, with the pastoral backdrop and mysterious foreground elements, including a uniform cap that seems to float lightly upon an indistinct, fur-draped stool or chair. Clad in his form-fitting uniform and tall boots, the father appears larger than life, with his left foot exceeding the frame and his head reaching the very top of it. His gloved right hand holds the left glove loosely, hiding its fingers beneath the palm—a secretive or protective position that recalls young Ackerley’s folded hand in the father and son portrait previously discussed. The ungloved hand provides what Barthes calls the punctum, the piercing detail of the photograph. Looking at a portrait of someone who has died, 43

Ackerley 1999, 256-57.

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Chapter One

Barthes writes, “I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake.”44 Here, the father’s hand looks detached, surprisingly thin and bony for such a large man—nearly skeletal. I read death, at once future and past, youthful and lost, in this ghostly, free-floating hand. Ackerley delivers the impossibility of his project through this photograph. The time span of relation is past: the father—and now the son, Ackerley himself—are dead, and their mutual secrets will never be exchanged. Bechdel has a similar photographic moment (Fig. [4]) that makes her “sit up” with visual identification after her father’s death. Here, though, Bechdel depicts a photo not of her father, but of one of his teenaged lovers: the family babysitter, Roy. Instead of poring over the father’s image, as both authors have been shown to do thus far, Bechdel tries to discover her father through his gaze—to see what he sees. Bechdel explains the formative impact of finding this photograph a year after her father’s death: That’s when I ran across this photograph. It was a stunning glimpse into my father’s hidden life, this life that was running parallel to our regular everyday existence. And it was particularly compelling to me at the time because I was just coming out myself. I felt this sort of posthumous bond with my father, like I shared this thing with him, like we were comrades. I didn’t start working on the book then, but over the years that picture persisted in my memory. It’s literally the core of the book, the centerfold.45

The “centerfold” is the only double-page panel of Fun Home. A complex dynamic of revelation and protection inhabits this centerfold. It is probable that Bechdel altered Roy’s name and appearance in order to protect his identity; Roy was a minor when this erotic photograph was taken. Plenty of text crowds the page around Roy’s reclining figure, detaining the reader long enough to simulate Bechdel’s long, ambivalent gaze.46 Her father has blotted out the year and the “bullets” printed on Roy’s portrait in “a curiously ineffectual attempt” to alter the evidence of his illicit gaze.47 Or, inadvertently, the date-blotting might make that erotic look timeless and 44

Barthes 1982, 96 (emphasis in original). Quoted in Bechdel 2006b, 1006. 46 I am borrowing here a term from Edward Said’s introduction to Joe Sacco’s graphic narrative Palestine in which he writes: “Sacco’s art has the power to detain us, to keep us from impatiently wandering off in order to follow a catch-phrase or a lamentably predictable narrative of triumph and fulfillment. And this is perhaps the greatest of his achievements” (idem 2002, v). 47 Bechdel 2006c, 101. 45

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intergenerational, as Bechdel imagines herself viewing the photograph with the same awed gaze as her father. The concealed-and-revealed date “69” implies both the sexual pose and the legal stakes of the father’s affair with a high school boy.48 One caption reads, “the picture was in an envelope labeled ‘family’ in Dad’s handwriting, along with other shots from the same trip.”49 Residing within the family archive, the father’s secret hides in plain sight. The photo is a portrait of secret desire, of a sexual relation from which Bechdel was excluded but now begins to comprehend. The reader, in turn, feels that very same simultaneous mirroring and exclusion. Bechdel draws Fun Home in two styles: a cartoonish, generalized style for “diegetic,” narrative storytelling, and crosshatched, finely-detailed “archival” style for drawn photographs. In a layering of these styles, Bechdel’s life-sized, generalized, genderless hand lies just next to the reader’s hand holding the page.50 Bechdel’s hand is one step closer to the scene of the photograph, to the site of the secret, but still outside of it. The reader tries to see what Bechdel sees, as the author tries to see what her father saw in Roy. In her “imaginative investment and creation” of postmemory, Bechdel renders her father’s gaze in all its inaccessibility.51 This diegetic hand of the daughter holding Ray’s portrait echoes an image on the previous page of Fun Home, in which an adolescent Bechdel admires a centerfold in Esquire magazine, with her father looking over her shoulder. Together they gaze at a fashion spread of a shirtless model in a three-piece suit, with a disembodied female hand caressing the model’s muscled chest. “The objects of our desire were quite different,” Bechdel writes: her father presumably desires the figure in the advertisement, while Bechdel desires to be that man, to inhabit that hard, masculine body with a desiring gaze and hand upon it.52 In the mirroring of these adjacent centerfolds—Esquire model and Roy the babysitter—Bechdel’s enlarged 48 Just a few pages later, Bechdel will make a similar numerical discovery of social censure as she and a group of lesbian friends are “eighty-sixed” from Chumley’s bar in New York (idem 2006b, 106). 49 Bechdel 2006c, 101. 50 For a very similar layering of diegetic and archival styles see Art Spiegelman’s early comic Prisoner from Hell Planet, reprinted in Maus. Spiegelman depicts his cartooned, grotesque hand holding up an actual, archival photograph of his mother and himself on a family vacation. As Hirsch argues in Family Frames, these archival photographs break the narrative frame of history and seep into the present day (idem 1997, 33). 51 Hirsch 1997, 22. 52 Bechdel 2006c, 99.

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Chapter One

hand, holding Roy’s photo, displaces the female model’s hand; the site of desire is no longer the male chest or even the father’s lover, but the longing of Bechdel as a daughter, archivist, and artist. Bechdel’s artistic thumbprint on this photograph reminds the reader of the intergenerational and artistic stakes of uncovering a secret and attempting to share its awefilled impact outside the family. The scopophilic, gendered caress of the Esquire centerfold is transformed into an artist’s diligent penstrokes in the family centerfold, as Bechdel seizes control of how these images will look and feel, how her father’s secrets will be exposed to the reader. Bechdel’s artistic hand marks the distances of familial desire.

Fig. [4]

Two levels of confession intersect in Fun Home and My Father and Myself: the truncated confession of sexuality to parents, and the subsequent “confession” to readers, outside the family. Bechdel notes that when she wrote her coming-out letter to her family, “I had imagined my confession as emancipation from my parents, but instead I was pulled back into their orbit.”53 Similarly, Helena Gurfinkel identifies within Ackerley’s

53

Bechdel 2006c, 59.

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memoir “a figure of the artist who refuses to leave the father’s house.”54 Ackerley and Bechdel do, in fact, leave their fathers’ houses. Yet when they leave, they carry their fathers within them, refashioning paternal secrets in their own image. Neither Ackerley nor Bechdel is able to openly discuss sexuality with the father. Facing his father a half century before Bechdel, Ackerley is cut off mid-sentence when he confesses to his sick father, “‘I don’t really mind telling you. I went to meet a sailor friend…’ But he interrupted me with ‘It’s all right, old boy. I prefer not to know. So long as you enjoyed yourself, that’s the main thing.’”55 Bechdel’s father also evades his daughter’s self-labeling, sidestepping the question of sexual identity by responding, “At least you’re human. Everyone should experiment.”56 Father and daughter cannot intersect in a moment of sexual confession; they can merely coincide—or as Bechdel writes, “the end of his lie coincided with the beginning of my truth.”57 Ackerley, in turn, regrets never telling his father about his homosexuality: “It is the purpose of the rest of this memoir to explore, as briefly as possible, the reasons for our failure.”58 Nevertheless, even as these two writers mourn the gaps of secrecy within their relationships with their fathers, they acknowledge that the secrecy produced the autobiography. Without a family secret, there would be no material, no book. According to memoir theorist Nancy K. Miller, the act of separation is only the first step in the family memoir: You leave home, cut yourself off […]. You write about this. What you left is your material. You make reparations for leaving by writing, and by this act you return home, only as author, not authored. You’ve written the story, rewritten the story that wrote you. Earned and betrayed the bequest.59

In that return home for the material of a story worth telling, the lure of what cannot be known or told is often the strongest. After he discovers the military portrait of his father, Ackerley writes: “What fun it would be if I could add the charge of homosexuality to my father’s other sexual vagaries! What irony if it could be proved that he had led in his youth the very kind of life I was leading!”60 The story of the secret becomes, 54

Gurfinkel 2008, 555. Ackerley 1999, 190. 56 Bechdel 2006c, 210. 57 Bechdel 2006c, 117. 58 Ackerley 1999, 100. 59 Miller 1996, 94. 60 Ackerley 1999, 257. 55

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Ackerley writes, “the raison d’etre, of this examining and self-examining book; not the only raison d’etre, it must be admitted, for, being a writer, I perceived that I had a good story to tell, a story which, as it ramified, grew better and better.”61 In other words, the irony of proving his father’s homosexuality would satisfy him not only as a son but as a writer as well. That writer’s irony, the satisfaction of a good story, drives Ackerley’s search for sexual identification in his father’s image. However, neither Bechdel nor Ackerley succeeds in making a father’s secrets visually apparent—neither can produce what Barthes calls a “just image,” which in their cases would be a visual proof of a father’s sexuality.62 The reader cannot see the secret: the father’s hidden patterns of desire. What a reader can see is a writer’s desire: the verbal and visual efforts to render and interpret a familial bond. Near the end of her quest for her father’s secret, Bechdel writes: “‘Erotic truth’ is a rather sweeping concept. I shouldn’t pretend to know what my father’s was.”63 The “erotic truth” of a father remains unknown, but when combined with creative truth—the artistic quest itself—the result is a kind of “relational truth,” the marking of distance and intimacy to the father’s secrets.64 Nancy K. Miller writes: The betrayal of secrets is a requirement of the autobiographical act. To mark off your difference through betrayal—you may be the father, I’m the writer—is the confirmation of both separation and relation.65

The flow of secrets Ackerley and Bechdel calibrate their “relational truth,” their similarities and distances from their fathers. And since a reader cannot see a father’s secret in these photographs quite like the son or daughter, Ackerley and Bechdel turn to another representation of secrets. Both authors distill their 61

Ackerley 1999, 214. Barthes 1982, 70. 63 Bechdel 2006c, 230. 64 Susan McHugh identifies canines as the figure that measures the sexual distance between Ackerley and his father. Ackerley wrote copiously about his emotional attachment to his dog, Queenie. Analyzing a scene in which Ackerley and his father regard a dog’s feces on the sidewalk in order to sidestep a discussion of sex, McHugh argues that dogs are “marking the distance between Ackerley’s father’s likely sexual relationship with [an] older man and the son’s biographical attempt to extrapolate from these circumstances a queer identity for his father” (idem 2000, 26). 65 Miller 1996, 124 (emphasis in original). 62

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fathers’ secrets in “secretions”—bodily fluids, photographic developing fluid—as they seek a solution of sexual identity developed in visual and bodily terms. Daniel Hayes proposes that secrets, like bodily fluids, carefully shared or withheld, serve as a mechanism of regulating bonds between people: “Negotiating the space between people—determining levels of intimacy, closeness, separation, and distance—is a matter of controlling or not controlling the permeability of these thresholds, or, alternatively, governing the flow of secrets.”66 As Hayes points out, the verb secrete has two somewhat contrary meanings: “(1) to emit, as from a gland, and (2) to hide or conceal. […] Those closest to our secretions are often those closest to our secrets.”67 Through images of flow, fluidity, and cleaving that signify artistic and sexual works-in-progress, both Ackerley and Bechdel calibrate the family distances necessary to relate, separate, and create. For Ackerley’s father, the “flow” of secrets is limited to the realm of masculinity, of the dirty jokes he calls “yarns.” As Ackerley recalls, “to my young mind these yarns were seldom good and never single; one of them always reminded him or his cronies of another; they seemed to adhere together in their sexual fluid like flies in treacle.”68 But what “adheres” in that sentence—the stories, or the cronies who tell them? Who or what exactly is stickily bonded through the proliferation of stories? The father’s “cronies” were privy to the father’s secret mistress and second family, which Ackerley did not discover until after his father’s death. Excluded from his father’s flow of verbal “yarns,” secrets, and storytelling, Ackerley attempts to identify with the “fluid” of his father’s bodily secret: the syphilis that caused his death. In order to relate, Ackerley writes about his own sexually transmitted disease, “a dose of anal clap.”69 As Ackerley narrates, a Chlamydia-inflicted lover “unbuttoned his flies to exhibit the proof, squeezing out the pus for my enlightenment […] I saw it as one of the highest compliments I had been paid.”70 Denied his father’s secrets, that “sexual fluid like flies in treacle,” Ackerley instead shares the pus in pants’ “flies” with a lover and with a reader.71 Exhibiting the proof—sharing that fluid—is exactly what the father’s photos cannot do. Ackerley substitutes textual secrets for visual ones, and a reader for a paternal confidante. Although Ackerley repeatedly laments 66

Hayes 1997, 243 (emphasis in original). Hayes 1997, 243. 68 Ackerley 1999, 129. 69 Ackerley 1999. 180. 70 Ackerley 1999, 181. 71 Ackerley 1999, 131. 67

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the failure of his relationship with his father, the book ends on a note of sexual failure: “Sometimes I managed; often the very fear perhaps of the frustration and humiliation of failure caused me to fail.”72 He closes the memoir with his failure to ejaculate rather than his failure to relate. In Fun Home, Bechdel relates the blocked flow of secrets to the difficulty of capturing what she calls her father’s “fluid charm, which eluded the still camera.”73 She cannot quite grasp her father, visually or emotionally. No single photograph can display his secrets; only Bechdel’s artistic process can substitute for the gaps within the family story. And indeed, Bechdel’s artistic process and sexual process—the coming-out that began at age nineteen and which takes flight in the public record of Fun Home—both hinge on the calibration of the flow of secrets. Bechdel’s fluids of both sensuality and sexuality are a part of her drawing and her visual process of storytelling. A few weeks after she begins menstruating, young Bechdel experiences her first orgasm while working on a drawing of a basketball player. She codes both the orgasm and menstruation as a secretive “N” in her adolescent diary.74 These fluids are solitary; there is no interchange of secrets. And even when father and daughter share the same atmosphere, their flow of secrets is dammed. Experiencing queerfriendly Greenwich Village for the first time, vacationing with her father at age fifteen, Bechdel recalls: “It was like the moment the manicurist in the Palmolive commercial informs her client, ‘You’re soaking in it.’”75 Bechdel and her father each “soak” separately in their secret sexuality; their secrets coincide, but never intermingle. In her search for secrets after his death, Bechdel highlights the process of film development, the developing solution that brings evidence of her father’s sexuality to light. She captions the centerfold photo, “a trace of Roy has been caught on light-sensitive paper.”76 Developing the film—that is, soaking it in solution—has yielded a lasting photographic trace of her father’s homoerotic gaze. The development from film to photograph, and then to drawing and text, allows for the belated flow of an identifactory gaze from father to artist to reader. Photographic process is written into every panel of Fun Home. Bechdel, who calls herself a “method cartoonist,”77 sketched each character in each frame from a snapshot of herself in the

72

Ackerley 1999, 283. Bechdel 2006c, 64. 74 Bechdel 2006c, 169. 75 Bechdel 2006c, 190. 76 Bechdel 2006c, 101. 77 Bechdel 2006a. 73

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pose she wished to draw.78 She embodies her subjects, recreating them in her own image. Each author’s “secretions,” then, point to the narrative process itself, the documented effort to identify with the father through a series of visualizations and embodiments.

Conclusion “The thought of origins soothes us,” Barthes writes, “whereas that of the future disturbs us, agonizes us.”79 I would like to suggest that for the nonprocreative queer author, the process of writing and visually incarnating the past for the reader might ease the uncertainty of the future. The postmemorial imagination mines unknown history as a source of art. Embracing an artistic, queer life, both Ackerley and Bechdel carry on the family name in print, not in blood. Their creativity has an erotic and generative component. Bechdel writes in Fun Home that as a child she swore that in order to honor her parents’ dreams and carve out her own future, she would never marry, “that I would carry on to live the artist’s life they had each abdicated.”80 That “artist’s life” produces books, “spawned” and “generated” in Bechdel’s words, by the commingling of parental photographs and postmemorial imagination.81 Yet in this tricky analogy of artistic generation between queer writers and fathers, where do mothers fit in? In these family stories, centered on a father’s loss, the mother is a figure of ambivalence, who nevertheless quietly drives the writer’s creative process from the memoir’s margins. A year after the publication of Fun Home, Bechdel wrote: [My mother] didn’t quite understand why I wanted to reveal all our sordid family secrets to the general public, but she never tried to talk me out of it. I know I hurt her by writing this book. She made that clear, but she also let me know that she grasped the complexity of the situation. At one point after Fun Home came out, she sent me a review from a local newspaper. It cited the William Faulkner quote, “The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. […] If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.” Then the reviewer went

78

Similarly, Marjane Satrapi posed for all the reference shots for the 2007 film version of her graphic memoir Persepolis. In referring to that, she said in an interview: “I play all the roles, even the dog” (quoted in Hohenadel 2007). 79 Barthes 1982, 105. 80 Bechdel 2006c, 73. 81 Quoted in Bechdel 2006b, 1005-1006.

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Chapter One on to say, “Rarely are the old ladies asked how they felt about it.” Mom liked that—that someone was considering her side of the story.82

In Fun Home, Bechdel’s mother is the one who discloses the father’s sexual secrets. However, in drawing her mother’s guarded but revelatory letter, held up for the reader’s eye, Bechdel promptly disobeys her mother’s interdiction: “Her P.S. instructed me to destroy the letter.”83 Had Bechdel obeyed her mother’s instructions there would have been no book. Ackerley, too, struggles with preservation and publication in My Father and Myself, and his mother, an object of scorn throughout much of the memoir, 84 is nevertheless the one enabling the preservation of the family story. Ackerley recounts rifling through his mother’s possessions after her death, searching for more evidence of his father’s sexual life, and instead finding boxes chock-full of trash, meaningless keepsakes, and waste-paper. Roger J. Porter likens Ackerley’s digging to “a parody of useless evidence.”85 Yet there is a lesson within these mounds of waste. From his mother, Ackerley learns to preserve—and publish—what he does not and cannot know. The secrets of a family are neither waste nor failure, but the material of a book. Ackerley writes about his mother’s odd collection of waste-paper: This was my mother’s comment on life. It might serve also as a comment on this family memoir, which belongs, I am inclined to think, to her luggage. A good many questions have been asked, few receive answers. Some facts have been established, much else may well be fiction, the rest is silence. Of my father, my mother, myself, I know in the end practically nothing. Nevertheless, I preserve it, if only because it offers a friendly unconditional response to my father’s plea in his posthumous letter: “I hope people will generally be kind to my memory.”86

Bechdel and Ackerley seek in their fathers’ portraits an essence of heredity, proof that something lives on in paternal absence. Their process of mourning calls for an image, a visual representation of the father’s mortal secrets. What is revealed in their photographic quest may not be a visual secret, but simply the process itself, the negotiation of familial revelation that is extended to the reader. Ackerley spins the flatness of the 82

Bechdel 2007. Bechdel 2006c, 78. 84 Clayton J. Whisnant calls Ackerley’s misogyny toward his mother, sister, and other women, “a wedge that Ackerley used to force apart gender and sexuality” (idem 2002, 138). 85 Porter 2004, 104. 86 Ackerley 1999, 268. 83

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photograph into a “yarn” of sexual confession. And Bechdel’s process of representation materializes the artist’s hand that sketches the intersection of death and desire. In Camera Lucida, Barthes, too, finds himself searching for a “just image” of his deceased mother.87 Moving far beyond Ackerley’s partial withholding of gazes and grasps, Barthes declines to share that allimportant photo of his mother with the reader. He famously writes in parentheses, “(I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary’ […] but in it, for you, no wound.)”88 That open wound of loss is manifest in Ackerley and Bechdel’s family secrets. Rendering the father’s “erotic truth,” distilled through the author’s hand and eye, may not restore the father, but it can bond the author and reader in a sticky solution of secrets withheld and revealed.

Works Cited Ackerley, J. R. (1968) 1999. My Father and Myself. New York: New York Review Books. Auden, W. H. 1969. “Papa Was a Wise Old Sly-Boots” (review of My Father and Myself, by J. R. Ackerley). The New York Review of Books, March 27. Barthes, Roland. (1980) 1982. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Bechdel, Alison. 2006a. “A Conversation with Alison Bechdel.” Houghton Mifflin press release, June. —. 2006b. “An Interview with Alison Bechdel.” An interview by Hillary Chute. Modern Fiction Studies 52.4: 1004-13. —. 2006c. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Houghton Mifflin. —. 2007. “What the Little Old Ladies Feel.” Slate, March 27.

Chute, Hillary. 2008a. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA 123.2: 452-65.

87 88

Barthes 1982, 70. Barthes 1982, 73.

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—. 2008b. “Ragtime, Kavalier & Clay, and the Framing of Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies 54.2: 268-301. Chute, Hillary and Marianne DeKoven. 2006. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4: 767-82. Cvetkovich, Anne. 2008. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.1-2: 111-28. Eakin, Paul John. 2008. Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gurfinkel, Helena. 2008. “My Father and Myself: J. R. Ackerley’s Marginal Modernist Künstlerroman.” Biography 31.4: 555-76. Gustines, George Gene. 2009. “Arts Beat: Introducing The New York Times Graphic Books Best Seller List.” New York Times, March 5.

Hayes, Daniel. 1997. “Autobiography’s Secret.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 12.2: 243-60. Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hohenadel, Kristin. 2007. “An Animated Adventure, Drawn From Life.” The New York Times, January 21.

Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. “The Autobiographical Pact.” In On Autobiography, edited and with a foreword by Paul John Eakin; translated by Katherine Leary, 3-30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mason, Mary G. 1980. “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers.” In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, edited by James Olney, 207-35. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McHugh, Susan. 2000. “Marrying My Bitch: J. R. Ackerley’s Pack Sexualities.” Critical Inquiry 27.1: 21-41. Miller, Nancy K. 1996. Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Porter, Roger J. 2004. “Finding the Father: Autobiography as Bureau of Missing Persons.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 19.1-2: 100-117. Said, Edward. 2002. “Homage to Joe Sacco.” Introduction to Palestine, by Joe Sacco, i-x. New York: Fantographics. Spiegelman, Art. 1996. The Complete Maus. New York: Pantheon. Warner, Michael. 1991. “Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet.” Social Text 29: 3-17.

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Whisnant, Clayton J. 2002. “Masculinity and Desire in the Works of J. R. Ackerley.” Journal of Homosexuality 43.2: 124-142. Whitlock, Gillian. 2006. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4: 965-79.

CHAPTER TWO POSTSECRET AS IMAGETEXT: THE RECLAMATION OF TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCES AND IDENTITY TANYA K. RODRIGUE

For several decades, the enigmatic cognitive and linguistic effects of trauma and traumatic experiences have intrigued scholars in disciplines ranging from literary studies to art history. Trauma—conceived in relation to actual events as well as the effects of the events —is most commonly defined as an “overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events” that results in lasting changes of emotion, cognition, and memories, and possibly a disconnection among these functions.1 Psychoanalysts, sociologists, and literary theorists argue that physical and emotional trauma dismantles language; the experience severs the connection between the memory of the event and the language that would and/or could describe it. As a result, traumatized individuals often remember only fragments of the event, and sometimes nothing at all, and many have difficulty articulating the experience in discursive terms. Much of the time, traumatic events are identified as an absence, or that which has not come to be understood. From diverse disciplinary perspectives, scholars and theorists have grappled with complex questions about the (re)construction2 and 1

Caruth 1996, 11 I use the term (re)construction rather than reconstruction, or (re)construct rather than reconstruct, intentionally. Trauma may prevent the formation of memories, and thus memories of the event or particular moments of the event literally may not exist. As a result, a person may never be able to reconstruct—defined as construct again—the experience in its entirety, or in other words, piece together parts or fragments of memory like a jigsaw puzzle. Yet, a person can construct a traumatic experience from memories that do exist or identify an experience as traumatic when a dearth of memories is recognized. While some may not be able

2

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representation of traumatic experiences. How does one give form to fragments of experience, language, and memory? How can one give presence to absence? How does one represent and recreate the “real” when traumatic memory and disjointed language, as well as “reality” itself, defy “truth” in moments of crisis? How might a traumatized individual bear witness to the experience and testify about an event that has yet to be understood? In this essay, I argue that imagetext functions as a productive means to recognize an event as traumatic, represent traumatic experiences, and engage in dialogue for the purposes of understanding trauma. Echoing W. J. T. Mitchell, I refer to imagetext as pictures and texts that embody both discursive and non-discursive language, as well as multiple, historical, and sometimes conflicting discourses. The use of imagetext as a medium of trauma representation extends trauma scholarship in meaningful ways: it complicates scholars’ understanding of the relationship between trauma and language, and challenges arguments that trauma is best represented in either discursive or non-discursive language. To exemplify how imagetext paves an avenue for the reclamation of memory, language, and identity, I explore PostSecret postcards—multimodal confessions ‘inscripted’ on 4-by-6 inch mailable material—as imagetext. The postcards constitute the PostSecret art project that began in 2004. Frank Warren, founder of PostSecret, placed postcards in random public locations, soliciting people to share a secret “that was true” and that they had never told to anyone.3 Warren began posting the confessions of his choice every Sunday to a weblog, postsecret.blogspot.com. Since 2004, this social experiment has transformed into a cultural phenomenon, whereby thousands of people have sent Warren confessional postcards and have become devoted PostSecret followers. As of May 2011, the PostSecret blog had an estimated 1,292,300 monthly visits4 and 434,759,172 total visits.5 Additionally, nearly one million Facebook users “like” the PostSecret page. Since its inception, Warren, who Forbes named the fourteenth most influential person on the Internet in 2009,6 has to reconstruct an experience or parts of it, others have formed memories, and are able to access and reconnect the severed memories. In turn, a person may be able to construct the experience again, or reconstruct, via the reconnection of severed language and memory. Thus in an effort to address both those who have and have not registered traumatic experiences in memories, I use (re)construction to simultaneously denote reconstruction and construction. 3 Warren 2005, 1. 4 “PostSecret.Com Overview,” http://www.trafficestimate.com/postsecret.com. 5 PostSecret Website, http://www.postsecret.blogspot.com. 6 Web Celeb 25, in Ewalt 2009.

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continued to post the cards to the blog and has also published them in several book collections.7 Additionally, he travels around the country, hosting exhibits and giving talks, much of the time about suicide awareness and prevention. The postcard secrets display a range of emotions and experiences: happy secrets—“I anonymously send e.e. cummings photos to people;” bizarre secrets—“I made deer hump;” melancholy secrets—“9,898 students and I’ve never felt more alone;” amusing secrets—“If I charged the people I babysit for by the scream I’d be rich;” funny secrets: “I used to think the Sistine Chapel was called the 16th chapel!;” honest secrets—“I am terrified of growing up;” desperate secrets—“Barely here;” racist secrets—“Asians scare me;” and hopeful secrets—“Dear Mom & Dad, I was going to commit suicide the day you sent me to rehab. You have saved my life. I love you both.” Many people use the postcards to reveal traumatic secrets about sexual abuse including rape, molestation, and incest: “(I was molested) There I said it” and “I was molested as a child and never told anyone. As an adult, I tracked him down, killed him, and never told anyone.” In this essay, I focus on the confessional postcards that depict traumatic events, particularly experiences of rape, which are often kept “secret” due to their “unspeakable” nature. I chose to work with PostSecret postcards for several reasons. As imagetexts, PostSecret postcards strongly illustrate how images as texts and texts as images have the potential to evoke and resist dominant discourses that have guided traumatized individuals in representing their experiences and thus identities in genres such as autobiography or memoir. Dominant discourses, in this essay, are defined as language, knowledge, and worldviews that have become normalized and accepted as evident in society. Such discourses resist individualized epistemological frameworks and perpetuate master narratives. Imagetext evokes discourses of trauma—which can be understood as knowledgeclaims brought forth in scholarly and professional conversations about trauma, traumatic memory, and the complexity of trauma representation and identity construction. Trauma discourses, I argue, directly engage and challenge dominant discourses. It is precisely in these dialogical engagements, in the conversations among multiple, conflicting discourses, that trauma can be understood. The connections among languages or discourses have the potential to elucidate social constructions of trauma representations and identities. These intersections also reveal that trauma discourses can serve as sites for the deconstruction of social constructions of identity and spaces for identity (re)construction. Additionally, the space 7

See Warren 2005; 2006; 2007a; 2007b; and 2009.

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of dialogical interaction provides a rich terrain for understanding particular events as traumatic. Another reason for my decision to explore PostSecret postcards is that the project—both its goal and the process by which testimonials are collected—strongly lends itself to close explorations of trauma representation, particularly within the context of dominant discourses. Warren encourages the disclosure of never-told-before secrets, and by extension, traumatic experiences. Secrets, like trauma, can be defined as “keeping painful thoughts and impulses out of conscious awareness.”8 Harboring significant secrets is known to produce the same psychological effects as having experienced trauma—repression and often erasure or fragmentation of memory. Secrets, also like traumatic experiences, are initially recorded at a “nonverbal level in the form of mental images, bodily movements and affect-related visceral charges.”9 Judith Herman, in fact, draws a direct relationship between trauma and secrets, claiming traumatized individuals are in conflict “between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud,” and are often torn between “secrecy” and “truth-telling.” She contends that most times “secrecy” prevails, yet those who do divulge their secrets can begin a “healing process” in the wake of trauma.10 Herman’s argument encapsulates the PostSecret project’s goal to encourage traumatized individuals to testify for the purpose of comprehending life experiences. Additionally, Warren has created a process for testifying—composing and sending confessional postcards via “snail mail”—that in itself directly confronts and resists oppressive dominant discourses. The process eradicates the demand, which dominant discourses have created, to “prove” or provide “forensic evidence” in court or elsewhere of a traumatic experience. In using the postcards, people shape and define their testimonies in a way they see fit without being accused of lying, which is often a result of one’s inability to coherently and linearly articulate a traumatic experience. Since participants submit by postal mail there is no concern with traceability of IP address; Warren scans and uploads their postcards whereby PostSecret confessors are thus ensured complete anonymity in the virtual world, unlike with other confessional websites. Warren, who has, not surprisingly, been deemed “America’s Most Trusted Man,” protects each creator’s identity in a way that other confessional mediums cannot, while simultaneously maintaining the integrity and 8

Kelly 2002, 5. Kelly 2002, 18. 10 Herman 1997, 1. 9

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meaning of the testimonies. Hence, the imagetext in the postcards not only evoke and resist dominant discourses, the postcards themselves do as well. Lastly, PostSecret postcards, when read as imagetext in the medium of a weblog, complicate the traditional understanding of the role and relationship of testifier and witness, the nature of testimony, and the way traumatized individuals achieve understanding of their experiences. In trauma discourses, a person who has experienced trauma is the one who testifies about the experience and seeks to understand it. Within the context of PostSecret, the postcard creator may in fact use the postcard to bear witness and gain understanding of trauma, yet this may not always be the case. A postcard creator might construct a fictional account of trauma for other reasons that I later describe. Yet ultimately, the question of whether or not these representations embody the “truth”—a subject I probe from various angles and in multiple contexts throughout this essay—is not, because of the genre in which the postcards are situated, at the heart of what is at stake. Unlike common confessional mediums such as autobiography and memoir, the blog as an anonymous confessional space blurs the line between testifier and witness, the traumatized and voyeur, and the victim and consumer of trauma—in fact, it has the potential to eradicate such fixed identities. As PostSecret postcards simulate reality, trauma representation on the postcards defy notions of “real” and “truth,” and invite identification and affect. Thus, anyone—the creator or the viewer—can use the imagetext as a canvas to represent trauma or recognize an event as traumatic.

Bringing imagetext into focus Before beginning the exploration of the postcard as imagetext, it is necessary to explain the concept of imagetext in more detail. In Picture Theory (1994), W. J. T. Mitchell claims representations are a result of the interaction between pictures and texts. “The interaction of pictures and texts,” he writes, “is constitutive of representation as such: all media are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous; there are no ‘purely’ visual or verbal arts.”11 He defines imagetext as the inextricable connection of non-discursive language to discursive language, explaining the manifestation of non-discursive language in textual discourses as follows:

11

Mitchell 1994, 5.

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[T]he pictorial field itself [is] a field understood as a complex medium that is always already mixed and heterogeneous, situated within institutions, histories, and discourses: the image understood, in short, as an imagetext. The appropriate texts for ‘comparison’ with the image need not be fetched from afar with historicist or systemic analogies. They are already inside the image, perhaps most deeply when they seem to be most completely absent, invisible and inaudible.12

Similarly, Mitchell asserts that discursive language is simultaneously nondiscursive language by the very nature of writing. He argues that “‘pure’ texts incorporate visuality quite literally the moment they are written or printed in visible form.”13 Likewise, discursive language, according to Mitchell, metaphorically embodies non-discursive language: The visual representations appropriate to a discourse need not be imported: they are already immanent in the words, in the fabric of description, narrative “vision,” represented objects and places, metaphor, formal arrangements and distinctions of textual functions, even in typography, paper, binding, or in the physical immediacy of voice and the speaker’s body.14

Mitchell’s concept of imagetext illustrates the dialogical relationship between the signified and the signifier. When considering the signified, it is important also to acknowledge the dialogical relationship between the discourses embodied in history and in discourses themselves. Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism extends Mitchell’s theory of imagetext. Bakthin explains the dialogical nature of language within a broad context. Language, Bakhtin claims, is a product of the multiple environments that it enters and where it is used, and thus consists of multiple social, political, and historical views and events that cannot be separated. He writes: The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threats, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue.15

12

Mitchell 1994, 98. Mitchell 1994, 95. 14 Mitchell 1994, 99. 15 Bakhtin 2008, 288. 13

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The utterance is in constant dialogue with itself as well as with other utterances and their histories. Exploration of this dialogue, Bakhtin claims, is essential for understanding a diversified world. Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism asks us to consider the complex nature of language and to study language, perspectives, power relations, and cultures that occur within dialogical relationships. In analyzing images and texts, not only do we need to resist the common definition of the textual and the visual as separate and distinct vehicles of representation, but we also need to work toward a holistic treatment of imagetexts in order to come to a more complex understanding of representation and the meaning it embodies.

Trauma representation Imagetext, both in its potential to construct a trauma representation and its use as a “lens” to read and thus understand trauma, is unique in scholarly conversations about trauma because it deconstructs the image/text binary and offers an alternative means to represent and come to know trauma. Many scholars embrace the binary, arguing that either discursive language or non-discursive language is most adequate for trauma representation. Psychoanalyst Dori Laub claims that a person must form discursive, coherent language—with the help of a listener who acts as a co-participant in the meaning-making process—to describe the traumatic event.16 Similarly, psychologist Judith Herman claims the traumatized individual must bear witness and reconstruct the trauma narrative discursively within a social context “that affirms and protects the victim and that joins the victim and witness in a common alliance.”17 In opposition, Cathy Caruth, a literary theorist, claims that trauma can only be depicted “in a language that is always somehow literary: a language that defies, even as it claims, our understanding.”18 Toni Morrison agrees, claiming metaphors are most effective for embodying and conveying the “unspeakable.” According to Morrison, metaphors are a “way of seeing something, either familiar or unfamiliar, in a way that you can grasp it.”19 Still other scholars claim trauma is most adequately represented in images. In Trauma and Visuality in Modernity (2006), for instance, Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg state, “the inability to frame trauma in and of itself lends the form almost naturally to a process of visualization as expiation.”20 16

Felman and Laub 1992, 57. Herman 1997, 9. 18 Caruth 1996, 5. 19 Quoted in Taylor-Guthrie 1994, 35. 20 Saltzman and Rosenberg 2006, xii. 17

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The most popular medium for the representation of traumatic experiences today is life writing genres, genres that demand the telling of “true” experiences, such as autobiography and memoirs. Although these “truth-telling” narratives give form to absence, and presumably lead to an understanding of something otherwise incomprehensible, many scholars argue that life writing genres are nevertheless problematic. For instance, Wendy Hesford and Leigh Gilmore claim trauma itself defies linear writing and thus cannot adequately be reflected or represented within narrative genres. Hence, such established genres that offer traumatized individuals, or those in “crisis,” a way to represent their “real” experiences are in fact oppressive. Trauma and violence, Hesford argues, “throw truthtelling genres into crisis” because the “truth” is unable to be captured.21 The depiction of “real” experiences—characterized as fixed, stable, and factual—cannot possibly represent a “crisis,” which is characterized by fragmentation and instability. Hesford identifies the struggle for representations of crisis or traumatic experiences in genres couched in truth-telling discourse as the “crisis of the real.”22 Hesford, Gilmore, and Jill Ker Conway also maintain that life writing genres such as memoir and autobiography emerge from, and are shaped by, dominant discourses that construct generic identities. Life writing genres have predetermined structures that consist of pre-established identity models, or what have been identified as cultural scripts (Hesford),23 archetypal life scripts (Ker Conway), or autobiographical scripts (Gilmore). According to Gilmore, the autobiography genre forces the writer to mold his/her experience into these identity scripts. As a result, the writer represents and embodies a false, generic identity that is socially accepted and expected. Thus, the reconstruction of trauma narratives in autobiography not only obscures authentic identity, but also perpetuates a false sense of what it means to have, to represent, and to bear witness to trauma. Autobiography, Gilmore contends, also erases the importance of coming to know one’s trauma and the effects of it. Ultimately, autobiography, in addition to other life writing genres, silences and oppresses individuals, and in turn, perpetuates and maintains generic stereotypes.24

21

Hesford and Kozol 2000, 3. Hesford and Kozol 2000, 3. 23 Hesford 2000, 13-14. Hesford specifically refers to rape scripts in this essay. The term scripts is used to “draw attention to how historical, geopolitical and cultural struggles, narratives, and fantasies shape the materiality of rape and its representation.” 24 Gilmore 1994, 25. 22

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In an attempt to offer a less problematic way to tell and hence understand a traumatic experience, scholars have presented alternative genres of writing for the representation of trauma. Gilmore advocates the use of rhetorical strategies—such as writing non-linearly, using hybridwriting, and resisting the confessional mode. Naming this genre “autobiographics,” Gilmore claims this kind of writing will disrupt, interrupt, and rupture oppressive dominant discourses of truth-telling. Literary scholar Ellen Brinks advocates writing in the gothic genre, as its conventions—repetition, fragmentation, return of the repressed and the uncanny, the feeling of absence, and the lack of coherent narrative— reflect the nature of trauma itself.25 Ross Chambers claims dualautobiography—testimonials that combine a person who suffered the trauma and someone else who might or might not be explicitly affected— can function as a means to lead the readers of these texts to a better understanding and awareness of trauma.26 The use of imagetext as a medium of trauma representation is similar to that of alternative genres of writing in that it confronts and challenges oppressive discourses that have historically constructed identities of traumatized individuals. Yet, in defining texts as images and images as texts, imagetext as both a medium of representation and a conceptual lens through which to read trauma representations in general, proves to be an even more fitting space for trauma expression than alternative genres of writing. Imagetext captures and encapsulates the language of trauma— both the “speakable” and “unspeakable”—while simultaneously defining trauma, its symptoms and effects, and traumatic experiences in relation to, and in conflict with, dominant discourses. Furthermore, imagetext, unlike alternative genres of writing, provides multiple epistemological sites and paths for anyone to (re)construct traumatic experiences and identity. A close exploration of PostSecret postcards will demonstrate this potential.

PostSecret as imagetext Although many postcards represent events and situations that may be considered traumatic, this essay focuses on representations of traumatic experiences of rape. More specifically, while many PostSecret postcards that depict the trauma of rape exist, I focus on one particular postcard. My reasons for doing so are twofold: (1) the close examination and exploration, that comes through the sustained work with one visual 25 26

Brinks 2004, 293. Chambers 2004, 380-81.

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artifact, allows for the productive scrutiny of the relationship between language, visuals, and politics,27 and (2) the manifestation of multiple discourses in the specific postcard under examination is highly evident, and therefore immensely powerful, in illustrating how imagetext complicates and extends theories of representation in trauma scholarship. In this analysis, I do not assume an actual rape victim created the postcard. I will return to this question of truth and representation later in this essay. For the present, I am interested in highlighting how the postcard serves as a representation of how PostSecret’s imagetext—and by extension, the use of multi-media compositions in virtual spaces—offers a site to help traumatized individuals come to know trauma.

Fig. [1]

27

Such analysis lends itself to James Elkin’s call for more rigorous analysis in the field of visual culture. For fuller discussion, see idem 2003, 63.

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The PostSecret postcard under analysis (Fig. [1]) is a photograph seemingly glued to a postcard.28 The photograph depicts a scene on a beach—beige sand with slate colored water, foaming broken waves in the distance, and a lone tennis ball sitting in the sand in the foreground. On the right side of the photograph, there is a figure that appears to be a woman dressed in green capris pants and a long-sleeved blue shirt. She is barefoot. The figure’s head and genital region are crossed out multiple times with what appears to be a thin, black marker. The markings over the genitals extend beyond the width of this person’s body, thus obliterating other body parts such as her hands. As a result, both the figure’s face and hands are obscured. Yet the viewer is faintly able to see the figure’s dark shoulder-length hair, a feature-less face, and a small part of her neck. In the foreground of the photograph, there is text written on two white labels (which are not part of the original pictorial field) that are attached to the photograph; the text is handwritten in what appears to be the same thin, black marker that was used to mark the figure. The labels are approximately one inch apart from one another, of which the bottom sticker is only a couple of centimeters above the bottom of the photograph. The top label is situated approximately an inch further to the left than the bottom label. The text on the top sticker reads: “I hate when ppl. talk about sex.” The text on the bottom sticker reads: “on the beach as a sexy thing.” Near the top of the postcard there is text written directly on the surface of the photograph in the same thin, black marker as the text on the labels. The text is upside-down and reads: “i was raped on a beach.” The label text, the text at the top of the photograph, and the figure are nearly equidistant to one another and although the figure occupies a smaller space than the text, the viewer’s eye is immediately drawn to the figure because of the intensity of dark, multiple markings across her face and genital area. These markings are poignant for several reasons. The markings are dark scribbles, yet meticulously drawn to black out the figure’s face and genitals. The inconsistency and darkness of the markings insinuate that the person who marked the photograph was drawing quickly and aggressively. This act, in turn, suggests a certain emotive disposition while marking the photograph—anger, frustration, sadness, rage, grief, irrationality, pain, sorrow, trauma, and/or confusion. In addition, based on the way the figure in the photograph is standing, the viewer is expecting to see the figure’s body in its entirety. However, the markings obscure her body, leaving the viewer with numerous questions: is that a woman? What

28

Published in Warren 2006.

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does she look like? Why are her face and genital area crossed out? What does the undoctored picture look like? Yet, the viewer is not drawn only to the figure but to the text as well. In juxtaposition to the figure, the blog viewer reads the text, presumably the bottom two stickers first, as they are right-side up. Together they read: “I hate when ppl. talk about sex on the beach as a sexy thing.” The blog viewer must angle his/her head in a way that enables him/her to read the rest of the text—“i was raped on a beach,” which, unlike the other text, is written directly onto the photograph. The upside down position of the top text —“i was raped on a beach”—suggests possible reluctance, hesitance, or fear in declaring this experience. At the same time, the placement of the statement on the photograph perhaps functions as a rhetorical strategy in that it imposes the language onto the actual beach scene to emphasize the happenings of the event or perhaps to “deface” the photograph, a common perception about manipulated photographs in this society. Here we see a double defacement—of both the figure and the photograph; moreover, the idea of manipulated documentation may gesture toward the elusiveness of truth and even evidence in such cases, a topic I will return to later. Figurative language—analogy—is used to bear witness to the experience. Public discourse about the act of sex on the beach is directly connected to the traumatic experience of rape. If we use the lens of writers like Caruth and Morrison, the analogy, like a metaphor, suggests the figurative language embodies and represents the trauma. If we turn our attention to the figure of the woman and the markings across her body, we could, like Saltzman and Rosenberg, say that the image contains and represents the trauma, perhaps leading to an understanding of the event. Yet, the postcard as imagetext—particularly the language and the image of the woman’s body—complicates the image-text binary, offering an opportunity for the exploration of the discourses embedded within the image and text, and the dialogical interaction among them. The postcard as imagetext evokes and presents the dominant discourses that have co-opted trauma representations, as well as the discourses of trauma that challenge those representations. The exploration of imagetext will reveal how the text embodies visuals that both define and describe specific discourses that create a site for the reconstruction of trauma narratives by enabling and inviting those who have experienced trauma to bear witness. In the following sections, I will narrow my focus to the imagetext of the figure and the text “i was raped on the beach,” both of which, I claim, focus the viewer’s attention on the traumatized individual, and thus embody several discourses specific to the traumatized person. Although an examination of the beach scene is important, for the purposes of this essay the exploration

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of the figure is more productive for demonstrating the relationship between imagetext and the representation and (re)construction of trauma narratives.

Dom(i)nant discourses of rape and gender In the imagetext in question, the handwritten text, which also embodies the visual, connects the literal words to the traumatized individual; they literally and figuratively emerge from her being. The visual readings inspired by the text—“i was raped on a beach”—picture the act of rape and the environment in which it occurred. We imagine two individuals, one of whom is physically, emotionally, and mentally violating the other, and the beach, also evident in the pictorial field, as the location in which this violation took place. We also see the “I” in “I hate when ppl talk about sex…on the beach as a sexy thing.” The “I” refers both to the figure in the pictorial field as well as the “i” in “i was raped on a beach,” and vice versa. The person who has been raped is situated within a cultural, social, and historical context, and thereby placed amidst notions of sex, intimacy, and romance (that connect to broader ideologies and perspectives) to which many people subscribe. Societal norms and perspectives, in turn, are situated within her. The confession of rape shatters the collective belief of the “ppl” (people) to whom the anonymous female postcard-creator refers as well as her inclusivity in that community.29 The person who has been sexually violated approaches sex, intimacy, partnership, and romance from a position different from the “ppl,” a position of one who has endured a traumatic experience and has potentially suffered cognitive and linguistic effects of trauma. The woman is seeking an understanding of her rape within the larger context of trauma discourses. In this imagetext, the capital I and the lower case i denote both dominant discourses and trauma discourses (at the heart of which stand individualized narratives of rape), and the tensions and conflicts between them. Where the dominant discourses (capital I) offer seemingly fixed ways of seeing the world and deny personalized interpretive frameworks for understanding trauma, the trauma discourses (lower case i) potentially offer greater access to and understanding of an individual’s traumatic experience. The dominant discourses and trauma discourses in which the individual is immersed, as represented in this imagetext, are entangled in one another, engaged in a struggle to construct trauma and identity.

29 In this essay, I focus specifically on females who have been sexually abused, yet I am aware and sensitive to the fact that boys and men also endure sexual abuse.

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The dominant discourses of rape and the raped body, emerging from the media, politics, and culture, are embodied in this imagetext. The issue of credibility lies at the center of dominant discourses, as the “truth” of what occurred is needed to confirm the act of rape. Sometimes people who experience sexual abuse are viewed with skepticism; their credibility is often challenged both in the courtroom and in the community.30 Dominant discourses of rape are couched in criminal justice, truth-telling, and legal discourses. The rape becomes understood through certain channels: a crime is evident in that the act is reported, a testimony is required, and, when officials are involved, court proceedings may follow.31 Thus, just like any other crime, the “truth” is determined by proof of the incident, regarding both the act and the people involved. But, of note, the manner in which this occurs is highly fraught—especially for the victim. Recently, a former police officer speaking on NPR’s Talk of the Nation said many police officers (herself excluded) believe “that it’s a victim’s job to prove they were sexually assaulted”32 from the moment the act is first reported. Such a demand is likely to cause a victim stress and anxiety. Moreover, one of the steps taken toward finding proof of the act is through consideration of rape testimonies, a genre, like all types of trauma testimonies, that is intimately tied to legal testimony, its characteristics, and its context.33 A person who has experienced rape gains credibility in testifying about the rape, whether it be to a police officer, members of the court, or even in casual conversation with friends or family members, in a clear and articulate way, coherently narrating the series of events and telling the story in the same way each time it is retold. But of course here is where this type of proof becomes complicated. When exploring the genre of a police report, trauma and feminist scholar Christine Shearer-

30

This skepticism is widely displayed in various communities, and documented in many sources. Such sources range from victim advocate training manuals, such as “Excellence in Advocacy: A Victim-Centered Approach at the Ohio Family Violence Prevention Center,” to judicial workshops, such as The National Judicial Education Program (NJEP)’s “Understanding Sexual Violence: Prosecuting Adult Rape and Sexual Assault Cases,” to television reports, memoirs, and newspaper and magazine articles that narrate circumstances where the credibility of a girl or a woman has been challenged by family members, friends, the law, or other community member, such as a recent Ms. Magazine story, “The New York Times Puts Another Alleged Rape Victim on Trial” (Hallett 2011). 31 Shearer-Cremean 2004, 178. 32 Archambault 2011. 33 Gilmore 1994, 5.

