The Transformative Power of Literature and Narrative: Promoting Positive Change 3823385739, 9783823385738

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Corinna Assmann · Jan Rupp · Christine Schwanecke (eds.)

ISBN 978-3-8233-8573-8

The Transformative Power of Literature and Narrative

www.narr.de

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Assmann · Rupp · Schwanecke (eds.)

Narrative plays a central role for individual and collective lives – this insight has arguably only grown at a time of multiple social and cultural challenges in the 21st century. The present volume aims to further substantiate the case for literature and narrative, taking inspiration from Vera Nünning’s eminent work over the past decades. Located at the intersection of cognitive and cultural narratology, the book is concerned with the way literature affects individuals, how it works at an intersubjective level, enabling communication and community, and how it furthers social and cultural change.

The Transformative Power of Literature and Narrative Promoting Positive Change Band 86

The Transformative Power of Literature and Narrative: Promoting Positive Change

herausgegeben von Anja Bandau (Hannover), Justus Fetscher (Mannheim), Ralf Haekel (Leipzig), Caroline Lusin (Mannheim), Cornelia Ruhe (Mannheim)

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Corinna Assmann / Jan Rupp / Christine Schwanecke (eds.)

The Transformative Power of Literature and Narrative: Promoting Positive Change   A Conceptual Volume in Honour of Vera Nünning

Umschlagabbildung: Adobe Stock-ID: 359840858; Ping198 Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar.

Gedruckt mit Unterstützung der Athenaeum-Stiftung D. Goetze. DOI: https://doi.org/10.24053/9783823395737 © 2023 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Überset‐ zungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Alle Informationen in diesem Buch wurden mit großer Sorgfalt erstellt. Fehler können dennoch nicht völlig ausgeschlossen werden. Weder Verlag noch Autor:innen oder Herausgeber:innen übernehmen deshalb eine Gewährleistung für die Korrektheit des Inhaltes und haften nicht für fehlerhafte Angaben und deren Folgen. Diese Publikation enthält gegebenenfalls Links zu externen Inhalten Dritter, auf die weder Verlag noch Autor:innen oder Herausgeber:innen Einfluss haben. Für die Inhalte der verlinkten Seiten sind stets die jeweiligen Anbieter oder Betreibenden der Seiten verantwortlich. Internet: www.narr.de eMail: [email protected] CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 0175-3169 ISBN 978-3-8233-8573-8 (Print) ISBN 978-3-8233-9573-7 (ePDF) ISBN 978-3-8233-0389-3 (ePub)

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Contents Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Corinna Assmann, Jan Rupp, and Christine Schwanecke Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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I.

Literature Affecting Lives at an Individual Level

Jan Rupp Haiku and Healing. Lessons from the Pandemic Classroom for Literature and Narrative in Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Stefanie Schäfer ‘Not form which you see, but emotion which you feel’. Crisis, Time, and Hyperempathy in Octavia Butler’s Earthseed Novels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Christine Schwanecke Narrating the Pandemic. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) as Salutogenesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Cristian Camilo Cuervo Can Literature Heal? Therapeutic Dimensions of Writing and Narrative . . 83 II.

Literature and Positive Change at an Intersubjective Level

Dorina-Daniela Vasiloiu Reflections of ‘Togetherness’ and a Co-Narrating Community in Fictional ‘We’-Narratives. A Case Study of the Japanese ‘Picture Brides’ in Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic (2011) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Max Cannings Reading Unreliable Narration. Enhancing our Empathy, Understanding, and Self-Examination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

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Contents

Sebastian Beckmann Promoting Empathy in ‘Generation Me’. The Didactic Potential of Unreliable Narratives Featuring Narrators with a Mental Illness in the EFL Classroom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Caroline Lusin Renouncers, Rumours, and ‘Beyond-the-Pales’. Nikolai Gogol and the Subversive Power of Narrative(s) in Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018) . . . . . . . . 173 III.

Narratives Promoting Social and Cultural Change

Alexander Schindler Positive Change in Crime Fiction. Genre Renewal and the Politics of Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Cheryl A. Head’s Bury Me When I’m Dead (2016) . . 197 Corinna Assmann Maps and Narrative. Mobilizing and Connecting Perspectives in a Space of Encounter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 Nina Gillé ‘United in Positive Intention’. Self-Transcendence Values and the Negotiation of Crises in George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) . . . 243 Désirée Link Optimism in the Anthropocene. Cultivating Hope in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2012) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263

Foreword This project initially grew from our collective desire to celebrate Vera Nünning’s outstanding contribution to the research of narrative and the study of English literature and culture on the occasion of her 60th birthday in April 2021. As her (former) PhD students and mentees, we were keen to express our gratitude for her academic guidance and long-standing support. With her research and teaching at Heidelberg, she has generated a veritable ‘school’ of literary scholars who are both narratologically-minded and interested in culture, in historical contexts, as well as in the functions, effects, and values of reading fiction. This volume began with an online celebration of Vera Nünning’s jubilee in the form of a virtual colloquium with greetings, presentations, and musical interludes. Besides the contributors to this volume, we would like to thank, first and foremost, Ansgar Nünning, whose cordial and conspiratorial support in preparation of the surprise colloquium proved essential and invaluable. We are also grateful to the former members of Vera Nünning’s team who participated in the colloquium but were not able to submit a chapter to this book – Claire Earnshaw, Stephanie Frink, Gesine Heil, and Bernard Woodley. We, the editors, would like to extend our thanks to our colleague and friend Caroline Lusin and the other general editors of the MABEL-series, in which this volume appears. We are grateful to Kathrin Heyng, Sariya Sloan, and Iris Steinmaier from Narr Francke Attempto, who kindly assisted us in the publication process. For further support we thank Marion Gymnich (University of Bonn) and Jacqueline Auer (University of Graz). Last, but not least, we thank our magnificent English proof-reader, Max Cannings, as well as our fantastic copy-editing crew, Lukas Kreutzwiesner and Alex Thallinger from the University of Graz, for their energetic, thorough, and substantial contribution to this publication. Corinna Assmann, Jan Rupp, and Christine Schwanecke Heidelberg, Gießen, and Graz, August 2022

Introduction

Corinna Assmann, Jan Rupp, and Christine Schwanecke

1. Celebrating Vera Nünning’s Scholarship in Literature and Narrative

Literature and narrative play a central role for individual and collective lives – this insight has arguably only grown at a time of multiple social and cultural challenges in the 21st century. Whether it is to grapple with increasingly complex identities or with a proliferation of migrant, public health, economic, and environmental crises, literature and narrative are time and again being evoked as interpretive frames and tools of meaning-making. For anyone interested in the formal workings, the cultural functions, and the transformative power of literature and narrative, Vera Nünning’s scholarship stands as an eminent orientation and inspiration. With the present volume, we would like to pay tribute to our mentor, who celebrated a jubilee birthday in 2021 and from whom we were able to learn so tremendously since she became Chair of English Philology at Heidelberg University in 2002. Collecting contributions from a school of junior researchers and colleagues who cut their academic teeth under her supervision, we seek to celebrate her work by bringing it into dialogue with ‘positive change’ – a concept that resonates in many of her writings and, as a veritable travelling concept, informs a broad range of current inter- and transdisciplinary debates. With her groundbreaking research in English literature and culture, as well as in literary and narrative theory, Vera Nünning has profoundly influenced and shaped the national and international landscape of English literary and cultural studies.1 With her accomplishments in breaking down the complexities 1

She has not only contributed to literary criticism with her multitude of monographs, edited volumes, and articles on cultural history from the 16th to the 19th century and British fiction from the 18th to the 21st century; she has also carried out research and taught in various international contexts: for instance, as guest professor at the Universities of Zaragoza (2006), Lisbon (2009), Helsinki (2010), and Bergamo (2011). In addition, she has held major offices in international higher education, having served as

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of literature and its wealth of cultural repercussions for introductory purposes, she has, together with her husband Ansgar Nünning, moulded generations of students and academics-to-be.2 Not least, she has managed to demonstrate the importance of narrative to human existence and its potential to instigate positive change to scholars outside the field of literature (see “Brückenschlag”), as well as to a wider non-academic audience beyond the university’s ivory tower (see “Contemporary Absurdities”). Apart from their academic weight, Vera Nünning’s efforts to scrutinize and promote literature and narrative are of fundamental social, political, and cultural value. This is especially true today, at a time that has come to be perceived as one of innumerable democratic, economic, political, and humanitarian crises.3 It is a time at which nationalistic and economic narratives are dictating political and private actions,4 and at which the humanities, which may actually provide tools for unmasking reductive metaphors and plots, are being publicly devalued and disavowed: “Diese schlimme Zeit macht jetzt hoffentlich auch dem Letzten klar, dass Professoren für Medizin, Chemie und Biologie unendlich viel wichtiger sind

2 3

4

vice-president of the German consortium of the German-Turkish University in Istanbul from 2009 to 2019 and as vice-rector for international affairs at Heidelberg University from 2006 to 2009. Her countless contributions to English literary and cultural studies have also been translated into many languages, among them Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Czech. The multiple reprints of the introductions she co-authored with Ansgar Nünning, Grundkurs anglistisch-amerikanistische Literaturwissenschaft and An Introduction to the Study of English and American Literature, are cases in point. Since the new millennium, we have witnessed several economic crises spreading from the financial sector (2007/08); various political crises, such as those around Brexit (2016-2019), the so-called ‘war on terror’ or the Russia-Ukraine conflict (since 2014), and full-blown war on the European continent (2022); an increasingly alarming environmental crisis; humanitarian crises, such as the European ‘migrant crisis’ (since 2015); as well as the social and public health crises of a pandemic (since 2019), with which people all over the world have been trying cope. See Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, in which he illustrates the power of stories, and especially an interview in which he highlights the supremacy of economic narratives: “Die besten Geschichtenerzähler der Welt sind nicht die Nobelpreisträger für Literatur, sondern die für Wirtschaftswissenschaften. Sie überzeugen Milliarden Menschen auf der ganzen Welt, einen Monat hart zu arbeiten, um am Ende ein paar Zettel in die Hand gedrückt zu bekommen oder ein paar Zahlen auf dem Konto zu haben. Warum tun wir Menschen so etwas Unvernünftiges? Weil wir glauben, was die Banker uns erzählen.” (Lüpke and Harms n.p.) (“The best storytellers in the world are not the recipients of the Nobel Prize in literature, but the laureates in economic sciences. They convince billions of people all around the world to work hard for a month, just to be handed a few sheets of paper or have a few numbers added to their bank account. Why do we humans do something so unreasonable? Because we believe what the bankers are telling us.” Translated by A. Thallinger.)

Introduction

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als solche für ‘Gender Studies’” (qtd. in Hensel 2020).5 Posts on so-called social media like this Tweet are not just latter-day aberrations of the ‘two cultures’ debate, but deeply ignorant at best and politically dangerous at worst. In the 21st century, we have all too often witnessed the power of narratives and the detrimental, even life-threatening consequences they can have.6 Regarding this concerning trend, Vera Nünning’s work offers an extremely powerful and instructive counterpoint. Her studies do not only shed light on how narratives work, but also on how they are used in literature and culture, and, perhaps more importantly, how they can be used to better ends. In its academic complexity, her œuvre counters trends of political over-simplification and medial reduction of cultural intricacies. In her appreciation of literary fiction, Vera Nünning time and again highlights the transformative potential of literature. In its positive thrust, ultimately, her work illustrates the power of literature to counter the hegemonic narratives of 21st-century culture, to serve as a “cultural resource of resilience” (Nünning, “Resilience” 35), and to inspire positive change in individual and collective lives. In this light, the present volume sets out to actualize and further substantiate Vera Nünning’s long-standing case for literature and narrative, celebrating and taking inspiration from her wide-ranging scholarship over the past few decades. We begin by elaborating further on the concept of ‘positive change’ (Sect. 2). Based on Vera Nünning’s understanding of literature as an art form with positive potential and real-world effects, we consider more closely how reading and narrative relate to positive change (Sect. 3). We will then sketch major directions of Vera Nünning’s formative work in literary, cultural, and narrative studies as are pertinent to our project. Against this backdrop, we will preview the contributions to this volume, which variously take up Vera Nünning’s interdisciplinary inquiry to explore potentials of the transformative power of literature and narrative, which can be harnessed by individuals and groups as agents of positive change in today’s world (Sect. 4).

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6

“The current crisis has hopefully shown every last one of us that professors of medicine, chemistry, and biology are infinitely more important than those of ‘gender studies’” (translated by A. Thallinger). This was a post on Twitter by an association close to the Christian Democratic Union political party in Germany at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic. Not only can stories be “weapons of mass destruction” (Nünning and Nünning, “Stories as ‘Weapons’” 187), stories of ‘stolen elections’ can also result in deadly riots (as in the 2021 United States Capitol attack). Stories can be purposefully exploited for personal gain at the cost of democratic structures and transnational alliances (see Nünning “Resilience”; Rupp; Schwanecke).

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2. Locating Positive Change: Towards a Definition of a Transdisciplinary Concept

Over the past few decades, ‘positive change’ has emerged as a truly transdisci‐ plinary or ‘travelling concept’ (see Bal). Its application in literary and cultural studies is arguably less pronounced than in other fields, leaving a research gap that we hope this volume will work towards filling. Notable recourse to positive change comes in Elizabeth Ammons’s Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet. In this book-length study, Ammons confronts questions of relevance and the humanities’ increasingly embattled status quo by pointing out their embeddedness in real-world concerns: “Liberal arts faculty need to own the fact there is real-world purpose to our teaching” (32, emphasis in original). As she insists, “we need to link our work to the progressive antiracist, feminist, materialist, gay and lesbian, and anti-imperialist work of the last half century” (ibid.). By drawing on or restoring these connections, Ammons pays homage to a long “activist tradition in American literature” (ibid. 38), in which she assembles writers as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Toni Morrison: “a tradition of profound hope and idealism, belief that people can and will hear, think, and take action to bring positive change” (ibid.). In the humanities and beyond, this is a “paradigm [which] believes human beings have the power to create fundamental positive change and will take action in the service of social justice and planetary health” (ibid. 169) – a hope that Ammons rearticulates with a particular view to 21st-century US-American culture wars. While Ammons makes a powerful case around the activist tradition of liberal arts in the US, we suggest that there is much more to say about the role of literature and culture for positive change, even (or especially) from a more philologically grounded and less overtly political stance that we seek to explore by engaging with Vera Nünning’s work. Before fleshing out these perspectives on positive change in literary and cultural studies, however, we first want to look further afield at where the concept has travelled and how it is used in pertinent contexts. Across a broad disciplinary spectrum from psychology to economics and sports, positive change is variously discussed as personal growth, corporate and collective values, global competence, sustainable life, and cultural participation. Mapping the most recent academic monographs and articles, one realizes that the topic features especially in three fields: first, economics, finance, and technology; second, education, psychology, and the behavioural sciences; third, environmental research and sustainability studies. Many studies have in common that they are not interested in change in general (in the sense that

Introduction

13

things become or can become different); but all are interested in phenomena that change or can be changed for the better – to the benefit of an individual or a collective. By way of a brief review, we will single out current academic research in the above domains to illustrate how they conceptualize and make use of positive change. Within the first field, that of economics, finance, and technology, the concept is often used to demarcate strategies of successful leadership, to guide effective business transformations, or to enhance strategies of re-structuring teams and companies. Within the realm of management, it has been defined as a leader’s “successful transformation” within companies (Tkacyk 38) with the aim to “change teams, increase [their] change friendliness and readiness, overcome resistance, promote resilience, develop change agents, and lead an agile culture” (ibid. 35). Studies and guidebooks like the one just quoted seem to have rather limited concerns, their interest being predominantly quantitative and intra-sectorial in that they pertain exclusively to business matters. Positive change, brought about by a certain kind of leadership and coaching, is to increase a company’s efficiency, perhaps at the cost of individual concerns (e.g., resistance on the part of teams) and of ignoring extra-sectorial matters (beyond the world of economics). It may also mean to follow through with one’s own agenda, by way of effective communication strategies (“leading by listening”, Levine 102) and successful advertising (e.g., urban renewal projects; see ibid.). In these uses, the qualifier ‘positive’ does not define specific values pursued through change, meaning it does not primarily describe or relate to the aspired outcome of change, but it refers to the ways in which change is carried through, enforced, and communicated. There are, however, business studies framing positive change in a more qualitative and socially considerate manner. Even though they do not put principles before profit, either, they manage not to completely exclude the former: they at least link potential positive changes within an organization to a CEO’s “integrity” and concern for “human, environmental, social, cultural and political” issues (Smith 1). Within the second field, the realm of education, psychology, and the be‐ havioural sciences, positive change is neither framed as a change of people, their opinions, or of infrastructure, nor as an increase of efficiency; rather, it is conceptualized as a matter of perspective, experience, and/or cognition. The concept, in this context, is situated within the larger field of positive psychology, which presents a shift in 20th-century psychology away from a focus on “repairing damage using a disease model of human functioning” towards “the idea of a fulfilled individual and a thriving community” (Seligman 3). Such an understanding sees the possibility of change not only in “pathological

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situations” that need repair or healing, but also in “virtuous situations and situations of development” (Inghilleri et al. 6) more generally, which entails a much broader vision of both the beneficiaries and the contexts of positive change. In a study on adversity in sports and the resulting effects on individuals, teams, and cultures, for instance, psychologists explore how defeats or other unfavourable experiences in sports can be a repository of personal growth and institutional development. For example, they study how, on the basis of negative experiences, “individuals can become more resilient, relationships can strengthen, teams can develop a more positive identity, organizations can improve their policies and practices, […] and countries can bring about greater social justice” (Wadey et al. xvi). On a more general level, the behavioural sciences have explored what people may experience as positive change in everyday life, for instance, in education, therapy, or political participation. They have located the roots of such change in four areas – “personal charac‐ teristics, everyday experience, psychological well-being and elements of the socio-relational and environmental context” (Inghilleri et al. 1) – and they relate occurrences of such a transformation to experiences of flow “as a driving force for the subjective development” (ibid.). A central concept of positive psychology, flow is intricately connected to well-being: “a good life is one that is characterized by complete absorption in what one does” (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi 89, emphasis in original).7 In contrast to the streamlining endeavours of the economic sector, in which unwanted or unnecessary elements are reduced or removed to promote positive change, the behavioural sciences explicitly expect positive change to make individuals and institutions more complex and creative (see Inghilleri et al. 4). To define the ‘positive’ element of change in more detail, we can draw on fields of research and practice that use similar concepts and provide more con‐ crete ideas of what qualifies as objectively positive. Two areas seem particularly pertinent in order to gauge positive change in its individual, intersubjective/so‐ cial, and collective dimension: psychology and sociology. As mentioned above, the field of positive psychology can be regarded as a disciplinary anchor for some of the main uses of the concept. Although not an established concept per se in the field, positive change is alluded to and implied in its basic tenets

7

Flow denotes “experiences during which individuals are fully involved in the present moment” (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi 89). For scholars of literature, it does not seem far-fetched to look for such experiences of flow in the process of reading literature, in which experiences of immersion, transportation, and emotional engagement with the storyworld and its characters are likely to cause such a state of ‘complete absorption’ (see Auyoung).

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surrounding the question of “[w]hat constitutes a good life” (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi 89). The founder of the field, Martin Seligman, sets out what constitutes positive experience on the level of the individual as well as that of the group: .

[T]he subjective level is about positive subjective experience: well-being and satisfac‐ tion (past); flow, joy, the sensual pleasures, and happiness (present); and constructive cognitions about the future – optimism, hope, and faith. At the individual level it is about positive personal traits – the capacity for love and vocation, courage, interper‐ sonal skill, aesthetic sensibility, perseverance, forgiveness, originality, future-mind‐ edness, high talent, and wisdom. At the group level it is about the civic virtues and the institutions that move individuals toward better citizenship: responsibility, nurturance, altruism, civility, moderation, tolerance, and work ethic (3).

These two levels are closely intertwined, with the social level feeding back into the level of subjective experience, as, for instance, research on the positive effects of enhanced empathy on personal well-being shows (see Bauer; Shanafelt et al.). The interconnectedness of the individual and the social level is important in order to delimit the concept of positive change, even if the outcome does not necessarily incorporate all aspects contained in the three main fields of positive change research outlined above. The example of economics in particular shows that change might lead to growth and thus promote goals set by a company, but if these goals on an individual level (even if shared by a group of individuals) do not align with group goals of responsibility, altruism, or moderation, we would be hard-pressed to classify such change as positive at a more general level. In contrast, positive change accounts for change as embedded in larger social structures and interconnected with other developments. The question of perspective mentioned above does not mean that change can be viewed as positive from one side and negative from the other, and still qualify as positive change. It means that a situation, an event, an experience can be reviewed from a perspective that highlights those elements that may induce personal growth, resilience, strength, or satisfaction – in this sense, it becomes a question of narrative emplotment and meaning-making. While psychology is interested in the personal and intersubjective dimen‐ sions of well-being, sociology may offer a fruitful complementary perspective that focuses on the larger picture of society or culture. Peter A. Hall and Michèle Lamont ask what makes societies successful, and thereby propose another possible way of capturing what we mean with ‘positive change’. Taking “population health […] as a proxy [and quantifiable measure] for social well-being” (2), Hall and Lamont underscore the social dimension of individual

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health with regard to different levels of relationships, social networks, and community.8 What this perspective adds to the above, however, is that it goes beyond the intersubjective level and takes society and culture into account, “bring[ing] the cultural dimensions of such relationships into fuller focus” (ibid. 8 f.). By regarding “institutional practices and cultural repertoires” (ibid. 1) as “social (including symbolic) resources” (ibid. 7) for problem-solving, overcoming challenges, or improving well-being, the approach acknowledges the role of narrative and other cultural ways of world- and meaning-making in positive change. It looks at how social relations are embedded in ‘webs of meaning’, and thus takes into account not only (self-)interest but the dimension of morals and ethics, and how these are structured by values (see ibid. 11). Positive change, in this light, connects with values such as “wellbeing, solidarity, and [social] recognition” (Berezin and Lamont 202), the dissemination of which may promote social transformation and positive change. In the third context, environmental research and sustainability studies, pos‐ itive change is called for in view of “insurmountable environmental challenges”, such as the exhaustion of finite resources and irreversible consequences of climate change (Zeunert 35). Scholars in these fields make the case for imple‐ menting positive changes within the environment (instead of merely talking about them), which intend to ‘heal’ the environment and/or avert the disas‐ trous and lethal ecological scenarios humankind is speedily heading towards. With regard to the complexity and scope of environmental developments, understanding the interrelation of multiple systems, human and non-human, as well as institutions or political and cultural beliefs is vital. Ecocritical approaches analyse, for instance, how systems like forests, capitalism, and political institutions are intertwined and how they develop alongside and with each other (i.e., how they transform in their connectedness). The aim of such research is to spot the points at which one or more systems are capable of accommodating positive changes and to identify how those critical points can be used to promote resilience and sustainability within these system(s) (see Gunderson and Holling). No matter from which perspective the travelling concept of positive change is studied, in which ways it is defined, or how its outcomes are envisioned – if we abstract from the aforementioned research fields, they all implicitly or explicitly demarcate two situations: One before a certain event or transformative incident, and one after it. Thus, the concept of positive change can be regarded 8

As other possible ways of quantifying success on the societal level, the authors name “nonviolent intergroup relations, open access to education, civic participation, cultural tolerance, and social inclusion” (Hall and Lamont 2).

Introduction

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as a mini-narrative, one that entails a change of situation (brought about by an event, incident, or series of events). At the same time, it is less open than any default mini-narrative because it already entails a certain ending, one with an inherent promise; the outcome is always a good one or at least one that shows an improvement: institutions, relations, situations ameliorate; people get better, more creative, efficient, or fulfilled; environments are less exploited or even saved. Most of the time, this change does not happen instantaneously – rather, it takes time; it is brought about by repeated efforts (in business settings, therapy sessions, landscape architecture, and the like); and the energy invested is consciously geared towards a change of the status quo for the better. 3. Changing Minds and Worlds: The Transformative Power of Literature and Narrative in Vera Nünning’s Work

Taking up this multidisciplinary debate, and taking their cue from major direc‐ tions of Vera Nünning’s research, the contributors to this volume acknowledge that the reading of literature, too, can be conceived in the terms of such a mini-narrative. Especially her most recent work has become invested in how literature and narrative may work towards positive change in an ever more complex 21st-century reality. She has framed these changes and slow transformations as exceedingly powerful ones, as they can have a strong and lasting impact on the lives of individuals, collectives, and cultures. In the context of this volume, we want to emphasize two strands of her research that lie at the heart of her conceptualizations of the role of literature within culture, and which, accordingly, define her scholarship as one that is equally interested in culture and literature. The first focuses on the possible effects of reading on the reader with regard to empathy, cognitive abilities, belief change, or values. As a narratologist, she has contributed to the field by providing frameworks for textual strategies and narrative techniques that further particular responses and positive effects in readers. The second strand is her interest in narrative more generally as a way of worldmaking and a ‘tool for thinking’. Rather than following the ubiquitous use and conceptually vague notion of narrative that we can see in both academic and public discourse at large, she argues for the importance of an interdisciplinary, theoretically sound concept of narrative and narrativity, and for the specific contribution that literary scholars can make to the field (see “Erzählen und Identität”; “Narrativität”). In Vera Nünning’s work, these two strands are closely connected, with narrative, “as a way of understanding, conceptualizing and constructing

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the world” (“Narrativität” 1, our translation), forming the basis for how we may gauge the power of literature to induce change in readers. It is, in particular, the exploration of “Cognitive Science and the Value of Literature for Life”, as per the title of one of her articles, which has increasingly won her international attention and recognition. In her monograph Reading Fictions, Changing Minds, she illustrates the positive effects engagement with fiction and narrative can have on the brain, on personal behaviour, and on interpersonal relations: First, fiction can improve readers’ cognitive abilities […] by encouraging readers to take the characters’ perspectives. By these means, fiction can enhance two important components of the cognitive skills necessary for understanding others, viz. empathy and what are called ‘theory-of-mind’ abilities. Second, reading fiction can arguably increase narrative competence and cultivate cognitive processes by providing com‐ plex models for understanding the connections between human desires, thoughts, intentions and actions. Third […], fictional tales are an important source of social learning, particularly for adults: cognitive skills can be practiced, honed, refined and extended by dealing with a wide range of personalities and situations […], a much broader spectrum of situations than one could possibly encounter in daily life […]. (19)

In her pursuit of cognitive narratology and of adjacent fields, Vera Nünning has concentrated on a variety of questions that include individual well-being (see “Literaturwissenschaft”; “How to Stay Healthy”) and cognitive abilities (see “Intelligenz”), readers’ transportation into the storyworld and their (emotional) investment in specific characters and their perspectives (see “Value”; “Affective Value”), and the dissemination of values (see Nünning and Nünning, “Extor‐ tion”). Most importantly, she analyses the ways in which literature supports processes of perspective-taking and empathy in readers, which in turn may lead to more altruistic behaviour and the cultivation of pro-social values. Highlighting the comprehensive cognitive, emotional, and social potential of literature and the notable effects that a life-long immersion in fiction and narrative can have on individuals as well as on groups, she generates imposing arguments that not only foreground the positive power of literature but also invalidate claims that belittle the importance of narrative fiction and/or the humanities. The second strand of her research that we wish to single out builds on a long engagement with narrative as a way of worldmaking (see Nünning and Nünning, Cultural Ways), which ranges from self-making to community-making and literary worldmaking (Nünning and Nünning, “Ways of Worldmaking” 12).

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Narrative is a fundamental device of meaning-making and thus for processing events and evaluating and understanding our lives and the world around us: “By telling a story, we render what happened intelligible; we organize events in a way that makes it possible to understand them.” (Nünning, “Identity” 59) This is not only a retrospective process; rather, our thinking, perception, and experience is always prefigured by narrative forms and patterns. Such narrative schemata are culturally specific as much as they constitute the foundations of cultures more generally. As Vera Nünning has shown, this cultural component is an integral part of research in this field, whether it focuses on individual self-making (see, for instance, “‘Writing Selves’”) or on the collective level of meaning-making. This nexus of narrative and identity can be seen as a cornerstone of her approach to the study of culture, and has shaped her specific perspective as both a literary scholar and a historian. We can trace this approach early on in her work, for instance in her analyses of what was formerly known as the ‘Indian Mutiny’ (a word that in itself contains a mini-narrative that brings a certain framing to the historical events which, in turn, served to legitimatize violent retributions and widespread atrocities). Her corresponding publications engage with the construction and reality-shaping power of narrative in different formats of writing (from historiography and personal eye-witness accounts to literature) and dissect their various forms of cross-pollination, thus offering up a model of how broadly and encompassing the study of narrative in culture can be laid out (see “Bedeutung”; “Ereignis”).9 As Vera Nünning makes us aware of, narrative is not inherently an agent of positive change: [S]tories – especially origin myths – can foster social cohesion and improve the relations between members of a given culture. In contrast, competing stories can also exacerbate conflicts between different groups and incite their emotions, possibly pushing them into violence. (“Identity” 61)

A more recent example of how “conflict- and worldmaking” (Nünning and Nünning, “Stories as ‘Weapons’” 187) may go hand in hand (when we look at the functions and effects of narrative) is the case of former US President George W. Bush’s “stories of mass destruction” (see ibid.) or the so-called ‘war on terror’ (see Nünning, “Identity”). In all this, however, Vera Nünning does not lose sight of the wider goal, namely to find answers to the question of how the worldmaking power of narrative can help societies build a better future, 9

For other examples of this approach, see also Nünning, “Literature”, “A ‘Usable Past’”, “Historical Variability”, “Collective Memory”, “Macht”, “Writing Selves”, “Imperial Story Telling”; and Nünning and Nünning, “Invention”, “Thronjubiläen”.

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or, in other words, to achieve or induce positive change. Besides defusing the potentially dangerous powers of narrative through gaining a more thorough understanding of their workings, she points to the ways “narratives can arguably also be ways of conflict-solving” (Nünning and Nünning, “Stories as ‘Weapons’” 224) and thereby agents of positive change. Considering the proliferation of scenarios and narratives of crisis since the turn of the 21st century, these questions have become even more pressing. In their special issue on Krisennarrative und Krisenszenarien, Vera and Ansgar Nünning show how these narratives, disseminated by mass media, exert a cer‐ tain authority within cultural debates and how they, even though they deal with critical scenarios, can trigger positive situational transformations within collec‐ tives and cultures. Dealing with crises as metaphorical mini-narratives, Vera and Ansgar Nünning foreground how these metaphors structure perception and steer human cognition towards the successful processing of current political and cultural affairs (see “Krise”). They explore to what extent narratives of crisis en‐ able the cognitive and emotional processing of complex, critical circumstances, which may be perceived as overpowering and inaccessible. Moreover, they demonstrate how these narratives further historical understanding, diagnoses of the present, and conceptualizations of possible futures (see ibid. 256-61). The transformative power that makes narratives of crisis accessible to hu‐ mans, thus turning feelings of helplessness and despair in the face of challenging situations into experiences of understanding and manageability, can also be attributed to literature itself. Referring to Paul Ricœur’s three-dimensional model of mimesis, Vera and Ansgar Nünning convincingly argue that literary texts may function as ‘laboratories’ of alternative worlds and futures (see ibid. 262-69), in which there is far more possible than the technological, political, humanitarian, and mental constraints of our present time suggest: Indem literarische Werke auf reale Krisengeschichten referieren, erweisen sie sich einerseits als ein Medium des kulturellen Gedächtnisses für kollektive Krisenerfahrungen. Andererseits können literarische Krisennarrative durch Formen der Konfiguration, Reintegration, Verfremdung und Metareflexion von realen und imaginären Krisen maßgeblich dazu beitragen, den Horizont des Denkbaren und der Handlungsmöglichkeiten zu vergrößern. (Ibid. 266)10

10

“In referring to real stories of crisis, literary works constitute, on the one hand, a medium of cultural memory for collective experiences of crisis. On the other hand, literary narratives of crisis can be instrumental in widening the horizon of the thinkable and broadening the scope of agency through forms of configuration, reintegration, aliena‐ tion, and metareflection of real and imaginary crises” (translated by A. Thallinger).

Introduction

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Framing narratives (of crisis) in such a way, Vera and Ansgar Nünning display the profound impact literature can have on collectives and individuals: It is not only a powerful cognitive device that helps archiving and historicizing crises; it also allows people to cope with present challenges, specific crises, and overpowering times. Ultimately, it may help us to imagine positive change and better futures, broadening our minds and furnishing societies and cultures with novel thoughts and new scopes of action. 4. Mapping Positive Change in Literature and Narrative: Contributions to this Volume

The present conceptual volume is located at the intersection of cognitive and cultural narratology and thus reflects the broad range of implications and possibilities opened up by Vera Nünning’s advances in research on literature and narrative. Following the routes that she has mapped out with her work, we identify three general directions in her research regarding the potential impact of literature and narrative. Accordingly, the volume is concerned with, firstly, the way literature affects lives at the level of the individual, but it also deals with how personal aspects of reading play out at, secondly, an intersubjective level – relating to how individual factors improve social interaction and enable understanding, communication, and community – and inform, thirdly, the role of narratives in promoting social and cultural change. With regard to the first aspect, contributions tackle the question of how literature and reading foster well-being and advance psychological health. Understanding narrative as a form of self-making moreover draws attention to how narrative can be used to make processes of healing possible, help overcome individual crises, or incite redemptive change. This approach ties in with Vera Nünning’s work on the nexus of narratology and ‘salutogenesis’ (see Nünning and Nünning, “How to Stay Healthy”) as well as the knowledge of literature as a resource for building a good life (eudaimonia) (see ibid.; “Literaturwissenschaft”). The second focus is concerned with the cognitive potential of literature and narrative to induce positive effects in readers’ minds, thereby promoting under‐ standing and empathy for others and laying the foundations for more equitable forms of community and stronger social cohesion. With her monograph Reading Fictions, Changing Minds, Vera Nünning has explored in depth the cognitive value of literature for life (see also “Cognitive Science”; “Narrative Fiction”), the functions of representing and evoking emotions (see also “Affective Value”;

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“Zugang zu Depressionen”), as well as the role of perspective-taking and the ethics of reading (see also “Ethics”). Thirdly, taking the cultural dimension of narrative into account, possible aspects of the topic relate to how narratives help to counter crises and promote positive change. Narrative holds the potential to envision alternative routes into a more liveable future and offer conciliatory (re-)imaginings and retellings of the past. Negotiating and conveying cultural values, literature plays an important role in imagining and shaping our society. Possible avenues for research into this topic have been laid out by Vera Nünning in writings on a variety of different subjects. In these, the role of narrative as a form of worldmaking constitutes an important focus in explorations of the relationship between culture, narrative, and literature. While the dissemination of values through literature has always featured prominently in Vera Nünning’s work, the question of how narrative becomes important with regard to resilience and meaning-making in connection with crises (see “Resilience”; “Affective Value”; Nünning and Nünning, “Krise”) presents a more recent focus of research. Responding to these avenues of research, the contributions in this volume build and further elaborate on the transformative power of literature and narrative in a broad variety of theoretical reflections and case studies. In his contribution, Jan Rupp takes up Vera Nünning’s holistic perspective on the “value of literature for life” (“Cognitive Science” 85), importantly including mat‐ ters of health, while also drawing on what she and Ansgar Nünning have called the “salutogenetic power of narrative” (Nünning and Nünning, “How to Stay Healthy” 169). Revisiting the pandemic classroom, Rupp explores the potential of literature and stories to foster narrative sense-making, mental well-being, and resilience in adverse times. His close readings include Zadie Smith’s collection of coronavirus essays, Intimations, which is partly based on her rereading of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, as well as a set of student texts that have used haiku to compose and share stories of pandemic experience. In both cases, he argues that the affordances of concrete literary and narrative forms allow for expressing and channelling experiences to begin with, highlighting the extent of positive change to be had from reading and writing. In her contribution, Stefanie Schäfer takes her cue from Vera Nünning’s work in cognitive narratology, invoking her discussion of Virginia Woolf’s essays as another major concern in her scholarly œuvre. As Schäfer recalls, Vera Nünning enlists Woolf’s dictum about books as “emotion which you feel” (Nünning and Nünning, “Stories as ‘Weapons’” 38) to complicate the potential of affect in literature and the reading process beyond the idea of feeling empathy with fictional characters. Thinking along with and on from Woolf, Nünning

Introduction

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delineates empathy formation as a “dual process”, as a back and forth between engaged and disengaged cognitive activities in the reader’s mind, feeling like the protagonist on the one hand and assessing the overall situation in question on the other (see ibid. 43 f.). Schäfer applies this distinction to her reading of the African American science fiction writer Octavia Butler. As Schäfer shows, Butler explores how hyperempathy on the level of characters can confront nationalist ideologies in 21st-century America, as well as forcing readers to position themselves in relation to the global climate crisis. Travelling in time, Christine Schwanecke provides a historical example of literature’s positive thrust. Studying Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, she shows the extent to which Vera Nünning’s research is also pertinent for an analysis of early modern fiction. Focusing on literature as salutogenesis, Schwanecke explores, on the one hand, the possible psychological healing powers of narrativization. After all, the narrator processes incisive historical events, namely the outbreak of the bubonic Plague in England in 1665 and its aftermath, by psycho-geographically and narratively mapping them. On the other hand, she deals with literature’s potential function as a pandemic archive, which, passing down pandemic knowledge to new generations, seems to display even the potential to actually – physically! – save lives. Also engaging with Vera Nünning’s work on the salutogenic, healing power of literature, Cristian Camilo Cuervo focuses on therapeutic dimensions of writing and storytelling. With a view to the production and praxis of literature specifically, he differentiates a wide range of motivations and purposes, in‐ cluding bibliotherapy or the use of writing to cope with challenging experiences. Based on a set of typological distinctions at the intersection of literature, well-being, and medicine, he then turns to a brief literary history of therapeutic writing from Virginia Woolf via Stephen King to Amanda Gorman. In this tour d’horizon, the manifold uses of expressive writing – tackling such diverse conditions as depression (Woolf), alcoholism (King), or speech impediments (Gorman) – become clear. Moreover, as Cuervo shows, writing is not only a form of self-therapy for authors. It can also offer help and healing to audiences, as Gorman’s inaugural poem The Hill We Climb and its message to a divided nation suggests. In an all-around sense, Cuervo argues that therapeutic writing works towards a consolidation of well-being for both individuals and collectives. In her article on The Buddha in the Attic, which won its author, Julie Otsuka, three prestigious awards, Daniela-Dorina Vasiloiu illustrates the validity of Vera Nünning’s observation that “literary works […] enable us to appreciate […] heterogeneity and complexity, but also help us to accept otherness, to refrain from stereotyping and categorizing others, and to abandon the insistence on

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closure” (“Ethics” 47). Theorizing and analysing the both unusual and complex narrative situation of the US-American novel, which largely hinges on the use of the second person plural, Vasiloiu demonstrates how the narrating ‘we’ traces stories of Japanese picture brides immigrating to the US in the early 1900s to reflect both same- and otherness. She displays, in addition, how the peculiarly heterogeneous narrative voice enables readers to improve their cognitive abilities and broaden their world-knowledge. Furthermore, she exemplifies how this kind of ‘unnatural narrative’ unfolds its tremendous transformative power: after all, the reading of Otsuka’s ‘we’-narrative cautions readers to refrain from rigid classifications and to reassess normative belief-systems critically. In his contribution, Max Cannings asks how reading not only enhances our empathy and understanding, but also our abilities of self-examination. He ap‐ proaches this topic from the angle of unreliable narration and thus connects the issue of empathy with another of Vera Nünning’s particular and longstanding narratological interests (see “Historical Variability”; “Ethics and Unreliability”; Unreliable Narration). He demonstrates the question of unreliability to be particularly interesting for analyses of empathy and perspective-taking, as the complexity of the narrative form challenges readers to question their investment in the narration from an ethical standpoint, and to reflect what this means regarding the empathy or understanding they may have developed towards the narrator. Comparing three texts – Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal –, Cannings offers a complex reading of different forms of unreliable narration and explores the positive insights that readers may take away from such novels, and what they can learn for their own lives. With Sebastian Beckmann’s article, another aspect of narrative’s power to change the world for the better comes to the fore. Dealing with Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel Gone Girl, Beckmann speculates how the transformative power of literature may be put to use in a classroom setting to broaden students’ horizons both cognitively and emotionally. As a narrative that features a narrator who is unreliable and has a mental illness, it might enable readers to critically cope with a postfactual world in which simplifying and essentializing dichotomies, such as true vs. false, good vs. bad, or right vs. wrong dominate. Novels like Gone Girl, which play with narrative and ethical ambivalence, if studied at school, might induce students to examine their possible beliefs in these dichotomies. In-class discussions of complex narratives like Gillian Flynn’s might, as Vera Nünning has shown in another context (see Reading Fictions), both enhance empathy for others and engender critical self-reflection. They may provide a helpful resource for a critical re-assessment of students’ possible

Introduction

25

social (media) practices – not least because Gone Girl’s complex narrative design and character construction problematize the notion that reality’s complexities can be captured in just one picture on Instagram or in 280-character tweets. Caroline Lusin turns to contemporary Irish literature, examining Anna Burns’ award-winning novel Milkman as an example of a ‘broken narrative’. She uses this concept developed by Vera and Ansgar Nünning (“Broken Narratives”) as a basis to further elaborate this volume’s inquiry into literature’s positive merits. Uncovering the novel’s intertextual references to Nikolai Gogol’s “The Over‐ coat”, Lusin highlights the possible dark sides of narratives and their ambivalent functions in processes of worldmaking and self-making. In their ‘brokenness’, both novel and short story probe the limits of narrative meaning-making. Both Milkman and “The Overcoat” emphasize the constraints of narrative processing and expression, especially when it comes to traumatic experiences. At the same time, they enable readers to see how narratives, broken though they may be, can empower characters – as well as narratees and readers – to overcome a shattered sense of worlds and selves. In his contribution, Alexander Schindler turns to the potential of positive change in and through crime fiction, a major scholarly concern as well as a passion of Vera Nünning’s. Her edited collection on the American and British crime novel (see Kriminalroman), among other publications, has been one of the first studies to trace and take stock of crime fiction’s contemporary metamorphosis from a niche of easy entertainment and genre fiction into a template of serious literary fiction. Taking up her characterization of crime novels as modern-day social novels, Schindler demonstrates a broad range of positive change in terms of gender, race, and class. His case study is Cheryl A. Head’s multiperspectival novel Bury Me When I’m Dead, which features a bisexual woman of colour as a hard-boiled private eye heading a team of private investigators in Detroit. As Schindler shows, this narrative constellation allows Head to tackle a broad array of topics, including gender politics and racial diversity. Capitalizing on its generic adaptability, crime fiction thus lends itself to a broad spectrum of progressive agendas where positive change can happen. Like other contributions, Corinna Assmann also focuses on empathy, but foregrounds a mostly overlooked feature of perspective, namely its spatial dimension and how this relates to spatial (and social) positionings and mobility. This angle prompts her to set narrative into relation with maps as another way of worldmaking, and to examine how the two share qualities that may be effective in promoting positive change. With the help of two Anglo-Pakistani novels that revolve around social conflict and division, Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography and Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, Assmann investigates the power

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of narrative and cartography to create a common ground and connect people, despite the violence and trauma that govern the characters’ lives. Delving into the realm of historical fiction, Nina Gillé shows in her con‐ tribution that values take a prominent role in the context of literary crisis narratives. She looks at George Saunders’s Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which is set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, to gauge how self-transcendence values can be beneficial in solving crises. This group of values includes concepts such as benevolence, universalism, and compassion, and correlates with the novel’s interest in empathy and altruism. In her reading of the novel, Gillé teases out the correspondences between structural elements such as the polyphonic narration of the novel and its constellation of characters on the one hand, and the negotiation of values and their ultimate hierarchization on the other. In the end, she is able to demonstrate how the novel broaches broader concerns such as racial and social inequality, and may thus offer valuable incentives for productively overcoming the social divisions that threaten society and social cohesion then and now. Désirée Link’s contribution deals with one of the issues of our times that most urgently calls for positive change, namely the climate crisis. In light of the imminent dangers to our living conditions that this crisis poses, as well as its vast dimensions and complexity, it is often asked how news stories, for example, can create a sense of this urgency and incite a willingness for change rather than overwhelm people and leave them paralyzed in the face of a catastrophic outlook. In other words: Is there reason for optimism in the Anthropocene? Link makes the argument that literature may play a prominent role in cultivating hope as an instigator and motivator of positive change, while also accommodating the complexities and intricate interdependencies of climate conditions that we need to understand for changes in our behaviour to be purposeful and effective. Her analysis of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behaviour explores the ways in which hope and optimism are connected with narratological questions around empathy and character perspective. With their explorations of narrative and positive change, the assembled (former) PhD students and mentees of Vera Nünning conduct analyses that she, once more, has prepared the ground for and that in many ways would not have been possible without her fundamental work. The contributions not only draw on and attest to Vera Nünning’s recent explorations of the transformative power of literature (at the levels of both the individual and the communal, as well as in theoretical terms attending to the intricate relationship of narrative and culture); they also owe to her breadth of interest, versatility, and knowledge. Her research is the same as her mentorship: comprehensive, flexible, and widely

Introduction

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applicable – a treasure trove and an invaluable inspiration for further inquiry at the intersection of narratology, literature, and cultural studies. Thank you, Vera Nünning! Obviously, not only fiction can lead to positive change in a variety of ways, but also your wide-ranging work. For us, it carries a tremendous amount of academic and personal transformative power – a fact which this volume celebrates and, we hope, is a testament to. Bibliography Ammons, Elizabeth. Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet. Iowa UP, 2010. Auyoung, Elaine. “Reading.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, no. 3/4, 2018, pp. 823-26. Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto UP, 2002. Bauer, Joachim. Das empathische Gen. Humanität, das Gute und die Bestimmung des Menschen. Herder, 2021. Berezin, Mabel, and Michèle Lamont. “Mutuality, Mobilization, and Messaging for Health Promotion: Toward Collective Cultural Change.” Social Science & Medicine, no. 165, 2016, 201-05. Gunderson, Lars H., and Crawford S. Holling, editors. Panarchy: Understanding Trans‐ formations in Human and Natural Systems. Island Press, 2002. Harari, Yuval Noah. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Spiegel & Grau, 2018. Hall, Peter Andrew, and Michèle Lamont. “Introduction.” Successful Societies. How Institutions and Culture Affect Health, edited by Peter A. Hall, and Michèle Lamont, Cambridge UP, 2002, pp. 1-22. Hensel, Jana. “Die Krise der Männer. In der Corona-Pandemie zeigt sich, wer in Deutsch‐ land die Macht hat. Männer glauben, die Lösungen zu haben, Frauen arbeiten derweil in systemrelevanten Berufen.” Zeit Online, 13 April 2020, https://www.zeit.de/gesell schaft/zeitgeschehen/2020-04/gleichberechtigung-coronavirus-maenner-frauen-wiss enschaftler-politiker-systemrelevante-berufe. Last accessed 28 Aug. 2022. Inghilleri, Paolo, Giuseppe Riva, and Eleonora Riva. “Introduction: Positive Change in Global World: Creative Individuals and Complex Societies.” Enabling Positive Change: Flow and Complexity in Daily Experience, edited by Paolo Inghilleri, Giuseppe Riva, and Eleonora Riva, De Gruyter, 2014, pp. 1-5. Levine, Jeff. Leadership in Planning: How to Communicate Ideas and Effect Positive Change. Routledge, 2021. Lüpke, Marc von, and Florian Harms. “Interview. Star-Historiker Harari: ‘Im schlimmsten Fall kollabiert unsere Weltordnung’.” t-online, 23 Oct. 2020, https://www .t-online.de/nachrichten/wissen/geschichte/id_88582030/harari-zur-pandemie-coron a-hat-das-potential-die-welt-besser-zu-machen-.html. Last accessed 23 March 2020.