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Cremean discusses the complication for demanding such a narrative, as linear narratives conflict with trauma symptoms.34 The need for a person who has experienced rape to prove one’s credibility and provide proof of a rape is so embedded in the cultural fabric of this society that countless Internet forums exist where people discuss ways to prove that they have been raped, mostly when physical evidence, such as bruises, is absent. In the same vein, the End Violence Against Women International (EVAWI) recently launched the Start by Believing campaign—a campaign “dedicated to improving the criminal justice response to violence against women on every level.”35 The campaign encourages all people that play a role in “the many steps a survivor must take on the road to justice and healing,” including police officers, doctors, nurses, family members, and friends, to trust rather than doubt or question when told of a sexual abuse situation. The very existence of such a campaign reveals that questioning a survivor’s credibility is a normalized practice in this society. Of course, when searching for “truth,” in a number of situations, the act of questioning has benefits. But the situation of rape victims provides a special case in which questioning can be debilitating, particularly when it comes to the pursuit of justice, as well as the mental healing of the victim. In looking at the relationship between credibility and language, dominant social and cultural discourses that are shaped by institutionalized patriarchal structures also contextualize the dominant discourse of rape in a plethora of ways: the historical identity of women as “irrational” (often times associated with menstruation); the historical and present-day oppression and silencing of women (literally and metaphorically)—in the home, workplace, and public space; the historical notion of woman as property (dowries); the social and cultural perpetuation of the erasure of woman’s subjectivity (“I now pronounce you man and wife” at marriage ceremonies; “Mr. and Mrs. Tom Jones”); and the nature of heterosexual sex—the woman perceived as the receiver, the passive partner, and the man defined as the giver, the dominant partner. Furthermore, patriarchal discourses have imposed identities on those who have experienced rape— “victim,” “survivor,” “martyr”—a person who wants and needs empathy, 34

Shearer-Cremean 2004. End Violence Against Women International (EVAWI), 2011, http://www. startbybelieving.org/AboutTheCampaign.aspx. This organization is made up of victim advocates who hold training sessions, webinars, and conferences in an effort to educate a wide range of professionals who respond to women who have experienced violence. The board consists of fourteen individuals in various fields, including law, medicine, publishing, and consulting. 35

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sympathy, or pity. These identity labels, particularly that of “survivor” and “victim,” according to Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray-Rosendale in “Survivor Discourse: Transgression and Recuperation,” at times, perpetuate the dominant discourse of patriarchy and thus function to uphold the historically patriarchal, dominant roles of men in this society.36 As these varied patriarchal discourses inform the dominant discourse of rape, the issue of credibility plays a significant role in how dominant culture silences, disembodies, and (re)defines the identity of traumatized individuals. As people who experience trauma are often unable to reconnect fragmented language and recollections—and consequently fragmented narratives of their own experience—of trauma, they often lose credibility. If a traumatized person were to report the act of rape to authorities, to friends, or even to family members, the possible inability to describe what happened lends itself to the reception of skeptical questions: why can’t you describe what actually happened? You’re not making sense—what are you saying?37 Similarly, the inability to remember portions of the traumatic experience also evokes questions such as: what do you mean you cannot remember? Why don’t you know what he looks like? Are you really sure this happened? Weren’t you with your friends? With rape cases, this is particularly problematic as the perpetrator does not possess the same symptoms and thus is able to articulate what often times are lies. Regarding this aspect Judith Herman writes: After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies (from the perpetrator): it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on.38

The symptoms of trauma, fragmented language, and obstruction of memory certainly contribute to how dominant rape discourse has been constructed to entail a position of distrust of the alleged victim. In turn, the dominant discourse of rape, which is symbolically embedded in the imagetext under analysis, serves to further silence traumatized individuals, as they are afraid of being accused of lying or are incapable of remembering. The possible inability to remember or explain the rape in combination with those asking why an individual cannot remember, could lead the traumatized person to potentially question herself: did I actually want it? Maybe it was just sex. I did really like him. Did this really 36

Alcoff and Gray-Rosedale 1993, 266-68. Alcoff and Gray-Rosedale 1993, 266-68 38 Herman 1997, 8. 37

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happen? Maybe I am exaggerating. Maybe I am making a big deal out of nothing. Even if a traumatized individual is able to “prove” herself—either through physical evidence, dominant autobiographical scripts, or after the process of working to reclaim memories, the dominant cultural discourses often still work to define the experience, and at the same time, silence and erase the traumatized individual. The media and the public contribute to descriptions of rape as horrific, horrendous, tragic, oppressive, violent, and brutal. The woman becomes victimized, tainted—she will never be the same again. High profile rape cases stand the risk of transforming both the raped person and the incident into a spectacle,39 resulting in the consumption, commodification, and exploitation of one’s trauma, as well as possible repeat trauma. The dominant discourses dictate a raped person’s subjectivity—how she feels about herself, her body, her emotions, and her place in the world. Her social identity is that of a “victim” who is literally and metaphorically confined to her victimization. The traumatized individual is expected to be irrational, upset, devastated, emotionally unstable, or helpless and hopeless. Her body is violated, transformed into the site of rape, and as a result, she loses possession of it. Her victimization aligns her with other victims of violence, and possibly even all “victims”—people who lose a sense of self or control due to a situation, experience, or another person or groups of people that renders them helpless. Although the subjectivity and social identity of the traumatized individual might be socially constructed, it is very important to note that it is possible—and even quite likely—that the traumatized individual does truly feel some, and maybe even all, of the emotion society projects on her. Yet, my intention in acknowledging the social construction of trauma and the subjectivity of the traumatized individuals is to highlight the way dominant discourses create essentialist 39 The Central Park rape in New York City in 1989 is a strong example of a high profile rape case. Trisha Meili, a 29-year old investment banker was raped, beaten, and nearly killed in Central Park, and at the time, five black teenagers confessed to the assault. In this particular rape case, the newspapers carefully recounted every detail of the rape, with particular attention paid to racial identities. The embedded discourse of racism and power relations rose to the surface as people asked: would this case be so highly publicized if the perpetrators were white? Would this case be so highly publicized if the raped woman was black? The “spectacle” of the Central Park rape case prompted examination of media (and society in general) and racism, which of course is an essential exploration, yet at the same time, this attention obscured and silenced Meili. The five men were convicted and served sentences from seven to eleven years. In an interesting turn of events, Matais Reyes, a convicted serial rapist confessed to the assault in 2002, claiming he was the only perpetrator. The convictions of the five young men were overturned.

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identities and thus erase the person who has endured trauma and the effects it has.

D(I)scourses of trauma, language, and identity The imagetext under exploration embodies understandings of trauma and trauma representation that have been neglected, ignored, or erased in dominant discourses. The postcard as imagetext functions as a “contact zone” or, in the words of Mary Louise Pratt, a space where dominant discourses and trauma discourses “meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.”40 The engagement of these multiple, conflicting discourses reveals that the absence of trauma discourses perpetuates oppressive identity scripts and domineering avenues of representation. The presence of trauma discourses exposes, disrupts, and dismantles these oppressive forces, as they offer knowledge about trauma and the complexity of its representation. As this knowledge informs visuals and texts, imagetext functions to represent trauma in a way that resists pre-established identity scripts. In analyzing the postcard as imagetext, the central discourses of trauma most obviously manifest in the figure, which directly confronts the dominant discourses that claim language and identity are not affected by trauma. The Xs across her genital area and face mark a raped body—she is biologically, mentally, and literally erased. She is a fractured and fragmented being. The marks strip the woman of her subjectivity and identity; she is unidentifiable both to herself and the world. She is someone different, someone unrecognizable. The X marks across her face reveal that the experience has potentially left her without voice and language, a symptom of trauma. The upside-down, lower case “i”—the identity of the traumatized individual—and the “I”—the identity constructed by dominant discourses—represent the tension in identity construction, the struggle in representing an identity that has been altered by an experience and shaped by dominant discourses. The suggestion that the person who has endured trauma is left linguistically paralyzed and with a fractured identity evokes questions about “true” events and “real” representations. The normalized understandings of “truth” and “reality” are directly associated with stable, linear, coherent language and a confirmed understanding of the experience. Trauma discourses, by contrast, expose that “reality” cannot be represented within the dominant frameworks, as events that are defined as traumatic resist 40

Pratt 1991, 34.

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“truth-telling.” The inability to tell the truth eradicates the possibility for accurate or authentic representation of the event. The imagetext depicts resistance to dominant discourses or constructed identities as it proclaims the “unspeakable”—i was raped on the beach—and confronts accusations of credibility by clearly identifying the “what” and “where” of the experience. The imagetext suggests voice and language can be regained and reclaimed, both from dominant discourses as well as the traumatic experience itself via mediums such as imagetext. The postcard as imagetext creates space for discourses of traumatic memory, calling attention to their absence in dominant discourses and their role in (re)constructing and representing identity. The dominant discourses of rape have historically defied the means for reclamation of experience and identity by eradicating or not acknowledging the complex role memory plays in understanding and representing the “real.” Memories live in the body, in places, and in time, and thus in the imagetext under analysis, memories are contained in the figure, the pictorial field, the beach, and the event itself. The knowledge that memories embody both the locational and the temporal is crucial to understanding trauma representations. Discourses of traumatic memory enable and invite those who have been traumatized to take ownership of their past and identity, as memories—whether they are records, recollections, or fragments of an event—are subjective and unique to individuals. Therefore, they cannot by nature be “written” or “recollected” by anyone but the individual. The ownership of memories, in this case, reclaims traumatic experiences from oppressive dominant discourses that force traumatized individuals to forget or deem them incapable of remembering, hence suggesting memories do not exist. In reclaiming memory, the imagetext might also function as a way to bring recognition to traumatic memories, and perhaps help a person who has experienced trauma reconnect disjointed memories—a possibility that is embodied in the imagetext “i was raped on the beach.” Most importantly, imagetext offers a way to communicate, express, and represent trauma—the event and effects from the event—by identifying where it lives, a concept I will explore momentarily. In Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (2000), Edward Casey explains that traumatic memories are marginalized memories that have been pushed to the periphery of one’s consciousness. Traumatic memories, according to Casey, recede with time because remembering or reliving the traumatic experience is traumatic in itself, and often times, the memory turns into re-creations. Therefore, rather than draw on the marginalized, fragmented memories of trauma and thus experience repeated trauma, a

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person might develop a narrative about the experience.41 These narratives, however, rely on pre-established forms; they are, I would argue, cultural scripts birthed directly from dominant discourses. Such narratives obscure the happenings of the event that produced cognitive, emotional, and mental effects, and more importantly, they obscure how traumatic events deny such narratives. That is, these re-creations disregard the very failures inherent in narratives of pre-established forms. The imagetext, by contrast, calls attention to potential manifestations of traumatic memories in the body, indicating their fragmented nature and thus revealing their inability to be articulated. This form of representation embraces rather than denies the lack of a cohesive narrative. Simultaneously and perhaps surprisingly, the body, itself informed by discourses of memory, represents an avenue for expressing trauma without having to relive the event. Casey explains that traumatic memories first and foremost live in the body and hence, Casey claims “there is no memory without body memory.”42 Roberta Culbertson echoes Casey: The memory of trauma, or the knowledge of things past, is not merely of a wild and skewed time inaccessible except on its own terms, either in “flashbacks” or “neuroses” or in the form of the numb survivor self, but also the memory of other levels of reality, sense not even by the fives sense, but by the body itself.43

The marks across the figure in the pictorial field of the postcard literalize a representation of a fragmented person; she is defaced, desexed, and degendered. Her body, and by extension, her memories, and the language connected to those memories, are no longer whole. The imagetext reveals the connection between traumatic memories in the body to place memory, actual spaces or locations that function as “containers” where memory and time are held together.44 Casey defines place as a “keeper of memories…one of the main ways by which the past comes to be secured in the presence held in things before us and around us.”45 A particular place, like the beach on the postcard, holds and has the potential to evoke certain memories that are appropriate for different kinds of remembering—visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. The imagetext as a vehicle of trauma representation has the potential for an exposure or 41

Casey 2000, 164. Casey 2000, 172. 43 Culbertson 1995, 176. 44 Casey 2000, 215. 45 Casey 2000, 213. 42

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acknowledgement of possible sites of traumatic memory manifestation, indicating where fragmentary memories might be held and suggesting possible ways to reconnect them and the language that describes them. Imagetext offers an avenue for a traumatized person to feel, see, sense, and live the trauma—without actually experiencing it again. Via imagetext, a person who has experienced trauma can bear witness and thus ultimately come to know his/her trauma or something about it. A photograph that functions as a postcard in itself evokes discourses of memory tied to representations of the “real.” Historically, photographs are understood as documents that capture and freeze a moment in time, sites that encapsulate and can later be used to evoke memories. Photographs make the “real” transparent. From crime scenes to paparazzi sightings, photographs are used as evidence that denote the truth, proving something true or false, real or fake. Roland Barthes explains that photographs are not “real” in the sense that they exist in the present; rather, they capture something “that-has-been,” something that existed in reality in the past and cannot be repeated.46 The photograph, Barthes claims, cannot be detached from its referent. Some scholars refute the idea that photographs are “real” in any way, and through such a lens, the medium of the PostSecret postcard under analysis, a photograph (which is appended to a postcard), disrupts discourses of truth-telling and dominant discourses in general. In “Looking at Photographs,” Victor Burgin says photographs do not have a fixed meaning. Strongly echoing Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and directly in line with my reading of imagetext, Burgin explains that a photograph is a “complex site of intertextuality,” a text that has engaged with multiple texts in and across time.47 In simple terms, photographs are rhetorical, and can be manipulated in such a way as to construct meaning. The photograph tells a version of the “truth,” or in other words, a representation—whether it is a re-creation or a copy—of a traumatic experience while at the same time, resists the assumption that the event is “true” or “real.” Just like the creator, the viewer, who I will focus on in the next section of this essay, will hold power in the construction of meaning.

46 47

Barthes 1982, 4; 76-77. Burgin 1982, 144.

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Confessions: The role of the blogger and blog viewer The reading of PostSecret postcards as imagetext on a blog brings a new dimension to discussions of “truth-telling,” confessionals, representation in general, and trauma representation specifically. Interestingly, just like an autobiography or memoir, a blog is what can be categorized as a “truthtelling,” or confessional, genre.48 Thus, the PostSecret project is a “truthtelling” genre made up of confessional postcards that are situated within a “truth-telling” genre, a blog. As explored throughout this essay, the dialogical engagement of dominant discourses and discourses of trauma in the postcard under examination work to disrupt the notion of “true” and “real” representations of trauma. The medium of the blog further complicates “real” representations and the possibility of trauma representation, as the traumatic experience, simulated in its existence on the Internet, challenges “reality” as we know it and presents a pathway for viewers to shape an identity. A blog, by its very nature, invites people to share their lives, experiences, and opinions. Bloggers display personal information or share their thoughts, ideas, and observations. Bloggers ask viewers to engage with them via blog posts and hyperlinks.49 In many cases, the blog, in addition to many other mediums like tabloid magazines, reality television shows, and talk shows like Jerry Springer, functions as a platform for both exhibitionism and voyeurism. Our culture, according to Clay Calvert in Voyeur Nation, is obsessed with watching other people and knowing the “truth” about their lives. He identifies this social phenomenon as “mediated voyeurism,” which he defines as follows: The consumption of revealing images of, and information about, others’ apparently real and unguarded lives, often, yet now always, for purposes of entertainment but frequently at the expense of privacy and discourse, through the means of the mass media and Internet.50

In “Blogging as Social Action,” Carolyn Miller claims that voyeurism has “become synonymous with information access and the public’s right to know. Seeing is knowing, not just believing.”51 Exposure and consumption 48 Several scholars such as David Weinberger (2002) or Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd (2004) characterize blogs as confessional in nature. 49 Blood 2000. 50 Calvert 2000, 3. 51 Miller and Shepherd 2004 (emphasis in original).

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of “real” life events through mediation have come to prove that which is “real.” Yet, as Miller claims, mediation has transformed what constitutes the “real.” Drawing on Baudrillard’s concept of simulacrum, Miller argues that the social phenomenon of voyeurism in present-day culture transforms the “real” into a copy of reality—“rather than representing the real, the simulation constitutes the real.”52 Voyeurism, the act of consuming mediated simulations, and exhibitionism, revealing one’s personal experiences, are often characterized as perverse, sexual, and even pornographic in nature, yet are not, in actuality, always so. In fact, Calvert claims that most “mediated voyeurism” is neither sordid nor sexual. Rather, voyeurs watch others in order to: (1) build community; (2) have companionship (particularly for those that have difficulty interacting with humans face-to-face); (3) be entertained; (4) feel a sense of power and self-esteem (to see other people’s tragedies, problems, or issues and feel better about one’s own life); (5) ease loneliness; (6) help people understand their role in society; (7) sympathize or empathize; (8) ask people to reflect on how they might handle a similar situation; (9) identify with others; (10) occupy one’s time; and finally, (11) know the “truth”—watch people live in an “unscripted” and “realistic” environment.53 The consumption of others’ “real” lives fulfills a need for people to enter into the lives of others, to “try” on various identities, to understand one’s own identity, and to confirm and affirm one’s own life experiences.54 Voyeurs can do all of these things from a “safe” distance in a safe “place”—at their home, while surfing the Internet for example, without any human interaction.55 Although Calvert claims “mediated voyeurism” is mostly sexually benign, there are countless confessional blogs and forums on the Internet that cannot be described as such, e.g., “adultconfessions.com” (eighteen years old and over), “unburdened.net,” “noteful.com,” “subtleconfessions .com,” “confessionpost.com,” “anoymousvoices.com,” or “roofessions .com.” Many websites seemingly pride themselves on inviting what one could call “perverse” voyeurism and exhibitionism, and as a result, these sites transform trauma into spectacle. For example, “unburdened.net,” which was unveiled in 2006, is described as “raw, unedited and frequently disturbing,” and warns that “viewer discretion is recommended for all confessions.”56 Similarly, “noteful.com,” a site where exhibitionists and 52

Miller and Shepherd 2004. For further discussion, see Baudrillard 1988, 166-84. Calvert 2000, 53-57; 60-71. 54 Conway 1999, 17. 55 Calvert 2000, 66. 56 Anonymous Confessions, http://www.unburdened.net. 53

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voyeurs can buy sex toys, challenges viewers to post the most scandalous or shocking secrets, stating: “Is your secret unheard of? Is it too dark to mention? We doubt it, try us!”57 Such sites will appear wholly perverse, disturbing, and offensive to some. For example, several people on noteful.com confess and describe incestuous encounters in great detail, using graphic language to describe invited or uninvited sexual acts. The viewers rate the confessions, and although they have no shared criteria to do so, it nevertheless seems that the more sexual or scandalous the post, the higher the rating. This is likely behavior that many would find objectionable, even degrading. To some extent, PostSecret confessional postcards, like the one under analysis in this essay, can beckon and perpetuate perverse voyeurism and exhibitionism. Yet as this article shows, when read as imagetext, the PostSecret blog and its confessional postcards invite forms of voyeurism that have the potential to help people identify events as traumatic, understand trauma experiences, (re)construct identity, and form a support system, as many blogs do, for living with trauma. Unlike other confessional blogs, the PostSecret project complicates the traditional mediated confessional mode and blurs the identity of the blogger. The PostSecret postcard creator is not composing a confession on the computer nor actually going to a virtual confessional site. The anonymous confessor is one step removed from the process of blogging. Frank Warren or his employees are confessional mediators: they decide which confessions are scanned and posted to the blog. They also control the nature and number of comments on the postcards; rather than use the comment feature common on most blogs, viewers must email comments directly to the organization. Therefore, the blogger—the presumed exhibitionist—is blurred, complicating his/her role in this genre. In fact, bloggers, Miller claims, are “less interested in role playing than in locating, or constructing for themselves and for others, an identity that they can understand as unitary, as ‘real.’”58 Following this, it is possible that the PostSecret postcard creators want to construct a “real” identity for themselves and others. On the other hand, it is equally possible that their goal is to produce creative artifacts with outrageous secrets for a hope of seeing it on the blog Sunday morning. Similarly, one can wonder if perhaps Warren chooses the postcards based on those who he thinks are the most “real”—the most likely to accomplish a goal of creating community and using the postcards

57 58

Noteful.com, http://www.noteful.com/publicportal/Home.aspx. Miller and Shepherd 2004.

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to help others articulate secrets they might be “keeping from themselves.”59 Yet, in postcards that depict trauma, the fact of whether or not they are “real” does not, in the end, matter. Imagetexts do not simply function as a way for one person to represent a traumatic experience. Rather, they function as rhetorical epistemological avenues of identity (re)construction for anyone—voyeurs, exhibitionists, PostSecret employees, and even postal workers—through affect, identification, and the engagement of multiple, competing discourses. The avenues do not impose autobiographical scripts nor fill-in-the-blank identity categories, as each person will “read” the imagetext in a different way and (re)construct an identity or a fragment of an identity that he or she sees fit at a particular moment in time within a particular social context. As a result, the viewer can enact similar functions as a blogger, building a representation of an event that shapes ideas about him/herself and others. Although one might argue that imagetexts equally stand the risk of defining experiences or dictating how people might understand an experience, compared to other forms of expression, they have greater potential to more fully succeed in constructing identity; this occurs precisely because they create a socially contextualized space that houses competing, conflicting forces—namely dominant discourses and trauma discourses. In the postcard examined as imagetext in this essay, the images and the discourses embodied in the images and texts, as well as the photograph and manipulation of the photograph ask voyeurs to feel emotion. According to Charles Hill in the “The Psychology of Visual Images,” the associations with these facets trigger mental images and emotional responses.60 The figure of the woman on the beach creates a realistic—or what psychologists might call a vivid—scenario. Consequently, according to Hill, viewers are likely to feel more emotion than they would perhaps from reading a description of a rape in a memoir or autobiography.61 Also, the photograph itself has the potential to trigger what Barthes calls the punctum. The punctum, which is a Latin word derived from the Greek for trauma, is a detail in a photograph that “pricks” or “wounds” a viewer.62 Appropriately named, the punctum is not easily communicable in language; it is, rather, an unexpected feeling that moves the viewer in a particular way. The punctum is subjective, thus not everyone will react in the same way to photographs or details in photographs. This feeling, 59

Warren 2005, 2. Hill 2004, 31. 61 Hill 2004, 31. 62 Barthes 1982, 26-27 60

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Barthes explains, is dependent upon one’s lived experiences. The punctum is metonymic, and thus can function as a way to define something or someone.63 A PostSecret blog viewer who has endured trauma may encounter this “lightning-like” feeling and experience it as an invitation to construct meaning of his own while interacting and engaging with the postcards. Emotive responses also spur vivid and strong memories of that which evoked the emotions. Thus, a PostSecret viewer who is left with a lasting impression may be prompted to reflect on the postcard, and the associations, discourses, feelings, and experiences that manifest in the imagetext. These emotions, particularly those of empathy and sympathy, have the potential to create connection between the viewer and the postcard. The voyeur who looks at the postcards in this way, as Calvert suggests, could perhaps “try on” the identity she thinks is being constructed via the postcard, or use the postcard as a way to “affirm or “reaffirm” her own life experiences, or reconnect a fragmented identity. Furthermore, affect is connected to memory and remembering, and thus the postcard as imagetext could stimulate the viewer’s memories, guiding her in recognizing, accessing, or even “feeling” memories, perhaps traumatic memories stored inside the body. The prompting of bodily memories also has the potential to evoke place, space, and time memories. The memories could work to help the viewer understand a happening in his/her own life or his/her selfhood. The viewer might also reclaim memories that have been severed from language, which, as we already know, many scholars argue is the means to represent, come to know, and thus communicate traumatic experience. Directly connected to affect, the postcard as imagetext invites identification as it offers viewers a familiar site (and sight)—the beach; a familiar medium—a photograph that captures a particular moment in time; a familiar discourse—sex on the beach; and a familiar (at least insofar as this is a term all are familiar with) traumatic experience—rape. The viewer, like that which is connoted by the figure on the beach, is a living body; one who might feel disconnected or fragmented at times. Identification brings forth a sense of collective experience, or at least the recognition that shared experiences do exist. The communal sharing of what is or what could potentially be offers an avenue for constructing a community, albeit a virtual community. The sense of community—despite viewers’ remote and passive participation—could be comforting to those who cannot yet speak about a traumatic experience, are unable to trust others to share their experiences, or have shame about traumatic events. Participation in a community might encourage or assist 63

Barthes 1982, 45.

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viewers in more clearly understanding their identity, affirming their experiences, or building an aspect of identity that has not yet been understood. Such community also has the potential to help those who have not experienced trauma develop compassion for those who have, and perhaps encourage thoughtful consideration of the effects of trauma.

Concluding remarks Imagetext and its use as a medium of trauma representation extends trauma scholarship, as it deconstructs the image-text binary and reveals the value in imagining texts as images and images as texts in the representation and (re)construction of trauma narratives. Imagetext reveals that language is not one-dimensional; language is both textual and visual, and embodies struggling, contentious discourses and histories. It fosters layers of meaning-making spaces and provides various avenues and options for the reconnection of severed connections related to trauma and trauma representation. These connections include the noted language-memory fracture identified in common definitions of trauma, and the dominant discourse/trauma discourse disconnection that has historically erased trauma and silenced those who have experienced the trauma. The construction of a representation can help bring understanding to crucial (yet also, sometimes, elusive if not buried) life experiences, awareness to the role of society in defining such experiences, and ultimately can aid in (re)building one’s subjectivity. In addition, imagetext has the potential to guide viewers in recognizing the tensions that exist between dominant scripted identities and actual or individualized identities of those who have experienced trauma. Both identification and emotive responses from imagetexts evoke cultural and social contexts, histories, and values that are constructed by dominant discourses.64 The possible identification of this tension and of the oppressive forces of dominant discourses might help viewers understand identity as a rhetorical social construct, which may prompt reflective practices that could assist in identity and memory reclamation. Lastly, imagetext in virtual spaces, such as a blog, offers many people—not just the person who constructed the representation—the opportunity to form community and create their own representation. The sense of community that PostSecret as imagetext fosters, as well as our knowledge about dominant discourses, trauma discourses, and the relationship between the two, reveals that the site has the potential to 64

Hill 2004, 34.

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function as a space for political and social change. Although many might argue mediation breeds passivity which breeds inaction, the postcards as imagetext can also encourage social action. The PostSecret project has the potential to function similarly to survivors’ movement rallies or demonstrations like “Take Back the Night,” as it works to bring awareness to trauma and traumatic events, and encourages people to “break the silence,” bear witness to their trauma, and share stories about their experiences for purposes of empowerment and confrontation of violence.

Works Cited Alcoff, Linda and Laura Gray-Rosedale. 1993. “Survivor Discourse: Transgression and Recuperation.” Signs 18. 2: 260-90. Archambault, Joanne. 2011. “Many Rape Victims Say Justice System Still Fails Them.” National Public Radio, Talk of the Nation. June 14.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1975) 2008. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barthes, Roland. (1980) 1982. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. “Simulacra and Simulations.” In Selected Writings, edited, with an introduction, by Mark Poster, 166-84. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Blood, Rebecca. 2000. “Weblogs: A History and Perspective.” What’s in Rebecca's Pocket? (weblog). September 7. Brinks, Ellen. 2004. “‘Nobody’s Children’: Gothic Representation and Traumatic History in The Devil’s Backbone.” JAC 24.3: 291-310. Burgin, Victor. 1982. “Looking at Photographs.” In Thinking Photography, edited by Victor Burgin, 142-216. London: Macmillan. Calvert, Clay. 2000. Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Casey, Edward S. 2000. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chambers, Ross. 2004. “Bringing It Home: Teaching, Trauma, Testimonial (on Elizabeth Stone’s A Boy I Once Knew).” JAC 24.2: 375-98.

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Conway, Jill Ker. 1999. When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography. New York: Vintage. Culbertson, Roberta. 1995. “Embodied Memory, Transcendence, and Telling: Recounting Trauma, Re-establishing the Self.” New Literary History 26.1 (1995): 169-95. Elkins, James. 2003. Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. New York: Routledge. Ewalt, David M. 2009. “Web Celeb 25.” Forbes.com, January 29.

Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. 1992. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge. Gilmore, Leigh. 1994. Autobiographies: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hallett, Stephanie. 2011. “The New York Times Puts Another Alleged Rape Victim on Trial.” Ms. Magazine blog, April 19. . Herman, Judith. 1997. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence— From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Perseus Books. Hesford, Wendy. 2000. “Rape Stories: Material Rhetoric and the Trauma of Representation.” In Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the “Real,” edited by Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol, 1346. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Hesford, Wendy and Wendy Kozol. 2000. “Introduction: Is There a “Real” Crisis?” In Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the “Real,” edited by Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol, 1-12. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Hill, Charles. 2004. “The Psychology of Rhetorical Images.” In Defining Visual Rhetorics, edited by Charles Hill and Marguerite H. Helmers, 25-40. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Kelly, Anita E. 2002. The Psychology of Secrets. New York: Kluwer Academic / Plenum. Miller, Carolyn R. and Dawn Shepherd. 2004 “Blogging as Social Action.” Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs (online collection), edited by Laura Gurak et al.

Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91: 3340.

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Saltzman, Lisa and Eric Rosenberg, eds. 2006. Trauma and Visuality in Modernity. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press. Shearer-Cremean, Christine. 2004. “The Epistemology of Police Science and the Silencing of Battered Women.” In Survivor Rhetoric: Negotiations and Narrativity in Abused Women’s Language, edited by Christine Shearer-Cremean and Carol Winkelmann, 166-96. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Taylor-Guthrie, Danielle. 1994. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Warren, Frank. 2005. PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives. New York: HarperCollins. —. 2006. My Secret: A PostSecret Book. New York: HarperCollins. —. 2007a. A Lifetime of Secrets: A PostSecret Book. New York: William Morrow —. 2007b. The Secret Lives of Men and Women: A PostSecret Book. New York: Regan. —. 2009. PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God. New York: William Morrow. Weinberger, David. 2002. Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. Cambridge, MA: Perseus.

CHAPTER THREE DIFFICULT ARTICULATIONS: COMICS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, TRAUMA, AND DISABILITY DALE JACOBS AND JAY DOLMAGE

By examining Stitches, David Small’s 2009 graphic memoir of medical trauma, we seek to understand comics memoir in general and comics memoirs of trauma and disability in particular. Drawing on theories of comics, multimodality, autobiography, trauma, and disability studies, we explore these “difficult articulations” as a way to examine how both self and trauma/disability are constructed in the multimodal textual space of a comics memoir. While autobiography may not be the genre that most people associate with comics, autobiographical comics have been an important form of comics since the underground movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In an overview of the field entitled “Autography’s Biography, 1972-2007,” Jared Gardner traces the current production of autobiographical comics to the 1972 publication of Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, usually seen as the first piece of longform autobiography in comics form.1 Like many prose autobiographies, these graphic narratives often deal with trauma and traumatic events; unlike prose autobiographies, comics draw on images as well as words to construct identity and convey meaning to the reader. In traditional prose memoirs of trauma, such as Alice Sebold’s Lucky (1999), Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995), or Aron Ralston’s 127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2004), language bears the burden of representing what is unimaginable and of providing an avenue towards “healing” for the trauma survivor. As Leigh Gilmore explains, what is crucial to the experience of trauma are “the selfaltering, even self-shattering experience of violence, injury, and harm” and

1

Gardner 2008, 7.

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“the multiple difficulties that arise in trying to articulate it.”2 She goes on to write, “Language is asserted as that which can realize trauma even as it is theorized as that which fails in the face of trauma.”3 Traditional memoirs of disability also bear the burden of challenging a normative culture as they confront the normative tropes of narrative. How do you make the unique, embodied experience of trauma or disability accessible to the reader? The answer, all too often, is that memoirs of trauma and disability fail to trouble norms of representation or norms of representing. Both trauma and disability share the curious problem of being seemingly ineffable and individuated, yet also over-determined. Despite Gilmore’s arguments for the necessity to look beyond the claims of language with regard to trauma memoir, she nonetheless succinctly articulates a central problem of not only memoirs of trauma, but of all memoirs, including those involving disability: how do we construct from our memories the normative shape of narrative? But what if language were not the only resource available to the memoirist? Would new possibilities for articulation open? Or would the difficulties simply multiply and layer? Multimodal texts such as comics draw on not only linguistic signs, but also visual, gestural, spatial, audio, and multimodal (the combination of all of the aforementioned) systems of signs. The available resources expand, just as possibilities and difficulties proliferate. What is the story of David Small’s disease and disability? The simple version is that he had asthma as a child and then cancer, the treatment of which damaged his vocal chords. A simple way to explain David Small’s trauma is to note that his father exposed him to excessive radiation in trying to treat his asthma, causing him to develop cancer, a crucial fact that his parents hid from him. You could say that his disease caused disability which caused trauma. Or, you could say his trauma was disabling. However, through this narrative itself, we see that disease, disability, and trauma are much more complicated and interrelated. There is no certain way to trace the causal relationships between these three things and, as we shall see, the available resources for representing these intersecting phenomena are extremely complex. As such, comics represent a rich but fraught medium for mapping the ways that bodies are shaped by disability and trauma—and also how they might re-shape these experiences. The shaping-by is powerful but not impossible to subvert; the shaping-of is potentially rich, but exponentially fraught. 2 3

Gilmore 2001, 6. Gilmore 2001, 7.

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Comic selves As Charles Hatfield argues in Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (2005), today’s alternative comics—including autobiographical comic books4 such as Joe Matt’s Peepshow, Ed Brubaker’s Lowlife, Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur, and Julie Doucet’s Dirty Plotte—owe much to the work of underground creators such as Green, Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, and Trina Robbins.5 Green’s Binky Brown may be the first extended piece of comics autobiography, but it must be noted that Crumb included many autobiographical elements in his comics of the 1960s, a practice on which Green simply extended with Binky Brown. Moreover, Crumb realized the potential of using the standard-size comic book format, with its accompanying expectations and associations, as a medium of critique within which creators could work against the expectations of the form. In his work and that of other underground creators, form and content were inseparable. Creators of underground comics were not constrained by the mainstream comics industry with its division of labor (with writing, penciling, lettering, inking, and coloring all performed by different people), adherence to a restrictive Comics Code, and focus on profit, thus freeing them to explore a variety of topics and genres, including autobiography.6 These serialized memoirs often deal with the private and painfully intimate, focusing on issues such as dead-end jobs, relationships, and sex as they relate to each creator’s life. While there are still many examples of such serialized work published through small and independent presses, comics memoir is now often published by major publishing houses in the form of original graphic novels, prominent examples of which include Alison Bechdel’s 2006 Fun Home (from Houghton Mifflin) and Small’s Stiches (from Norton). Such publications are marketed to a much broader audience and sold in bookstores and not solely in comics specialty stores. Rather than drawing on the form of the comic book and the associations that adhere to it, these comics autobiographies use the multimodality inherent in the comics form, but 4

By “comic books”, we refer to the material artifact of the serialized, centerstapled pamphlet. When we refer to “comics,” we are referring to the medium itself. 5 Hatfield 2005, 3-31. 6 After 1954, most publishers agreed to submit voluntarily to the Comics Code Authority, a code of standards that curbed depictions of violence, crime, and sexuality. The Code is generally seen as a stifling force on the development of comics. For more on the institution of the Comics Code and its effect on the industry, see Nyberg 1998 and Wright 2001.

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also remediate themselves on the prose autobiography, the genre with which the broader audience to which they are marketed will be most familiar. In both comics and prose, autobiography and memoir currently represent an important segment of the publishing industry, a trend that can be seen in bestseller lists, bookstore displays, and newspaper coverage. While the rise in prominence of life writing, like the rise in reality television, has gained momentum over the last fifteen years, autobiography and the theory surrounding it has, of course, a much longer history. One of the first theorists of autobiography, Georges Gusdorf, famously (and androcentrically) argued the following in his 1956 essay “Conditions and the Limits of Autobiography”: The author of an autobiography gives himself the job of narrating his own history; what he sets out to do is to reassemble the scattered elements of his individual life and to regroup them in a comprehensive sketch. […] The author of a private journal, noting his impressions and mental notes from day to day, fixes the portrait of his daily reality without any concern for continuity. Autobiography, on the other hand, requires a man to take a distance with regard to himself in order to reconstitute himself in the focus of his special unity and identity across time.7

In this conception of autobiography, the author maintains complete control in the narration of life and construction of identity, consciously constructing an identity “as he believes and wishes himself to be and to have been.”8 Here the autobiographer attempts to give meaning to a (public) life lived; for Gusdorf, autobiography is about “great men” (as he would have it) presenting and justifying their lives. As we shall see, Gusdorf’s theory has been extensively critiqued by writers such as Gilmore and can be productively complicated by work in Disability Studies. Gusdorf’s positioning of narrative at the heart of autobiography, however, is an important concept that can be seen in later theoretical work by writers such as Paul John Eakin, Paul Anthony Kerby, and Charlotte Linde. To summarize these scholars’ argument: [N]arrativization is the way that we as human beings make sense of our identities and the social spheres in which we exist; both consciously and unconsciously, we all continuously construct ourselves in story (to ourselves and to others) as a way to deal with the discontinuities of our 7 8

Gusdorf 1980, 35. Gusdorf 1980, 45.

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lives. […] As we continually construct our identities, we do so through narrative, whether in private thought or public autobiography.9

This idea of the self made in story is a key concept in autobiography: the fragmented self is assembled in a temporarily stable form as it is simultaneously created and communicated in ways that are inextricably connected. While prose autobiography relies on language to construct the self, comics autobiography uses multiple modes of meaning as the building blocks of textual identity, including the alphabetic, the spatial, and the visual, as well as the audio and gestural (both of which are represented in comics by the visual).10 A comics page has multiple panels with gutters separating them from each other. The gutter may be either “a physical or conceptual space that acts as a caesura through which connections are made and meanings are negotiated. Images of people, objects, animals, and settings, word balloons, lettering, sound effects, and gutters all come together to form page layouts that work to create meaning in distinctive ways and in multiple semiotic realms.”11 For example, in the first eight pages of Stitches, Small uses all of these elements to create a self within the narrative of his family. The opening two pages, identically laid out grids with five panels per page, act as an extended establishing shot. Each successive panel on the first page encapsulates an ever more focused view of where David Small lives—from city to neighborhood to block to street to house—while the second page continues this movement into the house until the final panel in which we see David Small as a young child drawing in his living room.12 All of this scene setting is accomplished through a combination of the visual and spatial modes, through what is in the panels and how they are arranged in relation to each other. Readers make sense of this sequence through what Thierry Groensteen calls arthrology or the relationship between panels; such relationships happen both in sequence (restricted arthrology, as we see here) and in the network that is formed by all of the panels within a comics story (general arthrology, as we shall see in our later discussion).13 9

Jacobs 2008, 70-71. For a fuller summary of the ideas of Eakin, Kerby, and Linde, see ibid. 10 For a more detailed description of the application of multimodality to comics, see Jacobs 2007. 11 Jacobs 2008, 64. 12 Small 2009, 12-13. We use David Small to indicate the character in the autobiography and Small to indicate the creator of the autobiography. 13 For a fuller discussion of this term, see Groensteen 2007.

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As the panels move the reader in and through the house, other modes are introduced, including the gestural (such as the visual depictions of both David Small’s mother’s body language and expressions, and David Small’s reactions to them), the alphabetic (through caption boxes in which Small uses an authorial voice to describe his mother slamming doors, his father hitting a punching bag, and his brother banging his drum as their languages), and the audio (as seen in the sound effects of all of his family members’ “languages”).14 This depiction of his family stands in stark contrast to the next two pages in which getting sick, which Small describes as his “language,” is represented as silent, with no visual representation of any diegetic sound.15 All of these elements thus combine with both the depictions of people and place within the panels (the visual) and the layout of the panels on the page as well as their relationship to each other (the spatial) to form a multimodal text that gives a complex picture of David Small’s childhood family dynamic and the way Small constructs his own place within it and his relationship to it. Despite the usefulness of the link between narrative, autobiography, and the construction of self, the danger of Gusdorf’s definition is that it excludes many people who are often marginalized by disability, race, class, or gender and does not reflect the current state of publishing in the field of autobiography.16 Further, Gilmore, in The Limits of Autobiography (2001), usefully critiques Gusdorf’s focus on the public and on public personages, arguing instead that the autobiography taps into the confessional practices that pervade mass culture and mass media in North America. She goes on to write that “the efflorescence of talk shows and their mutating confessional forms has pushed forward another representative: neither celebrity nor statesperson, but the dysfunctional and downtrodden, the cheated-on and the cheating, the everyman and everywoman of the bad times that keep on coming.”17 Such foregrounding of the confessional results in what Gilmore calls “the autobiographical paradox of the unusual or unrepresentative life becoming representative.”18 While Gusdorf saw the lives of the famous as representative in that they served as instructional examples, Gilmore sees the autobiographical paradox operative in autobiographies that focus on trauma (such as the aforementioned Lucky, Two or Three Things I Know 14

Small 2009, 15-17. Small 2009, 18-19. 16 See Gilmore 1994 and 2001; Smith and Watson 1998; Benstock 1998; and Bergland 1994. 17 Gilmore 2001, 17. 18 Gilmore 2001, 19. 15

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for Sure, 127 Hours, and Stitches). Here trauma represents experience that is outside the ordinary, that is, in fact, unrepresentative. Narratives of trauma (and disability) thus show how “issues of self-representation and representativeness intersect and exist in tension that can, if dealt with in ways that question this relationship, lead to an interrogation of representation itself.”19 By showing the ways in which a text is itself a construct, through strategies such as heightening the distance between the writer-as-writer and writer-as-subject, the tension between representation and representativeness can be exploited and critiqued. In the comics form, “the split between the autographer and the subject is etched on every page, and the hand-crafted nature of the images and the ‘autobiofictional’ nature of the narrative are undeniable.”20 The body of the author is literally rendered on the page, a product of both the physical act of inscription and the rhetoricity of any narrative; it is concordantly a reality and a reality effect.

Disability rhetorics Disability Studies theory offers some productive possibilities for exploring the tension between reality and representation. As Rosemarie GarlandThomson writes, “seeing disability as a representational system engages several premises of current critical theory: that representation structures reality, that the margins constitute the center, that human identity is multiple and unstable, and that all analysis and evaluation has political implications.”21 Or, as Tobin Siebers suggests: [D]isability offers a challenge to the representation of the body [...]. Usually this means that the disabled body provides insight into the fact that all bodies are socially constructed—that social attitudes and institutions determine, far greater than biological fact, the representation of the body’s reality.22

In short, understanding the many ways that the disabled body is constructed is a means of recognizing the social (and rhetorical) construction of all bodies. 19

Jacobs 2008, 76. Gardner 2008, 12. Gardner uses the term “autographer” intentionally here, in order to draw attention to the “autobiofictional” nature she mentions. When we use her term we intend to call up the same attention. 21 Garland-Thomson 2000, 19. 22 Siebers 2008, 54. We will revisit this point later in the chapter. 20

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One avenue into this exploration is to view the ways that disability has been typically—or stereotypically—constructed through narrative. Thomas Couser suggests that there are “hegemonic scripts” for autobiographical disability narratives: “preferred plots and rhetorical schemes” to which these stories must conform.23 Couser lists five common rhetorics: triumph, horror, spiritual compensation, nostalgia, and emancipation.24 The rhetoric of triumph demands that people with disabilities overcome or compensate for their disability; horror renders disability abject and terrifying; spiritual compensation implies that disability is a punishment for a moral failing; the memoir of nostalgia longs for the time before the author became disabled. Finally, the rhetoric of emancipation, while not leading to the overcoming of disability, instead removes “physical, social and cultural obstacles” for people with disabilities.25 Such narratives “decisively represent disability not as a flaw of [the] body but as the prejudicial construct of a normative culture.”26 Autobiographical disability narratives construct temporarily stable selves based on the narratives of the dominant culture; textual identity is thus, in effect, narratively contained. Disability has also traditionally been a visually overdetermined concept. Garland-Thomson suggests that there are four dominant visual rhetorics of disability: the wondrous, the sentimental, the exotic, and the ordinary or realistic. Like the rhetoric of triumph, the wondrous trope places the disabled person on a pedestal—to be admired for his/her achievements, whether such achievements are remarkable or quotidian. Sentimental images elicit pity and call for charity. Exotic visual figures are gothic, grotesque, freakified. As Elizabeth Grosz writes, “freakish” or “freakified” Others “imperil the very definitions we rely on to classify humans [and] identities” as the Othered body “confirms the viewer as bounded, belonging to a ‘proper’ social category.”27 Disability becomes “all that must be ejected or abjected from self-image to make the bounded, category-obeying self possible.”28 Finally, the ordinary or realistic mode of visual representation is intended to humanize, naturalize, maybe even normalize disability. Robert McRuer offers an important extension of Garland-Thomson’s scheme when he writes that any of these four rhetorics can be employed in either hegemonic or counter-hegemonic

23

Couser 2001, 79. Couser 2001, 79. 25 Couser 2001, 87. 26 Couser 2001, 89. 27 Grosz 1996, 57; 65. 28 Grosz 1996, 65. 24

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forms.29 Most commonly, however, these visual rhetorics circumscribe and limit the experiences of people with disabilities, offering little rhetorical or narrative space for re-signification by people with disabilities themselves. Certainly, most mainstream comic books and graphic novels offer up these visual rhetorics in overtly hegemonic ways. For example, disabled children are often seen as helpless and in need of rescuing, a trope seen when Superman or Spider-Man is depicted as pulling a child in a wheelchair from a burning building; such sentimental visual images serve to underscore the heroism of the main character as he is saving those who are deemed most vulnerable. Deformities are worn by comics villains as signs of evil or divine punishment (Dr. Doom’s disfigurement or the Mole Man’s hunched and “deformed” body) and these “crippled” geniuses are seen as motivated by their anger at the world; in other words, these figures are depicted as the grotesque Other. The flip side of the coin is that superheroes such as Daredevil or Professor Charles Xavier have superpowers to overcome their disabilities and are thus celebrated for their triumphs over adversity. Xavier, although paralyzed, leads the X-Men from his wheelchair with the aid of advanced telepathic powers that allow him to transcend his condition; these powers are visually represented by movement lines that emanate from him as he controls the world around him even as he remains seated in his wheelchair. Daredevil, like most superheroes, has a divided identity: Matt Murdoch, blind attorney by day, and Daredevil, super protector of Hell’s Kitchen by night. When he appears as Murdoch, his disability is constructed through the visual markers of the cane and dark glasses. Moreover, despite the fact that he is a successful attorney, Murdoch is often shown holding someone’s arm to cross the street or carry out other daily activities, emphasizing disability as dependence. Such visual cues create distance between this identity and his alter ego, effectively hiding his secret identity, but also emphasizing his wondrous triumph over his disability. This distance is emphasized visually when we see Daredevil in his sleek red costume moving gracefully around the rooftops of the city, his cane transformed from a blind man’s aid to a baton that is part weapon and part grappling hook, his remaining senses heightened to allow him to “see” and move at superhuman levels.30 In Daredevil, then, we are given visual portrayals that emphasize the ordinary (as Murdoch does his work as a lawyer), the pitiable (as Murdoch is 29

McRuer 2006, 193. These abilities arose simultaneously to and as a result of the trauma that caused his blindness: trying to save a blind man about to be hit by a truck, Murdoch is hit in the eyes by radioactive waste from the truck, causing both blindness and a heightening of his other senses. 30

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portrayed as being dependent on others), and the wondrous (as Daredevil fights an array of villains in New York). In other words, in these comics, disability is visually and narratively circumscribed and there is little room for revision of this signification. However, as Susan Squier suggests, “as a medium combining verbal and gestural expression, comics can convey the complex social impact of a physical or mental impairment, as well as the way the body registers social and institutional constraints.”31 She goes on to write that comics may have the power to “move us beyond the damaging discourse of […] normalcy into a genuine encounter with the experience of disability,” while Gillian Whitlock adds that the “unique vocabulary and grammar of comics and cartoon drawing might produce an imaginative and ethical engagement with the proximity of the other.”32 We agree with them about the potential of the medium, and while we will soon address the complicated ways in which disability and trauma are constructed in autobiography through our examination of Small’s Stitches, for now let us briefly look at Oracle, an example from mainstream comics that demonstrates the possibilities of the medium identified by Squier and Whitlock. A character in the fictional world of DC comics for more than twenty years, Oracle is the alter ego of Barbara Gordon, a character previously known as Batgirl (for just over twenty years). In the 1988 graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke by writer Alan Moore and artist Brian Bolland, Gordon is shot through the spinal cord by the Joker, leaving her a paraplegic.33 Subsequently, Gordon becomes the Oracle, a computer expert and information specialist who serves as an invaluable resource to other characters in the DC universe in their fight against crime. Oracle is, in most ways, a portrayal of disability in what Garland-Thomson describes as the ordinary or realistic mode: she is always shown in her wheelchair and her chair is part of her identity, rather than an object of pity, wonder, or revulsion. She has no superpowers, but instead is adept at manipulating information and using computers as part of a life that also includes dealing with the myriad physical and cultural obstacles that exist because of the fact that she is in a wheelchair. For instance, she is shown using an accessible shower.34 As Andrew Wheeler writes, “This is the rare example of a [mainstream comics] character who has actually been shown coming to terms with a disability. She leads a full life and makes a unique contribution, and she’s not consumed by bitterness or anger about her 31

Squier 2008, 74. Squier 2008, 86; Whitlock 2006, 978. 33 Moore and Bolland 1988. 34 Pantozzi 2011. 32

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condition. For all these reasons, she’s an especially popular character among readers looking for a hero with a disability to identify with.”35 In fact, she has been so popular among people with disabilities that the news that DC plans to restore her ability to walk so that she could once again become Batgirl was met with fierce resistance. In an article on the website Newsarama entitled “Oracle Is Stronger Than Batgirl Will Ever Be,” Jill Pantozzi, who self-identifies as using a wheelchair herself, wrote that “Oracle is my symbol. Just like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are symbols for many others.”36 Clearly, for Pantozzi and many others, Oracle represents what Couser would call an emancipatory narrative that “represent[s] disability not as a flaw of [the] body but as the prejudicial construct of a normative culture.”37 Yet in planning to restore Barbara Gordon’s ability to walk so that she can throw off the mantle of Oracle and once again become Batgirl, normative culture would reassert its control of this mainstream comics narrative. What, then, of these possibilities in comics memoir? Though we recognize the problematic constraint of dominant cultural/rhetorical tropes of disability and trauma that we outlined previously, in comics autobiography we see the kind of potential for textual identity seen here, as autographers seek to construct themselves through the multimodal form of comics.

Stitching In Stitches, Small engages in complex representations of his own body that operate across many of these modes of signification. For most of the first part of the book, these representations include recurrent instances of the rhetoric of the “exotic” in his depiction of his own body. For example, early in the book a young David Small and his brother are looking through one of their father’s medical textbooks in his study. The first two panels show the brothers in a frame together, presented without background so that we will focus on the interaction between the two of them. In the first panel, David Small asks, “Eeww! And what’s that? A titty? A thing?” as his facial expression and body language further stress both his curiosity and his revulsion. In the next panel, his brother, clearly irritated as shown by the look on his face and his body language, replies, “No, stupid. That’s a growth.” From there, we move to an extreme close-up of David Small’s eyes and then to a series of three frames that zoom in on the neck growth 35

Wheeler 2010. Pantozzi 2011. 37 Couser 2001, 89. 36

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depicted in the photograph in the textbook.38 In this way, the reader is not only invited into this frame (and thus to see the visual depiction of the growth), but is compelled to follow David Small’s gaze. We cannot help but look (gawk?) at the individual in the photo, his head twisted so the camera can focus on his neck. “What’s a growth?” David Small asks. “It’s…it’s…something that grows. It’s unnatural,” replies his brother.39 What is notable about such medical images is that they form a kind of visual synecdoche: the anomalous part is at the center of the frame, and this part stands in for the entire human, whose face is either out of frame or out of focus, and whose gaze (if present) is always directed elsewhere. Here, then, the visual, the alphabetic, the spatial, and the gestural all combine to create a complex multimodal sequence in which Small not only constructs his own reaction to and relationship with this medical text, but pushes readers to also engage with this medical gaze. Disability Studies theorists argue that attitudes towards disability are constructed powerfully through visual means: Lennard Davis has famously suggested that disability “shows up as a disruption of the visual field.”40 That is, disability is something that the supposedly able-bodied viewer recognizes in another body (through the medical gaze) as uncanny or abnormal, deficient in form and/or function, and the viewer generally responds with “horror, fear, pity, compassion, and avoidance.”41 Mitchell and Snyder suggest that “people with disabilities [have] recognized the violative nature of this tendency toward over-evaluation most viscerally” because many have “endured hours of diagnostic scrutiny on medical examination tables (not to mention a representation in textbooks that replicated this process).”42 The appearance of just such a medical textbook in Stitches replicates this gaze viscerally for the young David Small, and for the reader. Later in the book, when a growth is found on the adolescent David Small’s own neck, he flashes back to the earlier image from the medical textbook as he looks at himself in a mirror. In a large panel, with our view coming from behind the mirror out at David Small, we see him staring at his reflection, the growth in his neck bulging; immediately beside his neck is a small bubble with the image of him and his brother looking in the medical book as his brother says, “that’s a growth,” a clear echo of the

38

Small 2009, 54. Small 2009, 55. 40 Davis 1995, 142. 41 Davis 1995, 142. 42 Mitchell and Snyder 2001, 374-75. 39

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earlier panel where they first discovered the text as children.43 Below this panel, in a smaller panel, we once again zoom in on the textbook image; the presentation of this panel is nearly identical to the close-up of the image discussed earlier, save for the fact that the figure of David Small on the right side of the panel has been shaded over, forcing us to focus exclusively on the image of the growth. The use of these panels illustrates Groensteen’s notion of general arthrology, as both of these panels are linked to previous panels through the network of the memoir as a whole.44 That is, we make sense of them differently because of the resonance that is created by their earlier inclusion in the network (we may even physically flip back to examine these images again) and this reinscription of meaning in turn affects the way that we make sense of the panels in sequence in this two-page spread (restricted arthrology); likewise, these panels make us reconsider the meaning of the earlier panels. Clearly, David Small (and the audience) is forced, however uncomfortably, to synthesize or assimilate both the Othering of the medical gaze and a newly unfamiliar sense of self. As discussed above, Grosz has argued that when we see disability as “freakish,” these Other bodies “confirm the viewer as bounded, belonging to a ‘proper’ social category.”45 The medical gaze effectively accomplishes this Othering, this making exotic. But in directly confronting this Other in the mirror, Small troubles the clear distinction between the exotic or freakified body and his own, and he invites his audience into this space through the available means at his disposal, including the use of general arthrology.46 The mirror he gazes into is mounted on the inside of an open closet door. This might be seen as a moment of transition for David Small: the moment in which he begins to see himself as disabled, sick, or afflicted. This is also the moment in which Small draws David Small as disabled.47 As Hatfield writes of comics memoir in general, “[w]e see how the cartoonist envisions him or herself; the inward vision takes on an outward form. This graphical self-representation literalizes a process already implicit in prose autobiography.”48 Small’s evolving sense of self becomes graphically and rhetorically demonstrated on the page. The causal relationships between disease, disability, and trauma begin to take on greater complexity, as Small attempts to demonstrate through his arthrological braiding of the text. 43

Small 2009, 118. Groensteen 2007, 144-58. 45 Grosz 1996, 57; 65. 46 Small 2009, 119. 47 Small 2009, 119. 48 Hatfield 2005, 114. 44

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At this point David Small also begins to examine himself obsessively. In one particularly disturbing sequence, he is shown examining his neck in a bathroom mirror. He stares intensely at his neck and the growth expands. He imagines the growth as a small fetus, a fetus that David Small stumbled upon in a medical laboratory in his father’s hospital years before, a connection that is made by the affordances of arthrology in the comics form.49 The mirror here becomes a powerful symbol as this bathroom mirror not only echoes the mirror in the closet, but also recalls arthrologically a bathroom mirror that his grandmother gazed into after she had held his hands under hot water, burning them when he was a small child.50 Later in the book, we return to this viewpoint before the bathroom mirror. Small graphically depicts a huge scar on David Small’s neck. It turns out that the growth had been cancerous, and required two lengthy and painful surgeries to remove when he was fourteen; despite these surgeries, at this point in the narrative David Small has not yet been told about the cancer, and neither has the reader. In this post-surgery bathroom scene, we no longer view him through the mirror, but instead share his reflected view of himself in it, as though through his eyes. He describes his neck as “a crusted black track of stitches; my smooth young throat slashed and laced up like a bloody boot.”51 It becomes clear that his movement is not out of abjection, but rather into it: he once again sees and draws himself as though he were the anomaly in the medical textbook. But he is also beginning to work through some of the medical trauma of his youth. For David Small, this working-through happens only obliquely on the pages of the memoir, traced through its narrative. But this happens also for Small retroactively through the inscription of the story itself. Further, because neither David Small nor the reader yet knows the true medical nature of what was beneath the scar, or what it will take to heal, physically and psychically, we share his discomfort and worry. In the reveal as the reader flips the page, this close-up view of his stitches is subtly altered visually so that it becomes a staircase, the parallel

49

Small 2009, 146-47. Near the very end of the book, David Small visits his mother in the hospital, where she dies. Before he leaves the hospital, he visits the radiology department, where his father had “treated” his sinus condition. He looks at the jar of fetuses again. Now, however, a small smile is shown on one fetus as the protagonist’s gaze zooms in on it. In turn, an ambiguous look—perhaps of surprise or hope—appears on David Small’s face. The fetus now seems to represent the possibility of birth rather than the horror of difference or death. 50 Small 2009, 94. 51 Small 2009, 191.

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lines of the stitching blurring into the lines of the stairs.52 In the subsequent pages, we see David Small climb the stairs and encounter his verbally abusive mother. “Stop pressing on your neck,” she barks. “If you don’t stop it will never heal properly.”53 She is writing something at a desk. Later that night, after a nightmare, Small wakes, walks back up the stairs and reads what his mother had been writing: “Dear Mama, David has been home two weeks now, of course the boy does not know it was cancer.”54 The next chapter begins with Small writing, “suddenly things began making sense.”55 He has come to a sort of awakening. Much of these first 200 pages of Stitches, before “things start making sense,” layer what Garland-Thomson would call “exotic” images of disability, what Grosz would suggest “freakify” disability, and what Couser would label the “horrific.” We recognize how David Small is interpellated by a medical gaze, and we move in and out of this line of sight and its rhetorical entailments. But perhaps the most dominant disability trope of this pre-“awakening” content in Stitches is what Couser might label nostalgia. It is not that Small demonstrates fondness for his past or his childhood. In fact, quite the opposite. Small’s orientation lacks any real yearning for a pre-disability state. But in revisiting his traumatic past, Small “ceases to orient [himself] towards the future.”56 After the tumor has been removed, Small is able to begin piecing his story back together for himself (and the reader), understanding what has truly happened, ascribing motivations to actions. He works through some of the trauma of the surgery, some of the abuse and neglect of his childhood. David Small has also now lost his voice—his thyroid and a vocal chord were removed during the surgery. From this point on, David Small’s voice is marked out as a painful whisper through a speech bubble enclosed by broken lines, a visual marker indicating that his voice has dropped to a hushed murmur. This marker renders the act of speech as a physical struggle; this struggle mirrors the difficult nature of the material David Small is remembering and Small is representing. Flashbacks to previous events and the confrontation of memories are also represented in a new series of modes: several long dream sequences; exchanges with a psychiatrist in which David Small whispers his narration of painful memories and listens as the psychiatrist speaks difficult truths; and long stretches in which the protagonist does not speak at all. In removing or 52

Small 2009, 192. Small 2009, 193-95. 54 Small 2009, 204. 55 Small 2009, 210 56 Couser 2001, 83. 53

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altering one of the key narrative devices of any autobiographer (speech), internal thought (as represented alphabetically through caption boxes), visuals, gestures, and the spatial relations of panels take on even greater consequence. In a sixteen-page sequence in which his father takes an adult David Small out to dinner, he does not speak at all. The first two pages of this sequence begin with two page-wide panels that act as establishing shots for the restaurant, the second of which shows a bustling restaurant in which music plays in the background (as indicated by the inclusion of musical notes on a staff that forms a second border near the top of the panel). We are then given a silent panel that shows David Small in profile from a perspective just over his father’s shoulder. The next five panels all have nearly identical composition, with part of David Small’s face on the left side of the panel and his father in various poses of drinking and smoking. The only sound here is indicated by the KLIK of his father’s lighter; even the sound of his father’s voice ordering a drink is left out of the panel. The final two panels of the second pages show a close-up of David Small followed by a panel (in both sequence and in the direction of his eye line) that has nothing in it but an ashtray filled with cigarette butts and burning cigarettes.57 Words are stripped from this sequence, just as they have been stripped from David Small. As a comics creator, however, Small can still construct his textual identity in the context of his autobiographical story through all of the other modes at his disposal. At the end of this dinner, his father asks David Small to go for a walk, and finally admits that, through the ongoing and intense x-ray treatments he had subjected him to as a young boy, he gave him cancer.58 The adult David Small flashes back to a view of his childhood self on his father’s x-ray table as his father walks away from him; David Small is left standing alone. His silence perhaps speaks to the ineffability of the moment, or perhaps it is just silence.

Arts of self As we suggested at the beginning of this chapter, in traditional prose memoirs of trauma, language bears the burden of representing what is unimaginable and of providing an avenue towards “healing” for the trauma survivor. Traditional memoirs of disability also bear the burden of challenging a normative culture as they confront (and sometimes embrace) the normative tendencies of narrative. Stitches as a narrative does not 57 58

Small 2009, 280-81. Small 2009, 284-95.

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escape the normative tropes of the memoir of trauma or disability, as we have shown. However, Small does subvert and challenge these norms in his book. Likewise, the visual rhetoric of the book invokes norms and challenges them. But because language is not the only resource available, and always interacts multimodally with visual, gestural, spatial, and audio systems, new possibilities for articulation open, even as difficulties multiply and layer. In comics autobiography, a self is “made” through the story; which self is made is inextricably connected, symbolically, to how the self is made. Stitches shares this multimodal reflexivity with other comics autobiographies. Further, because Small’s life is out of the ordinary, and in a way, what Gilmore calls “unrepresentative,” Small’s narrative is particularly aware of its own constructedness.59 In a sequence just before his mother’s death, we see David Small moving out of his parents’ house and establishing a life for himself. Recall that Couser suggested that the rhetoric of emancipation, while not leading to the overcoming of disability, instead removes “physical, social and cultural obstacles” for people with disabilities.60 Moving out of his parents’ home, David Small does not necessarily “heal” or change intrinsically; he simply moves into a new, less oppressive environment that allows him to shape his own life and make friends. He notes that his new friends’ “circumstances and behavior were, by almost any standard, bizarre. But I felt more normal among them, and less lonely.”61 Small directly confronts the “prejudicial construct[s] of a normative culture,” one of the key conditions of Couser’s rhetoric of emancipation.62 Likewise, Garland-Thomson suggests that the “ordinary” or “realistic” mode of visual representation is intended to humanize or maybe even normalize disability. David Small leads an independent life, with friends and fulfilling work, but he also carries around the weight of his past and the difficulties that his vocal disability presents. Through this narrative Small is, to paraphrase Gusdorf, making sense of his identity and his social sphere. However, he also deals with, without necessarily solving, the discontinuities of his life. The section ends with a borderless full-page panel in which David Small is shown standing at an easel, drawing a naked woman, looking back over his shoulder directly at the reader. He is surrounded at the easel

59

Gilmore 2001, 19. Couser 2001, 87. 61 Small 2009, 300. 62 Couser 2001, 89. 60

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by three women.63 One says “Hey! You are really good,” while another says, “cool neck scarf!,” referring to the scarf that conveniently conceals his scar.64 In the upper corner of the panel, unbounded by a caption box, are the following words: “Art became my home. Not only did it give me back my voice, but art has given me everything I have wanted or needed since.”65 In this scene, we see evidence of the rhetorics of “triumph” or the “wondrous”: David Small’s skill as an artist in a way negates the stigma of his disability, giving him a “voice,” and he hides the scar that represents his trauma. But we also see evidence of the tropes of the “ordinary” or of “emancipation” at the same time, in part reinforced by the scene’s reflexive evocation of its own rhetoricity. This artist is looking at us as he draws himself; like any image of a painter within a painting, an artist depicted within her or his creation calls up a mise en abyme. Such scenes always directly confront their own artifice. Of course David Small does not necessarily need a woman to view his art and exclaim that it is “really good!” We also do not need him to explain that art gave him a “voice.” We see the evidence in our hands, in this book. Couser points out that the rhetoric of “emancipation” in disability memoirs often also overtly shapes the act of inscription itself. That is, “personal narrative is crucial to physical and psychological emancipation.”66 But the method of this inscription has often been unique for people with disabilities. Couser examines the case of Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer and her memoir I Raise My Eyes to Say Yes (1989), as well as Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997). In both cases, the authors needed to develop gestures and other nonverbal communication in order to “collaboratively self-inscribe” with the help of “receptive others.”67 To tell these stories, the authors need to invent and teach a new kind of language. Small instead utilizes the dynamic language of comics. The canvas that David Small stands in front of in this panel echoes the shape and positioning of mirrors David Small has stood before previously in the memoir. Earlier, these mirrors allowed Small to isolate and focus on his abnormality, or they called up abject memories. But in this frame, 63

It is perhaps unsurprising that part of Small’s narrated evolution includes some form of validation from the opposite sex. One social impact of disability is that people with disabilities are often de-sexualized, disabled men are emasculated. This scene before the easel appears to be a possible repudiation of this effect. 64 Small 2009, 302. 65 Small 2009, 302. 66 Couser 2001, 87. 67 Couser 2001, 87.

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Small is actively shaping his reality. It may not necessarily always be “really good!” but David Small’s life will be different, in part because he can now narrate it. As Siebers argues, “the disabled body changes the process of representation itself […]. Different bodies require and create new modes of representation.”68 Small not only uses the rhetoric of comics to tell a story of trauma, disease, and disability, but his unique subjective and bodily experiences necessarily add to the continual evolution of the medium itself. The complicated interrelationships between disease, disability, and trauma call for the complex arthrology Small utilizes in Stitches. We have argued that comics in general, and comics autobiography specifically, might offer unique multimodal means to multiply modes of representation, and perhaps also to interrogate the limitations of these modes. As Hillary Chute claims, comics might offer “rigorous experimental attention to form as a mode of political intervention.”69 As we have shown, the multimodality of comics makes the physicality of the form more apparent; but then it also multiplies the “regimes of normalcy” even as it multiplies the means of challenging them. One does not finish reading Stitches feeling that David Small has been cured or normalized. Likewise, one cannot set down this book and feel that comics autobiography has solved any crisis of representation. That said, a book like Stitches does several important things at the same time in that memoirs such as this one draw attention to the diversity of bodies and the sometimes extreme difficulty of their lives without demanding normative resolutions. These comics also ask us to pay close attention to the multiplicity of expressive forms afforded by the medium, without suggesting that any mode is superior or isolated. Finally, comics autobiographies allow meanings to multiply in the tension between representation and representativeness. In these ways, such difficult articulations draw us all in.

Works Cited Allison, Dorothy. 1995. Two or Three Things I know For Sure. New York: Dutton. Bauby, Jean-Dominique. 1997. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Translated from the French by Jeremy Leggatt. New York: A. A. Knopf: Distributed by Random House.

68 69

Siebers 2008, 54. Chute 2008, 462.

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Bechdel, Alison. 2006. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Benstock, Shari, ed. 1998. The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Bergland, Betty Ann. 1994. “Representing Ethnicity in Autobiography: Narratives of Opposition.” Yearbook of English Studies 24: 67-93. Chute, Hillary. 2008. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA 123.2: 452-65. Couser, G. Thomas. 2001. “Conflicting Paradigms: The Rhetorics of Disability Memoir.” In Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture, edited by James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, 78-91. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Davis, Lennard J. 1995. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. New York: Verso. Gardner, Jared. 2008. “Autography’s Biography, 1972-2007.” Biography 31.1: 1-26. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2000. “The New Disability Studies: Inclusion or Tolerance?” ADE Bulletin 124: 18-22. Gilmore, Leigh. 1994. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —. 2001. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Green, Justin. (1972) 2009. Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. With introduction by Art Spiegelman. San Fransisco: McSweeney’s. Groensteen, Thierry. (1999) 2007. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1996. “Intolerable Ambiguity.” In Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, edited by Rosemarie Garland Thomson, 55-68. New York: NYU Press. Gusdorf, Georges. (1956) 1980. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, edited by James Olney, 28-48. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hatfield, Charles. 2005. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Jacobs, Dale. 2007. “Marveling at The Man Called Nova: Comics as Sponsors of Multimodal Literacy.” CCC 59.2: 180-205. —. 2008. “Multimodal Constructions of Self: Autobiographical Comics and the Case of Joe Matt’s Peepshow.” Biography 31.1: 59-84. McRuer, Robert. 2006. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: NYU Press.

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Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder. 2001. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependence of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Moore, Alan and Brian Bolland. 1988. Batman: The Killing Joke. New York: DC Comics. Nyberg, Amy Kiste. 1998. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Pantozzi, Jill. 2011. “Oracle Is Stronger Than Batgirl Will Ever Be.” Newsarama.com, June 6. Ralston, Aron. (2004) 2010. 127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place. New York: Atria Paperback. Sebold, Alice. 1999. Lucky. New York: Scribner. Siebers, Tobin. 2008. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sienkiewicz-Mercer, Ruth and Steven B. Kaplan. 1989. I Raise My Eyes to Say Yes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Small, David. 2009. Stitches. New York: W. W. Norton. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson, eds. 1998. Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Squier, Susan M. 2008. “So Long as They Grow Out of It: Comics, the Discourse of Developmental Normalcy, and Disability.” Journal of Medical Humanities 29: 71-88. Wheeler, Andrew. 2010. “No More Mutants #5: Superhuman Disabilities.” Bleedingcool, October 30. Whitlock, Gillian. 2006. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 965-79. Wright, Bradford W. 2001. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

PART II: TEXT AND IMAGE IN THE NOVEL

CHAPTER FOUR THE MADELEINE REVISUALIZED: PROUSTIAN MEMORY AND SEBALDIAN VISUALITY LAUREN WALSH

The moral backbone of literature is about [the] whole question of memory. —W. G. Sebald1

What is the status of memory in a society obsessed with the visual image? If in Western culture we have, in part, been taught how to remember by great modernist authors like Marcel Proust, who wrote in an era before the triumph of the visual, what new lessons in remembering might we need to learn in order to recall and thus avoid the catastrophes of the recent past? I address these questions to W. G. Sebald, in relation to his last novel, Austerlitz (2001). Writing in dialogue with Proust, Sebald was responding both to the Holocaust and to the new dominance of the visual image. In so doing, I will argue, Sebald revises Proust so as to outline a practice of memory that is both more strenuous and more uncertain.2 Many scholars have written on the role of memory and history in Austerlitz, often in response to the black and white reproductions of photographs that appear throughout the novel. They have routinely noted that Sebald exposes the inability to know the past through photos despite that medium’s status as documentary. But what remains ripe for exploration is what Sebald is doing in moments where photos are not reproduced—specifically, moments of Proustian-like involuntary memory. In fact, in episodes of unconscious recall, photographs are recurrently 1

Sebald 2001b. The ideas in this chapter were first treated in Walsh 2008. I thank Marianne Hirsch, Bruce Robbins, David Damrosch, Rachel Hollander, Laura Liu, and Linta Varghese for assisting me with the conception of these ideas and helping to shape them for presentation here.

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absent. Yet, as I will show, the involuntary memory itself can take the form of a photograph, albeit a figurative one. Playing with representational modes, Sebald uses text to convey narrative memory, but he does so in a quintessentially pictorial manner. Indeed, the novel’s episodes of involuntary recollection, limited in number overall, are overwhelmingly visual in nature. Of interest here are the recovered scenes from the protagonist’s repressed early childhood, and in particular, the instances of involuntary memory that not only appear without actual photographic artifacts, but which occur, instead, as ekphrastic “photos,” or what I will call photo-textual memories.3 Sebald’s text-image work thus functions at two levels. The abstract concept of involuntary memory now appears in those cases as a “photograph,” but that “photo” consists of text; the very words on the page evoke the sense of a framed and static image. The fictional medium—text as its building blocks—thereby allows readers to encounter both memory and photography anew. In this way, Sebald’s novel compels us to address the crucial question of memory’s status today, in an image-oriented, post-Holocaust world. Sebald’s writing has produced comparisons to Proust, but such observations usually remain general in nature.4 Thus I want to begin by showing that Sebald’s relation to the French writer goes beyond an abstract measure of stylistic resonance and even beyond the shared interest in the intricacies of memory. In fact, Sebald consciously adopts moments of remembrance from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927).5 Yet 3 After constructing this idea, I came across Li Zeng’s doctoral dissertation on the popular memory of China’s Cultural Revolution (2008), in which the term “phototextual memories” is used differently, exploring Chinese public memory through narratives that include photographs. “Phototextuality” and “photo-text” have also been used more generally in examination of photographs as narrative and in analysis of literature that situates photographs and text together, side by side (see, for instance, Hughes and Noble 2003 or Bryant 1996). 4 For example, in discussing Sebald’s rhetorical strategies, Martin Swales states: “[T]here is a high degree of literariness in evidence: echoes of earlier literary forms and periods and of specific writers from Classical Greece to key figures of High Modernism (Rilke, Kafka, Proust, Nabokov) abound” (idem 2004, 23). By contrast, the noted Proust scholar Richard Bales provides insightful analyses of the notion of “displacement” in Proust and Sebald and of the status of both authors as travelogue writers (see idem 2003 and 2009). Franz Loquai also contributes a valuable piece to the underexplored connection between these writers (see idem 2005), as does Ann Pearson in her helpful 2008 article on intertextuality in Sebald’s work, to which I will return later in this chapter. 5 À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) was originally published over seven volumes, between 1913 and 1927.

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in adopting them he also adapts them, significantly rewriting moments of involuntary recall, in particular when depicting memory itself like a photograph. The involuntary memory, as a mode of recollection that occurs spontaneously, not by choice, was, for Proust, a more accurate form of remembrance, truer to the past than memories that are consciously produced. Writing the involuntary memory in a manner reminiscent of a photograph, Sebald plays with and against these ideas of truth and accuracy; the photograph is a medium of documentation, but it is also, for him, inadequate as a record of the past and inherently fallible in any attempted recuperation of past time. He thus invokes the quintessential modernist author of memory precisely to alter his legacy, reducing Proust’s “vast structure of recollection” (his édifice immense du souvenir),6 at times to a static portrayal. In so doing, Sebald declares that the structures of fiction-based memory of the early twentieth century are no longer apt at the end of the century. In response both to visual technologies and to the Holocaust, I will argue, Sebald demands that we see—almost literally, with his photo-like memories—the importance of memory, and that we also recognize its failings and limitations. This double demand emerges from the very literariness of his project, which can thus be distinguished from the greater body of scholarly writing on the Shoah and memory. The reading presented here focuses largely on three literary moments that unite Sebald with Proust. First, I establish Austerlitz’s Proustian intertextuality by examining a Sebaldian scene of involuntary memory that derives unmistakably from In Search of Lost Time. Second, I explore another scene of involuntary recall in order to establish the new status of the visual for Sebald’s post-war understanding of involuntary memory. And third, I read one more scene of remembrance in Austerlitz to ascertain the role of photography in experiencing memories of an involuntary nature. My exploration of the tension between visual recollection and verbal representation leads, finally, to questioning whether imagination is allowable in the remembering of the Holocaust.

6 Proust 1998, 64; idem 1987, 145. For continuity, all English language passages quoted from À la recherche du temps perdu come from the translation done by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (or Andreas Mayor, in the final volume) and Terence Kilmartin and later revised by D. J. Enright. I also offer in two instances Stephen Hudson’s translation from Time Regained (see footnotes 20 and 50).

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The Proustian past Sebald defers to Proust because In Search of Lost Time grapples with the ideas of voluntary and involuntary memory, and sets a defining model for the unconscious recall of the past as it occurred, for Marcel (the narrator, who is named late in the novel), through the taste of a madeleine immersed in a spoonful of tea.7 But importantly, Sebald also engages that voluminous novel because Proust was highly attuned to the special relationship between photography and memory. While the nineteenthcentury realist novel incorporated descriptions of photography in its main narrative, Proust was, arguably, the first major author to consistently connect photography’s influence to narrative memory. Writing in the early part of the twentieth century, when the camera was still growing into its role as a part of everyday social interaction, Proust foresaw the snapshot’s power to exert an influence on remembrance.8 His references to memory within the novel often invoke the language of photography: “Our memory is like one of those shops in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.”9 Furthermore, Proust writes elaborate scenes structured around a photograph, such as the episode in Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann) where Mlle Vinteuil flirts with her friend-lover via their interaction with a photograph of the dead M. Vinteuil. The photo represents the living memory of the dead father, and the girls’ irreverent behavior is a response to his legacy as an overbearing parent.10 Proust thus describes memory photographically while also offering photographs as objects of tremendous interpretative mnemonic value. Yet the Proustian structure of memory, that édifice immense du souvenir, is hardly photographic in portrayal. A photograph, through its flattened, twodimensional representation, depicts a single captured moment in time. It is a frozen rendering of an instant. By contrast, the recovered Proustian memory leads to an extensive reminiscence. Marcel does not simply recall an instant from his youth when he tastes the madeleine; rather, for the next two hundred pages he recounts his childhood in Combray. 7

The protagonist and his creator share a name, but they are not the same figure. Thus, for the character-narrator, I use “Marcel.” For the author, I use “Proust.” 8 For a social history of photography see, for instance, Lemagny and Rouillé 1987. 9 Proust 1992c, 543. For more on Proust and visuality see, for example, Shattuck 1964 and, more recently, Infantino 1992 and Bal 1997. 10 For an extended exploration of this scene, and of how Vinteuil’s photograph mediates past and present, see Chapter One in Walsh 2008.

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It is useful at this point to review the two modes of memory that occupy Proust’s thought: voluntary (mémoire volontaire) and involuntary (mémoire involontaire).11 The voluntary memory, as that which is consciously recalled, exists, for Proust, in the domain of intellect and not of sensorial experience. It can never restore the past in its complete effulgence. The voluntary memory, as such, is a depreciated form, untruthful to the past. By contrast, the involuntary memory overtakes its rememberer, flooding him/her with details, sensations, and emotions from the past in response to some trigger in the present. In Marcel’s most celebrated case, the trigger is the taste of a little cake moistened by tea, a snack he had as a child in sick Aunt Leonie’s bedroom. Proust views the involuntary memory as a pure, or undegraded and unaltered, reconnection with the past.12 In a passage from In Search of Lost Time, the narrator delineates this difference between habit-inflected voluntary memory and its purer involuntary counterpart: And as Habit (l’habitude) weakens everything, what best reminds us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten (because it was of no importance, and we therefore left it in full possession of its strength). That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us […]. Outside us? Within us, rather, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion (un oubli) more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the person that we were, place ourselves in relation to things as he was placed, suffer anew because we are no longer ourselves but he.13

In saying that we can “recover the person that we were,” Proust, through his narrator, seems to claim that the past is recuperable, if only “from time to time.” We “are no longer ourselves” in the present moment, but rather 11

The conception of these terms may have been influenced by Henri Bergson’s Matière et mémoire (1896), where the author used similar language, mémoire habitude (habit memory) and mémoire pure (pure memory). Yet it should be noted that Proust asserted a fundamental distinction between Bergson’s thinking and his own (see, for instance, Shattuck 1982, Appendix, 170). Indeed, voluntary and involuntary memory do not map directly to habit and pure memory. Even so, many scholars hold that Proust’s thought was influenced by the prominent philosopher. 12 I use “pure” (or “purity”) in this chapter not to invoke Bergson’s term, but when considering mnemonic episodes that, like Proustian involuntary recollection, appear to restore the original experience, through the unadulterated recapture of a preserved past. 13 Proust 1992c, 254; idem 1992a, 226. The appearance of “l’habitude” in this passage could be seen to indicate a debt to Bergson.

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find our past selves and the essence of a past time re-instantiated, however temporarily, and reanimated. We therefore can regain the past—with a similar sense of recapture conveyed in the title of the final volume of the novel, Time Regained (Le Temps retrouvé)—not in moments of ordinary, voluntary recollection, but in those rarer, more wondrous episodes of pure, involuntary memory. These episodes, ultimately, will supply the “raw material” for Marcel’s work as a writer; the extra-temporal re-experience of the past within the present reveals the truth, as Proust says, of life.14 By contrast, Sebald offers no such promise of recapture. In fact, to believe the past is recoverable in a re-experiential way is, he suggests, dangerous in settings where the stakes have risen so high—in the postHolocaust context. Memory, whether evoked through fiction or photography, is always a limited representation, not a true past regained. Thus even the pleasing idea of a pure, involuntary memory must be framed, ultimately, as an act of representative construction and not as an unquestioned re-instantiation of a lost past moment into the present. Sebald draws this important distinction to the fore in his rewriting of Proustian memory, showing how both the fiction and the photos—the real as well as the ekphrastic—function on a representative plane.

Austerlitz’s present efforts in search of past time As a work of fiction, Austerlitz (as with other of Sebald’s texts) is most immediately remarkable for its inclusion of black and white photographs, which punctuate the narrative. Sometimes a given reproduced photo is large enough to fill the entire space of the two open-face pages; more often, however, the images are much smaller and cover just a portion of a single page. A few of the photos seem to have little obvious relation to the text of the narrative that literally frames them, but in plenty of cases there does appear to be a connection. Yet because the narrative does not explicitly refer to the images that sit alongside it and because none of the photos in the novel is captioned, there is still a tremendous burden on the reader to perform interpretative work. Sebald seems, quite intentionally, to force us to consider how we read and interpret photographs specifically, and forms of documentation, more generally.

14

Shattuck 1982, Appendix, 171. Here Proust speaks of his own writing—although Marcel talks of very similar “raw material” in the novel—and says that involuntary memories “alone carry the seal of authenticity.” He also elaborates on the “untruthful” nature of voluntary memory (ibid., 170).

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Austerlitz is a fictional story set against a historically real backdrop. The main narrative occurs in our present day as the eponymous Jacques Austerlitz goes in search of his “missing” past, from which he was severed as a young child. In 1939, not quite five years old, his mother put him on one of the Kindertransporte, thereby securing his passage out of Nazioccupied Prague. A Jew by birth, Austerlitz escapes the Holocaust and is raised in Wales under a new name, Dafydd Elias. As an adult, he appears to have no knowledge of his childhood before 1939, unable to recall his home and his parents, a consequence of the trauma he suffered as a boy, cut off from his mother and father and thrust into a new and, as we learn, inhospitable setting. The adoptive parents—one a stern preacher, the other a frail, sickly woman—cannot offer Austerlitz the affection that a frightened, vulnerable child needs, and in response, the newly named Dafydd shuts down to his past, suppressing all memory of his former life because it is too painful to face the loss he has suffered. As an adult, the protagonist experiences a moment of Proustian-like involuntary memory that brings back fragmentary details from long ago. He recalls a decisive episode from 1939, an experience in a train station, which I will explore shortly, but is still unable to remember any specifics from earlier in his life. Shortly after this point in the story, the protagonist (who learned his birth name, but no other background, as a student) decides to track down the facts of his childhood; in particular, he seeks information about his mother, ultimately stating his desire to locate an image of her. The novel is distinctive for the way in which we learn the complicated story of Austerlitz’s search for information regarding his past. Where Proust gives us Marcel’s first-person recollection of his childhood, Austerlitz is multiply mediated. Austerlitz tells his story to an unnamed narrator, who then narrates that tale to the reader in the form of a recall. The narrator relates the conversations he has had with Austerlitz, sometimes describing with third-person voicing, other times quoting Austerlitz’s own words. In doing so, the narrator pieces together for the reader Austerlitz’s journey to acquire details about his past. Yet even this is complicated, as the novel does not use quotation marks to signify when someone is being quoted. Rather, the text slides between characters’ voices, placing the burden on the reader to understand and interpret, as Sebald again forces us to think about the media we employ in tasks of representation. Moreover, Austerlitz’s memory, as he conveys it to his interlocutor (our narrator), is highly fragmentary. One frequently reads comments such as “if I remember correctly” or “I cannot say exactly.” As often, however, the reader is given confident assurances that a moment is

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“imprinted on his memory” and that Austerlitz can “still remember very clearly.”15 This attention to the workings of memory permeates the entirety of Austerlitz, making it, in some regards, an overwhelming text for scholars of memory. The direct homages to Proust, however, occur infrequently, and thus in standing out from the broader background of generalized comments about remembrance and forgetfulness, they take on great importance. In fact, Sebald chooses moments and details from Proust discriminatingly. He rewrites moments of involuntary memory, ultimately taking to task, as I will show, the Proustian assumption of any possible purity of memory.

Sebald’s rewriting of Proust: Establishing the intertextuality Sebald’s most explicit reference to a Proustian scene of involuntary memory occurs as Jacques Austerlitz walks along uneven paving. He is, at the time, in Prague, investigating his background, as he has recently come to believe that the train that sped him through Europe to Great Britain departed from this Czech city. While there, he visits the state archives building in hopes of learning the address where he lived as a boy. The trip proves successful; the government worker in the archives office presents Austerlitz with a list of seven records, each for an individual with the same family name, accompanied by profession information and an address that had been inhabited by each Austerlitz. Yet none of the names, professions, or city districts appears to spark a recognition for the protagonist, and instead the archivist simply suggests to Austerlitz that he “try the Šporkova, a small street a few paces uphill from the Schönborn Palace, where the register of inhabitants for 1938 said that Agáta Austerlitzová had been living at Number 12 in that year.”16 Austerlitz sets off, and as he approaches the building, we read: [W]hen I felt the uneven paving of the Šporkova underfoot (die unebenen Pflastersteine der Šporkova unter meinen Füßen) as step by step I climbed uphill, it was as if I had already been this way before and memories were revealing themselves to me not by means of any mental effort but through my senses, so long numbed and now coming back to life.17

15

Sebald 2001a, 219; 140; 112; 262. Sebald 2001a, 150. 17 Sebald 2001a, 150; idem 2003b, 220. 16

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That the “memories were revealing themselves” to Austerlitz “not by means of any mental effort” defines this experience as a moment of involuntary recollection. There is no conscious mnemonic straining to recall the past; instead the trigger of “the uneven paving of the Šporkova underfoot” prompts the sudden release of formerly suppressed memories. This scene borrows its trigger from one of Proust’s most poetic moments of involuntary memory, one that occurs in the final book of his seven-volume novel. We read in Time Regained: [A]s I moved sharply backwards I tripped against the uneven paving-stones in front of the coach-house. […] [R]ecovering my balance, I put my foot on a stone which was slightly lower than its neighbor […]. […] The happiness which I had just felt was unquestionably the same as that which I had felt when I tasted the madeleine soaked in tea.18

In referencing the madeleine, Proust frames this scene as another moment of mémoire involontaire. Moreover, the two passages, side by side, make clear that Proust is Sebald’s source for his Austerlitz version of the scene. In both cases the feeling of “uneven paving” stimulates involuntary recall. Proust continues: [A] profound azure intoxicated my eyes, impressions of coolness, of dazzling light, swirled round me and in my desire to seize them […] I continued, ignoring the evident amusement of the great crowd of chauffeurs, to stagger as I had staggered a few seconds ago, with one foot on the higher paving-stone and the other on the lower. Every time that I merely repeated this physical movement, I achieved nothing; but if I succeeded, forgetting the Guermantes party, in recapturing what I had felt when I first placed my feet on the ground in this way, again the dazzling and indistinct vision fluttered near me, as if to say: “Seize me as I pass if you can, and try to solve the riddle of happiness which I set you.” And almost at once I recognised the vision: it was Venice, of which my efforts to describe it and the supposed snapshots taken by my memory had never told me anything, but which the sensation which I had once experienced as I stood upon two uneven stones in the baptistery of St Mark’s had, recurring a moment ago, restored to me complete with all the other sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation, all of which had been waiting in their place—from which with imperious suddenness a chance happening had caused them to emerge—in the series of forgotten days.19

18 19

Proust 1992b, 216-17. Proust 1992b, 217-18.

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Marcel had a similar experience of standing on uneven paving in Venice, and this moment, outside the Guermantes reception in France, recalls one of the “forgotten days.” Likewise, though Sebald does not equally explicate the workings of involuntary memory, the reader can assume— and this intertext all but confirms—that for Austerlitz, some memories return because the sensation of the uneven paving is a sensation from his past. This, we gather, is the street he walked as a child, those many “forgotten days” ago. It is significant that Sebald chooses to relate to this scene from In Search of Lost Time because the Proustian original makes explicit mention of the interworkings of memory and photography: “the supposed snapshots taken by my memory had never told me anything.”20 Here the mental pictures of voluntary memory fail to restore the past to Marcel. Even when the involuntary memory emerges, this Proustian passage, as with Sebald’s version, does not show us the memory, but rather focuses on the moment of experiencing its recollection. While Marcel tells us that his is a “vision,” in fact it is more; he pushes beyond the visual to a full emotive recapture of the past, “restored […] complete with all the other sensations” he experienced that day in Venice. The visual is thus but one component. Sebald, as I will demonstrate shortly, reconfigures involuntary memory. At key moments, he will present Austerlitz’s memory, when the recollection itself (not just the experience of it) is described to us, as if it were a photograph. That is, the focus is predominantly visual. While these two “paving” scenes are so clearly related, Austerlitz does not create a direct echo. Where Proust emphasizes the realm of recovered affect and the re-living, through memory, of a moment in Marcel’s past, Sebald shifts in the opposite direction, moving the attention to his character’s present surroundings. Just after the “memories were revealing themselves,” we read chiefly of the many sights Austerlitz observes as he enters 12 Šporkova: “[T]he metal box for the electrics built into the wall beside the entrance with its lightning symbol, the octofoil mosaic flower in shades of dove gray and snow white set in the flecked artificial-stone floor of the hall, […] the gently rising flight of stairs, with hazelnut-shaped iron knobs placed at intervals in the handrail of the banisters.”21 While these visuals, we are told, are evocative of his forgotten past, no specific memory of a buried experience is here restored to Austerlitz as it was for Marcel. 20

Hudson’s version reads: “And then, all at once, I recognised that Venice which my descriptive efforts and pretended snapshots of memory had failed to recall” (Proust 1931, 211). 21 Sebald 2001a, 151.

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Despite this disparity, Sebald further shores up the intertextual connection through his mention of the color blue. Throughout In Search of Lost Time, moments of involuntary memory are described with colors, most strikingly with comparisons to an overwhelming or intoxicating “azure” (un azur profond).22 Proust’s first instance of involuntary memory, which will be examined in more depth shortly, occurs early in the novel. Marcel, as yet unused to the sensation of memories, unwilled, rising within him, perceives a “whirling medley of stirred-up colours.”23 By a later example, when the feel of a napkin triggers the return of a past time, he is flooded with an “azure” that is “pure and saline and swelled into blue and bosomy undulations.”24 Thus as the concept and experience of involuntary recollection take shape—for Marcel, for the novel, and for the reader— what began as a swirl of colors, symbolic of the swirling new sensations enveloping Marcel, crystallizes into a dazzling blue.25 Sebald picks up on this heightened Proustian color and incorporates it, transfigured for his own novel. The concentrated azure of Proust becomes just the smallest of details in Sebald. For Proust, the use of color to describe that which is experiential heightens, and thereby emphasizes to the reader, the sensorial nature of the involuntary recall. For Sebald, who, in multiple examples, undoes that fully sensorial nature, the formerly dazzling blue is now far more muted. It does not saturate the rememberer, nor swell into undulations. It is even muted in its placement; it does not always appear directly during the experience of involuntary recollection itself. Nevertheless, in Austerlitz, episodes that house a moment of involuntary memory frequently include a mention of the color blue. Shortly after Austerlitz walks the uneven paving, we read of a “blue dog” (einen blaufarbenen Hund). Before he enters 12 Šporkova and before describing the items in the hallway, Austerlitz stops to examine “the smooth plaster above the keystone of the arch” of another building 22

Proust 1986, 256. Proust 1998, 62. 24 Proust 1992b, 219. 25 In all likelihood Proust would have been familiar with the significance of blue to earlier literary traditions, for instance, Novalis’s “blue flower” (Blaue Blume), which became a central emblem of German Romanticism, and the Symbolists’, especially Baudelaire’s and Mallarmé’s, presentations of “l’azur.” In both cases, blue symbolizes a move beyond material reality; there is a metaphysical striving toward infinitude, which resonates here with the all-encompassing, sensory-loaded experience of the Proustian involuntary memory. These associations with the color blue were helpfully brought to my attention by Mark Anderson of Columbia University’s German department. 23

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entrance; “[t]he cast was no more than a square foot in size, and showed, set against a spangled sea-green background, a blue dog carrying a small branch in its mouth.”26 The blue marks a connection to Proust, and thus the modernist literary past appears in a post-war novelistic present—it is, however, altered in its portrayal. Ann Pearson, without significant attention to the role of photography, provides a reading of Sebald’s borrowing of this paving scene from In Search of Lost Time that also recognizes a departure from the original. She notes that one difference between Marcel and Austerlitz—a difference that can be seen as directly connected to Sebald’s emphasis on Austerlitz’s present surroundings—is that “Austerlitz experiences an actual physical recovery of a lost place.”27 Indeed, 12 Šporkova turns out to be the protagonist’s childhood home. Pearson’s exploration of the appearance of Proust is motivated by a desire to understand how intertextuality works within Sebald’s oeuvre. Thus here she shows how Sebald uses Proust as a counterpoint to Austerlitz. Marcel’s recovery is mnemonic; Austerlitz’s is, she says, literal.28 Yet interestingly, the physical location is incapable of giving a sense of closure; rather—and here is where attention to photos is essential—it is shortly after this episode that we note Austerlitz’s need to find an image of his mother, a need that only intensifies over the course of the novel. Sebald seems, then, to position the photograph as a medium vested with heightened potential meaning. It is fitting that Austerlitz experiences his version of the Proustian uneven paving involuntary memory as he walks toward his old home, for Marcel’s recollection of his childhood is triggered within a domestic space, as he tastes the madeleine, prepared by his mother, at home. At the same time, this also highlights a tremendous dissimilarity—counterpoint, as per Pearson—that grows from the difference in the historical settings of the novels; as an adult in Swann’s Way, Marcel still has his mother, while Austerlitz can only hope to recover a photo of Agáta.29 The outcome of 26

Sebald 2001a, 151 (emphasis added); idem 2003b, 221. Pearson 2008, 270 (emphasis in original). Pearson notes that Austerlitz also meets a person from his past, Vera (on whom I will elaborate later). In addition, she provides a compelling reading of another moment of Proustian interextuality with the episode of the compost heap in Austerlitz’s garden (ibid., 271). 28 Pearson rightly notes another contrast: Marcel “finds in the resurgence of the past the impetus for the literary work upon which he will at last embark” whereas that “ecstatic sense of artistic vocation” is absent in Austerlitz (idem 2008, 270-71). 29 On the limits of art, Pearson says, the “salvation through art” for Marcel is, in the post-Holocaust setting, an experience of loss for Austerlitz (idem 2008, 27374). 27

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history—the Nazi agenda specifically—has ensured that Austerlitz can never be with his mother again; Agáta perished after being forced to Theresienstadt. Sebald’s scene of the uneven paving thus establishes an unquestionable reference to Proust and simultaneously reminds us that the concerns are graver in the post-Holocaust setting. This scene also signals an important turning point in the novel, as Austerlitz, intent on his quest for information, feels sure that he has found some pieces of his past.