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Nakamura, Jeanne, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. “The Concept of Flow.” Handbook of Positive Psychology, edited by Charles R. Snyder, and Shane J. Lopez, Oxford UP, 2002, pp. 89-105. Nünning, Ansgar, and Vera Nünning. “Krise als medialer Leitbegriff und kulturelles Erzählmuster: Merkmale und Funktionen von Krisennarrativen als Sinnstiftung über Zeiterfahrung und als literarische Laboratorien für alternative Welten.” Germa‐ nisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, vol. 70, no. 3-4, 2020, pp. 241-78. —. “Stories as ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’: George W. Bush’s Narratives of Crisis as Paradigm Examples of Ways of World- and Conflict-Making (and Concept-Solving?).” Narrative(s) in Conflict, edited by Wolfgang Müller-Funk, and Clemens Ruthner, De Gruyter, 2017, pp. 187-229. ―. “Conceptualizing ‘Broken Narratives’ from a Narratological Perspective: Domains, Concepts, Features, Functions, and Suggestions for Research.” Narrative im Bruch: The‐ oretische Positionen und Anwendungen, edited by Anna Babka, Marlen Bidwell-Steiner, and Wolfgang Müller-Funk, V&R unipress, 2016, pp. 38-86. —. “‘For greedie gaine hee thrust the weake to wall’: Extortion and the Negotiation of Values in Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts and the Scandal of Sir Giles Mompesson.” Acts of Crime: Lawlessness on the Early Modern Stage. Essays in Honour of Andreas Höfele, edited by Bettina Boecker et al., Könighausen und Neumann, 2015, pp. 131-56. —. “Ways of Worldmaking as a Model for the Study of Culture: Theoretical Frameworks, Epistemological Underpinnings, New Horizons.” Cultural Ways of Worldmaking. Media and Narratives, edited by Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning, and Birgit Neumann, De Gruyter, 2010, pp. 1-25. Nünning, Vera. “Intelligenz in und mit Literatur.” Intelligenz: Theoretische Grundlagen und praktische Anwendungen, edited by Rainer M. Holm-Hadulla, Joachim Funke, and Michael Wink, Heidelberg UP, 2021, pp. 421-50. —. “(European) Narratives as a Cultural Resource of Resilience.” Europe’s Crises and Cultural Resources of Resilience. Conceptual Explorations and Literary Negotiations, edited by Imke Polland, Michael Basseler, Ansgar Nünning, and Sandro Moraldo, WVT, 2020, pp. 35-52. —. “Identity: Cultural Ways of Making Selves.” Key Concepts for the Study of Culture: An Introduction, by Vera Nünning, Philipp Löffler, and Margit Peterfy, WVT, 2020, pp. 169-204. —. “The Value of Literature for the ‘Extensions of our Sympathies’: Twelve Strategies for the Direction of Readers’ Sympathy.” REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, vol. 36, 2020, pp. 72-98.

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—. “Contemporary Absurdities and the Power of Literature | Vera Nünning | TEDxUni‐ Heidelberg” YouTube, uploaded by TEDx Talks, 17 Oct. 2017, https://www.youtube.c om/watch?v=35vx8xPC_Z8. Last accessed 25 March 2022. —. “The Affective Value of Fiction: Presenting and Evoking Emotions.” Writing Emotions: Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature, edited by Ingeborg Jandl, Susanne Knaller, Sabine Schönfellner, and Gudrun Tockner, transcript, 2017, pp. 29-54. —. “Literature – Narrative – Forms of Life.” Emergent Forms of Life in Anglophone Literature: Conceptual Frameworks and Analyses, edited by Michael Basseler, Daniel Hartley, and Ansgar Nünning, WVT, 2015, pp. 141-62. —. “The Ethics of Fictional Form: Persuasiveness and Perspective Taking from the Point of View of Cognitive Literary Studies.” Arcadia, vol. 50, no. 1, 2015, pp. 37-56. —. “Narrative Fiction and Cognition: Why We Should Read Fiction.” Forum for World Literature Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2015, pp. 41-61. —. “Ein literaturwissenschaftlicher Zugang zu Depressionen am Beispiel von Jonathan Franzens Roman The Corrections (2001).” Die vielen Gesichter der Depression. Ursachen, Erscheinungsformen und Behandlungsweisen, edited by Rainer M. Holm-Hadulla, and Andreas Draguhn, Winter, 2015, pp. 295-317. —. “Cognitive Science and the Value of Literature for Life.” Values of Literature, edited by Hanna Meretoja et al., Rodopi, 2015, pp. 95-116. —. Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction. Winter, 2014. —. “Erzählen und Identität: Die Bedeutung des Erzählens im Schnittfeld zwischen kulturwissenschaftlicher Narratologie und Psychologie.” Kultur – Wissen – Narration. Perspektiven transdisziplinärer Erzählforschung für die Kulturwissenschaften, edited by Alexandra Strohmaier, transcript, 2013, pp. 145-70. —. “Narrativität als interdisziplinäre Schlüsselkategorie.” Forum Marsilius-Kolleg, vol. 6, 2013, pp. 1-17, https://doi.org/10.11588/fmk.2013.0.10768. Last accessed 28 Aug. 2022. —. “Ein Brückenschlag zwischen Disziplinen. Erzählen als Konzept der Kulturwissenschaften.” Krise der Geisteswissenschaften? Ihre Bedeutung und gesell‐ schaftliche Relevanz heute, edited by Helmut Reinalter, Edition Weimar, 2011, pp. 39-60. —. “Formulae for Imperial Story Telling: The Formation and Dissemination of Imperial Values in Victorian Narratives.” Stories of Empire: Narrative Strategies for the Legiti‐ mation of an Imperial World Order, edited by Christa Knellwolf King, and Margarete Rubik, WVT, 2009, pp. 13-37. —. “‘Writing Selves and Others’: Zur Konstruktion von Selbst- und Fremdbildern in Reiseberichten der frühen Neuzeit.” Points of Arrival: Travels in Time, Space, and Self / Zielpunkte: Unterwegs in Zeit, Raum und Selbst, edited by Marion Gymnich, Ansgar Nünning, Vera Nünning, and Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre, Narr, 2007, pp. 61-78. —. “‘How Can You Say They’re Like You and Me?’ Ethics and Unreliability in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (1997) and Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down (2005).” On

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the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English, edited by Silvia Martínez-Falquina, and Bárbara Arizti, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, pp. 327-41. —. “Die Macht der Mythen – Elisabeth I.” Mythen Europas: Schlüsselfiguren der Imagina‐ tion: Renaissance, edited by Christine Stroble, and Michael Neumann, Friedrich Pustet, 2006, pp. 58-80. —. “Fictions of Collective Memory.” REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, vol. 21, 2005, pp. 305-33. —. “Unreliable Narration and the Historical Variability of Values and Norms: The Vicar of Wakefield as a Test-Case of a Cultural-Historical Narratology.” Translated by Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, Recent Developments in German Narratology, edited by Monika Fludernik, and Uri Margolin, Style, vol. 38, no. 2, 2004, pp. 236-52. —. “A ‘Usable Past’: Fictions of Memory and British National Identity.” Journal for the Study of British Cultures, vol. 10, no. 1, 2003, pp. 27-48. —. “Where Literature, Culture and the History of Mentalities Meet: Changes in British National Identity as a Paradigm for a New Kind of Literary/Cultural History.” REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, vol. 17, 2001, pp. 211-38. —. “‘Daß jeder seine Pflicht thue’: Die Bedeutung der Indian Mutiny für das nationale britische Selbstverständnis.” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, vol. 78, 1996, pp. 363-91. —. “Vom historischen Ereignis zum imperialen Mythos: The Siege of Lucknow als Paradigma für den imperialistischen Diskurs.” Anglistik & Englischunterricht, vol. 58, 1996, pp. 51-71. —, editor. Unreliable Narration and Trustworthiness. Intermedial and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, De Gruyter, 2015. —, editor. Der amerikanische und britische Kriminalroman: Genres – Entwicklungen – Fallstudien. WVT, 2008. Nünning, Vera, and Ansgar Nünning. “Literaturwissenschaft und der eudaimonic turn: Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen zum Lebenswissen der Literatur und zu Axel Hackes Wozu wir da sind als literarisches Gedankenexperiment für ein gelungenes Leben.” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, vol. 70, no. 1, 2020, pp. 53-83. —. “How to Stay Healthy and Foster Well-Being with Narratives, or: Where Narratology and Salutogenesis Could Meet.” How to Do Things with Narrative: Cognitive and Diachronic Perspectives, edited by Jan Alber, and Greta Olson, De Gruyter, 2017, pp. 157-86. —. An Introduction to the Study of English and American Literature. Klett Sprachen, 2009 [2005]. ―. Grundkurs Anglistisch-Amerikanistische Literaturwissenschaft. Klett, 2008 [2001]. —. “Die Thronjubiläen Königin Viktorias als Paradigma imperialistischer Erinnerung‐ skultur.” Atlantic Understandings: Essays on European and American History in Honor

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of Hermann Wellenreuther, edited by Claudia Schnurmann, and Hartmut Lehmann, LIT Verlag, 2006, pp. 317-45. —. “The Invention of an Empress: Factions and Fictions of Queen Victoria’s Jubilees of 1887 and 1897 as Acts of Cultural Memory.” In the Footsteps of Queen Victoria: Wege zum viktorianischen Zeitalter, edited by Christa Jahnson, Studien zur englischen Literatur, vol. 15, LIT Verlag, 2003, pp. 83-112. Nünning, Vera, Ansgar Nünning, and Birgit Neumann, editors. Cultural Ways of World‐ making. Media and Narratives. De Gruyter, 2010. Rupp, Jan. “Writing Back to Brexit: Refugees, Transcultural Intertextuality, and the Colonial Archive.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 56, no. 5, 2020, pp. 689-702. Schwanecke, Christine. “Fiktionen und Narrative der Brexit-Krise: Das Gattungsspektrum des Brexit-Romans, medialer ‚Bullshit‘ und der ‚Patient‘ Großbritannien.” Krisennarrative und Krisenszenarien, edited by Ansgar Nünning, and Vera Nünning, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, vol. 70, no. 3-4, 2020, pp. 315-36. Seligman, Martin E. P. “Positive Psychology, Positive Prevention, and Positive Therapy.” Handbook of Positive Psychology, edited by Charles. R. Snyder, and Shane J. Lopez, Oxford UP, 2002, pp. 3-9. Shanafelt, Taid D. et al. “Relationship between Increased Personal Well-Being and Enhanced Empathy among Internal Medicine Residents.” Journal of General Internal Medicine, vol. 20, no. 7, 2020, pp. 559-64. Smith, Michael. Leading with Integrity: Creating Positive Change in Organizations. Rout‐ ledge, 2019. Tkacyk, Bart. Leading Positive Organizational Change: Energize – Redesign – Gel. Rout‐ ledge, 2021. Wadey, Ross, Melissa Day, and Karen Howells. Growth Following Adversity in Sport: A Mechanism to Positive Change. Routledge, 2021. Zeunert, Joshua. Landscape Architecture and Environmental Sustainability: Creating Positive Change Through Design. Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2017.

I. Literature Affecting Lives at an Individual Level

Haiku and Healing Lessons from the Pandemic Classroom for Literature and Narrative in Life

Jan Rupp

When a raven croaks inauspiciously, let not the external impression carry you away, but straightway draw a distinction in your own mind, and say, “None of these portents are for me, but either for my paltry body, or my paltry estate, or my paltry opinion, or my children, or my wife. But for me every por‐ tent is favourable, if I so wish; for whatever be the outcome, it is within my power to derive benefit from it”. (Epictetus 497)

1. Introduction: Literature and Narrative in/of Pandemic Times

There was little in favour of the recent pandemic moment, but it no doubt highlighted the fundamental role of literature and narrative in life. Even if scandalously overlooked by politicians and public health experts at times, literature, narrative, and culture overall clearly possess systemic relevance, contributing to those areas of ‘essential work’ that keep individuals and societies safe and sound. Writing and reading may not actually put food on the table, deliver goods, or run hospitals. But books undoubtedly help us to develop an informed response to the challenge at hand; to look after ourselves and others responsibly; to get on top of the ‘outbreak narrative’ (see Wald) – to know and be able to engage with the kind of stories pandemic societies live by; and, not least, to learn from historical precedent.

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Indeed, in trying to make sense of the present not a few readers have turned to and rediscovered a past archive of pandemic literature from Boccaccio to Defoe and Camus. Not a few writers have built on these predecessors to actualize and add to the tradition. Among others, the Stoics and their credo of keeping calm and staying positive in the face of adversity, as illustrated by the Encheiridion of Epictetus quoted above, have been frequently invoked. Without a doubt, keeping the company of ravens and listening to them intimately is beneficial at all times – including when their wise song may be felt to resonate with the ill omen of a particular moment. Sensing and confronting such portents is central to Stoic thought and practice of the good life. For the individual, Stoicism involves inner reflection and self-inspection to focus on what power and agency for positive outcomes exist or remain even in challenging situations. The classic model of this practice of mental resilience is arguably Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, who also lived in pandemic times, in his case of the Antonine Plague (165 to 180 AD). This first known pandemic impacting the Roman Empire provides an important context to Aurelius’s Meditations and adds to the resonance this text has unfolded during the coronavirus pandemic. Crucially, as Aurelius’s meditations make clear, Stoic resilience is not a solipsistic or egotistic, but an essentially altruistic affair, pursuing self-improvement and guidance to individual as well as collective ends. It involves realizing the extent to which the individual relies on others, and to which developing a Stoic mind-set is ultimately geared towards helping others. Thus, Stoic ideas of the good life speak to our current moment not least because they are predicated on the individual’s collective responsibility. That we ought to protect ourselves and others, and behave in a way that will not harm others (and spread infection, for example), is a fact that living through a pandemic makes abundantly clear. To those who have been willing to learn, past literary archives, including Aurelius’s Meditations alongside a wealth of other texts, have offered crucial lessons on how to grapple with as well as think beyond the present moment. It is this potential of books and stories to foster narrative sense-making, mental well-being, and resilience that I want to highlight in this contribution, taking my cue from what are paramount concerns of Vera Nünning’s seminal interdisciplinary work on literature and narrative. In what follows, I will present two case studies from the pandemic classroom. The first is Intimations: Six Essays by Zadie Smith, published in 2020, which is partly based on her rereading of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Smith’s collection of coronavirus essays has featured on many recent reading lists and syllabi. It is a case in point for the current retrieval of canonical texts, and an eloquent meditation on the role of reading and writing in adverse times. My second case study is a set of

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student texts, which have used haiku to compose and share stories of pandemic experience. In this classroom exercise, haiku served as a template and writing prompt, in a similar way that Marcus Aurelius serves as a model for Smith. In both cases, I will suggest, the affordances of concrete literary and narrative forms and genres – essay and haiku, respectively – allow for expressing and channelling experiences. Both case studies are thus paradigmatic examples of the transformative power of literature and narrative, and of the positive change to be had from reading and writing. 2. Essential Work: Salutogenesis and the Value of Literature and Narrative for Life

Before moving on to these examples and close readings, I want to elaborate on my proposition of literature and narrative as ‘essential work’. This is not a new term by any means, but it has gained currency and widespread application during the coronavirus pandemic. In its more specific use, essential work refers to the vital services and sectors of work – such as the medical profession, care for the elderly, or public transport – that ensure the functioning of society. At the beginning of the public health emergency, employees in these professions rose to unexpected prominence, receiving daily rounds of clapping as a new social ritual from families in lockdown and those working from home. Confronted with a situation of yet incalculable risk, the distinction between essential and non-essential work to ensure a bare minimum for survival seemed plausible enough. As the pandemic and mitigation measures wore on, however, the clapping gradually abated, and the politicians’ words of praise failed to turn into actual financial commitment and reward for health care workers. With the collateral damage of economic doom in the hospitality industry, for example, as well as growing rumours about an unacknowledged ‘mental health pandemic’, the question of quite what is essential for individual and collective lives acquired renewed urgency. A whole range of sectors and professions began to reassert themselves and challenge the previous consensus about essential versus non-essential work. Among many others, cultural practitioners and advocates for a vibrant literary life joined this debate to remind audiences that man does not live by bread alone. While the focus on key services for the survival of people and society may have been born of necessity, what these interventions rightly showed was that the distinction between essential and non-essential work was much too simplistic. Worse still, it unduly deprivileged vast sectors of economic and social life. Arguing for literature and narrative as essential

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work, then, is part of redressing the balance. At the same time, of course, there is little point in simply reversing a false, polarizing distinction or in perpetuating a misleadingly competitive logic. Just as much as acknowledging that literature and narrative perform essential work, it is important to determine and differentiate specifically how this is done. In both these respects, Vera Nünning’s work is an essential reference, in‐ cluding for the important intersection between literature, narrative, and matters of health at issue. In her article “How to Stay Healthy and Foster Well-Being with Narratives, or: Where Salutogenesis and Narratology Could Meet”, she observes, with Ansgar Nünning: “narrative theory has only recently begun to be concerned with the cultural work that narratives do” (Nünning and Nünning, “How to Stay Healthy” 157). In other words, foregrounding the “performative qualities of narrative” (ibid.) is an important intellectual move to enter literature and narrative into a discussion over essential cultural work to begin with. As Vera and Ansgar Nünning continue to argue, one important context of this work, performed by literature and narrative, is ‘salutogenesis’. Thus, they take up Aaron Antonovsky’s original term and holistic inquiry into which physical, social, and emotional factors, among others, are responsible for human health and well-being. In building on Antonovsky as well as on approaches of narrative medicine, Vera and Ansgar Nünning go a long way towards demonstrating the health benefits of literature and narrative; furthermore, they differentiate how the salutogenic power involved may unfold. Among other aspects, they start from Antonovsky’s “key term for the definition and understanding of salutogenesis, i.e. the concept of a ‘sense of coherence’” (ibid. 167). As they argue, “this sense of coherence is a prerequisite for mental and physical health” – and “almost certainly connected to narrative competence and the reading of fictional, and factual, narratives” (ibid.). Further zooming in on the three components making up the sense of coherence – ‘comprehensibility’, ‘manageability’, ‘meaningfulness’ (see Antonovsky) – they delineate how these “three dimensions or factors […] can be mapped onto concepts and concerns in narrative theory” (Nünning and Nünning, “How to Stay Healthy” 167). As for the first component, comprehensibility refers to the way events in one’s life ideally happen in an orderly and predictable fashion, in a way that can be understood and allows for reasonable future predictions. Narrative comprehension more specifically may serve as a test case and training ground: “reading narratives, especially literary fiction, can have at least as many health benefits as telling and writing stories” (ibid.). As they elaborate, “[t]he salutary effects of reading fiction include an enhancement of several cognitive and emotional abilities, especially an improvement of empathy, Theory of Mind,

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perspective-taking, and thus the ability to understand others.” (Ibid.) Reading fiction goes far beyond aesthetic experience or pleasure, which leads Vera Nünning to posit an all-around “value of literature for life” (see “Cognitive Science”). Literature and narrative thus have an impact far beyond the page, influencing how readers experience their everyday reality: “narrative is among the crucial ways in which human beings comprehend what is happening in their lives and what is going on around them by creating mental models of the characters, contexts, events, and settings that constitute a story” (Nünning and Nünning, “How to Stay Healthy” 167).1 With these general benefits of narrative for comprehensibility and our sense of coherence in mind, the recent interest in literary archives, specifically of pandemic narratives, is easy to account for. Rereading fictional accounts of comparable experiences and events in the past, such as Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1772), no doubt offers ways to comprehend the present, to better understand individual and collective responses to the current emergency, and to predict the future.2 What is more, and further on comprehensibility, narrative plays a role not only in retelling and reimagining pandemics in fiction, but also in processing and experiencing pandemics as a highly conventionalized ‘outbreak narrative’, in Priscilla Wald’s term. Analysing a wide range of fictional and, importantly, also factual narratives, Wald shows how the lived experience of pandemics – through media coverage, for example – always already tends to be shaped in terms of a story. Outbreak narratives follow an uncannily similar pattern, involving stock characters like patient zero and superspreaders, or notorious events like asymptomatic transmission. The place and time of outbreak narratives typically locate the origin of disease in some dubious eastern setting and credit western scientific expertise with containing and conquering the outbreak (see Wald 1-28). These spatiotemporal patterns are only too familiar when placed next to recent narrative sense-making of the coronavirus pandemic. As

1

2

For her encompassing book-length account of how reading narrative fiction and being immersed in storyworlds can hone narrative competence and serve as a privileged means of acquiring cognitive, affective, and social skills, see V. Nünning, Reading Fictions. See also V. Nünning, “Depressionen” and “Affective Value”, as well as Bahrs for the reception of Vera Nünning’s interdisciplinary work at the intersection of narrative studies, cognitive science, and salutogenesis. Along with Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (see Christine Schwanecke’s contribu‐ tion in this volume), current rereadings of pandemic literature have included such world literature classics as Giovani Boccaccio’s Decamerone (1349-53), Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill” (1926), Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), and Albert Camus’ La Peste (1947).

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Wald rightly warns, the outbreak story is a problematic narrative to live by when it comes to the potential limits of scientism and the lingering colonialist worldview involved. Readers who familiarize themselves with fictional and factual narratives of pandemics thus stand to enhance their sense of coherence significantly. They learn from historical precedent to understand the present and future, and they develop a critical narrative competence to assess stereotypical modes of processing reality. As for manageability, the second component of the sense of coherence, narrative competence primarily consists in being able to tell and process stories that are indicative of “challenges, crises, problems, and stressful situations” (Nünning and Nünning, “How to Stay Healthy” 167). Such stories are often “broken narratives” (ibid.), as in the context of traumatic experiences, but the very attempt and ability to articulate them, however broken, already works towards restoring coherence to the disrupted lives that are retold. While comprehensibility may be seen to benefit from reading, or the reception of literature and narrative, it becomes clear that manageability is oriented more towards production, as a storytelling practice. On balance, the same goes for the third component of the sense of coherence, meaningfulness, as a general belief and felt experience that life is meaningful and worth living. Viewed from the perspective of narrative theory, this component “is even more closely connected to narrative and narrative competence in that storytelling is a crucial tool for the creation of identities, meaning, and selves” (ibid. 168). With the disruptive effects of social distancing and other mitigation measures for meaningful mores of individual and communal life, the constitutive and redemptive role of narratives as “one of the most important cultural ways of meaning-making” (ibid.) is particularly pronounced at times of crisis, such as in a pandemic. In my two case studies to follow, both reception- and production-oriented dimensions of the salutogenic power of literature and narrative loom large. In fact, just as the three components of the sense of coherence are closely interlinked, processes of reception and production are complementary and ideally combine to maximize the health benefits of reading, telling, and writing stories. As my first example of Zadie Smith and her taking recourse to Marcus Aurelius shows, good writers tend to be avid and attentive readers (Sect. 3). Conversely, good readers can capitalize on the salutogenic power of literature and narrative when they put their narrative competence, honed through the close reading of fictional and factual stories, into storytelling practice (Sect. 4). Regarding the texts at the centre of my second case study, I therefore deliberately employed a creative writing exercise for my students to produce pandemic haiku of their own, in line with general principles of active writing and other

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production-oriented methods of the literature classroom. Along with tracing the potential of reception and production for improving our sense of coherence, allowing us to better comprehend, manage, and live meaningful lives, both case studies will moreover pay close attention to aspects of form and genre, to the concrete affordances of essay and haiku respectively.3 3. Writing as Control and Coherence in Disruptive Times: The Coronavirus Essay

Both in connection with and away from the coronavirus pandemic, the essay has recently attracted renewed attention, as volumes such as The Essay: Forms and Transformations (Flothow et al.) and On Essays: Montaigne to the Present (Karshan and Murphy) attest. Part of this scholarly interest is certainly time-transcending, trying to raise the profile of the essay’s rich history up to the present time, a history that appears to have been acknowledged and studied less widely than that of other forms and genres. Part of the reason for this relative neglect are arguably the essay’s multifarious character and highly diverse manifestations: “pointing at essays, or at things that have been called essays, immediately reveals a baffling and incongruous variety of works” (Karshan and Murphy, “Introduction” 6). Already Montaigne plays on the full range of its possible meanings, to propose essayistic writing as tentative, risky, and experimental way of rejecting authority and exercise the free thinking of the author: rather a style and attitude than a form (ibid. 4).

Still, via translations of Michel de Motaigne’s formative Essais (1580), the essay entered English (and other languages) as the name for a genre, one ultimately held together by family resemblances, however loose and flexible at times, as many critics pointed out. As Virginia Woolf wrote in her 1922 essay, “The Modern Essay”: “The form admits variety. The essay can be short or long, about God or Spinoza, or about turtles and Cheapside.” (41) As is well known, this thematic and formal range or flexibility has also allowed for articulating marginalized perspectives, for broaching progressive feminist and anti-colonial politics (with Virginia Woolf’s essays as a case in point once more), and for tackling complex, specialist, and novel sets of circumstances from an integrative or even non-specialist point of view.

3

In foregrounding aspects of the essential cultural work of form and genre I am guided by new formalist approaches in the study of literature and culture (see Levine; Kovach et al.).

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Given its affordance of explorative, interdiscursive, and interdisciplinary writing, it does not come as a surprise that the essay has featured prominently in attempts to reflect on and make sense of the coronavirus pandemic, char‐ acterized as the latter is by a plethora of scientific, political, and economic implications, to name just a few. So many writers and commentators have drawn on the essay as a formal template that speaking of the ‘coronavirus essay’ as a subset seems justified indeed. In keeping with the generic tradition, the coronavirus essay ranges widely from personal introspection to contemplating social, political, or environmental repercussions of the pandemic. That one can use the essay as an explorative and experimental template, first to comprehend and manage a disorienting new situation, and then to maintain or restore a sense of coherence and meaningful life, certainly adds to the genre’s appeal as a major form of pandemic writing. Moreover, while the essay is not a narrative genre in a more narrow sense, many coronavirus essays do engage in narrative sense-making, grappling with the temporality of the pandemic’s dramatic onset and further course. In her much-noted 2020 essay “The Pandemic is a Portal”, Arundhati Roy stressed the pandemic’s momentous, eventful intervention to issue a call for action, using the metaphor of the portal as an opportunity to change direction and project a different narrative into the future. While Roy’s essay is expressly future-oriented, critiquing the status quo and attempting to turn the pandemic into a watershed moment of positive change, Zadie Smith’s Intimations: Six Essays focuses on the immediate impact of the pandemic’s first wave and lockdown in the spring of 2020. As the title of her collection suggests, she foregrounds a more tentative, searching, and personal style than Roy, one equally afforded by the essay as a genre: “What I’ve tried to do is organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me […]. These are above all personal essays: small by definition, short by necessity” (Intimations xi).4 As Smith makes clear, her essays, however small, are central to a personal act of narrative sense-making, trying to organize and interpret the events she has experienced. To this end, she uses the essay to retell, comprehend, and manage her very own pandemic narrative, investing it with meaning while simultaneously drawing on the salutogenic power of a predecessor story. Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, consonant with Intimations certainly not by coincidence, is an overarching reference and motif throughout. As Smith notes in her foreword:

4

In the following, references to Intimations: Six Essays will be given without repeating the title.

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Early on in the crisis, I picked up Marcus Aurelius and for the first time in my life read his Meditations not as an academic exercise, nor in pursuit of pleasure, but with the same attitude I bring to the instructions for a flat-pack table – I was in need of practical assistance. (That the assistance Aurelius offers is for the spirit makes it no less practical in my view). […] I am no more Stoic than I was when I opened that ancient book. But I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard. (Ibid.)

This quotation is conspicuous for highlighting the spiritual health benefits offered by Aurelius’s work, and indicative of several shared insights, charac‐ teristics, and lessons that Smith derives from his Meditations. Central are the practical, real-life implications of writing as personal inquiry and self-discovery, however spiritual. What is also key is the dialogical rather than solipsistic dimension of writing, however intimate, for “writing means being overheard” (ibid.). As this makes clear, Stoicism is not only or even primarily a recipe for self-help, but a moral philosophy, thinking about the self in terms of social relationships and responsibility. Not least, what unites Smith and Aurelius is the fact that both their texts are motivated by existential circumstances. While Aurelius noted down (part of) his Meditations under the impression of the Antonine Plague, Smith turns to Aurelius as inspiration for her Intimations during the unfolding coronavirus pandemic. Accordingly, both works show that writing, however tentative as meditation or intimation, provides practical assistance in trying times, such as a medium of ‘cooling down’ (see Rastogi). Smith further elaborates on the salutogenic potentials of writing and reading when she qualifies the idea of ‘creative writing’ in “Peonies”, the collection’s first essay: Writing is routinely described as ‘creative’ – this has never struck me as the correct word. […] Writing is control. […] Experience – mystifying, overwhelming, conscious, subconscious – rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, sometimes submitting to, whatever confronts us. But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mould of their own devising. Writing is all resistance. (4 f., emphasis in original)

The meditation on writing in this passage tellingly pinpoints the transformative power of literature and narrative to foster resilience and well-being, for Smith’s description of the writer’s work corresponds closely with the basic workings of narrative. Any narrative turns potentially chaotic or “mystifying” (5) events and experiences into some kind of order, helping the writer to “adapt, to learn, to accommodate” (ibid.). Rather than a pleasurable pastime, then, writing serves a crucial, almost life-saving function. Specifically, writers capitalize on

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this life-saving function by telling a story, by providing a shape, mould, or story pattern for what would otherwise remain overwhelming. Control of, and resistance to, a ‘pre-narrative’ chaos of events and experiences, as Smith indicates, constitute a particular affordance of literary and storytelling form. Her own attempt to contain bewildering and unsettling experiences involves taking recourse to Marcus Aurelius, and it is her concluding piece – the title essay “Intimations” – which comes closest to the ancient book’s form and shape. As is well known, Aurelius opens his Meditations in Book 1, entitled “Debts and Lessons” (Aurelius 3) by placing himself in relation to his circle of family, friends, and mentors, and by listing the lessons he has learned and his debts to each of them. Tracing his family tree and close acquaintances, he remembers central insights, character traits, and skills that he owes to each of them and has been able to acquire only through keeping their company. His grandfather was a model of “character and self-control” (ibid.), for example, while his mother was admired by Aurelius for her “reverence of the divine, her generosity, her inability not only to do wrong but even to conceive of doing it” (ibid.). From his teacher and friend Rusticus, whom he credits for “introducing me to Epictetus’s lectures” (ibid. 6), he has learnt: “To read attentively – not to be satisfied with ‘just getting the gist of it’. And not to fall for every smooth talker” (ibid.).5 Thus, the social and moral dimension of Stoic inquiry becomes clear from the outset. Smith repeats this act of relational self- and hetero-characterization by taking up Aurelius’s formula, though with a significant difference in that she remembers many more female figures of influence than the Roman emperor. At a time of social distancing, Smith assembles her personal and spiritual community on the page, acknowledging her debts and obligations as a relative and friend. Top of the list is her mother: “Energy, vitality, charisma. The source: an undimmed childishness. Which I share.” (73) She also pays homage to other writers and artists, such as Zora Neale Hurston (“The importance of finding your own language”, 77) and Tracy Chapman (“‘All that you have is your soul.’ Therefore: liberty”, ibid.). A particularly poignant lesson, highlighting once more the curing power of writing in the context of mental health, Smith has learned from (reading) Virginia Woolf: “To replace that missing layer of skin with language. For as long as that works” (78). Smith’s catalogue, moving, like Aurelius, from the nuclear family to a wider circle of formative influences and encounters, ultimately retells Smith’s personal genealogy and moral education, as a relational story of how she has become the person she is. At a time

5

Underscoring this intellectual legacy going back to Epictetus, the edition of Aurelius’s Meditations quoted features a raven (a frequent reference in Stoic writing) on the cover.

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of disrupted lives and communities during the pandemic, Smith symbolically reassembles and restores the significant others and the meaningful relationships in her life. Just like her collection of coronavirus essays overall, this list and the stories it tells work towards maintaining a sense of coherence, as a testament to the salutogenic power of literature and narrative. 4. Haiku and Healing: Poetry and Miniature Stories as Pandemic Relief

Segueing to my second case study, I want to explore further the nature of writing as control, resilience, and care, as well as the empowering role of form and genre. My next example are not works by professional writers like Smith, but a set of student texts, produced as part of an active writing exercise while dealing with haiku as a genre of pandemic literature. With the new challenges posed by online teaching and learning, keeping a strict academic as well as recreational writing regime has been a frequent piece of advice for students recently. Elsewhere, insight into the role of writing and creativity for coping, mental health benefits, and healing has grown significantly (see Stephenson and Rosen), too, with an intellectual legacy extending back to the psychoanalytic talking cure. During the pandemic, this recuperative praxis and track record of writing and storytelling provided an additional rationale for including a practical element in the literature classroom. Before moving on to the student texts and the pandemic relief they offer, it is worth reflecting on the general potential of haiku in contexts of (mental) health, or even of poetry more broadly. Poetic responses have loomed large from early on in the pandemic, arguably in sync with a broader revival in contexts of performance and social media, associated with the work of new voices such as Amanda Gorman or Rupi Kaur. Meanwhile, collections of pandemic poetry are legion, published online or in book form, such as Olive Senior’s 2021 collection Pandemic Poems: First Wave or other telling titles such as Pandemic Haiku: Living through Covid-19 by Robert Epstein or Coronavirus Haiku: Poetry to Help Lighten Your Pandemic Days by James Weir, both published in 2020. Many works, by professional and citizen poets alike, share a firm belief in the meaning-making potential and health benefits of poetry. One salient, if perhaps not unexpected, form of recent writing endeavours on news websites, social media, or in print publications has been haiku. Clearly, the connection between haiku and healing, widely mooted in general therapeutic contexts (see Stephenson and Rosen; Stork), also lends itself to working through and communicating pandemic experiences and stress.

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As studies of “the expressive writing paradigm” (Stephenson and Rosen 38) as a therapeutic intervention have found out, “writing haiku about nature led to decreased illness orientation” (ibid. 36), while “writing in narrative about a neutral topic led to decreases in anxiety and depression” (ibid.). As famously practiced in literary modernism, a special affordance of haiku poetry seems to be its potential to channel concentration, for example, by presenting and contemplating arresting images. As the student texts explored further below show, “haiku writing increases creativity and sensitivity to topic” (ibid.) indeed, and it is the formal discipline of haiku which paradoxically allows for expressing a wide range of feeling and thought. However, apart from the sense of relief that a concentrated focus on writing haiku may bring, my students also used the form to process life events they were going through in terms of narrative. While not a narrative genre more strictly speaking, in other words, haiku did offer a template for narrative comprehension, and thus for maintaining the sense of coherence at the heart of literature’s salutogenic power.6 Alongside reading and discussing haiku in a literature course on pandemic narratives, I chose haiku for a writing exercise, asking students to use the form to express a defining observation or a central experience during the pandemic. Only a few participants were familiar with haiku, let alone with writing haiku, but it proved to be very productive to reflect on, as well as actually practice, what these short poems can do. The simple, if rigid structure of haiku – three lines with five, seven, and five syllables respectively – turned out to be easy to learn, and I was impressed with the well over twenty haiku that my students produced within no more than half an hour. Moreover, using a Moodle forum to publish and circulate the poems made it a personal as well as collective writing process and shared experience. Students not only composed their own haiku but also commented on them and posted replies to their fellow students’ pieces in the forum.7 The result was a highly multi-faceted and collaborative set of pandemic stories, capitalizing on the brevity of haiku and their tonal range. Haiku can be witty or moody and melancholic, and they do have the capacity to serve as ‘nut-shell’ or miniature narratives. My students composed a great variety of 6 7

On the therapeutic dimensions of writing and narrative see also the contribution by Cristian Camilo Cuervo in this volume. In the following, I quote from the poems and responses posted to a Moodle forum as part of my literature seminar “Plague to Pandemic: Literary and Cultural Responses”, conducted at Wuppertal University during the winter semester 2020/21. The four haiku quoted are by Melissa Celine Tang, Filiz Sahin, Sofia Valery Schneider, and Anna Celina Stockhausen, respectively; my thanks to all of them for granting me permission to include their poems here.

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stories, to capture and represent pandemic time and space, among other aspects. In the following haiku, entitled “Lockdown” (Tang), for example, the form’s three-part structure is employed to great effect: Lockdown in few words Days where packages arrive And days where they don’t

This perception of amorphous, monotonous lockdown routine was echoed by many other poems, as in “A Day in My Life” (Sahin): Wake up, drink coffee, Zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom. Repeat. That’s life now.

Another haiku was entitled “infinite routes” (Schneider), adding to and projec‐ ting a sense of repetitive lockdown life, only ever punctuated by uneventful, ‘infinite routes’ indeed: into the kitchen back to the supermarket oh boy – what an adventure

I was much taken with how these haiku enabled the students to articulate characteristic pandemic experiences, to vent their frustration, but in so doing to lighten up their lockdown blues at the same time. As these examples show, the haiku’s affordance of succinct observations as well as witty twists and turns clearly offered some much-needed comic or indeed pandemic relief. Moreover, the poems allowed the students to think through their situation not only by themselves, but also together, in solidarity, as many responses in the forum, such as “This is incredibly relatable” (Ernat) or “This is a rather sad one[,] but I like it because it describes reality at the moment” (Böhm), showed. Writing these haiku was an act of storytelling as much as story-sharing. While many students addressed the status quo, capitalizing on the potential of haiku poetry to promote creativity and sensitivity, others also used their haiku to project stories and imagine a post-pandemic future. As Vera and Ansgar Nünning point out, in order for salutogenic narratives to be successful they always have to include a forward-looking dimension and “enable[…] human beings to make plans for the future” (“How to Stay Healty” 167). Here again, as in “A New Beginning” (Stockhausen), the form of haiku proved essential:

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The earth is healing The sun rises on the shore A new beginning

This haiku, entitled “A New Beginning”, in a small way encapsulates the essential work, the transformative power of literature and narrative, as I would like to suggest in closing. The poem is not limited to the reality of disruptive lockdown today, but it builds on the power of the imagination to envisage healing and a new beginning tomorrow – precisely by using the tranquil, meditative quality, as well as the soothing simplicity and flow of haiku. 5. Conclusion

As I hope to have shown, both my case studies provide ample evidence and illustration of the salutogenic power of literature and narrative, of their potential for positive change, specifically in times of crisis and uncertainty. In their own different ways, both case studies moreover demonstrate the transformative impact of generic conventions on how and what kind of narrative sense-making is afforded by the (coronavirus) essay and (the students’ pandemic) haiku respectively. This role of generic conventions, as a differentiating factor of the health benefits of reading, telling, and writing fictional and factual stories, clearly merits further inquiry, both in theoretical and in analytical terms. When it comes to the generic cartography of pandemic narratives, an entire continent that has been beyond the scope of this article is a plethora of dystopian and post-apocalyptic stories, which readers have explored to ponder the impact and future consequences of the (coronavirus) pandemic at hand. Where I have focused on the role of literary archives, as previous pandemic narratives that might serve as a historical precedent and lesson, a complementary body of writing is the burgeoning field of speculative fiction.8 Post-apocalyptic works – such as Margaret’s Atwood’s trilogy Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013) – have enjoyed considerable success as an inter‐ pretive template of recent events (see McCartney). However, where rereading pandemic works such as Aurelius’s Meditations allows for extrapolating a sense of coherence from comparable past experiences in the modern coronavirus essay, post-apocalyptic fiction operates in a very different way. Rather than looking back, post-apocalyptic works imagine a future anterior to arrive at a

8

For a related discussion of speculative fiction as a medium of positive change, see the contribution by Désirée Link in this volume.

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more complete narrative, filling in blanks left by the disruptive present and its uncertain trajectory. Such genre-specific modalities and affordances clearly deserve greater attention if one wants to further substantiate and explicate the salutogenic potential of literature and narrative, building on Vera Nünning’s pioneering work at the intersection of literary studies, narrative theory, and cognitive as well as health science. Another major desideratum consists in closely intersecting and capitalizing on processes of both reception and production, as practiced by the set of student haiku discussed. In keeping with Vera Nünning’s account of the holistic value of literature for life, and with the all-around way in which narrative comprehen‐ sion benefits our sense of coherence through acts of reading, telling, and writing, a similar holism is clearly due for the literature classroom and beyond. As has been seen, it is in the interplay of reception- and production-oriented activities – Smith revisiting Aurelius for meditations of her own and the students engaging with haiku to get to grips with their pandemic experiences – that the salutogenic power of literature and narrative may fully unfold. With a proliferation of crises in the 21st century (see Nünning and Nünning “Krise”) – from public health emergencies to environmental disaster and new fears of nuclear war –, we urgently rely on this transformative power and the positive change it offers. Bibliography

  Primary Literature

Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. Translated by Gregory Hays, Random House, 2003. Epictetus. Discourses, Books 3-4. Fragments. The Encheiridion. Translated by W. A. Oldfather, Harvard UP, 1928. Epstein, Robert. Pandemic Haiku: Living through Covid-19. Middle Island Press, 2020. Roy, Arundhati. “The Pandemic is a Portal.” Financial Times, 3 Apr. 2020, https://www.ft .com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca. Last accessed 29 Aug. 2022. Sahin, Filiz. “A Day in My Life.” Plague to Pandemic: Literary and Cultural Re‐ sponses, Moodle Forum, Moodle, 26 Jan. 2021, moodle.uni-wuppertal.de/course/forum‐ view.php?id=21256. Last accessed 29 Aug. 2022. Schneider, Sofia Valery. “infinite routes.” Plague to Pandemic: Literary and Cultural Responses, Moodle Forum, Moodle, 26 Jan. 2021, moodle.uni-wuppertal.de/course/fo‐ rumview.php?id=21256. Last accessed 29 Aug. 2022. Senior, Olive. Pandemic Poems: First Wave. Printed by the author, 2021. Smith, Zadie. Intimations: Six Essays. Penguin, 2020.

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Stockhausen, Anna Celina. “A New Beginning.” Plague to Pandemic: Literary and Cultural Responses, Moodle Forum, Moodle, 26 Jan. 2021, moodle.uni-wuppertal.de/course/fo‐ rumview.php?id=21256. Last accessed 29 Aug. 2022. Tang, Melissa Celine. “Lockdown.” Plague to Pandemic: Literary and Cultural Re‐ sponses, Moodle Forum, Moodle, 26 Jan. 2021, moodle.uni-wuppertal.de/course/forum‐ view.php?id=21256. Last accessed 29 Aug. 2022. Weir, James. Coronavirus Haiku: Poetry to Help Lighten Your Pandemic Days. Printed by the author, 2020.