Sebald’s rewriting of Proust: Increased stakes and heightened visuality The episode just analyzed reveals the evident transposition of mnemonic prompt from one novel to another. If that assessment shows some of the ways that Sebald is rethinking Proust, the following does so even more greatly. Reading what could be considered the grandest moments of involuntary memory from both novels—Marcel’s scene of the madeleine, Austerlitz’s scene in a train station waiting room—exposes the prioritized role of sight for Sebald. As an intertext for framing this emphasis on sight, Proust is exemplary. More so than many of his modernist contemporaries, he thinks deeply about photography, reflecting on it in his writings, both his fiction and essays. It provides a valuable analogy for contemplating memory. But for Proust, even if the experience of a recovered past is fleeting, the involuntary memory is nevertheless vast in structure because it is highly sensorial, conveying a full affective re-engagement with past time. In other words, the Proustian involuntary memory is not written as if it were a photograph. Through important scenes of Proustian echo, Sebald rearticulates the points of emphasis to show how the status of memory has shifted over the course of the century. If he stresses this new status by forcing us to read text as if it were image, he also forces us out of a traditional modernist model of memory and into the image-oriented present day. His mixing of text and image media obliges us to consider the nature of representational forms, both literary (novel) and documentary (photography), as they function—for Austerlitz and its reader—in the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century mindset. At present, I will show that Austerlitz offers a contrast to the Proustian depiction of memory. Sebald portrays the photo-textual memory. The madeleine scene from In Search of Lost Time is so well known that I will only give it here the briefest of description: Marcel had not much thought about his childhood in a long time, but upon tasting the small spongy cake soaked in tea, he experiences a strange, new feeling— inklings of the past returned. He attempts, consciously, to seize that

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memory, but the conscious endeavors repeatedly fail. The memory, however, suddenly divulges itself to Marcel, and he subsequently recalls his childhood in tremendous detail. In Austerlitz, the main character wanders through London’s Liverpool Street train station, finding himself, eventually and by chance, in a disused Ladies’ Waiting Room, which is largely in ruins and will soon be built over. He describes strange visions that occur in the “dusty gray light” of this spectral space, and initially he recalls memories from the “outlying regions” of his mind, such as an experience from 1968. But he begins to sense, if at first abstractly, that this room brings back “memories behind and within which many things much further back in the past seemed to lie.”30 There is a shift from the conscious, if outlying, memories to the unconscious or, as we learn, repressed. While the space as a whole is rather confounding, Austerlitz is specifically “dazzled” as the critical recollection involuntarily emerges.31 The significance of this place then reveals itself in one crystalline memory. It was through this station that Austerlitz entered Great Britain in 1939; it was here, this waiting room, where the small boy of four and a half was picked up by new parents and carried into a new life. In both In Search of Lost Time and Austerlitz, these scenes are the first portrayal of involuntary memory as experienced by the main character. Each scene depicts the protagonist grappling with an experience both new and stunning—especially stunning, almost nightmarish in Austerlitz’s case. For Marcel, the past, once accessed through the triggered memory, comes flowing forth in recollection; for Austerlitz, the involuntary memory provokes an awakening, and eventually he will undertake a painful and laborious journey to find information. The realm of memory, even involuntary memory, which, when triggered effectively, occurs spontaneously, is nevertheless characterized by Sebald as still strenuous and arduous in practice. For Austerlitz, this involuntary memory produces an anguished revelation: I became aware, through my dull bemusement, of the destructive effect on me of my desolation through all those past years, and a terrible weariness overcame me at the idea that I had never really been alive, or was only now being born, almost on the eve of my death.32 30

Sebald 2001a, 136. This use of “dazzled” (wie ein Geblendeter) could be seen to connect with that term’s appearance, twice as “dazzling” (éblouissante), in Proust’s uneven paving episode (Sebald 2003b, 200; Proust 1986, 256-57). 32 Sebald 2001a, 137. 31

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Shortly after, he says: “I realized then […] how little practice I had in using my memory.”33 In due course, Austerlitz travels to Prague and commences the detective work of learning about his past. Marcel, of course, undertakes no similar geographic journey to find a missing past that was shaped by the dire European politics of the late 1930s. Nevertheless, we find in Proust’s madeleine scene a subdued (pre)version of Austerlitz’s revelation: “Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray [the place where Marcel spent large portions of his childhood], except what lay in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me.”34 As with Austerlitz, though less drastic in effect, Marcel’s greater or deeper memory of the past has remained unengaged. Yet Austerlitz’s memory, far from being simply unengaged, has been effaced through “desolation,” and thus Sebald reworks this overlap, adding ominous layers. The lack of a memory’s “existence” in Proust becomes a question of life and death in Austerlitz— “I had never really been alive.” Sebald meaningfully changes the terms at stake; in the wake of the Holocaust, memory or lack thereof, becomes associated with narratives of survival and demise. The perishing of memory, here, is tantamount to the death of an individual. In addition, Sebald forges another significant connection through the language of “theatre” and “drama.” For the Proustian narrator those are the fragments of his Combray past that do remain alive in memory. On the one hand, Marcel is referring to affecting bedtime scenes, which occur early in Swann’s Way; on the other, this language, as it describes conscious (voluntary) memories of Marcel’s past, offers a way to consider involuntary memory in contrast.35 In Austerlitz, we read similarly that when the protagonist walks into the space of the waiting room, he feels “like an actor who, upon making his entrance, has completely and irrevocably forgotten not only the lines he knew by heart but the very part 33

Sebald 2001a, 139. Proust 1998, 60. 35 Marcel speaks of these memories as quite powerful and in this regard they are perhaps not the typical “residue” of mémoire volontaire (Proust 1998, 59). Nevertheless, by Proust’s definition these are voluntary memories because they have remained accessible and have been consciously recalled. Richard Terdiman likewise notes that in contrast to the moment of the madeleine, these memories are voluntarily recollected and thus shown as “depreciated” (idem 1993, 227; 231). Speaking to what I have here called their powerful quality, he also builds upon this reading, observing that repressed content from this period in Marcel’s life emerges late in the novel. 34

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he has so often played.”36 Both authors at these moments thus distinguish the theatricality of conscious memory from the, until now, dead or dormant unconscious memory of the past. But again, Sebald reworks the Proustian original; the bedtime drama becomes post-war nightmare. For Austerlitz, the actor self is the only self to which he has any access. This actor cannot remove his costume when the curtain falls because nothing rests beneath it. From the perspective of clinical psychiatry, Henry Krystal explains that there exist cases, where, in the wake of trauma (and before victims have been able to process what has befallen them), “no trace of a registration of any kind is left in the psyche, instead, a void, a hole is found.”37 The horror of this moment in Austerlitz rests in the protagonist’s dreadful realization that his conscious memories have led, in his mind, to the creation of a false identity in having “voided” the trauma from his youth. He first consciously grasps his unwitting role as “actor” in the moments leading up to his visual involuntary memory. As Proust frames the opening of the madeleine scene, he strongly asserts a definition of involuntary recollection: And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.38

Sebald’s rewriting of Proust reiterates the importance of chance; Austerlitz winds up in this waiting room “through a series of coincidences.”39 But significantly, Sebald intensifies this experience, heightening the role of death. Austerlitz, already described as a man who is not alive, here comes upon the trigger just before it must die, “a few weeks at the most before [the old waiting room] vanished for ever in the rebuilding.”40 As I will examine momentarily, Austerlitz’s experience in this dying space puts pressure on a dominant medium of historical documentation—the photograph. Where taste and smell were crucial to Marcel’s madeleine 36

Sebald 2001a, 134. Quoted in Caruth 1995, 6. 38 Proust 1998, 59-60. 39 Sebald 2001a, 138. Furthermore, Sebald echoes the Proustian usage of blue, in description of one of the odd visions that the waiting room inspires. Austerlitz relates, “I saw the birds spread their great wings and fly away through the blue air” (ibid., 135). 40 Sebald 2001a, 138. 37

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episode, here sight is the privileged sense. And precisely what Austerlitz sees, amidst the ruins of the station around him, is an image from 1939. The critical moment I want to explore begins: “I felt, said Austerlitz, that the waiting room where I stood as if dazzled contained all the hours of my past life, all the suppressed and extinguished fears and wishes I had ever entertained, as if the black and white diamond pattern of the stone slabs beneath my feet were the board on which the endgame would be played, and it covered the entire plane of time.”41 Austerlitz then continues in a manner that shows the importance of visuality, and moreover, shows that this involuntary memory is cast as if it were a photograph: Perhaps that is why, in the gloomy light of the waiting room, I also saw two middle-aged people dressed in the style of the thirties, a woman in a light gabardine coat with a hat at an angle on her head, and a thin man beside her wearing a dark suit and a dog collar. And I not only saw the minister and his wife, said Austerlitz, I also saw the boy they had come to meet. He was sitting by himself on a bench over to one side. His legs, in white knee-length socks, did not reach the floor, and but for the small rucksack he was holding on his lap I don’t think I would have known him, said Austerlitz. As it was, I recognized him by that rucksack of his, and for the first time in as far back as I can remember I recollected myself as a small child, at the moment when I realized that it must have been to this same waiting room I had come on my arrival in England over half a century ago.42

The emphasis on sight is immediately apparent through the repeated usage of the verb to see: “I saw” (ich sah). What Austerlitz views is decidedly not cinematic in scope, for the action is frozen. There is no movement in this portrayal; rather, the weight is on visual description (such as specific articles of clothing and the detail of the boy’s legs not reaching the floor). Even the past continuous verb constructions depict no motion, and in fact they contribute to the descriptive quality of this passage. For instance, the sentence “He was sitting by himself on a bench over to one side” communicates an image the reader readily pictures.43 Notably, it is a static image. The only real action in this description of the people Austerlitz observes occurs through the verb to see, that is, Austerlitz’s seeing of the scene before him.44 That act of sight shows us what is being seen—a 41

Sebald 2001a, 136. Sebald 2001a, 136-37. 43 “Er saß für sich allein seitab auf einer Bank” (Sebald 2003b, 201). 44 The other verbs in this passage, such as “recollect” and “recognize,” that could be thought of as more active, still do not outwardly convey action. Moreover, they 42

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frozen tableau. This moment of looking at an instant of past time is thus framed like the experience of looking at a photograph. In preceding this memory, which is so evocative of a photo, with the statement that the space of the waiting room “contained all the hours of [Austerlitz’s] past life,” Sebald marks a connection between history and the media we use to represent it. “[T]he entire plane of time,” or at the least all of past time, as this waiting room is a site somehow suffused with the past, is knowable only in mediated form—through constructions such as photos, memories, and that which here bridges the two, photo-textual memories. Further, the fact that photos occupy a significant role in our endeavors to reconnect with the past—an endeavor that we see Austerlitz later undertake in his ardent desire to find an image of his mother and which we see in practice in the shape of this involuntary memory—could be seen as underscored by that which is literally under Austerlitz’s feet. He stands on a black and white diamond-patterned floor. That floor recalls the traditional black and white of photography, and the diamond pattern evokes the rectangular shape of a photograph. Yet that floor is also, metaphorically, a chessboard or a game. The implications may be both that Austerlitz is a pawn, having been made subject to historical forces that upended his life, and that the constructedness of the “game” in this space suffused with past time parallels the constructions we build (or write, or see) in trying to know the past. If these constructions cover the entirety of time and if this is where the “endgame,” as Austerlitz says, plays out, then perhaps Sebald is suggesting that, especially in today’s image culture, the ability to distinguish between the actual and the constructed is diminished. In this light, we can say, for example, that his use of reproduced photographs without captioning information is meant to disconcert his reader, and in disturbing us from a relaxed reading, he forces us to think about our relationship to images. Austerlitz’s relation to this train station memory image is made fully apparent through the perspective and voicing in this scene. Unlike the Proustian narrator who follows his madeleine-induced involuntary memory with a long first-person reminiscence, Sebald’s protagonist appears as if dissociated from himself in the moment of his recollected memory. The past seems to surface, but not in the first person, not as a reexperience. And it does not, as with Marcel, lead to the recovered childhood that is so plentifully restored as to be narratively reanimated. Instead, Austerlitz views his past as if in third person; he looks at the are only applied to adult Austerlitz (the only active participant here), and, as terms for remembrance and revelation, they function here to align the workings of memory and sight.

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image of this scene and he sees himself as a boy sitting on a bench, waiting to go off to his new life in Wales.45 Again, Sebald creates the sensation of looking at a photograph, here seemingly a photograph from Austerlitz’s past. But what is described and portrayed like a photo is, in fact, a memory. In reframing memory in this distanced and photo-like manner, Sebald affirms that the past cannot be recaptured in the celebratory fashion of Proust’s narrator. We can attempt to recall the past; we can even experience moments of involuntary remembrance, where we can review (or re-view) the details that appear to us, and we can try to make sense of what we see. But in the end what we obtain is always and only a representation of the past. Sebald stresses this commentary in the very act of picturing this memory like a photograph—that is, as a commonplace, two-dimensional mode of representation. His reworking of Proust thus demands that the reader consider the limitations of representation in general and memory specifically.

Trauma and visual memory Growing directly from Sebald’s concerns for remembrance, forgetting, and representation in the post-Holocaust age, the third-person distancing of the train station scene reinforces an emphasis on the protagonist’s traumatic repression of past experiences. To look at the past, rather than to attempt a Proustian-like first-person recuperation, is a less painful way to remember and relate to the Holocaust-based traumas this character suffered. Were Austerlitz’s recollections to involve an “expansion” of memory, to use Proust’s term, the character might once again be psychologically destroyed. As it is, the experience in the waiting room produces a “rending” feeling within him.46 45

Even the statement “I recollected myself as a small child” embodies a tremendous distance, positioning the self through an other—that child. Austerlitz does not reconnect with the child in a first-person manner that could say “I remember sitting in this train station.” Instead, the adult protagonist reasons that “it must have been” this waiting room. In contrast, as Marcel experiences an involuntary recollection in Time Regained, Proust emphasizes the quality of reexperience: “I seemed to be in the railway carriage again, opening a bottle of beer” (idem 1992b, 218-219). 46 Sebald 2001a, 137. Many scholars have looked at the place of trauma in Sebald’s work. For a small but representative set of essays, see Part V, “Haunting, Trauma, Memory” in Long and Whitehead 2004. Carolin Duttlinger also offers an insightful reading of “traumatic photographs” in Austerlitz, connecting Freud’s model of trauma and latency with the novel’s interest in a latency inherent in

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This connection of the visual with Austerlitz’s status as a traumatized individual has more than simply a fiction-based significance. According to Cathy Caruth, “[t]o be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event.”47 From the vantage of psychiatry and cognitive neuroscience, traumatic experiences may be more likely to be encoded visually. Responding to the visual (even “photographic”) form of traumatic memories, John H. Krystal, Stephen M. Southwick, and Dennis S. Charney explain the possibility that “during traumatization, there is a shift away from verbal encoding toward encoding in emotional, pictorial, auditory, and other sensory-based memory systems.”48 Such memories, they suggest, may be “stored and rehearsed” as “essentially ‘snapshots.’”49 Sebald’s rewriting of Proust necessarily takes on the sinister aftereffects of the Holocaust. His photo-like memories are not memories of trauma per se, but they are memories that were repressed in the aftermath of Austerlitz’s traumatic removal from his family. That evacuation from Prague occurs as a direct response to the circumstances of the Holocaust that threatened young Austerlitz’s life and took his parents’. Thus perhaps with this in mind do we see Sebald forging a connection between the iconic nature of traumatic memory and his photo-like depictions of memory. In reworking Proust, Sebald appears to push the portrayal of recovered memory into a more image-based realm. In the scene of the uneven paving, Proust referred to “snapshots of memory,” but did not actually depict them.50 In fact, for him, those snapshots represent the limitations of voluntary memory. For Sebald, by contrast, that form can now be seen to characterize certain involuntary recollections, as we saw in the case of the waiting room. We are even told at one point in Austerlitz, “[w]hen memories come back to you, you sometimes feel as if you were looking at the past.”51 But for all of Sebald’s language of “looking at” past time, what is it that one really sees? What is at stake, now, is how the recall of a Sebaldian photo-like involuntary memory correlates to the Proustian idea of a purer, buried or forgotten memory. Of utmost importance to Sebald is the meaning and developing photographs in a chemical bath (see idem 2004, 158-59). On the analogy between photography and traumatic memory, see also Barzilai (2006). 47 Caruth 1995, 4-5. 48 Krystal, Southwick, and Charney 1997, 158. 49 Krystal, Southwick, and Charney 1997, 157. 50 Proust 1931, 211. 51 In this passage, a friend of Austerlitz’s mother is speaking, also telling Austerlitz, “if I close my eyes I see the two of us as it were disembodied” (Sebald 2001a, 158-59, emphasis added).

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value assigned to our memories, perhaps especially our involuntary memories, precisely because they seem less subject to the distortions that occur over time. This is true for Austerlitz; his moments of involuntary recollection feel less questioned (by the protagonist and his interlocutor) within the narrative. In fact, as Austerlitz walks the uneven paving, when “memories were revealing themselves” to him, even the reader does not feel pushed to question the existence of these memories or the validity of this instant. Quite the opposite, she is led to trust in this as a moment of pure recollection because the novel shortly thereafter confirms that Austerlitz has located the address where he lived as a boy; he did walk that uneven street. Yet at the same time, Sebald introduces a tension into this type of implicit trust when he reminds us to reflect on the constructedness of our access to the past, as he does through the metaphor of the “black and white diamond pattern” floor. Greater questions loom behind all of this. First, despite Sebald’s distrust in the Proustian notion of pure memory, do photo-textual involuntary memories nevertheless offer something of an unadulterated access to the past? And second, can the photo-textual memory grant us historical, even documentarist worth in the way that a photograph can?

Sebald’s involuntary memory Having established Sebald’s Proustian intertextuality and, significantly, the way his literary rewriting can be coded photographically, I turn my attention now beyond, simply, the observation of visuality in Sebaldian memory and toward an analysis of the relationship between photo-textual memory and actual photos themselves. Austerlitz’s involuntary memories of his “lost” Prague childhood repeatedly transpire in the absence of reproduced photos. This phenomenon becomes especially noteworthy in the cases where the involuntary memory itself takes a photo-like form, as these lead us to interrogate the special role of photographs in recovering repressed memories. An examination of the photo-textual memory in the episode at the Estates Theater usefully allows me to explore why Sebald has created this dynamic between photography, memory, and the representation of the past. The scene occurs while Austerlitz is in Prague, after he has located his childhood home. He is now in touch with Vera, his former nurserymaid, who tells him that his mother, an actress-singer, made her Prague debut at the Estates Theater in 1938, and that as a small boy he attended a rehearsal. With this information, Austerlitz sets off to visit the theater, and there he experiences another moment of involuntary recollection. Initially

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Austerlitz tries to will forth his memory, but “the harder [he] tried to conjure up at least some faint recollection of [his mother’s] appearance, the more the theater seemed to be shrinking.”52 In Proustian fashion, the conscious attempt to recall the “lost” past fails. Instead, and as with Marcel, the involuntary memory transpires as a chance occurrence: Only after a while, when someone or other walked quickly over the stage behind the drawn curtain, sending a ripple through the heavy folds of fabric with his rapid pace, only then, said Austerlitz, did the shadows begin to move, and I saw the conductor of the orchestra down in the pit like a beetle in his black tailcoat, and other black-clad figures busy with all kinds of instruments, I heard their music mingling with the voices, and all of a sudden I thought that in between one of the musicians’ heads and the neck of a double bass, in the bright strip of light between the wooden floorboards and the hem of the curtain, I caught sight of a sky-blue shoe embroidered with silver sequins.53

What is particularly curious about this episode is the ambiguous way that Sebald frames the temporalities. In the narrative’s present, we know for sure that Austerlitz enters the theater. But at what point does the memory begin? Is it the movement of the theater curtain that prompts the recollection, allowing Austerlitz to “see” (remember) the orchestra members? Or are those members actually in the theater for a dress rehearsal, initially obscured from sight because they are in the pit and have not yet begun to play, and does the involuntary memory begin “all of a sudden,” an echoing of Proust’s “[a]nd suddenly the memory revealed itself”?54 Though it seems likely that the entire scene is a recollection, this blurring as we move from present to past is important. It resonates with Sebald’s stylistic decision to forego quotation marks and captions. In other words, it creates yet another moment where the text makes us unsure in order to remind us that ventures into the past are always “blurry.” Nevertheless, the status of sight remains privileged in this episode. Austerlitz saw (sah ich) the conductor, saw the musicians, he caught sight of the shoe (glaubte auf einmal […] Schuh zu erblicken).55 And while the musicians, on first read, might seem to be moving—“figures busy with all kinds of instruments”—this is diluted grammatically, as Sebald suggests possible motion without ever showing specific activity. The English

52

Sebald 2001a, 160-61. Sebald 2001a, 161. 54 Proust 1998, 63. 55 Sebald 2003b, 236. 53

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translation captures this sentiment in framing that phrase without a verb.56 We are even told that “the shadows begin to move,” but again this is shrouded (shadowed) in uncertainty. Are these literal shadows, given movement through the curtain’s rippling, or is this a metaphor for the stirrings of memory? The entirety of the passage after “the shadows begin to move” is rendered here with no other explicit motion. Thus despite the mention of sound, there is a flattening of the experience, as this image is effectively static. In the end, the critical moment occurs when Austerlitz catches sight of the shoe.57 The blue of the shoe is, of course, the color associated with Sebald’s and Proust’s involuntary memories. Moreover, this particular moment indisputably offers an involuntarily recalled vision; that shoe can only be interpreted as a memory. The novel shores up this reading through Vera, as I will explain shortly. Importantly, here, the focus is entirely visual (not at all auditory), and significantly, at this moment (and in contrast to the grammar-induced uncertainty with the musicians) there remains no ambiguity with regard to movement; the shoe conducts no action. Rather, it is acted upon; it is seen or “caught” by Austerlitz, as if he had taken a photograph of it. Further, that image, like a photo on display, is framed on all sides, between the musician’s head and the neck of the bass, between the “wooden floorboards and the hem of the curtain.” In addition, the shoe is illuminated in a “strip of light,” as if strategically spotlighted, to make it the focal point of the tableau—the focal point of this photo-textual memory. Immediately following the sentence describing the blue shoe, Sebald cuts to a new scene, without even beginning a new paragraph: On the evening of that day, when I visited Vera for the second time in her flat in the Šporkova and she confirmed, in answer to my question, that Agáta had indeed worn sequined sky-blue shoes with her costume as Olympia, I felt as if something were shattering inside my brain.58

56

The German reads, “die mit allerlei Instrumenten hantierten” (Sebald 2003b, 236). This could convey nonspecific motion (as in, “fiddling with instruments”) or it can act more descriptively (as in, “occupied [or occupying themselves] with instruments”). 57 Heightening the emphasis on this exact moment, Sebald shifts from the verb sehen to erblicken (see preceding paragraph), which can carry a more powerful connotation than what this English translation of the scene registers, that is, a sense of “to behold,” or to catch sight of something specially, not casually, sought after, such as the “Promised Land.” Again, my thanks to Mark Anderson for noting this. 58 Sebald 2001a, 161.

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It appears that the past and the present have collided (as we saw prefigured in the temporal “blurriness” at the start of this involuntary recollection), and this collision subsequently takes a mental toll on the protagonist. Likewise, after the photo-textual memory in the train station waiting room, Austerlitz feels that “rending” sensation, previously mentioned. These moments of rupture and mental “shattering” that sometimes characterize the protagonist in the aftermath of involuntary memory would seem to imply that these memories are, like Proust’s, purer. Were they voluntary memories, they would not produce such a dramatic response because they would already be known to the rememberer.59 That these memories mentally shock Austerlitz suggests that some buried, even protected, information from his past is being forcefully dislodged from its hiding place, a Proustian oubli. Moreover, and in contrast to a characterization of the more vaguely recollected form of voluntary memory, Austerlitz recalls the minutiae of the Estates Theater moment correctly. This appears to be verified when Vera substantiates the existence of Austerlitz’s mother’s sky-blue shoes with sequins. Interestingly, Austerlitz makes a point of stating that he brought his camera with him to the theater and that he “obtained permission from the porter, in exchange for a not inconsiderable tip, to take some photographs in the recently refurbished auditorium.”60 In a text that has so many reproduced photographs, this diegetic mention of picture taking becomes especially important. But in fact, the protagonist does not diegetically share photographs of the auditorium with the narrator, nor does Sebald reproduce any for the reader. The radical absence of the referenced photos is thus striking. Moreover, in forcing us to read a mnemonic “photo” instead of showing us an actual one, their absence is further underscored, and our attention is consequently directed to the role of photos in such scenes. Certainly, we presume along logical lines, there can be no photo of the recalled memory itself, because that remembrance, despite all its visuality, is actually only in Austerlitz’s mind. The blue shoe poking out from under the curtain is not really there when Austerlitz returns to the Estates Theater as an adult. Significantly, however, we do not even get photos of that which prompts the involuntary memory—the stage, its drawn curtain. These are photographable entities from a venue where Austerlitz supposedly took pictures. 59

Where Marcel’s dramatic response (as gestured to in passages presented earlier in this chapter) is an overwhelming happiness, here we see Austerlitz’s, in the post-Holocaust context, as a shattering. 60 Sebald 2001a, 160.

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Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980), a text with which Sebald was undoubtedly familiar, offers a theoretical framework for consideration of the phenomenon that Austerlitz here manifests. The photograph, Barthes says, disables our ability to recall the past; the photo “actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.”61 Photographs, he believes, “violent[ly]” impose a finite image and thereby prevent the rememberer’s attempted recall; the fuller remembrance of a given experience is supplanted by (only) what is pictured in the photograph from it. The photo comes to act as the “memory” (or counter-memory) of a given moment despite the fact that it can only capture an instant, can only convey a limited perspective. In withholding photographs at moments of involuntary recollection, Sebald would seem to adopt this Barthesian reading.62 The lack of photographs allows the memory to proceed. Such is the situation with the Estates Theater scene. Moreover, this pattern is borne out with the Ladies’ Waiting Room episode. There is no photo of that space, only the photo-textual memory. This is even the case with the moment of the uneven paving, despite the lack of photo-textual memory in that episode. While that scene at large, from walking up the street to entering the protagonist’s childhood building, seems haunted with elements of the past, in fact the only point at which memories explicitly return to Austerlitz—the point that directly parallels Marcel’s experience—is when he feels the uneven street. And that is an image that is noticeably missing, especially in contrast to the fact that shortly thereafter we see two photos of details that the reader assumes could be of the building at 12 Šporkova. Yet by the time those images appear, Austerlitz (precisely because there is no photo-textual memory to view) is focused in and on his present surroundings.63 Returning to the example of the Estates Theater, the suggestion is thus that this moment with the blue shoe offers us something “pure”—if the 61

Barthes 2000, 91. While photos sometimes appear alongside the novel’s depiciton of voluntary memory and sometimes are absent—an interesting topic for exploration in itself— there seems a heightened significance to the fact that they are recurrently absent from episodes of involuntary memory of Austerlitz’s repressed childhood. 63 In another episode, when a brief vision occurs, there is a photo. A Czech phrase written on the back of the photo, not the photo itself, is what incites the vision, but it is not clear if the vision is a scene from the protagonist’s past or just a mental picturing of the recollected meaning of the phrase. Significantly, the back of the photo is not pictured in the narrative (only the front is). This episode, moreover, and in keeping with Barthes’s formula, goes on to make explicit that when Austerlitz “studied” the photo, it spurs no memories (Sebald 2001a, 184). 62

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lack of a photo is equivalent to the flow of detailed remembrance. Sebald, however, will complicate this suggestion of Proustian purity. As I will show, he creates a push and pull, toward and then against accepting the protagonist’s memories as accurate, that is meant to unnerve. In shaking us from a space of relaxed reading, we are forced to think about how we should understand Austerlitz’s memories.

Why the photographic form? If the focus is on memory itself, why then, in rewriting Proust, does Sebald cast involuntary memories photographically? Why choose this form, if its actual, tangible counterpart in fact blocks memory? On the one hand, Sebald is literalizing Proust’s figurative mental snapshots, a concept that conveys the relatedness of these two forms. Both the memory and the photograph aim to capture and preserve moments of time past. As Susan Sontag states, “[m]emory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image.”64 On the other hand, Sebald plays with the photographic form in order to produce a commentary on historical documentation. The photograph, as I will explain momentarily, carries with it both actual and assumed levels of authentication. In moving the photograph from its tangible form to a photo-textual memory, Sebald undoes the levels of actual authentication and, in the end, renders the involuntary memory as unsubstantiated as voluntary memory. The suggested alignment of a Proustian purity of memory with some of Austerlitz’s recollections therefore serves ultimately to demarcate a point of difference. The reader is moved between moments of ostensible mnemonic accuracy (the seeming true past recollected) and scenes that undermine that accuracy with uncertainty, in order to make her conscious of the complexities of memory, and of how we use our memories in the present to construct an understanding of the past. In the end, Sebald pushes our interpretations further and further into the realm of uncertainty. He again heightens what we will see as a great dissimilarity between Marcel and Austerlitz, for at the end of the century, the Proustian model of memory cannot successfully stand as Sebald’s model. An important component of Sebald’s model, the photo-textual memory is informed by the photographic medium. The photograph is, writes Barthes emphatically, “authentication itself.”65 Working from the mechanical principles of film-based photography, where one can trace a 64 65

Sontag 2003, 22. Barthes 2000, 87.

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physical path of light from the referent (or subject of the photo) through the camera to the film that records the image, Barthes says: “I can never deny that the thing [referent] has been there.” “There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past,” he continues; “this constraint exists only for Photography.”66 When one looks at a film-based photograph, one is assured of the image’s Barthesian ça-a-été, or That-has-been. Every filmbased photograph, photo manipulation notwithstanding, possesses an indexical authority that derives from that contact between light, referent, and film. This renders the photograph a highly documentarist medium. It documents the That-has-been. “Photographs furnish evidence,” observes Sontag; “there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.”67 We are, as a result, conditioned to view (“presume”) photographs as having a unique ability to authenticate and, accordingly, a high level of documentary authority. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright add that portrait images—“on passports, driver’s licenses, credit cards, and identification cards for schools, the welfare system, and many other institutions”—function, in today’s society, like fingerprints.68 This positions our idea of photographic indexicality at an especially high level, insinuating that the photograph’s trace is as definitive a form of verification as one’s unique fingerprint. In other words, there is a cultural belief in the photograph as an empirical tool, a piece of evidence. Yet in the end it is that very belief in a documentary authority that Sebald desires to challenge. Russell J. A. Kilbourn, writing about both photographic and cinematic images in Austerlitz, argues that “their worthiness as standards of authenticity on any level is cast irredeemably into doubt.”69 This observation is particularly germane in light of my reading of Sebald’s intermedial mixing. Presenting a “photograph” as a memory, Sebald undoes the That-has-been. There is no longer any literalized indexical authority, as what had been material (photograph) is now written (photo-textual memory). Sebald declares that our artifacts, both the tangible as well as the intangible (memory), can never thoroughly document, and suggests, to the utter deflation of the reader, that Austerlitz’s past cannot be known. Austerlitz may think he regains his missing past—“I came upon the photograph of an anonymous actress who seemed to resemble my dim memory of my mother, and in whom Vera 66 Barthes 2000, 76 (emphasis in original). For a discussion of indexicality in digital photography, see, for example, Mitchell 1992. 67 Sontag 1990, 5. 68 Sturken and Cartwright 2001, 23. 69 Kilbourn 2004, 152.

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[…] immediately and without a shadow of a doubt, as she said, recognized Agáta as she had then been”70—but Sebald shows us that certainty in this belief is misguided. He ensures this reading of the uncertainties of memory by undermining, in prior episodes, both Vera and Austerlitz’s ability to remember and recognize. This destabilizing of our access to the past occurs through scenes that contest the presumed authority of the photograph, and that, in turn, ultimately challenges the status of the phototextual memory. In one episode, Vera, who was both young Austerlitz’s nurserymaid and his mother’s dear friend, finds a photo (reproduced in the novel) of an actress whom she initially believes to be Agáta, but then she determines that the picture is decidedly not of her.71 Vera’s behavior here, though it plays out quickly in the narrative, is quite complicated. She “recognizes” in a photograph someone she knew quite well, but ultimately reverses that position, realizing that she has misread the image. For a moment, though, that photograph acts as false documentation, that is, falsely appearing as an artifact of Agáta. Despite the fact that Vera seems to apprehend and correct her mistake, Sebald nevertheless points to the exceedingly fragile relationship we have with media of documentation; it is highly difficult to ensure the correct reading. Sebald echoes this behavior of misrecognition in another scene, when Austerlitz, responding in part to “faint memories” (schwachen Erinnerungen), clearly believes he may have located his mother in a crowd of people in video footage from 1944.72 As again an image is reproduced in the novel, we are led to suppose that Austerlitz has isolated a single frame of film, effectively turning moving image into a photo. Vera, however, “stud[ies] the face” and rejects his finding as incorrect, and Sebald, moreover, casts this moment through a historical veil of utter falsity and misrepresentation.73 The film that Austerlitz watches is a work of Nazi propaganda, where what is presented as verisimilitude is nothing more than a ghastly and deadly fraud. In 1944 Germany’s Ministry of Propaganda produced the film The Führer Gives a City to the Jews (Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt) within the Theresienstadt ghetto. While this project was intended to demonstrate to the International Red Cross, among others, that the ghetto’s Jews were treated humanely and lived in resort-like conditions, in reality, this film bears false witness; parts 70

Sebald 2001a, 252-53. Sebald 2001a, 181. The reader assumes that the photo pictured on page 182 is the same as that which Vera describes. 72 Sebald 2001a, 251; idem 2003b, 358. 73 Sebald 2001a, 253. 71

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of Theresienstadt were effectively turned into a large stage while a fullscale deception was performed and filmed. In fact, the Jewish director as well as much of the “cast”—the prisoners who appear in the footage— were deported to Auschwitz after filming was finished. Thus Sebald returns to the theme of theatrics, here with an example that shows just how high the stakes are when it comes to seeing—or not—history for what it is. Furthermore, Carolin Duttlinger links this episode with Sebald’s interest in trauma, noting that Austerlitz here “is marked by an uncanny complicity with the film’s own dissimulating strategy, thus illustrating his investment in images which conceal, rather than reveal, the underlying traumatic reality behind the veil of reassuring normality.”74 Duttlinger’s insight may explain why Austerlitz has no emotional reaction upon finally possessing what he supposes to be a genuine photo of his real mother. If his first “recognition” (the film) of his mother was false, perhaps it was so for a reason—to protect him from a reconnection with a traumatic past. That post-traumatic response is also almost certainly in play with the second recognition (the anonymous actress photo that Austerlitz finds and which Vera corroborates)—which is thus better positioned here as a “recognition.” Barthes’s logic on counter-memory notwithstanding, the allegedly correct photo of Agáta calls forth no buried feelings in the protagonist because, very likely, this is not an image of Austerlitz’s mother. The photograph thus functions not as concrete evidence but as interpretable artifact to which Austerlitz (and Vera, who likewise suffered the shattering loss of a loved friend) can assign meaning. It moves from the realm of the historical into a space shaded by invention and imagination. If Austerlitz has not really found his mother’s image, then he circumvents a re-experience of the trauma of having lost her. Sebald’s The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten: Vier lange Erzählungen— 1992), a collection of short stories that blends elements of fiction and documentary-style case studies, reveals a related situation. As Christopher Gregory-Guider writes of one of the protagonists, “[Max] Ferber waits years before reading his mother’s diary, hoping that he can somehow suspend, or at least delay, the reality of her death.”75 Ferber, a character who, as a teenager, was also displaced by the Holocaust, displays a similar act of self-protection in relation to a re-engagement with his traumatic past. Where Ferber delays reading the diary, Austerlitz perpetually seeks, and on more than one occasion “finds,” women who are likely not his mother. 74

Duttlinger 2004, 167. Duttlinger notes in particular that Austerlitz imagines a version of the film where he sees his mother in “idyllic scenes” (ibid., 167). 75 Gregory-Guider 2005, 441.

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By identifying the lost maternal figure in images of women who are probably not really his mother, Austerlitz avoids a confrontation with the true loss itself—he never comes face to (photographed) face with the real Agáta. In the end, the alleged true image of Agáta is merely a “memento” (Andenken) that Austerlitz passes on to the narrator.76 But if the tangible photo is a mere token, despite having sought it for over a hundred pages, its power is not; the protagonist has gained. What had been missing for the vast majority of his life is now believed to be found. Austerlitz’s identity becomes a little more complete through a potentially imaginative interpretation of a photo. Marianne Hirsch’s profound concept of “postmemory” has resonance with this reading of imagination and recollection.77 With Austerlitz, she has been particularly interested in the role of gender as a special trope of remembrance. Providing a reading of the mistaken Agáta from the Nazi film still, Hirsch writes: “the maternal image in Austerlitz provokes us to scrutinize the unraveling link between present and past that defines indexicality as no more than performative.”78 Indeed, the misreadings of the mother photos ultimately demonstrate Sebald’s point that the past cannot truly be known. This commentary is further highlighted as the reader sees (even if the character cannot) that Austerlitz, despite having encountered places as well as a person from his childhood, and despite having possible pieces of familial evidence at hand, attains no great surety of his own past. Too much uncertainty abounds. At a more fundamental level, which engages deeply with the conventions of literary memory, this commentary exists through the Proustian intertexts. Sebald fuses a connection to Proust through the adoption of both scenes of involuntary memory and particular stylistic behaviors. In reiterating moments of Proustian involuntary memory, Sebald, at times, suggests that Austerlitz experiences the recall of “pure” memories. But his intertextuality reshapes the Proustian portrayal, notably when framing the memory as a static (or practically so) visual. The decision to cast memories as if they 76

Sebald 2001a, 253; idem 2003b, 361. Postmemory describes “the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that they ‘remember’ only as the stories and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right” (Hirsch 1999, 8). 78 Hirsch 2008, 125. With the performative index, a term Hirsch borrows from Margaret Olin, the viewer’s needs and desires (in Austerlitz’s case, the need to find his mother) are dominant and thereby subordinate the significance of the actual content of the image. 77

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were photos to be studied puts these mnemonic portrayals in dialogue with the complicated debates that surround documentation, representation, and historicity. If photos are shown to be unreliable as evidence, then so too are photo-textual memories, a form inherently denied any indexical authority. Moreover, even if select episodes of returned memory from Austerlitz’s Prague past could be said to gesture toward recovered feelings or more extended views of a scene, Sebald has nevertheless already troubled our ability to trust in the veracity of these depictions any more than in the flattened photo-textual memory.79 He therefore undermines the status of both the tangible records of the past, the photographs, as well as the intangible—even the records of the past, which sometimes seem purer or more accurate, that we hold in the form of memories. Not only are both forms constructs for representation, but, posits Sebald, all such representational practice is subject to acts of imaginative interpretation, whether we are conscious or not of that potential. Even the very setting itself of the sky-blue shoe involuntary memory supports this effort of undermining any ability to verify a recollection. This episode occurs in the space of a theater, where performed artificiality and not actuality reigns. We read: “Around me the tiers of seats with their gilded adornments shining through the dim light rose to the roof; before me the proscenium arch of the stage on which Agáta had once stood was like a blind eye.”80 Everything here is a production; the chairs are ornamented, the light too faint to illuminate (a pre-echo of the “dim memory”—now seen, too, as a construction—with the anonymous actress photo). Likewise, the “spotlight” that we saw on the blue shoe was another piece of set design. The proscenium’s comparison to a “blind eye,” moreover, is highly significant; that description occurs immediately before Austerlitz attempts to will forth his memory. The remembrance ultimately proceeds in its photo-like form, but it is viewed in light too dim to see and framed in an arch of blindness. Though Vera confirms the one-time existence of the shoe and thus seems to affirm the accuracy of Austerlitz’s 79 Such episodes help, on the one hand, to align recovered memory with a Proustian-like purity, by offering what may seem a more first-person perspective or depicting some unambiguous movement. On the other hand, alongside the thirdperson distancing and the stasis of photo-like recollection, Sebald emphasizes that push and pull between believing in memory as a recaptured past and seeing it as a form of construction. Furthermore, in this light, Austerlitz’s claim (although he is not speaking of involuntary memory and not of his repressed childhood) that looking at photographs from a trip to a museum returned memories of that event to him is also, at the least, troubled (Sebald 2001a, 268). 80 Sebald 2001a, 160.

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recollection, the narrative itself strongly implies that no such guarantee of the memory can exist. The possibly pure memory and the necessarily contrived setting are provocatively yoked together. It is a pattern—the seemingly true bound to the essentially constructed—that repeats itself in Sebald. Indeed, a similar moment occurs in the final story of The Emigrants. Describing a reverie, the narrator says: The sound came from so far away that it was as if he were walking about behind the wing flats of an infinitely deep stage. On those flats, which in truth did not exist, I saw, one by one, pictures from an exhibition that I had seen in Frankfurt the year before. They were colour photographs […].81

Again, Sebald fuses the artificial setting of the stage with the apparent actuality of photos the narrator recalls seeing at an exhibition. Sebald, therefore, reminds us of what Proust asks us to forget—of a great degree of ultimate unknowability of the past, even one’s own.

Rewriting as re-imagining W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz reframes scenes of Proustian involuntary memory so as to make them more visually photographic and to engage the historical fact of the Holocaust, which puts an extra burden on remembrance. At first glance, this appears paradoxical. Vision seems closer to “pure” memory than verbal description and thus the construction of photo-textual memories seems to ease the work of remembrance. Yet as the contrast with Proust reveals, Sebald is wary of the belief in “pure” memory and the consequent hope that the past can ever be recaptured, let alone re-experienced. Austerlitz thus highlights the failure to recover the past. The protagonist does not regain his childhood with any degree of plentitude. In Sebald’s world, there is an irrevocable disconnect from past events. It seems likely that Sebald’s skepticism toward memory is motivated by a situation that Proust did not have to face: a “society of the image” in which the visual is too often accepted trustingly as an adequate representation of the past. At the same time, however, Sebald’s world also differs from Proust’s in that the Holocaust has happened, and the general imperative to remember is therefore even stronger than it was for the earlier writer. It is also now a more collective imperative. One way of reading the implicit dialogue between the two writers that I have been uncovering would be to take Sebald as questioning the loose and lazy analogy between memory as 81

Sebald 1997, 235.

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therapy for the damaged individual and memory as therapy for a damaged or guilty society. Even if Austerlitz, like an artist, imagines or invents some of what he thinks he remembers, there is arguably a therapeutic pay-off. He earns some (if small) degree of escape from the trauma that defines his life. In finding what he thinks is an image of his long missing, long dead mother, Austerlitz may be able to begin to live again, where before, as we know, it was as if he “had never really been alive.”82 Having “found” his mother, and next going in search of information about his father, Austerlitz feels himself somewhat “liberated.”83 We are reminded late in the novel of just how dire the situation had been: “Who knows, said Austerlitz, what would have become of me […] when I could remember nothing about myself, or my own previous history.”84 This passage, which appears in description of the first of several episodes of “blackout” that Austerlitz suffers as an adult (these grow, he indicates, from his traumatic past), questions the protagonist’s fate should he remain in the hospital where he has been recovering. But of course it also suggests that Austerlitz, like his childhood, would be obliterated if it were not for some degree of remembrance, however partial and inventive. In this light, the imaginative, in being personally recuperative, appears to be approved of by Sebald. It is not clear, however, that this would hold true for the non-Jewish Germans, of whom Sebald vehemently demands that they remember, not invent, what their nation did.85 The Holocaust thus seems to distinguish Sebald’s problematic of memory from Proust’s. But perhaps this difference is after all not as absolute or decisive as it appears. If the Holocaust seems to be the force working against memory in Austerlitz, one may well ask what force works against it in Proust. Is the loss of memory simply a biological fact about the human brain, a sad and universal truth of individual mortality? The 82

Austerlitz’s assertion that he “was only now being born” represents a new conception—with all of that word’s birth-related associations—of self. 83 Sebald 2001a, 253. He feels liberated from the “false” life he had been living. 84 Sebald 2001a, 270. 85 For instance, condemning Germany’s post-Holocaust “amnesia,” Sebald’s narrator of “Max Ferber” in The Emigrants states: “I felt increasingly that the mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans, and the efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up, were beginning to affect my head and my nerves” (Sebald 1997, 225). See also Sebald’s interview with Maya Jaggi (Sebald 2001b). There he talks of growing up in a small German town and particular social bracket where the “so-called conspiracy of silence was at its most present.” On German civilians silencing their own traumatic history of the period, see Sebald’s critical essay “Air War and Literature” (idem 2003a).

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fact that Marcel’s childhood needs to be recovered may seem self-evident, a matter about which there is nothing to say. Yet, and as is made clear by the end of In Search of Lost Time, Proust is thinking of the collapse of an aristocratic society, overwhelmed by the ambitions of its sometimes tasteless inferiors; his object is not merely the aging of an individual. Nor is Sebald, when he lays out the problematic of memory, merely thinking about the Holocaust. In Austerlitz and elsewhere, he goes to great lengths to parallel the destruction caused by the Nazis and the destruction that is still going on around us, caused by modern industrial society. It would not be unfair to say that on many occasions the Holocaust functions primarily as a metaphor for a more general process of destruction and loss. Sebald and Proust both set the problematic of memory within a theory of history as decline from a past that was, at least from certain perspectives, a thing of relative greatness and nobility. Though the Proustian narrator comes to see the sometimes ruthless workings of social codes, he concludes the novel chiefly occupying a space of detachment, as he prizes most a position outside of the now and within Time itself, contemplating the “purer” truth that he finds in the time regained through involuntary recollection. In the end, neither author can be said to contribute to what Sontag has taught us to think of as an ethics of the image. Ethics has to do with action in the present. For both Proust and Sebald, the present, in its own ways, seems too depleted for any action, other than remembering, to be meaningful. At the same time, however, the writing of their books is both remembrance and an ethical act in the present—these works give a space for reflection on what is remembered, providing the opportunity for ethical insight that can be lacking when amidst action itself.

Works Cited Bal, Mieke. 1997. The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bales, Richard. 2003. “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Narrator: the Inscription of Travel in Proust and W. G. Sebald.” In Cross-Cultural Travel: Papers from the Royal Irish Academy Symposium on Literature and Travel, edited by Jane Conroy, 507-12. New York: Peter Lang. —. 2009. “Homeland and Displacement: The Status of Text in Sebald and Proust.” In W. G. Sebald: Schreiben ex patria/ Expatriate Writing, edited by Gerhard Fischer, 461-74. New York: Rodopi.