  Secondary Literature

Antonovsky, Aaron. Health, Stress, and Coping. Jossey-Bass, 1991. Bahrs, Ottomar, editor. Der Mensch: Zeitschrift für Salutogenese und Anthropologische Medizin. Sinnstiftende Erzählungen, vol. 59, no. 2, 2019. Böhm, Jana. “This is a rather sad one but I like it because it describes reality at the moment.” Plague to Pandemic: Literary and Cultural Responses, Moodle Forum, Moodle, 26 Jan. 2021, moodle.uni-wuppertal.de/course/ forumview.php?id=21256. Last accessed 29 Aug. 2022. Ernat, Sophia. “This is incredibly relatable.” Plague to Pandemic: Literary and Cultural Responses, Moodle Forum, Moodle, 26 Jan. 2021, moodle.uni-wuppertal.de/course/fo‐ rumview.php?id=21256. Last accessed 29 Aug. 2022. Flothow, Dorothea, Markus Oppolzer, and Sabine Coelsch-Foisner. The Essay: Forms and Transformations. Winter, 2017. Karshan, Thomas, and Kathryn Murphy. “Introduction: On the Difficulty of Introducing a Work of this Kind.” On Essays: Montaigne to the Present, edited by Thomas Karshan, and Kathryn Murphy, Oxford UP, 2020, pp. 1-30. —, editors. On Essays: Montaigne to the Present. Oxford UP, 2020. Kovach, Elizabeth, Imke Polland, and Ansgar Nünnig, editors. Forms at Work: New Formalist Approaches in the Study of Literature, Culture, and Media. WVT, 2021. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton UP, 2017. McCartney, Margaret. “The Art of Medicine: Pandemics Past and Dystopian Futures.” The Lancet, vol. 396, 2020, pp. 526-27. Nünning, Ansgar, and Vera Nünning. “Krise als medialer Leitbegriff und kulturelles Erzählmuster: Merkmale und Funktionen von Krisennarrativen als Sinnstiftung über Zeiterfahrung und als literarische Laboratorien für alternative Welten.” Germa‐ nisch-Romanische Monatsschrift: Narrative der Krise, vol. 70, no. 3-4, pp. 241-78. Nünning, Vera. “The Affective Value of Fiction: Presenting and Evoking Emotions.” Writing Emotions: Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature, edited by Ingeborg Jandl et al., transcript, 2017, pp. 29-54.

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—. “Cognitive Science and the Value of Literature for Life.” Values of Literature, edited by Hanna Meretoja et al., Rodopi, 2015, pp. 95-116. —. “Ein literaturwissenschaftlicher Zugang zu Depressionen am Beispiel von Jonathan Franzens Roman The Corrections (2001).” Die vielen Gesichter der Depression. Ursachen, Erscheinungsformen und Behandlungsweisen, edited by Rainer M. Holm-Hadulla, and Andreas Draguhn, Winter, 2015, pp. 295-317. —. Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction. Winter, 2014. Nünning, Vera, and Ansgar Nünning. “How to Stay Healthy and Foster Well-Being with Narratives, or: Where Narratology and Salutogenesis Could Meet.” How to Do Things with Narrative: Cognitive and Diachronic Perspectives, edited by Jan Alber, and Greta Olson, De Gruyter, 2017, pp. 157-86. Rastogi, Pallavi. “Flattening the Curse: Cooling Down with Zadie Smith’s Intimations.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 58, no. 2, 2022, pp. 240-52. Stephenson, Kittredge, and David H. Rosen. “Haiku and Healing: An Empirical Study of Poetry Writing as Therapeutic and Creative Intervention.” Empirical Studies of the Arts, vol. 33, no. 1, 2015, pp. 36-60. Stork, Brian. “Narrative Medicine: Haiku and Healing – Creating Connections.” The Permanente Journal, 2020, https://doi.org/10.7812/TPP/19.176. Last accessed 29 Aug. 2022. Wald, Priscilla. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Duke UP, 2008. Woolf, Virginia. “The Modern Essay.” Collected Essays, vol. 2, The Hogarth Press, 1966, pp. 41-50.

‘Not form which you see, but emotion which you feel’ Crisis, Time, and Hyperempathy in Octavia Butler’s Earthseed Novels

Stefanie Schäfer

1. Introduction: Reading Feelings

In “A Theory of Writing: Virginia’ Woolf’s Aesthetics from the Point of View of her Critical Essays”, Vera Nünning sheds new light on the modernist author’s concept of writing as communication, a process that has to be updated to follow social and cultural changes. As times change, the form and style of writing have to change with them to fulfil literature’s communicative function. This also pertains to readers, who become “co-creators willing and able to apply their knowledge and their imagination in order to become immersed in the fictional world, and to understand the characters” (“Theory” 988). Woolf, who tends to “use, rather than explicate, her aesthetic principles” (ibid. 992), describes her own writing as practice of a “common reader” (ibid. 982, 992), thus tacitly discarding the writer-as-genius stereotype and posing as an equal participant in the production of stories – and of emotions: “‘the book itself’ is not form which you see, but emotion which you feel”, Woolf writes (qtd. in “Affective Value” 38). Tracing Woolf’s œuvre further in “The Affective Value of Fiction: Presenting and Evoking Emotions”, Nünning invokes Woolf’s dictum about books as “emo‐ tion which you feel” (38). She maintains that in exploring the affective potential of literature and the reading process, we have to go beyond the well-known tenet of literary figures inducing our empathy. Instead, Nünning argues, empathy formation works as a “dual process” (ibid. 43), as a back-and-forth between two cognitive activities in the reader’s mind: engaged vs. disengaged, or ‘feeling like’ the protagonist vs. assessing the situation and judging it morally (see ibid. 43 f.). Vera Nünning’s work in cognitive and cultural narratology maps the potential of literature in times of crisis. My contribution looks at the United States and

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the contemporary revival of African American science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998; Sower and Talents in the following). I will show how, when read in the 21st century, Butler’s novels articulate a call to action on Donald Trump’s animation of ethnonationalist and settler colonialist ideologies (see Pease), and also urge readers to position themselves in relation to the global climate crisis. This call to positioning is aided by the protagonist-experiencer Lauren’s ‘hyperempathy’, which is at once a superpower and a pathological condition. In the following, my contribution links together the back-and-forth of empathy formation with the narrative presentation of hyperempathy. I explore the story and discourse levels of the novels based on my understanding of self-narration as a scenario of mutual recognition between the narrator and the reader (see Schäfer) to uncover how different scenarios of narration used in the parables (comprising e.g. moments of prophecy, confessional, self-observation) impel readers to switch between different addressee roles. Finally, I consider a contemporary reading response in light of two aspects: the futures projected by the novel and by the current crises of the Covid-19 global pandemic and climate change. 2. Hyperempathy and Survival in Post-Apocalyptic California: Octavia Butler’s Earthseed Parables

In the early 1990s, Octavia Butler’s parables diversified science fiction by featuring a black female heroine whose ‘superpower’ is hyperempathy. In The Parable of the Sower, Lauren Oya Olamina, a teenager in the year 2024, sees her home in Robledo (Spanish for oakwood), California, destroyed by looters and drug addicts in a state of anarchy cultivated by the populist President Donner. Lauren escapes by a hair’s breadth and founds Acorn, a multiracial community of survivors on the North American Pacific coast. From oakwood to acorn, Lauren thus ‘sows’ the seeds for a better anthropogenic world. The novel is presented as Lauren’s own writing in her log, which also articulates her vision for the future Earthseed community. Its title, “EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING by Lauren Oya Olamina” reappears in capitals on the opening page and throughout the book, asserting her authorship and entangling introspective intimacy with Lauren’s self-monitored reinvention as a visionary leader. Lauren’s narrative discourse and diegetic speech serve to establish her agenda. In the course of events, Lauren takes on the role of commentator on the events that brought about the collapse of her world:

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Addicts are running wild, setting fires in areas that the earthquake didn’t damage. Bands of the street poor precede or follow them, grabbing whatever they can from stores and from the walled enclaves of the rich and what’s left of the middle class. Yeah. (Parable of the Sower 232)1

Amidst this chaos, Lauren builds her vision from intersectional, Buddhist, and phenomenological reflections (see Johnson 92). Her metaphorical toolkit is comprised of organic, medical, and biblical terms (“We are a harvest of survivors”, 280) as well as references to the struggle against historic structural racism and slavery in the United States. In trying to save people from debt slavery, she tells her partner in conversation that the Earthseed followers have become “the crew of a new underground railroad” – and then comments to the reader: “Slavery again – even worse than my father thought, or at least sooner. He thought it would take a while.” (277) With these nods to black history, Butler collapses past struggles into the chaotic present of 2024, showing how structural inequalities have built the crisis of the present moment. Lauren’s narrative discourse thus contextualizes and explains her perspective to the readers. The material presentation of the book, with epigraphs from her Earthseed writings and dates that indicate the time and sequence of the story, produces a reality effect. It compels readers to imagine that they hold Lauren’s diary in their hands and are reading a story of the (nowadays not so remote) future. This effect is bolstered by the different scenarios of the narrative discourse that readers have to navigate: Lauren’s personal confessions; furthermore, her attempts at coming to terms, through writing, with her experiences of traumatizing loss and fighting for her life; and finally, her quest for spiritual fulfilment as she develops her Earthseed Creed (“I need to write about what I believe. I need to begin to put together the scattered verses that I’ve been writing about God since I was twelve”, 23). All these scenarios are intermingled to form a narrative progression in which readers engage and disengage with Lauren and her circumstances, judge her actions and her intimate thoughts revealed in her diary, and evaluate her views of life in apocalyptic California, but also, of course, in light of our own present moment – but more on that below. Here I would argue that due to the book’s discourse and narrative organization as Lauren’s writing, we are addressed as imagined and as flesh-and-blood readers. In other words: when we read Butler’s Parable of the Sower, we are asked to position ourselves in relation to the events that have destroyed Lauren’s world, to ponder her theological and philosophical 1

In the following, references to Parable of the Sower will be given without repeating the title.

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propositions of a new relationship between humankind, God, and Earth. The book we hold in our hands, as Woolf contends, is transformed from a simple material object into the provocation of an intellectual and emotional response. In Butler’s sequel, the 1998 Parable of the Talents, we meet Lauren again, now as leader of the Earthseed community, but here her voice is accompanied by other points of view: the novel combines her daughter Asha’s writing, the journals of her partner Frank, and her own writings as read and commented upon by Asha, who struggles to find her own way as daughter of a busy religious leader. In Sower, we closely follow Lauren’s maturing and rebuilding efforts, while in Talents we get other views of what happened, most notably the version of Taylor Franklin Bankole, born in 1970, who becomes her partner and is described as a Frederick Douglass figure in Sower. Bankole blames humankind for the events between 2015 and 2030 commonly memorized as ‘the Apocalypse’; he simply calls it “the Pox” (Parable of the Talents 8),2 a disease Earth’s population brought on themselves by our refusal to deal with obvious problems in climatic, economic, and sociological crises. […] I have watched education become more of a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people. (Ibid.)

In light of the narrative presentation of Talents, Lauren’s writings in Sower appear more subjective and sometimes even self-obsessed. Her transformation from unruly teenager cutting out her own path during the Pox to charismatic founder and protector of the Acorn settlement happens in Sower, but it is contextualized, as well as criticized, in Talents. Only in reading both novels can readers get this more encompassing picture. That the parable consists of two parts reiterates the narrative of destruction and rebuilding, of apocalypse and rejuvenation in the biblical genre of the parable, a vignette that tells a person’s story to morally instruct readers by example. Parables ask readers to empathize and judge the characters, to engage and disengage in order to learn and do better themselves. Butler’s parables thus present the narrative progression from sowing to fruition, outlining the anarchy necessary for the new start and gesturing towards space colonization early on, when Lauren, in Sower, projects that “space could be our future” (20). Like the sower’s parable, Lauren’s parable

2

In the following, references to Parable of the Talents will be given without repeating the title.

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intersects with the biblical exodus narrative and posits her as a stand-in for humanity as a whole, since, in Lauren’s view, “[t]he Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars” (208). Harking back to the current analysis, the narrative and generic markers Butler employs in her design of Sower and Talents make a case for reading as a communicative process between text and reader, in which the physical book becomes a medium of reader emotion and judgment. Readers can ponder the meanings of this religion for themselves, for instance in conversations imparted to us: when Bankole, in Sower, calls on Lauren to add “a sprinkling of mystical confusion” to make Earthseed more attractive for potential followers, she responds “I’ll leave that to my descendants” (253). Before looking more closely at the linkage of Butler’s Earthseed novels to the present moment, I turn to the second instance of empathy they offer on the story and plot-level. Lauren’s hyperempathy syndrome, or ‘sharing’, is a condition she was born with because her mother used Paracetco, a fictional drug designed to enhance cognitive performance. In Sower, Lauren cannot “help seeing – collecting – [other people’s] misery” (10) and sometimes is overwhelmed and immobilized by this sharing. Lauren’s comments on her hyperempathy often veer towards personal conundrum and struggle, as well as towards the confessional. Growing up, her parents seek to empower her by treating her as if she can shake it off, but Lauren frankly acknowledges both the social stigma and the individual burden: “being the most vulnerable person I know is damned sure not something I want to boast about” (12). She describes her condition as follows: I feel what I see others feeling or what I believe they feel. Hyperempathy is what the doctors call an ‘organic delusional syndrome’. Big shit. It hurts that’s all I know. Thanks to Paracetco, the small pill, the Einstein powder, the particular drug my mother chose to abuse before my birth killed her, I’m crazy. I get a lot of grief that doesn’t belong to me, and that isn’t real. But it hurts. (Ibid.)

Importantly, her sharing is based not so much on other people’s actual feelings but on mediation, on her interpretation of it: she feels “what I see others feeling or what I believe they feel” (ibid.). Hyperempathy as a key character trait and plot device asks readers to focus on our own reading of others, on our interpretation of observed actions as expressions of inner feeling. Also, Lauren’s hyperempathy is proof, to her, of the emotions of others. Rather than an ability like telepathy, Lauren feels organic empathy triggered by a cognitive and emotional reading of others. As the daughter of a man who was high up in the ranks of a crumbling order (“a preacher, a professor, and a dean”, ibid.), Lauren starts doubting her family’s beliefs early on, specifically their concept

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of God as taken from the Book of Job; to her he “sounds a lot like Zeus – a super-powerful man, playing with his toys the way my youngest brothers play with toy soldiers. Bang! Bang!” (15) Due to her sharing syndrome and her observations, Lauren engages her own theodicy and starts developing this “thing (this idea? Philosophy? New religion?)” (25) that ultimately becomes the book she is writing, “Earthseed, the Books of the Living”. Her hyperempathy is the burden of literal “com-passion” and a superpower (Johnson 92), which makes her both reluctant to hurt others but also causes her to fight harder if need be – at the cost of sharing the pain and feeling the experience of death when she kills her opponents in combat. In the course of the story, as she becomes a fighter and leader, readers witness her character development and maturation, which is also palpable in her writings and vision for Earthseed. Another key characteristic on the plot level is the narrative progression. Sower ends on a hopeful note that promises rebirth despite mourning: Lauren leads a memorial for those the community lost along the way; “we buried our dead and planted oak trees. Afterward, we sat together and talked and ate a meal and decided to call this place Acorn” (311). For the reader, Lauren quotes the parable of the sower from the Bible (ibid., see “Luke” 8.5-8). In this quote, many seeds are lost but “others fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bore fruit an [sic] hundredfold” (ibid.). The novel’s finale literally bookends The Parable of the Sower and points to the biblical example, to Lauren’s story, and to the novel in our hands at the same time. It invites a discussion about reading Butler specifically in times described as crises, which I turn to now. 3. Parables for Our Time? Reading Lauren Oya Olamina Today

In 2020, the US was in a state of crisis. The murder of George Floyd, an unarmed African American, by police on 25th May was a mind-harrowing example of unchecked structural racism that undermined the nation’s egalitarian beliefs and inspired nation-wide solidarity protests. Existential threats to American lives also came from raging California wildfires, a testament to climate change, and from the Covid-19 pandemic, which had been handled poorly by the federal government, preoccupied with a re-election campaign in the fall. In the Trump era, readers turned to dystopian fiction (see e.g. McCarthy), and Octavia Butler’s parables quickly experienced a renaissance. In “Parable of the Butler”, his review of the forthcoming Library of America edition of Butler’s works and of Lynell George’s biography, Ed Park attributes Butler’s success in the present to her own exemplarity or fitness to serve as a parable. Overlooked in her own time as professional author, Butler’s writings differ from dystopian novels by white

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authors – due, he argues, to her attunement “to this country’s racial fault lines” (Park n.p.). Butler criticized the absence of “minority characters in science fiction”, and her protagonist Lauren thus represents a commentary on how sci-fi has imagined (American) futures and on the arrival of African American literature in what Cameron Leader-Picone calls the contemporary “post” era. As well as the Library of America edition that anthologizes Butler’s œuvre, Sower has been published as a graphic novel (see Butler et al.) and has been turned into an opera in a Lincoln Center workshop production (Jerkins). In light of these developments it would be easy to embrace Lauren and her hyperempathy as a new black girl harbinger of a more ecofriendly future, and to assess reading Sower and Talents today as an experience that encourages readers to adapt “species thinking” and critically reflect on the inbuilt injustice of global capitalism and imperialism which have brought about climate change in the first place (Chakrabarty 216 f.). When wandering with Lauren through the cinders of civilization in the mid-2020s, readers might be persuaded to act in time to avoid ‘the Pox’ – cue the ‘Fridays for Future’ protests. But as Butler stated in a 2001 interview, “the threat of shared pain wouldn’t necessarily make people behave better toward one another” (qtd. in Leong 20). Lauren’s racial blackness points to the future only by way of a deviation to the past. Lauren’s hyperempathy achieves, as Diana Leong has argued, a “Mattering of Black Lives” that reminds us of the endemic and structural violence the present is built upon. It also indicates a critical oversight in the “nonhuman turn” or “new materialism’s” ignorance of structural racism’s legacies (ibid. 6). While scholarship on Butler’s Earthseed parables has overlooked the protagonist’s racial blackness, as Leong proposes, “what we lose in this rush from the particular to the universal is any consideration of how the material-semiotic history of race governs, from the outset, what can and cannot be made legible as a universal” (ibid. 19). Starting with her name, Lauren Oya Olamina is readable only as descendant of people who suffered from racial injustice. She reminds us of Civil Rights and nomenclature struggles when she, in Sower, notes an important commonality with her partner Bankole, an ‘instant bond’: “We’re both descended from men who assumed African surnames back during the 1960s. His father and my grandfather had had their names legally changed, and both had chosen Yoruba replacement names.” (215) The destruction of Lauren’s family and gated community is also a result of what Bankole, in Talents, called “convenience, profit and inertia” (8) exacted by the privileged upon the marginalized. The collapse first hits the most vulnerable, who become the “street poor”, the naked rape victims Lauren cannot bear to even look at. Kim D. Hester Williams reads Sower from an ecocritical perspective on BIPoC

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activist responses to environmental threats; as a racial speculative narrative, she contends, the novel “exposes the enduring, false claims of a post-civil rights and postracial society while imagining how humans in ecological decline can be ‘saved’ by earth’s most ‘wretched’ racial inhabitants” (234). So how do we contextualize the Butler renaissance in 2020, a time of multiple crises in the US, with the affective values of fiction, reading, and empathy? Ansgar and Vera Nünning argue that crisis narratives serve as interrogations of our experience of time and provide a laboratory for building alternative worlds (see “Krise” 245). Butler suggests that unity in diversity is the key. In Sower, she has Lauren provide a hint in one of her Earthseed epigraphs, a variation of the US national motto ‘e pluribus unum’, sans the civil religion part but with a Darwinist ring: Embrace diversity Unite – Or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed By those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity Or be destroyed. (185)

In this sense, reading Lauren is only possible by acknowledging her difference, which is symbolized by her racial empathy: we witness her reading others and feeling their feelings. While, due to her superpower, we can hardly always ‘feel with her’, our judgment of her reading will yield a view of the utopian project that is Earthseed. The future that Butler proposes is therefore deeply material, an Afrofuturist “black visioning of a future that is political and cultural, and proposes practices, identities and ways of being in the world” (Lynch and Gunkel 21). Read in a moment of crisis, with the year of its fictional setting in 2024 nearly upon us and the fictional beginning of ‘the Pox’ dating to 2015 in Bankole’s chronology, Butler’s Earthseed parables collapse the perceived temporal orders of past-present-future into a node of hyperempathic inquiry. American readers might bring thoughts of national crisis, a dramatic Presidential election campaign, and the insurrection of 6th January 2021, to their reading response. However, the unsettling issues of climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, varied as they may be, interlink an American viewpoint with a transnational readership who might reconsider: are we reading others correctly? Do we feel as they feel – or does our interpretation fail us? What are

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the pasts we might be overlooking, and do our stories of the future meet with their stories? It is both complicated and disturbing, and that is the challenge. 4. Conclusion

In Parable of the Talents, Lauren’s daughter Asha grows up without knowing her mother and builds her own storyworld. Where Lauren invented a religion, Asha writes so-called ‘Dreamask scenarios’, stories for virtual reality programs, “head cages, dream books, or simply Masks” that allow people to “identify with any of several characters [and …] submerge themselves in other, simpler, happier lives” (212). The technical innovation of Dreamask virtual role play clashes with Lauren’s hyperempathy, the mother-prophet’s knowledge is overwritten by her daughter’s technological escapism. Rather than daring to feel with others and be hurt in the process, the consumers of Dreamasks choose nostalgic self-isolation, readily providing the new, ultra-conservative Christian government with a powerful surveillance regime. And while a select (and enlightened) few of Lauren’s acolytes lift off in space ships on their way to new planets, old Planet Earth has never stopped burning. As I have tried to show, the future Octavia Butler projected when she invented her hyperempathic protagonist in the early 1990s carries uncanny dystopic resonances with the present moment. These resonances ask readers to position themselves in relation to the aesthetics and the ethics of narrative and of literature. Vera Nünning’s research on the affective values of reading provides an incentive for unpacking these resonances. Her linkage between cognitive and cultural narratology and Virginia Woolf’s modernist poetics points the way forward for scholarly inquiry into the meanings of books as ‘emotions you feel’ and impels us to look up and beyond the crisis-ridden present – but without looking away. Bibliography

  Primary Sources

Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower. Headline Publishing, 2019 [1993]. —. Parable of the Talents. Headline Publishing, 2019 [1998]. Butler, Octavia, Damian Duffy, and John Jennings. Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation. Abrams Comic Arts, 2020.

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Secondary Sources

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, 2009, pp. 197-222. Jerkins, Morgan. “An Antidote to a Season of Political Despair.” Harper’s Bazaar, 20 July 2022. www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/film-tv/a40667205/an-antidote-to-a-season-of -political-despair/. Last accessed 21 Aug. 2022. Johnson, Ikea M. “On Compassion and the Sublime Black Body: Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” Journal of Comparative Literature & Aesthetics, vol. 43, no. 2, 2020, pp. 92-101. Leader-Picone, Cameron. Black and More Than Black: African American Fiction in the Post Era. UP of Mississippi, 2019. Leong, Diana. “The Mattering of Black Lives: Octavia Butler’s Hyperempathy and the Promise of the New Materialisms.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, vol. 2, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1-35. “Luke”. King James Bible Online (King James Version), 2007, https://www.kingjamesbible online.org/. Last accessed 29 Aug. 2022. lynch, kara, and Henriette Gunkel. “Lift Off… An Introduction.” We Travel the Space Ways. Black Imagination, Fragments, and Diffractions, edited by Henriette Gunkel and kara lynch, transcript, pp. 21-46. McCarthy, Patrick A. “Reading Dystopian Novels in the Trump Era.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 47, no .1, 2020, pp. 111-17. Nünning, Ansgar, and Vera Nünning. “Krise als medialer Leitbegriff und kulturelles Erzählmuster.” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, vol. 70, no. 3-4, 2020, pp. 241-78. Nünning, Vera. “‘A Theory of the Art of Writing’: Virginia Woolf’s Aesthetics from the Point of View of Her Critical Essays.” English Studies, vol. 98, no. 8, 2017, pp. 978-94. —. “The Affective Value of Fiction Presenting and Evoking Emotions.” Writing Emotions: Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature, edited by Ingeborg Jandl, Susanne Knaller, and Sabine Schönfellner, transcript, 2017, pp. 29-54. Nünning, Vera, and Ansgar Nünning. “How to Stay Healthy and Foster Well-Being with Narratives, or: Where Narratology and Salutogenesis Could Meet.” How to Do Things with Narrative, edited by Jan Alber, and Greta Olson, De Gruyter, 2017, pp. 157-86. Park, Ed. “Parable of the Butler”. Harper’s Magazine, Feb. 2021, https://harpers.org/arch ive/2021/02/parable-of-the-butler-octavia-butler-kindred-fledgling/. Last accessed 28 Aug. 2022. Pease, Donald E. “Donald Trump’s Settler-Colonist State (Fantasy): A New Era of Illiberal Hegemony?” Trump’s America: Political Culture and National Identity, edited by Liam Kennedy, Edinburgh UP, 2020, pp. 23-52. Schäfer, Stefanie. Just the Two of Us: Self-Narration and Recognition in the Contemporary American Novel. WVT, 2011.

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Williams, Kim D. Hester. “Earthseeds of Change: Postapocalyptic Mythmaking, Race, and Ecology in The Book of Eli and Octavia Butler’s Womanist Parables.” Racial Ecologies, edited by Leilani Nishime, and Kim D. Hester Williams, U of Washington P, 2018, pp. 234-49.

Narrating the Pandemic Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) as Salutogenesis

Christine Schwanecke

“[W]hen the Plague came to be very raging, […] there was scarce any passing by the Streets but that several dead Bodies would be lying here and there upon the Ground[.]” (Defoe 69) “Defoe’s interest in the subject [of Plague] knew no bounds; natural disaster was for him a favourite ground on which to explore questions of faith and history.” (Roberts xi)

1. Introducing a Paradox: Writing about Largescale Deadly Disease, Fostering Well-Being, and Health?

Reading these quotes, one might wonder how Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), can, in all conscience, be interpreted as a narrative that is interested in the origins of health, ‘salutogenesis’, rather than one that centres on the causes and effects of disease, ‘pathogenesis’. After all, the narrative, which is presented as an eyewitness account, follows the severe outbreak of the Plague in London in the year 1665. Whole streets were littered with dead bodies, a sign of the “world running out of control” (Roberts xxvi); the Plague posed a threat to both individual human life and the social order as a whole. The incentive to, perhaps paradoxically, read Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year as salutogenesis is rooted in three main reasons. Firstly, it necessarily follows Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning’s pertinent observation that narrative

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theory and history have not yet sufficiently paid heed to the “performative functions that storytelling [fulfils] in such domains as politics, law, […] medicine, and other areas” (“How to Stay Healthy” 157). Neither have literary scholars even begun to study the “considerable overlap between narrative studies and what has come to be known as ‘salutogenesis.’” (Ibid.) Sooner rather than later, this research lacuna has to be filled. Secondly, this article wants to pay tribute to Vera Nünning’s groundbreaking research on literature and narrative, one that, as the introduction to this volume shows, never fails to display narrative’s transformative power, i.e., its ability to change the world for the better. In this spirit, a change of perspective in the analysis of Defoe’s Journal seems to be in order. Because, thirdly, Defoe’s Journal has been chiefly understood as an “attempt to find possible causes for the plague epidemic” (Löffler 185 f.), that is, as a mere exercise in pathogenesis. Researchers have focused on this because it was only at the end of the 19th century that the medical sciences recognized the Plague’s source as a bacterium, Yersinia pestis (see Landa 213). In this context, Defoe’s strong – albeit not exclusive – pathogenetic focus on the search for the medical reasons for the outbreak and spreading of the Great Plague of London proved particularly interesting (see Defoe 64 f.). By contrast, following Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning’s proposed “salutogenic narratology” (“How to Stay Healthy” 159), one will find upon revisiting A Journal of the Plague Year’s narrative structure, aims, and content that there is an astonishing and as of yet unacknowledged emphasis on salutogenesis. The story’s narrator, of whom we know just the initials, H.F., does not seem to be exclusively interested in digesting death numbers and woe. Narrating the pandemic, H.F. rather seems intent on keeping his mind and body healthy and to foster other people’s emotional well-being, as well as to contributing to their physical welfare. In the terms of salutogenic narratology, the narrator decidedly foregrounds the “salutogenic power of narratives” (ibid. 169-76). Before proving my thesis, I will look at ‘salutogenesis’ as well as its semantics (Sect. 2), and delineate in which respects the concept, which by means of conceptual transfer ‘travelled’ from medicine to literature, might be relevant for an adequate understanding of Defoe’s alleged eyewitness account. Based on this, I will explore the ways in which the healing powers of storytelling are foregrounded in the 18th-century narrative at hand by the discursive emplotment and the narrativization of statistical data (Sect. 3). Before coming to a conclusion (Sect. 5), I will also analyse the ways in which storytelling can be an influence on human health through A Journal of the Plague Year’s narrative simulation of experience and decision-making during the 1665 pandemic (Sect. 4). Finally, I will show how Defoe’s 1722 narrative serves as a literary archive of salutogenic knowledge that has the potential to literally save future lives.

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2. From Sociology to Literature: Reframing the Travelling Concept of ‘Salutogenesis’ for Narrative Studies

Originating in sociology, ‘salutogenesis’ can be classified as a travelling concept (sensu Bal), one that has crossed various disciplinary borders between sociology, psychology, medicine, and literary studies as well as between some of the latter’s sub-disciplines, for instance, narrative medicine and salutogenic narratology.1 The term was first conceptualised in 1979 by sociologist Aaron Antonovsky and with it he arguably introduced “a major philosophical change in thought, from the traditional pathogenic orientation to the salutogenic view of […] health” (Antonovsky and Sagy 16). Aiming at a shift of perspective in gauging an individual’s state of health along a continuum between the two poles of health and illness, Antonovsky turned away from the – then and now – dominant question of why people become sick.2 He thought it more constructive to try to find out why people stay well and how they “move towards the health pole on the ease–dis-ease continuum” (ibid.). In a nutshell, rather than asking what makes human beings ill, he posed the question of what fostered their physical and emotional well-being in the first place. In order to transfer the travelling concept of ‘salutogenesis’ from sociology to literary studies, a closer look at Antonovsky’s theory and its primary meanings proves helpful. Teasing out the potential conceptual overlaps with narratology in general, I aim to assess their use for a salutogenic analysis of A Journal of the Plague Year 3 in particular. Maurice Mittelmark and Georg Bauer provide a useful overview of the diverse meanings of salutogenesis, which they discuss in three pertinent senses. In their opinion, salutogenesis refers, firstly and most generally, to “a scholarly orientation focusing attention on the study of the origins of health and assets for health, contra the origins of disease and risk factors” (7, emphasis in original). The aforementioned orientation has three characteristics (see ibid. 11): different from pathogenesis, it does not conceptualize a ‘health versus illness’ dichotomy, but assumes a continuum between the poles of ease and dis-ease (see ibid.). Furthermore, a salutogenic orientation is a matter of 1

2 3

For details on ‘salutogenic narratology’ and ‘narrative medicine’ see Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning (“How to Stay Healthy”). For a discussion of how to best frame narrative’s interdisciplinary history – either as that of a travelling concept or as a “complex co-emergence of interest in […] storytelling in a wide array of disciplines” (ibid. 161) – see ibid. (159-62). The default interests of medicine as well as “narrative medicine […] [are still] pathog‐ raphy and pathogenic issues rather than salotugenesis” (Nünning and Nünning, “How to Stay Healthy” 158). This narrative shall henceforth be referred to as A Journal.

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perspective-taking: it is less interested in risk factors and more interested in factors beneficial to human health.4 Lastly, it is not interested in isolating one specific illness, ailment, or disability that an individual human being might live with; salutogenesis is a holistic endeavour that considers all aspects of human life and applies to whole communities (see ibid.). This salutogenic orientation towards health and its focus on community shall inform my reading of A Journal. It both contrasts and complements the widely-practiced way of reading illness narratives, or, “broken narratives” (Nünning and Nünning, “How to Stay Healthy” 167) as pathographies of individuals (see ibid. 164). And it accounts for the fact that a pandemic like the Plague is conventionally regarded as an occurrence of illness that affects whole communities, i.e., a great number of people over a larger geographical area or several areas (see Bell, “Introduction” 1 f.). In a second, narrower sense, salutogenesis refers to the “salutogenetic model” that Antonovsky designed in 1979, with the help of which the sociologist aims at abstracting and relating different factors that influence people’s health (qtd. in Mittelmark and Bauer 9; see also ibid. 7-9). With this model, he also visualizes how psychosocial resources shape people’s resilience and how their life experiences influence what he calls a “sense of coherence” (ibid. 9). He assumes that the stronger a people’s sense of coherence, the better they can cope with stress factors, the more resilient they are, and the easier they can influence their movement on the ease–dis-ease continuum. While this model might, content-wise, not be of primary interest in our endeavour to develop a conceptual overlap between the sociological concept and its possible framings in narratology, one of its parts does stand out: it is the ‘sense of coherence’ itself, which Mittelmark and Bauer mark as the third, and most specific, meaning of salutogenesis. Antonovsky defines this sense as a global orientation that expresses the extent to which one has a pervasive, enduring though dynamic feeling of confidence that one’s internal and external environments are predictable and that there is a high probability that things will work out as well as can reasonably be expected (qtd. in Mittelmark and Bauer 7).

A ‘sense of coherence’, ‘global orientation’, feeling of ‘confidence that things will work out’ are factors that either are established by processes of narrativization or determine them. Even if not specifically for sociology and narratology, Vera 4

Even though they focus on factors that improve people’s health, researchers who take the perspective of salutogenesis do not totally exclude or shun questions of pathogenesis. Despite their (or rather part of their) research being oriented towards salutogenesis, they tend to “incorporate[…] aspects of both pathogenesis and salutogenesis” (Mittelmark and Bauer 11).

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Nünning and Ansgar Nünning have pointed towards the aforementioned nexus where medical experience and narrative theory also meet: In broken narratives [like (medical) illness narratives] and disrupted lives it is especially pertinent that their narrators make a sustained effort at reconstructing some kind of coherence and continuity, and that storytelling itself is an important means of regaining some sense of manageability and coherence. (“How to Stay Healthy” 167 f.)

Arguing that A Journal is a narrative endeavour to try and make sense of the 1665 Plague, to mend what had been individually, communally, and globally disrupted, and to convey some feeling of ‘manageability’, I will show that Antonovsky’s ‘sense of coherence’ is a concept that can be fruitfully applied to this very text. Defoe’s narrative will not be interpreted as “foremost a story of a city whose geography becomes haunted by the outbreak of an epidemic” (Löffler 186), but as a story told for salutogenic reasons. H.F. tells a narrative that helps both narrator and narratee to stay mentally and physically healthy in a city ravaged by disease and enables future generations to learn how to do the same for outbreaks yet to come. 3. How ‘Storytelling’ and ‘Emplotment’ Determine our Health: Focusing on Survival and Staying Sane by Recounting Stories Seen and Heard

In the following, I will tackle the problem of how Defoe’s A Journal, a narrative about life-threatening illness, severe pain, and high death tolls can be considered salutogenic. I will argue that, firstly, narrative emplotment in particular and, secondly, storytelling in general are implicitly and explicitly presented as decisive factors that positively influence our mental health. Both seem to establish a ‘sense of coherence’ in a storyworld that, struck by “disaster” (Roberts xi), seems frightfully broken and out of order. The ‘mode of emplotment’ (sensu White, “Historical Emplotment”) is a decisive factor in implicitly establishing a salutogenic orientation in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal; this is evident when one considers the narrative’s general plot development towards a fairly positive ending. Although written and published more than half a century later, the narrative is presented as an eyewitness account of the Great Plague of London in 1665. Its narrator H.F.5 (A Journal 5

Critics hold that Defoe’s A Journal is “fiction masquerading as history and vice versa” (Roberts xiii). Still, there might be a documentary and autobiographical dimension to it: the initials ‘H.F.’ might refer to “Defoe’s uncle Henry Foe, who in 1665 was, like his counterpart [i.e., the narrator], a middle-aged Whitechapel saddler” (ibid. xiv) who “lived long enough

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of the Plague Year, 212)6 traces the Plague’s vague beginnings, documents its devastating peak in the summer and autumn of 1665, and follows it up to the time when it surprisingly subsided and, finally, ended. Concluding with the successful battle against the “formidable Enemy” (202), the Plague, and a verbal celebration of the “Joy” of survival (210, 209-12), H.F.’s mode of emplotment is an overall salutogenic one. In historiography, as Hayden White states, “at least two versions of the same set of events can be imagined” (“The Value” 23); and this self-same set of events can be emploted in at least two different ways. Against this backdrop, it is remarkable that H.F.’s alleged ‘historical account’ ends on a comparatively confident note, when it could have also ended quite differently.7 Despite the narrative’s unquestionably detailed presentation of illness and pain throughout, its teleology is ultimately moving towards a display of strength and resilience. Recounting tales of “Contagion” and the “Terrors of Death” (209), the narrator finally emphasizes his and others’ survival. This becomes even clearer when one considers H.F.’s final words: A dreadful Plague in London was, In the Year Sixty Five, Which Swept an Hundred Thousand Souls Away; yet I alive! H.F. FINIS. (212, emphasis in original)

The last words at the end of both A Journal and the narrator’s ‘real’ 1665 “Memorandums”, on which he claims to have based the former (see ibid.), is an exclamation of survival, personal safety, and health – even in the face of thousands of deaths. “[Y]et I alive!” (ibid.) is not only a cry of relief; it is also a metonymic reference to the whole narrative’s general orientation towards salutogenic issues, towards emphasizing, at an outstanding point in the pandemic narrative – its very end – not dread, illness, and death (even if these are also recognized), but resilience, health, and survival. So, it is true that Defoe’s fiction is designed as a ‘memoir’ that documents H.F.’s wanderings through the Plague-ridden streets and takes stock of the devastation caused by the pandemic. Yet, its teleology endows the asserted historical account’s ‘reality’

6 7

to tell […] [his nephew] [about his experiences of the Plague in London]” (ibid.). His stories might lie at the heart of the narrative reconstruction of the events of 1665 by Defoe. In the following, references to A Journal of the Plague Year will be given without repeating the title. As Hayden White emphasizes, it is in the nature of all historical accounts that “they can be recorded otherwise” (“The Value” 23, emphasis in original).

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with positivity: making use of what has come to be known as “recency bias” (see e.g. Sumner), the narrator’s salutogenic mode of emplotment allows his narratee to prioritize the question of how to prevail over and survive illness and death. The mode of A Journal’s emplotment, however, affects not only a ‘salutogenic orientation’ but also a certain ‘sense of coherence’; and this despite the fact that events are chronicled that almost cry out for either a representation in ‘broken narrative’ form or in mundane data collections. As H.F. warns his narratees, “I am now come […] to the month of September, which was the most dreadful of its kind, I believe, that ever London saw, for by all Accounts that I have seen of the preceding Visitations which have been in London, nothing has been like it” (153, emphasis in original). To prove his point that nothing else had been as bad as the 1665 Plague, H.F. once more fashions himself as a historiographer and gathers a lot of data,8 and, as writers of annals and chronicles would (see White, “The Value” 11-13), presents them in lists (see Fig. 1) or tables (see Fig. 2). At the same time, he takes a critical stance towards them, implying that bare numbers left unframed are mere fragments of experience and potentially unreliable. This is why H.F. leaves this data, mere ‘bones’ of life, not without context. To stay within the metaphor, he ‘puts flesh to the bone’ by, on the one hand, interpreting and assessing his statistics as well as, on the other hand, illustrating them, even narrativizing them.

Fig. 1: List of reasons for deaths in which the Plague and childbirth coincide (101).

The victims of deaths that are likely to be caused by a combination of childbirth and infection are varied (see Fig. 1): they are new mothers (“Child-Bed”, 101), 8

H.F. gives numbers of burials (see e.g. 42, 160-63), provides mortality bills (see e.g. 4 f., 154, 176 f.), which report both cause and number of deaths “in 97 city parishes” (218), and lists all other kinds of data. For instance, governmental orders designed to put a halt to the spreading of the bacillus (34-41) or the economic repercussions of the Plague (82 f.).

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they are unborn (“Abortive”, ibid.) and stillborn babies, they are babies just baptized (“Chrisoms”, ibid.), and other smaller infants. Lists like these are, in general, non-narrative and not prone to elicit much empathy in their recipients. By selecting these special victim groups, which are especially defenceless and vulnerable, and by combining one list (Fig. 1) with another that gives large numbers (Fig. 2), H.F. might still manage to trigger readers’ sympathies. Even in a non-narrative (or, not a genuinely narrative emplotment like this), the numbers in these death statistics, which are nearly doubled if one compares the pre-pandemic state with the one of 1665, might have the potential to shock.

Fig. 2: A statistical overview of the increased mortality rate in childbed and childbirth during the Plague time (102).

With additional narrative framings of the combined list and statistics, the narrator takes his emplotment at least two steps further. Contextualizing and assessing the figures, H.F. firstly moderates the possible feelings of unease that might arise in the reader at the reception of the unframed lists and numbers. Secondly, he warns his narratees of the latent imprecision of numbers because they do not account for the people who have left the city. Assuming an even higher number of fatalities and conceding to give just “a probable Conjecture” (102, my emphasis), he meta-referentially questions the success of any historiographic attempt at capturing the Plague in bare numbers. The way in which H.F. emplots his Plague statistics and lists furthermore attests to the fact that “[t]he significance of narrative is not latent in the data of experience, or of imagination, but fabricated in the process of subjecting that data to the elemental rhetoric of the narrative form itself” (Walsh 39). His numbers, left unframed, are mere fragments of experience, hard to process for any narratee or reader. This is why H.F. narrativizes them by embedding them

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in illustrative stories seen and heard. The numbers are filled with life when he relates the narrative of an apothecary whose patients, a nursing mother and her newborn, died so surprisingly fast that he did not even manage to get home to fetch them some medicine (see 103). Another example is when H.F. tells the story of an infected baby. His mother would not isolate it, but still breast-fed, whereupon she too got infected “and dy’d with the Child in her Arms dead also” (ibid.). Emplotments and narrativizations like the above, even though they might be hard to swallow, seem to be attempts at making the otherwise fragmentary statistics digestible in the first place. They fill in gaps, frame and explain numbers, and illustrate them. With them, H.F. avoids presenting his narratees with a broken narrative that is as fragmentary and hard to process as the disruptive experiences of pandemic life itself. Like theories of salutogenesis (see footnote 4), H.F.’s narrativizations do nut shun pathogenesis but provide a framework for the large-scale and overwhelming experience of death by embellishing the numbers with stories that “would make the hardest Heart move” (103). They clad numbers and traumatic life experiences in words and thus establish a ‘sense of coherence’, a sense of the possibility that experiences of death and illness, when put in words, are able to be processed by those who remain alive; and that one can, metaphorically and literally, come to terms with trauma, in spite of everything. H.F.’s strategies of emplotment and narrativization thus become a way of bettering one’s health by serving as tools that help with processing trauma. They also allow people to help improve their mental health, which might have been affected by the extreme circumstances. This is an experience that the narrator himself has gone through – as he explicitly states. As a foil to his own experiences, he introduces various forms of psychological ailments that occurred during and because of the pandemic.9 They range from anxiety to depression and other forms of mental illness; sometimes they result in extreme desperation and violent behaviour against others or even self-harm: [I]t is scarce credible what dreadful Cases happened in particular Families every Day; People in the rage of the Distemper, or in the Torment of their Swellings, which was indeed intolerable, running out of their own Government, raving and distracted, and oftentimes laying violent Hands upon themselves, throwing themselves out at their

9

With his discussion of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), Sebastian Beckmann’s article in this volume might provide a complementary view to my observations on mental illness in novels. Beckmann explores the ways in which current unreliable narratives may represent mental illness and, in doing so, trigger positive change in contemporary readers’ lives.