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Barthes, Roland. (1980) 2000. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Barzilai, Maya. 2006. “On Exposure: Photography and Uncanny Memory in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz.” In W. G. Sebald: History-Memory-Trauma, edited by Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh, 205-218. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Bergson, Henri. (1896) 1939. Matière et mémoire: essai sur la relation du corps à l'esprit. Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France. Bryant, Marsha, ed. 1996. Photo-textualities: Reading Photographs and Literature. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Caruth, Cathy, ed. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Duttlinger, Carolin. 2004. “Traumatic Photographs: Remembrance and the Technical Media in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” In W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion, edited by J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead, 15571. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Gregory-Guider, Christopher C. 2005. “The Sixth Emigrant: Traveling Places in the Works of W. G. Sebald.” Contemporary Literature 46.3: 422-49. Hirsch, Marianne. 1999. “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy.” In Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, 323. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. —. 2008. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29.1: 103-28. Hughes, Alex and Andrea Noble, eds. 2003. Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Infantino, Stephen C. 1992. Photographic Vision in Proust. New York: Peter Lang. Kilbourn, Russell J. A. 2004. “Architecture and Cinema: The Representation of Memory in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” In W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion, edited by J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead, 140-54. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Krystal, John H., Stephen M. Southwick, and Dennis S. Charney. 1997. “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: Psychobiological Mechanisms of Traumatic Remembrance.” In Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, edited by Daniel L. Schacter, 15072. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Lemagny, Jean-Claude and André Rouillé, eds. (1986) 1987. A History of Photography: Social and Cultural Perspectives. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: Cambridge University Press. Long, J. J. and Anne Whitehead, eds. 2004. W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Loquai, Franz. 2005. “Max und Marcel: Eine Betrachtung über die Erinnerungskünstler Sebald und Proust.” In Sebald. Lektüren., edited by Marcel Atze and Franz Loquai, 212-227. Eggingen: Edition Isele. Mitchell, William J. 1992. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pearson, Ann. 2008. “‘Remembrance…is nothing other than a quotation’: The Intertextual Fictions of W. G. Sebald.” Comparative Literature Summer 60.3: 261-78. Proust, Marcel. 1931. Time Regained. Translated by Stephen Hudson. Remembrance of Things Past, part VIII. London: Chatto and Windus. —. (1927) 1986. Le Temps retrouvé. Edited by Bernard Brun. À la recherche du temps perdu vol. X. Edited by Jean Milly. Paris: GF Flammarion. —. (1913) 1987. Du côté de chez Swann. Edited by Bernard Brun and Anne Herschberg-Pierrot. À la recherche du temps perdu vol. I. Edited by Jean Milly. Paris: GF Flammarion. —. (1919) 1992a. À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. Edited by Eugène Nicole. À la recherche du temps perdu vol. II. Paris: Librairie Générale Française. —. 1992b. Time Regained. In Search of Lost Time vol. VI. Translated by Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright. (Also in this edition: A Guide to Proust, compiled by Terence Kilmartin, revised by Joanna Kilmartin.) London: Chatto and Windus. —. 1992c. Within a Budding Grove. In Search of Lost Time vol. II. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright. London: Chatto and Windus. —. 1998. Swann's Way. In Search of Lost Time vol. I. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright. New York: Modern Library. Sebald, W. G. (1992) 1997. The Emigrants. Translated by Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions Books. —. 2001a. Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Random House. —. 2001b. “The Last Word.” An Interview by Maya Jaggi. The Guardian, 21 December.

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—. (1999) 2003a. “Air War and Literature.” In On the History of Natural Destruction. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Random House. —. (2001) 2003b. Austerlitz. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch. Shattuck, Roger. 1964. Proust's Binoculars: A Study of Memory, Time, and Recognition in À la recherche du temps perdu. London: Chatto & Windus. —. 1982. “Appendix” (a 1913 interview with Proust originally published in Le Temps, translated by Shattuck). In Marcel Proust. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sontag, Susan. (1977) 1990. On Photography. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday. —. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright. 2001. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Swales, Martin. 2004. “Theoretical Reflections on the Work of W. G. Sebald.” In W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion, edited by J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead, 24-28. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Terdiman, Richard. 1993. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Walsh, Lauren. 2008. Snapshots of the Past: Novelistic Memory in the Age of Photography. PhD dissertation, Columbia University. Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses database (UMI No. 3317628). Zeng, Li. 2008. The Past Revisited: Popular Memory of the Cultural Revolution in Contemporary China. PhD dissertation, Northwestern University. Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses database (UMI No. 3303709).

CHAPTER FIVE IMMIGWRITING: PHOTOGRAPHS AS MIGRATORY AESTHETICS IN THE MODERN HEBREW NOVEL OFRA AMIHAY*

And there were the photographs—the photographs that testified, refuted, or did neither of that: constructed a third world, an obscure twilight zone. —Ronit Matalon1

Introduction In her short story “Bereshit” (“In the Beginning”), Hebrew author Dvora Baron (1887-1956) describes a photographer visiting the Lithuanian shtetl Zhuzhikovka.2 He witnesses the Jewish custom of depositing coins in charity boxes on Friday afternoon but when he takes out his camera to document the event, the woman conducting the act collapses at the sight of the camera and bursts into tears. Baron’s choice of a camera as the instigator of the woman’s shock is by no means coincidental.3 She *

I thank Yael Feldman and Marianne Hirsch for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 1 Matalon 1995, 35 (cf. idem 1998, 27). While I consulted Marsha Weinstein’s translation, in order to facilitate my discussion I will mainly use my own translation and mention page numbers in published translation. All other quotes of Hebrew material are my own translation. 2 Baron 1968, 225-35; cf. idem 2001, 3-15. The Yiddish word shtetl (small town) is commonly used for Jewish towns that existed in Central and Eastern Europe until the mid twentieth century. See for example Zborowski and Herzog 1995. 3 In another short story entitled “Mah shehayah” (“What Has Been”—Baron 1968, 126-81; cf. idem 1969, 77-153), Baron compares herself and her writing about the shtetl to “a kind of negative glass that has survived long after the photographed object no longer exists” (Baron 1968, 127; idem 1969, 79). This suggests that

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describes the woman’s collapse as a result of seeing not only “the ‘case’ in the visitor’s hands”—i.e., the camera—but also “what he was doing to her and to her son.”4 In other words, it is not only the mere sight of a technological instrument that startles the woman, but the act of having her picture taken. Both the general fear of technological progress and the specific fear of the camera were arguably shared by many pre-industrial societies. However, by creating a clear juxtaposition between the camera and a Jewish religious ceremony, Baron succeeds in capturing not only the pre-modern fear of technology or the camera, but also—and more importantly—the specific anxiety of the visual in traditional Jewish society. This story by Baron, considered by many to be the first Modern Hebrew woman writer,5 represents one of the many national tasks Hebrew literature took upon itself in the early stages of the Zionist project. Alongside the development and grounding of the revived Hebrew language and culture, Modern Hebrew literature played a salient role in reflecting the anxiety of the visual in the traditional setting, and in promoting the reembracing of the visual. Though somewhat less highlighted in scholarship, the reintroduction of the visual was an important goal of the Jewish national revival movement in its effort to create a “New Jew.” This imagined new generation of land/body-oriented Jews was envisioned by several early Zionist thinkers as an antithesis and a solution to the uprooted and text-oriented diasporic Jewish existence.6 As Avner Holtzman shows, a few of these thinkers further realized that the reembracing of the visual, both as an idea and as a practice, was a crucial component in this development. And as in the cases of the land, the body, and the language, this notion too was first realized in the literary realm.7 At the first stages of although Baron started writing when photography was still a relatively new invention (she published her first stories in 1903), she considered photography’s multifaceted metaphoric potential. Moreover, a photographer documenting shtetl life echoes Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport’s real ethnographic expedition from 1912. Rappoport, known under the pen name S. An-sky (best remembered as the author of The Dybbuk) traveled through Western Ukraine with a photographer and documented Jewish folk culture. See Avrutin et al. 2009 and Safran 2010. 4 Baron 1968, 229; idem 2001, 8 (my emphasis). 5 See for example Lieblich 1997; Feldman 1999, 1-20; Seidman and Kronfeld’s introduction in Baron 2001; Lubin 2007. 6 Much has been written on the subject of the “New Jew”—for good summaries of this discussion, see for example Shapira 1997; Almog 2000; Gluzman 2007. On the central role of literature in the crystallization of the “New Jew,” see for example Harshav 2003; Gluzman 2003. 7 Holtzman 1999, 38-92.

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this process, Modern Hebrew literature was barely catching up with her sister world-literatures in gradually embracing ekphrastic modes of writing in prose and poetry, an already long-standing tradition in Western literature at that point.8 A century later, starting in the early nineties of the twentieth century, a small number of Hebrew novelists began integrating actual visual elements into their writing—such as photographs, sketches, maps, and so on—not as mere illustrations but as an intrinsic part of their narratives.9 Yet unlike their literary ancestors, they did so in almost complete accordance with authors in the global literatures surrounding them. While historically the antagonism towards the visual could be considered a Jewish feature, the separation between the textual and the visual, especially within the literary realm, was a general Western notion, a persisting inheritance of the Enlightenment.10 Notwithstanding, these Hebrew authors also notably used this technique to confront particular Israeli cultural and political issues. One of the authors to stand out in this context is Ronit Matalon. In the early 1990s Matalon was a young writer at the beginning of her literary career—a brain-child of Baron who paved the path for feminine authorship in Modern Hebrew prose.11 In 1995 she published her debut novel Zeh im hapanim eleynu (published in English in 1998 as The One Facing Us) that presented a unique portrayal of immigrating and resettling experiences of a Jewish-Egyptian family. One of the most striking features of this novel are the different photographs that appear at the heading of almost every chapter. Her subsequent novels, Sarah, Sarah (2000—published in English in 2003 as Bliss) and Qol tseadeynu (The Sound of Our Steps—2008), do not incorporate actual visual images, nor do they declaratively deal with the exact same family. Yet photographs continue to play a decisive role in all of them and despite the differences, they are clearly variations of the 8

On ekphrasis in Western literature see for example Krieger 1992; Mitchell 1994, 151-81. As Mitchell points out, many trace ekphrasis back as far as the description of Achilles’s shield in The Iliad (ibid., 152). On ekphrasis and imagism in Modern Hebrew literature, see Holtzman 1999; 2003 and Mann 1998; 1999; 2004; 2006. 9 While in this article I focus on the work of Ronit Matalon, it is worthwhile mentioning other authors in this category, that are a subject of a broader project-inprogress of mine, namely Yoel Hoffmann (e.g. idem 1989) and Michal Govrin (e.g. idem 2002). 10 See Mitchell 1986, 95-115. Mitchell even compares Lessing to Newton and Kant. “If Newton reduced the physical, objective universe,” he writes, “and Kant the metaphysical, subjective universe to the categories of space and time, Lessing performed the same service for the intermediate world of signs and artistic media” (ibid., 96). 11 See Feldman 1999, 225.

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same familial saga, touching on the same issues.12 My focus will therefore be The One Facing Us yet with references to Matalon’s body of novelistic works as well as her collection of essays Qro ukhtov (Read and Write— 2001). I will analyze this novel as a distinct representative of the new wave it marks—a literary wave that could be defined, following W. J. T. Mitchell, as the “Imagetext turn” in the Hebrew novel.13 I will examine how photographs assist Matalon in what she elsewhere defines as her attempt to “tell the story of Jewish immigration from the inside.”14 However, I will show that Matalon’s usage of photos aids her in expanding this specific aspiration into an even wider quest allowing her to explore not only a specific immigration but immigration as a postcolonial state of mind. By using photographs as what Mieke Bal calls “migratory aesthetics,” and by practicing writing as an act of immigration, Matalon poetically pursues the postcolonial cultural idea of the “beyond.”15 To describe this literary practice I will suggest the term “immigwriting,” which echoes its three major components: writing, immigrating, and the (photographic) image. In this context, I will point out the connections between Matalon’s work and that of German author W. G. Sebald. A decisive archetype of the “imagetext turn” in world literature, Sebald is considered by now an integral component in any exploration of text and image relations within the novel. Yet his work is especially important in exploration of text and image as a tool of addressing issues of memory and immigration in the twentieth-century fin de siècle novel, expressly within a Jewish context. These comparative analyses result, ultimately, in a reading of Matalon’s novel that positions her text as a postcolonial appropriation of the Wandering Jew metaphor, embracing it as a desirable state of mind.

Immigration—the ultimate “in-between” In her essay “Mihuts lamakom, betokh hazman” (“Outside Place, Inside Time”—2001), Matalon explains that one of her goals in writing her first 12 There are several unmistakable similarities between the novels; most salient are the tough and resourceful figure of the mother, the mostly absent, politically active figure of the father, the caring figure of the blind grandmother, and the dynamic and adventurous figure of Tante Marcelle. 13 I am combining here two terms coined by Mitchell: “imagetext,” designed “to replace the predominantly binary theory of [the relation of pictures and discourse] with a dialectical picture” (idem 1994, 9) and “the pictorial turn,” which describes the centrality of the visual in twentieth-century thought (ibid., 11). 14 Matalon 2001b, 47. 15 Bhabha 1994, 1; Bal 2007, 111.

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novel was to tell the story of Jewish immigration from the inside and that in order to do so, she had to accomplish two things: “break the one language—the Hebrew, and break the one place—Israel.”16 And indeed, Matalon does succeed in breaking in this novel the exclusivity of both the Hebrew language and the Land of Israel. The Hebrew that many of her characters speak is porous, frequently gliding into Arabic and French. Similarly, Israel is described as one immigration-destination among many others (Africa, France, America), contrary to mainstream Zionist discourse. Yet a close scrutiny of this narrative reveals that this novel has a wider goal than merely to tell the story of a specific immigration, and it “breaks” more than just a specific language or a specific place. As several scholars have already recognized, through the story of the different immigration experiences of one Jewish family, The One Facing Us poetically illustrates the postcolonial call, as Homi Bhabha phrases it, to “locate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond.”17 Lily Rattok, for example, describes Matalon’s writing as an illustration of the postcolonial world reality in which homogenous cultures are redefined.18 Gil Hochberg focuses on Matalon’s return to the Levantinism as a mode of thinking or a state of mind that opens the possibility of “mobilizing memory as a decolonizing force.”19 However, a less examined aspect in this context is the pivotal place of the photographs in constructing this postcolonial stance. Yet in order to tackle this, we must first examine the outline of the novel and the ways this postcolonial stance is constructed in it before the photos “enter the picture” (to use an appropriate expression), echoing and enhancing it. The framework of Matalon’s novel entails a visit paid by Esther, an Israeli teenager, to her maternal uncle living in Duala, Cameroon. Esther is the daughter of Inès and Robert, who immigrated to Israel from Cairo in the 1950s. Growing up with a father more absent than present but with a very much present, although blind, grandmother (Nona Fortuné), at the age of seventeen Esther is sent by her mother and grandmother to Uncle Sicourelle in Cameroon, with the hope that the “fancy uncle” might “fix her head a little,” maybe even get her to finally “settle down.”20 Yet more than anything else, Esther is eager to reconstruct the story of her scattered family. And so this visit becomes Esther’s instrument trigger for telling the story of both sides of the family—Inès’s and Robert’s—mainly through 16

Matalon 2001b, 47. Bhabha 1994, 1. 18 Rattok 1997, 46, and see also idem 2000, 118. 19 Hochberg 2007, 63. 20 Matalon 1995, 22; cf. idem 1998, 15. 17

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the prism of the individual immigration experiences of each family branch to Israel, France, America, and, of course, Africa. Above all, this list of destinations reveals the refusal of this novel to tell the conventional story of what is perceived in Zionist ideology as the “natural” shift of Jewish immigration—namely, the immigration from the Diaspora to the Land of Israel. In what one might call the “Jewish mindset” throughout history, there have always been only two optional places for Jews: the Diaspora (Hagola) or the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael). Since biblical times, through the two millenia in the Diaspora, until the awakening of the Zionist movement, this dichotomy was at the core of Jewish thought. Even when the option of returning to the Land of Israel seemed out of reach or was not considered a practical option, and more so when Jews emigrated from one place in the Diaspora to another, Israel always remained an aspired option or at least, the ultimate Other option. In an attempt to break this fixed dichotomy, Matalon first of all multiplies the optional destinations of Jewish immigration. Israel is certainly one of the options, but it is far from being the only one. But more important than the actual multiplicity of places in the novel is the choice to tell the story of immigration as a state of mind. As Hochberg notes, by choosing to focus on the story of Jewish immigration rather than on either “exile” or “return,” Matalon replaces the existing narratives of theological exile or national recovery with the “narrative of immigration as a permanent condition that entailed no loss or final arrival.”21 Matalon adds to this “Jewish equation” of exile and return yet another optional place, the place in-between the Diaspora and the Land of Israel, the place of immigration. Immigration according to this novel should never be an attempt to begin anew or to substitute one culture for another. That this type of immigration is doomed to failure is demonstrated most clearly through the story of Uncle Moïse and his unsuccessful attempts, however desperate, to assimilate in a Kibbutz. Rather, immigration should be a postcolonial state of mind, based on a portable concept of culture, which goes beyond the dichotomy of origin and destination. Only by maintaining the former culture within the new place can one create a third place, a “beyond,” in which the origin is not completely forgotten while the destination is not entirely absorbed. In short, at the background of Matalon’s narrative stands Bhabha’s assertion that “the ‘beyond’ is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past.”22

21 22

Hochberg 2007, 63. Bhabha 1994, 1-2.

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In an oft revisited scene in the novel, Inès dismisses the need for roots. She agrees to give an interview to Zuza, her husband’s niece who is an American journalist writing a book on her familial roots. When Zuza wonders how the family could bear to leave Egypt, where their roots were, Inès exclaims: “roots, roots, roots. A person doesn’t need roots, Zuza, a person needs a home.”23 Such a proclamation may seem at first to contradict the call for immigration as a state of mind or for the portability of culture. By exclaiming that “a person doesn’t need roots […] a person needs a home,” Inès presumably belittles the importance of culture replacing it with the importance of a single physical place. However, I suggest that in the background of this scene stands the description of Inès as perpetually rearranging the house (to the extent of taking down an entire wall in a spur-of-the-moment decision!) and, more importantly, “constantly pulling up plants and trees, moving things from place to place” in her garden.24 The hidden centrality of this latter description is reiterated in a blurry photograph (Fig. [1]), entitled “A Photograph: Mother in the Yard” (Tatslum: Imma bahatser), indistinctly showing a woman in a yard next to a bush.25 As the text that follows this photo notes, she is holding a rope or a stick that is attached to the bush and it is unclear whether she is pushing it in or pulling it out of the ground. When read together with this description, Inès’s conversation with Zuza takes on a different meaning. It is not culture she disregards, but rather nostalgia. Roots, according to the scene in the garden, are portable and therefore there is no place for the sentimental kind of nostalgia Zuza expresses.26 The sentimental employment of “roots” makes Inès uncomfortable not because she abandoned her own roots completely, but because she sees no use in immobile roots.

23

Matalon 1995 294-95; idem 1998, 278. Matalon 1995, 163; cf. idem 1998, 144. 25 Matalon 1995, 74; cf. idem 1998, 66. All images from Matalon’s novel are reproduced in the form of a full page to demonstrate the “imagetext” effect. In Fig [3] the full page also conveys the mixture of languages discussed here. I thank the author for kindly allowing me to reproduce these images. 26 Several scholars note the distinct folklorist or Hollywoodian nature of Zuza’s roots seeking (see Rattok 2000, 126; Abramovich 2003, 8; Zoran 2008, 325). Indeed, when explaining her choice to write her book, Zuza defines roots as “a very hot topic in America at the moment,” and she is thrilled by the connection her aunt Inès draws between her project and the television miniseries Roots (Matalon 1995 288; idem 1998, 271. On the influence of Roots on root seeking in America, see Hirsch and Miller 2011, 1-2). However, behind Zuza’s project there is also clearly much of what Edward Said famously defined as “Orientalism” or the western imagination of the east as exotic and mysterious (see idem 1978). 24

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Fig. [1]

Through Inès’s character, Matalon manifests the idea that moving from one place to another does not mean leaving one’s roots or culture behind since that aspect of life should be portable and not connected to a specific physical location. By juxtaposing “roots” and “home” Matalon returns to the original meaning of nostalgia. According to Svetlana Boym, the term was first used as a medical title for home-sickness or the linking of “home” to one’s “native land” that leads to an incapability of constructing a new home anywhere else and to a constant longing.27 As Hochberg states, Inès represents in the novel the perception that “home is a necessity” and since culture should be portable, a home “can and should be constructed at any given moment, at any given place, even under circumstances of transition, 27

See Boym 2001, 3-18. As Boym notes, the term nostalgia was first used by a Swiss doctor in 1688, who portmanteaued the Greek noun ȞȩıIJȠȢ (return home) with the Greek verb ĮȜȖȑȦ (to be ill) in order to describe “the sad mood originating from the desire for return to one’s native land” (ibid., 3).

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as within a tent.”28 Hochberg is referring here to a description of the first years in Israel which Inès and Robert spent in a tent camp for immigrants. When Robert dismisses Inès’s efforts to improve and decorate the tent, begging her to realize that “it’s only a tent,” she replies: “tent shment, for now it’s a home.”29 This juxtaposition between necessity and nostalgia is at the very core of postcolonial thought.30 As Nissim Calderon notes, those who “fail” to immigrate in the novel are those who are either nostalgic towards their previous home or those unable to construct a new home.31 In other words, the conception of culture and roots as portable is crucial for embracing immigration as a state of mind. In her third novel, The Sound of Our Steps, Matalon tells yet another version of this familial saga. The narrator this time shifts between her childhood and adult perspectives while the mother, Lucette, is clearly the same counter-nostalgic character as the mother Inès in The One Facing Us. One of the chapters opens with the narrator comparing herself to her mother: Like her, I have no sites of nostalgia, and the return to “there,” as an idea or a reality, depresses and numbs me. I am willing to recognize the face of nostalgia for a moment, let it pass me by, but not in order to stay, not in order to take root. Root—another one of those things whose image, its mere image, makes me uncomfortable.32 28

Hochberg 2007, 59. In a conspicuous turn of events, the tent has recently resurfaced in Israeli public space as a central symbol in the civil protests of summer 2011. An analysis of the compelling connections between Matalon’s novel and those protests is beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it here to quote Ariella Azoulay (2011), who notes: “The tent, spontaneously chosen as the elementary form of this protest, quickly became part of a rich civil language of an orchestrated claim to share the public space,” with the Egyptian protest of last spring serving as a major source of inspiration for what she defines as a “civil awakening.” I thank Lauren Walsh for pointing out this text to me. 29 Matalon 1995, 188; cf. 1998, 171. 30 Bhabha 1994, 10. 31 Calderon 1995, 53. Although I agree with Calderon’s definition of failure in the novel, I reject his reading of the juxtaposition between home and roots as a proof that Matalon perceives roots as a “mythological fairytale.” 32 Matalon 2008, 100. Henri Raczymow summarizes this stance most beautifully when describing the state of mind shared by many Jewish writers, who are a second generation to displacement and loss of an “old world”: “The world that was destroyed was not mine. I never knew it. But I am, so many of us are the orphans of that world. Our roots are ‘diasporic.’ They do not go underground. They are not attached to any particular land or soil. […] Rather they creep up along the many roads of dispersion that the Jewish writer explores, or discovers, as he puts his

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This short paragraph seems to summarize Matalon’s ongoing discourse on roots, nostalgia, and memory. Furthermore, the repetition of the concept of “image” here reminds us that these issues are also, for Matalon, constructed through the very images—the photos—at work in her writing.

Photographic roots Alongside a wide geographic map and unique characters, Matalon lends the photographs in The One Facing Us a central role in constructing her postcolonial “counter-nostalgia” and “pro-portability” narrative. She does so first and foremost by creating an analogy between photographs and roots within the narrative. Esther, who is both the protagonist and the main narrator of this novel, undergoes a seeming process of formation based primarily on photographs. Discussing the photos from Uncle Sicourelle, Esther describes her childhood maturation: He sends photographs, just like that, one every few months, without a date, without a word, nothing […]. I am raised on these photographs. My grandmother, Nona Fortuné, raises me. She cannot see a thing […]. She explains to me what is in the photographs: this is your Uncle Jacquo. He is a very rich man in Africa. The whole port is his.33

As Hannan Hever maintains, Esther acquires her identity by becoming a mediator between the photographs and her blind grandmother, who in return mediates between Esther and the world. Hever defines this novel as “a series of disjointed gestures of writing in the genre of the novel.”34 These gestures, he argues, are aimed at telling a semi-autobiographical story by using sporadic elements of the Bildungsroman, but they do not develop into a full Bildungsroman since the world surrounding Esther is so fragmented. In such a fragmented world, the only way of telling that story is through the photographs. The photographs are, to use Hever’s words, “the only molecules left after the destruction of everything else.”35 Continuing this line of thought, I suggest reading the photographs not only lines down on the paper” (idem 1994, 103). See also Hirsch and Spitzer 2006, 86. Unlike Hirsch and Spitzer, who quote Raczymow as part of their discussion of the “rootless nostalgia of the children of exiles and refugees” (emphasis in original), I use it in the context of a postcolonial counter-nostalgic perception of roots as portable (and not absent). 33 Matalon 1995, 14; cf. idem 1998, 7. 34 Hever 2007, 334. 35 Hever 2007, 334.

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as the molecules left after the destruction, but as the roots to which the narrator can cling in order to uncover the fragmented story of her family, to tell it, and understand it. While Nona Fortuné treasures the photographs and hands them down to Esther as a precious inheritance, other members of the family relate to them with what seems at times to be complete carelessness. Yet even this carelessness is described not as a result of indifference but rather, as a rejection of the burden of proof, a denial of the need to record the past: In the siblings’ neglect, in their wasteful disregard for the few remaining photographs from There, there was something loud, almost declarative: that the burden of proof for their existence in the world is not theirs, that the photographed evidence—that limited object—insults the word, the memory, the boundlessness of the imagination.36

Furthermore, this carelessness is counterbalanced by the siblings, and especially Inès and Marcelle, repeatedly stealing photographs from one another, as if secretely trying to own as many pieces of the familial puzzle as possible: For years they had been stealing from each other. Full of selfrighteousness, each reclaiming “what is hers,” caught in an endless gameroutine of half serious acts of retaliation, amused and growling, pushing aside the thing behind all this—the photographs, using them as a mere trigger, an insignia of love.37

In other words, whether the siblings care to admit it or not, for them too the photographs function as familial roots. Rattok describes the substratum of Matalon’s novel as “the leafing through a family album,” an act that has no meaning “without a narratorobserver who can interpret the photographs and provide context to them.”38 The interpretation of the photographs can be described as based on two different processes: family traditions on the one hand and close reading on the other. The former echoes Siegfried Kracauer’s argument that without the oral traditions running in the family from generation to generation, the family photograph alone would not have sufficed to reconstruct the family history.39 And indeed, Matalon puts a great emphasis on the familial conversations that surround the few family 36

Matalon 1995, 121; cf. idem 1998, 113. Matalon 1995, 170; cf. idem 1998, 151. 38 Rattok 2000, 130. 39 Kracauer 1995, 48. See also Wigoder 2003, 77-106. 37

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photographs. The most salient example is of course the dialogues between Esther and her grandmother. As Gabriel Zoran posits, by occasionally positioning the granddaughter as the teller and the grandmother as the listener Matalon overturns the stereotypical model in which the familial memory is preserved by the grandparents or the parents and the grandchildren are passive listeners.40 Albeit in their own ways, the siblings also take part in accompanying the photos with words and gestures: They went their separate ways: different countries, times, and personal experiences divided them, opened great dark gaps between the few surviving photographs, empty spaces that demanded to be filled and were crammed with words, emotional gestures, childhood sensations, twisted and colored in different shades, desires and wishes that glued together past and future, and a longing for other days and for themselves in those other days—for a place that had never been a homeland but was nevertheless a home.41

Such attention to “cramming” the lacuna with words notwithstanding, Matalon puts even a stronger emphasis on the close reading of the photographs. By doing so, she echoes Susan Sontag’s assertion that “photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.”42 To continue the photographs-roots analogy, Matalon above all commemorates what people make of their own roots and how they read them. At the core of the photograph-reading that Matalon practices in the novel are both Walter Benjamin’s idea of “the optical unconsciousness” of the photograph (in his 1931 “Little History of Photography”), and Roland Barthes’s idea of the studium and the punctum of the photograph (in his 1980 Camera Lucida). “The optical unconsciousness” according to Benjamin is the information only a camera can reveal due to its ability to capture a specific moment. Benjamin offers the somewhat technical example of the inability to give an account of the posture of a person who begins to take a step until discovering it in a photograph. Yet he concludes this example by arguing that one “first learns of this optical unconscious through photography, just as he learns of the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis” thus endowing photography with the ability to reveal much more than physical postures.43 Barthes’s concepts of the 40

Zoran 2008, 325. Matalon 1995, 121; cf. idem 1998, 113. 42 Sontag 1979, 23. 43 Benjamin 2008, 278-79. 41

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studium and the punctum are undoubtedly influenced by Benjamin’s “optical unconsciousness” but they add a more subjective element to it. While the studium represents the cultural and historical context of a photograph, the punctum stands for a specific detail that engages the viewer in a more personal manner—a detail that does not merely interest but rather touches in the most personal possible way. “A photograph’s punctum,” writes Barthes, “is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me”).44 Photograph-readings based on these two approaches pay attention not only to the surface of the photo, its straightforward appearance, but also to its subconscious, hidden content thus making for a rich narrative that uses the photograph as an important trigger while constantly aiming at revealing its untold—or unshown as the case may be—secrets. I would like to demonstrate this by examining the third photo to appear in the novel (see Fig. [i] in centerfold). Together with the text that follows it, this photograph serves as an important exposition, both thematically and poetically. It shows an elegantly dressed man leaning on a bed and reading. The caption underneath it, which also functions as this chapter’s title, reads “A Photograph: Father in a Room” (Tatslum: Abba beheder). When Esther studies this photograph of her father, she tries to decipher the setting and the context of it—its studium. She attempts to estimate the time and place of when and where it was taken according to various depicted details: for example, “if it’s a parquet floor, the place is not Israel; if it’s a tile floor, it is.” Yet while doing so she suddenly notices a detail in the photograph that troubles her—a punctum that “pierces” her: He is wearing polished, black shoes, with socks in an eggplant-shade of purple; the socks seem tight, closely-fitting his ankles, shining in a yellowish sheen on the left ankle: a somewhat troubling, double-meaning sheen, indicating the socks’ silkiness, their superior quality, or the opposite: the sheen of a rundown fabric, which had been wearing thinner with each washing.45

This piercing element opens up the “optical unconscious” of the photograph. From describing the photograph itself, Esther turns to a detailed portrayal of the complicated and tense relationship between her parents. It is captured in a typical scene of her father washing his own socks and underwear in the sink while her mother watches him from a distance, angry yet at the same time deeply insulted by his aloofness and self44 45

Barthes 1981, 27. Matalon 1995, 38-39; cf. idem 1998, 30-31.

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sufficiency. This scene leads to a quarrel between Esther’s parents and eventually, to her father leaving the house for yet another unknown period to pursue his political activities, his struggle against what he defines as “the ruling class’s hatred of the Orient.”46 In other words, a small “crack” in the photograph of the elegant gentleman reveals its own opposite which secretly exists within it. To use a photographic term, albeit figuratively, this crack reveals the photograph’s own negative. This sense of a reading that aims at exposing the photograph and its negative is especially strong in light of the description that appears at the opening of this chapter: This photograph is always accompanied with a definite article: this is “the father,” not “Father,” “the father”—a generic adjective, an archetype, the absolute portrait of a father, floating unchangeable above time, places, circumstance—with the same slim signature of a mustache, Omar Sharif smile, and shiny shoes, asking to vanquish the fleeting moment and its capriciousness, to always be one.47

This text expresses the double function that Giorgio Agamben identifies as inherent to any photograph: the ability to turn a specific person, moment, or gesture into every person, moment, or gesture by halting them. Similarly to Barthes, Agamben is also following Benjamin in celebrating this specific character of the camera but he uses it to argue that the true fascination of photography is its ability to represent the world “as it appears on the last day.”48 As an emblematic example, he uses one of the first photographs ever taken, Daguerre’s 1838 Boulevard du Temple, also considered the first photograph to ever capture an image of a person.49 Regarding this photograph, in which the only person seen in a busy Parisian street is a man who stopped for a shoe-shine (consequently standing still long enough for Daguerre’s camera to capture him), Agamben writes: I could never have invented a more adequate image of the Last Judgment. The crowd of humans—indeed, all of humanity—is present but it cannot be seen, because the judgment concerns a single person […]. In the supreme instant, man, each man, is given over forever to his smallest, most

46

Matalon 1995, 225; cf. idem 1998, 209. Matalon 1995, 37-38; cf. idem 1998, 29. 48 Agamben 2007, 23. 49 For further discussion of this photograph, see Brunet 2009, 18-19. 47

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everyday gesture. And yet, thanks to the photographic lens, that gesture is now charged with the weight of an entire life.50

In other words, the last day according to Agamben is the everyday uniquely halted and captured by the camera. This process of freezing and fixating takes the moment out of the specific and the banal and grants it a metonymic quality. The shoe-shining gesture becomes an entire life and the man getting a shoe-shine in the street—every man. This occurs not allegorically but synecdochically, not because he symbolizes humanity but because his gesture put into halt becomes an annunciation of all human gestures. The novel as a genre aspires to accomplish the same goal precisely. According to Jacques Rancière, a figure in a novel “is no longer the illustrative ornament of discourse or the allegory of a hidden truth, but a body announcing another body.”51 When encountering in a novel a photograph of a man, with the title “father in a room,” readers assume that the man in the photograph is someone’s real private father (perhaps even Matalon’s), yet at the same time they witness his transformation into a fictional character. Like the man getting a shoe-shine in Daguerre’s photograph who, according to Agamben, becomes “all of humanity” once photographed, the very specific father, with his signature mustache and ever-shining shoes (!) becomes every father—“an archetype” of a father— once photographed and even more so, once his photograph is inserted into a novel. He is metamorphosed from a specific father to the generalized idea of the father. Matalon ‘hires’ this specific father (perhaps her own) like an actor—indeed, like Omar Sharif—to play the role of Esther’s father in what is after all not an autobiography but a fictional novel (despite the employment of many autobiographical details and personal photos). The presence of this photographic image accentuates his role as every father. To paraphrase Rancière, he is a father “announcing” another father. If we will, the photograph helps him to surpass the specific moment and represent the idea of the father that floats above all times, places, or circumstances. Yet one can hardly imagine a more powerful negative to this solid figure of a father as presented in the photograph, than the man exposed in the text—washing his dirty socks in the sink before leaving his wife and children once again for an unknown period of time. As this example plainly shows, the photographs/roots analogy does not endorse a sentimental attitude towards the photograph but defies it. Matalon belongs to a wider group of artists who, as Marianne Hirsch defines it, use family photographs in their work “going beyond their 50 51

Agamben 2007, 24. Rancière 2004, 75.

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conventional and opaque surfaces to expose the complicated stories of familial relation […] that have, for the most part, remained outside the family album.”52 Yet Esther reads her family photographs not only in a quest for the “optical unconsciousness” but also for the in-between world between what really was, what could have been, and, perhaps most importantly, what could still be. In a highly reflective paragraph, she concludes: This is the place where the photograph opens: the precise spot where the thin line between the real and the fiction flashes for a split moment, revealing itself, the place where the photograph announces not only of its being an evidence of the reality, but also of its possibilities.53

Out of Benjamin’s “optical subconscious” and Barthes’s punctum, Matalon seems to suggest, grow the possibilities the photograph has to offer. With relation to this paragraph Zoran further notes that these possibilities transcend photographic realism or Barthes’s Ça a été (That-has-been) notion, and allow the creation of the “mimetic realism” that comprises a novel.54 The photographs are, then, the roots that allow Esther to reconstruct the family story, to locate herself within it, and to find her own voice. The photographs allow Esther to find her own place and language, if we will, amongst the many places and languages surrounding her.

The missing photograph lingers This reading of the photograph’s optical unconscious through a specific punctum is what Mieke Bal calls a “counterreading,” a reading that responds to a text but at the same time shifts its emphasis and effect.55 When applied, as in Matalon’s case, in the reading of a photograph, such counterreading follows Sontag’s assertion that the camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses and therefore, the assumption that we know something about the world if we accept it as recorded in a photograph is actually the opposite of understanding. Understanding, Sontag argues, “starts from not accepting the world as it looks.”56 Hirsch defines such reading of family photographs as “resisting the images”—going beyond the conventional techniques of photography 52

Hirsch 1997, 7. Matalon 1995, 10-11; cf. idem 1998, 4. 54 Zoran 2008, 329. 55 Bal 1991, 37. 56 Sontag 1979, 23 (emphasis in original). 53

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as a strategy of intervention into the familial story. This idea corresponds with Barthes’s definition of the punctum as a “subtle beyond” (hors-champ subtil).57 Such “resisting of the image,” as Hirsch shows, can wear different forms, from a textual description of a chemical manipulation of familial photographs in an autobiographical novel, to a reading of unreproduced photographs. The ultimate example of the latter is Barthes’s choice to avoid reproducing the “Winter Garden” photograph of his mother in Camera Lucida, thus transforming the image into what Hirsch calls a “prose picture.”58 Matalon uses this technique in her novel as well, alongside the multilayered reading of photos, by opening several chapters with only the title of an un-reproduced photograph, defined by the text as a “missing photograph” (tatslum haser) as opposed to most other chapters that open with an actual photograph (as in the previous discussion). One photograph, the wedding photograph of Uncle Sicourelle, even “goes missing” during the narrative. It is reproduced on page 69 with the title “A Photograph: The Wedding: Monsieur and Madame Sicourelle at the Entrance to City Hall, Brazzaville, 1954” (Tatslum: hahatunnah: Misyeh umadam Sicourelle befetah beit hairiyah, Brazzaville, 1954) and although the same title appears on page 88, the photo is not reproduced again. It is not defined by the text as missing, but the choice not to reproduce it a second time renders it as yet another “missing photograph” (see Fig. [2] and Fig. [3]).59 By reading missing photographs, Matalon does not only echo Barthes’s decision not to reproduce a specific photograph, but also demands that her readers practice his argument according to which “in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.”60 She underscores this choice by placing at the heart of the narrative the character of Nona Fortuné who treasures the photographs despite her 57

Barthes 1980, 93; idem 1981, 59. Hirsch, Family Frames, 3; 189-215. 59 Matalon 1995, 69; 88 (cf. idem 1998, 61; 80). In the English translation it is reproduced a second time (see idem 1998, 80), an alteration that subverts the significance of the original choice. 60 Barthes 1981, 53. This idea is actually quoted in the novel as part of Inès’s conversation with Zuza. At the beginning of the conversation Zuza declares that “in order to really see a photograph, we must look away or simply close our eyes,” while dramatically closing her eyes and tilting her chin (Matalon 1995 285; idem 1998, 268). The choice to plant an almost direct quote from Barthes in the mouth of this nostalgic, melodramatic character ridicules not the idea itself but Zuza’s “ready-made” wisdom (as opposed to Nona Fortuné who practices this technique due to physical limitations and out of a genuine urge). On the missing photograph in Camera Lucida, see for example Hirsch 1997, 8-9 and Wigoder 2003, 84-5. 58

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blindness and reads them with the assistance of her granddaughter. In her very blindness she enacts a perpetual literal “looking away” while also remaining highly engaged with that which the photograph portrays.

Fig. [2]

Fig. [3]

That said, in the context of The One Facing Us the missing photographs have another significant effect. By including not only photographs but also missing ones, Matalon advances the portability characteristic of the photograph a step further. As Hirsch notes, it is since the invention of the portable camera that photography gradually became “the family’s primary instrument of self knowledge and representation—the means by which family memory would be continued and perpetuated, by which the family’s story would henceforth be told.”61 Hirsch relates this to Barthes’s idea of Ça a été or the evidential force of photography. This distinct quality leads to the hope of finding some truth about the past of the family in the family photograph, which sometimes even replaces actual memories 61

Hirsch 1997, 6-7.

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(astutely defined by Hirsch as “postmemory”).62 However, I would like to argue that the portable nature of the photograph, which allows one to move the family photographs from one place to another, as well as to hand them down from generation to generation, has played an equally crucial role in the photograph’s stature as a fundamental component in the family history. In this sense, missing photographs are one inevitable consequence, alongside the possibility of physical damage, of photographs’ portability and tangibility. Matalon underscores the central place of the photograph in the story of the family even when lost. A lost photograph, Matalon seems to suggest, does not leave a complete void; its imagined “negative” keeps lingering and circulating in the family memory and it remains an active part of the family roots. It is precisely the portability of the photograph that makes the photographs/roots analogy so central in constructing the postcolonial stance in this novel, in locating culture in the realm of the beyond and in focusing on immigration as a state of mind.

Migratory aesthetics I: The photographs as immigrants in the novel As several scholars have noted, this novel is markedly invested in the mixing of genres. The most prominent genres are of course fiction and autobiography, since Matalon constructs a work of fiction which practices the memoir technique of including photographs within a life-narrative, using some of her own family photos.63 To this she adds the mixture of the novel and the essay by inserting credited excerpts from Jacqueline Kahanoff’s essay collection Mimizrah shemesh (Toward the Rising Sun— 1978). Matalon underlines both choices by turning Kahanoff into a fictional minor character in the narrative, who is said to appear in two photographs, one extremely blurry and the other missing.64 Hever even identifies in the opening of the novel, with the photograph and the assertion “this is my uncle,” a literary homage to the illustrated Africa stories for children by Hebrew author Nahum Gutman.65 Michael Gluzman concludes that unlike other writers, Matalon shifts from one genre to the other in the framework of one text, thus turning the mixing of genres into a 62

Hirsch 1997, 17-40; idem 2008. On the practice of including photographs in memoirs and autobiographies, see Adams 2000. 64 See Matalon 1995, 130; 197; idem 1998, 123; 180. 65 Hever 2007, 331. 63

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political project, where the borders between the private and the public are blurred.66 In a recent conversation I had with Matalon, she revealed yet another genre that is at play in this novel, less obvious but highly significant, namely: the “photo-roman.” Known in Britain as the “photo-story” or “photo-novel,” this quasi-literary popular genre (by now in decline) appeared in the form of booklets or magazines, featuring romantic dialogues accompanied by still photographs.67 As it turns out, Matalon’s mother loved reading popular French photo-roman magazines, such as Nous Deux (Us Two) or Intimité (Intimacy), which she would exchange with her neighbors, and which fascinated Matalon as a child. “I could sit with them for hours,” she noted, “trying to decipher the connection between the words and the images.”68 Matalon’s choice to engage with the photo-roman as a mode of writing expands the blurring of borders beyond the private and the public to blurring those between high culture and popular culture. This registers with the postcolonial perspective that resists “the attempt at holistic forms of social explanation,” as Bhabha describes it and continues: It forces a recognition of the more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres. It is from this hybrid location of cultural value […] that the postcolonial intellectual attempts to elaborate a historical and literary project.69

Furthermore, by using the “imagetext” form, Matalon introduces a hybridity not only of two (or more) different genres but of two semiotic languages: the visual and the textual. In other words, the postcolonial linguistic hybridity at which Matalon aims (“the breaking of the one language”), is achieved first of all through the incorporation of the photographs. It is achieved even before the textual narrative begins, by the mere insertion of a photograph at its opening. Thus, the insertion of the

66

Matalon 2001a, 229. A private conversation with Matalon, Tel Aviv, February 21, 2010. As Clive Scott notes in The Spoken Image: Photography and Language (1999), the photoroman originated in the cine-novel, booklets of film script and stills that flourished from the 1920s through the 1940s and “best served its social purpose of bringing the cinema to communities, particularly provincial or rural ones, which did not boast a cinema” (ibid., 184). 68 A private conversation with Matalon, Tel Aviv, February 21, 2010. 69 Bhabha 1994, 248. 67

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photograph not only resembles the insertion of other languages, genres, or other works, like Kahanoff’s essays70— it anticipates it. As Bhabha notes, the postcolonial emphasis on hybridity as an ideal mode of action relies on Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s discussion of dialogism in the discourse of the novel.71 According to Bakhtin, alongside dialogism and pure dialogues, hybridization is the prominent category of devices for creating the structure of a language in the novel. By hybridity Bakhtin refers to “a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor.”72 With Bakhtin’s model in mind, the employment of photographs in a novel can arguably act as an intensification of the hybridization that occurs in the discourse of any novel. However, in a novel aimed at telling “the story of immigration from inside,” I suggest that such hybridization can take on yet a more specific meaning. In effect, Matalon chooses to write in a manner in which the photographs themselves can be designated as immigrants—belonging to the visual world, immigrating into the textual one, into the novel. In other words, Matalon turns the photographs into what Bal defines as “migratory aesthetics”—a term referring “not to actual migration, but to the cultural inspiration that migration, if encountered on its own terms, can yield.”73 In discussing accent as an idea relevant not only to spoken language, but also to translation, Bal writes: Instead of being a deviation of a smooth self-evident mainstream, then, accents that remind us of the translated quality of the words spoken can also be seen as cultural, specifically linguistic, enrichments. […] By [accented translation] I mean translation that bears the traces, the remainder, of what is itself a translation as well as of that translated status of its ‘original.’ […] The concept of accent, then, becomes a key element of a ‘migratory aesthetics.’74

Accordingly, Matalon’s project can be understood as translating visual images—family photographs—into a textual narrative—a novel. By 70

Rattok 2000, 119. Bhabha 1994, 269-75. 72 Bakhtin 2006, 358. 73 Bal 2007, 111. 74 Bal 2007, 111 (single quotes in the original). Elsewhere (idem 2005) Bal refers to the migratory aesthetics potential of food (namely, communities of immigrants importing traditional foods) and space (namely, the influence of immigration on the looks of European inner-cities). 71

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performing such acts of translation in using the photographs as “migratory aesthetics,” Matalon creates the crucial postcolonial link between translation and immigration as a state of mind, in which culture is perceived “as a strategy of survival” which is both “transnational and translational.”75 Furthermore, in choosing to include those photographs at the opening of chapters, Matalon not only creates a Balian “accented” translation but she insists at the same time on preserving the status of the photographs as immigrants in the text. To use the Benjaminian term in “The Task of the Translator” (1923), she leaves certain aspects of the photographs “untranslatable” (unübersetzbar).76 Matalon forges a seemingly dependent relationship between image and text; for example, readers only understand the names of depicted characters, and the time and place of the photographs through the written narrative. At the same time, however, the image is never completely integrated into the text; it remains autonomous and preserves its visuality and uniqueness. It is precisely the fact that the text “translates” it, but only to a certain extent, that allows the photograph to preserve its own accent. It offers an opposition to the textual language and an alternative reading by practicing an immigration that transcends the dichotomy of here and there, an immigration which means, to quote Bhabha once again, “neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past.”77 The photographs thus function both as immigrants and as “migratory aesthetics” within a narrative dedicated not only to telling the story of a specific immigration, but to celebrating immigration as a state of mind.