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Windows, shooting themselves, &c.; Mothers murthering [sic] their own Children, in their Lunacy, some dying of meer Grief, as a Passion, some of meer Fright and Surprize without any Infection at all; others frighted into Idiotism, and foolish Distractions, some into despair and Lunacy, others into mellancholy Madness.” (71)

In an explicit meta-narrative comment, H.F. explains how he is able to cope with the circumstances, which frighten and disturb him as well. Terrified by those frightful Objects [which H.F. witnesses in the streets of London], I would retire Home sometimes, and resolve to go out no more, and perhaps, I would keep those Resolutions for three or four Days, which Time I spent in the most serious Thankfulness for my Preservation, and the Preservation of my Family […]: Such intervals as I had, I employed in reading Books, and in writing down my Memorandums of what occurred to me every Day, and out of which, afterwards, I [took] most of this Work as it relates to my Observations without Doors. (67)

One of the ways that help H.F. in coping with his fear, the threat of infection, and with the largescale devastation that he experiences outside the safe walls of his home is – besides thanking God, “Fasting, Humiliation, and Meditation” (ibid.) – reading fiction and writing down his ‘Memorandums’, i.e., his autobiographi‐ cally informed experiences of the Plague. Accordingly, the cultural practices of reading and life-writing are explicitly given the status of health tools, tools that keep the narrator’s sanity intact.10 Engaging with literature – producing it, receiving it – becomes, in A Journal, a strongly recommended and invaluable instrument of salutogenesis, of staying healthy (at least mentally) during this pandemic and, by extension, possible future pandemics. 4. A Journal of the Plague Year as Literary Plague Prophylaxis: Simulating Pandemic Experience and Passing Down Pandemic Knowledge to New Generations

Since it was not known until the late 19th century that the pestilence was spread via bacteria, there was much speculation in the early modern era on the possible causes of the Plague. David Bell contends that “[l]ike other natural disasters, Plague was seen by early modern people in both scientific and religious

10

For a more detailed discussion of the relationship between salutogenesis and thera‐ peutic writing/reading (‘bibliotherapy’), see Cristian Camilo Cuervo’s contribution to this volume; for an impressive illustration of the healing powers of writing literature, especially autobiographical essays and haiku, within the current Covid-19 pandemic, see Jan Rupp’s article in this volume.

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contexts” (“Medical Understanding” 133). By way of example, he lists various early modern medical explanations of how the pestilence was believed to spread. Some early modern people saw the roots of the pandemic in natural causes, such as contact between people (see “contagion”, ibid. 123 f.) or the transmission of the illness via water, weather, and air (see “miasma”, ibid.). Other ‘natural’ causes were assumed to be an imbalance of the ‘humours’ (see ibid. 126) or rare astrological phenomena like comets or eclipses (see ibid. 123).11 Among causes that early modern people categorized as ‘supernatural’ were, for instance, the belief in God’s wrath, sorcery, or other paranormal phenomena (see ibid.). Accordingly, early modern ideas of how to prevent the Plague and stay healthy were manifold, but oftentimes not very beneficial to people’s well-being; suggested measures sometimes even worsened people’s physical condition (blood-letting, for instance, often weakened people instead of ‘balancing their humours’, see ibid. 147). Against this backdrop, A Journal can be regarded as Plague prophylaxis by literary means. In a salutogenic vein, it not only records and stores the manifold ways in which the Londoners of 1665 tried to get rid of the pestilence and regain their health; its narrator also assesses their quality and success in preventing or controlling the disease’s spread. Sharing the perceptions of the ‘experiencing’ H.F. and tracing the decision-making processes as well as assessments of the ‘narrating’ H.F. may, by way of what Vera Nünning describes as “simulation” (Reading Fictions 247), trigger cognitive processes in those who read A Journal. Based on their second-hand simulation, when they are faced with similar problems of their own they will already have a cognitive storage of possible experiences, salutogenic assessments, and choices available, which enriches their own everyday-life repertoire of experience and may facilitate their own salutogenic decision-making, even in the face of cataclysmic situations they only know from literature and have not faced in real life. Salutogenic simulation is one of the professed aims of the narrator. Pondering his choice of staying in town when his brother, and yes, even the King (15, 17), have fled to the countryside, H.F. does not just simply explain his decision-making strategies. Conveying his arguments and thoughts, he also aims at helping future generations.

11

Daniel Defoe’s narrator, H.F., tells his readers of two “blazing Star[s] or Comet[s]” (18) that he, and others, spotted before the occurrence of the Plague in 1665 and the ‘Great Fire’ in 1666, respectively. He admits that he was, at least at first, “apt to look upon them, [sic] as the Forerunners and Warnings of Gods [sic] Judgements” (19).

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I mention this Story also as the best Method I can advise any Person to take in such a Case [of decision-making in Plague times], especially, if he be one that makes Conscience of his Duty, and would be directed what to do in it (10).

With this, he transports a strong ‘sense of coherence’, as Antonovsky defined it, to future readers. H.F. conveys “a pervasive, enduring though dynamic feeling of confidence that one’s internal and external environments are predictable” (Antonovsky; qtd. in Mittelmark and Bauer 7). If one takes the experiences of H.F. seriously, which readers can re-live second-hand, and acts according to his seasoned advice, it is likely that in future outbreaks things “will work out as well as can reasonably be expected” (ibid.). In other words, H.F. relates the outcome of measures taken in 1665 and thus not only shows but also verifies their ‘predictable’, ‘expected’ outcome in future circumstances and environments where another Plague outbreak might occur. He thus provides his readers with the comforting confidence that they, if they act according to well-tried and cognitively re-lived strategies of Plague prevention, can reasonably expect to keep their physical and mental health intact. Advising people on how to stay alive and well, A Journal’s narrator presents forms and effects of health measures taken in the 1665 outbreak of the pestilence and, posing as an educative authority, he overtly assesses what can or cannot be gained from them. Among the instruments that ‘will not work out well’ for prophylaxis he enlists, for instance, the seeking of advice with “Fortune-Tellers” and “Astrologers” (24), who tell people their “Fortunes […] [and calculate] their Nativities” (ibid.). H.F. witnesses “innumerable Attendants crouched about their Doors everyday” (25) and directly assesses this practice as unfavourable: “I need not mention, what a horrid Delusion this was” (ibid.). The narrator makes it clear that fortune-tellers and the like do not at all represent an improvement to one’s health. On the contrary, he metaphorically frames them (as well as the practice of people trying to better their health through them) as diseases themselves, for which there was “no Remedy […], till the Plague it self [sic] put an End to it all; and I suppose, clear’d the Town of most of those Calculators themselves” (ibid). The same holds true for the so-called “Quacks” (27), whom people purportedly were “running after” (ibid.). The narrator cautions his readers against reverting to them as well, as they are in all likelihood solely interested in people’s money. He assesses his experience of people who were as mad, upon their running after Quacks […] for Medicines and Remedies; […] that they not only spent their Money, but even poison’d themselves before-hand for fear of the Poison of the Infection, and prepar’d their Bodies for the Plague, instead of preserving them against it. (Ibid.)

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In his salutogenic endeavour to save the lives of future generations by educating them, he makes explicit the danger of seeking help with the abovementioned deceivers: their so-called “Pills, Potions, and Preservatives” (ibid.) will not protect one’s body; rather, they will compromise its health or even invite infection. Among the methods that can be ‘reasonably expected to work out well’ for Plague prophylaxis are, among others, self-isolation of the healthy and the quarantine of the sick. What concerns the former, H.F. brings in the opinion of a Physician and a friend of his, whom he commends to the reader due to his qualities as a Christian, doctor, and confidant (see ibid.). Said doctor is concerned because H.F. is wandering so often through the city; to prevent infection, he advises the narrator to “hold in […] [his] Mouth when […] [he is] in the streets” (ibid.) and eventually even persuades him to isolate himself and his family: It was now the beginning of August, and the Plague grew very violent and terrible in the Place where I liv’d, and Dr. Heath coming to visit me, and finding that I ventured so often out in the Streets, earnestly perswaded [sic] me to lock myself up and my Family, and not to suffer any of us to go out of Doors; to keep all of our Windows fast, Shutters and Curtains close, and never to open them; but first to make very strong Smoke in the Room, where the Window, or Door was to be opened […]. (Ibid., emphasis in original)

Foregrounding his advisor’s authority by way of naming and repeating his profession and title and by expressing his own confidence in him regarding a salutogenic orientation, the narrator applies discursive strategies that stage the advice of his friend as reliable, and if followed will keep people safe and healthy. Despite his presentation and promotion of isolation as a salutogenic factor, H.F. admits that, even if one wants to heed the doctor’s advice, one’s social status might influence how well it can be followed. Poor people often lack the means to sufficiently care for the necessary provisions that will feed them during their isolation (68): “[T]he Necessity of going out of the Houses to buy Provisions, was in great Measure the Ruin of the whole City, for the People catch’d the Distemper, on those Occasions, one of another” (ibid.). While the wealthy are more likely to choose isolation as a prophylactic safety measure, H.F. presents and discusses another salutogenic strategy, one officially ordered by the Lord Mayor (35-37) to stop the Plague from spreading and to keep people safe – at least those who had not yet been infected. The Lord Mayor ordered the houses of the infected to be shut up, commanding watchmen to enforce their inhabitants’ quarantine and to take care of vital errands for them (35), including organizing food, medicine, doctors, and/or funeral carts.

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These proceedings had severe consequences: firstly, the healthy members of a household were also quarantined when a case of the Plague had occurred in it. H.F. comments upon this prevention measure as “very hard and cruel [looking]” (42) because people who had not yet caught the Plague “might have escaped [illness and death], if they had been remov’d from the Sick” (ibid.). Secondly, there were people for whom the quarantine was very hard to bear, even throwing them into despair, especially when faced with severe pain: “and many […] threw themselves out of Windows, when they found they cou’d not get leave to go out of their Doors.” (141) And, thirdly, even the watchmen were in danger: some were deceived,12 and violence was used against others that resulted in injury (see 43). In spite of these problems, H.F. promotes this official salutogenic policy. Arguing that the greater social cause warranted and excused any individual suffering, he concludes his assessment: “But it was a publick Good that justified the private Mischief” (ibid.). By collecting salutogenic measures aimed at preventing infection, assessing some as useless, some as helpful, some as ambiguous in effect or practicability, the narrator thus presents A Journal as an archive of remarkably broad pandemic knowledge. This archive is put together for a purpose, as H.F. makes explicit when recounting in a dialogic style the story of three travellers who behaved in an exemplary fashion during the pandemic: Their Story has a Moral in […] it, and their [the travellers’] whole Conduct, and that of some others who they join’d with, is a Pattern for all poor Men to follow, or Women either, if ever such a Time comes again; and if there was no other End in recording it, I think this a very just one, whether my Account be exactly according to Fact or no. (105)

As this narrative framing makes clear, Defoe’s 1722 narrative is not just sup‐ posed to be an archive that merely collects data. Neither does it just list measures to fight the Plague and accumulate stories of health-preservation. Rather, it is an archive that repeatedly shows the limits of statistical information,13 one that is deliberately narrativized, and purposefully endowed with the qualities of fiction (“Fact or no”, 105). A Journal is consciously presented as a ‘literary 12 13

There is, for example, the story of a watchman who was tricked into leaving the house of infection to fetch a death cart so that all inhabitants, “whether sick or sound” (45), were able to flee (see 43-45). He repeatedly criticizes the official statistics as incomplete, e.g., the one he gives on page 85: “If I may be allowed to give my Opinion, […] I do verily believe […] that there died, at least, 100000 of the Plague only, […] and besides those which died in the Fields, and High-ways, and secret Places […] and who were not put down in the Bills, tho’ they really belonged to the Body of the Inhabitants.” (86)

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archive’, one that makes use of one of fiction’s most valuable cognitive effects, namely ‘simulation’ (see Nünning, Reading Fictions 247-62). It is one that, as Vera Nünning argues, allows its “readers to make experiences ‘via proxy’” (ibid. 247): “it offers readers vicarious experiences, which they make by coming to know the actions, thoughts and feelings of characters” (ibid.). In the case of A Journal, experiences of the Plague and strategies of self-preservation are simulated. They are also assessed by the narrator so that readers can potentially profit from his encounter with the 1665 Plague without being actually subjected to the pande‐ mic’s dangers themselves. Additionally, they rehearse the cognitive processes of evaluation and decision-making, a kind of second-order, meta-simulation. The fact that H.F. is a, if not ‘authorial’ at least ‘authoritative’, narrator who explains, comments, and assesses the salutogenic attempts of Londoners to try and ensure a sound physical condition, makes him a provider of “privileged processes of sense making” (Nünning, Reading Fictions 257) to readers who “in everyday situations […] do not have access to […] [this] kind of ‘authorial’ information” (ibid.). With a narrator like H.F., Defoe is able to convey a ‘sense of coherence’ to contemporary and future readers. New generations not only learn about possible – and tested – salutogenic measures; they also, through narratorial simulation, learn by proxy to assess their efficiency (or proneness to fail in the case of “Quacks”, 27, and others). A Journal thus in itself provides, in Antonovsky’s terms, the ‘global orientation’ towards a ‘pervasive feeling of confidence’ that one can, at least partially, have control over their own health if they act according to well-tried strategies and steer clear of dubious ones. Even if they should then be faced with challenging and disruptive threats to their health at some point in life, they would have experienced, at least by proxy, how others tried to save their physical or mental health (successfully and unsuccessfully), and may preserve their own by reverting to their knowledge of literature. With his narrator’s stories and the simulation of assessments of salutogenic measures established during the 1665 pandemic, Defoe’s 1722 narrative hence promotes the knowledge of methods that can help us stay physically intact and thus may – quite literally – save lives. 5. Conclusion

In the spirit of Vera Nünning’s central observation that “[s]tories and the un‐ derstanding of narratives […] play a crucial role in the comprehension of our life […]” (“Literature” 143), the present article asks how A Journal fulfils this ‘crucial role’. It shows how a highly present auto-diegetic narrator reflects, emplots, and narrativizes “pre-narrative perceptions […] [and] transcendental experiences”

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(ibid.) of the 1665 Plague in London in order to interpret this cataclysmic event – to make it understandable and even experiential. In contrast to previous, rather pathogenic readings of Defoe’s 1722 narrative, which regard the “account of the fateful year of 1665 [as one] that seeks to examine the emotional and psychological impacts of the epidemic” (Löffler 186), my argument is based on a diametrically opposed understanding on the allegedly autobiographic report. In an attempt at making Vera and Ansgar Nünning’s idea of narrative as means of salutogenesis (see “How to Stay Healthy”) productive for the under‐ standing of 18th-century fiction, I refrain from regarding A Journal as a broken narrative, as one that focuses on “traumatic experiences, events and ruptures that do not lend themselves to being readily assimilated into conventional plots, schemata or cultural scripts” (Nünning and Nünning, “‘Broken Narratives’” 49). Understanding ‘salutogenesis’ as an orientation towards health issues and as ‘sense of coherence’ respectively, I show how the narrative under observation implicitly and explicitly applies narrative mending strategies that give the disruptive experiences and fragmentary yet distressing statistical data of the 1665 Plague a salutogenic form and meaning. Through a narrative emplotment that fills gaps in knowledge and focuses on the question of how to survive during the pandemic, as well as through the narrative processing of traumatic stories of the individual fates of Londoners during the Plague, the very strategies of ‘storytelling’ and ‘emplotment’ become factors in promoting public and individual health. Even if they do not ‘heal’ traumatic experiences, they make them able to be processed and strikingly show how it may be possible to stay sane even in the face of overwhelming pain and grief. In addition, I have discussed A Journal as literary Plague prophylaxis. As the ‘experiencing I’ of H.F. and his ‘narrating I’ simulate pandemic experience and put pandemic knowledge into a ‘literary archive’, making it accessible to later generations, the fictional account of frightening illness, severe pain, and large-scale death becomes essentially life-affirming and salutogenic. It can be argued that it literally saves lives. Looking at an 18th-century text written about a pandemic and taking Vera Nünning’s groundbreaking research on the cognitive value of literature into account, further research questions arise. For instance, the question of how literary salutogenesis can be brought one step further and even used in today’s contexts and across a variety of literary and non-literary sectors, such as politics, medicine, and law. Seeing that the questions Vera Nünning asks in her research and the interdisciplinary theories that she provides for literary analysis and beyond might be also fruitfully applied to pressing current issues, one feels compelled to ask how literature, politics, or medicine (i.e., the health sector in

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general, and virologists in particular) should narrate and emplot today’s crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, to make them understandable and graspable for a society as a whole (and not just privileged parts of it). After all, as Fritz Breithaupt has recently shown, cultural narratives that help in overcoming crises are still lacking for the pandemic of 2020 (see 206). Against the backdrop of this article, it becomes clearer that cultural narratives that have a decidedly salutogenic orientation are also missing, those that show how to stay mentally and physically well and to ensure individual as well as collective health in these distressing days. Bearing in mind the “question of storytelling’s health benefits” (Nünning and Nünning, “How to Stay Healthy” 157), it can be asked, in all good reason, how any of the above mentioned sectors – health, politics, literature – could work with narration as a way to promote health during the Covid-19 pandemic and other crises. So that they, like their 18th-century literary forerunners, might actually manage to save lives. Bibliography

  Primary Sources

Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year, edited by Louis Landa. Oxford UP, 2010 [1722].

  Secondary Sources

Antonovsky, Avishai, and Shifra Sagy. “Aaron Antonovsky, the Scholar and the Man behind Salutogenesis.” The Handbook of Salutogenesis, edited by Maurice B. Mittelmark et al., Springer Nature, 2017, pp. 15-23. Ebook, doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-04600-6_2. Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. U of Toronto P, 2002. Bell, Dean Philip. “Introduction.” Plague in the Early Modern World: A Documentary History, edited by Dean Philip Bell, Taylor & Francis, 2019, pp. 1-11. ―. “Medical Understanding of and Responses to the Plague.” Plague in the Early Modern World: A Documentary History, edited by Dean Philip Bell, Taylor & Francis, 2019, pp. 123-67. Breithaupt, Fritz. Das Narrative Gehirn: Was unsere Neuronen erzählen. Suhrkamp, 2022. Löffler, Catharina. Walking in the City: Urban Experience and Literary Psychogeography in Eighteenth-Century London. Metzler, 2017. Landa, Louis. “Appendix: A Medical Note.” Daniel Defoe: A Journal of the Plague Year, edited by Louis Landa, Oxford UP, 2010, pp. 213-16. Mittelmark, Maurice B., and Georg F. Bauer. “The Meanings of Salutogenesis.” The Handbook of Salutogenesis, edited by Maurice B. Mittelmark et al., Springer Nature, 2017, pp. 7-13. Ebook, doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-04600-6_2.

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Nünning, Ansgar, and Vera Nünning. “Conceptualizing ‘Broken Narratives’ from a Narratological Perspective: Domains, Concepts, Features, Functions, and Suggestions for Research.” Narrative im Bruch: Theoretische Positionen und Anwendungen, edited by Anna Babka, Marlen Bidwell-Steiner, and Wolfgang Müller-Funk, V&R unipress, 2016, pp. 38-86. Nünning, Vera. “Literature – Narrative – Forms of Life.” Emergent Forms of Life in Anglophone Literature: Conceptual Frameworks and Critical Analyses, edited by Michael Basseler, Daniel Hartley, and Ansgar Nünning, WVT, 2015, pp. 141-62. ―. Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction. Winter, 2014. Nünning, Vera, and Ansgar Nünning. “How to Stay Healthy and Foster Well-Being with Narratives, or: Where Narratology and Salutogenesis Could Meet.” How to Do Things with Narrative, edited by Jan Alber, and Greta Olson, De Gruyter, 2017, pp.157-86. Roberts, David. “Introduction.” Daniel Defoe: A Journal of the Plague Year, edited by Louis Landa. Oxford UP, 2010, pp. ix-xxvi. Sumner, Emily et al. “Cake or Broccoli? Recency Biases Children’s Verbal Responses.” PLoS ONE, vol. 14, no. 6, 2019, n.p., doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0217207. Walsh, Richard. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Ohio State UP, 2007. White, Hayden. “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth.” Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”, edited by Saul Friedlander, Harvard UP, 1992, pp. 37-53. –. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 1, 1980, pp. 5-27.

Can Literature Heal? Therapeutic Dimensions of Writing and Narrative

Cristian Camilo Cuervo

1. Can Literature Heal? Between Reading and Writing

In an effort to understand the functions of literature, and more specifically its impact and benefits beyond its most obvious purposes, many old questions about its very nature have become even more pressing in recent years. For instance, in addition to entertainment, spurring on the imagination, or commenting on the society or the spirit of its time, does it have a higher purpose? Are not the essential aims of literature actually educational, political or, even, transformational? In this sense, within its spectrum of functions, why not include the possibility of healing in this list? In a world that currently seems to be embedded in a state of continuous crises and a progressively globalized sense of anxiety and meaninglessness, questions like “Can literature heal?” could be simultaneously problematic and promising. This dichotomy can be explained by the urgent need to find solutions to such crises, implying that, under pressing conditions, humans might tend to see answers, remedies, and refuges practically everywhere. It is not easy to give a straightforward answer to the question of whether or not there is a healing potential in literature, but a good starting point is to realize, as Vera Nünning explains, that “narrative enables people to make sense of experiences and cognitive processes, [and] it is likely that narrative competence plays an important role in people’s sense of well-being” (Reading Fictions 310). The way we see, interpret, experience, remember, and project our lives and the world, and how they can be represented through the form of a narrative, allows us to build our memories, our identity, our plans, and the way we relate and deal with our situation in life. Consequently, the importance of narratives is by no means minor since they are ultimately “what people live by – be it stories

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of their own personal lives or stories about communities” (Nünning, “Identity” 199). This leads us to wonder if, given this relevance, we can consider narrative competence as part of a toolbox or a survival kit to deal with realities that, regardless of whether they are collective or individual, are increasingly complex and threatening. Although storytelling is not exempt from having a negative side, this does not mean that its positive potential is secondary; on the contrary, it is perhaps at its very core. In this regard, Vera Nünning points out how “stories can cause harm and division as well as foster community, but they are also powerful means of making sense of our lives and of coping with problems” (ibid.). Accordingly, discerning the meaningfulness derived from the creation of fictional narratives, whether by reading or writing them, is essential in exploring the range of possibilities of literature, especially those with a beneficial effect on our lives, and that may indeed include the capacity to heal. This article is aimed at exploring the ways narrative competence can connect to a therapeutic ‘power’ of fiction, that is, how literature can be used as a strategy for the promotion of healing. To this end, the focus will be on the ‘act of writing’ rather than the more frequently explored ‘act of reading’. Initially, this will be done by examining the reasons that authors have for writing and if it is possible to identify an explicit desire to heal (themselves or others) as one of them. This involves the comprehension of the modern conception of health and how it is reflected in therapeutic practices such as bibliotherapy and, in greater detail, expressive writing. Finally, case studies of selected writers highlighting the individual and social impact of writing will provide insights into the many ways in which it can promote an idea of genuine and integral well-being. 2. Why and for what do Writers write? A Typology of Motivational Purposes for Fiction Writing

If we want to understand the therapeutic functions of writing, and of fiction writing in particular, it is first necessary to unveil its possible roles and relationships within a more general framework of literature. With that in mind, the figure of ‘the writer’ comes into play, whose very existence is already enough to raise the cardinal question: why and for what do writers write? An adequate answer cannot be limited to simply affirming – as is commonly believed – that they write just because they want to express themselves. Rather, further and more precise queries also need to be considered: Do authors create their works with the simple intention of conveying their emotions and thoughts? Are they concerned about themselves or their audiences? What is the function of the

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artwork: to convey emotions and thoughts, or to act as medium, or message? Finally, is there any observable connection between the act of writing and an objective sense of well-being? In his essay “Why I Write” George Orwell dealt with this problem and deemed that there are four reasons to write, namely, sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose (see 76-85). The diagram below illustrates his ideas: Sheer egoism

Aesthetic enthu‐ siasm

Historical im‐ pulse

Political purpose

“desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remem‐ bered after death”

“Perception of beauty in the ex‐ ternal world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement”

“desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of poste‐ rity.”

“desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of so‐ ciety that they should strive after.”

Fig. 1: Motives for writing. Adapted from George Orwell’s essay “Why I Write” (80-82).

In a similar fashion, Mario Vargas Llosa, in his doctoral thesis on Gabriel García Márquez (both of whom would go on to be awarded Nobel Prizes in literature), dedicated several lines to reflecting on the reasons that drive the act of writing: Writing novels is an act of rebellion against reality, against God, against God’s creation which is the reality. It is an attempt at correction, change or abolition of the real reality, of its substitution by the fictitious reality that the novelist creates. This is a dissident: he creates illusory life, creates verbal worlds because he does not accept life and world as they are (or as he thinks they are). The root of his vocation is a feeling of dissatisfaction against life; each novel is a secret deicide, a symbolic murder of reality. (90, my translation)1

Apart from the fact that neither Orwell nor Vargas Llosa explicitly included ‘healing’ as a reason to write, there is another coincidence: neither of them made a clear distinction between ‘motivations’ and ‘purposes’ for writing. Therefore, a careful pondering of this aspect could be useful. Motivations would 1

Vargas Llosa’s idea of writing as a way of ‘deicide’ is so prevalent in his work that it gives name to the thesis itself: García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (Story of a Deicide), and is taken up again in his book La verdad de las mentiras (A Writer’s Reality) where he asserts: “the handful of fictions that are the subject of this book proves that, despite the pessimistic prophecies about the future of literature, the deicides still roam the city imagining stories to make up for the deficiencies of History.” (14, my translation)

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answer the question of why writers write: they represent the causes that set the author’s creative machinery, their wit and imagination, in motion. They could be understood as the origins of the desire – or need – for writing. On the other hand, purposes give us answers for what writers write: more than causes, they are the (expected) consequences of writing. There is an intention and therefore a projection into the future. However, the nature of both motivations and purposes is closely intertwined, which makes their examination difficult without considering countless contextual variables. It is for this reason that the term ‘motivating-purposes’ is proposed here as an attempt to embrace the two dimensions and enable the comprehension of the causes behind and the objectives beyond the creative act of writing. It is also evident that, apart from these motivating-purposes, there is another factor to keep in mind. The act of writing involves a focus or orientation, that is, what the act of writing revolves around: the authors themselves, their work, their audience, or their context. Each orientation is necessarily influenced by a concrete group of motivating-purposes and comprises a wide range of them. The following classification includes four focuses and a list of motivating-purposes that is in no way complete or definitive: Author-oriented

Work-oriented

Audience-ori‐ ented

Context-oriented

To express oneself

To experiment

To inform

To describe

To escape

To create

To educate

To interpret

To experience life

To commit deicide

To entertain

To criticize

To show adherence  

To scandalize

To satirize

To become im‐ mortal

 

To move

To transform

To understand

 

To frighten

To denounce

To learn

 

To persuade

To organize

To feel pleasure

 

To deceive

To transgress

To experiment

 

 

To rebel

 

 

 

To break free from

To heal (oneself)

 

To heal (others)

To heal

Fig. 2: A typology of writers’ motivating-purposes (chart mine).

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What writers do when writing is more than just channelling their inner world outwards. They may write as a mechanism that enables escape from their reality or even from themselves, using it to live other lives. When writing, authors can experience all the possibilities that real life has totally or partially denied them: They can become explorers, shamans, demons, extinct animals, Victorian houses, giant sequoias, Death, or even other writers. This in turn could imply several practices (such as choosing and experimenting with the feelings and thoughts of characters) that lead to processes of learning that can be subsequently transferred to the author’s own life. If reading fictions can boost the development of social skills, empathy, and the understanding of others (see Nünning, Reading Fictions 28 f., 93-95, 175 f.), this may be equally true in the case of writing these same fictions. The mere job of imagining the psychological traits of a character involves an exercise of ‘putting oneself in somebody else’s shoes’; this effect must be greatly enhanced when this is done with the necessary rigour to produce a credible literary persona, as well as when it is repeated numerous times, as in the case of prolific character constellations. On the other hand, considering that the written word has been a mechanism to guarantee that human emotions and thoughts can survive the progress of time, it is not unreasonable that some writers have openly admitted that creating their artworks is an effective way of achieving posterity and, essentially, becoming immortal.2 Writers are very aware that, intentionally or not, their chances of being remembered after writing are augmented in comparison to those who do not leave any visible legacy. By writing, authors are perhaps fulfilling an ancestral longing of humankind – immortality – and this can be considered as a form of personal and universal healing: they may have, in their own way, found a cure for death. Even though several other motivating-purposes could be listed, the current analysis ultimately leads to the therapeutic function(s) of writing. Here, func‐ tions in the plural must be stressed since the use of writing as a mechanism of healing may offer more than just one dimension, that is, not exclusively author-oriented but also aimed at their audience (readers/actual people), or the context (society but also the natural milieu, the wholeness of the world and the universe).

2

References to writing as a means of achieving immortality can be found in Ancient Egypt as early as the 12th century BC. The poem The Immortality of Writers not only exhorts the reader to become a writer, but also points to the fact that words written on papyrus are more enduring than monuments and pyramids of stone, as well as a more effective means of being remembered than leaving offspring, which just like one’s own body, will eventually turn to dust (see Foster 227 f.).

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3. Therapeutic Dimensions of Writing: Bibliotherapy and Beyond

It is not possible to move on in the discussion around healing in general, and much less, healing as an associated attribute of literature, without first understanding what ‘health’ is. This necessarily starts by appreciating this concept beyond the outdated and biased belief that it is just an antonym of illness. According to the World Health Organization, “[h]ealth is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (n.p.). This definition provides three key aspects: First, being healthy is not the same as not being sick; second, health is a holistic expression of well-being; and third, such welfare comprises three dimensions: body, mind, and society. This multidimensional conception of ‘health’ easily aligns with the principles of salutogenesis first proposed by Aaron Antonovsky,3 which state that “it [is] more important to focus on peoples’ resources and capacity to create health than the classic focus on risks, ill health, and disease” (Lindström and Eriksson 440). This implies that the idea of healing (= to make something/somebody healthy) is therefore associated with the one of well-being, and must be interpreted not only as rehabilitation but also, in a more integral way, as prevention and preservation. Thus, Antonovsky’s salutogenic model “posits that life experiences help shape one’s sense of coherence [which, when strong] helps one mobilise resources to cope with stressors and manage tension successfully” (Mittelmark and Bauer 7). Vera Nünning underscores how such a sense of coherence “is a crucial factor for people’s sense of mental well-being, [and] is almost certainly connected to narrative competence and the reading of fictional stories” (Reading Fictions 310). However, this notion can also be applied to the active creation of written narratives. This is possible when we identify both the elements of wellness/health promotion shared in a diverse range of reading and writing acts, and the spirit of salutogenesis present in different writers’ motivating-purposes, including those where the desire for healing is not explicit or the author is not the exclusive beneficiary. It is therefore not surprising that therapeutic writing is closely related to the perhaps better-known concept of therapeutic reading or ‘bibliotherapy’, and that some health professionals see both as complementary practices (see Gillam 101-16). The reading of books is one of the many strategies thought to shape or reshape human minds. Just to give an idea of how ingrained this potential

3

For a more detailed elaboration on the concept of ‘salutogenesis’, see Jan Rupp’s and Christine Schwanecke’s respective contributions in this volume.

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of literature is, in ancient Greece some libraries had their entrances adorned with the inscription Ψυχῆς Ἰατρεῖον: ‘Place of Healing for the Soul’, which can be traced back to 3rd-century BCE in ancient Egypt (see “‘Healing-Place for the Soul’”). Later in the 19th century, the postulates of bibliotherapy – although not necessarily under this name – were used as an accepted approach for rehabilitation, particularly within penitentiary systems. This is evident by the extensive incorporation of libraries in the prisons of the US and UK, as well as the publication of manuals for instruction of prison librarians. Many of them also included thorough catalogues of titles prescribed to provide relief, healing, and education to the inmates as part of their process of reintegration into society (see Sweeney 33-36). Needless to say, the content of the catalogues was mainly religious and moralistic; the introduction of other material such as travel books, literary works, and scientific texts would come later (see ibid. 28). This shows how the concerns about the influence of reading on readers’ minds remained a prominent matter, accompanied by a usually very subjective assessment of the moral, pedagogical, and social value of books. This, in turn, typically led to a reductionist categorization of ‘beneficial’ books that helped inspire, convert, and rehabilitate, and ‘dangerous’ books that could ruin not only the individual but endanger society as a whole.4 If a bibliotherapeutic approach can positively affect readers to the point of even helping them transform their mindsets or emotionally heal, is this then an accidental result, or did writers initially create their works with that purpose in mind? To what extent do the therapeutic effects of reading literature depend on the reader’s internal process, or how much do they underlie the original act of writing per se? In this case, one could suggest that healing as an aim of narrative might be one of the primary motivating-purposes of authors, not strictly aimed at themselves but rather at their audience. As a consequence, the therapeutic power of narratives in general can be more easily discerned, as Vera and Ansgar Nünning note when claiming that “[…] health benefits are ascribed to forming a story. Storytelling is key to enhancing an individual’s sense of coherence, which is so crucial for staying healthy and being well.” (174) In this way, many of these benefits behind the process of generating a story are true for both readers and writers. What is more, in the case of the latter, they may have a broader scope, since the act of creation is by nature more proactive, elaborate, and less contemplative. This advantage would 4

Works such as The Reading of Books: Its Pleasures, Profits, and Perils, the long-lived publication of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum by the Catholic Church from 1564 to 1966, or the blacklists made by the Nazi librarian Wolfgang Herrmann in 1933 (see Ovenden 121; Ritzheimer 280) well exemplify these fears.

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not be reserved only for pre-established authors who have already been writing long before thinking of it as a means for healing, but also for people with no previous literary experience, that is, those who have just begun writing as part of therapy, with the explicit goal of coping with traumatic events or mental and even physical health issues. In line with this, approaches such as therapeutic writing (more frequently known as ‘expressive writing’) have been more extensively examined since the 1980s, when the studies conducted by the social psychologist James W. Pennebaker (see Pennebaker and Beall; Pennebaker et al.) started to draw attention to the relationship between emotions, expressiveness, writing, and health (see Lepore and Smyth 4). Many of these initial experiments have been replicated and adapted in recent decades, showing evidence of the influence of storytelling on emotional and bodily health (see Bucci 93-122). A session of expressive writing may vary widely depending on the therapist, not just in terms of duration or frequency, but also in its methodology: the task can be done in a group or individually, in person or online (email, WhatsApp, etc.), or be typed or handwritten (see Baikie and Wilhelm 343). Likewise, in those cases in which patients have difficulties writing by hand, due to problems of illiteracy, disease, or impairment, they can opt for the use of devices to record or type their texts (see Pennebaker and Smyth 174). The writings can be done in the style of a letter, addressing a person (real or imaginary, dead or alive) or simply expressing feelings without having any addressee. The main premise of the exercise is, however, mainly formulaic and mostly involves patients being asked to write the “deepest thoughts and feelings about the most traumatic experience of [their] entire life or an extremely important emotional issue that has affected [them].” (Baikie and Wilhelm 338) During a session of expressive writing, patients may be encouraged to write about their personal relationships (with relatives, partners, friends, etc.); their past, current or future experiences, namely their memories, their aspirations or self-expectations; or their reality at the moment of the therapy (see ibid.). It is worth mentioning the confidentiality of the texts (they are not supposed to be read by anyone else unless the patient wishes it, see ibid. 343) as well as the fact that there is no need to observe the usual formal rules of spelling, grammar, or sentence structure (see Pennebaker and Smyth 16, 19, 26), which certainly emphasizes the ‘expressive’ character of this approach as well as its author-oriented focus. Although one might be led to assume that its scope of application is restricted to psychological disorders, especially such that are connected with trauma,

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expressive writing has been used for diverse medical problems, ranging from anxiety to oncological conditions (see Stanton et al.; Merz et al.). Longer-term benefits of expressive writing Health outcomes

Social and behavioural outcomes

•

• • • • • •

• • • • • • • • •

Fewer stress-related visits to the doctor Improved immune system functioning Reduced blood pressure Improved lung function Improved liver function Fewer days in hospital Improved mood/affect Feeling of greater psychological well-being Reduced depressive symptoms before examinations Fewer post-traumatic intrusion and avoidance symptoms

Reduced absenteeism from work Quicker re-employment after job loss Improved working memory Improved sporting performance Higher students’ grade point average Altered social and linguistic behaviour

Fig. 3: Some benefits of expressive writing (Baikie and Wilhelm 339).

Even though the effectiveness of expressive writing can vary depending on individual particularities, the more studies are conducted, the more evidence is collected in favour of its integration in therapeutic environments, albeit cautiously (see Baikie and Wilhelm 341, 344), as well as in public health and social care systems, such as the person-centred model of care in the UK (see Sampson 312, 318). These experiences are now less and less unusual and have made expressive writing, along with bibliotherapy, mainstream subjects for scholars beyond psychology or literary studies, even to the point of becoming topics of discussion on some social agendas (see ibid. 318). What is more, a further comprehensive approach has given rise to concepts such as narrative medicine, which is concerned not only with the therapeutic process of patients but also with how the tools offered by literature can be integrated into the professional training of health workers (see “Aims”). Thanks to this growing interest, it is possible to observe how two universes that seemed to be academically disjointed – modern medicine and literature – converge and make scenarios that were previously unviable or infrequent possible, such as “a poet [that] leads a workshop with stroke patients in rehab; or a writer and a clinician [that] co-run a psychotherapy group for people with dependency problems” (Sampson 312).

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4. Authors and Mental Health: Therapeutic Writing from Virginia Woolf to Amanda Gorman

Expression, pleasure, creation, or transformation – to what extent is there an intrinsic sense of well-being correlated to the act of writing? Some writers have devoted their lives to writing literature and, consequently, they may argue a simple but still very valid point: writing is an enjoyable act.5 In this way, due to the notion of integral well-being, writing would be genuinely boosting the idea of health that the WHO advocates. There is no need to have the pretext of trauma because, in this case, writing would be acting as a vaccine rather than as an antidote. However, could life itself be understood as a trauma or illness? If so, by writing, would not writers be trying to cure it? This leads us to an intriguing phenomenon: the popular assumption that there may be a connection between some mental disorders and the practice of creative writing. This idea, although attractive and even addressed by some studies, is indeed controversial, considering that most of the evidence is highly anecdotal and does not allow for any empirical experimentation. This can be explained by the fact that, although there could be thousands of authors throughout history who had mental conditions, we only have record of those archetypical cases we know that have transcended anonymity and time due to their talent as well as their ‘madness’ (e.g. Poe, Hemingway, Woolf, etc.). Furthermore, the chances of creating accurate clinical profiles are slim, unless these had already been developed with the author as a patient when they were still alive, which would be very exceptional. This only leaves the option of conducting historical, literary, and historiometric research, which is still very problematic when the subject of study is the human psyche of an individual long deceased.6 Even then, the analyses of the available investigations on this matter have given rise to three main lines of thought. One argues that mental disorders, particularly in authors who have had them since an early age, are expressed

5

6

And even then, many writers acknowledge the hardships, if not sacrifices, involved in the act of writing. Orwell asserted that “[w]riting a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand.” (85) Nevertheless, several studies made during the 1980s and 1990s, examining artists in general but focusing on writers and poets, together with later meta-analyses, have shed some light on the incidence of mental disorders. For instance, “artists experience up to 18 times the rate of suicide seen in the general population, eight to 10 times the rate of depression and 10 to 20 times the rate of manic-depression and cyclothymia” (Jamison, “Manic-Depressive Illness” 65 f.).

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through the writing act, without this having any ameliorating or worsening effect. That is to say, writing would essentially be a symptom of the disease, and therefore the more severe the latter, the more intense the former, which could explain the extraordinary talent commonly attributed to these authors (see Kaufman and Sexton, “Writing Cure” 268-71). In this way, the disorder happens to be the unavoidable driving force of the process of writing – brilliant writing – and the main reason why these authors excelled and, ultimately, why we remember them. In light of such a possibility, Katherine Dalsimer neatly summarizes the complexity of its implications by wondering about Virginia Woolf: “Was her illness a terrible obstacle to her art, or the necessary condition for it?” (75) Another approach, no less divisive, would suggest that creative writing may negatively impact the mental conditions of these exceptional artists. It would work in a way analogous to an addiction, in which seemingly “the immersion in creative and emotional writing only perpetuates mental or emotional anguish” (Kaufman and Sexton, “Creative Writer” 259). In other words, by writing, authors would be catalyzing all the genius associated with their ‘madness’ in an explosive release of creativity, inspiration, and emotional pain. A process that can bring some temporary relief, but, after all, just ends up in a vicious circle. A third perspective would favour the principle of healing even in the cases of a prolonged mental illness. In this respect, the creative act of writing would not be symptomatic or harmful but rather a palliative strategy to cope with the anguish inherent to the lives of these artists, to the point that they actually help themselves survive by writing (see Kaufman and Sexton, “Writing Cure” 268-82). Including those scenarios that ended in suicide (not uncommon for many artists, but especially widespread among poets, see Jamison, Touched with Fire 72), it is thought that their lives could have been cut even shorter if they had not found and benefited from the lifeguarding shelter of literature. Could this have been true for Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, or Virginia Woolf? Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar, for example, is considered mostly an autobiographical work, featuring many resemblances between the American poet and the protagonist Esther Greenwood: Plath lived with depression and bipolar disorder just as Esther does in the novel. Similarly, the lives of both the author and the character were marked by persistent suicide attempts that, in the case of Plath, resulted in her death one month after the novel was published. Again, before the scarcity of empirical evidence, many of these theories remain mainly speculative, unless, for instance, the artist possessed an outspoken willingness to use writing to heal themselves, just as Virginia Woolf expressed in her autobiographical essays:

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“The only way I keep afloat is by working… Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down.” (235) Unlike Woolf, even today, not many authors openly admit that they write with the intention of healing or surviving in mind, and yet, few would deny the gratifying effect that writing has on their lives. Recalling the WHO integral definition of health as a state of physical, emotional, and social welfare, one might presume that by writing, consciously or not, writers are working on the improvement of their health conditions. In this sense, the book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) by the US-American author Stephen King deserves a special mention. Although he is better known for his horror and science fiction novels, this work is instead a peculiar hybrid between a writing handbook, essayistic contributions, and an autobiography, including an epilogue chapter addressing the traumatic experience of a car accident that jeopardized both his life and his ability to write. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft was initially conceived as a book to answer questions about professional writing, or as King himself calls it a “damn writing book” (265).7 The work is divided into five sections, three of them: “What Writing Is”, “Toolbox”, and “On Writing”, addressing some practical issues related to grammar, style, advice for would-be authors, and some personal considerations on literature. It is the first chapter, “C.V.”, that constitutes the actual memoir, where King presents a brief autobiographical review of events that led him to becoming an author. Among his disclosures are his problems with alcohol and drug abuse and how these were mirrored in both the creative process and the resulting content of his novels, where his own experiences were depicted sometimes via allegories, sometimes with more straightforward images. He states that the part of him that knew he was an alcoholic “began to scream for help in the only way it knew how, through my fiction and through my monsters” (96). He also reveals how, after an arduous process of giving up his addictions, including alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, and mouthwash, he was genuinely afraid of not being able to write again. Eventually, not without effort and support, and finally sober and lucid, he could continue his literary career, highlighting the essential role of writing in this process of rehabilitation. He deftly summarizes this conviction when concluding that “[l]ife isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.” (101) King had started the book in 1997 but left it barely outlined for almost two years. It was precisely when he resumed it, in the summer of 1999, that he suf‐

7

In the following, references to On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft will be given without repeating the title.

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fered a dramatic car accident that sent him to hospital and a subsequent season of surgeries, medication, and painful recovery. Together with the physical ordeal, he had to once again face the fear of feeling unable to write. It was during this time of rehab that the middle sections of the book were written; without any explicit reference to the traumatic experience he was going through, they embody his arduous comeback to writing. The fifth and final chapter “On Living: A Postscript”, had not been in mind when the book was first imagined, however, it would end up being an explicit testimony on King’s accident and his life afterwards. It became both a memoir and profound reflection where he acknowledged his previous experience with the healing power of writing in his life, which he expected to have again: Yet at the same time I felt I’d reached one of those crossroads moments when you’re all out of choices. And I had been in terrible situations before which the writing had helped me get over – had helped me forget myself for at least a little while. Perhaps it would help me again. (266)

He certainly admits that writing is not a miraculous cure: “Writing did not save my life – Dr. David Brown’s skill and my wife’s loving care did that” (269), although he cannot ignore its significance as an act that has incessantly fostered his wellbeing: “but it has continued to do what it always has done: it makes my life a brighter and more pleasant place” (ibid.). King’s very final consideration is a declaration of principles on what the purpose of writing is and how its benefits are a common weal for both the authors and their readers. Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. (Ibid.)