Migratory aesthetics II: Immigwriting In explaining her choice to include photographs in her first novel, Matalon once said: “it is part of my decision not to obscure or erase the footsteps of the writing […] by leaving the photographs in, it is as if I have revealed what activated me, what was the ‘trigger’ in my work.”78 What Matalon describes here in fact is a refusal to obey the established boundaries between the process of writing and the final product, between the world of authors and the new world created by them. In a way, the photographs are 75

Bhabha 1994, 247. Benjamin 1968, 81; idem 2005, 64. 77 Bhabha 1994, 1-2. 78 Quoted in Abramovich 2003, 4. 76

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not only her “triggers,” but also her “notes” or “sketches,” which more typically would never be included in the finished product. Following this, it can be said that Matalon perceives the act of writing as a certain kind of immigration in which she as a writer emigrates from a personal world to a new, more public one. In that personal world, the photographs function as her roots.79 By including them in the final version of her novel she expresses a refusal to leave the roots of her writing process behind upon entering the new world of the novel. In doing so, she creates a third kind of an accomplished literary product—a novel that still contains “the footsteps of the writing.” This focus on the process of writing itself mirrors her focus on immigration itself.80 Interestingly though not surprisingly, when asked a similar question regarding his choice to incorporate photographs in his novels, German author W. G. Sebald gave almost an identical explanation. “It is one way,” Sebald replied, “of making obvious that you don’t begin with a white page, you do have sources, you do have materials; if you create something that seems as if it proceeded seamlessly from your pen, then you hide the material sources of your work.”81 Sebald dedicated most of his (unfortunately short) literary oeuvre to the poetic exploration of memory, displacement, and immigration—with a particular interest in postHolocaust Jewish immigration. He is also one of the pioneering master authors of the imagetext turn in the twentieth-century novel. In their similar statements, then, both authors echo their perception of writing as an act of immigration that defies conventional categorizations. In their insistence on including the photographic roots of their writing, both authors practice Benjamin’s call for authors to adopt the photograph as a 79

It is important to note that these photographs function as Matalon’s roots by being the visual origins that instigate her writing, but not because they are necessarily from her own familial collection. At the opening of the book Matalon thanks five different families, including her own, for allowing her to use photographs from their collections, thus signaling that not all photos reproduced in the novel carry autobiographical significance. 80 In her aforementioned essay “Outside Place, Inside Time,” Matalon quotes her uncle and aunt who used to say that their wish is to die on an airplane since this is where they spent most of their lives. She sympathizes with the choice of the airplane, or movement itself, as the right place, “which is not an actual place […] which is almost exclusively constructed of movement” (idem 2001, 41-42). By including photographs in her novel it can also be said that Matalon chooses to stay in the “airplane stage” of writing without entirely arriving at a “final destination.” Hochberg is also right in relating this quote to the aforementioned description of Inès constantly pulling up and re-planting plants (see idem 2007, 65). 81 Quoted in Elcott 2004, 203.

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means of breaching imposed barriers between author and reader. In “The Author as Producer” (1934) Benjamin writes: What we require of the photographer is the ability to give his picture a caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary use value. But we will make this demand most emphatically when we—the writers—take up photography. […] [T]echnical progress is for the author as producer the foundation of his political progress. In other words, only by transcending the specialization in the process of intellectual production—a specialization that, in the bourgeois view, constitutes its order—can one make this production politically useful; and the barriers imposed by specialization must be breached jointly by the productive forces that they were set up to divide.82

Benjamin’s rhetoric is unmistakably influenced by Marxist tradition (the language of production, specialization, and bourgeoisie), whereas Matalon and Sebald do not reflect such commitments. Yet both adopt Benjamin’s notion of interruption through splitting the focalizing authority between the textual and the visual. In both authors’ work, the act of storytelling is no longer exclusively textual. In both cases, when speaking of the reader “one does not refer to empirical reading experiences,” as Silke Horstkotte notes in reference to Sebald, “but rather to a reader who is also a spectator,” or, as Hirsch labels it, a “viewer/reader.”83 However, these authors do not seek merely to split the narrative authority into two semiotic fields; rather, they aspire to question focalizing authority all together. Both authors employ different literary techniques in order to break the narration authority, the main one being splitting the narrating voice. As Bal notes in her study of narratology, there are several optional narrating voices in the novel form. The two basic options are either a first-person or a thirdperson narrator, but there are also a number of optional combinations.

82

Benjamin 2008, 87. As Azoulay notes, in his own writing Benjamin did in fact follow this call, but until recently the majority of reprints of his work left no trace of the visual elements included in the original. Azoulay points out that this erasure of “visual paragraphs” ironically attests to the very same “violent separation in modern era between text and image” against which Benjamin writes (Azoulay 2006, 10-11). Yet this tendency is gradually changing. For example, Azoulay edited a Hebrew edition of “Little History of Photography” which includes all the photographs that appeared in the original publication, and an English edition of Benjamin’s writings on media, as well as a German publication of materials from his archives, include many visual elements (see Benjamin 2004; 2008; 2010). 83 Horstkotte 2005, 269; Hirsch 1997, 39.

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Thus “all kinds of ‘I’s” can exist in the sphere of the novel.84 In The One Facing Us (as in The Sound of Our Steps) Matalon takes advantage of both basic options, using the first-person and third-person narrator interchangeably. Sebald, on the other hand, seems to take the splitting of the narrating voice even further. He uses as many “kinds of ‘I’s” as possible with the most far-reaching examples found, ironically, in his only novel titled after its central protagonist—Austerlitz (2001).85 The questioning of narrative ownership is where photography as a specific visual medium plays a crucial role. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Benjamin posits that photography dismantles the concepts of origin and authenticity in the visual sphere.86 Developing this idea, Ariella Azoulay further argues that the very essence of photography is the defiance of ownership: The concepts of property and ownership are foreign to the logic of photography. What is seen in a photograph evades all criteria for ownership and cannot be appropriated; from this it is impossible to establish a single, stable meaning of photography that would negate or supersede all others. A photograph is neither the product of a single person, despite the concept of ‘author’ having been established in relation to photography, nor is it even solely a product of human hands. A photographic image, then, can at most be entrusted to someone for a certain time.87

By carrying this fundamental avoidance of ownership into the novel, both in Matalon’s case and in Sebald’s the presence of photographs deepens the dismantling of any ownership over the narrative. In short, both writers practice what I term “immigwriting”: writing as a postcolonial act of immigration, by using photographic images as “migratory aesthetics,” in order to explore that very same act. Immigration becomes a major theme in Sebald’s 1992 Die Ausgewanderten (translated in 1996 as The Emigrants). As the German subtitle suggests, this novel is divided into four long narratives (vier lange Erzählungen), each focusing on a different German character in exile that either is related to the narrator—himself a German in exile (as in all of Sebald’s novels)—or encounters him at different points of his life. 84

Bal 1997, 123. The narrating authority in Austerlitz constantly changes hands, leading to oddities such as: “can’t you tell me […] she asked, said Austerlitz” (kannst du mir nicht sagen, sagte sie, sagte Austerlitz—Sebald 2008, 311; idem 2001, 215). 86 Benjamin 2008, 23-24. 87 Azoulay 2008, 103. 85

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Together the narrator and characters comprise a picture of a lost generation or what Marianne Hirsch calls the “postgeneration” that is constantly seeking to reconstruct a lost past. Hirsch argues that in such an existence photographs play a key role since they uniquely “function as ghostly revenants from an irretrievably lost past world.”88 Published only three years after Sebald’s The Emigrants, Matalon’s The One Facing Us similarly presents several stories of immigration, intertwined with scattered photographs, that unite together into a meditation on memory and immigration as an existential state of mind. Yet a fundamental difference between the two authors should be noted in this context. While Sebald represents a post-Holocaust melancholic dismantlement of the narrative authority, Matalon reflects a hope to reconstruct a certain narrating ability that can grow out of the destruction. This ability is based precisely on a heteroglossic narrating authority, or as Matalon herself defined it (regarding the differences between herself and Sebald), “an almost playful understanding of the author as an entire population of voices.”89 As Rattok notes, Esther’s major discovery throughout the novel is the world of her own literary creation.90 Continuing this, I suggest that it is by using the photographic roots, “the only molecules left after the destruction of everything else,”91 that Esther gradually discovers the inbetween world of writing, and like Matalon herself, she does not leave her roots behind upon immigrating into that world.

Conclusion: A wandering Jew with a bundle full of photographs In the same essay with which I opened, Matalon writes: My family biography allowed me to examine the two possibilities of immigration: a permanent state and a chronic disease, as opposed to a passing traumatic event—and I basically chose the first option, the chronic state of immigration.92

Matalon’s designation of the immigration-possibility she chose as “a chronic disease” is highly meaningful. What this essay describes, as does Matalon’s novel, is in fact a choice of an existence that was perceived as a 88

Hirsch 2008, 115. A private conversation with Matalon, Tel Aviv, February 21, 2010. 90 Rattok 2000, 131. 91 Hever 2007, 334. 92 Matalon 2001b,48. 89

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punishment in both Jewish and Christian traditions. In Jewish tradition, the idea originates in the story of Cain and Abel, where Cain’s major punishment is a fate of eternal wandering. A medieval Christian legend describes Jesus stopping for a rest on a Jew’s doorstep, but the latter refuses to allow him to do so, crying out “walk faster!” to which Jesus replies: “I go but you will walk until I come again.”93 As Richard Cohen notes, visual depictions of the Wandering Jew throughout history reflect the “historical tension between Jews and non-Jews in different periods.”94 Thus, Matalon’s choice to embrace, figuratively, the state of existence of the Wandering Jew is an act of self-inflicting punishment or disease that challenges the very cultural and historical perception of the act of wandering as such. Notwithstanding, similarly to her choice to tell the story of immigration from inside, this choice bears meaning in the particular context of Israeli society as well. Matalon embraces a state of existence that has been used for centuries as a derisive metaphor in the constant conflict between Jewish culture and its surrounding cultures. In choosing that mode of existence, Matalon subverts the traditional understanding, which renders the wanderer as the punished outsider; Matalon recasts that role in reclaiming movement from the wanderer in exile, elevating it to a portability that allows for crucial “betweens” and “beyonds.” By doing so she employs the postcolonial “beyond” in order to blur another fundamental boundary in the early Zionist narrative in addition to the border between “Here” and “There”—namely, the separation between “Us” and “Them,” between “Me” and the “Other.” In depicting an immigration of Egyptian Jews to the young State of Israel (among many other immigrations), Matalon touches on a matter that was rarely addressed by Zionist thought: the strong connection Jews from Arab countries felt towards Arab culture, which grew to become the ultimate Other of Israeli culture. These Jews, who were expected to sympathize entirely with the young nation in its battle against the 93

Attempts to trace this legend to the New Testament point to Matthew 16:28 and John 21:20-23, but these are inconclusive as direct links. See Anderson 1965. 94 Cohen 2007, 147. As Cohen shows, the medieval legend might stem from the New Testament (and possibly from the biblical story of Cain). However, it emerged into a full-blown legend only in the thirteenth century and gained popularity only after the publication of an influential German version of it (which included a vignette portraying the Wandering Jew in crude outlines) in early sevteenth century. In the context of Matalon’s positive usage of this notion, it is noteworthy that in 1981 Stefan Heym published his novel Ahasver (published in English in 1984 as The Wandering Jew), which portrayed the wandering Jew as the manifestation of the spirit of resistance and solidarity.

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competing Other, felt at times torn between the alternatives and offended by the patronizing and contemptuous Israeli approach towards Arab culture. This issue is addressed in the novel mostly through the figure of the father, Robert. In a neighborhood newsletter he publishes as part of his intensive political activity, Robert defines the Arabs in one of his essays as “our brethren” (bney amenu—literally “the sons of our people”), lamenting the humiliation of Oriental Jews and Arabs alike by the Ashkenazi elite.95 In the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, Robert is described as follows: He walked around “like someone who just had a cold shower,” shrunk in humiliation, blinking in disbelief every time he hears the stories about how the Egyptian soldiers left their shoes behind and fled barefoot. “Barefoot,” he repeated as if ironically, “barefoot indeed.”96

Inès considers this refusal to join the winning Israeli side an act of treason and purposely breaks the news of the victory to Robert with the words “we won.” In response, Robert not only disparages her usage of the first-person plural but turns to second-person plural, exclaiming: “you [pl.] will eat this occupation till it goes out of your noses.” In return she ragingly throws a plant-pot at him yelling: “go on, you traitor, go back to where you came from.”97 The object Inès uses as a “weapon” in this dispute, a plant-pot, seems random at first but is in fact quite meaningful. Offering the most literal possibility for portable roots, the plant-pot comes to signify Inès’s character as the ultimate representative of postcolonial mobility of cultural roots in the novel. Yet she uses it to express her disapproval of Robert’s refusal to participate in the hatred and dismissal of the Other. In this sense, in their blind devotion to only one side of the postcolonial “coin,” both characters neglect the crucial second side. Inès is so devoted to her efforts to construct, maintain, and renew a home that she chooses to ignore the very same need of her surrounding Others; Robert, on the other hand, is so dedicated to his political efforts to accept the Others and break imposed national and ethnical dichotomies, that he neglects his home completely. In the narrative Esther constructs with the help of the photographs, the seemingly irreconcilable essences of her mother and father unite after all into a complex vision of the Wandering Jew as a state of mind. Their approaches combined together seem to be the real hope this novel offers. This unification of Inès’s and Robert’s competing stances occurs through their child, the narrator, and is mirrored in the unique presence of a 95

Matalon 1995, 233; cf. idem 1998, 261. Matalon 1995, 261; cf. idem 1998, 244-45. 97 Matalon 1995, 261; cf. idem 1998, 245. 96

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competing medium—the photographs—within the text. Esther is able to take in and learn from these perspectives and form a more encompassing philosophy. In this vision, the mobility of roots and culture is crucial but depends on an ability to belong even while in motion. At the same time, this belonging does not denote seclusion. It preserves the sense of the beyond that allows one to include the “There” and the “Other” within the “Here” and the “Self”—whether it is a singular “me” or a plural “we.” As Matalon puts it, in further explaining her choice of “the chronic state of immigration”: I chose it not only because it is more colorful, more dynamic, more exotic; but mainly because that “there” of the immigration allowed me to look at the “here,” because through the invasion of the foreign language, the foreign culture, I can better hear the Hebrew, the Israeli culture. The universal dimension of immigration and its universal validity allow a perspective in which one can move around, and an identity that already contains its changing potential.98

In other words, as a postcolonial state of mind, the Wandering Jew metaphor not only becomes a positive, desirable existence, it also ceases to be exclusively Jewish. The One Facing Us marks a climactic point in the entry of photography into Hebrew literature.99 In this sense, together with a few other authors, Matalon contributes to the “normalization” of Hebrew literature by taking part in the completion of the Zionist effort to reembrace the visual. Yet in doing so, Matalon at the same time questions some of the most fundamental aspects of the Zionist project, namely the return to the land of Israel and the revival of the Hebrew language. In turning actual photographs into a prominent poetic tool in a literary meditation on the subject of immigration as a desirable state of mind, Matalon breaks the land/body/language/image Zionist paradigm. Instead of reinforcing Zionist discourse, the visual image becomes a resisting tool subverting it. To quote Esther, the photographs assist Matalon in constructing “a third world, an obscure twilight zone.”100 By doing so, she challenges the limited boundaries particularly set forth by Zionism, based on a fixed contrast between here and there, the Land of Israel and the Diaspora. The alternative reality delineated by Matalon shows her yearning for a postcolonial space in which Jewish particularism is integrated in a 98

Matalon 2001b,48. Zoran 2008, 317. 100 Matalon 1995, 35; cf. idem 1998, 27. 99

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multicultural background. She connects Hebrew literature to a current movement in world literature of transcending the dichotomy between text and image, while offering the postcolonial Wandering Jew figure as a valuable metaphor in any act of immigwriting. In April 2008 Columbia University hosted a conference entitled “Rites of Return: Poetics and Politics,” dedicated to “the new genealogy, cultural memory, and the contemporary obsession with the recovery of roots.”101 As an illustration for the conference-poster the organizers chose a painting by Argentinean artist Mirta Kupferminc entitled En Camino (On the Road—2001, Fig. [4]), showing a group of people with rooted-trees in their hands or houses on their backs.102 This image fascinated me and was a meaningful inspiration for my study of Matalon’s work. I will therefore conclude my analysis with this image, thus practicing myself, as Matalon and Sebald do, the Benjaminean call for writers not to leave their visual roots behind. Like Matalon, Kupferminc focuses on immigration itself, the road, and portrays the need for portability of roots and home in postcolonial existence. Like the figures in Kupferminc’s painting, Matalon’s characters—and she herself as a writer—are “on the road,” only instead of trees and homes, they carry bundles full of photographs.

Fig. [4] 101

From the conference program. For the proceedings of this conference, see Hirsch and Miller 2011. 102 I thank the artist for kindly allowing me to reproduce her painting.

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Works Cited Abramovich, Dvir. 2003. “Ronit Matalon’s Ethnic Masterpiece.” Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal 3, 2. Adams, Timothy Dow. 2000. Light Writing & Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Agamben, Giorgio. (2005) 2007. Profanations. Translated by Jeff Fort. New York: Zone Books. Almog, Oz. (1997) 2000. The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew. Translated by Haim Watzman. Berkeley: University of California Press. Anderson, George Kumler. The Legend of the Wandering Jew. Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1965. Avrutin, Eugene M. et al., eds. 2009. Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press. Azoulay, Ariella. 2006. Hayoh hayah paam: tsillum beiqvot Walter Benjamin (Once Upon a Time: Photography Following Walter Benjamin). Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press (Hebrew). —. 2008. The Civil Contract. New York: Zone Books. —. 2011. “Civil Awakening.” The Critical Inquiry Blog. September 19. http://critinq.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/civil-awakening/ Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1975) 2006. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bal, Mieke. 1991. Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. The Northrop Frye Lectures in Literary Theory, Cambridge New Art History and Criticism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. —. 1997. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2nd Ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —. 2005. “Food, Form, and Visibility: Glub and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life.” Postcolonial Studies 8.1: 51-73. —. 2007. “Translating Translation.” Journal of Visual Culture 6.1: 10924. Baron, Dvorah. 1968. Parshiyot: sippurim mequbbatsim (Affairs: Collected Stories). Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik (Hebrew).

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—. 1969. The Thorny Path. Translated by Joseph Schachter. Edited by Itzhak Hanoch. Jerusalem: Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature. —. 2001. “The First Day” and Other Stories. Translated by Naomi Seidman with Chana Kronfeld; edited by Chana Kronfeld and Naomi Seidman. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barthes, Roland. 1980. La chambre claire: note sur la photographie. Paris: Gallimard. —. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang—A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace & world. —. (1931) 2004. Historyah qtanah shel hatsillum (A Little History of Photography). Translated by Hanan Elstein; edited by Adam Tenenbaum and Ariella Azoulay. Tel Aviv: Bavel (Hebrew). —. (1931) 2005. “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.” In Sprache und Geschichte: Philosophische Essays. 50-64. Ditzingen: Reclam. —. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin and translated by Edmund Jephcott et al. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. —. 2010. Walter Benjamins Archive: Bilder, Texte und Zeichen. Bearbeitet von Ursula Marx et al. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bhabha Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London; New York: Routledge. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Brunet, François. 2009. Photography and Literature. Exposures. London: Reaktion Books. Calderon, Nissim. 1995. “Lo hakol sippur ehad: al Zeh im hapanim eleynu shel Ronit Matalon” (“Not Everything is One Story: On Ronit Matalon’s The One Facing Us”). Rehov 2: 48-58 (Hebrew). Cohen, Richard I. 2007. “The Wandering Jew from Medieval Legend to Modern Metaphor.” In The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times, edited by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and Jonathan Karp, 147-75. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Elcott, Noam M. 2004. “Tattered Snapshots and Castaway Tongues: An Essay at Layout and Translation with W. G. Sebald.” Germanic Review 79.3: 203-23.

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Feldman, Yael S. 1999. No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women’s Fiction, Gender and Culture Series. New York: Columbia University Press. Gluzman, Michael. 2003. The Politics of Canonicity: Lines of Resistance in Modernist Hebrew Poetry. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. —. 2007. Haguf hatsiyoni: leumiyut, migdar uminiyut basifrut hayisreelit hahadashah (The Zionist Body: Nationality, Gender, and Sexuality in the New Israeli Literature). Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad (Hebrew). Govrin, Michal. 2002. Hevzeqim (Snapshots). Tel Aviv: Am Oved (Hebrew). Harshav, Benjamin. 2003. “Theses on the Historical Context of the Modern Jewish Revolution.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 10.4: 301-2. Heym, Stefan. 1981. Ahasver: Roman. München: Bertelsmann. —. 1984. The Wandering Jew. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Hever, Hannan. 2003. “‘Tnu lo badranim—veyanuah beshalom’: sifrut yisreelit bizman shel qibbush” (“‘Give Him Entertainers—and He Shall Rest in Peace’: Israeli literature in a Time of Occupation”). Alpayim 25: 155-69 (Hebrew). —. 2007. Hasippur vehaleom: qriot biqortiyot beqanon hasipporet haivrit (The Narrative and the Nation: Critical Readings in the Canon of Hebrew Fiction). Tel Aviv: Resling (Hebrew). Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 2008. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29.1: 103-28. Hirsch, Marianne and Nancy K. Miller, eds. 2011. Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory, Gender and Culture Series. New York: Columbia University Press. Hirsch, Marianne and Leo Spitzer. 2006. “‘We Would Not Have Come Without You’: Generations of Nostalgia.” In Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts, edited by Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone. 79-96. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Hochberg, Gil. 2007. In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination, Translation/transnation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hoffmann, Yoel. 1989. Bernhard. Jerusalem: Keter (Hebrew). Holtzman, Avner. 1999. Melekhet mahshevet—thiyat haumah: hasifrut haivrit lenokhah haomanut haplastit (A Work of Art—National Revival: Hebrew Literature Facing the Plastic Art). Haifa: Haifa University and Tel Aviv: Zmora-Bitan (Hebrew).

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—. 2003. “The Jewish Renaissance and the Plastic Arts.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 10.4: 351-59. Horstkotte, Silke. 2005. “Fantastic Gaps: Photography Inserted into Narrative in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” In Science, Technology, and the German Cultural Imagination: Papers from the Conference “The Fragile Tradition,” Cambridge 2002, edited by Christian Emden and David Midgley, 269-86. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Kahanoff, Jacqueline. 1978. Mimizrah shemesh (Toward the Rising Sun). Tel Aviv: Yariv (Hebrew). Kracauer, Siegfried. (1963) 1995. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Krieger, Murray. 1992. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kupferminc, Mirta. 2001. En Camino. Etching intaglio, 15.75 x 25.20 in.

Lieblich, Amia. 1997. Conversations with Dvora: An Experimental Biography of the First Modern Hebrew Woman Writer. Translated by Naomi Seidman; edited by Chana Kronfeld and Naomi Seidman. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lubin, Orly. 2007. “Tidbits from Nehama’s kitchen: Alternative Nationalism in Dvora Baron’s The Exiles.” In Hebrew, Gender, and Modernity: Critical Responses to Dvora Baron’s Fiction, edited by Sheila E. Jelen and Shachar Pinsker, 91-104. Bethesda, MD: University Press of Maryland. Mann, Barbara. 1998. “Toward an Understanding of Jewish Imagism.” Religion & Literature 30.3: 23-46. —. 1999. “Framing the Native: Esther Raab’s Visual Poetics.” Israel Studies 4.1: 234-57. —. 2004. “Jewish Imagism and the ‘Mosaic Negative.’” Jewish Studies Quarterly 11.3: 282-91. —. 2006. “Visions of Jewish Modernism.” Modernism/ Modernity 13.4: 673-99. Matalon, Ronit. 1995. Zeh im hapanim eleynu (The One Facing Us). Tel Aviv: Am Oved (Hebrew). —. 1998. The One Facing Us: A Novel. Translated by Marsha Weinstein. New York: Metropolitan Books. —. 2000. Sarah, Sarah. Tel Aviv: Am Oved (Hebrew). —. 2001a. “Lehisaret al yedei hahomer, lo lehitrapeq alav” (“To be Scratched by the Material, Not to Cuddle it”). An Interview by Michael Gluzman. Mikan 2: 228-48 (Hebrew).

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—. 2001b. Qro ukhtov (Read and Write). Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad (Hebrew). —. 2003. Bliss. Translated by Jessica Cohen. New York: Metropolitan Books. —. 2008. Qol tseadeynu (The Sound of Our Steps). Tel Aviv: Am Oved (Hebrew). McCulloh, Mark. 2003. Understanding W. G. Sebald. Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Raczymow, Henri. 1994. “Memory Shot Through With Holes.” Translated by Alan Astro. Yale French Studies 85 (Discourses of Jewish Identity in Twentieth-Century France): 98-105. Rancière, Jacques. (1998) 2004. The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rattok, Lily. 1997. “My Gaze Was All I Had: The Problem of Representation in the Works of Ronit Matalon.” Israel Social Science Research 12.1: 44-55. —. 2000. “Stranger at Home: The Discourse of Identity in Ronit Matalon’s The One Facing Us.” In Discourse on Gender: Gendered Discourse in the Middle East, edited by Boaz Shoshan, 95-115. Westport, Conn. and London: Praeger. Safran, Gabriella, 2010. “The Weaver” (a review of Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions edited by Eugene M. Avrutin et al., 2009). The Jewish Review of Books 2: 35-37. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Sebald, W. G. 1996. The Emigrants. Translated by Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions. —. 2001. Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Modern Library. —. (2001) 2008. Austerlitz. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. —. (1992) 2009. Die Ausgewanderten: Vier lange Erzählungen. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Scott, Clive. 1999. The Spoken Image: Photography and Language. London: Reaktion.

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Shapira, Anita. 1997. “The Origins of the Myth of the ‘New Jew’: The Zionist Variety.” In The Fate of the European Jews, 1939-1945: Continuity or Contingency? Studies in Contemporary Jewry 13, edited by Jonathan Frankel, 255-64. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sontag, Susan. (1977) 1979. On Photography. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin. Wigoder, Meir. 2003. “Hahistoryah, reshitah babayit: tsillum vezikaron bekhitvey Siegfried Kracauer veRoland Barthes” (“History Begins at Home: Photography and Memory in the Writings of Siegfried Kracauer and Roland Barthes”). Teoryah uviqoret 21: 77-106 (Hebrew). Zborowski, Mark and Elizabeth Herzog. 1995. Life is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl. Foreword by Margaret Mead; introduction by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. New York: Schocken Books. Zoran, Gabriel. 2008. “Beyn bidyon letiud: hadirat hatematiqah shel hatsillum el haromanim haivriyim bashanim haaharonot—iyyun bezeh im hapanim eleynu uveheder” (“Between Fiction and Documentary: The Entry of the Theme of Photography into Hebrew Novels in Recent Years—A Study of The One Facing Us and Room”). In Itot shel shinnuy: sifruyot yehudiyot batqufah hamodernit—qovets maamarim likhvodo shel Dan Miron (Times of Change: Jewish Literatures in the Modern Era—an Anthology of Article in Honor of Dan Miron), edited by Gidi Nevo, Michal Arbel, and Michael Gluzman, 317-40. Qiryat Sdeh Boqer: The Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel & Zionism; Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Hebrew).

Fig. [i]: From Ronit Matalon, The One Facing Us (chapter 5)

Fig. [ii]: From Leslie Scalapino, The Tango (chapter 6)

Fig. [iii]: From Leslie Scalapino, The Tango (chapter 6)

Fig. [iv]: Scott McFarland, Orchard View with the Effect of Seasons, Variations # 1 (chapter 11)

Fig. [v]: Scott McFarland, Orchard View with the Effect of Seasons, Variations # 2 (chapter 11)

Fig. [vi]: Jan Peter Tripp, Time goes on (chapter 11)

Fig. [vii]: Jan Peter Tripp, Déjà vu oder Der Zwischenfall (chapter 11)1

Fig. [viii]: Jan van Eyck, Arnolfini Portrait (chapter 11)

1

The picture within the painting is Tripp’s earlier work, Déclaration de guerre.

PART III: TEXT AND IMAGE IN POETRY

CHAPTER SIX OUT OF SITE: PHOTOGRAPHY, WRITING, AND DISPLACEMENT IN LESLIE SCALAPINO’S THE TANGO MAGNUS BREMMER

Introduction In February 2001, the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City hosted an exhibition entitled Poetry Plastique. The show gathered texts written to be exhibited from more than thirty poets. Words were wrenched, so to speak, from the paper into the gallery space—displayed on the walls, projected on screens, printed on objects. One of the participants was the American poet Leslie Scalapino (1944-2010). She contributed a photo-text work titled “Wall Hanging: What’s Place—War in Night,” which consisted of a poetic text and a series of photographs taken by the author. Photography and text were printed on separate strips of muslin textile and hung on the wall, draped in a parallel vertical series of discrete paragraphs and images. Later that same year, Scalapino published an extended version of this photo-text in book form, entitled The Tango (see Fig. [ii] in centerfold).1 The Tango consists of ten spreads comprising twenty unnumbered pages, fifty-four photographs, texts, and reproductions of textile work by Marina Adams. The text is divided into three sections or phases entitled: “What’s place— war in ‘night,’” “What’s place—‘moon’ ‘rose,’” and “The Tango—‘night’ any night is can’t.” In the four spreads of the first section, the text and the color photographs are paralleled in vertical series as shown here. The following sections are less strictly arranged, or more typographically varied: black and white photographs are displayed in pairs, intermixed with the reproduced textiles. 1

Scalapino 2001.

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In both the book and the exhibition piece, the photographs picture Tibetan monks in a courtyard, sitting on the ground, gathered in groups under shadows cast by trees, immersed in ritualized debate. Some photographs portray individual monks, by focusing in on their backs, faces, and hands. The juxtaposed serial poem is striking in its sheer density, the syntactical complexity of its language, a distinguishing characteristic of Scalapino’s poetry. The text is not a caption of the photographs; as it seems, it lacks obvious relation to the photographs, to the pictured scene. The text is noteworthy in its shortage of visual descriptions. A substantial part of experiencing this medial composite involves reflecting on how these separate series of images and phrases could be read/viewed. What is the possible relation of the writings to the pictured place, the monastic garden in Tibet? And what is the relation between the text and the photographical space that represents this scene? In contrast to the main thematic line in Scalapino scholarship, I will not address these questions as an issue of visuality. Rather, as my title suggests, I will try to show how deeply Scalapino’s use of photography is associated with an interest in location. I will address the significance of this theme in The Tango, both thematically, formally, and in the rapport between photographs and words, as well as between photo-text and reader/viewer. In all these cases, a category emerges that I will call “hetero-positionality” in Scalapino’s writing. My analysis of this “heteropositional” quality in Scalapino’s poetic practice will converse with two concepts that I find relevant and valuable for this discussion: Michel Foucault’s notion of “heterotopias” (and “heterochronia”) and Roland Barthes’s concept of the “Neutral.” After addressing the term “hetero-positionality,” I will take on questions of writing, subjectivity, and positionality, as it is being evoked in The Tango. Then, I will discuss the relation between photography and language by implementing Barthes’s early image-text terminology into his later thinking. In the last section I will discuss how the multiple publication forms that Scalapino has used for her photo-texts create different reader/viewer positions. This section augments the discussion of hetero-positionality in The Tango to matters of materiality, evoked by the publication strategies used by Scalapino for her photo-texts. Building on the fact that Scalapino’s use of photographs has rarely been commented upon, this article will create three prisms from which to view The Tango that are all related to photography’s place in the 2001 photo-text. The aim is to show how this use of the photographic imagery reflects a way of thinking about negativity as a plurality of time and space that is relevant to Scalapino’s poetic writing at large.

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Hetero-positionality Leslie Scalapino’s poetry juxtaposes inquiries into subjectivity and spirituality with political issues and documentary practices. These two sides could seem to be paradoxical, but in Scalapino’s work they appear to be mutually influential. In this context, The Tango is both a significant and representative part of Scalapino’s oeuvre. The negotiation between the political and philosophical is at center stage in this poetic photo-text. Most strikingly, perhaps, is it represented by the very subject of the images in it—the equally spiritual and political topos of Tibet. Tibet serves as a location, in several senses, for the poetic discussion. But the seemingly paradoxical constellation also works on a formal level. The philosophical negativity, staged in the poetic monologue and represented by the ostensibly non-communicative relation between image and text, co-exists with the documentary specificity and concreteness achieved by the use of photography and material aspects, such as the use of Tibet-originated muslin textile. As part of the exhibition Poetry Plastique, and by its various material instantiations, Scalapino’s photo-text raises questions on the locality of the literary text already by way of its publication. As the subheading “What’s place— war in ‘night’” suggests, The Tango is also a text thematically engaged with the question of location. First of all, linguistically: the text itself is permeated with place-related words (“location,” “site,” “placement”), spatial metaphors (“ground,” “basis”), and spatial demonstratives (“there,” “that,” “where”). On several occasions the text suggests a certain loss of locality—the word “dis-placement” recurs throughout, saturated with various meanings by the density of the surrounding paragraph. It mainly involves a recurrent disposition in Scalapino’s writing—namely, an address of questions on awareness and perception—initiating an inquiry into the locations of phenomena, events, and states of consciousness. A substantial part of reading The Tango consists in tracing this very process of “dis-placement” in time and space, which concerns the subversion of subject/object relations and similar constellations. In this sense, photography is more than simply illustrative imagery or a pragmatic aid in Scalapino’s writing. Rather, the medium itself could be seen as a deep-going influence. Further inquiry into the theoretical history of photography could give valuable notions for thematizing the plurality, materiality, and heterogeneity behind the negativity in Scalapino’s work. For instance, there is a common conception, most influentially proposed by Roland Barthes, that the photograph has a paradoxical relationship to

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its referent.2 A photograph of a particular place preserves a record of that place, but also displaces it in time and space. When viewing a photograph in the present, it is a past present that one is witnessing. Additionally, the photograph puts the viewer in connection with a different place than the place from where the image is being viewed. I argue that the photographic experience, with its amalgamation of these different spatial and temporal modalities, is a strong influence on Scalapino’s writing. The photographs serve both as an augmentation of the writing space, creating an intermedial space, and as a locational and positional extension through the represented space of the photograph, that is, the referential object (for example, the Tibetan monastery in The Tango). In reading, this creates an experience of a plural sense of place. The Tango is neither the first nor the only work of Scalapino’s that feature photographs.3 In all of her photo-texts the aforementioned plurality is performed on several levels, which I suggest makes them particularly suggestive in the understanding and reception of her work. The process of “dis-placement,” here with relation to photography, aims at negativity in terms of dissolution of values, but through a paradoxical plurality. As a recurring element in Scalapino’s writing, negativity rarely means cancellation in terms of a complete emptiness, but rather emerges at a point of plurality, of the multiple. Through the serial form, categories such as the “poetic I” are deconstructed in a process of mutual cancellation, contradictions, and constellations of plurality. This is what happens to the allegedly stable concepts of place and site in The Tango when they are “displaced.” Following Laura Hinton’s concept of an “a-positionality of the subject”4 (which she coined with regard to Scalapino’s writing), as well as Foucault’s notion of “heterotopias” (and “heterochronia”) and Barthes’s idea of the “Neutral,” I suggest calling this experience in Scalapino’s writing “hetero-positionality.” Foucault gives “heterotopias” a straggling, sometimes contradictory definition in his 1967 lecture “Different Spaces” 2 This notion, and its existential or aesthetic consequences, is a much-discussed issue in the theories of photography. See, for instance, Barthes 1977 or Prosser 2005. 3 Several of Scalapino’s books have photographs as the frontispiece, three of them—including her last book, Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows (2010)—are photo-texts, juxtaposing photographs and writing. In two of these, it is the author herself that has taken the pictures; in both, all photographs are from one particular place: Crowd and not evening or light (1992) features photographs from Venice Beach; The Tango pictures Tibetan monks at the Sera Monastery in Lhasa, Tibet. 4 Hinton 1999.

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(“Des Espaces autres”).5 Related to his understanding of the outside, “heterotopia” signifies an “other” place that is not “no place,” i.e.—utopia. It is a negativistic concept, but—as the prefix hetero- suggests—it aims towards plurality. A main idea depicts “heterotopias” as a physical place that in some sense contains several places.6 This negativity by plurality is something that Foucault’s concept shares with Barthes’s analysis of le Neutre. At the end of one of his last courses at the Collège de France, Barthes reaches the final of a swarming series of definitions of this concept, the topic of the course. It is a concept that shares many conceptual likenesses with other Barthesian concepts dealing with “suspension of meaning,” such as “degree zero,” the “obtuse meaning,” or the “punctum” of Camera Lucida (1980).7 However, its basis is not that of cancellation or reduction. In fact, the best image of the “Neutral,” Barthes concludes, “is not the null, it’s the plural.” Barthes maintains: [T]he Neuter extended to discourse (to texts, to behaviors, to ‘motions’) is not that of Neither […] nor, it’s ‘both at once,’ ‘at the same time,’ or ‘that alternates with.’8

It is in this same sense that I apprehend the “hetero-positional” construct in Scalapino’s The Tango as a modality or figure that seeks negativity through plurality, by contradiction, suspension, and permutation.

Writing, subjectivity, and place From her debut with O and Other Poems in 1976 until her sudden death in 2010, Leslie Scalapino produced a complex body of work. In it, the poetry is the main artery, but her catalogue also contains drama, a novel trilogy, and several collaborations with artists. Still, everything that Scalapino wrote is marked by her idiosyncratic use of language. For instance, Scalapino’s poetic writing often uses a sequential method, producing series of paragraphs. While participating in the series, every single discrete paragraph forms a complex entity of its own, interfolded with brackets, hyphens, and other typographic markers. The series is also pervaded by

5

Foucault 1998. Foucault 1998, 25. 7 Barthes 2000. 8 Barthes 2005, 120. 6

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recurring words and phrases.9 The resulting text is often strikingly hermetic, but a text with a tangibly oral, rhythmic, and semantic complexity. Over the last two decades, Leslie Scalapino’s poetry has gradually gained scholarly attention. This attention has focused upon two main modalities in her work: visuality and subjectivity. In an interview with the poet in 1996, Elisabeth Frost asserts that Scalapino is “a profoundly visual writer.”10 Megan Simpson dedicates a chapter of her study Poetic Epistemologies to Scalapino, concluding that her writing is a performance of “language-as-perception” or “perception-as-language.”11 Simpson also terms the discrete elements in Scalapino’s serial poetry as frames. Scalapino herself often commented on her own writing in visual, optical, or even photographical metaphors, talking, for example, about the “camera-lens of writing.”12 However, these analogies posit a relation between inner and outer that cannot be reduced to visuality or mere perceptual issues. They are tangential to a recurring constellation in Scalapino’s work, a tension between consciousness, writing, and the exteriority of phenomena and events. As a dialectic between self and world, Scalapino’s interest in this constellation concerns the second of the two modalities, subjectivity. The recurring theme in Scalapino’s poetry of enabling and subverting dichotomies like inner/outer or subject/object has caused Laura Hinton to suggest, in an interesting and thought-provoking article, that Scalapino’s writings, as a feminist strategy, evoke an “apositionality of the subject.”13 Bruce Campbell discusses a similar subject category in an article appropriately entitled “Neither in nor out.”14 Scalapino’s texts present writing as a practice that is in-between inner and outer phenomena. This “a-positionality of the subject” can also be related to the Buddhist readings of Scalapino’s writing, most notably by Lyn Hejinian and Jason Lagapa. Lagapa, arguing for a “disontological poetics,” explores the thematic similarities between Buddhist thought and Scalapino’s poetry, pointing to her attempt at denying the substance of the self by, among other things, conceptualizing the poetic subject in a play of negations and self-contradictory statements.15 Hejinian emphasizes, above the general claim of the intricate relation of phenomenal and empirical experience, the 9

On seriality, see Conte 1999, specifically his discussion on Scalapino in 276-77. Scalapino 1996, 4. 11 Simpson 2000, 124. 12 Scalapino 2008, 27. 13 Hinton 1999, 133. 14 Campbell 1992. 15 Lagapa 2006. 10

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ubiquity of pain and suffering as a central Buddhist topic in Scalapino’s work.16 I propose that both of these modalities are deeply connected to a notion of location, which ultimately amounts to a wider notion of place. As Hinton’s phrase “a-positionality” implies, there is a questioning of where the subject of Scalapino’s poetry is. However, I suggest, it is not a question of lacking place or position. On the contrary, Scalapino’s poetry presents an incessant, subversive process of locating the self in writing. In an essay on The Tango, Scalapino describes her writing practice with the ambiguous term “location-notation.”17 The serial form of Scalapino’s writing, I posit, amounts to a continuous localization (and, consequently, continuous dis-localization) of the self—a positionality that is constantly changing, incessantly performed and staged in the discrete fragments of the serial poems, re-inventing itself in every instance of the serial form. A decisive difference between Scalapino’s photo-texts and her books without images is the fact that in the photo-texts the serial poetry does not exist as an isolated item. In The Tango, the writing is juxtaposed to a photographic representation with a quite specific location—a Tibetan Monastery. In its exhibition version, Scalapino included a note that, among other things, informed the readers/viewers that the photograph depicts the courtyard of the Sera Monastery in Llasa, Tibet. While reading The Tango, then, one is confronted with the task of approximating the relation of the writing with the photographic representation of the scene at the courtyard in Tibet. The meta-commentary that appears in the very first paragraphs of the book reads: observation (‘so’ present-time) of a real-time event (past)—to make these be the same ‘in order’ to dis-place ‘them’ and one.

One notices in this paragraph two positions: “observation”/”present” and “event/”past.” One also notices the outlines of a practice, that of “ordering” or “dis-placing.” Throughout the text, this “practice” is selfreflected, making assertions on locations of phenomena and events. Regarding the photographs, this process could be interpreted in at least two senses—from the author/photographer’s point of view and from the reader/viewer’s. Scalapino’s photographic series documents what was a 16 17

Hejinian 2002. Scalapino 2007, 15.

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specific place at a specific time, yet the arrangement is done in hindsight. The reader of the photo-texts, on the other hand, experiences a representation in the present, which ultimately is a trace of a past occasion—a “present observation” of a “past event.” The writing complicates the whole equation. Throughout, it conceptualizes these two spatial and temporal modalities, the “presentness” of observation and “pastness” of place. A few paragraphs later, one reads: it is not even to state location in a different way, it is / not to re-state conditions even.

As with the “event,” the categories of facts or objects—that is, “location” or “conditions”—are not said to be presented by a subjective “statement.” Rather, location is nothing other than “statement.” Moreover, the conceptualization of an event according to the text is “not to re-state conditions even.” In short, there is a motion in The Tango that tends to equal the process of articulation—i.e., writing—with the event and location that it is trying to apprehend and formulate. In fact, the text states that they are part of a simultaneous process. Writing does not “re-state conditions” of actual events and objects; these are intrinsically linked to their linguistic articulation. Here, the word “both” is symptomatic, functioning as answer to the “neither-nor” questions posed throughout the text. Does an action or event occur in reality, or in the abstraction of language? The answer is: “both.” A symptomatic phrase reads, for example: the relation between emotion and event, neither/ causing the other. nor do they have no relation.

The recurring establishment of the constellation “subjectivity/language” in The Tango is a telling marker on where the critical non-relation between inner (emotion) and outer (event) is thought to take place. This linguistic, analytical undertaking in Scalapino’s poetry stages the idea of a displacement of events in language. As an intermedial composite, then, The Tango connects seemingly incompatible registers of time and space. It is in this context that I turn now to consider the subject of the images. An immediate reaction to the use of the word “dis-placement” next to images of Tibetan monks could elicit thoughts on experiences of being displaced, in terms of removed from a particular place. In the Tibetan case, displacement involves geopolitical issues on the struggle for authorial control of land, the occupation of place, and, consequently, the displacement of native culture and people. Yet, it is not such reflections

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that are being manifestly debated in The Tango. Scalapino has written on Tibet on other occasions. In Dahlias Iris: Secret Autobiography and Fiction (2003), for instance, she writes in a prose fragment: Tibet […] visibly contains all times, is occupied (by invaders and/or by itself), and impinged on is transforming conceptually and physically en masse by this cultural and material occupation.18

This passage tells of a complex history, a place occupied by “invaders” as well as by “itself,” and is therefore in a process of constant transformation. Yet, it reveals that for Scalapino, it is also a symbolic place that, remarkably, contains not only several dimensions of time, but also several places. Tibet is then, in Scalapino’s view, something of a “heterotopias” in Foucault’s sense. Foucault’s definition of “heterotopias” is complex. The five principles that he outlines for the concept seem to pull it in different directions. A common denominator, however, appears to be the place that in some sense contains other places: The heterotopia has the ability to juxtapose in a single real place several emplacements that are incompatible in themselves.19

In The Tango, this heterotopic quality could be figured in several senses. If the photographic images are reason enough to consider Tibet a topic, Scalapino’s characterization from Dahlia’s Iris seems relevant, not least considering Foucault’s addition of the symmetrical temporal sibling of “heterotopias”—“heterochronia.” “More often than not,” Foucault concludes, “heterotopias are connected with temporal discontinuities.”20 In addition, Scalapino’s displacements of binary opposition, as discussed above, also welcome a view of place that contains several places and layers of temporal dimensions. The initial subversion of “present observation” of a “past event” connotes such an idea. The fact that Tibet is brought to the photo-text as actual photographs (rather than some other visual representation) could invoke “heterotopias” and “heterochronias” metonymically. When speaking of the heterotopic capability of “juxtaposing in a single real place /…/ several sites that are in themselves incompatible,” Foucault gives the theatre and cinema as two examples. The photographic technology as such, though, seems supremely apt to exemplify the concept, in bringing these two places and timeframes into an 18

Scalapino 2003, 17. Foucault 1998, 181. 20 Foucault 1998, 182. 19

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incompatible juxtaposition and materialization. In line with Foucault’s conceptualization, the photograph is a physical localizable place that represents or reproduces a spatial and temporal dimension that is incompatible with the one in which the image is being viewed. In this way, Scalapino’s photographs of the monastery testify to this paradoxical locality of the photographic experience. The serial arrangement of the images multiplies this spatiotemporal complex even further. The main instance of dis-placement performed in The Tango is in the intermediate relation between the writing and the photographic representation. Considering the fact that Scalapino’s complex poetic inquiry is juxtaposed with photographs of an important site in Tibetan culture, two questions arise: how can this relation be viewed, and what possible impact can the visual scenery have on the reading of the text? On a thematical level, supplemented by the visual scenery, formulations like the following seem to imply historical context in the written: Were killed practicing in the monasteries—shipped to labor, dying, trains shipping them, ringed in by barbed wire haul on dam sites tunnels exhaustion famine in lines. the same figure repeated everywhere changes it there as if changed but not either from within or without that /[…]/ Rode back in on horses raids into their own landand were defeated—by modern military that had invaded grinding them, sent to camps, starved, were executed.