According to his short manifesto, writing is inherently a tool to lift spirits – emphatically to be happy – and to promote mutual improvement in the lives of those who write and those who read, thus suggesting that the main if not the sole purpose of writing is to provide an opportunity to heal in its broadest sense; no more and no less. This last thought involves the notion of the therapeutic function of writing within the audience-oriented focus when recognizing that the readers are expected to be susceptible to its benefits. Nevertheless, similar to the reluctance of most writers to openly consider writing as a tool for healing themselves, few

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of them would dare to claim that they write with the intention of helping others to heal. In this sense, the intentional goal of publishing could provide some clues, since, when knowing in advance that you are writing about a traumatic expe‐ rience with a final audience in mind, you should take more into consideration than the mere desire of coping with it on a personal basis. Again, it is necessary to recall that the initial motivating-purposes of authors can deeply vary from the ultimate effect that their works have on their readers. This implies that even without wishing it, the writer could have created a work that would be deemed, treated, and used as a healing tool by their audience. The abovementioned book by Stephen King could be seen as an inspiring testimony on writing in general and as a therapeutic strategy, even though it was not originally intended to be so. Another example, less known but equally suited to illustrate this point, is the Colombian poet and novelist Piedad Bonnett, who went through the experience of losing a son to suicide in 2011, which later became the subject of her novel, Lo que no tiene nombre (2013, “What has no name”, my translation). She affirmed that she “never thought of it as a therapeutic procedure” (“La Colombiana” n.p., my translation), but instead preferred to consider that she used storytelling as a way to gain insight into her son’s thoughts (see ibid.). Thanks to this work, Bonnett became well known in academic circles that discuss psychiatric disorders such as those that her son had, as well as in support networks for grief management (see “‘Lo Que No Tiene Nombre’”). Moreover, despite her reluctance to assign her novel a primary healing motivation, she admitted that since its publication she began devoting some hours per day to answering letters from parents dealing with a mental disorder or the suicide of their children (see ibid.). Eventually, she was awarded the title of one of the ‘best leaders’ in Colombia in 2013, thanks to her commitment to “raise awareness about mental health issues through a moving literary testimony, widely publicised for its quality and originality” (“Los 120 Mejores” n.p., my translation). Those who read fictional works that narrate situations that they themselves have faced in their lives may easily identify with the characters or situations there described. Through reading them, they can understand certain circum‐ stances, motivations, or emotions related to their own traumas; or feel encour‐ aged to speak up about their grief, look for professional advice, or seek or even create support networks, just as in the case of many of Bonnett’s readers. This indeed represents a way of promoting healing (audience-oriented) regardless of the original author’s intentions. What is more, when a literary work impacts readers who have not undergone similar situations to those experienced by the

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writer or who were unfamiliar with the subjects treated in the work, a process of public awareness takes place (for instance about mental health, suicide, phobias, eating disorders, etc). That way, we observe not only a healing mechanism aimed at the readers directly concerned, but there may be also a preventive effect on society in general, a major and more ambitious outcome that might be considered as context-oriented. Together with these personal adversities, collective catastrophes can nurture the need to write as an instrument for coping with the subsequent trauma and pain. This relationship between calamity and artistic boom is not new and can be traced through the ages. The Great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s, the two World Wars in the 20th century, and other countless disasters, natural or manmade, global or regional, are just examples of how disruptive and traumatic events have been addressed using literature – and art in general – in an attempt to understand these events, come to terms with them, and then collectively move on. More contemporary threats include climate change, the rise of populism, structural racism, terrorism and, by all means, the increasing menace/reality of pandemics. Concerning climate change, we witnessed the surge of a new literary genre, so-called climate fiction or ‘cli-fi’8 and, not surprisingly, in the face of the latest global health emergency, there has already been an increase in relevant literature, its name yet to be properly coined: Covid fiction and non-fiction, pandemic novels, post-pandemic literature, etc.9 The year 2020 wound up being another of those ‘catastrophic’ years, a turning point in the recent history of the world. The Covid-19 pandemic was itself prevalent enough to affect essentially all aspects of life and be considered by many as the beginning of a new era or an accelerant of several transforming trends that were already underway. However, this year was also unique due to several other reasons. The case of the United States is a clear example in which, together with the health emergency, there was an associated economic crunch

8 9

See Désirée Link’s contribution in this volume. Some examples can be mentioned from the plethora of titles that emerged in 2020 as a result of the pandemic. One is Intimations: Six Essays by Zadie Smith, written during the zenith of the New York lockdown and addressing varied subjects, such as the craft of writing, the murder of George Floyd and, obviously, the health emergency itself. Another is the anthology And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again: Writers from Around the World on the COVID-19 Pandemic , edited by Ilan Stavans, presenting essays by authors and artists from more than thirty countries, including Nobel Prize laureates, discussing the peculiarities and afflictions suffered in different corners of the world during this period. For an analysis of Smith’s collection of essays and other examples of pandemic literature, see Jan Rupp’s contribution in this volume.

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not seen since the times of the Great Depression of 1929. Likewise, we observed the growing turmoil around the phenomenon of racial injustice, fuelled by the murder of George Floyd but in no way limited to this single event, all amid one of the most controversial presidencies and pugnacious electoral processes of American political history. After such a disruptive year, the outcome was a country profoundly fractured, a society physically and emotionally exhausted and, following the attack on the US Capitol on 6th January 2021, also a democracy injured. It was not by chance that, since the Democratic candidate Joe Biden emerged as the president-elect on 3rd November 2020, his speeches and a myriad of headlines alluded to ‘healing a nation’ or ‘heal the wounds and divisions of the country’, as the most central focus of his presidency (see C. Alter; Wilkie; “Opinion”). It was no coincidence either that, amidst a context marked by deep racial tensions, a young Black woman, the activist and National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman was chosen to deliver a poem during the inauguration of Biden. When she wrote The Hill We Climb (2021), she had enough individual reasons, as well as a strong social conviction, to use the idea of healing as the main driving force of her creation. The motivating-purpose of the poet was to heal and send a message of reconciliation, unity, and hope for the future while acknowledging the turbulent moment her country was experiencing: America is messy. It’s still in its early development of all that we can become. And I have to recognize that in the poem. I can’t ignore that or erase it. And so I crafted an inaugural poem that recognizes these scars and these wounds. Hopefully, it will move us toward healing them. (Barajas n.p.)

Given the circumstances – a nation effectively injured by health, economic, social, and even existential crises, together with a scenario, Capitol Hill, still exhibiting the havoc of an attack suffered just two weeks before – The Hill We Climb was intentionally created to transcend the immediate setting and serve as a healing instrument aimed not only at those attending the inauguration but at the entire nation. It was not in vain that Gorman underlines: In my poem, I’m not going to in any way gloss over what we’ve seen over the past few weeks and, dare I say, the past few years. But what I really aspire to do in the poem is to be able to use my words to envision a way in which our country can still come together and can still heal. (A. Alter n.p.).

Rarely has the therapeutic dimension of literature been used so strategically, far beyond the usual author-oriented perspective, in such an opportune context,

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targeting such a wide audience, and pursuing such an ambitious goal, all with just 723 words and five minutes to read them. Mostly praised by critics, The Hill We Climb represents a tribute to the strength of American society when prevailing over adversity, without leaving aside its incomplete and perfectible nature. Despite the apparently uncompli‐ cated structure, the poem is extremely rich in rhetorical devices, allusions, and symbolisms, in particular those associated with the motivating-purpose of healing. Although the term ‘heal’ is not explicit within the text, it is included as part of a recurrent game of opposite semantic fields that leads from harm towards reparation (‘past’/‘future’, ‘shade’/‘light’, ‘suffering’/‘recovery’, ‘destruction’/‘fixing’, etc). This contrast is not reduced to just a juxtaposition of elements but rather constructed as a continuum, a process of improvement or evolution. Sometimes this correlation is direct and more evident, as when Gorman proclaims “that even as we grieved, we grew. / That even as we hurt, we hoped.” (The Hill We Climb 26)10 In other cases, the associations are not immediate and are instead scattered throughout the text, as in the phrases emphasizing the need for pursuing a different, better future: “We will rebuild, reconcile and recover” (46), “[w]e close the divide because we know to put our future first” (22), or “[f]or while we have our eyes on the future” (32), as opposed to an idea of ‘a past’ that Gorman rejects and wants to overcome: “We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be (38)” or “So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left.” (42) Equally persistent is the idea of ‘moving upwards’ characterized by the title of the poem itself, The Hill We Climb, used once within the text (28), or by statements such as “We will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one” (42), followed by the anaphoric construction “We will rise […]” (44), included four times near the end of the composition.11 Beyond Gorman’s exercise of using writing as an intentional means for col‐ lective healing, there is another notable aspect to bear in mind. The exploration of this therapeutic function is not something aleatory in her life and did not just pop up in a critical moment in US history, it is deeply rooted in her own personal experience. She was diagnosed early in her life with a hearing disorder that, in turn, affected her pronunciation and speech, making it difficult for her to learn basic sounds such as /sh/ or /r/ (see Barajas; Goldstein). She repeatedly acknowledged that reading and writing poetry played a role similar to speech 10 11

In the following, references to The Hill We Climb will be given without repeating the title. The complementary notion of ‘down’ is not explicitly conveyed but is rather replaced by the concepts ‘shade’, ‘past’, ‘catastrophe’, ‘division’ etc.

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therapy (see Humphries), allowing her to eventually overcome her disorder and, simultaneously, enhance many essential skills for her development as a poet (see Barajas; Goldstein). In this way, the use of poetry to learn how to speak her native language gave her a much deeper phonetic insight into English (see Goldstein), making her appreciate her former speech problem, “not as a weakness or a disability, but as one of [her] greatest strengths” (ibid. n.p.). The example of Amanda Gorman reflects literature’s ability to heal in its broadest sense. A usage not concealed under the attire of euphemisms, evasion, or denial so common among writers when inquired about it, but overtly and categorically meant for that purpose: heal the artist, heal their readers, and heal their reality. In doing so, the act of writing could be leading to the acceptance of one’s own failures, fragility, and trauma, as well as to coping, the consequent self-improvement, the eventual overcoming of crises, and the consolidation of a real sense of well-being for both individuals and societies. 5. Conclusion

The benefits of literature as a therapeutic tool are not a recent conception, but go back as far as cultures of ancient Egypt and Greece, where places devoted to reading were believed to offer relief for mind or soul, equivalent to a hospital taking care of the body. While the use of treatments such as bibliotherapy became an official practice in the 19th century, initially in penitentiary contexts, ‘creative’ or ‘expressive writing’ as a therapy has become popular only in more recent times. This still emerging field of writing therapy offers a promising perspective, having already proved its applicability for a wide range of both emotional and physical conditions. This growing interest has meant that several disciplines such as psychology, psychiatry, neurosciences, linguistics, literary studies, and cognitive narratology have started examining this intriguing rela‐ tion between well-being, health, writing, and reading – not to mention medical sciences such as immunology, oncology, rheumatology, or pain management, in which the usefulness of this therapeutic approach has been also investigated (see Baikie and Wilhelm 340; Furnes and Dysvik). While writing as a way of coping with trauma in average individuals is more commonly explored, in the case of established or professional writers this research tends to be less solid and more problematic. Likewise, examining the connections between the creative exercise of writing and mental health among prominent figures of literature proves particularly challenging. Given the obvious downside that most of them are no longer alive and the only testimony of their psyche – or at least the richest – lies precisely in their

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works, there is no room for empirical experimentation, just leaving the option of historical and literary analysis in the light of modern psychological inter‐ pretation. Nevertheless, some writers have openly admitted that writing has played a substantial role in their lives. They have praised its positive effects for temporarily alleviating a condition of persistent depression and excitement, and thus, to some extent, prolonging their life, as can be inferred in the case of Virginia Woolf; for helping to overcome a lifetime riddled with addiction or to cope with physical and emotional trauma as Stephen King admits; or for serving as a means of self-learning and identity-making as a poet when dealing with a speech disability, as Amanda Gorman points out. These scenarios showing the potential of writing to heal or help manage crises are by no means accidental. Considering that literature may be the only opportunity to imagine and materialize worlds that would otherwise be unrealizable, by “constructing innovative narratives, we can find ways out of seemingly hopeless situations and establish life stories that turn us into agents or ‘authors’ of our own experiences” (Nünning, “Identity” 199). In other words, for both authors and their readers, literature and narrative open up a wide and empowering horizon of personal possibilities and self-realization. In the case of authors, whether one writes a bestseller, a story that no one will read, or a poem to heal a nation, the mere sight of the finished work may be reason enough to generate a deep feeling of satisfaction in its creator, in contrast to the well-known fear of the blank page. This sense of achievement, obviously not exclusive to writing, is in itself an element that can be also associated with an idea of personal wellness and emotional health. All in all, for most writers, rather than a transitory resource for times of crisis, writing represents their profession, their way of making a living or, more essentially, an inherent and inseparable part of their existence and identity. We might still wonder if any writer has ever written with the express desire to feel distressed, but we might safely assume that, for those who have decided to pursue a career as authors, they did so because they found in writing the possibility of working on what they love, what complements them and shapes their uniqueness, not only as professionals but as humans. In this way, writing is not simply a matter of ‘doing’ but a matter of ‘being’. From this perspective, the notion that writing heals goes far beyond the more traditional therapeutic sense of the word, involving two further-reaching prin‐ ciples present in many writer’s motivating-purposes: the pursuit of well-being and self-fulfilment. These ultimate goals are in line with modern and more comprehensive definitions of health. They usher in a horizon in which healing ceases to be an individual entitlement and starts to incorporate collectivities

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as well. Although literature might be far from being considered a panacea – if health is a state of physical, mental, and social well-being, writing could, by all means, be used as an ever-available path towards that sense of plenitude that we all long for. Bibliography

  Primary Sources

Bonnett, Piedad. Lo que no tiene nombre. Alfaguara, 2013. Gorman, Amanda. The Hill We Climb. Hoffmann and Campe, 2021. King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Scribner, 2000. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three 1925-1930. Harcourt, 1977.

  Secondary Sources

“Aims of the German Network for Narrative Medicine.” German Network for Narrative Medicine, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, 31 July 2019, en.netzwerk-narrativemedizin.de/about-narrative-medi‐ cine/aims-of-the-german-network-for-narrative-medicine. Last accessed 10 July 2022. Alter, Alexandra. “Amanda Gorman Captures the Moment, in Verse.” The New York Times, 19 Jan. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/books/amanda-gorman-inauguration-hil l-we-climb.html. Last accessed 24 June 2022. Alter, Charlotte. “President-Elect Joe Biden Vows to Usher in ‘A Time to Heal’.” Time, 8 Nov. 2020, https://time.com/5908983/president-elect-joe-biden-vows-to-usher-in-a-ti me-to-heal-in-america/. Last accessed 24 June 2022. Baikie, Karen A., and Kay Wilhelm. “Emotional and Physical Health Benefits of Expres‐ sive Writing.” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, vol. 11, no. 5, 2005, pp. 338-46, doi:10.1192/apt.11.5.338. Barajas, Julia. “How a 22-year-old L.A. Native Became Biden’s Inauguration Poet.” Los Angeles Times, 17 Jan. 2021, www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2021 -01-17/amanda-gorman-biden-inauguration-poet. Last accessed 24 June 2022. Bucci, Wilma. “The Power of the Narrative: A Multiple Code Account.” Emotion, Disclo‐ sure, & Health, edited by James W. Pennebaker, American Psychological Association, 1995, pp. 93-122. “Constitution of the World Health Organization.” World Health Organization, WHO, ww w.who.int/about/governance/constitution. Last accessed 24 June 2022. Dalsimer, Katherine. “Encountering Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and Julia Duck‐ worth Stephen.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis, edited by Vera J. Camden, Cambridge UP, 2022, pp. 72-89. Foster, John Lawrence. Ancient Egyptian Literature: An Anthology. U of Texas P, 2001.

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Furnes, Bodil, and Elin Dysvik. “Therapeutic Writing and Chronic Pain: Experiences of Therapeutic Writing in a Cognitive Behavioural Programme for People with Chronic Pain” Journal of Clinical Nursing, vol. 21, no. 23/24, 2012, pp. 3372-81. Gillam, Tony. Creativity, Wellbeing and Mental Health Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Goldstein, Joelle. “Amanda Gorman Tells Oprah Winfrey Why Her Speech Impediment Is ‘One of My Greatest Strengths’.” PEOPLE, 25 Mar. 2021, https://people.com/human-int erest/amanda-gorman-opens-up-speech-impediment-oprah-winfrey-interview/. Last accessed 22 June 2022. “‘Healing-Place for the Soul’: Diodorus, Egyptian Libraries, and Renaissance Reception, a Talk by Mark Roblee, Visiting Lecturer, History Department, UMass Amherst.” UMass Amherst, Nov. 2014, https://www.umass.edu/renaissance/event/roblee. Last accessed 24 June 2022. Humphries, Monica. “Amanda Gorman used poetry to overcome her speech impediment.” Insider, 30 Mar. 2021, www.insider.com/amanda-gorman-used-poetry-to-overcome-s peech-impediment-2021-3. Last accessed 22 June 2022. “La Colombiana Piedad Bonnett Narra el Suicidio de su Hijo en ‘Lo que no Tiene Nombre’.” Europapress, 27 Sept. 2013, www.europapress.es/cultura/libros-00132/notic ia-colombiana-piedad-bonnett-narra-suicidio-hijo-no-tiene-nombre-20130927134948 .html. Last accessed 24 June 2022. “Los 120 Mejores Líderes de Colombia.” Fundación Liderazgo y Democracia, 2013, https:// fundacionlyd.org/noticias/148-los-120-mejores-lideres-de-colombia. Last accessed 24 June 2022. “‘Lo Que No Tiene Nombre’, Recorriendo el camino de la pérdida de un hijo.” Manejo‐ delDuelo.com, 2014, https://manejodelduelo.com/suicidio-de-un-hijo. Last accessed 1 July 2022. Jamison, Kay Redfield. “Manic-Depressive Illness and Creativity.” Scientific American, vol. 272, no. 2, 1995, pp. 62-67. —. Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. Free Press, 1993. Kaufman, James C., and Janel D. Sexton. “The Creative Writer and Mental Health: The Importance of Domains and Style.” Writing: A Mosaic of New Perspectives, edited by Elena L. Grigorenko, Elisa Mambrino, and Davd D. Preiss, Psychology Press, 2012, pp. 259-74. —. “Why Doesn’t the Writing Cure Help Poets?” Review of General Psychology, vol. 10, no. 3, 2006, pp. 268-82, doi:10.1037/1089-2680.10.3.268. Lepore, Stephen J., and Joshua M. Smyth. “The Writing Cure: An Overview.” The Writing Cure: How Expressive Writing Promotes Health and Emotional Well-Being, edited by Stephen J. Lepore, and Joshua M. Smyth, American Psychological Association, 2002, pp. 3-14.

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Lindström, Bengt, and Monica Eriksson. “Salutogenesis.” Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, vol. 59, 2005, pp. 440-42, doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/jech.2005.03 4777. Mittelmark, Maurice B., and Georg F. Bauer. “The Meanings of Salutogenesis.” The Handbook of Salutogenesis, edited by Maurice B. Mittelmark et al., Springer, 2017, pp. 7-13. Merz, Erin L., Rina S. Fox, and Vanessa L. Malcarne. “Expressive Writing Interventions in Cancer Patients: A Systematic Review” Health Psychology Review, vol. 8, no. 3, 2014, pp. 339-61, doi.org/10.1080/17437199.2014.882007. Nünning, Vera. “Identity: Cultural Ways of Making Selves”. Key Concepts for the Study of Culture: An Introduction, edited by Vera Nünning, Philipp Löffler, and Margit Peterfy, WVT, 2020, pp. 169-204. —. Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction. Winter, 2014. Nünning, Vera, and Ansgar Nünning. “How to Stay Healthy and Foster Well-Being with Narratives, or: Where Narratology and Salutogenesis Could Meet.” How to Do Things with Narrative: Cognitive and Diachronic Perspectives, edited by Jan Alber, and Greta Olson, De Gruyter, 2017, pp. 157-86. “Opinion: How Joe Biden can ‘Heal the Nation’.” The Wall Street Journal, 1 Dec. 2020, w ww.wsj.com/articles/how-joe-biden-can-heal-the-nation-11606866098. Last accessed 24 June 2022. Orwell, George. “Why I Write.” Ideas, Insights and Arguments: A Non-fiction Collection, edited by Michael Marland, Cambridge UP, 2022, pp. 76-85. Ovenden, Richard. Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge. Harvard UP, 2020. Pennebaker, James W. Emotion, Disclosure, & Health. American Psychological Associa‐ tion, 1995. Pennebaker, James W., and Sandra K. Beall. “Confronting a Traumatic Event. Toward an Understanding of Inhibition and Disease.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, vol. 95, no. 3, 1986, pp. 274-81, doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.95.3.274. Pennebaker, James W., Janice K. Kiecolt-Glaser, and Ronald Glaser. “Disclosure of Traumas and Immune Function. Health Implications for Psychotherapy.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, vol. 56, no. 2, 1988, pp. 239-45, doi.org/ 10.1037/0022-006X.56.2.239. Pennebaker, James W., and Joshua M. Smyth. Opening Up by Writing It Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain. The Guilford Press, 2016. Ritzheimer, Kara L. ‘Trash,’ Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany. Cambridge UP, 2016. Sampson, Fiona. “Writing as ‘Therapy’.” The Handbook of Creative Writing, edited by Steven Earnshaw, Edinburgh UP, 2007, pp. 312-19.

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Stanton, Anette L., and Sharon Danoff-Burg. “Emotional Expression, Expressive Writing, and Cancer.” The Writing Cure: How Expressive Writing Promotes Health and Emotional Well-Being, edited by Stephen J. Lepore and Joshua M. Smyth, American Psychological Association, 2002, pp. 31-51. Sweeney, Megan. Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons. U of North Carolina P, 2010. Vargas Llosa, Mario. García Márquez: Historia de un Deicidio. Monte Ávila, 1971. —. La Verdad de las Mentiras. Santillana, 2007 [1990]. Wilkie, Christina. “Biden Calls for Unity and Healing after Electoral College Certifies his Victory.” CNBC, 15 Dec. 2020, www.cnbc.com/2020/12/14/biden-calls-for-unity-and-h ealing-after-electoral-college-cements-his-victory.html. Last accessed 24 June 2022.

II. Literature and Positive Change at an Intersubjective Level

Reflections of ‘Togetherness’ and a Co-Narrating Community in Fictional ‘We’-Narratives A Case Study of the Japanese ‘Picture Brides’ in Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic (2011)

Dorina-Daniela Vasiloiu

1. Introduction: A Constructive Approach to the First-Person-Plural Narration

Fictional ‘we’-narratives are generally viewed as problematic because of the fluid form of collective speech and thought they display. However, irrespective of the experimental form of address and multiperspectival rendition of the story, ‘we’-narratives may also offer a powerful and enriching alternative to what readers normally experience in a fictional text. A story told from a collective ‘we’-perspective would normally only occur in real-life communication when one representative is chosen to talk on behalf of a group of individuals. With fictional ‘we’-narratives, scholars have identified a number of controversial issues with regard to the use of the plural personal pronoun ‘we’ in fictional discourse. In brief, some highlight the unnatural or non-mimetic communicative form of ‘we’-narratives, whereas others discuss their semantic elusiveness and the impossibility of attributing an individual identity to characters and narrators in the absence of clear pronominal reference. Others point to the difficulty of pursuing the narrative situation in a fictional communication of this type.1

1

In this sense, see, for example, Uri Margolin’s discussion of ‘we’-narratives in relation to the communicative situation (“Plural”) or his typology of collective narrative agents and narratives (“Telling Our Story”). Amit Marcus examines the deictic characteristics of the plural ‘we’ (2008) whereas Brian Richardson proposes analysis of the representation of social minds through ‘we’ and ‘they’/ natural and unnatural narratives (“Plural Focaliza‐ tion”; Unnatural Voices). Similarly, Jan Alber explores the social mind through the lens of the first-person plural. Furthermore, Monika Fludernik (“Politics”) gives insight into how the first-person plural pronouns create ambiguities on the level of the plot and narration

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For my analysis of ‘we’-narratives, however, I take my cue from Vera Nünning’s seminal studies and TED Talk on the many values of literature. The central line of argument that she emphasizes is that reading stories can “modify readers’ mental encyclopaedia and change their attitudes” (“Narrative Fiction” 43) as well as transmit values, “[and] exercise cognitive and affective processes” (“Ethics” 52). Nünning’s conceptual framework allows the accommodation of all fictional texts, which means that even the heterogenous structure of fictional ‘we’-narratives can be read into in a less contentious manner. Accordingly, the narrating ‘we’ definitely reflects otherness, which increases readers’ cognitive abilities and knowledge of the world. More importantly, as Nünning points out, “literary works […] enable us to appreciate this kind of heterogeneity and complexity, but also help us to accept otherness, to refrain from stereotyping and categorizing others, and to abandon the insistence on closure” (“Ethics” 47). Arguably, this astute observation on the transformative power of literature frees the reading of ‘we’-narratives from strict classification and a normative belief system. In a recent study, Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning reinforce the same idea and put forward a well-argued case for the necessity of adopting “a positive vision of what makes literature so valuable” (“Literature” 17), especially in these current times that have been marked not only by technology but also “multiple crises and catastrophes” (ibid.). The current research on ‘we’-narrative would certainly benefit from a more positive, constructive approach. I therefore aim to explore the fertile ground that this type of narration offers. For this purpose, it is necessary that ‘we’-narrative be approached from a similar standpoint, beyond the conventional conceptualization of the first-person plural narrator as marker of collectivity, “conformity”, or “suppression of individual difference” (see Beck 8). As I seek to demonstrate, the narrating ‘we’ can function as a narrative community whose collaborative storytelling spotlights beliefs, experience(s), or emotions in a shared social situation, without any diminishing effects on individuality. Furthermore, co-narrators’ interrelation in their shared social world of reference generates a sense of ‘togetherness’ on the discourse level (see Coates 92). Julie Otsuka’s novel, The Buddha in the Attic, is the first-person plural fictional text that I propose for my close reading. Some specific premises lie at the core of my undertaking to explore further potential values of ‘we’-narratives. Firstly, the concept of ‘co-narration’ aptly enables us to identify how fictional joint storytelling occasions the creation of a co-narrating community. The prevailing condition is for the protagonists to have shared some social context on the

in factual narrative. A more recent study by Natalya Bekhta (“We-Narratives”) suggests that ‘we’-narrative has occasioned a new form of narrative transmission.

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story level. Hence, the collaborative character of the narrative emerges from the Japanese women’s account of joint travelling on the boat to America and co-shared experience as immigrants to the new country in the early 1900s. Secondly, on the discourse level, the narrating ‘we’ shares the task of storytelling. The cohesiveness of their communicative enterprise is established by the personal stories about common experience of their journey to a new land, and then, the hardships endured there. Thirdly, the young Japanese brides stand for multiple sources of knowledge united by similar life experiences and cultural values. The following state-of-the-art review synthesizes some of the most articulate critical research on ‘we’-narratives in order to set up a more comprehensive theoretical background and discern the elements that can give a fresh insight into this form of narration. 2. A Brief Outline of Current Research on ‘We’-Narratives

From a semantic perspective, the first-person plural pronoun allows a variety of particular or general associations of an ‘I’ with others (I and s/he; I and they; I and ‘you’). Amit Marcus, for instance, reflects on the “semantic instability” or “fluidity” of ‘first-person plural narration’, referring to it as a “hybrid form” since “there are thematically significant shifts from ‘we’ to other pronouns and vice versa” (“Dialogue” 135). Furthermore, in the absence of a clear referent, some problems may arise in fictional discourse with respect to ‘who’ the narrators are, ‘whom’ they address, and whether the narrators and narratees function as a group or separately on the same level of narrative communication. This, in turn, may affect the process of assessing if the story events have been experienced in a collective or individual way, and hence, from whose perspective the story is told (see Fludernik, “Peculiarities” 173 f.). Furthermore, as Monika Fludernik observes, “communal narration is rarely collective” due to the fact that a con‐ versation usually unfolds on a turn-taking principle (ibid. 175). The first-person plural noun thus bears ideological meanings for the narrative constructed collectively since, on the textual level, the ‘we’-referent may be used to “exploit the tension between generality and individuality” or to “alternat[e] between narratives of shared experience and scenes involving individual experiences that counterpoint, diversify, or exemplarily corroborate collective fortunes” (ibid. 188). However, irrespective of the grammatical “oddities of combination and collocation” (ibid.) that may occur in this type of narration, the lack of an equivalent in the real world, or the challenges it may present to the reader when it comes to empathizing and sympathizing with the community at the core of the narration, the fictional ‘we’-voices still plays an important role

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in transmitting information about the community’s shared experiences (see ibid.). With no correspondent of naturally occurring collective voices in the real word, communication partners convey information, tell stories, or take part in a conversation in unison only if it is pre-scripted and programmed to be delivered in a collective format. In this sense, Brian Richardson classifies ‘we’-narrative as “unnatural” (Un‐ natural Voices 389). Conversely, Ansgar Nünning and Natalya Bekhta find this categorization too general (see “Critique” 419 f.). As they explain, an interpretation of plural narrations in strictly mimetic or realist terms according to which a “singular homo- and intradiegetic narrator […] cannot know other minds” is remnant of “a classical narratological paradigm that denies narrator’s plurality” (ibid. 423). In their view, such an approach does not serve the study of fiction at all. In two of her studies, Bekhta offers an extensive and solid argument for the necessity of reconceptualizing ‘we’-narrative in terms of the categories of narrator, narrative situation, and narrative levels of communication (see “We-Narratives”; “Narrative Situations”).2 In this way, the first-person plural narration can reveal its complex implications for fictional discourse as well as the communal narrator’s socio-cognitive and communicative activity of collective storytelling.3 Other studies remark that the use of the collective voice questions individualism, dominant discourses, or political ideologies. It also problematizes the individual’s alienation or loss of identity in a globalized world or gives voice to particular social groups (see Beck; Fludernik, “Politics”). The overview above represents only a brief sketch of the most recent research in the field: there are some additional aspects that require further clarification.

2

3

Bekhta stresses the importance of differentiating between narration and narrative, and their “indicative” and “performative” dimensions (“Narrative Situations” 105). As Bekhta argues, “[n]arration in the plural is a narrative technique used in various narrative situations”, but also “mostly performatively” in the case of what she terms “we-narratives proper” (ibid.). Bekhta continues to argue that “[t]he performative ‘we’ […] creates a more complex reference: it expresses something that is imagined or wished” as well as “erases the single speaker who utters it [and] constructs a plural storytelling voice and a plural narrator, communal or collective” (ibid. 107). She thus considers it opportune to introduce a reconceptualized term, i.e. “we-narrative proper”, that is “a narrative in which the first-person plural pronoun is used on both the level of discourse and on that of the story to designate the narrating instance(s) that are also the narrated entities” and that is “characterized by its peculiar epistemological composition, as it expresses collective knowledge” (ibid. 113). For a more detailed account of how the ‘we’-referent dynamically influences the modes in which narrative situation, focalization, and perspective are represented, see, for example, Lanser and Margolin (“Plural”), Marcus (2008), Richardson (“Plural Focalization”), Alber, or Fludernik (“We-Narration”).

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One of them is the ‘communal voice’, which, given the singular form of the noun, has added to the fuzziness surrounding ‘we’-narratives. The concept is first introduced by Susan Lanser in Fictions of Authority as a category to refer to authorial and personal voices in authorial and first-person narrative situations that employ “either a collective voice or a collective of voices [to] share narrative authority” (21). Lanser explains that this type of voice can occur in “a singular form in which one narrator speaks for a collective, a simultaneous form in which a plural ‘we’ narrates, and a sequential form in which individual members of a group narrate in turn” (ibid.).4 In a similar vein, Uri Margolin uses the term ‘collective’ for the type of narrative in which “a collective narrative agent occupies the protagonist role” and “act[s] as a plural subject or we-group, capable of forming shared group intentions and acting on them jointly” (“Plural” 591). On reviewing Lanser’s choice of ‘communal’ and Margolin’s ‘collective’, Bekhta treats ‘communal’ and ‘collective’ as specific thematic types of plural narration and points out that representations of a community by single narrators or the turns-to-talk by multiple ‘I’-narrators to “refer to themselves or other characters” do not automatically create “a new narrative form” (“Narrative Situations” 110 f., emphasis in original). Given the fact that “we-narration is only one technique amongst many that can produce an effect of a communal story”, she further suggests that there should be a clearer delimitation between rhetorical effects and the modes in which they are conveyed (“We-Narratives” 169). From a socio-cultural viewpoint, Raymond Williams’ salient definitions of ‘collective’ and ‘common’/‘community’ will help build a conceptual bridge between the state of the art in ‘we’-narratives research and my reading of Otsuka’s novel through the lens of ‘co-narration’. William’s entry allocated to the etymology and definition of ‘collective’ has “collective” as “describ[ing] people acting together” (34). Under ‘common’, Williams enumerates several meanings, but the one with direct connection to this study is that the term “indicate[s] a whole group or interest […] [and] affirm[s] something shared” (35). ‘Community’ has also gained various meanings throughout social history: “a sense of common identity and characteristics” (ibid. 39); “a particular quality of relationship”; “felt to be more immediate than society” (ibid.); it forges “more direct, more total and therefore more significant relationships” (ibid.) in contrast to “the more formal, more abstract and more instrumental relationships of state, or of society in its modern sense” (ibid. 40, emphasis in original); “the warmly 4

Bekhta offers her own classification for the communicative situations that include the ‘we’ as a referent: as group members taking individual turns; and a single group member representing the group, “if empowered to do so” (“Narrative Situations” 178).

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persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or […] an alternative set of relationships” (ibid.). William’s delineations of ‘collective’ and ‘common’ display slightly different nuances, which shows, at least from a socio-cultural standpoint, that the two concepts are not interchangeable. For my study of ‘we’-narrative as co-narration, the term I suggest for the ‘collective voice’ or ‘communal narrator’ is ‘co-narrating community’.5 Therefore, the first-person plural represents a community of ‘I’-narrators, whose individual identity temporarily withdraws to the background for the benefit of the story. In turn, the focus is oriented towards the knowledge that the members of the ‘co-narrating community’ share and construct together about their social world. 3. Conceptualizing ‘We-Narratives’ as Co-Narrations

Co-narration means a joint, collaborative activity between participants in a telling event. Co-narration has been typically associated with conversational narratives and used to examine how they are created collaboratively. An essential aspect of co-narration is the understanding of storytelling as an undertaking that is no longer the responsibility of “a single knowing teller” (Ochs et al. 242). Rather, it concerns all the co-present active participants, “even those who do not have direct knowledge of the narrated events, [but can] probe for or contribute information relevant to clarifying a narrative problem” (ibid.). Socially, co-narration ensues from personal viewpoints, affective states, and emotions interwoven together to create the bigger picture. Co-narration is by nature a social activity that situates communication partners in direct relation with the other members of the narrating group. This is due to shared story events that have occasioned the tellers ‘coming’ together to construe meanings through storytelling.6 As Neal Norrick defines it,

5

6

Jan Alber, for example, defines we-narratives as “two or more protagonists to represent collective or otherwise shared experiences”, with “[e]ither the speaker speak[ing] for himor herself and somebody else or we listen to a collective voice, which consists of several speakers at the same time” (213). As this definition indicates, it is probably the association of the singular ‘voice’ or ‘narrator’ with an adjective denoting collectivity and too much focus on the form that have caused the fuzziness around the identity of ‘we’ and the narrator perspective. Our way of life is based on “shared meanings”, “shared concepts”, and “shared modes of discourse” for “negotiating differences in meaning and interpretation” (Bruner 13). Sharing is the basic principle that governs humans’ social relations. Therefore, knowledge and meanings depend on collaborative relations with others (see Crossley 16).

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co-narration modulates rapport in multiple ways, first because it allows participants to re-live common experiences, second because it confirms the long-term bond they share, and third because the experience of collaborative narration itself redounds to feelings of belonging (91).

Furthermore, Norrick argues that regardless of the various points of view, manner of presentation, or the possible differences in content or “significance”, co-narration has “tellers cobble together a coherent version for remembering and retelling” (116). In other words, co-narration involves storytellers’ memory and recounting personal experiences and knowledge of a shared social context. Communal storytelling shows how the knowledge held by the members of the narrating group become “discoverable” in a shared communicative situation, and emphasizes that this type of narrative focuses on “creating knowledge [together] rather than merely finding who has what knowledge” (Olson and Bruner 15, emphasis in original). Viewed from this perspective, it no longer seems to be so crucial to attribute an individual identity to a collective voice when reading ‘we’-narratives. Returning to Bekhta’s differentiation between ‘we’-narrative (product) and ‘we’-narration (process), as well as her definition of ‘we’-narrative “as a narra‐ tive situation […] where ‘person’ refers to a group who narrates and who is also a character, consistently using the first-person plural pronoun for self-designation and self-reference” (“Collective Narration” 165), it is necessary to underline two major points. First, by approaching ‘we’-narrative as co-narration, whose form, structure, and interactional dimension include both process and product, readers are offered “a very capacious and infinitely expandable voice” (Ryan n.p.). As Otsuka explains, “telling the story from the point of view of a single picture bride” would have been “too narrow and confining” (ibid.). Furthermore, from a cultural perspective, Japan is “a very group-oriented culture” as opposed to “the emphasis on the individual” in the US, and thus, it “made more sense to speak of the picture brides as a collective entity” (ibid.). This echoes what Vera Nünning has delineated as the affective value of literature. Not only do such narrating groups “evoke a higher intensity of emotions” together rather than individually, but they also “enable readers to make experiences which are beyond their reach in ordinary life” (“Affective Value” 46). Furthermore, the cognitive value of the ‘we’-narration in Otsuka’s novel is also present due to the fact that readers gain knowledge about an “unfamiliar”, forgotten period of time in the history of Japan-United States relations and about the oppression of a cultural community, with a special focus on the women belonging to it (Nünning, “Affective Value” 48). Otsuka’s comparison also highlights the cultural value of the ‘we’-narration, which now

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becomes a means of expressing cultural diversity and difference, resilience, or social (dis)integration. Co-narration in literature means that multiple storytellers contribute to a story, which implies a collaborative construction of the narrative. A shared communicative space (situated on the discourse level) allows for various normative standards and perceptions to be known, challenged, reformed, or questioned intersubjectively on a social scale. For example, an entire community, professional group, or even culture, as is the case with Otsuka’s novel, puts forward a multiplicity of individual views, which co-create a larger story in which “no one ‘I’ is more important than any other” (Ryan n.p.). The focus is thus on the knowledge that is co-shared through the stories about the narrative community. This line of thinking proves yet again how powerful a medium literature is for the generation of knowledge (see Nünning and Nünning 22). Furthermore, ‘co-narration’ offers an alternative to the self-centred readings of ‘we’-narratives and directs attention to the rationale and the purpose behind the use of ‘we’ in fiction. Arguably, fictional co-narrators’ communicative action does not take place as in real-life conversation, but with an addressee or a group of addressees (see Fludernik, “Peculiarities” 174). What is more, as Bekhta observes, the “we-narrator creates a holistic supraindividual level that supersedes a mere aggregation of individual characters”, which cannot be reducible to a representative of the group (see “We-Narratives” 165). Through its highly interpersonal character, co-narration opens up the opportunity to create a “joint biography” (Goffman 48), and, at the same time, it “give[s] color and pathos to lives”, “attribute[s] cause and agency to experiences”, and “establish[es] social identity” (Schiff 44). With such a special focus on the social events and circumstances that the storytellers co-share, the ‘we’-narrative becomes the medium for communal production of meaning (see Gergen 46). In other words, the ‘we’-storytellers share knowledge about a common world of reference, namely the story level, where they may also function as individual or collective characters.7 Although the individual accounts are not singled out as in the case of ‘I’ or multiple ‘I’-narrator(s), the narrators’ shared storytelling has narrative communication as a network of interwoven perspectives, which boosts the collaborative design of the discourse and narrative performativity, hence the sense of ‘togetherness’. The co-narrating characters’ socio-cognitive

7

Studies of collaborative narrative and, implicitly, co-narration, have generally pursued multiple ‘I’-speakers who convey their perspectives on a turn-taking basis during their conversation or collaborative storytelling enterprise (see, for example, Ochs et al.; Aronsson and Cederborg; Norrick; Blum-Kulka; Goodwin).

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alignment with one another is implied in their shared knowledge or experience of the recounted social circumstances or events. Patrick Hogan, for example, notes that this type of narrative draws attention to “the possibility of genuinely sharing ideas, understandings, and emotions” and by “[t]he cultivation of such sharing – or at least an aspiration toward it”, authors may “create a sense of national or other social unity” (249). As he goes on to argue, “the use of group narration is clearly a possible discourse correlate of such shared mentalities” (ibid.). The collaborative construction of a narrative including shared attitudes, experiences, and perceptions of a narrative community may yield a greater perception and feeling of solidarity (see Eder 226). The use of such a strategy heightens the performative dimension of the narrative, but also the social relationship between the members of the narrative community, since they render a shared orientation toward co-experienced story events or their “actions and motivations” (ibid. 229). As far as the narrator is concerned, the concept of co-narrating community bears more relevance for the present analysis of ‘we’-narrative. The discourse level represents the space where ‘meanings-in-common’ are produced and where the story results from a collaborative effort. Irrespective of the fact that the ‘we’-narrator may be “vague” and “subsumed” (see Marcus, “Dialogue” 3) to an “amorphous” collective voice (see Bekhta, “Narrative Situations” 114), it is the commonality of the storytellers’ experience in the storyworld that unifies all their individual stories into an interpersonal story on the discourse level. From the standpoint of collaborative narrative, stories and their “tellings and retellings” are “collaboratively produced, i.e. co-narrated, by those participating in the social interaction”, hence, not typically individual enterprises (Ochs et al. 241, emphasis in original). In what follows, I propose a close reading of Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic in order to explore and illustrate how the young Japanese brides emerge as multiple sources of knowledge and meanings, and how their narrating community is formed by the fact that their co-shared storytelling unfolds in a communal communicative context. 4. The Buddha in the Attic: A Communal Narrative of Co-Shared Experience

Julie Otsuka’s novel The Buddha in the Attic is an example of how we-narration “succeeds in reimagining the plight of a whole generation of Japanese immigrant women” (Fludernik, “Peculiarities” 189). In brief, the story is co-told mostly in the first-person plural by Japanese women, who in the early 1900s embark on a

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boat voyage to the US to marry Japanese men already resident there, known to them only by the photographs they had been sent. The first chapters start with an account of a boatload of these mail-order brides, then goes on to the marital and social hardships they co-experience in their new country, and to their social relationship with their American bosses and neighbours. The attack on Pearl Harbor brings devastating consequences for the Japanese communities as men are arrested without warning, and eventually entire families are sent away to unknown locations. For instance, the chapter entitled “Last Day” is an account of the final departure of the Japanese from their homes, jobs, and schools. In the last chapter, “A Disappearance”, there is a change in the identity of ‘we’, that is, the story is continued in the first-person plural, but this time from the perspective of the neighbouring white American families. The choice of ‘we’, as the author herself has it, meant “a very freeing voice” as “it allowed […] to show a bigger world” (Reynolds Adler n.p.). Or, as Marcus notes, it symbolizes “life lived in circumstances of extreme danger, suffering, and humiliation, the need for a protective community, and the avoidance of introspection, retrospection, and prospection”, as well as “the wish to survive” (“Narrative Fiction” 59).8 In his discussion of two different literary ‘we’-narra‐ tions, Marcus points out that ‘we’ “represents neither a stable community nor a well defined world-view or system of values” (ibid. 59). Nevertheless, regardless of the tendency to mainly focus on the drawbacks of the ‘we’ pronominal category with regard to perspective and focalization, ‘we’-narration proves fruitful when considered in terms of the values it brings forth. To put it in Otsuka’s words, the ‘we’-narrative is an all-comprehensive form to “tell them [the stories] all”, and displays a “freeing voice” (Reynolds Adler n.p.). It is a breakaway from long-standing literary conventions through which the tone would have “felt forced and flat” (Ryan n.p.) if the story had been told from “the point of view of a single picture bride” (Reynolds Adler n.p.). A question that needs to be further addressed is the way in which the ‘we’-referent contributes to the collaborative construction of the narrative. An 8

Other readings of Otsuka’s novel pursue ‘we’ as being a “risky business” (Le Guin n.p.). Bekhta, for instance, analyses the “collective protagonist-narrator” and its use in the narration to illustrate the loss of women’s individuality, or “the insignificance and effacement of the whole community” (“Narrative Situations” 113). In Fludernik’s view, the protagonists share a “communal predicament” (“Peculiarities” 182). Furthermore, Maxey refers to the “rhetorical or political power” of the novel (“‘We’ Narrator” 4). In a similar vein, Munos argues that Otsuka’s story enables a re-orientation of “dominant perceptions” (“Unnaturally” 70), which expose not only women’s objectification and subordination (see Rimadini and Syafe’i, “Women” 83), but also cultural and “gender disparity” (Cisneros, “Buddha” 122).

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alternative approach would be to shift attention from the identity of ‘who talks/sees’ to the knowledge conveyed though the co-narrators’ account. In other words, it is the ‘meanings-in-common’ emerging from what is told/seen that co-create the bigger picture. In the case of the female Japanese immigrants, their exceptional story would have otherwise remained, to put it in Delphine Munos’ words, “in the amnesias of History” (67).9 Secondly, understanding ‘we’-narration as co-narration does not mean that the importance of individual stories lessens; on the contrary, they all play a crucial role in communicating shared messages and motivations as they relate to one another. In other words, people’s individual stories are connected by the common historic moment of mass immigration of Japanese women to America for arranged marriages; they gain a greater power when they are discursively transmitted in ‘a display of togetherness’.10 In order to highlight how this web of relations works to the benefit of ‘we’-narrative as co-narration, this analysis pursues the protagonists’ shared circumstances and experiences. As posited here, they are interwoven into the storyworld and rendered in such a way that they neither lose individuality nor their personal quality or importance. Thirdly, co-narration is a form of narrative that accommodates both conver‐ gent and divergent accounts of the story within the narrating community (see Eder; Norrick; Du Bois). To link this point to the novel, in the final chapter, it is the American neighbours who start reflecting on the gradual disappearance of the Japanese from their cities. This change in the identity of ‘we’, as will be illustrated in the analytical part, neither destabilizes the communal world-view nor affects the ‘togetherness’ effect.

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In one of her interviews, Otsuka reflects on people’s proneness to forget ‘shameful’ historic episodes when she talks about the numerous encounters she has had with Japanese Americans who thought the story was purely fictional: “People just don’t want to hear about it, and it’s still not being taught in the schools. Sometimes I’ll find myself talking to a group of students who […] say, ‘This didn’t really happen, right? It’s fiction? You made it up?’ Or, ‘I didn’t know.’ (Many older adults tell me this as well) And I’ll have to explain that no, I didn’t make it up, it really happened, right here, in our own country, not so long ago” (“Julie Otsuka” n.p.). In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt delineates between strength and power, defining the former as “the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation” whereas the latter is “what keeps the public realm […] spring[ing] up between men when they act together” (200).

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5. Shared Story Spaces: The Boat – ‘Home’ – ‘The Edges of their Towns’ – The Unknown ‘Safe Place’

Space plays a vital role in Otsuka’s novel. The boat, the margins of the towns where the Japanese Americans have to live, and the unknown “safe place” (116) where they disappear to one day without any notice map out the main social contexts that mark the three key events of the story: the voyage from Japan to America, their new home, and their eventual internment. These spaces are essential to demonstrate that the shared experiences in the story world provide the content and motivation for the communal storytelling enterprise on the discourse level. To start with, the boat has deeper implications than a means of transport used by the young Japanese women to travel to America. It represents the first shared social space that occasions these women to meet and then experience a common destiny, as they recount upon their arrival.11 The description of the boat journey signals both physical and social differences but also similarities between the protagonists: “[w]e had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall”; “[s]ome of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country” (The Buddha in the Attic 5).12 The women who embarked on this long journey reveal themselves to one another by comparing the photos of their husbands, telling each other about the island of their provenance, “discuss[ing] the unknown continent ahead of us” (6 f.), or talking “about all the things we remembered from home” (17). Physically, they share the “filthy and dim” sleeping conditions “down below in steerage” (6). They suffer seasickness together and moments of paralysis as they “lay awake for hours in the swaying damp darkness of the hold, filled with longing and dread” (9). The boat, and later on the home and the unknown safe place respectively, represent social spaces of common experiences. The boat is the first-time encounter space for the protagonists to introduce themselves to one another, and share fears and dreams about America and their husbands. Furthermore, it is also the place where particularities within the same cultural community are laid out in terms of education and social status: “[s]ome of us were from Tokyo, and had seen everything, and spoke beautiful Japanese, and did not mix much with

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From a social perspective, the boat could be an example of a “space of appearance”, that is “the space where [we] appear to others as others appear to [us]” (Arendt 198). For an ampler discussion of social commonality and individuals’ taking action together in various contexts of the public realm, see Studdert and Walkerdine. In the following, references to The Buddha in the Attic will be given without repeating the title.

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any of the others. Many more of us were from Kagoshima and spoke in a thick southern dialect” (8). In addition, behaviour is a marker of social status: “[m]ost of us had good manners and were extremely polite” (6). As the protagonists arrive in America, each with their own life experience, again “one of us would cover her eyes and turn away […] but the rest of us would lower our heads and smooth down the skirts of our kimonos and walk down the gangplank and step out into the still warm day” (18). The boat symbolizes the shared domestic status of all of these women: a cargo of amorphous objectified individuals, or mere goods shipped from Japan to America for economic reasons. The Japanese women gradually come to realize that their new home of America does not mean “large, many-roomed houses” (29), as untruthfully described by their husbands in their letters. Some lived “in tents” and “barns out of doors, in the fields” (29), others in “unsightly shacks” (35); some “moved […] into their suburbs” (37), and eventually, with the internment process, some are sent to an unknown “safe place”, as the mayor “is quoted saying in this morning’s Star Tribune” (116). The home becomes a space of abominable physical and psychological abuses and harassments. The women suffer from domestic abuse by their own husbands, but also authoritarian abuse by their bosses. The boat and the home thus represent forms of claustrophobic prison-like enclosures and restricted mobility. What is more, the women speak no English upon arrival, which leads to complete linguistic isolation, and hence, social marginalization in their new land. The final part of the story refers to a more dilated, uncertain space, that is the internment camps: “[F]irst they told us we were being sent to the mountains” (99), “then we heard we were being sent to the desert” (100), and then, “we knew it would only be a matter of time until all traces of us were gone” (104). The examples above are only a few of the numerous descriptions and references to how the co-narrated spaces affect the protagonists’ life and communal action in the story’s social world. Not only do the boat, new home, and the unknown safe place all represent the shared social context for important events of the story, but they also support co-narration on the discourse level in that they function as shared spaces of reference for those involved in the story events. In addition, the protagonists become identifiable in relation to space in that they are addressed by their country of origin rather than their names: “Come, Japanese!” (3).13 This identification of the protagonists by space and not by 13

The chapter entitled “Last Day”, however, gives references to a number of different names. This is a strategy of personalizing some of the ‘we’-protagonists/-narrators and has a powerful effect on the way the narrating community is projected on the

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their given names, or by a collective one, the ‘Picture Brides’, as they have gone down in history, is suggestive of the effacement of individualities that has typically occurred in massive population movements. By the same token, the ‘we’-referent indicates a form of empowerment for the narrating community to tell their story in a display of togetherness. Ruth Maxey, for example, observes that “[t]he story of the picture brides is given greater political and rhetorical power through its collective narration” (10). As she has it, ‘we’-narration gives “women with sometimes little English, who are silenced by mainstream society, the literary space to speak, their words gaining incremental impact through the power of shared narration” (ibid.). Through the ‘we’-narration, an entire set of valuable knowledge, memories, affective states, and emotions is put forth. As Vera Nünning argues, “complex works that resist easy answers […] encourage readers to accept and even ap‐ preciate heterogeneity and alterity” (“Ethics” 53). Based on true but little-known facts in the history of the US, the Japanese women’s interrelated personal stories give a valuable lesson about the past, cultural resilience, and the imperative necessity for change in humanity’s mind-set lest such historical mistakes should ever reoccur (see Nünning and Nünning). Furthermore, Fludernik notes that “[d]espite the disparity in locations and individual solutions to the problem, the overwhelming communal predicament comes across as a shared experience of the we-protagonists (and we-narrators)” (“Peculiarities” 182). It is without a doubt this “communal predicament” that lies at the core of co-narration due to the emphasis it places on the protagonists’ narrators’ shared experience. Consequently, co-narration entails the merging of “group perspectives and values” together into a “coherent version for remembering and retelling” (Norrick 116). Such retelling and remembering processes are vital for the way in which the world progresses. As Vera Nünning perceptively observes, fiction is an excellent medium to “lower barriers against sociologically and ethnically dissimilar others and change readers’ attitudes with regard to ethnic or social out-groups” (“Value of Literature” 95).

discourse level. It is also powerful on the story level, where emphasis is placed on the large number of individual lives that are irreversibly affected by an initial uncertainty, sudden arrests, and the enforced mass movement of the Japanese community to an unknown destination. As for the discourse level, it highlights the use of ‘we’ as inclusive of all stories, which are all interrelated, and helps co-construct the bigger picture. The result is that ‘we’ neither imposes a uniform world-view nor an amorphous form of referencing in the communal storytelling.

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6. Two Different Cultures Co-Sharing the Discursive Space

Critical reception of ‘we’-narration in Otsuka’s novel has mostly focused on the ambiguities caused by the use of the first-person plural, which is understandable since it is the most dominant group reference. The other pronominal forms such as ‘they’ or an implied vague ‘you’ have therefore been overshadowed by this major concern for ‘we’ and the drawbacks and risks involved in its use in fictional discourse.14 The particular pronominal forms, however, facilitate an understanding of ‘we’-narration as co-narration. ‘We’ refers to the entire narrating community whereas “some of us”, “most of us”, “many more of us”, “several of us”, “a few of us”, “a number of us”, “others of us” represent smaller or larger parts of it. The “one of us” or “another of us” singular references interpolated all throughout the ‘we’ discourse reflect a dynamic narrating community made up of particular individuals coming from different places in Japan, each with their own personal life story, values, and expectations. The ‘we’-reference lays emphasis on the shared dimension of their American experience. It heightens the women’s shared implacable fate once they arrive in America: “to do the work that no self-respecting American would do.” (29) Moreover, they find themselves lumped together with other Asian nationalities in America in a so-called Asian melting pot, where work performance and “docile dispositions” (ibid.) are valued rather than cultural specificity. This extends the ‘we’-reference to other Asian cultures: “We had all the virtues of the Chinese […] faster than the Filipinos and less arrogant than the Hindus. We were more disciplined than the Koreans” (ibid.). As the story unfolds and reveals the abominable living conditions and treatment of these young women on both the domestic and public level, the pronominal reference shifts to ‘them’, the children. This strategy exposes a new shared reality, namely the growing rift between generations with the beginning of school, but also the ongoing sacrifice and suffering of the young women, now in the role of mothers:

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In her brief discussion of Otsuka’s novel, Bekhta points to the “particularization of the collective voice” through the use of ‘one of us’, ‘some of us’, but only to turn back to “generalization as the narrative progresses” (“Narrative Situations” 112). The ‘we’-voice has a “unifying and homogenizing quality”, which “thematizes the disappearance of the women’s individuality” (ibid. 113). Bekhta observes that such particularizations help “avoid[ing] the potential emotional dryness of a uniform voice”, but argues that this part of the process of “[e]verything individual […] feed[ing] back into the collective” (ibid.).

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One by one all the old words we had taught them began to disappear from their heads […] THEY GAVE THEMSELVES new names we had not chosen for them and could barely pronounce […]; Our daughters took big long steps, in the American manner, and moved with undignified haste […]; Our sons grew enormous. They insisted on eating bacon and eggs every morning for breakfast instead of bean-paste soup. […] MOSTLY, they were ashamed of us. (72-75, emphasis in original)

As the inclusion of other pronominal forms highlights individual dreams, fears, and choices in the ‘we’-narration, the third-person plural also becomes a group of individualized ‘one’-s, when the mothers reflect upon their children’s ingenuous plans for the future: “STILL, they dreamed. […] One wanted to save up enough money to buy his own farm. […] One wanted to become a teacher. One wanted to become a doctor. […] One wanted to become a star” (79, emphasis in original). This expresses the co-shared deep maternal concern for their children’s future in the context of a grave socio-political human-rights crisis looming on the horizon. Once the crisis begins, the ‘we’-discourse unfolds from the perspective of the white American community, taking different stances towards the disappearance of the Japanese from their neighbourhood. However, in general, the white American we-narration discloses the common citizens’ unawareness of the state-political decisions and, implicitly, of their consequences for the Japanese community: “OUR MAYOR has assured us there is no need for alarm. ‘The Japanese are in a safe place,’ […] But what place could be safer, some of us ask, than right here in our own town?” (116, emphasis in original) The White American neighbours’ retrospections and acknowledgement of the Japanese people’s qualities express some concern, appreciation, and even sympathy for the Japanese community’s uncertain fate. For example, even though the white American community’s final contribution to the story does not offer a solution to the problem, it may stand for a subtle hint at the crucial role that politics plays in uniting or dividing neighbouring communities. After all, it is indicated that these communities would have, without political instigations, possibly co-existed in peace: “But most of us find it difficult to believe that our former neighbours could have posed a threat to our town.” (119) The American co-narrative could indicate what social psychologists have termed ‘cognitive dissonance’ (see Festinger 177 f.) as feelings of unease and tension within the American community emerge at the prospect of what might have happened to the Japanese: PEOPLE BEGIN to demand answers. Did the Japanese go to the reception centers voluntarily, or under duress? What is their ultimate destination? Why were we not

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informed of their departure in advance? Who, if anyone, will intervene on their behalf? Are they innocent? Are they guilty? Are they even really gone? Because isn’t it odd that no one we know saw them leave? (123, emphasis in original)

The requests for explanations reflect the state of citizens’ confusion and conflicting beliefs existing within the American community at the time. The mayor’s reassurance that it was the Japanese people’s choice to leave offers the contradictory information that common citizens may receive in the public space. This explains the state of confusion, hence their shying away from learning about the problem: “Many of us admit that although we passed by the notices every day on our way into town, it never occurred to us to stop and read one.” (117) Although the two communal perspectives are at opposing poles at the level of the storyworld, the shared storytelling appears to restore, at least in the fictional discourse, some balance. Overall, the ‘we’-narration marks a relationship of “introspection, retrospec‐ tion and prospection” (Marcus, “Narrative Fiction” 59). The Japanese women’s perspective is proleptically geared during the boat journey in particular when they refer to their dreams and hopes for their life in America, and towards the end, when the story reaches its climax, i.e. their mass-internment. The focus in their storytelling is on their thoughts, attitudes, and values while struggling to survive the new life conditions in America. As far as the story of the American narrating community is concerned, their perspective is rendered mostly retro‐ spectively. The Americans’ storytelling revolves around the aftermath of the internment and concerns the realization that “[t]he Japanese have disappeared from our town” (115). However, at times, it is also geared towards the future when the American narrating community admits that “[a]ll we know is that the Japanese are out there somewhere, in one place or another, and we shall probably not meet them again in this world” (129). There is also some introspection at the community level when they say: “[w]e wonder if it wasn’t somehow all our fault. Perhaps we should have petitioned the mayor. The governor. The President himself.” (122) The (Japanese and American) ‘we’-protagonists in the storyworld form a co-narrating community on the discourse level due to their communal narration and reference to a common series of events and shared experiences, which, on the whole, succeeds in building a coherent story-world view. For the Japanese narrating community, the ‘we’-referent serves as a form of address that expresses the protagonists’ dignified communal resistance and resilient spirit under extreme conditions (see Ryan n.p.). For the American one, the ‘we’-referent may indicate a communal guilt and questioning of the time’s values, attitudes, and lack of civic response and action with regard

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to their neighbours’ fate and treatment, but also a form of reconciliation and atonement: “Please let them stay. Or simply knocked on their doors and offered to help. If only, we say to ourselves, we’d known.” (122, emphasis in original) The co-sharing of (inter)personal attitudes, expectations, motivations, and orientations has a paradoxical effect on the narrative construction. One the one hand, it represents a constant source of tension and a sense of disequilibrium within the story. On the other hand, it also creates a sense of solidarity in suffering, a subtle invitation to reconciliation through remembering, retelling, and reflecting on selves and others in a display of togetherness (‘we’-narration). Such sense of togetherness allows divergent perspectives to be shared even in the ‘extraordinary’ circumstances of American history at the beginning of the 20th century. For this reason at least, ‘we’-narration is worth exploring as co-narration. 7. Conclusion

The present alternative close reading of Julie Otsuka’s ‘we’-narration has highlighted the multiple storytellers’ shared knowledge of story matters and common discursive space, which is constructed as such by the narrators’ convergent or divergent contributions and is oriented towards a common world of reference. In a real-life communicative situation, co-narration would typically work on a turn-taking basis for the multiple members of the narrative community, which is created as a result of the shared goal of co-telling a shared story. Approached in relation to its structural form and the implications for the various levels of narrative communication in fiction, ‘we’-narration may still baffle text interpreters. However, a strictly formal interpretation of a literary text, especially one with an experimental form for which literary critics have yet to find a fully-fledged theoretical model, sometimes misses the essential role of literature and the messages encoded in fictional discourse, as mentioned above. The claim that a ‘we’-narration is less powerful than an ‘I’-narration in evoking readers’ sympathy seems to still echo classical narratological opinions. However, reading fiction beyond the conventions of the still dominant communication model established by structural narratologists makes it possible to conceive ‘the absence’ of an ‘I’-storyteller since, as Bekhta reinforces “the obvious again, fiction can do more” (“Narrative Situations” 117; see also Nünning and Bekhta 423; Mar 257). Alber et al. also argue that when “[c]onfronted with seemingly strange acts of narration most readers will probably first try to employ a range of strategies for naturalizing and understanding the narration in accordance with real-life parameters” (363).

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Nevertheless, fiction gives readers “the option to apply a qualitatively different set of interpretive rules to the text” from the ones they normally apply to real-world storytelling (ibid.). In a thought-provoking talk about the power of literature, Vera Nünning emphasizes yet again that literary works enable us to experience an alternative form of life since they “can shed new light on things we knew, we thought we knew quite well” (“Contemporary Absurdities” 11:42-45) and “help us gain a complex view of the world” (ibid. 12:13-15). Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic is a compelling example of how literary experiment transforms the traditional storyteller into a narrating community that integrates within multiple sources of story knowledge and narrative discourse. Whether convergent or not, all perspectives on the story matter can be accommodated in the fictional ‘we’-narration, or co-narration, as proposed here, especially in consideration of the socio-cognitive power of stories. Bibliography

  Primary Sources

Otsuka, Julie. The Buddha in the Attic. Penguin, 2011.

  Secondary Sources

Alber, Jan. “The Social Minds in Factual and Fictional We-Narratives of the Twentieth Century.” Narrative, vol. 23, no. 2, 2015, pp. 213-25. Alber, Jan, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson. “Unnatural Voices, Minds, and Narration.” The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, edited by Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale, Routledge, 2012, pp. 351-67. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. The U of Chicago P, 1998 [1958]. Aronsson, Karin, and Ann-Christin Cederborg. “Conarration and Voice in Family Therapy: Voicing, Devoicing and Orchestration.” Text, vol. 14, no. 3, 1994, pp. 345-70. Beck, Michaela. “The Vagaries of E Pluribus Unum: First-Person Plural Narration in Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End and Tara Shea Nesbit’s The Wives of Los Alamos.” COPAS – Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1-20. Bekhta, Natalya. “The Promises and Challenges of ‘We’: First-Person Plural Discourses across Genres.” Style, vol. 54, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1-6. —. “We-Narratives: The Distinctiveness of Collective Narration.” Narrative, vol. 25, no. 2, 2017, pp. 164-81.

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—. “Emerging Narrative Situations: A Definition of We-Narratives Proper.” Emerging Vectors of Narratology, edited by Per Krogh Hansen, John Pier, Phillipe Roussin, and Wolf Schmid, De Gruyter, 2017, pp. 101-26. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. “Modes of Meaning Making in Young Children’s Conversational Storytelling.” The Sociolinguistics of Narrative, edited by Joanna Thornborrow, and Jennifer Coates, John Benjamins, 2005, pp. 149-70. Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meaning. Harvard UP, 1990. Cisneros, Pamela. “Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic: The Japanese American Immigrant Experience and Racial Prejudice in the U.S.” Confetti. A World Literatures and Cultures Journal, vol. 7, 2021, pp. 118-37. Coates, Jennifer. “Masculinity, Collaborative Narration and the Heterosexual Couple.” The Sociolinguistics of Narrative, edited by Joanna Thornborrow, and Jennifer Coates, John Benjamins, 2005, pp. 89-106. Crossley, Nick. Intersubjectivity. The Fabric of Social Becoming. Sage, 1996. Du Bois, John W. “The Stance Triangle.” Stancetaking in Discourse. Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, edited by Robert Englebretson, John Benjamins, 2007, pp. 139-82. Eder, Donna. “Building Cohesion Through Collaborative Narration.” Social Psychology Quaterly, vol. 51, no. 3, 1988, pp. 225-35. Festinger, Leon. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford UP, 1985 [1957]. Fludernik, Monika. “The Politics of We-Narration: The One vs. the Many.” Style, vol. 54, no. 1, 2020, pp. 98-110. —. “Let us Tell You Our Story: We-Narration and Its Pronominal Peculiarities.” Pronouns in Literature. Positions and Perspectives in Language, edited by Alison Gibbons, and Andrea Macrae, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 171-92. —. “The Many in Action and Thought. Towards a Poetics of the Collective Narrative.” Narrative, vol. 25, no. 2, 2017, pp. 139-63. —. “The Category of ‘Person’ in Fiction: You and We Narrative Multiplicity and Inde‐ terminacy of Reference.” Current Trends in Narratology, edited by Greta Olson, De Gruyter, 2011, pp. 101-41. Gergen, Kenneth. Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community. Oxford UP, 2009. Goffman, Erving. “Felicity’s Condition.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 89, no. 1, 1983, pp. 1-53. Goodwin, Charles. “Narrative as Talk-in-Interaction.” The Handbook of Narrative Anal‐ ysis, edited by Anna de Fina, and Alexandra Georgakopoulou, John Wiley & Sons, 2015, pp.195-218. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Narrative Discourse. Authors and Narrators in Literature, Film, and Art. Ohio State UP, 2013. Lanser, Susan Sniader. Fictions of Authority. Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Cornell UP, 1992.

Reflections of ‘Togetherness’ and a Co-Narrating Community in Fictional ‘We’-Narratives

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Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka – Review.” The Guardian, 27 Jan. 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/27/buddha-in-the-attic-revi ew. Last accessed 26 Aug. 2022. Mar, Raymond A. “Stories and the Promotion of Social Cognition.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 27, no. 4, 2018, pp. 257-62. Marcus, Amit. “Dialogue and Authoritativeness in ‘We’ Fictional Narratives: A Bakhti‐ nian Approach.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, vol. 6, no. 1, 2008, pp. 135-61. —. “A Contextual View of Narrative Fiction in the First Person Plural”. Narrative, vol. 16, no. 1, 2008, pp. 46-64. Margolin, Uri. “Telling in the Plural: From Grammar to Ideology.” Poetics Today, vol. 21, no. 3, 2000, pp. 591-618. —. “Telling Our Story: On ‘We’ Literary Narratives.” Language and Literature, vol. 5, no. 2, 1996, pp. 115-33. Maxey, Ruth. “The Rise of the ‘We’ Narrator in Modern American Fiction.” European Journal of American Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 2015, pp. 1-15. Munos, Delphine. “We Narration in Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic: ‘Unnaturally’ Asian American?” Frontiers of Narrative Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2018, pp. 66-81. Norrick, Neal R. Conversational Narrative: Storytelling in Everyday Talk. John Benjamins, 2000. Nünning, Ansgar, and Natalya Bekhta. “‘Unnatural’ or ‘Fictional’? A Partial Critique of Unnatural Narrative Theory and Its Discontents.” Style, vol. 50, no. 4, 2016, pp. 419-26. Nünning, Vera. “Contemporary Absurdities and the Power of Literature | Vera Nünning | TEDxUniHeidelberg.” YouTube, uploaded by TEDx Talks, 17 Oct. 2017, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=35vx8xPCZ8&;abchannel=TEDxTalks. Last accessed 26 Aug. 2022. —. “The Value of Literature for the ‘Extension of Our Sympathies’: Twelve Strategies for the Direction of Readers’ Sympathy.” REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, vol. 36, 2021, pp. 73-98. —. “The Affective Value of Fiction: Presenting and Evoking Emotions.” Writing Emotions: Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature, edited by Ingeborg Jandl, Susanne Knaller, Sabine Schönfellner, and Gudrun Tockner, transcript, 2017, pp. 29-54. —. “Narrative Fiction and Cognition: Why We Should Read Fiction.” Forum for World Literature Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2015, pp. 41-61. —. “The Ethics of (Fictional) Form: Persuasiveness and Perspective Taking from the Point of View of Cognitive Literary Studies.” Arcadia, vol. 50, no. 1, 2015, pp. 37-51. Nünning, Vera, and Ansgar Nünning. “Literature as Mind Changer, ‘Valorisation Labo‐ ratory’, and Cultural Resource of Resilience: Conceptualising the Value of Literature.”

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REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, vol. 36, 2021, pp. 15-53. Ochs, Elinor, Ruth Smith, and Carolyn Taylor. “Detective Stories at Dinnertime: Problem-Solving through Co-Narration.” Cultural Dynamics, vol. 2, no. 2, 1989, pp. 238-57. Olson, David R., and Jerome S. Bruner. “Folk Psychology and Folk Pedagogy.” Modes of Thought: Explorations in Culture and Cognition, edited by David R. Olson, and Nancy Torrance, Cambridge UP, 1996, pp. 9-27. Palmer, Alan. Social Minds in the Novel. Ohio State UP, 2010. Reynolds Adler, Laura. “Julie Otsuka. Finding Inspiration in History’s Dark Corners. Interviews.” Book Page, 16 Aug. 2011, https://www.bookpage.com/interviews/8733-ju lie-otsuka-fiction/. Last accessed 26 Aug. 2022. Richardson, Brian. “Plural Focalization, Singular Voices: Wandering Perspectives in ‘We’-Narration.” Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization: Modeling Mediation in Narrative, edited by Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, De Gruyter, 2009, pp. 143-59. —. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Ohio State UP, 2006. Rimadini, Ulfa, and An Fauzia Rozani Syafe’i. “Utilizing Women in The Buddha in the Attic (2011) by Julie Otsuka.” E-Journal of English Language & Literature, vol. 9, no. 1, 2020, pp. 76-86. Ryan, Patrick. “Julie Otsuka | Interview.” Granta, 14 Oct. 2011, https://granta.com/interv iew-julie-otsuka/. Last accessed 26 Aug. 2022. Schiff, Brian. “The Function of Narrative: Toward a Narrative Psychology of Meaning.” Narrative Works: Issues, Investigations & Interventions, vol. 2, no. 1, 2012, pp. 33-47. Studdert, David, and Valerie Walkerdine. Rethinking Community Research. Inter-relation‐ ality, Communal Being and Commonality. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford UP, 1985 [1983].

Reading Unreliable Narration Enhancing our Empathy, Understanding, and Self-Examination

Max Cannings

The decision to believe in the reliability of a person always involves a risk and may be misguided and entail radical consequences for the future behaviour of both speaker and listener (V. Nünning, “Conceptualising” 1)

1. Unreliable Narration and Empathy

Throughout history, reading literature has often been seen as a form of improve‐ ment for both the self and for society as a whole, from the instructional morality of 18th and 19th century works to recent studies showing how reading fiction increases the empathy and improves the social skills of readers. When we think of literature’s ability to help us improve ourselves, we might conjure up the traditional notion of admirable heroes showing themselves to be good examples for readers to emulate, but literature has long since rejected the idea of using morality as a guiding principle. There is no longer any shielding of readers from evil or immoral characters, or having these characters be ultimately defeated by the heroes. Instead, we must reckon with the narrators and focalizers of novels such as The Collector, American Psycho, or A Clockwork Orange. As modern readers, our understanding of more complex depictions of mor‐ ality or immorality and the arbitrariness of designations like ‘good’ or ‘evil’ has grown. Presumably, our reading of immoral focalizers and narrators has not turned us into deviants, as someone from the 18th century might have feared, but has rather improved our mental faculties by experiencing other, if perhaps extreme, points of view. However, there is a special case to consider when dealing with narrators who are unreliable. How can being deceived by unreliable

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narrators, who often turn out to be murderers, liars, and manipulators, have a positive influence upon the reader or benefit society at large? An answer to this question has already been provided, in that readers can apply the critical skills they learn to other walks of life, as Vera Nünning says, “[t]he question of whether to believe a narrator or not transcends the field of literature. It is crucial in daily life as well as in social and economic interactions” (ibid. 2). Indeed, Nünning has made use of these skills to analyse the words of proved political liars such as Bill Clinton and Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (see V. Nünning, “Bill Clinton”). While these skills are undoubtedly valuable, readers must surely get more out of unreliable narrators than a set of tools to help spot liars in real life. Unreliable narration is a wide field of study, containing many literary examples that may not seem much alike. In this article, the following novels shall be examined: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989), Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal (2003), and Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). Two modern British novels and one piece of Golden-Age detective fiction may seem like odd bedfellows, and this appears to be justified by the theory of the subject. In his seminal work on unreliable narration, Ansgar Nünning sets out many common features of works containing unreliable narrators: [They are] first-person narrators who are also the protagonists of the stories and who recount a portion of their own lives. Second, the speakers all belong to what Chatman (1978: 33) has designated ‘overt narrators’, i.e. narrators who are clearly recognizable as speakers or writers and about whom the reader gets to know quite a lot. Third, these texts abound in narratorial comments and judgments, and, importantly, in reader address. The high frequency of reader addresses and the style strongly suggest communication between a speaker and a listener. Fourth, the three narrators are compulsive monologists in so far as they have one favourite topic, namely themselves. Finally, the stories are all told by what has come to be known as unreliable narrators. (86)

Even if this comprehensive list of features is not exhaustive, it applies very fittingly to two of the texts being examined in this article, namely The Remains of the Day and Notes on a Scandal. Conversely, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the narrator Doctor Sheppard has to share the limelight with Hercule Poirot; the narrative is more about the crime solving than the nature of Doctor Sheppard himself. There is another distinction to be made that sets The Murder of Roger Ackroyd apart from the other two texts, namely in the manner that they deceive. Vera Nünning sets this out thus: One might posit that a narrator who deliberately distorts the events in face-to-face communication probably causes some kind of damage to those listeners who believe

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him or her since they act upon mistaken beliefs and probably suffer from these actions. While the liar often profits from misrepresentations, the opposite seems to be the case with regard to unwitting but sincere narrators. Since the latter are likely to involuntarily provide signals that make it possible to detect their untrustworthiness, they cause damage primarily to themselves. If they are recognised as untrustworthy, listeners will arrive at less than favourable conclusions about the personality traits, competence or ethics of the narrator in question. (“Conceptualising” 13)

The narrator of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is deliberate in his deception, and the reader is in some sense ‘damaged’ by it, as shall be discussed below. It is also likely that readers will form less than favourable opinions of the ‘unwitting but sincere narrators’ of the other two novels by the end of their telling. However, these texts have been chosen not for the similarity of their depiction of unreliable narration, but for how the unreliability of the narrator affects the empathic responses of readers. The question then follows: why empathy? Empathy, like unreliable narration, is a rather broad concept with a myriad of definitions. For the basis of this article, I shall be working with the chapter on empathy from Vera Nünning’s Reading Fictions, Changing Minds, which provides a thorough but succinct overview of the subject. Nünning first makes it clear that what exactly defines empathy is contested in studies on the subject: whether it is related to or the same as sympathy and how far it is to do with the emotions, theory of mind, or perspective-taking (see Reading Fictions 94). She then defines empathy as “[a]n empathic sharing of the feelings of others” (ibid. 95), which allows her to examine each of these contested aspects separately in her book. Due to the simplicity and usefulness of this definition, I shall also use it for the purposes of this article. Nünning makes two important points about how reading fiction invokes an empathic response in a reader: Firstly, reading fiction is a long, passive process, meaning the reader is exposed more to feeling empathy than they might be in many real-life experiences; secondly, the imagination, often overlooked when discussing empathy, is mostly employed when we are in complex situations with unfamiliar others – meaning more imaginative effort is needed to share the feelings of one dissimilar from oneself (see ibid. 102 f.). Nünning also points out that empathic responses to stimuli are often automatic and done without much cognitive effort when concerned with people similar to oneself, and that prejudice can reduce empathic responses (see ibid. 103) – from this we can gather that the crucial factor in how readers empathically respond to fictional characters or narrators is how similar or different they are in terms of the characteristics of their identity: age, ethnicity, gender etc. The conclusion that Nünning comes to is that “reading fiction can play an important role in the

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enhancement of the ability to empathise with others, in that it can help readers to understand and share emotions of characters who are very different from themselves.” (Ibid.) We might add another difference to those that already exist between a char‐ acter/narrator and a reader, namely the problems or afflictions that might cause the former’s unreliability. An unreliable narrator may have vastly different ethics or evaluations of reality compared to the reader’s own or engage in immoral or illegal behaviour. The problem is that Nünning, in this sense, is talking about characteristics of identity, not the unique and vastly differing mental and emotional states of various unreliable narrators. If, then, this does not neatly fit into the criteria for empathic responses from readers, the question becomes: how does the unreliability resulting from these mental or emotional states change or affect our empathy? Generally speaking, unreliable narrators are often depicted as mentally ill or unstable, they have often committed some crime or exhibit deviant behaviour, or at the very least have attempted to deceive the reader into believing their own account rather than what we might call the objective ‘truth’ of the storyworld, in other words, ‘what really happened’. Of course, the very basic act of experiencing events from someone else’s point of view invokes empathy, and as noted above there have been many narratives from the perspective of abhorrent focalizers. But what about when a character, specifically a homodiegetic narrator, is purposefully trying to convince the reader that events in the storyworld are otherwise than they actually are? In the following, the three novels shall be individually analysed as to how the type and function of the narrator’s unreliability influences the reader’s empathy towards the narrator. In section 2, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd shall be discussed, where the reader’s empathy is allowed to accumulate before being cruelly undercut at the novel’s close. Section 3 examines The Remains of the Day, where the effect of a fiction of memory allows for the juxtaposition of empathic personal heartbreak with the insidious denial of collaboration with Nazism. Section 4 looks at Notes on a Scandal, where the reader, swept into the narrative by details of a juicy sex scandal, is forced to examine their collusion with an amusing yet obsessive narrator.1 Section 5 concludes the article and explains how these unreliable narrators may promote positive change despite their deceptive nature.

1

I would like to note that even though the order in which I examine these novels is chronological from their date of publication, I do not necessarily consider the findings of this article as evidence of a causal development of unreliable narration.

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2. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The first instance we shall examine is the narrator of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This novel is a classic example of crime or detective fiction, a genre characterized by twists and turns in the narrative and rife with generic conventions. Whilst not a genre perceived as being at the forefront of emotional introspectiveness (often focusing more on the ‘whodunit?’), trust in the narrator being reliable plays an important role. The narrative is reported by Doctor Sheppard, who gives off the initial impression of being a trustworthy sort: he embodies the role of ‘village doctor’ quite nicely, which is a position or even stereotype easily imaged by an English readership, and at first, he seems above suspicion. He claims that he “came into a legacy” (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd 33),2 so is perhaps not desperate for money or in debt; he is unmarried and middle-aged, so any crime of passion seems unlikely; Poirot characterizes him as “a man who knows the folly and vanity of most things in this life of ours” (34); and, most importantly, Sheppard appears to have an alibi for the murder that inevitably occurs. Of course, these facts are textual facts of the storyworld, but in addition, there are text-external influences on why the reader specifically might find no reason to disbelieve Sheppard’s narration. He is a doctor, a profession that is widely considered as trustworthy and connected with the desire to save life rather than destroy it, as embodied in the Hippocratic Oath. There are also genre conventions at work, namely the ‘sidekick’ of the detective taking the part of the narrator of the story, the most famous example being of course Doctor Watson’s narration of Sherlock Holmes’ crime solving. This similarity is even stressed in the novel: “I played Watson to his Sherlock.” (203 f.) This convention is also a staple of Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels, with Captain Hastings normally playing the part of narrator and assistant to the detective. Doctor Sheppard, curiously, shares some superficial likenesses with Captain Hastings, namely a desire to go to South America and a tendency to make unwise financial investments (34 f.). This strange coincidental similarity is even directly brought to the reader’s attention when Poirot first meets Sheppard: “I have made the acquaintance of a man who in some ways resembles my far-off friend.” (36) This may initially come across to the reader as a superficial attempt to make them accept Sheppard as a narrator, rather than the character of Captain Hastings who they might already know. Naturally, this is exactly what Christie

2

In the following, references to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd will be given without repeating the title.

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intends: for the reader to associate Doctor Sheppard’s narration with the already familiar and trusted narration of the mild-mannered Captain Hastings. To the reader, this seems merely like an attempt to introduce a new character-narrator, but really it is a design to lull the reader into a false sense of security and enable the narrator’s deception. In a similar vein, the name ‘Sheppard’ evokes another meaning: a homonym of ‘shepherd’ might initially conjure up images of the pastoral and the religious to the reader, suggesting a benevolent caretaker. Of course, a shepherd is also a guide in control of the flock of sheep, much in the same way that Doctor Sheppard is in control of the narrative as narrator, thus dictating what the reader does and does not know and experience.3 A good example of Doctor Sheppard exercising this control over the narrative is when he leaves Ackroyd in his study: “The letter had been brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread. I hesitated with my hand on the door handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had left undone.” (63) When he is revealed as the murderer, Sheppard gloats about the deception in his narration: I am rather pleased with myself as a writer. What could be neater, for instance, than the following: ‘The letter had been brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread. I hesitated with my hand on the door handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had left undone’. All true you see. But suppose I had put a row of stars after the first sentence! Would somebody then have wondered what exactly happened in that blank ten minutes? (366 f., emphasis in original)

Indeed, there is very little chance that the reader would have figured out that Sheppard is the murderer. In the context of the storyworld, this is due to Sheppard’s alibi – revealed as fabricated very late in the novel (362) – and the various other characteristics of detective fiction, such as the suspicious behaviour of other suspects and various red herrings. In an intertextual context, this is because Christie is writing counter to the generic conventions of detective fiction and making the narrator the murderer, which should catch even the most seasoned reader of detective fiction off-guard.4 In traditional detective

3

4

It has been noted by critics that Sheppard’s sister Caroline, known for her curiosity and gossip of King’s Abbot, is a physical representation of the reader’s usual expectations of being given all of the information they are entitled to (see Ohme 138). Of course, Sheppard is equally deceptive to his sister through his lies of omission as he is to the reader. The specific convention is that of ‘fair-play’, in that it turns out that the most unlikely person has committed the murder (see Lindemann 158).

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fiction, the reader theoretically has all the information needed to solve the crime for themselves, and if they are unable then there is always the clever detective-figure who reveals all at the end. In this case, it is nearly impossible for the reader to solve the murder because they are missing information: Sheppard’s narration simply contains lies of omission. As defined by Phelan and Martin’s six types of unreliability, Sheppard’s unreliability can be classified as ‘underreporting’: he does not share information with the reader that he knows. Phelan and Martin write that unreliable narration is often multifaceted (see 96), and normally one encounters more than one of the six types of unreliability: “misreporting, misreading, misevaluating […,] underreporting, underreading, and underregarding” (ibid. 95). Contrary to this, Sheppard appears to only underreport. He also claims that apart from the deliberate omissions his account is entirely accurate, which does in fact fit in with Phelan and Martin’s assertion that unreliability/reliability is a spectrum rather than a binary (see ibid. 96): we should not completely dismiss his account as not to be believed just because some of it is unreliable. It could be argued that, compared to others, Doctor Sheppard is not a very unreliable narrator, because his lies are so few in number. However, the information they obscure is so crucial that they are very effective at deceiving the reader. As Theresa Heyd observes in her approach using Grice’s maxims, the nature of Sheppard’s unreliability is a quiet yet decisive breach of the quantity maxim: quite obviously, the narrator is aware of the facts he is omitting, and even more importantly, he is aware of the high relevance of the omitted information. Note that the narrative’s deceptive slant is based almost entirely on this single CP [Cooperative Principle] breach; there follow only a few evasive statements and minor maxim violations about details of the crime. (228)

The truth is revealed in the form of a bitter epigraph at the end of the novel, suggesting that Sheppard chooses to die by suicide rather than be convicted as a criminal. This makes The Murder of Roger Ackroyd similar to such novels as Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Sweet Tooth, where the unreliability of the narrator hinges on only one or very few untruths that are not shared with the reader until the end in an unexpected plot twist. Unlike the ‘compulsive monologists’ in Ansgar Nünning’s definition above, the reader is not meant to slowly realize the narrator’s unreliability, but rather be surprised by it. Now the question is: how does Sheppard’s form of unreliability affect the reader’s empathy? It must be said that Doctor Sheppard is not the most emo‐ tionally complex homodiegetic narrator, and the novel could be uncharitably described as merely ‘whodunit detective fiction’. However, the reader has nevertheless been experiencing the storyworld through Sheppard’s perspective

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for the majority of the novel with the firmly held belief that he cannot be the murderer. The reader, upon learning of the deception at the narrative’s end, is forced to suddenly reposition and re-evaluate the direction of their empathy. Every comment, dry witticism, or observation that Sheppard made as a narrator is something that the reader themselves took in and gave life to in their imagination: the reader’s immersion, freely given, may suddenly make them feel like they are complicit in the narrator’s crimes. The distance of similarity between the reader (assuming they are themselves not a murderer) and the narrator is suddenly increased greatly, the whiplash of this made all the worse by the sum of all the reader’s previous investment. This may lead the reader to ultimately question the generic conventions of crime and detective fiction, namely that just because a character may take the role of a homodiegetic narrator does not necessarily mean they are above suspicion, and thus ‘safe’ for their empathic investment. Although the didactic function of fiction may be considered a relic of the past, the reader may learn through being deceived that they should be careful who they trust, even if they are both a somewhat sardonic village doctor and homodiegetic narrator. 3. The Remains of the Day

Another narrator whose unreliability makes for an interesting discussion on empathy is the butler Stevens from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. This novel is mentioned by Vera Nünning in Reading Fictions, Changing Minds as an example of “fictions of memory” (Reading Fictions 118) where narrators tell events of the past and “reinterpret them within the framework of their present beliefs and values” (Reading Fictions 118; see Birke 101 f.). This mode of fiction is one example of fiction “delineat[ing] ways of regulating emotions” (ibid.), and Stevens’ account in particular is an example of an unsuccessful attempt at emotional regulation. The novel has all of the features of unreliable narration from Ansgar Nünning’s list above, but there is an additional element to consider, which makes this book stand out in the field of unreliable narration. The present action of the novel is set in 1956, and concerns a several-day car journey undertaken by Stevens to visit his old colleague Miss Kenton. Along the way, Stevens recollects his memories of events in the 1920s and 30s in a non-chronological order, yet the novel maintains a sense of narrative flow thanks to the linear structure of his journey from Oxfordshire to Weymouth. Thus, the non-linear sense of delving deeper into Stevens’ memories is parallel to the linear sense of making progress on a journey. This effectively creates a convincing sense of the narrator remembering to the reader, but this also enables

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an additional source of unreliability: Stevens might misremember events, or mix them up. Similarly to Doctor Sheppard, Stevens holds a social and professional position that one would normally associate with trustworthiness and reliability, and any given reader will most likely have a conception or stereotype of what a butler is or at least should be like. In contrast to Doctor Sheppard, Stevens’ unreliability does not come from underreporting revealed at the very end of the narrative, but mainly from misevaluation – in Phelan and Martin’s terms (95) – and misremembering as mentioned above.5 The misevaluation is born out of the interplay between the events of Stevens’ past, i.e. his service to Lord Darlington, and the events of the present, i.e. his six-day journey to Weymouth. When travelling, Stevens encounters people and places that trigger a remembrance, which in turn triggers other remembrances and tangents that may have very little to do with the original trigger. This new experience of a literal car journey is a metaphorical vehicle for Stevens to remember past events, to retell, re-evaluate and re-contextualize them in the present, thus making Stevens reflect and either admit or deny flaws or faults within himself or his former employer. The problem for Stevens, which the reader also comes to recognize, is his unwavering and unquestioning service to an employer who, pitying a defeated foe and supporting appeasement, became a Nazi-sympathizer in the years preceding the Second World War. This position Stevens takes is inherently problematic in the narrative storyworld, and assumedly the reader finds it just as problematic as well. The reasoning for Stevens’ behaviour is his mantra of professional dignity above all, even one’s own personal outlook, and it means that he did not question his employer’s views or orders, such as unfairly dismissing two Jewish members of staff (157). As Stevens gradually reveals more and more information about what Lord Darlington did and said before the war, he attempts to justify his employer’s pro-Nazi stance towards the reader: It occurs to me in recalling these words that, of course, many of Lord Darlington’s ideas will seem today rather odd – even, at times, unattractive. […] It is hardly my fault if his lordship’s life and work have turned out today to look, at best, a sad waste – and it is quite illogical that I should feel any regret or shame on my account. (The Remains of the Day 209-11)6

5

It should be noted that The Remains of the Day is the text that Phelan and Martin use in their work to demonstrate all six types of unreliability. For the purposes of this article, only the most relevant of these six will be discussed.

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These justifications are doomed to fail. Stevens’ claim that Lord Darlington’s support of fascist ideology may seem ‘odd’ or ‘unattractive’ to someone in 1956 implies that these views were not at all odd or unattractive in the thirties: society, he argues, only judged these views as wrong in hindsight after the experience of the ruinous Second World War. His argument is that the context of how fascism was perceived has changed, but this ultimately falls flat: the reader realizes that awareness of the dangers of fascism and ideological opposition to it already existed before the war. One character expressing this viewpoint is Mr Cardinal,7 who tries to make Lord Darlington’s naivety and misjudgement clear to Stevens. Stevens remembers Mr Cardinal saying “I know the situation in Germany now as well as anyone in this country, and I tell you, his lordship is being made a fool of” (233) and that “[n]o one with good judgement could persist in believing anything Herr Hitler says after the Rhineland, Stevens. His lordship is out of his depth.” (236) This provision of historical context shows that Stevens’ word choices of ‘odd’ and ‘unattractive’ are woefully inadequate in describing how Lord Darlington’s views and behaviour was seen by – presumably – the majority of his countrymen, both before and after the Second World War. Of course, part of the reason for Stevens’ choice of words here is that he is, in everything he says, unfailingly polite. Yet this politeness is more for his own benefit than the reader’s: “Stevens’s [quality] maxim breaches can be analyzed as face-saving strategies of a narrator who is propelled to reveal unpleasant or difficult issues to his narratees, yet feels the need to weaken the impact of his utterances.” (Heyd 230 f.) Stevens does attempt to weaken the impact of his statements to the reader,8 but thanks to the presence and utterances of such principled characters as Mr Cardinal, these attempts become transparent and ineffective. Defending the indefensible, Stevens’ blind professional loyalty to Lord Darlington has firmly 6 7 8

In the following, references to The Remains of the Day will be given without repeating the title. Miss Kenton is also a figure who is more critical of Lord Darlington’s views in the thirties and performs a similar function to Mr Cardinal. However, Mr Cardinal’s interaction with Stevens is more explicit about Lord Darlington’s failings. When finally explaining to the reader why Lord Darlington had been associated with allegations of antisemitism, Stevens says, “One really cannot guess the reason for these absurd allegations – unless, quite ludicrously, they originate from that brief, entirely insignificant few weeks in the early thirties when Mrs Carolyn Barnet came to wield an unusual influence over his lordship.” (153) Rather than directly cite Mrs Barnet as the reason, he has to characterize the allegations and their alleged reasoning as ridiculous, then characterize the time she spent with Darlington as meaningless, and then claim that her influence over him was unusual. It is only in this way Stevens thinks he can make his statement palatable to his addressee.