No details here suggest specific historical moments, though such violence as portrayed here could elicit historical events such as that of the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, and the following occupation.21 The scenes here depicted lie close to John F. Avedon’s account of the atrocities performed by the PLA in Tibetan monasteries, Sera included, and on its inhabitants. Like several monasteries, Sera was deserted, plundered, and damaged, its practice for several years temporarily housed in Bylakuppe, India.22 Needless to say, the history of Chinese-Tibetan relations is highly complex.23 Some aspects of The Tango, though, may indicate a support for the Tibetan cause—for instance, material aspects such as the muslin material used in the wall hanging version. The explicit account of violence 21

See Avedon 1997, 34-61. Avedon 1997, 48; 231-32; 100. 23 For a detailed account of the early years of the Chinese occupation, see Goldstein 2007. 22

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quoted above relates to certain recurring figures in The Tango. “Famine,” “starving,” “suffering,” “night”—these are words repeated throughout the text, though rarely in a context as semantically clear as in the passages above. The last line of The Tango reads: “Dying sole? (or living. at all.)” An ambiguous expression, “at all” could be read in several ways, not only as an expression of totality. The phrase gains from being read as a rhetorical figure of collectivity, that is, relating dialectically with the “oneness” of “sole.” It intimates, then, the homonymous “soul” as a transgressive, collective category. Hejinian’s remark, according to which much of Scalapino’s poetry is guided by the Buddhist notion of “the ubiquity of pain and suffering,” seems relevant here. Yet, the main characteristic of the writing’s relation to the visual representation remains its hermetic quality. Passages of violence and suffering are juxtaposed to photographic documents that show harmonious faces, a quiet conversation. And reflections of metaphysical character face a visual sibling that is photographically concrete and actual. The impact of this tension between word and image is perhaps most advantageously discernible in the indexical qualities of the text. Scalapino’s writing is permeated with deictic words, spatial but also temporal, as well as pronouns. Adjectives, by contrast, are sparser. A handful of arbitrary passages from her work can exemplify how Scalapino makes use of indexicality (italics added for emphasis): “Him not doing that intentionally”; “as if from ‘their’ conception (view there were only ‘that’ ‘one’)—and only ‘that’ ‘one’ and only ‘that’ ‘one’—an interior—and ‘that’ ‘one’ in it”; “their logic itself hierarchy which they call ‘analysis’ is invisible to them”; “must ‘accept’ death of others.—except them. except/ him. (can't) is them him also”; “she says the entire thing is ‘theirs’”; “There is no ‘social’ there”; and, finally, the recurring, symptomatically phrased: “to make these be the same ‘in order’ to dis-place ‘them’ and one.” An observant reader notes that the ambiguity in these passages not only derives from the lack of reference for the deictic words here (who is “them,” “she,” “him”?), but also from their elusive relations—“them,” “she,” “him,” and “it” are placed in relation with “there,” “that,” and “one.” One of these sentences—“(view there were only ‘that’ ‘one’)—and only ‘that’ ‘one’ and only ‘that’ ‘one’—an interior—and ‘that’ ‘one’ in it”—brings to mind Gertrude Stein’s iconic phrase “a rose is a rose is a rose” or, perhaps more pertinently, her deictic laden “There is no there there.”24 The “blank” qualities here relate to a third attribute, that of 24 The phrase “rose is a rose is a rose” was initially a part of Stein’s poem “Sacred Emily” from 1913 (Stein 1922, 178-88). Variations on the phrase re-appeared in

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seriality—the repetition of “‘that’ ‘one.’” The blankness not only lies in the deictic signification —“that one”—but in the elliptical identification: “only ‘that’ ‘one’ /[…]/ and ‘that’ ‘one’ in it.” Indexical markers concern place in terms of orientation and directionality. In order to make sense in a written text, a word such as “here” must have an obvious relation to the speaking subject or the textual subject of a given context. “There,” in turn, must relate to the placement of this “here.” Commenting on Alfred North Whitehead’s passage of the lost traveler (“a traveler, who has lost his way, should not ask, where am I? What he really wants to know is, where are the other places?”), Edward Casey remarks that “to become oriented again I have to know the respective theres of my changing here.”25 Thus, in various senses, directionality is related to the issue of subjectivity. In The Tango, there is an alliance between the question of dis-placement and the ambiguous status of the poetic I. In the text, an “I” appears only on one occasion. The place from which the text is propelled seems continuously altered or deferred. Adrienne Rich deals with the politics of indexical terms in her influential essay “Notes Toward a Politics of Location” (1986). Rich’s main objective is to point to the lack of influence from—and receptiveness towards—other ethnicities in a largely white-dominated feminist movement. Hence, she argues for the need and significance of localization in identity politics, as well as an awareness of one’s own position, for instance, geographically, ethnically, and sexually. From where do we speak—from what place, what background, and in which context? In this discussion on locatedness, Rich makes the keen observation that it is an issue that makes “even ordinary pronouns become a political problem.” She refers to the relation between “I” and “we,” the subject and the collective, and the unvoiced power structures that inhabit our use of them. What one ultimately must ask oneself, according to Rich, is: Who am “I” and who is “we”? As Rich encapsulates the problem painstakingly, “you cannot speak for me. I cannot speak for us.”26 Rich’s words are informative for looking at Scalapino’s use of indexical words in general, and pronouns in particular, in The Tango. The absence of an outspoken poetic “I” in The Tango should not, I propose, be seen as a manifestation of reluctance towards localization. Rather, it reflects a reluctance to form a subject that speaks for the Other. It stages Stein’s poetry several times later. The phrase “there is no there there” appears in Everybody’s Autobiography (idem 1993, 298). 25 Casey 1993, 5 (emphasis in original). 26 Rich 1986, 210-31.

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unwillingness to name, to fix, and to characterize. The answer to the previously posed question—who is “them,” “she,” “him,”?—is not manifested in the text. And neither do these pronouns find an obvious referent in the images. One could object here that Scalapino, as author and photographer, has a preferential right of interpretation. After all, she is the one who has made these monks and this monastery courtyard available, as photographic representations, to the reader/viewer. But the author is not synonymous with the text. The text actively refrains from naming the subjects, the Tibetan monks. Not only do the pronouns “them,” “she,” and “him” have no contextual reference, caught up in an intricate web of linguistic interrelations, but many of them also appear within quotation marks. It is a signature mark by Scalapino that can have different functions in different contexts. In The Tango, however, I propose to read them as a direct reference to issues on representation and discourse. They play with the very acts of naming, structuring, and determination. Linguist Emile Benveniste has suggested that the deictic word primarily refers to instances of discourse itself, since it is the context of the utterance that determines its meaning. Giorgio Agamben has expressed a similar thought through different terms, arguing that indexical language refers to the place of language itself.27 This is also what Scalapino ultimately does by playing with indexical words. She draws attention to discourse itself—and in Scalapino’s practice, to the problem of representing without making an “I” speak for “them.” Always localized in the linguistic gesture, yet unceasingly dis-localized in the serial form of writing, the subject of Scalapino’s poetry is not completely displaced; it inhabits “many places” at the same time. This also concerns the plurality that an intermedial composite embodies. The intimate serial arrangement that structures the photographic and textual material of The Tango highlights the relevancy of this spatial and temporal plurality.

Photography and language Scalapino’s photo-texts are characterized by a sense of “writing against” the image. The images in her photo-texts bring objects, events, and places to the literary text that the writing does not simply attest to or authenticate 27

See Benveniste 1971, 217-21 and Agamben 1991, 24 ff. For further reading on indexical language, subjectivity, and discourse, see Jakobson 1990, 386-92 or Wlad Godzich’s foreword in De Man 2002, xvi.

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in a verbal comment. Instead, it diverges from the specific locality of the image. Arguably, it suggests or creates other spaces. In Crowd and not evening or light (1992), the images of people at Venice Beach are supplemented with handwritten phrases—below, above, and on the side of the photographs. The photographs are straightforward in style; accordingly, Frost has likened them with family photographs.28 There is nothing familiar, however, in the supplementary phrases. In this ambiguous writing, the sentence “not quite that” recurs. It seems directed towards the photographs. Reading self-reflexively, one could propose that the phrase is an altering, even disqualifying gesture. The writer seems to be trying to grasp something from reality that the photographic representation cannot convey—it is “not quite that.” However, more than anything, such a reading sheds light on the ambiguous aspects of the photograph-text relationship. For example, we are compelled to consider how the use of indexical words can both establish and disqualify semantic relations between photo and text. In the following, I want to inquire into this phototextual discrepancy, and how it unfolds in The Tango. Barthes’s thoughts on photography and language will serve as a conversational partner in this analysis. Early on in his celebrated book on photography, Camera Lucida (1980), Barthes likens the essence of the photographic message with the Sanskrit word “tat,” meaning “that,” or “thus.” “A photograph,” Barthes writes, “is to be found at the end of this gesture; it says: ‘that, that’s it, that is something’, but says nothing more.” Significantly, Barthes states that this “pointing,” this deictic quality of the photograph, will always be followed by a similar but more semantically sharp verbal gesture—“look, there is my brother, there, there is my child.” The photograph, he asserts, “cannot escape this pure deictic language.”29 In other words, the “pure” pointing of language will always accompany the more obtuse pointing of the photograph. This gesture is indebted to what Barthes, in an earlier article, “Rhetoric of the Image” (1964), outlined as the prime function of language in relation to a photograph, that is, its “anchoring” function. As a verbal metalanguage, Barthes states, the linguistic comment “anchors”— that is, “elucidates”—the many potential meanings in a photograph, by being selective. “The text,” Barthes posits, “directs the reader through the signifieds of the image, causing him to avoid some and receive others.” It works against “the terror of uncertain signs,” constituted by the 28

Scalapino 1996, 18. Barthes 1993, 3:1112 (partly my translation). The first sentence of this quoted passage is omitted in the English translation, see Barthes 2000, 5. 29

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“continuous” message of the photograph.30 “Anchorage” concerns every instance of language that in some way reduces the semantic layers of the photographic image, not just indexical words. Barthes’s view of this gesture is somehow made more absolute in Camera Lucida (probably since his view on language changed quite drastically from his earlier, structuralist-oriented writings to his latter). The “pure deictic” gesture— there, that—seems to a lesser degree to concern semantic determination, than a repetition or doubling of the photographic gesture. Naturally, the use of indexical words in Scalapino’s photo-textual practice does not enter this equation without difficulty. We have already seen the example of the “not quite that” in Crowd and not evening or light. Even though indexical words appear with frequency in The Tango, there seems to be no instance of “pure deictic gesture” from language to photographs. That the text rarely offers a semantic context in a clear-cut way is, as mentioned, partly due to the lack of a pronounced subject, a poetic “I,” in the text. Neither do the photographs offer such an obvious context. From where, then, would this gesture emanate? One can begin addressing these issues by taking a closer look at the relation between photographs and texts in The Tango. In choosing an epitomizing example of this aspect of the photo-text relations in The Tango, we could look at the top right corner of the fourth spread in the first section of “What’s place—war in ‘night’” (see Fig. [iii] in centerfold). This discrete photo-text composite is illustrative in the sense that it juxtaposes Scalapino’s characteristic analytical reflection on the different modalities of location and place with the calm scene of the Sera Monastery courtyard. The phrases do not address these color photographs in the way of a caption; neither do they give much of a hint regarding their potential relevance in the “reading” of the photographic series. However, though the words in very few places can be said to comment on, or relate to, the scene of the images, the typographical layout of texts and photos implies a connection. Some phrases, for instance, are set in smaller, caption-like typeset. Silke Horstkotte, in an article on phototext novels by W. G. Sebald and Monika Maron, has discussed the layout and spatiality in these authors’ books in terms of “photo-text topography.”31 Borrowing Horstkotte’s terminology, the “topography” of The Tango can be described as changeable. In the first section, text and photographs are presented in vertical series. In the following sections, the relation becomes

30 31

Barthes 1977, 39-40 (emphasis in original). Horstkotte 2008.

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more varied. Text and fewer black-and-white photographs are arranged less strictly on the pages. Since image and text are juxtaposed on the page, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to read the text or view the images without noticing the presence of the other medium. Even more problematic would be to regard images and words as completely isolated, and not merely separate entities. The juxtaposing of photographs and words, side-by-side in the same representational space, has immediate and profound repercussions for how the words are read and the images are viewed. In short, juxtaposition is a material practice that conditions the production of meaning. I return now to Barthes’s terminology in pursuing this relation. One articulation of Scalapino’s words could be to “anchor” a specific meaning in the image. “Blossoming trees,” a phrase that recurs no less than ten times in this double-page alone, has an “anchoring” quality in the sense that there actually are blossoming trees in the courtyard that is portrayed in the photograph. Yet, the phrase “blossoming trees” constantly occurs in an already ambiguous context. Reading the phrase as a pure signification of a site visible in the photographs is disturbed by other surrounding factors. For instance, the sentence “‘seeing’ the man starving lying in garbage” evokes yet another scene, in clear distinction to the scene pictured in the photographs. The meta-quality in formulations such as these, makes the account of the states of the blossoming trees elusive: “place this to: seeing ‘at all’ is social—is blossoming trees.” The phrase that flanks one image on the same page (Fig. [1]), distinguishes the different appearances of “blossoming trees” in the writing: “there is no basis of the blossoming / tree—there—// and is ‘as’ one’s / subjectivity/language—‘there.’” The indexical words now seem uneager to signify a discernible “there” in the image. Paradoxically, the text is cunningly set in a caption-like typography, which in Horstkotte’s “topographical” understanding could assert a stronger relation between text and image. Yet, in the above quoted sentence, the semblance of a discernible object is, again, literally put in quotation marks, and involved in the analytical or linguistic play of conceptualization versus place. The words that end the passage take this movement full circle: “‘as’ ‘blossoming trees’ are one’s subjectivity/ language/‘there.’” Where is this “there”? Objects, not apprehendable as other than constructions in thought and language, are recurrently robbed of factual stability in the text. The issue of language as a form of “placement” or locational assertion is performed in the rhetorical figures of repetitions and permutable contradictions. Perhaps the text itself says it most clearly, when repeatedly stating: “a given in space—dis-place blossoming trees.”

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Fig. [1]

“Anchorage,” in its semiotic definition as verbal statements elucidating a semantic level of a photograph, seems obliterated here or at least hardly applicable to these sentences as a whole. With “anchorage” put out of play, one could instead propose that the image-text relation in The Tango enters here into a “relay,” the second photo-textual relation of image and word Barthes sketched out in the 1963 article.32 According to Barthes, the “relay” signifies a complementary relation of image and word on “a higher

32

Barthes 1977.

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level, that of the story, the anecdote, the diegesis.”33 But in the end, this too falls short as no such diegesis or story seems to establish itself in The Tango. As Marsha Bryant has observed, Barthes’s system does not include the possibility of a mutual play of “anchorage,” since he says nothing about the potential an image has to alter meanings in a written text.34 However, there are, arguably, examples of this in The Tango. A crucial feature of the text is the word “rose,” recurring throughout. As a designated “object,” it functions in much the same way as the “blossoming trees.” It mirrors the text’s analytical colloquy on the different locations of consciousness, of the mind’s relation to phenomena or objects, such as a rose, whether mental or actual. No less important, though, is the fact that “Sera” is the Tibetan word for “rose”. But the word “rose” gains its particularity primarily from the homonymous use of the word—both as an adjective (the color, for example of the monks’ robes) and as a verb (past tense of “rise”). In the first section of the photo-text, the color of the robes is visible in the color photographs, and therefore that color could be argued to be “chromatically” active here. However, in the spreads where Scalapino uses black-and-white photos, the polysemic reading is somewhat obstructed. In these cases the color is not “fixed” by the language—the opposite is true: it is added verbally. A dimension of randomness is invested here; one could even assert that the “anchoring” function lies both in word and image. In another fragment in the book (Fig. [2]), Scalapino plays with the polysemy of the word, again echoing the famous Gertrude Stein quote: “(R)ose—is not—rose (they rose) / both.” The three possible meanings—the flower, the color, the verb—are all relevant here. At times, the word “rose” is uttered in conjunction with “standing or curling” as well as “delicate backs.” When these phrases are juxtaposed with photographs of the monks, sitting in one group or rising to join another, the site of the courtyard could seem to directly address the text. However, just like the blossoming trees, the phrases are constantly slipping in, to, and out of different contexts. Here, the black-and-white photography is one part of the story. The other is the sentences to the left, again deviating from a possible pointing: “His dying is to be not in relation to/ space, or to conjecture.” “His” could be read out as the monk in the picture, but that is not an unequivocal reading. As an independent statement it leads readers both to collective memory as a possible theme in the text and to the role of linguistics in the constant 33 34

Barthes 1977, 41. Bryant 1996, 13.

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revision of statements (“conjecture”). This actualizes the second realm of Horstkotte’s “topographical context”—not the space of representation (the photo-text), but the represented space—in this case, the Tibetan monastery. Horstkotte discusses the possible connections between the two realms or spaces. In The Tango, these two spaces form a heterogeneous composite.

Fig. [2]

As shown, the juxtaposition of photographs and text in The Tango enables certain readings/viewings, but in the end delivers closure to none. Arguably, such closure arises only in the “locality” of every individual reading. Indexical words are in need of context; in the case of The Tango’s serial poem, these contexts are equivocal or shifting. “Anchorage,” if there is any, becomes a timely quality, realized in contingent association between word and image. This assignment is handed over to the reader. While indexical words are often essential to theories of the disambiguating role of language in relation to images, The Tango shows how indexical language can be equally accountable for ambiguity in photo-textual

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relations. But even if the text does not “anchor” the image, or the images do not “illustrate” the text, there still very much exists a case of mutual relation. For a text highly engaged with reflections on places or locations, the visual presence of a particular place or site is, of course, far from insignificant. The information on the front page, stating that photographs and words have the same originator, is also of importance. The notion of writing “as placement” or as a “relational location” builds on the juxtaposition of media as a material practice, the “photo-textual topography” created by arrangement. Reading Scalapino’s photo-texts uncovers no procedure of verbally controlling the polysemic character of the photographic image. Rather, it uncovers a practice of actively juxtaposing writing to photographs. It is not an act of elucidation but of producing plurality. The ambiguous use of indexical words, which eludes the “pure deictic gesture” from the verbal to the visual, both highlights and gives thrust to the juxtaposition as a practice. Consequently, this practice is less concerned with the emptiness of language and subjectivity, than with negativity through plurality. No sign of reduction should be ascribed to Scalapino’s use of indexical language in her photo-texts. It is not a practice of framing a photographical site. Instead, the photo-text evokes a plurality, a multitude of places and positions from which to view them. I opened by citing Barthes’s final formulation of the Neutral topic, according to which, “the Neuter extended to discourse […] is not that of Neither […] nor, it’s ‘both at once,’ ‘at the same time,’ or ‘that alternates with.’”35 It is clear now that this corresponds exceedingly well with Scalapino’s assertive ending to her negating neither/nor statements: “both,” “at once,” and the like. Read in this light, writing in The Tango is clearly an assertion of plurality. The equally frequently occurring phrase “bound as ‘split,’” therefore, could be a statement on the juxtaposition of image and word, which also transpires as the dependent, plural relation of a separation. During the course of the lecture series, Barthes gives nuance to the workings of his concept in order to avoid designation of an absolute negation, or complete dissolution of the speaking subject. “The Neutral doesn’t necessarily mean cancelling,” he writes, “but rather displacing, displacing oneself.”36 Barthes’s confession to plurality as displacement is also very much in line with the “hetero-positional” quality that I stress in the reading of Scalapino’s photo-text. Scalapino’s writing thematically engages with the issue of localization and places itself in relation to 35 36

Barthes 2005, 120. Barthes 2005, 137.

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photographic images, and as we know, the resulting reading is not characterized by cancellation or reduction but rather by a sense of plurality. In this regard, Scalapino dis-places writing by forcing it to exist in relation to another practice and material product, the photographic image and its represented space. The writing practice repeats that photographic quality of the self-contained, indexical trace of an action. The juxtaposition of these two indexical series performs a dis-placement as such. It binds image and words as it simultaneously splits them; it separates the representations by bringing them together—and thereby it forms a “hetero-positional” constellation. This process actualizes the third realm of Horstkotte’s concept of topography—namely, the extra-textual position taken by the reader. Ultimately, the photo-textual noncommunicative communication is a product of this realm. For instance, “anchorage” does not function as a semiotic assurance of elucidation, but as an extra-textual attribute.

Materiality Another noteworthy feature of Scalapino’s photo-textual experimentation is the various material forms in which it has appeared. The Tango is not the only photo-text by Scalapino that made an unconventional first appearance. The passages of Crowd and not evening or light that include photographs were originally written as part of a mail art project. The project, organized by Alternative Press, gathered poets to write texts for postcards, which were to be sent to individuals. Scalapino pasted photos taken at Venice Beach on the paper cards and wrote accompanying phrases by hand. These postcard artworks were later photocopied and featured as the title series in her 1992 book. It makes sense for Scalapino’s participation in projects proposing unconventional venues for distributing literature (the Poetry Plastique and the Alternative Press project) to center on photography. The use of the photographic medium is concurrent with platforms for distribution and reception unconventional for literary texts. Other poets from Scalapino’s generation—such as Susan Howe and Harryette Mullen—have worked with photography and photographers in installation form. Photo-texts by poets constitute a substantial but largely overlooked genre of twentiethcentury literature, one that has challenged literary convention in multiple ways. In an American context, it is a vivid tradition—from Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s books of photographs and poetry around 1900, through the collaboration of Hart Crane and a young Walker Evans on “The Bridge” in 1930, to the collaborations and artists’ books of the 1960s and 1970s by

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poets such as Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, and Bernadette Mayer. One could say that the photograph’s entry into literary text is concurrent with the development—from early modernist avant-garde forward—of the book as an aesthetic object, or “alternative space,” as Johanna Drucker has formulated it in her research on artists’ books.37 In a similar way that the book or the journal has functioned as an “alternative space” for artists, other forms, particularly those affirming three-dimensional space, have served similar functions for poets. Furthermore, The Tango is indebted to conceptual photo-text practices in general, and arguably to Robert Smithson’s photo-texts in particular, considering his interest in place and location, or what he calls “sites” and “non-sites.”38 Therefore, in their multiple publications in various material forms, Scalapino’s photo-texts question the confinement of the literary text to the book. Rather than viewing the poetic text as a final, closed product, Scalapino makes each publication an instance of an open-ended artistic process. Yet this does not make the materiality of the literary text less of an issue. On the contrary—it makes issues of materiality even more integral to the understanding of the text. It is not unusual to find in Scalapino’s poetry specific references to its own materiality. For instance, in a part of Crowd and not evening or light, one of the photographs from Venice Beach shows a child on a swing but the handwritten text juxtaposed to the photograph tells nothing of the image’s content. Instead, it reads: “scratch on it”—a reference to the fact that there is a palpable tear in the photograph’s surface.39 This reading is further highlighted by two pen marks on each side of the photograph. Rather than explicitly commenting on the visual motif of the photographic image, the text draws attention to a material aspect of the print. This means that this physical attribute of the photograph is not only directed at the (few) readers/viewers of the actual post cards, but is made manifest to all readers of the book Crowd and not evening or light. This deliberate and manifested awareness of the materiality of the medium is not a superficial aspect pointed out in passing, but a point made with deep resonance in Scalapino’s writing. It reflects a conviction that the content of an image is inseparable from its material conditions.40 Furthermore, I find it interesting that this comment is made regarding a photograph. As media scholar Friedrich Kittler 37

Drucker 2004. See Smithson 1996. 39 Frost (2004) has viewed the material aspects of Crowd and not evening or light as part of a larger theme of embodiment in Scalapino’s writing. 40 Arguably, it is in the same spirit that the muslin textile was used in “Wall Hanging,” as a material condition that must be read as an integral part of the work. 38

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famously claims, literature gained new awareness of its material existence (as the printed word) when confronted with visual media such as photography and film in the nineteenth century.41 It is not such a great step from this assertion to suggest that Scalapino’s awareness of the materiality of her writing practice is in some way concurrent with her use of photography and photographs. Materiality matters, then. But how should we define this category? The various answers proposed by scholars during the last few decades seem to agree on one thing: materiality comprises not simply the physical aspects of the books that distribute literary texts. Drucker has proposed that the concept of materiality should be understood as “a process of interpretation rather than a positing of the characteristics of an object.”42 It is only in relation to interpretation as an activity that this object exits, Drucker asserts. N. Katherine Hayles has developed a similar understanding of the concept of materiality. In the light of the digital era, Hayles advocates a concept of literary materiality as an emergent property rather than some static, physical attribute of a literary text. “The materiality of an embodied text,” Hayles writes, “is the interaction of its physical characteristics with its signifying strategies.”43 In other words, materiality equally concerns physical reality and signification; it is made from their interactions. With reference to Scalapino, these claims mean that the materiality of her photo-texts amounts to the interaction between their physical appearance and the work performed by the reader/viewer. In Scalapino’s case, then, the photo-text’s plurality of physical appearances also results in a plurality of reader/viewer positions. The issue of materiality consequently has a lot to do with what Mieke Bal, in an investigation of expository discourse, has called “situatedness.” With this term, Bal relates to the eventness of the art exhibition and the fact that every viewing of an exhibited work of art is always “situated” in a specific place at a specific time. What ultimately amounts to the actual work is always subject to an “activity of exchange” with the viewer.44 In this respect, Bal likens the exhibition to a conversation. Hence, The Tango’s “hetero-positional” quality also concerns the reader/viewer’s altering positions. In the end, it concerns the question of how reading cards and reading walls, rather than flipping through books, carries out alternative contexts for reading/ viewing.

41

See Kittler 1990. Drucker 1994, 43. 43 Hayles 1995, 103. 44 Bal 1996, 155. 42

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The ambition of the exhibition project Poetry Plastique was to call the conventions, materiality, and locality of traditional literary texts into question. As curator Charles Bernstein asserted, the texts exhibited were “not poems about pictures but pictures that are poems; not words affixed to a blank page but letters in time.”45 These words disclose an interesting constellation of the visual and verbal. First of all, the texts in the exhibition, according to Bernstein, are to be apprehended as visual and verbal representation equally. The poems in the gallery are pictures, that is, not simply linguistically legible phrases but also spatial constructions. Secondly, Bernstein stresses the importance of time. It is a concept with long-standing roots, theorized by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in 1766, that the difference between poetry and painting is that the former extends in time and the latter inhabits space.46 The past twenty years of cultural and aesthetic scholarship has proposed alternative perspectives to this idea. Projects such as Poetry Plastique physically echo these scholarly alternative perspectives, thus further questioning fixed dichotomies and hegemonic ideas like Lessing’s. As Bal puts it, “Talking takes time, and so does looking, but the timeconsuming nature of talking is taken much more easily for granted than that of looking.”47 The poetic works in Bernstein’s exhibition are words that are images—but that nonetheless extend in time, in the act of looking. When Bal speaks of works as “situated,” she aims, precisely, to gain this spatiotemporal dimension. Agreeing that an art work takes place and extends in time is the prerequisite for speaking of materiality as an emergent property of the work. The physical substrate inhabits space, one could say, and the human intention takes time. Consequently, this spatiotemporal dimension explains the work as an emergent, rather than static, phenomenon. When Scalapino talks about the postcard project (in the aforementioned essay on her photo-textual practice), she explains how the photo-text “[exists] in that form only once by being sent to a single individual,” thus referring to the eventness of the work. This “single individual” naturally experiences this artifact differently than the reader of the 1992 photo-text, not simply because he/she receives only a part of it, but because he/she in fact reads and views the postcard under different circumstances. Different physical properties elicit different reader/viewer interactions. The visitors of the Poetry Plastique exhibition (from which a very small amount of photographs have been preserved, none that are of Scalapino’s contribution) 45

Bernstein and Sanders 2001, 7. Lessing 1984. 47 Bal 1996, 155. 46

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probably experienced the exhibited work in a similar way. In this context, the photographs from the Sera Monastery and Scalapino’s poetic sequence will be framed in a significantly different way than when arranged in the book. What, then, do these differences signify? The most basic difference is perhaps the already discussed feature that Scalapino herself put into “Wall Hanging”—the muslin textile on which the artifact was printed. Also, the arrangement of photos and texts could have differed in proportion and scale, probably creating new juxtapositions. Even if small differences like these are never insignificant, when it comes to distinctions deriving from the contexts, there are several aspects to be taken into consideration. One important aspect pertains to what Bal calls “reading walls.”48 That is, to the fact that Scalapino’s contribution was not alone on the gallery wall, juxtaposed as it was to other poets’ plastic poetry. In this respect of expository display, Bal makes a valuable point when arguing that “connections between things are syntactical; they produce, so to speak, sentences conveying propositions.”49 Similar to Horstkotte’s “topographic” view, in her insistence on layout and spatial relations, Bal claims that the juxtaposition of things also “speaks.” The “exposition as display,” Bal stresses, “is a particular kind of speech act.”50 Following this, Scalapino’s “Wall Hanging” would have been viewed in connection with other works displayed on the same wall, and with the exhibition as a whole as frame. At the center of Bal’s study on expository discourse stands the question of what she calls the “expository agent.” This agent is not, Bal emphasizes, the curators or other actual persons related to the present event. The expository agent, the “I” of the exhibition, is a discursive subject that is visible, among other places, in the relation between verbal commentary and visual display. The “I” of the exhibition organizes, guides, and suggests viewings.51 The example of Scalapino’s “Wall Hanging” in Poetry Plastique is interesting in this context. In part this is because of how that exhibition differed from other, as it were, more traditional art exhibitions; but also because of the fact that Scalapino herself took part in the exhibition’s curatorial text, by introducing her own work. Like all the other contributors, Scalapino added a note on her project where she gave her view on the work. Among other things, she named the actual place where the photographs had been taken, the Sera Monastery in Llasa, Tibet. According to Bal, the speech-act produced by this sort of 48

Bal 1996, 112-28. Bal 1996, 87. 50 Bal 1996, 88. 51 Bal 1996, 16; 158-62. 49

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discourse—which is a product of verbal explanations as much as spatial connections—has the power to “shape the viewer’s experience to a considerable extent.” 52 In Scalapino’s case, the participation in the expository agency pertains to the book version as much as it does to the gallery contribution, since even the book version comes within a discursive frame. Gérard Genette calls this the “paratexts”: the cover with frontispiece, the authorial names, editorial information, and so forth.53 Moreover, on the back cover of the book Scalapino adds a note with a similar function as her curatorial contribution to Poetry Plastique, though quite different in character—and not naming the Sera Monastery. It speaks in the same voice as the poetic monologue, touching upon themes such as the relation of “mind phenomena to exterior phenomena.” It adds a reference or dimension similar to the note added to the exhibited piece. Still, the notes are embedded in two discursive frameworks that are traditionally provided by the publisher and curator’s context respectively. Scalapino, therefore, again exerts her participation in relation to the expository agent. What I primarily intended to show in this last section is how the sketched “hetero-positionality” also concerns the locality of the photo-text itself. Consequently, the work converges with a “hetero-positionality” of the reader/viewer. I suggest that these different platforms elicit different instances of interaction, which constitute the various materialities of the work. The readers/viewers of Scalapino’s photo-texts are gallery visitors as much as poetry readers. The reading experience can thus equally consist in flipping the pages of a book or gazing at a representation hung on a wall. Even in this sense, in its various materializations, Scalapino’s phototextual practices concern dis-localization or “dis-placement” as a plural construct. Most importantly, the various instances remind the reader to sense to what degree the reading of literary texts is a materially infused undertaking. In very much the same way as in the other instances, the “heteropositionality” of the material forms of reproduction of The Tango serves to deny singularity. It does so not by refraining from affirmation of the material dimension, but rather by supplanting the idea of a single representational form with a double material implementation.

52 53

Bal 1996, 30. Genette 1987.

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End note Scalapino’s The Tango raises questions such as from where, when, and in relation to what does something speak. This article proposes that “where” or “when” are equally interesting questions as “how” or “what.” The “displacement” of Scalapino’s poetic reflection is, if commenting upon itself, shadowed by a heterogeneous placement or positionality. I have tried to show how The Tango evokes notions of location—neither in terms of identity or singularity nor in terms of complete negativity, but, instead, in terms of plurality, of “hetero-positionality.” It does so, as shown, on several levels—thematically, formally, in its physical realizations, and in the different reader/viewer positions that these entail. The writing subjectivity of The Tango affirms constant localization without surrendering to the stability of a poetic “I.” Its photographs and serial poems enter into a close typographical encounter that ultimately highlights the fact that the relation is not that between a determining and determined medium; instead, it is one that forms a plurality of points of view. The publication of The Tango in two different physical substrates discloses the existence of the photo-text that is not reduced to a material singularity or symbolic unity.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. (1982) 1991. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Translated by Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Avedon, John F. 1997. In Exile from the Land of Snows: The Definitive Account of the Dalai Lama and Tibet Since the Chinese Conquest. New York: Harper Perennial. Bal, Mieke. 1996. Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis. New York: Routledge. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. Selected and translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana. —. 1993. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. —. (1980) 2000. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Vintage Books. —. (2002) 2005. The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977-1978). Text established, annotated, and presented by Thomas Clerc under the direction of Eric Marty, translated by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Benveniste, Emile. (1966) 1971. Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press. Bernstein, Charles and Jay Sanders, eds. 2001. Poetry Plastique. New York: Marianne Boesky Gallery and Granary Books. Bryant, Marsha, ed. 1996. Photo-Textualities: Reading Photographs and Literature. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Campbell, Bruce. 1992. “Neither in nor Out: The Poetry of Leslie Scalapino.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 8: 53-60. Casey, Edward S. 1993. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Conte, Joseph. 1999. Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. De Man, Paul. 2002. The Resistance to Theory. Foreword by Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Drucker, Johanna. 1994. The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923. Chicago: Chicago University Press. —. 2004. The Century of Artists’ Books. New York: Granary Books. Frost, Elisabeth. 2004. “How Bodies Act: Leslie Scalapino’s Still Performance.” How2 2.2. Foucault, Michel. 1998. “Different Spaces.” In Essential Works of Foucault: 1954-1984, vol 2. Aesthetics, edited by James D. Faubion and translated by Robert Hurley and others, 175-85. London: New Press. Genette, Gérard. 1987. Seuils. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Goldstein, Melvyn C. 2007. A History of Modern Tibet: Vol. 2, The Calm Before the Storm, 1951-1955. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1995. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hejinian, Lyn. 2002. “Figuring Out.” How2 1.7. Horstkotte, Silke. 2008. “Photo-Text Topographies: Photography and Representation of Space in W. G. Sebald and Monika Maron.” Poetics Today 29.1: 49-78. Hinton, Laura. 1999. “Formalism, Feminism, and Genre Slipping in the Poetic Writing of Leslie Scalapino.” In The Women Poets of the

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Americas: Toward a Pan-American Gathering, edited by Jacqueline Vaught Brogan and Cordelia Chávez Candelaria, 130-45. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Jakobson, Roman. 1990. On Language. Edited by Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kittler, Friedrich. (1985) 1990. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Translated by Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens, foreword by David E. Wellbery. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lagapa, Jason. 2006. “Something from Nothing: The Disontological Poetics of Leslie Scalapino.” Contemporary Literature 47.1: 30-61. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. (1766) 1984. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Translated by Edward Allen McCormick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Prosser, Jay. 2005. Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rich, Adrienne. 1986. “Notes toward a Politics of Location.” In Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985, 210-31. New York: Norton. Scalapino, Leslie. 1992. Crowd and not evening or light. Oakland: O Books/ Sun and Moon Press. —. 1996. “An Interview with Leslie Scalapino.” An interview by Elisabeth Frost. Contemporary Literature 37.1: 1-23. —. 2001. The Tango. New York: Granary Books. —. 2003. Dahlia’s Iris: Secret Autobiography and Fiction. Tallahassee, FL: FC2. —. 2007. Day Ocean State of Stars’ Night: Poems & Writings 1989 & 1999-2006. Los Angeles: Green Integer. —. 2008. It’s Go in Horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006. Berkeley: University of California Press. —. 2010. Floats Horse-Flotas or Horse Flows. Buffalo: Starcherone Books. Simpson, Megan. 2000. Poetic Epistemologies: Gender and Knowing in Women’s Language-oriented Writing. Albany: State University of New York Press. Smithson, Robert. 1996. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Edited by Jack Flam. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stein, Gertrude. 1922. Geography and Plays. Boston: The Four Seas Company. —. (1937) 1993. Everybody’s Biography. Cambridge: Exact Change.

CHAPTER SEVEN ORIENTATION, ENCOUNTER, AND SYNAESTHESIA IN PAUL CELAN AND YOKO TAWADA GIZEM ARSLAN

Introduction: Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada’s letters Translation and the materiality of language are among the most common interpretive foci for the vast international scholarship on Paul Celan, widely regarded as the greatest German-language poet of the twentieth century, and for the growing body of international scholarship on Yoko Tawada, one of the most widely read and acclaimed authors of nonGerman background living and writing in Germany today.1 A Romanian Jew whose family and friends perished in the Holocaust, Celan’s self, as well as the language of his poetry, are marked by the perils of the Third Reich.2 Although Celan’s literary language was German, this was a German all his own, transformed by the use of multiple languages, idiosyncratic word-splitting, as well as employment of the scientific 1

Tawada’s output is more diverse than Celan’s, and includes nearly forty original works of fiction, poetry, plays for radio and the theater, a libretto, as well as a CD entitled diagonal (2002) in collaboration with the pianist Aki Takase. 2 In his 1958 “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen” (“Rede anläßlich der Entgegennahme des Literaturpreises der Freien Hansestadt Bremen”), Celan famously suggests that language passed through perils and emerged “enriched by all this” (angereichert von all dem). His statement resists a triumphant reading even as it appears to celebrate language's survival. Celan tellingly places the word angereichert in quotation marks. The word is translated as “enriched,” but can also mean “enReiched”—i.e., that it acquired elements of the Third Reich (see idem 1983, 3:186 and 2000, 395).

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vocabularies of astronomy, geology, and anatomy. In a very different historical context of accelerated possibilities of travel in an increasingly multicultural world, Yoko Tawada is one of few contemporary authors who “consistently and deliberately developed their literary work in two languages simultaneously” (in Tawada’s case, German and Japanese).3 Translation and transformation constitute two of the most common themes and motifs of her literary and essayistic writing.4 Celan and Tawada thus respond to the transformations of the German language during the Third Reich and in the age of intensified global encounters, respectively.5 More generally, they remain attuned to the materiality of language. Although Tawada proves to be a close reader of Celan and evokes him as one of her muses, this shared attunement is less a product of Celan’s influence on Tawada than of common commitments of Celan and Tawada’s independent literary projects.6 This chapter will trace these transformations and materiality of language from the micro-perspective of the letter, or, to use a broader term, the orthographic symbol.7 Orthographic symbols for Celan and Tawada are multisensory elements of their work. They function as visual marks on a page, ciphers of absence and silence, sites of encounter, as well as figures and tools of orientation. This chapter thus argues that the orthographic symbol is not an incidental product of Celan and Tawada’s writing, but pivotal to an understanding of the materiality of language and sensory (e.g. visual) translation in Tawada and Celan’s literary and 3

Yildiz 2006, 157. To give only a few examples, Tawada’s 1998 Tübingen poetics lectures are entitled Verwandlungen (Transformations). One of these lectures is dedicated to the problem of translation. Besides having edited a collection of emerging literature also entitled Verwandlungen (1998), the title of Tawada’s 2002 essay collection, Überseezungen (Over-sea Tongues), is a play on the words Übersetzung (translation), Seezunge (sole), Übersee (overseas), and Zunge (tongue). 5 This chapter does not seek to underestimate the authors’ biographical multilingualism and the historical and cultural circumstances leading to their transposition into other geographies and languages. Nonetheless, it understands literary multilingualism as defined by Yasemin Yildiz, “as the co-existence and interaction of at least two languages, be it at the level of individuals, communities, discourses, or texts” (idem 2006, 4). For a more thorough exposition of twentiethcentury German literary multilingualism, see the introduction to Yildiz 2012. 6 For a brief discussion by Tawada of her experience of reading Celan’s poetry, see Brandt 2008, 14. 7 An orthographic symbol is understood as any individual character or punctuation used in an orthographic system, and an orthographic system as any script or system of writing. 4

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essayistic output. This essay, therefore, aims to contribute to the growing scholarship on the materiality and multisensory nature of writing systems, whose relationship to Celan and Tawada’s oeuvre has received insufficient critical attention to date.8 After exploring the dimensions of Celan and Tawada’s preoccupation with the materiality of language, this chapter will focus on the materiality of writing and reading on the typo-topographic space of the page and its relationship to the phenomena of image and sound in Celan and Tawada’s literary output. It will draw on Sybille Krämer’s plea for scholarly attention to text as image, cognitive tool, and technƝ, in addition to its more commonly acknowledged roles in communication and transcription, and Friedrich Kittler’s work on the intermediality of letters. This chapter will thus seek to uncover those instances in Celan and Tawada’s oeuvre when letters are treated as images in continual transformation. The point of departure for this analysis will be Tawada’s oft-quoted essay “Das Tor des Übersetzers, oder Celan liest Japanisch” (“The Gate of the Translator, or Celan Reads Japanese”) from the collection Talisman (1996), which features an encounter between Tawada and Celan’s poetics, and stages this encounter at the threshold of the Sino-Japanese ideogram for “gate.”9 As the ensuing discussion of Daniel Heller-Roazen’s reading of Ovid’s account of the water nymph Io will reveal, however, an analysis of the visuality of letters need not be limited to pictograms like the ideogram for “gate.” It can be extended to the entirety of the Latin alphabet. This, however, implies that letters of the alphabet are subject to visual translation as transformation. This chapter will thus trace the metamorphoses of the

8

This essay does not seek to argue for the primacy of seeing over hearing, but rather to explore the visuality of writing systems in Tawada and Celan in some detail. 9 This essay is not the first or last in which Tawada refers to orthographic symbols in Celan’s poetry. In Tawada’s 1993 short work of fiction Ein Gast (A Guest), the narrator speaks of her difficulties in reading texts written in phonetic alphabet, which she likens to a “grille” (Gitter) or “sand in the salad” (Sand im Salat—ibid., 20). This reference is most likely an allusion to the title of Celan’s 1959 poetry collection Sprachgitter (Speech-grille). See also “Rabbi Löw und 27 Punkte” (“Rabbi Löw and 27 Dots”) and “Die Krone aus Gras” (“The Crown of Grass”) in Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte (Language Police and Play Polyglots—Tawada 2007). The three literary essays (including “The Gate”) perform close readings of Celan’s poetry with detailed attention to punctuation and the shape of letters in Celan’s original poems, and ideograms and parts of ideograms in their Japanese translations. Many thanks to Leslie Adelson for pointing out the allusion to Celan’s Sprachgitter in Tawada’s Ein Gast.

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shape O, which can be read as letter, the number zero, and the circular form of a meridian in Celan and Tawada’s texts. This chapter will examine four works from Celan and Tawada’s literary and essayistic output. Drawing on Werner Hamacher’s exposition of the figure of inversion, or “the negative positing of the negative” in Celan,10 it will show that the letter O is a central image, sound, physical presence, and embodiment of inversion in “Es war Erde in ihnen” (“There Was Earth Inside Them”) from Celan’s 1963 poetry collection Die Niemandsrose (The No-one’s-rose). Likewise, Tawada’s chapter “Coronis” from her 2000 intertextual prose work Opium für Ovid: Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen (Opium for Ovid: A Pillow-book of 22 Women) foregrounds visual metamorphoses of the letter O. Hence, this chapter builds productive tensions between the visual mark on the page and the absence of its sound. The analysis will then trace the figure of the meridian in Tawada’s essay “An der Spree” (“On the Spree”) from her 2007 poetry and essay collection Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte (Language Police and Play Polyglots) and Celan’s Georg Büchner Prize acceptance speech entitled “Der Meridian” (“The Meridian”—1960). While Celan’s speech does not refer to the meridian as letter, Tawada’s zero and Celan’s meridian allow momentary orientations in which the number and the poem oscillate between their status as marks on a page and something virtual or extraterrestrial. In their multisensory employment of letters as sound and visual mark, Celan and Tawada display the irreducibility of their oeuvre to semantic sense-making.

The materiality of language The materiality of Celan and Tawada’s languages can be understood in several ways. First, both Celan and Tawada’s vocabulary refer to concrete objects and bodies. For instance, geological and botanical terms abound in Celan’s Niemandsrose. Rochelle Tobias draws attention to the languages of geology, astrology, and anatomy in Celan’s work, emphasizing the centrality of “forms of embodiment” for all three scientific disciplines and for Celan’s oeuvre. These scientific terms and Celan’s language all refer to bodies in some form: a celestial body, a sedimentary body, an organ, or a limb.11 Likewise, the significance of the body and sensory experience for Tawada’s oeuvre is evident in Tawada’s consistent engagement with bodily transformation. Opium für Ovid comprises twenty-two short prose 10 11

Hamacher 1996, 350. Tobias 2006, 118; 1.

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pieces about female characters from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with special emphasis on their transformations. Ein Gast (A Guest—1993) not only features scenes of hearing, mishearing, and an ear-infection, but also includes visual representations of the ear from various works of Western art. The 2002 essay collection Überseezungen (Over-sea Tongues) focuses on experiences of the tongue, understood both as the body part and the language localized on it.12 Secondly, the materiality of Celan and Tawada’s language can be understood as the materiality of their texts, which call upon the reader to enter them like a landscape, or assemble them like fragmented objects. Celan borrows a term from geography for his presentation of poetry in “Der Meridian,” which not only employs rich spatial vocabulary (“topos research,” “tropes,” “map”), but speaks of re-turning and encounter in poetry.13 Peter Szondi’s close reading of the poem “Engführung” (“Stretto”) from the collection Sprachgitter (Speech-grille—1959) is also based on the observation that the poem is a landscape exhorting the reader to enter it.14 In a similar vein, Ottmar Ette calls attention to texts by Roland Barthes and Yoko Tawada that not only tell of particular geographic formations, but perform these geographies in their structure.15 Tawada’s 1987 short-story “Bilderrätsel ohne Bilder” (“Picture Puzzles without Pictures”) consists of several narrative threads that never converge into a denouement. Instead, the story ends with the scene of a puppet’s dismemberment, at which moment the narrator fantasizes that a dismembered puppet could be reassembled like a disjointed story. The text thus both narrates this fantasy and enacts it in its narrative structure.16 12 On experiences of the tongue and mouth in Tawada, see for instance Genz 2005. On the intersections between experiences of the ear and surrealist aesthetics in Tawada, see Brandt 2007, 111-24. For a study linking bodies in motion and displacement through travel in Tawada, see Slaymaker 2010. 13 Celan 2011, 2-13; idem 1999, 2-13. 14 Szondi 1972, 49-50. This section of the chapter only seeks to lay out some texts by Celan and Tawada, and important contributions to Celan and Tawada scholarship that address different facets of the materiality of language in their oeuvre. A more thorough discussion of how these scholarly contributions relate to one another lies beyond the scope of this essay. Yet it should be noted that Rochelle Tobias opposes Szondi's reading of the performative dimension of Celan's poetry, where the poem enacts its utterances (see idem 2006, 5-6). 15 Ette 2010, 208-10. Indeed, Tawada’s poetics does recall Barthes’s notion of the writerly text, in which the reader is “no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text,” in contrast to the readerly text, in which the reader is only a receiver left with “the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text” (Barthes 1974, 4). 16 Tawada 1987, 55; 74.

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Thirdly, and most importantly for this analysis, Celan and Tawada thematize or explore the materiality of writing as visual marks on the typotopographic space of the page, in their poetics, and in their oeuvre. With reference to the visuality of Celan’s oeuvre, Thomas Schestag’s detailed readings of Celan’s idiosyncratically split words and fragments illustrate Celan's affinity for anagrams, as well as the rearrangeability and puzzlelike nature of letters, syllables, and words.17 However, to give one example from “Der Meridian,” Celan asks in his discussion of Georg Büchner’s Leonce und Lena (Leonce and Lena): Gibt es nicht gerade in “Leonce und Lena” diese den Worten unsichtbar zugelächelten Anführungszeichen, die vielleicht nicht als Gänsefüßchen, die vielmehr als Hasenöhrchen, das heißt also als etwas nicht ganz furchtlos über sich und die Worte Hinauslauschendes verstanden sein wollen?18 And yet: isn’t Leonce and Lena full of quotation marks, invisibly and smilingly added to the words, that want to be understood perhaps not as goose-feet (Gänsefüßchen), but rather as a hare’s ears (Hasenöhrchen), that is, something not completely fearless, that listens beyond itself and the words?19

The quotation marks around the cited words generate associations of a distinctly visual nature. At first, the marks are likened to goose feet, that is, bodily parts whose form and prints on the ground both resemble quotation marks.20 Celan decides on rabbit ears as the better resemblance, a pair of bodily organs that not only resemble the quotation marks visually, but which perform analogue functions in a body and body of text: that of listening.21 If rabbit ears best resemble quotation marks in function and visual form, then the quotation marks both reference and enact the speaker’s porousness in the speech “Der Meridian.” As Kristina Mendicino 17

Schestag 1994, 411-15. Celan 1999, 12 (§48c). 19 Celan 2011, 12 (§48c). 20 “Gänsefüßchen” (goose-feet) is an idiomatic expression for “quotation marks” in German. The more technical and commonly used term is “Anführungszeichen.” “Gänsefüßchen” is used mostly by children, or by adults speaking to children. Celan’s use of the expression in the formal context of an awards ceremony is an unusual choice that cannot be casual. 21 It is probably no accident that Celan has chosen precisely organs of hearing as the best visual analogue for quotation marks. Given that Celan’s words are delivered as part of a speech, this suggests that seeing and hearing for Celan are equally significant for the world of the text, even if the text is delivered orally. 18

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persuasively argues, “the first thing that the Meridian does is radically diffuse its speaker by condensing many temporalities and personae in the same words,” particularly by overwhelming the speaker’s voice with citations.22 In performing the permeability between Celan’s citations and the body of his speech on the typo-topographic space of the page, the rabbit-ears dramatize Celan’s practice of citation explosion and the ensuing disarticulation of the speaker in “Der Meridian.”23 In her second Tübingen poetics lecture entitled “Schift einer Schildkröte, oder Das Problem der Übersetzung” (“Writing of a Tortoise, or the Problem of Translation”), Tawada discusses problems attending translations between texts written using Sino-Japanese ideograms and those written in the Latin alphabet. Her observations of the forms of written characters consistently reveal that she regards them as visual marks on a page or as bodies in their own right. With reference to ideograms, Tawada declares: “a [Sino-Japanese] character is a picture that has been painted over several times” (ein Zeichen ist ein Bild, das mehrmals übermalt wurde).24 A character from Tawada’s essay “An der Spree” from Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte reads the letter of the Latin alphabet in this way, when she mistakes “The Marquise of O...” (a well-known fictional character of Heinrich von Kleist) for “The Marquise of Zero” (Die Marquise von Null).25 To the astonishment of Tawada's narrator in another essay in the same collection, entitled “Kleist auf Japanisch” (“Kleist in Japanese”), the name of the Marquise appears unchanged in Japanese translation as the letter O.26 Tawada’s Os and Celan’s quotation marks rely not on the sound of the letter O but its visual form as image on the page. This material writing entails more than communication in language. Writing the meridian, quotation marks, ideograms, and the zero do not only constitute the means to produce text as text but also text as 22

Mendicino 2011, 635. The faculty of hearing and the notion of the unerhört (unheard) are also of critical importance for Mendicino’s discussion of “other rhetoric” in “Der Meridian.” 23 While Mendicino focuses on the event of Celan’s speech, this analysis focuses on the written text of the Büchner Prize speech. Celan’s reference to the rabbit-ears suggests that the written page is significant for him even as he is delivering an oral address. 24 Tawada 1998, 30. All translations from Tawada’s work are Gizem Arslan’s unless noted or cited otherwise. 25 Tawada 2007, 19. 26 Tawada 2007, 89. Japanese uses a syllabary called Katakana for transcribing foreign names and loan-words. It would have been entirely possible for the Japanese translation to use Katakana and not the Latin alphabet.