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placed him on the wrong side of history. The fact that he is the one to firmly reject such feelings as ‘shame’ and ‘regret’ when he is writing into a void is very telling: he is in denial. This is made all the clearer by the fact that his thoughts on these feelings mark the end of a chapter (211): after reporting this, the narrator has to pause before continuing his narrative, leaving the reader to ponder what it is he might not be saying. On a more emotional level, this mantra of professional dignity is also what led to Stevens’ estrangement from a possible romantic partner, Miss Kenton, the object of his journey in the present action. When he undertakes the journey, it is under the pretence of offering to re-employ her in order to make his staff plan more efficient: “And the more I considered it, the more obvious it became that Miss Kenton […] was just the factor needed to enable me to complete a fully satisfactory staff plan for Darlington Hall.” (10) In contrast, at the end of his journey, Miss Kenton tells Stevens that they could have had a life together, and Stevens’ comment to the reader is: “Indeed – why should I not admit it? – at that moment, my heart was breaking.” (252) If Stevens’ stated motive at the beginning of the narrative was actually the case, it seems unlikely that such a visit would end in heartbreak. Yet, looking back at the beginning of the novel with the knowledge of Stevens’ feelings for Miss Kenton, one can pick up the hints more easily. The choice of words, ‘just the factor needed’, seems unremarkable enough on a first reading, but on a second reading one might think: are there no other professional housekeepers who would do? Someone closer than a long drive away? Could Stevens have not just sent a letter? With these questions in mind, seen in the context of Stevens’ professional mantra, it becomes fairly clear that Stevens could only persuade himself to use his leave and go on such a journey to visit his former colleague and love interest if he could think of a convincing, allegedly professional enough reason for doing so. The proof for this professional reason is the letter that Stevens receives and makes much reference to throughout the novel. The reader, however, only ever sees snatches of it, and Stevens’ evaluation of it changes in the course of the novel: [M]y receiving the letter from Miss Kenton, containing as it did, along with its long, rather unrevealing passages, an unmistakable nostalgia for Darlington Hall, and – I am quite sure of this – distinct hints of her desire to return here, obliged me to see my staff plan afresh. (10) I may as well say here that having reread her letter again tonight, I am inclined to believe I may well have read more into certain of her lines than perhaps was wise. (189)

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This shows that Stevens is not completely unaware of his own misevaluations, but it is also further evidence of his own unreliability and misconceptions at the start of the narrative. The fact that Miss Kenton rejects his offer, and thus does not return to Darlington Hall, is proof of this misevaluation. The above examples all show that Stevens is attempting to consolidate his own past worldview with the common prevailing worldviews of the present. These are embodied in the novel by such figures as the down-to-earth villagers and the educated Dr Carlisle, who all offer Stevens help and shelter when his car runs out of fuel (172-203). These figures represent direct and uncomfortable confrontations with views at odds with Stevens’ own, shaped by his past experiences. However, it should be noted that there are two instances of the past that Stevens has to reconcile with by the novel’s end: his loyal, unquestioning service to Lord Darlington twenty years previously, and his worldview and sense of self just before he undertook his journey to Weymouth. There has been critical disagreement as to whether Stevens learns anything or becomes any less unreliable or self-deluded by the end of the novel. Zuzana Fonioková writes that – compared to the unreliable narrator of Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World – “Stevens’ narration brings about his gradual release from self-deception and hence progress towards reliability” (106), whereas Elke D’hoker writes that “Stevens remains an unreliable narrator, who achieves only a partial understanding of his mistakes and sacrifices, who continues to defend aristocracy over democracy and who is still unable to open up to other people.” (153 f.) This critical disagreement may arise from the fact that they are each referring to the two different pasts: Fonioková to the recent past and D’hoker to the more distant one. It is perfectly possible that Stevens may make some progress on self-realization for his more recent past, such as his re-evaluation of Miss Kenton’s letter (149), yet make no progress on the more distant one, i.e. his evaluation of Lord Darlington’s activities before the war. Of course, he may succeed in this consolidation in the future, made possible by the novel’s open ending, but within the textual boundaries of the novel there are definitely failures of consolidation. Moreover, these failures happen across both the private sphere in regards to Stevens’ relationship with Miss Kenton and the public sphere in regards to his previous service to a Nazi sympathizer. The problem for Stevens, which is clear enough to have been previously identified by critics (see Ohme 159), is that both private and public spheres collide due to the nature of his work and his attitude towards it: his pride at organizing the international conference is inextricably connected to the death of his father (114 f.); similarly his service

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at the covert meeting between the Prime Minister and the German ambassador happens at the exact moment when Miss Kenton tells him she is getting married and leaving Darlington Hall (229 f.). Moments where we might typically expect great emotional anguish from Stevens are instead presented thus: “For all its sad associations, whenever I recall that evening [of the international conference] today, I find I do so with a large sense of triumph.” (115) We can summarize, then, that Stevens is unable to be emotionally honest with his past or current self, which seems to stem from dedication to his mantra of professional dignity. Indeed, as Ohme notes, his professionalism, meaning his lack of ability to criticize Lord Darlington’s views and take a moral stand against them, effectively ostracizes Stevens from the rest of society because of Darlington’s views and actions (160). He is unreliable because in deceiving himself – trying to play down the troublesome associations of his past – he is also trying to deceive the reader, who, unfortunately for Stevens, is a more objective observer and thus is more able to see through his deception and pass judgement on him. But how does this form of unreliable narration affect the reader’s empathy? Like Doctor Sheppard, the reader has a preconception of Stevens as a stereotype of an English butler: reserved, eloquent, and extremely polite. Unlike Christie’s narrator, Stevens gradually gains more and more moral and emotional com‐ plexity through the course of the novel. The reader is thus able to see the slow transformation from the simple stock character they may have imagined to an intricate depiction of denial, emotional repression, and moral failure. In short, by the novel’s end we see the character in a vastly different way than we did at the beginning, the problematic nature of his past and how he deals with it introduces a troublesome element to the reader’s empathic investment. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the reconfiguration of the reader’s attitude and empathy towards Doctor Sheppard happens very suddenly, and the nature of his crime is so great that all the reader can do is immediately condemn him and question their own involvement and immersion in his perspective. In contrast, the ‘true nature’ or ‘intentions’ of Stevens are multiple and more complex, and the nature of his crime is not simple, active, and close, such as the cold-blooded murder of a friend, but rather complex, passive, and distant, i.e. his inability to admit that he might have done wrong by unquestioningly serving a ‘misguided’ Nazi-sympathizer. The slow, piece-by-piece change in the reader’s attitude towards Stevens as he reveals yet more troubling information about his past9 thus allows them to take

9

Such as his seemingly relaxed attitude to firing two staff because they were Jewish (see 154-58).

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time to fully evaluate the moral and ethical implications of his service to Lord Darlington, rather than the quick and easy condemnation we can give to Dr Sheppard. Stevens is being gradually distanced from the reader’s natural inclination towards empathy throughout the novel, but is ultimately placed in a position where only the reader can judge if his recollections and the experiences on his journey enable him to realize his own shortcomings. It is no accident on Ishiguro’s part that these shortcomings are to blame for both his placement on the wrong side of history and a lack of romantic and emotional fulfilment. As Kathleen D’Angelo notes, readers tend to get very invested in romantic plots and the need to see them fulfilled, something that authors like Ian McEwan and Ishiguro take advantage of (see 101). Love between two characters that is requited yet unrealized is bound to evoke empathy in a reader, but unquestioning service to a Nazi-sympathizer will make the reader question that empathic response. The reader’s empathy is thus designed to cause a conflict when evaluating Stevens’ views, life events, and conduct: we feel sorry for his lack of emotional and romantic fulfilment, but we are also wary of his connection to and problematic defence of his former employer. This means that the reader is examining not only Stevens’ unreliability and denial, but also their own assumptions and investment in the narrative and narrator. 4. Notes on a Scandal

The final example of a narrator whose unreliability has interesting implications for the reader’s empathy is Barbara Covett from Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal. This novel is similar to The Remains of the Day in that the unreliable narrator fits very well with Ansgar Nünning’s list of features above, and recounts past events during a present action. However, unlike Stevens, Barbara’s narration at first glance appears to be mainly about someone else. The subject is Barbara’s teaching colleague Sheba, who has been the centre of media attention because of an extra-marital affair with one of her underage pupils. Barbara claims to be writing in order to “[help] the public understand who Sheba Hart really is” (Notes on a Scandal 8).10 This alternate focus on recording the story of someone else, along with the fact that Barbara is creating a written artefact that exists in the storyworld (in a similar way to Doctor Sheppard’s manuscript), means

10

In the following, references to Notes on a Scandal will be given without repeating the title.

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that this novel has rather different implications when considering its narrator’s unreliability. Barbara is a recently retired schoolteacher, a profession similar to both butler and doctor in that it is easy to conceptualize to a wide readership and comes with certain expected attributes such as authority and trustworthiness that suggest reliability. However, Barbara is unreliable: in Phelan and Martin’s terms she underreports by not revealing crucial pieces of information to the reader until later in the narrative, and she both misreads and misrepresents the nature of her past and current relationship with Sheba. Although, like Stevens, Barbara is recounting past events within a present action, the events being recorded are relatively recent, and they are not being recollected in a cognitive act of remembering, but rather are being purposely recorded with a seeming intent of publication: the reader is explicitly looking at the manuscript that Barbara is penning (7 f.). As with Stevens, the process of the reader realizing Barbara’s unreliability is gradual rather than sudden, and although a reader may suspect her unreliability early on, they may not realize the extent of Barbara’s attempt at deception and the sinister implications it has regarding her relationship with Sheba, revealing Barbara’s initial reasons for writing her account as less than truthful. A perceptive reader soon notices that there are inconsistencies within the very first few pages of the narrative, and that the narrator is not all she seems. Heller gives some initial clues as to Barbara’s true nature in her second name: ‘Covett’, a reference to Barbara coveting Sheba. Similarly, Sheba’s second name of ‘Hart’ is a homonym of ‘heart’, implying her as an object of affection for Connolly and Barbara, as well as another name for a deer, conjuring up images of the innocent and hunted to the reader. In terms of the inconsistencies, Barbara claims that “[w]e don’t have secrets, Sheba and I.” (1) Yet shortly afterwards she writes as an aside: “(Sheba doesn’t yet know about this project of mine. I fear it would only agitate her at the moment, so I’ve decided to keep it a secret until I’m a little further along.)” (8) More important however, is the stance that she takes as her role of a recorder of events: This is not a story about me. But since the task of telling it has fallen into my hands, and since I play a minor role in the events I am going to describe, it is only right that I should offer a brief account of myself and my relationship to the protagonist. […] I am presumptuous enough to believe that I am the person best qualified to write this small history. I would go so far as to hazard that I am the only person. […] I am not so foolhardy as to claim for myself an infallible version of the story. […] I should acknowledge straight away that, from a moral point of view, Sheba’s testimony regarding her conduct is not always reliable. (4-8)

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These statements are rather striking. Unlike Stevens, whose position is often not established so explicitly and who generally refrains from making outright bold statements, Barbara openly sets out the expectations and justifications of writing for both herself and the reader. She even introduces the notion that neither her nor Sheba’s accounts are entirely reliable, although she stresses that the “factual particulars” (ibid.) are not to be doubted. The problem for Barbara in making such explicit statements and justifications is that they can be easily disproven, which would not be the case if she were more like the reluctant Stevens. Indeed, some of her initial ruminations on the nature of truth and honesty (2 f.) should also act as a red flag to the reader, considering it is one of the first topics mentioned at the start of the novel. Barbara’s claim that the story is not about her becomes less and less believable over the course of the narrative, where a lot of time is spent on her experiences and emotional responses to events. A good example is when after finding out about Sheba’s affair with the schoolboy Steven Connolly, Barbara describes that “anger began to seep out like acid from a battery. […] But nothing had been said by either of us about her deceit of me. It hadn’t occurred to her to apologise for that. Did our friendship mean anything to her?” (163, emphasis in original) It is not just Barbara’s focus on her own emotional responses that disproves her earlier claim of not playing a central part in the narrative; Barbara also sees herself as a figure of equal importance to Sheba as her husband Richard or her underage lover. Barbara is clearly misreading the closeness and importance of her relationship with Sheba as evidenced by her narratorial musings: “Sheba has often told me that she thinks there’s a rhythm to married life, an ebb and flow in the pleasure that a couple take in one another. […] Now that Sheba and I are living together, I wonder whether this theory might apply to us.” (132) Barbara indulges in the thought that Sheba living with her is an equal situation to her marriage to Richard. However, these are not at all comparable, as Sheba only ended up with Barbara because she had nowhere else to go, she has no job or friends, and she is completely depending on Barbara to take care of her – her position now is as unlike her previous married life as it could be. There are also instances of misevaluation, for instance: “I knew it was important not to overstep the mark, not to appear too clingy, so I left only a few more messages at her house before I stopped ringing her altogether.” (143) Barbara introduces the concept of not being ‘too clingy’ as a context for her behaviour, but then describes something that to the reader makes her seem very ‘clingy’ indeed; clearly Barbara’s idea of acceptable social behaviour regarding how often one person contacts another is different from the reader’s. Another somewhat ironic example is how Barbara’s worry that Sheba might get ‘agitated’ if she finds out

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about the writing project is justified, though Sheba’s reaction is rather beyond agitation: You’re mad! You really believe this stuff is the truth. You write about things you never saw, people you don’t know. […] You’re not defending me. You’re exploiting me, that’s what’s going on here. All this time, you’ve been pretending to be my friend and what you really wanted is, is material … (236, emphasis in original).

Barbara initially sees herself as a loyal friend of Sheba’s trying to defend her from ignominy; by contrast, Sheba sees Barbara’s writing as an invasion of privacy and grossly inaccurate. Although there is no objective way of ascertaining the ‘truth’ of the storyworld in this instance, as Sheba herself is biased, this outburst throws doubt on Barbara’s version of events and attempt at truthful writing, which is supported by the reader’s own prior evaluation of Barbara’s (un)reliability. This novel resembles the previous two works in that the narrator omits crucial information when they embark upon their narrative, but it is more similar to The Remains of the Day in that the depths of the narrator’s character are slowly revealed, and their claims made at the beginning of the novel do not hold up to scrutiny. However, unlike Doctor Sheppard, who it is implied dies by suicide, and Stevens, who is left bereft, Barbara gets what she wants by the end of the narrative, namely Sheba.11 She starts by claiming that she is writing a defence of Sheba’s character against the media. This may initially seem like a noble motivation to the reader, but is shown in a new light when the wider context of Barbara’s manuscript becomes clear: Barbara’s writing is a demonstration of control over Sheba. This control is manifested in two ways. Firstly, after her husband, children, and former teenage lover have all mostly severed contact with her, Barbara is the only person left that Sheba has to rely on (see 6, 129). Secondly, both Barbara and Sheba embark on creative projects that they keep secret from the other; Barbara’s manuscript survives, whereas Barbara destroys Sheba’s project of a clay statue (243), her only means of expressing her relationship with Connolly, which is a symbolic enforcement of this control. This final, total control is also expressed in the closing lines of the novel: “‘[y]ou’re going to be alright, darling,’ I said, stroking her hair. ‘Barbara’s here.’ I felt her droop, as if in surrender. […] And she knows, by now, not to go too far without me.” (244) Despite their difficult circumstances 11

In fact, from the very start of Barbara’s narration, she already practically possesses Sheba in that they live together domestically and Barbara takes care of her by shopping and cooking for her (8 f.). The reader’s evaluation of this domestic relationship, of course, changes over time when they learn more about Barbara.

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as a household, Barbara seems quite pleased with how things have turned out. This is interesting, as Sheba’s dependence on Barbara has only come about because of Barbara revealing Sheba’s illegal affair, which she puts down to pure, passive chance (193). Thus, Barbara’s attempt at framing the events that led to this situation in this way suggests that she is trying to reconcile the fact that she betrayed Sheba’s secret with the fact that said betrayal has ended up in a situation she is pleased with. Notes on a Scandal has interesting implications when one looks at Barbara’s unreliability in the context of the reader’s empathy. Firstly, there is the moral conundrum of the reader’s complicity in Barbara’s work. Much like in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the reader gives Barbara’s narrative a certain legiti‐ macy by engaging with the text and experiencing the tale through her eyes. However, there is the additional element that Sheba has not consented to this depiction of herself, made all the worse by her outburst at its discovery. The reader feels as if they have participated in an invasion of privacy, as they have been previously reading and assumedly enjoying the intimate personal details of Sheba’s life without a second thought. A reader may initially feel they have permission to gain access to these intimate events if they are included as part of a narrative, only to later realize that Barbara does not actually have the right to give that permission. But then, this issue is not the only one the novel addresses and then subverts; in fact, it practically revels in overturning or questioning our modern Western ethics: With regard to the ethical issue involved in an affair between a 42-year old woman and a 15- and 16-year old boy, the novel shatters the clichés circulated by the media and raises more and more questions during the course of the narration, but it does not give any answers. […] In a novel with such an unstable ethical framework, any kind of value judgement is impossible. (V. Nünning, “Ethics” 386 f.)

Sheba, who is the most likely target of the reader’s empathy (see ibid. 386), also engages in deviant behaviour while suffering from the obsessive entrapment of another.12 Heller has thus presented us with an entanglement of broken ethics, involving the narrator Barbara, Sheba as a character and focalizer, and the reader as Barbara’s accomplice in the invasion of Sheba’s private life. This disallows the reader from using their superior sense of morality and ethics as a way to judge both narrator and focalizer. In fact, they themselves become somewhat culpable through their investment in the story, making them question the very 12

Nünning goes so far as to interpret Sheba’s clay statue, where a mother-like figure resembles Sheba and the son-like figure Connolly, as an expression of a desire for incest (see ibid. 386 f.).

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idea of morally judging others. As Nünning puts it: “Since we are repeatedly made aware that our assessment of the supposed facts is quite beside the point, we might, moreover, develop a more open-minded and liberal attitude with regard to the judgement of others” (ibid. 388). The experience of empathizing and colluding with morally deviant characters in complicated or complex situations may encourage readers to see beyond conventional ethics or simplified ideas of law or normality when judging others and give them the ability of feeling empathy for them nonetheless. Yet, there are still some instances where the reader may choose not to feel empathy for the narrator. During one of Barbara’s many tangents as a narrator, she reflects on loneliness, “long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude” (187), where she claims that Sheba’s idea of loneliness is vastly naïve, as her bouts of it are brief, compared to Barbara’s mostly friendless spinsterhood. Loneliness of any kind is an almost universal human emotion, easy to empathize with, and some of Barbara’s comments on loneliness and other topics might strike a chord with some readers.13 Yet, whilst a reader may understand Barbara’s loneliness, they may also recognize that it is the seed of her obsessive behaviour.14 Indeed, Vera Nünning goes one step further and claims that “[a]part from Barbara’s loneliness, there are no redeeming features which might induce readers to feel pity or sympathy with her” (“Ethics” 386). Barbara’s crime, then, is her selfishness: her attempt at portraying the revelation of Sheba’s secret as chance (193) is to shirk her responsibility for the deed and to try and disguise the fact that Sheba’s dependence on her (which she wanted) was gained through a deliberate betrayal. By realizing how betraying Sheba has benefitted Barbara, readers are able to discover an overall darker and more sinister aspect to Barbara’s obsession with Sheba. The reader is able to see that Barbara is trying to disguise her selfish motivation (which, like Dr Sheppard, is done through a simple lie of omission), and that she is trying to pass off her entrapment of Sheba as loyal friendship in a difficult circumstance, when really Barbara was the cause of that circumstance. In this difference lies the source of Barbara’s unreliability as a narrator. When one knows Barbara’s true motivation, looking

13 14

“They [people like Sheba] don’t know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can’t bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters.” (187) Sebastian Beckmann provides a clear definition of this obsessive behaviour: “Barbara is yearning for attention, affection, and needs to have power over Sheba in order to get what she wants” (54). For more on obsession in Notes on a Scandal, see Beckmann (36-81).

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back on her previous statements reveals the extent of how she wishes to present herself in a good light to the reader: That was when I stepped in. I put Sheba up for a week in my flat and then, when she got Eddie to let her stay in his house, I came with her. How could I not? Sheba was so pitifully alone. It would have taken a very unfeeling individual to desert her. (6)

Here, Barbara comes across as the selfless friend, not the covetous obsessive that she actually is. With this in mind, readers who may have recognized some of their own behaviours or opinions in Barbara’s covetous nature may wish to re-evaluate their own actions when it comes to interacting and respecting the needs of other people, and examine their own biases when it comes to looking at one’s own past behaviour. 5. Conclusion

To conclude, it is clear that the effect of the reader’s empathy for these unreliable narrators is more complex than simply understanding the different viewpoints of a doctor, butler, and teacher. Readers inhabit the perspective of these unreliable narrators just as they do with reliable ones, but the unreliability of the narrators challenges the reader in two ways: firstly, the reader examines the moral and ethical implications of their investment in the narration – in Christie’s novel the reader is forced to come to terms with the fact that they have been deceived by a murderer; in Ishiguro’s the reader is slowly exposed to a butler whose dedication to professionalism makes him disinclined to budge on his defence of his Nazi-sympathizer employer, and which also results in his lack of emotional fulfilment; and in Heller’s the reader is made to feel complicit in the insidious power grab by one woman on the personal life of another. It should be said that one does not necessarily need an unreliable narrator to achieve this effect, but, secondly, the reader is forced to think critically about the difference between the persona presented to them and the one the narrator wishes to obscure. Why are they practicing deception? To what extent are they successful or unsuccessful? Yet, unlike trying to solve a murder mystery or figure out a puzzle, in these narratives, this critical thinking is connected with the emotions of both the narrator and the reader. Was the reader able to pick up on the clues of Doctor Sheppard’s true nature? Should one feel pity for Stevens’ inability to be emotionally honest with himself and others? Barbara’s loneliness may be relatable, but are the consequences of overcoming it in the way she does desirable?

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Therefore, it seems that the positive effects of reading unreliable narration come from not simply just feeling along with the narrator, but exploring the implications of how feeling along can both deceive the reader and complicate the emotional tableau of the narrator for wishing to deceive the reader along with themselves. Narrators, focalizers, and characters are not always easily definable as either ‘good’ or ‘evil’; such designations are unhelpful in any case as they do not prevent a reader’s natural empathy for them. However, if a narrator is unreliable, then the reader is able to make a judgement and evaluation based on their experience with the narrator and not abstract notions of morality. In short, we learn that being able to empathize with others is a valuable and very human skill, but if done blindly can easily mislead us. Much like how reading fiction is a good way of experiencing other points of view and thus trains empathy, reading unreliable narrators teaches us not only to critically examine others, but ourselves as well: we should be careful with our empathic investment, and try to see how others may try and deceive us, or indeed, how we might deceive ourselves. In our current climate of the information age where emotion can be a vital factor in the manipulation of facts, a personal assessment of how our emotions and those of others can lead us astray might not be such a bad practice. As Vera Nünning states after examining the unreliability of certain political speeches: “Insofern ist es auch im Bereich des unglaubwürdigen Erzählens so, wie fast immer im Verhältnis von Literatur und Wirklichkeit: Literatur kann uns viel lehren – und sie lehrt es uns auf interessante Weise.”15 (“Bill Clinton” 200) Bibliography

  Primary Sources

Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. HarperCollins, 2002 [1926]. Heller, Zoë. Notes on a Scandal. Penguin, 2009 [2003]. Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. Faber & Faber, 1999 [1989].

  Secondary Sources

Beckmann, Sebastian. Psychological Aspects of Unreliable Narration. WVT, 2020. Birke, Dorothee. “Fictions of Memory: Kazuo Ishiguro.” Der zeitgenössische englische Roman: Genres – Entwicklungen – Modellinterpretationen, edited by Vera Nünning, WVT, 2007, pp. 101-16.

15

“In this regard, the area of unreliable narration exhibits the same qualities that nearly always appear in the relationship between literature and reality: literature can teach us a lot – and it teaches us in interesting ways.” (My translation)

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D’Angelo, Kathleen. “‘To Make a Novel’: The Construction of a Critical Readership in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 41, no. 1, 2009, pp. 88-105. D’hoker, Elke. “Unreliability between Mimesis and Metaphor: The works of Kazuo Ishiguro.” Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel, edited by Elke D’hoker, and Gunther Martens, De Gruyter, 2008, pp. 147-70. Fonioková, Zuzana. Kazuo Ishiguro and Max Frisch: Bending Facts in Unreliable and Unnatural Narration. Peter Lang, 2015. Heyd, Theresa. “Understanding and Handling Unreliable Narratives: A Pragmatic Model and Method.” Semiotica, no. 162, 2006, pp. 217-43. Lindemann, Uwe. “‘Lie or die!’ Über Wahrheit und Lüge im Kriminalroman am Beispiel von Agatha Christies The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Dashiell Hammetts The Maltese Falcon, Allain Robbe-Grillets Les Gommes und Friedrich Dürrenmatts Das Verspre‐ chen.” Dichter lügen, edited by Kurt Röttgerns, and Monika Schmitz-Emans, Die Blaue Eule, 2001, pp. 153-78. Nünning, Ansgar. “‘But why will you say that I am mad?’ On the Theory, History, and Signals of Unreliable Narration in British Fiction.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 22, no. 1, 1997, pp. 83-105. Nünning, Vera. “Bill Clinton, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg und andere unglaubwürdige Erzähler.” Texte. Seit 1386, edited by Ekkehard Felder, and Ludger Lieb, Winter, 2016, pp. 193-202. —. “Conceptualising (Un)reliability Narration and (Un)trustworthiness.” Unreliable Nar‐ ration and Trustworthiness: Intermedial and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Vera Nünning, De Gruyter, 2015, pp. 1-30. —. “Ethics and Aesthetics in British Novels at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century.” Ethics in Culture, edited by Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes, and Ansgar Nünning, De Gruyter, 2008, pp. 369-91. —. Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction. Winter, 2014. Ohme, Andreas. Skaz und Unreliable Narration. De Gruyter, 2015. Phelan, James, and Mary Patricia Martin. “The Lessons of ‘Weymouth’: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day.” Narratologies. New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, edited by David Herman, Ohio State UP, 1999, pp. 88-109.

Promoting Empathy in ‘Generation Me’ The Didactic Potential of Unreliable Narratives Featuring Narrators with a Mental Illness in the EFL Classroom

Sebastian Beckmann

1. Introduction: The Power of Literature

At a time of accelerating change and uncertainty, it is important to think about what young people are taught and how they are taught (see Ammons ix). In an ever-growing global society with seemingly endless means of communication, the world itself is more entangled than ever and young adults need to be equipped with appropriate tools in order to face and understand this intricate reality. This attempt to make sense of a complex present is, according to Ammons, the first step towards activism for change for the better (see ibid. x). Literature in general – and works that feature unreliable narrators with a mental illness in particular – can teach readers to navigate reality in a postfactual world, in which simple antagonisms such as true/false, good/bad, right/wrong, healthy/sick have become increasingly indistinguishable (see Phelan 1-3). As these boundaries are more and more blurred, literature and the study of litera‐ ture can counteract the current absurdity of limiting reality to 280 characters, with no context and hardly any content. Moreover, “at a moment when the legitimization of literary scholarship has become an urgent problem in many countries” (Nünning, “Ethics” 53), the real-world mission of literature highlights the relevance of literary inquiry (see Ammons x). This article takes its cue from the works of scholars such as Vera Nünning and Elizabeth Ammons, who have time and again shown that words have the power to transform people and to bring about positive change. Nünning, in particular, has emphasized the importance of literature at a time when the increasing complexity of today’s world is accompanied by a decreasing capability for empathy, to a point where being non-empathetic seems to have become socially acceptable. According to Grit Hein, present-day society does not

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facilitate the capability for empathy (see Kaess). Hein’s stance is supported and stressed by several scholars across various academic disciplines, most notably Jean M. Twenge, who characterizes the current generation of young adults as ‘Generation Me’. In many of her publications, Twenge draws a rather pessimistic picture of generations X through Z. The psychologist’s empirical research assigns characteristics like poor mental health, high occurrence of narcissistic traits, and low self-reliance to today’s youth. Furthermore, she claims that ‘Me students’ “have high IQs, but little desire to read long texts” (Twenge, “Changes” 398). This article proceeds from the assumption that literature and the study of literature in school can make a difference, can make someone change their beliefs, can promote empathy, and can help readers to foster critical thinking skills. As I will show below, works that feature unreliable narrators who suffer from mental illnesses are extraordinarily successful in fulfilling these functions. This article, which deals with the transformative power of literature in an EFL classroom, will explain to what extent students who engage themselves with unreliable narration are confronted with a writing technique that depicts manifold and potentially deceiving characteristics of human life. By dealing with unreliable narrators with a mental illness, these readers may catch a glimpse of the highs and lows of human existence that characters having a mental illness experience, and will be able to better understand how their minds function. In this way, they might even be inspired to turn from ‘Generation Me’ to ‘Generation Empathy’. In order to illustrate my argument, I will draw on Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl (2012) as a pertinent example of a currently popular trend in contem‐ porary literature: the portrayal of mentally and/or physically ill characters in first-person narratives. Moreover, these narratives often feature an ethically ambiguous storyworld and do not offer simple solutions. Many actions and utterances of the characters and narrators are questionable, and the reader’s affective responses to these actions may also be ambivalent. Because of this inscrutability, novels like Gone Girl lend themselves to fruitful and controversial discussions – especially in a classroom setting.1 The fact that many of these novels have recently been turned into motion pictures shows their appeal to a wide audience and readership, as well as that they address a specific zeitgeist with the ambiguous realities they present. In a world of alternative facts, in 1

Other examples of contemporary novels based on a similar premise are, for instance, Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller, You by Caroline Kepnes, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, and The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn.

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which concepts such as fact and fiction are constantly being interfused, novels featuring narrators with an unstable and unreliable worldview invite readers to critically reflect on questions of the dissemination of information and the manipulation of reality, and the real-world relevance of such issues. In the following sections, I elaborate on the didactic potential of unreliable narration and explore how pathological narcissism in Gone Girl might bring about positive change in the EFL classroom. In my analysis of the novel, I argue that studying Gone Girl enables students to better comprehend the narrator Amy Dunne’s thoughts and behaviour, thus encouraging them to feel empathy towards this character with a mental illness. Over the course of the novel, however, readers are forced to recalibrate their understanding of this character and the events presented to them, and are likely to morally distance themselves from her actions. 2. The Didactic Potential of Unreliable Narration in Conjunction with Mental Health

The pace of life in the 21st century facilitates an increasing number of illnesses: “Apparently, something about modern life is causing more people, particularly young people, to feel anxious and depressed.” (Twenge, “Differences” 469) Con‐ sequently, mental disorders are highly relevant for and acutely present in the lives of young people today. Issues of mental health have also gained increasing visibility over the past few years; in the wake of identity politics and an overall reevaluation of health issues, it is no longer a taboo to talk about mental illness and people have become used to addressing psychological disorders more openly. The occurrence, thematization, and further scrutiny of mental disorders in the novel I refer to in this article can most likely be traced back to this increased awareness. Literature is a powerful institution for formulating and manifesting these taboos, yet it also serves as an imaginative counter-discourse (see Zapf), offering a space to explore the psychological depths and nuances of mental health. In this capacity, literature can also enable readers to break out of long-held thought patterns. Moreover, as a reintegrative interdiscourse (see ibid.), literature is able to navigate and negotiate between various specialized discourses from different fields such as psychology, sociology, medicine, or the cognitive sciences. Novels featuring characters and narrators who suffer from mental illness contribute to an increasingly open discourse about mental health and provide great learning opportunities for students. By engaging with the narrators and their conditions, neurotypical students may get an insight into the mind of a person with a mental illness and thus begin to develop a sense of

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empathy for how people with mental disorders feel. What is more, reading and studying ‘sick-lit’ – literature that features characters with a physical or mental illness – has the potential to broaden one’s imagination of these disorders.2 This kind of literature can render mental disorders a little more concrete for the reader and make it possible to conceive what having a mental illness might actually mean. Generally speaking, reading is a complex process; the mere translation of signs on a sheet of paper into words into ideas is anything but simple. Thus, reading also has didactic potential in that it requires the use of refined cognitive skills. Readers of literature have to rely on their theory of mind in order to try to follow and understand the functioning of a character’s mind by attributing states of mind to them.3 The great benefit of studying literature is that in “fiction, the skill of mind-reading can be trained over and over again, with little risk of error” (Nikolajeva 275). For students in school, this means that they can master their mind-reading abilities through dealing with literature and then use their enhanced skills in real-life contexts. These skills are challenged and trained because, on the one hand, fictional and real-life thought processes work alike. The brain does not differentiate between something that one reads or sees and something that one actually does (see Zunshine, “Theory of Mind” 67). On the other hand, students’ theory-of-mind abilities are also challenged, because even though fictional and real minds function in similar ways, they are not completely identical. In order to detect and understand these differences, there is cognitive effort to be made on the reader’s end, as Alan Palmer emphasizes: I am not saying that fictional minds are the same as real minds. I am saying that fictional minds are similar to real minds in some ways and different from them in other ways. We will not understand fictional minds unless we understand both of these aspects: both their similarities to, and their differences from, real minds (19).

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The term ‘sick-lit’ usually refers to a popular sub-genre of young adult fiction. In these texts, kids are fighting and trying to live with grave, sometimes life-threatening, illnesses or neurological disorders. Popular examples include, among others: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Such novels clearly have a unique potential for cultivating empathy and can be didactically valuable. The difference between these novels and those like Gone Girl, where the narrator’s mental disorder makes her inflict violence and pain on others, is the fact that, for the latter, the potential increase of empathy is less obvious and full of ambiguities, thus requiring not only empathy but also distancing from the reader. Theory-of-mind abilities can be described as “the capacity to understand and anticipate other people’s actions as well as their beliefs, feelings, desires, and intentions” (Nünning, “Cognitive Science” 95).

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With regard to Twenge’s pessimistic analysis of today’s youth as an empathi‐ cally stunted ‘Generation Me’, another potential of literature becomes increas‐ ingly important: the way it allows readers to experience emotions and evokes empathy through perspective-taking. Maria Nikolajeva provides convincing support for this stance: “Fiction creates situations in which emotions are simulated; we engage with literary characters’ emotions because our brain can, through mirror neurons, simulate other people’s goals in the same manner as it can stimulate our own goals.” (276) Mature readers should be able to cognitively empathize with a character without necessarily sharing their emotions. Em‐ pathy, like theory of mind, is an important component of social cognition, and the two processes are often closely connected. In her contribution to cognitive narratology, Nünning explores “the ways in which reading can serve to enhance affective skills of understanding others” (Reading Fictions 95). In dealing with unreliable narrators with a mental illness, “cognitive empathy” (Brown et al. 952 f.) is particularly pertinent, as some of the emotions the narrators show would be ethically problematic to be shared unreflectively by the readers. Fiction in general encourages readers to take the narrators’ and other char‐ acters’ perspectives, thus providing ideal learning opportunities for students. Fiction makes it “possible to gather various experiences with regard to a broad range of different characters […]. Such experiences render it easier to understand thoughts and emotions which we have not encountered in our own lives” (Nünning, “Narrative Fiction” 51). As Nünning states elsewhere, taking “the perspective of fictional characters is […] a very complex process, involving the knowledge of the dynamic network of preconditions, adopting their spatio-temporal viewpoint and sharing their thoughts, perceptions and feelings” (Nünning, Reading Fictions 197). Especially with regard to unreliability and mental illness, understanding perspectives requires and includes the con‐ sideration of beliefs and personality traits, as well as a comprehension of the self-image of the character in question. Undoubtedly, taking on and understanding even one character’s perspective demands a vast number of skills. Vera Nünning emphasizes that most fictional texts are “narrated and structured in such way that they juxtapose different characters, and readers have to follow the thoughts and perceptions of different focalizers” (ibid. 198) and thereby facilitate effective settings for learning. This is especially true in the case of multiperspectival novels, which often provide mutually exclusive perspectives and require readers to modify their empathy as they make sense of a situation thus rendered (see Nünning, “Narrative Fiction” 48). As soon as the reader starts to doubt the narrator’s reliability, they are likely to take another character’s perspective and gauge the situation from this

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point of view. The reader is “induced to take several – often contradictory – perspectives on the same situation” (ibid. 53). When the social dynamics between characters change often and rapidly, the reader has to keep track of these changes: “If narrators or characters compare and balance the perspectives of others, if they ethically position themselves towards others and come up with their own interpretation, readers can simulate the characters’ cognitive processes.” (Ibid.) The power of literature to teach empathy has often been stressed with regard to bridging differences between people and promoting pro-social behaviour and openness towards others. Hogan stresses that “literary works often end up cultivating some empathy even for out-group members and at least partially challenging empathy-inhibiting ideologies” (Hogan 75). At the same time, he does not fail to hint at potential dangers, as these functions of literature may also be used to inhibit empathy for certain groups.4 Stereotypical representations of mental health issues have contributed to a negative image of mental illness and have done a lot of damage in the public discourse through stigmatization. It is not surprising that in the genre of Young Adult novels particularly, ‘sick lit’ and novels featuring characters with a disability, chronic illness, or mental disorder are very prominent. These novels have significant didactic potential because students are invited to imagine what happens in the minds of mentally or otherwise ill people by witnessing the character’s thoughts and actions. By delving into the minds of characters, students and young adults can gain an understanding for people who are different from them and go through life under other, perhaps disadvantageous conditions, and thereby expand their social skills and abilities of self-reflection. Novels in which mental illness is combined with unreliability in a narrator pose yet another challenge to readers, who have to align the narrator’s distorted experience and worldview with their own understanding of reality in the storyworld. The didactic potential here lies in the way such novels demand readers to read more thoroughly, to scrutinize the narrators’ version of the story and to question their motives. As unreliable narration requires especially high interpretative capabilities from readers, such novels, if taught effectively, can have a great impact on young adults. With fictional narratives as a testing ground, students can use these interpretive skills to detect unreliable narration – in fiction and beyond. In times in which the

4

Literature has – throughout history – been used for propaganda purposes, in order to disparage and condemn certain demographic or ethnic groups, or in order to promote marginalization. In short, the values which literature promotes are not unambiguous, and vary greatly.

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term ‘alternative facts’ is not an oxymoron anymore, there is no safer and more effective training environment than the study of literature in school. Unreliable narratives featuring characters or narrators with a mental illness possess particularly great didactic potential because the discussion of unreliable narrations entails a hands-on examination of the blurry boundaries between trust and suspicion, and because “the description of mental illness explores the fringes of human consciousness” (Christ 219) in general. This description allows for a great variety of meaningful topics to be discussed with young adults, among which are “self-perception, the (missing) connection between body and mind, the grey zones between imagination and reality, loss of control and the questions for the constituents of human identity” (ibid.). These are all questions that are extremely relevant for readers in the process of finding out who they are and where their place in society is. Education officials around the globe have started to realize the potential for positive change in the literature classroom, which has increasingly found its way into national and state standards, district curricula, and class syllabi. By way of example, I will point out the relevant standards for Germany. The first document to consult contains the standards for English as a foreign language from 2012, published and approved by the Ständige Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (KMK).5 Here, the KMK explicitly specifies several competencies that are directly connected to the study of literature. Besides specific text and media competencies, reading and studying literature in school are stated as positively impacting the students’ intercultural communicative competency (KMK 11), as they are required to discuss the works of fiction in their respective cultural context. The KMK expressly states that students are to analyse the perspectives and patterns of behaviour of fictional characters. Teachers are to enable and support students in taking someone else’s perspective and to make these processes of perspective-taking transparent (ibid. 20). This shift of emphasis in recent curriculum development can be seen to correlate with academic findings on the cognitive value of literature. In her 2014 book Reading Fictions, Changing Minds, Vera Nünning convincingly argues that “novels and other fictional works offer ideal conditions for practicing perspective-taking in that they generally not only juxtapose a broad range of characters and their perspectives, but are also often told from different points of view” (186 f.). Novels like Gone Girl enable students to develop the ability

5

The Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education of the States in the Federal Republic of Germany.

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to reflect upon their initial understanding of a text, put it into perspective, and, where necessary, revise their first interpretation – abilities that the KMK envisages the literature classroom to promote in students. The curriculum for English in the federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate emphasizes the triangle of reader, text, and author, the aesthetic potential of literature, and the focus on literary devices (see MBWWK 32-36). All three aspects are especially important when it comes to the analysis of novels that feature unreliable narrators: the inconsistencies in the text itself as well as the potentially contradictory interpretations of events by the narrator and by the reader, the artfully crafted novels in which the authors scatter more or less obvious signs of a narrator’s unreliability along the way, and the complexity of literature and aesthetic devices more generally. On the teacher’s part, it is important to raise an awareness of mental illness in conjunction with unreliable narration, and to encourage a critical discussion of related issues in class: not every narrator/character with a mental illness is unreliable, and not every unreliable narrator has a mental illness. Novels such as Gone Girl show that the empathy and understanding students may develop for narrators with a mental illness have to be balanced with a critical view of the transgressions that these characters commit. In this context, empathy is to be understood as comprehending and reconstructing the narrators’ actions in the context of their mental illness, bearing in mind that the image of the mental illness is a literary representation. In the analysis of Gone Girl, students and teachers have to collaborate in order to lay bare the narrator’s manipulative strategies and critically assess Amy’s criminal and violent actions. This is an ongoing process throughout the course of the novel and requires extraordinary cognitive effort on the student’s end. By using psychological insights and categories in analysing novels such as Gone Girl, students will be able to better comprehend the respective narrators and understand their motives. At the same time, it needs to be made clear that applying those insights and categories does not mean that the students are psychologists and capable of professionally assessing or diagnosing the narrators, let alone people outside of fiction. These categories are solely tools to deepen the understanding of fictional characters, point out similarities as well as differences with real-life examples, and highlight psychological illness as a defining concern of the text involved. Thus, balancing empathy and understanding on the one hand, and critical consideration on the other, is key to realizing the didactic and learning potential of novels like Gone Girl.

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3. Discussing Mental Illness and Unreliability in the EFL Classroom: Pathological Narcissism in Gone Girl

In his essay “The Ethics of Teaching Literature”, Wayne C. Booth audaciously makes the following claim: “English teachers, if they teach stories ethically, are more important to society than even the best teachers of Latin or Calculus or History.” (229) He believes that using the potential of literature in the classroom is an important step towards educating a generation of adolescents with “defensible values” (ibid.): adolescents who are able to consciously perceive their diverse social surroundings, assume responsibility for themselves and others, and grow to be critically thinking members of society. This is a goal that education officials around the globe have specified in national, statewide, and local curricula. Booth encourages teachers to get their students “engaged with the world of story […] and teach them to deal critically with that engagement. Entice them not only into loving this or that book or fixed list but into loving both the seduction of the story and the fun of criticizing those seductions.” (229 f.) I have chosen Gone Girl and the portrayal of pathological narcissism as the subject for this article because the story presented by Amy as one of the narrators of the novel seduces and misleads, and thus challenges readers to a critical reading that prevents them from falling prey to Amy’s seduction, as illustrated by this passage: I was Average Dumb Woman Married to Average Shitty Man. He had single-handedly de-amazed Amazing Amy. […] I could hear the tale, how everyone would love telling it: how amazing Amy, the girl who never did wrong, let herself be dragged, penniless, to the middle of the country, where her husband threw her over for a younger woman. How predictable, how perfectly average, how amusing. And her husband? He ended up happier than ever. No. I couldn’t allow that. No. Never. Never. He doesn’t get to do this to me and still fucking win. No. I changed my name for that piece of shit. Historical records have been altered – Amy Elliott to Amy Dunne – like it’s nothing. No, he does not get to win. So I began to think of a different story, a better story, that would destroy Nick for doing this to me. A story that would restore my perfection. It would make me the hero, flawless and adored. Because everyone loves the Dead Girl. (Gone Girl 376 f., emphasis in original)6

6

In the following, references to Gone Girl will be given without repeating the title.