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image. The produced images are not those to which the text refers but the images that the text is as visual presence on the page.

Visual letters The visual world of the page as typo-topographic space, and the capacities of letters as visual marks on a page and ciphers of absence in Celan and Tawada’s oeuvre have received limited critical attention to date.27 Despite the difficulties attending any interpretation of elements of language not typically considered vehicles of meaning, an analysis of letters attentive to their visual metamorphoses performs two significant types of critical labor: First, it focuses attention on the materiality of that which does the representing (in this case, letters as signs) as well as the paradoxical nature of this practice. In his reflections on the materiality of the sign in Western European philosophical traditions, Dieter Mersch summarizes this problematic thus: a sign represents something absent, and in so doing, purports to make that which is absent present again. That implies that exploring the materiality of the sign entails exploring tensions between the materiality of the representing and that which it is purported to represent.28 This chapter’s analysis holds that Celan and Tawada are not only attuned to the visuality of texts, but that they employ individual letters in order to throw letters in relief as the very material of writing. Secondly and relatedly, this essay also sees Celan and Tawada’s writing practices as intermedial, not only as text, but as image and mathematical operation. This analysis does not seek to present Celan and Tawada’s work, or texts in general, as image only, or to oppose the visual to other capacities of text. Rather, its focus on the intermedial should be understood as a plea for an enriched reading of literary texts that avails itself of their multiple sensory capacities. In her call for heightened scholarly attention to those aspects of writing that cannot be captured by the terms “communication,” “transcription,” and “symbolic structure,” Krämer opposes the “schemata of language or image, symbol or technƝ” (Schemata von Sprache oder 27

Thomas Schestag’s article “buk” (1994) is a noteworthy exception. While Schestag seeks to trace fragmented and split words throughout Celan’s oeuvre, this chapter will perform a close reading of one Celan poem in its entirety, in order to better understand the relationship between the world of the poem and the creative labor performed by the letter in it. For references to letters and fragments in Tawada’s work as nonsensical, see for example Anderson 2010; Arens 2007; or Knott 2010. This chapter will read such elements not as nonsensical, but rather as sensory. 28 Mersch 2002, 11-12; 18.

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Bild, Symbol oder Technik). She asserts instead that “writing as medium is a hybrid creation; it is an intermedial phenomenon” (Schrift als Medium ist eine Hybridbildung; sie ist ein intermediales Phänomen). She elects to focus on the performative aspects of writing (texts that enact what they say) as well as on those capacities of writing that spoken language cannot capture. She does so in order to replace the “or”s with “and”s.29 In this vein, Friedrich Kittler seeks to give orthographic symbols their place in the history of media. Although Kittler does not focus on the visual form of individual characters, his article “Number and Numeral” (2006) moves to “unfold the essential unity of writing, number, image and tone.” According to Kittler, letters were once used to record language, mathematics (letters corresponded to numbers), and music (letters designated tone).30 Claiming that media studies “only make sense when media make senses,” he adds importantly, “it is not the meaning of signs to make any sense, they are there to sharpen our senses rather than ensnare them in definitions.”31 The distinction between making sense and making senses is of crucial importance for two reasons. First, Kittler’s essay illustrates that the intermediality of writing is not an emerging phenomenon but one overlooked since Aristotle. He adds that for much longer than thought, letters presented readers with multiple reading possibilities (letters, numbers, or musical notation) which were left to the reader to discern. Secondly, Kittler’s letters do not necessarily “make sense,” in that they do not lead to singular definitions. They rather allow inherently multiple readings, for phenomenal sense (the sensory experience of text) as well as semantic sense. Given Celan and Tawada’s preoccupation with the materiality of texts evident in their attention to the visuality of quotation marks and the number zero respectively, letters as images in Celan and Tawada deserve critical attention.

The gate of the translator One oft-cited encounter between Tawada and Celan’s poetry takes place at the threshold of a sole written character, the Sino-Japanese radical for “gate” (㛛).32 In her 1996 essay “Das Tor des Übersetzers, oder Celan 29

Krämer 2003, 160-61; 174 (translation by Gizem Arslan). For a more thorough discussion of operative writing as a tool for cognition and the developments in mathematical calculations allowed by algebraic symbols, see Krämer 1993. 31 Kittler 2006, 52; 56-57. 32 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a radical is “[a]ny of the set of basic Chinese characters which, sometimes in a modified form, constitute 30

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liest Japanisch,” Tawada observes the appearance of seven Sino-Japanese ideograms containing the radical for “gate” in the Japanese translation of Celan’s 1955 poetry collection, Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (From Threshold to Threshold). These seven ideograms, 㛛 (gate), ⪺ (hear), 㛤 (open), 㛝 (flash, glitter), 㜈 (threshold), 㜌 (darkness), 㛫 (space, interval) might all have to do with gates at a semantic level.33 Tawada points out, however, that this connection might not be apparent to a reader accustomed to grasping the entirety of an ideogram at once, that is, a reader not attuned to the visual composition of ideograms.34 Precisely this visual attunement initiates Tawada’s close reading of Celan. In her reading, Tawada shifts the status of the radical “gate” from an accidentally occurring—and recurring—product of translation to the embodiment of Celan’s translatability, that is, the possibility that the translation of a literary work can itself be literature.35 Tawada suggests that Celan’s poems “peer into the Japanese” (ins Japanische hineinblicken), although Celan did not ever learn Japanese or work with a Japanese translator.36 For Tawada, the German original and the Japanese translation are literature in their own right. What is more important to her reading, however, is the semantically or functionally significant elements in the composition of other characters, and are used as a means of ordering and classifying characters in dictionaries.” (see the OED Online edition). This chapter categorizes the ideograms in the Japanese translation of Celan’s poetry as Sino-Japanese. This is because Chinese ideograms were adapted into Japanese, with important modifications in pronunciation, orthography, and general usage. 33 For example, the ideogram ⪺ (hear), there is an ear (⪥) under the gate, possibly eavesdropping on sounds beyond (see Tawada 1996, 126). 34 Tawada 1996, 122-23. 35 Tawada 1996, 126. “The Gate” reads Celan alongside Walter Benjamin’s essay “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (“The Task of the Translator”—1923) and takes the concept of translatability from Benjamin. Leslie Adelson (2011, 162-3) notes an important conceptual shift in Tawada’s treatment of Benjamin in “The Gate.” Adelson observes that “[t]he essay most often cited as bespeaking Benjamin’s influence on Tawada’s approach to translation” is her earliest published essay on Paul Celan, “Das Tor des Übersetzers oder Paul Celan liest Japanisch” (“The Translator’s Gate or Paul Celan Reads Japanese”) of 1996. Yet, in this early Celan essay, Tawada fashions a narrative “I” that has clearly read Benjamin but diverges significantly from his thoughts on translation by foregrounding acts of reading and writers who read, especially in the form of her narrative persona. For Benjamin in 1923, as is well known, neither the literary original nor a worthy translation revolves around “the reader.” For an overview of Tawada’s references to Benjamin and appropriations of certain elements of his work, see Ivanovic 2010. 36 Tawada 1996, 125.

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gate as site of encounter that enables the mutual illumination between the German and Japanese texts, and becomes a central figure for reading Celan’s poetic language. The gate indeed becomes pivotal, in particular for understanding the ways in which Celan’s poetry unlocks meaning rather than restrains it. “I began to regard Celan’s poems,” muses Tawada, “as gates and not as houses in which meaning is preserved like a possession” (Ich fing an, Celans Gedichte wie Tore zu betrachten und nicht etwa wie Häuser, in denen die Bedeutung wie ein Besitz aufbewahrt wird).37 This implies that Celan’s poems, and also Celan’s words in general, can be read as “gates,” or to use Celan’s words, as “thresholds.” They do not contain or circumscribe meaning; rather they open up possibilities for varied encounters with texts and words. Leslie Adelson comments on Tawada’s reading of Celan’s poetry: [It] does not mark a border (Grenze) between two distinct worlds but a threshold (Schwelle), a site where consciousness of something new flashes into view. (…) For Tawada reading Celan, the word is a site of opening, a threshold that beckons.38

According to Tawada, this “gate” or “threshold” is a space in its own right: “it is not about crossing a particular border, rather, wandering from border to border” (Es geht nicht darum, eine bestimmte Grenze zu überschreiten, sondern darum, von einer Grenze zu einer anderen zu wandern).39 As Adelson too observes, the space of the gate or threshold can never be closed, never be instrumentalized for passage from one region to another. It is important to note, however, that translatability and encounter for Tawada are embodied in a single written character, the radical for “gate.” This radical does not represent but embodies translatability as a visual mark on a page, attesting to Tawada’s insistence on the materiality of text, concretized in the act of reading. Christine Ivanovic observes that Tawada is invested in surface phenomena in the world of things and in the world of language. According to Ivanovic, Tawada is a proponent of a mode of reading in which the reader transforms the multivalent surfaces of writing into literary text through a process Ivanovic names “Verdichtung” (Compaction). Verdichtung refers to the multiple possibilities of interpreting surfaces “as constellations of writing or signs, which do not 37

Tawada 1996, 134. Adelson 2003, 24. 39 Tawada 1996, 128. 38

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express something, but draw in the gaze for the sake of compaction” (als Schrift- oder Zeichenkonstellationen, die nicht etwas ausdrücken, sondern den Blick in sich hineinziehen um der Verdichtung willen). 40 Secondly, the radical not only embodies but performs an encounter, quite literally as a site of opening and reception between Celan’s poetry in German and Japanese. Lastly, it takes on these functions only in the moments in which it is being read and written as a distinct and visual orthographic element. In the process, it becomes a pivotal figure for reading Celan’s poetry as a series of texts that seek to open up meaning rather than to restrain it. This mode of reading as a concretization of the non-semantic possibilities of text is exemplary not only of Tawada as reader but of Tawada as author.

Metamorphoses and writing The radical for “gate” might be particularly well-suited for visual readings as an ideogram—in fact, a pictogram whose shape resembles the object it designates. In related fashion, Daniel Heller-Roazen reads letters of the Latin alphabet as visual marks in a foundational moment of writing from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In his work on the forgetting of language, HellerRoazen documents that the babbling infant can pronounce sounds in any language. As the babble is chiseled into the language in which the infant is socialized, the gamut of its former sound production is lost. According to Heller-Roazen, certain moments of loss of speech, extra-linguistic sounds, and unsounded or lost letters paradoxically recall “the indistinct and immemorial babble that, in being lost, allowed all languages to be.”41 Heller-Roazen’s foundational moment of writing takes place in the story of the water nymph Io in the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Jupiter falls in love with Io. In an effort to conceal this relationship from his wife Juno, he surrounds himself and the nymph in heavy mists. When Juno descends to the earth to investigate this sudden midday darkness, Jupiter has little choice but to hide Io by transforming the nymph into a beautiful white cow. However, posing a series of pointed questions about the cow’s provenance, Juno requests the animal from her husband as a gift. Trapped, Jupiter yields. The transformed nymph is then entrusted to the care and vigilance of the hundred-eyed Argos. One day, however, she is able to steal away to the banks of her native river. There, unable to utter an intelligible sound, she communicates with her father the river god, by writing on the riverbank the two letters of her name. The letters on the 40 41

Ivanovic 2010, 185. Heller-Roazen 2008, 12.

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sand, Heller-Roazen argues, testify to the nymph’s metamorphosis. Metamorphosis necessitates that one form be changed completely into another. If the writing cow has undergone a real metamorphosis as opposed to mere modification, however, it cannot bear any resemblance to the nymph born to the river god Inachus. Heller-Roazen continues: Precisely for the metamorphosis to be without residue, it must paradoxically admit of a remainder that bears witness to the event of the mutation: an element both foreign to the new body and still contained within it, an exceptional trait in the body “strange” that harks back to the earlier shape it once possessed. In the case of the cow, the remainder is the written name of the vanished nymph, whose inscription marks the transformation of the creature it designates. I and O, the two letters drawn in the sand by the banks of the river, at once bear witness to the change and belie it. They are, in every sense of the word, what betray the metamorphosis.42

The letters of the nymph’s name, however, “have a unique position in the alphabet.” I and O are the basic elements from which all of the Attic Greek letters are built.43 The following can then be said of the nymph Io: [She] did much more than print her name at the banks of her father. She inscribed for the first time the two elements of human writing and thereby invented, albeit in nuce, the totality of human script. Writing, in short, is the creation of the cow: the remainder produced in the definitive disappearance of the voice.44

Heller-Roazen’s observations reveal several important features of this foundational moment of writing. First, if the letters printed on the sand “betray” the metamorphosis, and the writing-remainder is minute yet corporeal, then the metamorphosis serves also to materialize the letters by endowing them with corporeality. Secondly, after the loss of speech, the visual form of writing is foregrounded at the expense of the sound of the name Io. Thirdly, the letters I and O are foregrounded as separate elements of writing. Not only is writing presented as a concatenation of the visual forms of letters, but the letters of the alphabet themselves as combinations of two elemental geometric forms. Thus, what follows from the

42

Heller-Roazen 2008, 124. The Attic alphabet is not the Latin alphabet, but is related to it. The observation holds for both alphabets. 44 Heller-Roazen 2008, 125. 43

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impossibility of producing distinct human sounds is the moment of the innumerable possibilities of writing. Both Tawada and Heller-Roazen read possible literary coincidences (that there happens to be a particular high concentration of seven ideograms containing the same radical, or that the nymph happens to be called Io) as indispensable to the texts at hand. While Heller-Roazen thematizes the loss of speech more pointedly than Tawada, his reading of the Latin alphabet in visual fragmentation recalls Tawada’s reading of seven ideograms on the basis of their common radical. Their readings converge in their attention to visual elements of writing over the sound of a text in two distinct and disparate writing systems.

Celan’s visual poetics Although the sound-world of a Celan poem is by no means negligible, and although Celan does visually translate entire words, this section will expore the visual transformations of the letter O in the poem “Es war Erde in ihnen” from Die Niemandsrose.45 The letter O in “Es war Erde in ihnen” appears as a cipher of silence and absence, but also as sound, as the likeness of the number zero, as a visual mark of the incessant exercise of digging, and also of the final circular object in the poem, the ring. It thus participates on the elemental scale of the letter in what Werner Hamacher terms inversion in Celan’s poetics, “in which the phenomenal and linguistic world is opened onto a caesura that not a single shape of this world can exorcize, since each of these shapes results from it.”46 The letter O both concretizes a gap on the space of the page, and in its refusal to be read as a single type of sign, withdraws from any stable and unitary system of communication or sense-making. Absence is etched visually into the English title No-one’s-rose, semantically referencing and visually repeating a circular figure: “no-one” is a set of null value (0), while the title abounds in Os.47 One of the texts which best presents this abundance of absence on the space of the page is the first poem “Es war Erde in ihnen:” 45

The significance of Celan’s sound-worlds is evidenced famously by the uncanny contrapuntal rhythm of “Todesfuge” (“Death-fugue”) from Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory—1952). In the poem “Bei Wein und Verlorenheit” (“With Wine and Lostness”) from Die Niemandsrose, Celan translates the words “snow” (Schnee), “dregs” (Neige), and “neighs” (Gewieher) both visually and semantically. 46 Hamacher 1996, 360. 47 There is only one O in the German title. However, as “Es war Erde in ihnen” will suggest, Os do appear prominently elsewhere in the collection.

Orientation, Encounter, and Synaesthesia in Paul Celan & Yoko Tawada 213 Es war Erde in ihnen, und sie gruben. Sie gruben und gruben, so ging ihr Tag dahin, ihre Nacht. Und sie lobten nicht Gott, der, so hörten sie, all dies wollte, der, so hörten sie, all dies wusste. Sie gruben und hörten nichts mehr; sie wurden nicht weise, erfanden kein Lied, erdachten sich keinerlei Sprache. Sie gruben. Es kam eine Stille, es kam auch ein Sturm, es kamen die Meere alle. Ich grabe, du gräbst, und es gräbt auch der Wurm, und das Singende dort sagt: Sie graben. O einer, o keiner, o niemand, o du: Wohin gings, da‘s nirgendhin ging? O du gräbst und ich grab, und ich grab mich dir zu, und am Finger erwacht uns der Ring.48 There was earth inside them, and they dug. They dug and dug, and so their day went past, their night. And they did not praise God, who, so they heard, wanted all this, who, so they heard, witnessed all this. They dug and heard nothing more; they did not grow wise, invented no song, devised for themselves no sort of language. They dug. There came a stillness then, came also storm, all of the oceans came. I dig, you dig, and it digs too, the worm, and the singing there says: They dig. O one, o none, o no one, o you: Where did it go then, making for nowhere? 48

Celan 1983, 1: 211.

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The rhythm of digging in the poem is both visual and aural, as the recurring phrase “sie gruben” (they dug) punctuates the poem. If one recalls the poetic process of inversion at work in Celan’s oeuvre, according to Jürgen Lehmann, this recurring phrase “they dug/dig” can be read as the paradoxical reversal of the line “they shovel a grave in the air” from “Death-fugue.” The figures here have earth inside them, and instead of shoveling in the air, they dig into the earth, and into themselves.50 The poem recalls a biblical beginning, when “the Lord God formed man from the dust on the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”51 The Hebrew word “adamah,” here used for “ground,” also means “arable land,” which God’s breath animates into life. However, God, breath, and arable land have all withdrawn from this opening scene. Those digging have earth inside them, but this earth appears to be lifeless. The incessant activity of digging does not appear to have any purpose or goal other than the activity itself; it is an empty, nonagrarian exercise. No seed germinates. God is absent from the world he knows and wills, and which does not praise him. More importantly, however, breath and sound are absent: those digging “heard nothing more,” “did not grow wise, invented no song, /devised for themselves no sort of language.” They do not sound out a breath, that is, they do not call or sing, which typically involves sounding vowels in speech and musical tone. Those digging do not “grow wise,” or devise a language, thus cannot forge language and reason into logos. In Friedrich Kittler’s account of Homeric song notated by letters of the Greek alphabet, “the tone letters struck up did what vowels, as indicated by their very name, are said to do: they called—and like the sirens they called out to their hero.”52 This initial scene of “Es war Erde in ihnen” is one without the breath, language, and song of vowels. The O of the vocatives to come later emerges in this early section only as shapes of gaping holes in the ground. Nothing less than a sea-change can transform this scene, and in fact, the silence of the beginning could be the lull before the storm that comes in the fourth stanza. What follow are rhythmic invocations of digging, but 49

Celan 2000, 134-35. Lehmann 1997, 51. 51 Gen. 2:7. 52 Kittler 2006, 57. The Greek alphabet is significant for having introduced vowels into writing. 50

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with one important change: now it is not an empty or generic “they” that dig, but “I,” “you,” “the worm,” while a voice sings of the digging.53 As Yoko Tawada points out in her reading of this poem, this conjugation of the verb “dig” is not an empty grammar exercise, but is musical, much like a theme and its variations.54 The series of conjugations act like linguistic seeds that anticipate the botanic terminology and tropes of Niemandsrose. They germinate the scene, multiply the acts and actors of digging, and render their contours less vague than the impersonal “they.” Conjugation as linguistic germination and the stillness-storm dynamic form the poles of an oscillation, between stillness and deluge, the absence and presence of life, and the absence and emergence of sound. A breath has entered the scene. While it is still unclear whether the digging has become an agrarian exercise, the linguistic world of the poem has been sown with conjugations. More importantly, breath and music have entered the poem. However, the tonal call does not end there. It culminates in a series of vocatives. Grammatically, the vocative is a case where that which stands in the nominative (i.e. as subject) becomes an addressee. This appears to be the beginning of any communication in the poem, where one speaking being calls to another. Now, both the rhythm of digging and the series of vocative Os punctuate the fifth stanza. That which had insinuated itself into the fourth stanza as breath and song now appears as a vowel and calls out to an addressee. The nature of this addressee and the act of calling deserve particular scrutiny here. Hamacher cautions against reading Celan’s speakers and addressees as positive figures. Arguing that the caesura that runs through all of Celan’s poetry “disperses every unit and every condition that makes unity possible,”55 he holds that Celan’s “I”s and “you”s are disarticulated by this fissure as the communicative power of language is disrupted: I and Thou, which, according to dialogical theories, should reciprocally constitute each other, deconstitute each other in the chiasmus—it, too, an inversion—of their crossed attempts to get a grip on themselves and to make themselves capable of being grasped, until this deconstitution makes them into figures of an encounter with nothingness.56

53 In German, “the singing there” clearly denotes a person who is singing, not the event or action of singing that happens “over there.” 54 Tawada 2007, 75. 55 Hamacher 1996, 360. 56 Hamacher 1996, 373.

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The caesura of inversion both separates and binds; it also deconstitutes the speaker and addressee as parties of communication. But what are the “letteral” dimensions of inversion at work in the letter O and Celan’s vocatives? The vocatives count, address, and mark the entities that follow them. The first is “one,” the next “none,” then a “nobody,” followed by a “du,” as the poem alternates between calling “one” and “no-one.” Each O articulates sound and addresses; however, it simultaneously constitutes the addressee and deconstitutes him, in addressing him alternately as “one” and “no-one.” The words introduced by these exclamations refer both to human subjects and numbers. The words einer (one) and du (you) designate one person or a quantity of one, while keiner (none) and niemand (no one) designate both an absence and a set of null value. It is possible to read the stanza as a series of numbers, by substituting 1 where a quantity of one is referenced, and 0 where the quantity is zero. Especially in the last stanza, Celan’s visual poetics becomes apparent in the encounter between the sound of the letter O and this impossible counting enabled by the visual resemblance of the letter to zero. This contact and encounter between the different capacities of writing and of the orthographic symbol constitute the foundational moment of writing in which the caller and the addressee are inscribed on the page as “I” or implied by the word “one” as the number 1. In response and contrast, the letter O of the multiple vocatives and the number 0 implied by “none” and “no one” are inscribed as the possibility of their absence, almost visible on the space of the page as holes dug into the earth. The possibility of absence is heightened by the references to units of null value. Celan suggests a third dimension to this circular yet two-dimensional form, as a ring “awakens” on the last line of the poem. Because the ring could both refer to the shape of a ring or to the object itself, it remains ambiguous whether the circular form achieves this third dimension. The ring awakens as the “I” and “you” become “we,” a possible figure of circumscribing, yet also of a circularity and gap inscribed into this relationship from the first invocations of digging to the vocative address. While the vocative Os designate address, the letter O refuses to be read as a sign of communication. The multiple readings it invites as phenomenal sense (the image of the hole), cipher of absence (the number zero), and the ambiguous ring, disrupt communicative language and participate in a mode of sense-making that cannot be contained by semantic sense alone. If the last image of the ring is in fact the concretization of these many circular forms into a concrete object, then the potential materialization of

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the ring at the end might be the paradoxical withdrawal of the very element of writing (the letter O) from the space of the page.

Coronis and concrete letters Celan’s poetry concretizes and multiplies the sensory possibilities of the letter O in order to problematize its participation in semantic sensemaking. The following passage from Tawada addresses letters and pronunciation more explicitly than Celan, but makes a similar move: it presents a jumble of letters as sensical and multivalent, only to hinge their potential for multiple sense-making around the visual transformations of the letter O. Each chapter of Opium für Ovid: Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen features a female character from Ovid’s Metamorphoses transplanted into what appears to be contemporary Western Europe. The chapter entitled “Coronis” takes its name from Coronis of Larissa, a princess of famed beauty, who cheats on her lover Apollo. A raven reports this treachery to Apollo, who kills Coronis in a fit of jealous rage. However, Apollo’s fury soon turns upon the spy. He chars the white raven, turning its feathers black, the color they have remained to this day. This story is thus not about Coronis’s but rather the raven’s transformation, and not into another body, but from the common color of a page into a common color of ink. Tawada’s Coronis is an émigré author from a communist dictatorship. The dictatorship and its secret police appear to have made her the subject of practices of surveillance and persecution in her former life. As a result, she is troubled still by birds, whose appearance in front of her window arouse uneasiness at the haunting sense of being observed. Among interwoven and intertextual themes of witnessing, spying, and betrayal (as well as the refusal to betray), Coronis develops an eye condition in which there is a dark spot in her field of vision resembling an insect. When she goes to the doctor for an eye examination, the doctor attributes her condition to age and gives her an eye test: Der Arzt setzt ein Probebrille auf Coronis’ Nase und zeigt auf ein Plakat, auf dem Reihen von Buchstaben zu sehen sind. Sie sehen aus wie konkrete Poesie. “Was für einen Buchstaben sehen Sie dort?” Coronis sieht ein O, aber mit einer anderen Brille sieht sie ein Q, mit einer dritten ein G. “Was sehen Sie nun?” fragt der Arzt.

218

Chapter Seven “Ich sehe jedesmal was anderes. Durch häufigen Brillenwechsel Mehrdeutigkeit erleben, soll das der Sinn einer Brille sein?”57 The doctor places test glasses onto Coronis’s nose and points to a chart, on which rows of letters can be seen. They look like concrete poetry. “What kind of letters do you see there?” Coronis sees an O, but with another set of glasses she sees a Q, with a third, a G. “So, what do you see?” asks the doctor. “I see something different every time. Experiencing ambiguity by frequent change of glasses, is that supposed to be the point of wearing glasses?”

Coronis’s visual defect renders her a creator and reader of metamorphoses. This defect is quite literally a déformation professionelle, a physical deformation of the eye from age and use. It is the author’s almost physically irrepressible urge to write and rewrite even in the absence of pen and paper, and to read every jumble of letters as literature. Most importantly, however, Coronis interprets the metamorphoses of the letters O, Q and G neither as errors in the physiological faculty of vision, nor as written characters to be pronounced. Rather, the reappearance of letters in different forms constitutes an experience of Mehrdeutigkeit (ambiguity) whose literal rendering in English would be “multivalence,” or “multiplicity of meaning or interpretation.” For Coronis, each letter she does not pronounce but reads, rereads, and misreads, means something. This meaning, however, should not be mistaken for semantic sense alone. Coronis’s overall impression of the chart is that it is poetry, that is, not a series of randomly distributed letters. Importantly, it resembles concrete poetry, in which the visual form of the text is just as important as the meaning of the words in it.58 She thus immediately builds a tension between the totality of a text, the individual letters in it, and the potentially conflicting modes of reading they invite. Already, Coronis’s reading eye begins to take leave of the sounds for which the letters stand in favor of their visual form. In fact, Coronis’s experience of ambiguity is none other than the visual transformation of the letters she sees. Although the letters O, Q and G have sounds associated with them, here they are meaningful 57

Tawada 2000, 83. The links between concrete poetry and Tawada’s poetics, while not discussed here, are worthy of focused critical attention. For a recent analysis of twentiethcentury citational poetics that suggests some links between concrete poetry and Tawada’s work, see Perloff 2010. 58

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units that always gesture toward their status as visual marks. Coronis never pronounces or otherwise identifies any of the letters she sees, despite the doctor’s urging. It is also unclear whether she acknowledges that her eye condition might be supplying the extra line to the letters G and Q on the chart, which resemble the letter O and which one can approximate by adding a horizontal line or stroke to the letter O. Coronis’s reading is already a form of writing, as her eyes supply the very material of writing, a kind of ink in the shape of a dark spot in the eye, to the text before her. This small spot-insect resembles Coronis’s namesake in Ancient Greek grammar, the term “corǀnis,” meaning “[a] sign resembling an apostrophe (‘), placed over a vowel as a mark of contraction or crasis.”59 In fact, “corǀnis” itself is none other than the typo-pictographic presentation of a hook, as “țȠȡȦȞȓȢ” means “hook” in Ancient Greek.60 The text calls for the proper name Coronis, belonging to a person, and the common noun, designating the typographic mark, to be read together. The typographic mark is thus quite literally inscribed into Coronis, into Coronis’s name, into her body as a spot in her eye, and into the text before her as a small spot, signaling the absence of sound. Coronis’s experience of multivalence in the metamorphoses of the letters in the Latin alphabet foregrounds the visual form of the letters and reveals the ways in which letters and parts of letters are integral to Tawada’s poetics in various capacities. First of all, the letters can transform into one another: they can be read and misread, rewritten, or be translated into the elements of another writing system altogether.61 Opium für Ovid’s intertextuality with Ovid’s Metamorphoses and treatment of metamorphosis thus need not be limited to bodies alone.62 In fact, the 59

See the OED Online. Smyth 1920, §62. 61 In her second Tübingen Poetics Lecture, dedicated to the problem of translation, Tawada remarks: “One cannot translate the letters. It is in fact not the text that cannot be translated, it is the script” (Die Buchstaben kann man nicht übersetzen. Es ist eigentlich nicht der Text, den man nie übersetzen kann, sondern die Schrift—idem 1998, 35). This is not a statement about the absolute untranslatability of writing systems or of texts. Rather, Tawada elaborates that a literary translation has to work with the problem and impossibility of translation rather than seek to obliterate it. 62 Ovid’s Metamorphoses begins with the invocation: “My soul would sing of metamorphoses./ But since, o gods, you were the source of these/ bodies becoming other bodies, breathe/ your breath into my book of changes” (idem 1993, 3). Tawada’s essayistic writing supports this link. In her Tübingen Poetics Lecture cited above, and in her 2009 Cornell Lecture on Aesthetics entitled “The Letter as Literature’s Political and Poetic Body,” Tawada often speaks of letters as “bodies,” 60

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letters’ transformations are interlinked with Coronis’s bodily defect. Secondly, the grounds on which these letters can transform into one another is not aural but visual. The letters O, Q, and G are pronounced differently, but might well be mistaken for one another by someone with poor vision. Lastly, in Coronis’s reading of the different forms of these letters with different meanings, the letters’ multisensory nature (aural, oral and visual) are associated with different possibilities of meaning. The German words Bedeutung (meaning) and Mehrdeutigkeit (multivalence), both derived from the verb deuten, already suggest multiple possibilities of meaning. Deuten can mean “to mean,” but also “to indicate,” “to point to,” and “to interpret.” Multivalence for Coronis indicates semantic meaning and interpretation, but also the physical experience of pointing to things. Moreover, the word Sinn (sense), which Coronis uses in the same sentence as Mehrdeutigkeit, is about as multivalent in English as it is in German. Here connoting “purpose,” it can also mean “meaning” or “sense,” and is used with reference to the five senses. When Coronis asks if multivalence by change of glasses can be the purpose (“Sinn”) of wearing glasses, she hints at links between the faculty of vision and multiple possibilities of semantic and phenomenal sensemaking, suggested by the words Mehrdeutigkeit and Sinn. To recall Kittler’s formulation, the letters O, Q, and G “make senses.”63 Importantly, Tawada’s Coronis is not disarticulated as character in the same way Celan’s speaker and addressees are dissociated through inversion. Coronis writ large and the typographical mark that bears her name are both silent, in that they perform or signal the absence of sound. They thus make the absence of sound perceptible, in similar ways to Celan’s Os and zeros that signal absence. The typographic mark is linked synecdochally to Coronis’s body, while the letters O, Q, and G are linked intra- and intertextually to transformed bodies. Foregrounding the possibilities of text in the eye test chart, only to withdraw the pronunciation of letters from the protocol of the test, Tawada presents individual orthographic symbols as corporeal metamorphoses of one another and as vehicles of multivalence. Although these meanings are not pronounced, they are inscribed in the visually metamorphosed letters as possibility.

“animals,” and the “remaining bones” once the reader has consumed the text (see idem 1998, 30 and 2009, 3). 63 Kittler 2006, 52.

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Meridians The question remains, what are the operational functions of the letter O in Celan and Tawada’s oeuvre, given that “Es war Erde in ihnen” and Tawada’s chapter “Coronis” by and large do not reference orientation or mathematical calculation? This section will trace the circular forms of meridians in Celan’s 1960 Büchner Prize acceptance speech entitled “Der Meridian,” and Tawada’s essay “An der Spree” from Sprachpolizei und Sprachpolyglotte.64 Celan’s visual poetics suggest some affinities between the meridian and the letter O, both marks of re-turning that oscillate between materiality and absence. Their visual shape and foregrounded phenomenal sense participate in and enrich the utterances which they simultaneously interrupt. Tawada’s meridian’s link to the letter O and orientation, on the other hand, is more explicit. In drawing the shape of the number 0, Tawada’s text withdraws it from the protocol of communication and employs it as operative tool of orientation. In achieving orientation, however, the text suggests that the orientation is neither fixed nor final. Like Celan’s meridian, Tawada’s 0 suggests that orientation and encounter are inherently belated and need to be performed continually. Jürgen Lehmann draws attention to the lack of spatial markers in “Es war Erde in ihnen,” observing that both the word nirgendwohin (nowhere) and the question mark at the end of the second line of the last stanza indicate loss of direction. It is also possible, however, to read “nirgendwohin” against the grain as a real nowhere, a utopic space. Lehmann recalls “Der Meridian,” where Celan indicates a direction “im Lichte der U-topie” (in light of u-topia) towards the poem.65 In the case of “Der Meridian” and meridians, however, this turn draws a circle back to the point of departure. Celan’s conclusion in “Der Meridian” reveals the circular structure of his speech. He thematizes the globe’s revolution as research of both place—from the Greek IJȩʌȠȢ—and movement or “turning”—from the Greek IJȡȑʌȦ. Celan delineates his path in delivering his speech, declaring: “I am at the end—I am back at the beginning [...] I took this path, here too, in your presence. It was a circle” (ich bin am Ende—ich bin wieder am Anfang […] Ich bin auch hier, in Ihrer Gegenwart, diesen Weg gegangen. 64

The Büchner Prize is the most prestigious literary prize for German-language literature. It is given annually in memory of the German author Georg Büchner (1813-1837). The Spree is a river that flows through the Saxony, Brandenburg, and Berlin states of Germany. 65 Lehmann 1997, 55; Celan 1999, 10 (§40b); 8 (§31f); idem 2011, 10 (§40b); 8 (§31f).

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Es war ein Kreis).66 There is, however, one more moment of encounter, the one between this “I” and the circular path of writing around the globe: Ich finde etwas—wie die Sprache—Immaterielles, aber Irdisches, Terrestrisches, etwas Kreisförmiges, über die beiden Polen in sich selbst Zurückkehrendes und dabei—heitererweise—sogar die Tropen Durchkreuzendes—ich finde […] einen Meridian. I find something—like language—immaterial, yet terrestrial, something circular that returns to itself across both poles while—cheerfully—even crossing the tropics: I find […] a meridian. 67

This is thus a multiple encounter, between poetry and itself, between the poet and himself, and between the poet and the meridian. Celan’s choice of the meridian as the site of encounter is significant for the meridian’s double function as a tool of orientation in space, and indicator of time difference, but also of its function of traversing the circumference of the earth and thus dividing it. The meridian might thus be the best figure for speaking of temporality, splitting, and encounter in poetry in non-semantic terms. Speaking of time and meaning in Celan’s poetry, Hamacher observes: The word of time does not refer to objective data or abstract meanings; it is only as the withdrawal of objectivity and meaning. The language of finitude is the chronic retreat of the referential and semantic functions of language, because with each one of its words—all of which bend representations into life—the world and the very being of the things thus spoken are brought to the point of disappearance. In turning to speak to its own ground, Celan’s poetry can assert the condition of its possibility only as the condition of the impossibility of its stable semantic subsistence, and so it opens up the abyss of its own futility.68

According to Hamacher, the semantic potential of language is subject to time.69 This subjection implies, however, that language withdraws from stable conditions of sense-making and becomes non-representational, since by referencing things in the world, the language of time paradoxically erases its referents. The meridian constitutes the figure of this dimension of time in Celan’s poetry. Not only is the meridian itself both terrestrial (in that it is of the earth) and immaterial (in that it is only an imagined, 66

Celan 1999, 10-11 (§42a; §42f); idem 2011, 10-11 (§42a; §42f). Celan 1999, 12 (§50c); idem 2011 12 (§50c). 68 Hamacher 1996, 353 (emphasis in original). 69 Hamacher 1996, 352. 67

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conventional sign), it also the figure of time and splitting par excellence. It is an imagined site of encounter that deconstitutes the parties of the encounter by temporalizing and splitting them. Celan remains cognizant of the meridian’s capacities of temporal and semantic disarticulation, yet he finds consolation in its power to allow continual encounter. This does not mean that the meridian is strictly an operative tool for Celan. However, the meridian does allow orientation on what appears to be a global, even universal scale, albeit not in any conventional geographic sense. Celan states clearly that his place of origin cannot be found, and does not exist as such on a map.70 Still, his project of “topos research” (Toposforschung) “in the light of u-topia” (im Lichte der U-topie) can be read against the grain as the search for a real place, as Lehmann suggests.71 This essay reads “U-topie” as a real non-place, a place of U. The Greek ypsilon is a semi-vowel that itself stands at the threshold between the presence and absence of sound, that is, between the frictionless sound of a vowel and the friction, trill, hiss, or buzz of a consonant.72 With respect to audibility in Celan, Kristina Mendicino dissects Celan’s phrase “Majestät des Absurden” (“majesty of the absurd”), elegantly read by Jacques Derrida in the seminal essay “Majesties” (2005). However, she does so without attention to its reference to “an unheard dimension of speech,” since it “literally signals an intensified (ab-) deafness (surdus) […]. It would seem indeed that something ‘unheard’ enters Celan's audible speech.”73 Taking Celan and Mendicino at their word, this chapter suggests that the U of “U-topie” is a locus of this unheard dimension of Celan’s speech. That is, “U-topie” calls for the visual form of U to be read alongside its semantic function as prefix meaning “not,” and the near-inaudibility of ypsilon as one nearly unheard dimension of “Der Meridian.” U can also be read as a turn on the space of the page, alongside Celan’s invocations of “re-routings […] creaturely routes, […] a sending oneself ahead toward oneself, in search of oneself […] A kind of homecoming” (Um-Wege […] kreatürliche Wege, […] ein Sichvorausschicken zu sich selbst, auf der Suche nach sich selbst

70

Celan 1999, 12 (§49b-d); idem 2011, 12 (§49b-d). Lehmann 1997, 55; Celan 1999, 10 (§40a-b; §49a); idem 2011, 10 (§40a-b; §49a). 72 The German letter ypsilon (y), corresponding to the Greek ȣ, can be considered an endangered letter in German too, with recurrent yet unsuccessful attempts to discontinue its use. The author acknowledges that the German transcription differs from the Greek original. 73 Celan 1999, 3 (§7c); idem 2011, 3 (§49b-d); Mendicino 2011, 639. 71

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[…] Eine Art Heimkehr).74 U can both erase its place (topos) by negating it, but read visually, it simultaneously designates the space as a u-place on the space of the page, performing the turns of which Celan speaks. These encounters with the text that the meridian, the U, and “Es war Erde in ihnen”s O invite, call for an encounter with the semantic instability of the poem and the intermedial and sensory possibilities of reading the smallest elements of Celan’s texts. Tawada’s meridian too signals an integral relationship between the text, orientation, and time, while relying on similar capacities of sensemaking that semantic sense cannot contain. However, her meridian is an operational tool that, albeit only momentarily, enables orientation. When Tawada’s narrator in the fiction-essay “An der Spree” arrives in Berlin, she can name her location as “Europe,” but proclaims that she does not know where she is. The abundance of spatial markers (e.g. street signs) that pronounce her coordinates as Berlin, Zoological Gardens, likewise do not dissolve her disorientation. It appears that orientation in the global capital city Berlin is not a purely geographic problem, but an orthographic one: Das Alphabet erinnerte mich an den Nahen Osten. Vilém Flusser schrieb: “Das A zeigt noch immer die Hörner des syriakischen Stiers, das B noch immer die Kuppeln des semitischen Hauses, das C (G) noch immer den Buckel des Kamels in der vorderasiatischen Wüste.” Man schreibt das Alphabet, um die Wüste in der Sprache wachzurufen. Die Wüste ist die Vernunft, der Geist eines Mathematikers.75 The alphabet always reminded me of the Near East. Vilém Flusser wrote: “A stills shows the horns of the Syriac bull, B still the cupola of the Semitic house, C (G) still the humps of the camel in the Near Eastern desert.” One writes the alphabet in order to evoke the desert in language. The desert is reason, the mind of a mathematician.76

The image of letters of the Latin alphabet call the Near East into Berlin, and soon, signs from the rest of the world follow suit, when Arabic 74

Celan 1999, 11 (§46); idem 2011, 11 (§46). Tawada 2007, 11-12. 76 It is no accident that Tawada refers to the work of Vilém Flusser, one of the first practitioners of media theory as such, whose theories of cultural technique investigate writing, calculation, image, and figure as interlinked phenomena. I treat this connection between Flusser and Tawada in more detail in my dissertation in progress at Cornell University, entitled “Metamorphoses of the Letter in Paul Celan, Georges Perec, and Yoko Tawada.” 75

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numerals, the number zero (an Indian discovery), and Chinese ideograms are invoked. Berlin’s streets, the architecture of the train station, and various displays are described in terms of a plethora of mathematical and orthographic symbols, often supplying place names in Berlin. However, when the narrator decides to write a postcard to a friend, she realizes that she still does not know her address. In fact, she knows neither her friend’s whereabouts nor her own. It is at this point that she solves the problem on a piece of paper: Steht hier eine Null, so weiȕ man, dass es einen leeren Platz gibt. Steht hier keine Null, übersieht man den freien Platz. Deshalb kann man ohne die Null weder sich orientieren noch gut rechnen. Ich zeichnete auf einem Briefpapier eine Null und schrieb dazu: “Schau, die Null ist Indien. Der Ferne Osten ist genauso weit entfernt von Punkt Null wie Europa. Die Null in der Mitte, links der Nahe Osten mit seinem Europa, rechts der Ferne Osten: Das ist ein symmetrisches Bild. Ich weiȕ jetzt, wo ich bin.77 If there is a zero here, then one knows that there’s free space. If there’s no zero, then one overlooks the free space. I drew a zero on the letter paper and wrote: “Look, the zero is India. The Far East is exactly as far from point zero as Europe. The zero in the middle, on the left side the Near East with its Europe, on the right the Far East: That is a symmetrical image. I know now where I am.

The narrator informs us that she has “drawn” this zero on “letter paper.” Indeed, this is meant to be a correspondence. However, although she appears to address her friend, her writing serves not to communicate with another person but to solve a problem of orientation. This writing, then, is not communication but drawing and operation. It involves tracing the form of the number zero on a page, thus performing both mathematical calculation and geographic orientation. The presence of the zero on the page that represents null value makes the emptiness of the piece of paper perceptible. This absence that one might have otherwise overlooked resonates with that of the meridian, which only exists in the world as convention. Orientation in this text is not movement in space with reference to a fixed point, but a production of orientation through writingdrawing. It is immaterial to the narrator that the street signs in her surroundings all point to the fact that she is in Berlin.78 These signs remain 77

Tawada 2007, 22. In fact, the narrator’s coordinates in Berlin are anything but given. Her need to orient herself despite the street signs needs careful consideration as a moment of resistance to Eurocentric geographic conventions (e.g. the prime meridian that 78

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illegible and the orientation they allow (fixed-point orientation) inaccessible, unlike the metamorphoses of O. The narrator can only orient herself if she can produce that orientation in writing. Secondly, this orientation cannot happen only once. Immediately after this scene, the narrator proclaims surprisingly that she still does not know what zero is.79 The zero itself cannot be a given, a piece of writing on a page that is read, or a map to which the narrator could refer at a later time. If that had been the case, the street signs and station names in Berlin would have been accessible. They are not, because the drawing of the zero and the meridian are markers as much temporal as they are spatial. In fact, the narrator’s drawing the meridian already introduces time and belatedness into the writing practice, which has to be produced again in a subsequent moment of writing.80 Despite its subjection to disruption in time and call for continual reproductions, Tawada’s practice of orthographic orientation relies on the act of writing and the physical circumstances that surround it. Berlin’s streets are animated with the elements of various writing systems and formal languages (e.g. mathematics), while the narrator remains pointedly focused on her movements in the city. In addition, the moment of orientation is localized on the space of the page, reliant on the process of writing, and portrayed as an operation that yields orientation as its result. The relationship between the number zero and the meridian is semantic, visual, and operational: as zero points, circular forms, and tools of orientation. Celan’s meridian, like the orthographic symbol zero or the letter O, is “terrestrial” and “immaterial” alike. Tawada’s meridian likewise introduces temporality into the moment of writing that both interrupts it and calls for orientation, encounter, and writing to be performed continually as they gesture towards alternate possibilities of writing and sense-making.

Conclusion As Tawada’s reading of the radical for “gate” in the Japanese translation of Von Schwelle zu Schwelle and Daniel Heller-Roazen’s observations

passes through Greenwich, England), which would require a separate critical analysis. 79 Tawada 2007, 22. 80 Many thanks to John Namjun Kim for pointing out this dual function of the meridian, and for suggesting that orientation in this text is not fixed but a continual production necessitated by the dimension of time.

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about Io suggest, the radical 㛛 and the name Io might or might not be incidental to the Japanese translation of Celan and to Ovid’s text. However, the metamorphoses and recombinations of geometic components of orthographic symbols are not incidental but pivotal for a reading of the strategies by which Celan and Tawada respond to the semantic and referential potentials of language. The visual transformations of orthographic symbols into numbers and images allow their participation in mathematical operations and visual translation as transformation. These transformations call for an enriched reading of modes of phenomenal sense-making in Celan and Tawada’s language. The sensory capacities of the text, writing systems, and orthographic symbols thus resist participation in unified semantic systems. Celan and Tawada’s texts do not so much void their semantic content as disrupt it. They thus call for multisensory and multivalent readings, in which the sensory world of the text poses one of several reading choices presented to the reader. Writing thus gestures beyond communication to the possibility of non-communicative language, at the elemental level of the letter. In the context of the geographic, affective, and linguistic residues of genocide, and of an increasingly multilingual and intercultural world, respectively, Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada’s literary and essayistic output calls for critical attention to non-communicative and non-referential capacities of language. Once contemplated as image-text, the letter O reveals the historical intermediality of the Greek-derived Western European writing systems as adumbrated by Friedrich Kittler. O is not only a vowel but number, image, geographic figure, and body. In its unique position as one of the smallest elements of Western writing, the letter O and its circular form present one performance of writing as a visual and operative practice that opens literary language to inter- and intralingual encounter, orientation, and a reevaluation of the capacities of writing. Celan and Tawada’s visual transformations of the letter thus transform the very material of literary production at an elemental level.

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