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Gillian Flynn’s novel tells the story of a dysfunctional marriage that escalates into a twisted game of cat and mouse between Amy and Nick, the two spouses and homodiegetic narrators of the book. As the novel begins, Nick’s narration is intercepted by Amy’s diary entries from several years back. Later on, current Amy’s narration alternates with Nick’s and Diary Amy’s narration and adds to a more complete picture of the events in Gone Girl. Once successful writers, now struggling academics, Amy and Nick feel stuck in their lives. They have grown apart, and do not seem to respect each other anymore. While Nick attempts to escape his unsatisfying situation through an affair with one of his college students, his wife resorts to meticulously planning and executing her own disappearance and framing her husband for her alleged murder. In the quote above, Amy describes the motives for her revenge on her husband. Remarkably, she is not too concerned about the fact that Nick cheated on her. Instead, she is upset that he destroyed her unblemished fairy-tale life. She does not wish to take revenge on him because he betrayed their marriage, but because she fears being seen as average and no longer special by others. Her patterns of self-reflection and evaluation of others do not match generally valid rules of social interaction. For her, the only point of reference in her life is her appearance and her image: the way other people see her. With these characteristics, Amy clearly shows signs of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).7 When studying NPD, it is impossible to ignore Otto Kernberg and Heinz Kohut, émigré psychoanalysts from Austria. Both approached the concept of narcissism from different perspectives in the 1970s, which led to what secondary literature refers to as the Kohut-Kernberg controversy. Simply put, Kohut suggests that narcissism could be seen as a completely ‘normal’ component of a person’s personality, whereas Kernberg stresses the pathological aspects of the phenomenon (see Hotchkiss 130; Lunbeck 3). “Celebrating what others condemned, Kohut boldly reframed narcissism as a desirable, even healthy, dimension of mature selfhood” (Lunbeck 3). According to him, narcissism fosters creativity and promotes someone’s ambitions (see ibid.). In comparison, Kernberg’s narcissist “is an aggressive character – grandiose, self-absorbed, and exploitive, full of chronic envy and rage, and lacking in values and empathy” (Hotchkiss 130). In short, Kohut and Kernberg broadened the range of meaning of narcissism: it could refer to both destructiveness and self-preservation. Their understanding of narcissism includes patients who idealize themselves, exhibit their grandi‐ 7

Narcissistic personality disorder is the correct psychological term that characterizes the condition of Amy in Gone Girl. Henceforth, ‘narcissism’ and ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ will be used interchangeably.

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osity, possess the need to be admired, and are often arrogant and pretentious when interacting with other people. Kohut and Kernberg laid the groundwork for the conceptualization of narcissistic personality disorder as defined – and since that time altered and modernized – in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which the following analysis of the novel and the character of Amy Dunne in particular is based on (see Lunbeck 60). The DSM establishes two larger groups of diagnostic criteria that characterize narcissistic personality disorder. The first group contains manifestations of “Significant impairments in personality functioning” (APA 9). These may relate to, firstly, “Impairments in self functioning”, concerning either (a) “identity” (with aspects such as “[e]xcessive reference to others for self-definition and self-esteem regulation” and “exaggerated self-appraisal”) or (b) “self-direction” (in which “[g]oal-setting is based on gaining approval from others” and unrea‐ sonably high or low personal standards, based on the desire “to see oneself as exceptional” or “on a sense of entitlement” respectively; ibid.). Secondly, such impairments manifest in interpersonal functioning and may affect one’s capacity for (a) “empathy” (with an “[i]mpaired ability to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others”) or (b) “intimacy” (so that “[r]elationships [remain] largely superficial and exist to serve self-esteem regulation”; ibid.). The second group encompasses “Pathological personality traits”, which include “self-centredness [and] firmly holding to the belief that one is better than others” (‘grandiosity’) as well as attention and admiration seeking traits (ibid. 9 f.). Opinions on how to further classify and categorize NPD vary among experts. Alexander Lowen offers a highly differentiated and lucid description of NPD based on the diagnostic criteria presented above, which will prove beneficial for the analysis of Gone Girl. In Gone Girl, the main plot and myriad of decisions and developments along the way are dictated mostly by Amy’s need to feed her ego, and thus correspond with key symptoms of the disorder that I will stress in my analysis: the importance of appearance in connection with manipulative behaviour and the need for control. In addition to a heightened sense of self-importance, people suffering from NPD expect to be seen as superior even without accomplishments that warrant their superiority. They “are more concerned with how they appear than what they feel” (Lowen ix) and devote much of their energy toward the enhancement of their image, often at the “expense of the self” (ibid. 25). On the one hand, patients show a lack of concern for others, but on the other hand they are also insensitive to their own needs and show self-destructive behavior (see ibid).

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By and large, Amy’s scrupulous planning and her striving for perfectionism spring from her need to be regarded as superior by others. As narcissists have a strong desire to hold power over their image, they tend to set their goals based on gaining approval from others and define themselves according to what others say about them. This behaviour can be well observed in Amy: through her actions, she shapes a public image of herself that is far from honest and straightforward, but does exactly what it is supposed to do, namely evoke compassion and sympathy for her in an allegedly abusive marriage. She feels ostentatious because, due to her being intelligent, she has the power to shape the way people think about her and even more so about Nick. Besides being preoccupied with their image, people suffering from NPD often lie to themselves and to others and generally show manipulative behaviour. This often results in a blurring of the boundaries between right and wrong and, consequently, a lack of conscience that becomes visible in ruthless actions. Often, they have no problem with creatively rewriting history so that it fits their needs (see Lowen 54-56). Amy brags about herself and is egocentric: when she receives the attention that she desires, she is happy and flattered (see 13, 18, 75, 91 f., and 100). On the surface, the most important thing for her is to have a happy marriage so as to be viewed by everyone else as the perfect couple. Since her husband does not live up to this standard, she decides to ruin his life. While carrying out her plan, she draws her satisfaction from watching Nick’s undoing unfold live on television. In order to achieve her goals, the unreliable narrator develops and deploys lying and manipulation strategies – and, more precisely, forms of control over other people. She constantly lies without remorse. In addition to lying, narcissists like Amy may cheat, manipulate, and kill without feelings of guilt (see Lowen 22). Amy’s web of lies is so sophisticated that even the lead police detective implicitly attests to her rigor and bizarre success in a conversation with her husband Nick: ‘She foolproofed everything. It’s ludicrous, her story, but no more ludicrous than our story. Amy’s basically exploiting the sociopath’s most reliable maxim.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.’ (523)

As we can see, Amy has effectively rewritten history to fit her needs, displaying the behaviour of a textbook narcissist in Lowen’s sense. Faking seven years of diary entries and framing her husband for a crime he did not commit is most certainly Amy’s most momentous lie, yet far from being her only one.

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When analyzing Amy as a pathological liar, it is important to take the narrative perspective into consideration as well. Besides Amy’s actions, the reader can draw on characterizations of her made by others to understand who Amy Dunne really is – at first sight a successful writer and an alluring, lovable young woman, who eventually, however, is revealed as a manipulator and murderer at the end of the novel. Desi, her former suitor and later murder victim, concedes that there has always been a certain ambivalence to Amy: ‘Of course someone would…want her,’ he said. He had a deep voice, a fireside voice. ‘You know she always had that way. Of making people want her. Always. You know that old cliché: Men want her, and women want to be her. With Amy, that was true.’ (222)

Another common characteristic of NPD that Amy displays is a craving for power, the feeling of grandiosity, and the need to be in control and in charge. This can potentially result from an experience of humiliation as a child, and is most likely an attempt by someone with the condition to make up for a deficiency in feelings. However, the sufferer does not possess the skills to reflect on their own behaviour and eventually gets caught up in a vicious circle: their fear of insanity and inferiority results in the desire for more control and preoccupies them with fantasies about unlimited power and brilliance (see Lowen 75-77, 155-57). This desire for control is manifested most interestingly in the different personas that Amy puts on throughout the novel, and her mastery at changing from one to the other. She takes on at least three different and identifiable roles, which she discusses openly. Initially, the reader is introduced to Cool Amy, a persona that is constructed to comply with a certain hyper-masculine, sexualized fantasy of women in order to attain maximum validation from men. This persona already reveals Amy’s ability to create an image that perfectly matches what others want to see in her: [T]he Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes, and anal sex, and jams hotdogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. (299 f., emphasis in original)

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The second persona Amy possesses is referred to as Diary Amy. Diary Amy is a pure work of fiction within the novel and the crucial piece of her plan to frame her husband for her alleged disappearance. Diary Amy is a vulnerable, disappointed wife with an emotionally rough marriage. She comes off as full of herself and somewhat high-strung, but mostly in a non-pathological way. It is Amy’s intention to portray Diary Amy as the victim, not the perpetrator. She is in fact very successful in staging Diary Amy as a helpless and emotionally abused housewife. Later, she exposes her true self as Actual or Avenging Amy and it becomes obvious that she is anything but an innocent victim. In fact, she is a highly manipulative, controlling, exploitative, and revengeful character. Actual Amy first reveals herself at the beginning of Part Two, when she presents several items on her checklist: Item 22, Cut myself has been on the list a long time. Now it’s real, and my arm hurts. […] I ended up cutting into the inside of my upper arm, gnawing on a rag so I wouldn’t scream. […] Then I cleaned it up as poorly as Nick would have done after he bashed my head in. I want the house to tell a story of conflict between true and false. The living room looks staged, yet the blood has been cleaned up: It can’t be Amy. […] I can tell you more about how I did everything, but I’d like you to know me first. Not Diary Amy, who is a work of fiction (and Nick said I wasn’t really a writer, and why did I ever listen to him?), but me, Actual Amy. (296, emphasis in original)

Where Diary Amy is conflicted and at times also neurotic, Actual Amy shows psychopathic and straight-forward narcissistic traits. While the former struggles with the pressure supposedly put on her by society and herself, the latter takes pride in ridding herself of social imperatives – a common characteristic of narcissists, who think that they are better than others (see APA 10). Her willingness to share the compromising details of her plan as Actual Amy shows that her desire for revenge, probably along with a need to be admired for her intelligence and cunning, is stronger than an awareness of the boundaries of socially acceptable behaviour. Overall, her mastery over these different personas is an important aspect of her manipulative and controlling behaviour; Amy admits to taking on whatever personality fits a given occasion in order to be admired: “I can’t help it, it’s what I’ve always done: The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personality. What persona feels good, what’s coveted, what’s au courant?” (299) The different personas either show who Amy really is or who she claims to be, and can be categorized accordingly. The first group of personas comprises the finely crafted image that she presents to most people. Both Diary Amy and Cool Amy belong to this category, even

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though these two personalities are aimed at different audiences: the former at the police and the general public, the latter at her husband Nick and ‘friends’. The second group consists of Actual Amy, which can be characterized as the opposing persona.8 On top of this admittedly complicated puppetry of different personas, there is a fourth persona that holds the key to Amy’s personality, namely Amazing Amy. Amazing Amy is the title of a children’s book series written by Amy’s parents, Rand and Marybeth Elliot. Although Amy’s childhood served as inspiration for the series, Amazing Amy was better than Amy at everything. This constellation and the pressure exerted on her by her parents can be seen as a source of a fear of rejection and feelings of worthlessness that might result in the mental disorder that Amy displays later in life. Her parents’ idealized version of herself in the form of the children’s book character, while making her feel exceptional, also functioned as a constant implicit criticism for not measuring up to Amazing Amy’s standards in real life. In this way, Amy’s childhood gives ample reasons for her need to be perfect while at the same time feeling superior to others. As a dearly wished-for only child, she even feels threatened by her stillborn sisters, because “[t]hey get to be perfect without even trying”, while she had to “try, and every day is a chance to be less than perfect” (299). If dealt with in the classroom, recognizing and classifying these key symp‐ toms can help the students navigate the manipulations of the text more safely and gain a better understanding of the novel, how it functions, and how it relates to their own lives and reality. At the beginning, students are likely to develop sympathy for Amy, the devoted wife, until they are challenged to question their initial assumptions when Amy’s image starts to crack. And yet, exposing Amy as a pathological liar and manipulator is anything but straightforward and easy. It requires a deep understanding of the text as well as psychological knowledge to recognize her condition and how it dictates her actions and the images of herself that she displays. Besides the insights into a psychological disorder and its effects that the novel affords in a fictionalized way, it also welcomes a discussion on the larger social consequences of narcissistic behaviour, be it in the form of a clinical pathology, or in the more subdued, everyday forms that proliferate spaces such as social media in particular (see Twenge, “Overwhelming Evidence” 21 f.). On this basis, students could be invited to think about the degree of truth about social expectations and social relationships that might also be found in Amy’s narration, beneath the web of lies that she spins.

8

Throughout the novel, Amy’s different personas are characterized explicitly by herself or Nick and implicitly through her actions.

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To guide this reception and the students’ learning process with the novel, an agenda for the classroom could potentially include tasks that, on the one hand, focus on Amy’s characterization in the context of a psychologically informed reading, such as creative writing or role play units that stage verbal disputes between Amy’s different personas, a close analysis of the disparities between Amy’s self-characterizations and the ways she is presented from the point of view of other characters in novel, or a comparison between real-life symptoms of NPD (to be researched and presented by students) and the fictionalized rep‐ resentation of the disorder in the novel. On the other hand, it could be interesting to focus on features of the novel that guide its reception, including questions relating to the relationship between paratextual and textual information. In a next step, a more overarching perspective should be included that asks to what extent the novel can be read as social criticism. The objective of such a teaching unit is to better comprehend how the relationship between the narrator Amy and the reader is crafted in the novel, and how its dynamic influences how readers may evaluate the characters and events at different points in the story. Insights into Amy’s mental condition may support an empathic understanding of the character, while also encouraging students to morally distance themselves from her violent and criminal actions. Finally, relating aspects of Amy’s worldview and understanding of social relations to observations made in their own social reality could induce students to critically reflect on the narcissistic tendencies that might shape their social world, as well as contextualize those tendencies within a larger societal and cultural level. 4. Conclusion

Novels that feature unreliable narrators with a mental illness meet the require‐ ments of school curricula and standards to an undisputable degree and should therefore become an integral part of high school reading lists. They require perspective-taking, complex negotiations of fictional truth, and also encourage the reader to grapple with the aesthetic devices through which literature is crafted. Furthermore, they allow for an ethical debate of how mental disease is represented, narrated, and dealt with, and shed light on what it means to have a mental illness for that person and the people around them. Flynn’s novel is especially well-suited for the classroom because of its multiperspectivity and the possibility for students to contrast and discuss contradicting perspectives. As students develop an understanding of the way Amy guides the reception of the story, they will learn about the necessity of reframing this very reception, and by doing so enhance their self-reflective sagacity.

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Even though Gone Girl reads like a realistic depiction of people with NPD, it is a literary representation of the disorder and not an autobiographic account from real-life sufferers. After all, the novel portrays an almost clinical picture of NPD in an extreme form, which is unlikely to be found in such an exact, unvaried way in real life. This dimension of fictionalization has to be present at all times when discussing the novel in school. Moreover, teachers face the challenge of not allowing for any stigmatization of the illness, but rather working towards an understanding of the condition featured in the novel. It is of vital importance to make the students comprehend that mental illness does not equal unreliability in real life or fiction, but that the combination of the two phenomena is an artistic maneuver on the author’s part. Delving deep into stories that feature narrators with a mental illness also allows one to ask (and possibly answer) a whole array of ethical questions that can potentially influence one’s behavior: “It is through narratives and fictional worlds that we are sensitised to ethical questions and moral inquiries insofar as they open up possible ways of life, which we can either subscribe to or reject.” (Baumbach et al. 3) In the case of novels that feature unreliable narrators with a mental illness, the teacher’s role is to help students specify and clarify these moral values, because they are not explicitly stated. These values need inference on the part of the reader or student – particularly when they are less experienced in life. In order to be able to make these inferences, the reader or student will need to be equipped with appropriate theoretical and methodological tools, such as close reading and analytical tools that include the recognition of cognitive dimensions. If applied to texts featuring unreliable narrators, the detection and understanding of the literary realization of psychological disorders will make students more successful when dealing with other texts as well. Through learning about and studying fictional mental illnesses, students will develop and increase their empathy for people with similar disorders in real life. Even though they should undoubtedly not be led to welcome the violent actions in novels like Gone Girl, they should be made aware of the fact that the minds of people with a mental illness may work differently. Empathizing with, but then also distancing themselves in crucial ways from narrators like Amy and their anti-social behaviour, could thus help move this ‘Generation Me’ towards a ‘Generation You and Me’.

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Bibliography

  Primary Sources

Flynn, Gillian. Gone Girl. Crown Publishers, 2012.

  Secondary Sources

APA (American Psychiatric Association). “DSM-IV and DSM-5 Criteria for the Person‐ ality Disorders.” American Psychiatric Association, 2012, https://www.psi.uba.ar/acade mica/carrerasdegrado/psicologia/sitios_catedras/practicas_profesionales/820_clinica _tr_personalidad_psicosis/material/dsm.pdf. Last Accessed 24 Aug. 2022. Ammons, Elizabeth. Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet. U of Iowa P, 2010. Baumbach, Sibylle, Herbert Grabes, and Ansgar Nünning. “Values in Literature and the Value of Literature: Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating and Constructing Norms and Values.” Literature and Values, edited by Sibylle Baumbach, Herbert Grabes, and Ansgar Nünning, WVT, 2009, pp. 1-15. Booth, Wayne C. “The Ethics of Teaching Literature.” The Essential Wayne Booth, edited by Walter Jost, The U of Chicago P, 2006, pp. 220-37. Brown, Melissa McInnis, Rachel B. Thibodeau, Jillian M. Pierucci, and Ansley Tullo Gilpin. “Supporting the Development of Empathy: The Role of Theory of Mind and Fantasy Orientation.” Social Development, vol. 26, no. 4, 2017, pp. 951-64. Christ, Susanne. “Fictions of Ageing, Illness, and Dementia: Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Brother (2006) and Emma Healey’s Elizabeth Is Missing (2014).” The British Novel in the Twenty-First Century. Cultural Concerns – Literary Developments – Model Interpretations, edited by Vera Nünning, and Ansgar Nünning, WVT, 2018, pp. 217-30. Hogan, Patrick C. What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion. Cambridge UP, 2011. Hotchkiss, Sandy. “Key Concepts in the Theory and Treatment of Narcissistic Phe‐ nomena.” Clinical Social Work Journal, vol. 33, no. 2, 2005, pp. 127-44. Kaess, Christiane. “Hass ist einfach salonfähig geworden.” Deutschlandfunk Online, 24 Dec. 2019, https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/empathie-hass-ist-einfach-salonfaehig-g eworden.694.de.html?dram:article_id=466626. Last accessed 12 May 2022. KMK (Kultusministerkonferenz). “Bildungsstandards für die fortgeführte Fremdsprache (Englisch/Französisch) für die Allgemeine Hochschulreife.” Sekretariat der Ständigen Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 18 Oct. 2012, https://www.kmk.org/fileadmin/Dateien/veroeffentlichungen_beschluesse/201 2/2012_10_18-Bildungsstandards-Fortgef-FS-Abi.pdf. Last accessed 12 May 2022. Lowen, Alexander. Narcissism. Denial of the True Self. Touchstone, 1983. Lunbeck, Elizabeth. The Americanization of Narcissism. Harvard UP, 2014.

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MBWWK (Ministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Weiterbildung Rheinland-Pfalz). “Lehrplan Englisch. Grund- und Leistungsfach Jahrgangsstufen 11 bis 13 der gymna‐ sialen Oberstufe.” Bildungsserver Rheinland-Pfalz, 1998, https://lehrplaene.bildung-rp .de/. Last accessed 12 May 2022. Nikolajeva, Maria. “Reading Other People’s Minds Through Word and Image.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 43, no. 3, 2012, pp. 273-91. Nünning, Vera. “The Affective Value of Fiction: Presenting and Evoking Emotions.” Writing Emotions. Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature, edited by Ingeborg Jandl et al., transcript, 2017, pp. 29-54. —. “Cognitive Science and the Value of Literature for Life.” Values of Literature, edited by Hanna Meretoja, Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, and Kristina Malmio, Brill/Rodopi, 2015, pp. 95-116. —. “The Ethics of Fictional Form: Persuasiveness and Perspective Taking from the Point of View of Cognitive Literary Studies.” Arcadia, vol. 50, no. 1, 2015, pp. 37-56. —. “Narrative Fiction and Cognition: Why We Should Read Fiction.” Forum for World Literature Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2015, pp. 41-61. —. Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction, Winter, 2014. Palmer, Alan. Social Minds in the Novel. Ohio State UP, 2010. Phelan, James. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Ohio State UP, 2007. Romberg, Bertil. Studies in the Narrative Technique of the First-Person Novel. Almqvist & Wiksell, 1962. Twenge, Jean M. “Overwhelming Evidence for Generation Me: A Reply to Arnett.” Emerging Adulthood, vol. 1, no. 1, 2013, pp. 21-26. —. “Generational Differences in Mental Health: Are Children and Adolescents Suffering More, or Less?” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, vol. 81, no. 4, 2011, pp. 469-72. —. “Generational Changes and their Impact in the Classroom: Teaching Generation Me.” Medical Education, vol. 43, no. 5, 2009, pp. 398-405. Zapf, Hubert. “Literature as Cultural Ecology. Notes Towards a Functional Theory of Imaginative Texts, with Examples from American Literature.” REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, vol. 17, 2001, pp. 85-100. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Ohio State UP, 2006.

Renouncers, Rumours, and ‘Beyond-the-Pales’ Nikolai Gogol and the Subversive Power of Narrative(s) in Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018)

Caroline Lusin

Great literature skirts the irrational. (Vladimir Nabokov)

1. Worldmaking, Self-Making, and the ‘Dark Sides’ of Narrative

The publication of Anna Burns’ Milkman in 2018 was well-timed, as the novel resonated with the heated debates going on at the time about Brexit and the #MeToo movement (see also Hutton 354).1 Set in the 1970s in an unnamed city driven by sectarian conflict easily recognized as the Belfast of the Troubles,2 its story could still be read as a response to the contemporary moment. With her very first sentence, the novel’s nameless 18-year-old narrator and protagonist sets up an atmosphere of violence, threat, and death that shapes her frame of mind: “The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and […] threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died. He had been shot by one of the state hit squads and I did not care about the shooting of this man.” (Milkman 1)3 Worse than the physical violence that the narrator, referenced throughout only as ‘middle sister’, experiences from Somebody McSomebody is the sexualized psychological violence exerted on her by the eponymous Milkman, a high-ranking republican paramilitary whose harassment of her proves deeply unsettling. Milkman, she is sure, pursues her and spies on her, and rumours circulate about her having

1 2 3

Burns had already completed the novel in spring 2014, but struggled to find a publisher (see Hutton 352 f.). The term ‘Troubles’ refers to the period of the Northern Ireland conflict from the civil rights protests in the late 1960s up until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. In the following, references to Milkman will be given without repeating the title.

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an affair with the married man. The way in which he subtly but systematically intimidates the narrator in order to control her is a case in point for one of the ‘dark sides of empathy’ Fritz Breithaupt identifies in his study of that name (The Dark Sides of Empathy): empathy, according to Breithaupt, is a prerequisite not only of moral action, but also of negative impulses and actions like humiliation, cruelty, and stalking, which he describes as forms of ‘empathetic sadism’.4 Middle sister’s fictional autobiography, set in a Catholic quarter in North Belfast, therefore not only made a poignant contribution to increasing awareness of sexual violence against women; it also painted a haunting picture of the political conflict and radicalized sectarian communities a ‘hard’ Northern Irish Border might once more entail. However, in exploring the “intersection of nationalist politics and hypermasculinity” (White 122), Milkman also makes a point of highlighting the profoundly ambivalent functions of narrative in processes of worldmaking and self-making. Focusing on middle sister’s experience of being subjected to sexual harass‐ ment in an oppressive sectarian community, Milkman represents a characteris‐ tically ‘broken’ narrative marked by discontinuity and fragmentation. In its plot, events, and characters, the novel meets the central criteria developed by Vera and Ansgar Nünning for so-called ‘broken narratives’, which typically centre on “crucial and even traumatic experiences, events and ruptures that do not lend themselves to being readily assimilated into conventional plots, schemata or cultural scripts” (“‘Broken Narratives’” 49). Telling her story from a temporal distance of twenty years, middle sister is struggling to come to terms with the traumatic experience of being stalked by Milkman. From the point of view of the community, middle sister’s alleged involvement with Milkman certainly represents “a deviation from the canonical, i.e. from what is regarded as normal” (ibid. 57) – according to middle sister, rumour has it “that forty-one and eighteen was disgusting, that twenty-three years’ difference was disgusting, that he was married” (1). His arrival is not only unexpected (see Nünning and Nünning, “‘Broken Narratives’” 58), as he “stepped out from nowhere onto the scene” (2); for middle sister, the insistent pursuit by Milkman above all “transgresses the norms and routine of everyday experience” (Nünning and Nünning, “‘Broken Narratives’” 57) to the extent of reducing her to “some hypnotised, debilitated state” (298). His death towards the end of the novel leaves her stunned at the realization of “how much I’d been closed down, how much I’d been thwarted into a carefully constructed nothingness by that man” (303). Like a prototypical ‘broken narrative’, Milkman “thus revolves around a major event

4

For a more extensive exploration of literature and empathy see Nünning, Reading Fictions.

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that has severely disrupted the expectations, life and narrative of the respective subject” (Nünning and Nünning, “‘Broken Narratives’” 56). On the structural level, this disruptive element is expressed in “severely diminished degrees of continuity and coherence” (ibid. 41) occasioned in Milkman by an associative, digressive style, with many flashbacks and flashforwards. This digressive mode of narration not only “conveys […] [middle sister’s] fear and bewilderment at the time and calls attention to the act of telling” (White 113); it also indicates her struggles of framing and expressing her experience in an adequate way to overcome her shattered sense of self. While middle sister’s story may ultimately prove a case in point “that narra‐ tives are among the most important and powerful ways of self‑, community‑, identity‑, sense‑, and worldmaking” (Nünning and Nünning, “Salutogenesis” 158), it plays self-reflexively in many ways upon Nelson Goodman’s assertion that worlds are always made “from other worlds”, that “the making is a remaking” (6, emphasis in original). As if to draw attention to its own ‘literariness’, middle sister’s narrative is steeped in implicit as well as explicit allusions to a variety of different intertexts and media. Writing in The Guardian, Claire Kilroy finds middle sister’s “digressive, batty narrative voice” reminiscent of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and her alleged involvement with several men can be read as an ironic reversal of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. When middle sister first meets Milkman, she is in the middle of reading Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe; the fact that Milkman usually appears in a white, “shapeshifting” (3) van is a similarly ironic reversal of the cliché of the gallant knight in shining armour on a white steed. Writing in The Irish Times, finally, Adrian McKinty remarks that “Milkman reads like one of those Russian novels that begins ‘In those days, in our Province, in the town of Z-’ and […] there are agreeable echoes of Chekov, Tolstoy and Turgenev.” (n.p.) But I would argue that Milkman’s most resonant intertext is the short story “The Overcoat” (“Shinel”, 1842) by Nikolai Gogol, whom critics described as “easily the most innovative and unclassifiable Russian writer” (Hokanson 543), one of a cycle of five stories known collectively as Gogol’s ‘Petersburg Tales’.5 “The Overcoat” centres on a poor copying clerk called Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, who does not have any meaningful social relations. One day he finds that his old winter coat has become so threadbare that he is forced to order a new one, which he can barely afford. Henceforth all his mental energy is consumed by the new coat, which he treats like a beloved woman; as the owner of the new coat, Akaky suddenly becomes

5

Unlike the other intertexts, Gogol and his “Overcoat” are mentioned three times (20, twice on page 21), which underscores their relevance to Milkman.

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popular and is even invited to a party. However, when the coat is stolen, all his efforts to retrieve it fail; once more isolated, he dies of grief. In true Romantic fashion, the story ends with the fantastic appearance of a ghost who avenges Akaky’s death by stealing the coats of other people. At first glance, there do not seem to be any obvious parallels to Milkman; a closer look, however, reveals that the texts share key motifs, plot elements, and topics. In the following, I propose to read Milkman through the lens of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” to uncover the redemptive as well as subversive, but also seductive power of narratives in both texts. The intertextual relationship between these texts is emblematic of how, as Vera Nünning argues drawing on Paul Ricoeur, “fictional narratives always make use of material that is ‘pre-figured’ by both literature and other discourses” (“Fictional Worlds” 216). Milkman not only shares key social, ideological, and political features of the narrated world with “The Overcoat”; the protagonists also employ the same coping strategies, and both texts display a similar approach to language as a tool of both oppression and liberation. The foil of Gogol’s story enables middle sister to frame and articulate her traumatic experiences and, by providing her with ways of worldmaking, allows her to assert her own narrative authority. In the upshot, Milkman thus without a doubt gestures towards the capacity of narratives to bring about positive change, since it functions for the narrator as a tool of self-exploration and, ultimately, self-assertion; but at the same time the novel resists a reading that elides the ‘dark sides’ of narrative. Against the backdrop of Gogol’s “Overcoat”, Milkman illustrates on the level of its plot how narrative may function as a vehicle of oppression or escapist immersion; on the level of narrative mediation, however, the novel simultaneously confirms how narrative and story-telling can constitute poetic acts of rebellion against the hegemonic essentialist logic of its narrated world. Proceeding from a comparison between the oppressive social and political orders in Milkman and “The Overcoat”, I will elaborate on how, on the one hand, the characters use narratives as a means of dissociation from their everyday reality; on the other hand, I will illustrate how the use of language by the narrators effectively subverts the notion of monolithic truth on which these worlds are built. 2. Social Hierarchies, Binaries, and the Repressive City

Milkman and “The Overcoat” are both set in a world subjected to rigid binary structures in geographical, ideological, as well as social terms. While the Ireland of the Troubles was shaped by the contrast between Protestant North (Belfast) and Catholic South (Dublin), the Russia of Gogol’s time operated on an

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ideological as well as geographical division between East (Moscow) and West (St. Petersburg). Founded in 1703 by Tsar Peter the Great with a precise political and military purpose, the port of St. Petersburg was supposed to function as a ‘window to the West’ and its innovations, whereas Moscow stood for the traditional ‘holy Rus’; the church reigned in Moscow, and in Petersburg the state. As Kathleen Scollins argues, “Petersburg’s situation on the northwestern periphery of the territory marked it as fundamentally non-Russian, an unrooted, foreign city alienated from its native culture” (xix), a topology reminiscent of industrialized Belfast, inclined towards Britain, whereas “Moscow, in the imagination of the people, symbolized everything national, truly Russian, the motherland.” (Volkov 51, my translation)6 Where Moscow and Petersburg are representative of the opposing ideologies of the ‘Slavophiles’ on the one hand and the ‘Westerners’ on the other, Belfast and Dublin are associated with the conflict between loyalists and republicans expressed also in religious terms as ‘Protestant’ versus ‘Catholic’. The narrated worlds of both texts are thus steeped in “polarity and contradiction” (Scollins xix) in a way that is reflected in the respective social structures, as both are set in historical periods in which the individual was faced with repression from overpowering authorities making short shrift with human rights. Notwithstanding the difference in historical context, both middle sister and Akaky must contend with an extremely rigid system of norms and regulations geared towards eliminating any divergence and upheld by constant censorship and surveillance (see Volkov 48). The Tsarist Russia of Gogol’s time was do‐ minated by a rigidly stratified social system in which everything, down to people’s hairstyle and dress, was strictly regulated. The so-called ‘Table of Ranks’ introduced by Peter the Great was notorious at the time for creating a claustrophobic society in which the ruling elite cruelly repressed people of lower rank or divergent opinions – as the narrator of “The Overcoat” explains, “with us rank is the first thing that has to be declared” (“The Overcoat” 116).7 This system of regulations was perceived to have a profoundly dehumanizing effect on subjects, and it is characteristic of 19th-century Petersburg fiction that “the city’s dehumanizing forces are aligned against the individual” (Scollins 199). Akaky, too, is strangely devoid of any distinctive features: he “cannot be described as very remarkable; he was shortish, somewhat pockmarked, with somewhat reddish hair, apparently with somewhat less than perfect eyesight, with a somewhat

6 7

“Москва в народном сознании символизировала все национальное, исконно русское, родное” (Volkov 51). In the following, references to “The Overcoat” will be given without repeating the title.

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baldish pate” (115). The narrator is clear about the fact that “[a]bsolutely no respect whatever was accorded him in the department” (117), and the ‘important personage’ Akaky turns to for help after the theft of his coat treats him with such violent contempt that “Akaky Akakievich was paralysed with terror, and lurched backwards, shaking like a leaf and quite unable to remain on his feet” (139). With all his insecurity and lack of distinction, Akaky is clearly the product of a repressive hierarchical system leaving no space for the individual. The Belfast of the Troubles may be an altogether different setting, but Milkman depicts a society equally founded on hierarchy, authority, and intimi‐ dation; it is a world in which, as the narrator states, “violence was everybody’s main gauge for judging those around them” (2). In middle sister’s district, power and authority are largely a question of violence and hypermasculinity, as “the men of power in our area” is synonymous with “the paramilitaries in our area” (12). Just like how the thieves in “The Overcoat” simply take Akaky’s beloved garment away, the paramilitaries in Milkman threaten to commandeer a valuable car part from middle sister’s boyfriend, extort money, and generally disrespect basic human rights. What is more, everything in this community is strictly divided along the lines of ‘us’ and ‘them’: “‘Us’ and ‘them’ was second nature, convenient, familiar, insider” (22). The two rivalling factions – the ‘renouncers of the state’ and the ‘defenders of the state’ – as well as the state itself rigidly police the borders between these categories. As middle sister explains, this division emerging from radical ‘othering’ shapes all areas of life in her community: As regards the psycho-political atmosphere, with its rules of allegiance, of tribal iden‐ tification, of what was allowed and not allowed, matters didn’t stop at ‘their names’ and at ‘our names’, at ‘us’ and ‘them’, at ‘our community’ and ‘their community’, at ‘over the road’, ‘over the water’ and ‘over the border’. Other issues had similar directives as well. […] There was food and drink. The right butter. The wrong butter. The tea of allegiance. The tea of betrayal. There were ‘our shops’ and ‘their shops’. Placenames. What school you went to. (24 f.)

The list, need I say it, goes on. Shared membership of this community is ruth‐ lessly enforced, and those who resist the obligation to conform find themselves branded, like middle sister, as “beyond-the-pales” (59). Just as Akaky appears almost as a nonentity, middle sister’s community is highly suspicious of what deviates from the average norm, cultivating the same “all-pervasive climate of official suspicion” (Peace xxvii) as Tsar Nicholas’ police state: “So shiny was bad, and ‘too sad’ was bad, and ‘too joyous’ was bad, which meant you had to go around not being anything” (91). The community’s reaction to middle sister’s

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forced involvement with Milkman, along with its radical thinking in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’, illustrate how empathy, in the words of Breithaupt, can “lead to perceiving the social world in black and white, thinking in terms of friend and enemy”, because “[h]uman beings tend to quickly take sides in conflicts and use empathy to glorify their chosen side while condemning and demonizing the other side” (17).8 As I will illustrate in the following, the characters navigate these profoundly oppressive systems in both Milkman and “The Overcoat” in ways that explore the power of narratives to foster both dissociation and empathetic identification. 3. Strategies of Dissociation and the Fetishization of Objects

In the system of binary opposition characterizing their lived reality in both geographical and ideological terms, the central characters of Milkman and “The Overcoat” do not only find themselves on the very margins of their respective soci‐ eties and communities; they actively dissociate themselves from their surroundings by immersing themselves into imagined, alternative realities bearing witness to the potency of fiction. In the case of middle sister, it is at least as much her avid reading as her alleged affair with Milkman that turns her into an outsider. Constantly ‘reading while walking’, middle sister systematically retreats from the violence around her into the far-removed world of 19th-century fiction: Every weekday, rain or shine, gunplay or bombs, stand-off or riots, I preferred to walk home reading my latest book. This would be a nineteenth-century book because I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century. (5)

In a debate with her ‘longest friend’, this friend not only confirms middle sister’s outsider status; she also highlights the extent to which middle sister’s reading transports her into a mental space entirely different from the Belfast streets she is walking while reading:

8

This notion of empathy as encouraging black-and-white side-taking is based on Breithaupt’s three-person model of empathy, in which empathy originates in the detached observer of a conflict taking the side of one the parties of the conflict. What happens in this situation is that “the observer experiences the emotional situation of A and develops empathy for A but apathy or antipathy for B” (Breithaupt 100). As Breithaupt explains, “[e]mpathy is not the end here but rather the beginning for renewed and or confirmed side-taking and, therefore, a stronger alignment with the chosen side” in a positive feedback loop (ibid. 100 f.). For more detail on this three-person model see Breithaupt (75-130).

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It’s the way you do it – reading books – whole books, taking notes, checking footnotes, underlining passages as you’re at some desk or something, in a little private study or something, the curtains closed, your lamp on, a cup of tea besides you, essays being penned – your discourses, your lucubrations. It’s disturbing. It’s deviant. It’s optical-illusional. Not public-spirited. (200, emphasis in original)

Associated with seclusion, security, and comfort, the closed space of this mental world contrasts in almost all respects with the everyday reality of sectarian Belfast and the novel’s implied setting of Ardoyne, a world in which violence has become the norm. In the Belfast of the Troubles, explosives are paradoxically perceived as less threatening than books, as middle sister asks her friend: “‘Are you saying it’s okay for him [Milkman] to go round with Semtex but not okay for me to read Jane Eyre in public?’ […] ‘Semtex isn’t unusual,’ she said.” (200 f.) Middle sister’s empathetic immersion into narrative, then, serves her to efface herself from an everyday reality in which the basic premises of right and wrong are skewed. In constantly immersing herself in the literature of previous centuries, middle sister adopts the same strategy as Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich to escape a hostile and repressive world. Not only does Akaky shun all usual pleasures, resuming work even in his spare time in the evening; he becomes absorbed in his job of copying so completely that he starts living in a reality that is entirely his own. As Gogol’s narrator reflects: It would be an understatement to say that he served with diligence; nay, he served with love. In his work, his copying, he beheld a world that was colourful [orig. ‘raznoobraznyj’ = ‘multifarious’, my translation] and attractive. His face would take on an expression of pleasure; there were certain letters of the alphabet which he particularly favoured and if he encountered them he would be quite transported: he would chuckle and wink and mouth sounds, so that it seemed possible to read in his face every letter described by his pen. […] Beyond his copying the world seemed not to exist for him. (118)9

If Akaky’s intense emotional interaction with the letters betrayed by his facial expressions suggests a human interpersonal relationship, it also foregrounds the hermetic seclusion of his inner world; the world of letters seems much more real to him than what is going on around him. Indeed, the narrator leaves no

9

Brombert points out how the principle of copying is even rooted in Akaky Akakievich’s name, “because the syllable kak = like (tak kak = just as) embeds the principle of sameness in Akaky’s name, determining, it would seem, his single-minded, life-long activity of copying and implicit condemnation to sameness” (570).

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doubt as to what extent Akaky is wont to lose touch with reality, as he describes Akaky walking about town as follows: But when Akaky Akakievich ever looked at anything he only saw all about him the even lines scripted in his neat hand, and only if a horse should appear from nowhere and thrust its nose over his shoulder, emitting a blast of horsy breath through its nostrils onto his cheeks, might he realize that he was in the middle of the street and not in the middle of a sentence. (119)

This description of how Akaky’s internal vision of the letters obliterates every‐ thing around him metaphorically highlights the worldmaking power of narrative as well as the escapist element inherent in immersing oneself into fiction. The fact that it is specifically physical, sensual experiences that interrupt Akaky’s immersion emphasizes the contrast between mental world and physical world. The passage from “The Overcoat” just quoted reads like a metaphorical description of the effects of middle sister’s ‘reading while walking’ in Milkman, and indeed both texts foreground the escapism involved in their protagonists’ habit of imaginative dissociation. With Akaky Akakievich, focusing on his letters even in his spare time is a means of ignoring an everyday reality in which he is lacking any agency or meaningful personal contacts. Where middle sister is concerned, she explicitly acknowledges that her reading functions as a means of avoiding reality: “I knew that by reading while walking I was losing touch with communal up-to-datedness […]. Purposely not wanting to know, therefore, was exactly what my reading-while-walking was about.” (65) Referring to her reading, she talks about “my disappearances into other dimensions” (208), and her longest friend explicitly identifies this strategy, too: “Your not wanting to be present but now forced by circumstance of Milkman to be present has been one of those reality checks that life has given you […].” (203) Milkman, in other words, does not just embody the patriarchal oppression and toxic masculinity rife in middle sister’s community (see e.g. Darling); he represents what cannot be ignored, an invasive element or reality principle forcing her to face up to the terrifying reality of sectarian Belfast whose excessive violence is shaped by the same kind of hypermasculinity Milkman embodies. As middle sister concedes towards the end of the novel, “[t]he truth was dawning on me of how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, be adult.” (294) In Milkman, middle sister thus has to confront a hostile force similar in kind to the one Akaky has to face: his coat is taken by “a couple of men with moustaches” (133), and hence “by thieves whose masculinity is emphasized by their moustaches” (Peace xx).

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In both Milkman and “The Overcoat”, middle sister’s and Akaky’s fixation on reading and letters respectively gesture towards a wider concern with infatuation and obsession, which both texts negotiate in similar ways. Dmitri Chizhevsky has pointed out that “[o]ne of the leading ideas in Gogol’s fictional works is that each person has his particular fervor, his passion, his enthusiasm.” (315) With Akaky, it is his new coat from which he suddenly derives an illusion of support and meaning in an existence, in the words of Richard Peace, “in all senses bereft of significance” (xxxi). Even as Akaky has to starve saving money for the new coat, the mere expectation of the new coat brings forth a change, as “he derived spiritual nourishment, feeding on the dream of his new coat” (127): With this new regime his whole existence became somehow more fulfilled, as if he had got married, as if there were some other person with him, as if he were no longer alone but attended by some fair companion who had agreed to step down life’s path with him – and this pleasant companion, this soul mate was none other than his heavy, padded overcoat […]. He became somehow more alive, and stronger in character, like a man who has determined his goal in life. (Ibid.)

The coat clearly serves as a substitute for the female companion Akaky is lacking, a notion underscored in the original Russian by the fact that the word for ‘overcoat’, shinel, is female. The coat as an object of erotic infatuation thus not only literally cloaks the latter’s absence in Akaky’s real life; it also ties in with Peace’s observation that “for the Gogolian chinovnik the external identity of rank replaces the inner content of personality” (xii f., emphasis in original) – the cloak, too, only serves as an external veil for the emptiness underneath. On a more abstract level, the fetishization of the coat highlights the dehumanization of Akaky and – by extension – the world to which he belongs. In the words of Bodo Zelinsky, [t]he erotic vocabulary reveals Akaky Akakievich’s strong emotional connection to the new coat to radically call it into question in a profoundly ironic move. What is so questionable about this connection is the fact that a banal everyday object should cease to function as an object and instead be ascribed the quality of a human being. […] The fetishization of the coat dehumanizes Akaky and his world even more strongly. (58, my translation)10 10

“Das erotische Vokabular weist auf Akakij Akakiewitschs starke seelische Bindung an den neuen Mantel und entlarvt als Mittel der Ironie die tiefe Fragwürdigkeit dieser Bindung. Fragwürdig ist, daß ein banales Objekt, ein Gegenstand des täglichen Gebrauchs, aus seiner Dingsphäre herausgelöst wird und die Qualität eines menschlichen Wesens erhält. […] Die Erhebung des Mantels zum Fetisch bewirkt eine Zunahme der Entmenschlichung.” (Zelinsky 58)

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As the central symbol of the story (see ibid. 60), the coat epitomizes the “fantastically limited, closed-in structure of thoughts, feelings and desires” (Eichenbaum 396) at the core of Gogol’s text. Such fetishization, then, works in two directions: to the same degree as the fetishized coat is humanized, the admirer of the fetish is dehumanized (see Böhme 335 f.). Gogol’s eroticized overcoat has its functional equivalent in Milkman in a rare antique car part acquired by middle sister’s boyfriend, or more precisely ‘maybe-boyfriend’, as she constantly refers to him. Having managed to get hold of a rare old Blower Bentley, maybe-boyfriend and his colleagues take the antique car apart and distribute its components among themselves, leaving maybe-boyfriend with the car’s supercharger. Like Akaky’s new coat, the supercharger turns into a local attraction that draws half the neighbourhood to maybe-boyfriend’s house to admire it in the most excited terms, sparking lively debates from which middle sister is excluded: “Soon the house was packed and I was shoved into a corner with the car-nuts talking classic cars, historic cars, enigmatic cars, performance cars, muscle cars, soft-skinned cars […].” (21) While this general enthusiasm clearly mirrors the absurdly overawed reaction of Akaky’s colleagues to his new coat,11 maybe-boyfriend also shares Akaky’s erotic feelings for his most prized possession in admiring the car part: “And now he was doting on it […]. He stood beside it, gazing down, a big smile on his face, beaming away. And that was what he did – the way I’d get turned on, the way he’d turn me on […].” (17) If the car as such is the central fetish of modernity (see Bischoff 400), the fact that maybe-boyfriend and his fellow enthusiasts should idolize merely a part of it, entirely dysfunctional on its own, underscores the irony of their behaviour foregrounded by the narrator. In relating maybe-boyfriend’s story of the supercharger, middle sister describes how “all of them – meaning the guys at work – had been overcome with orgasms because some super-special motor vehicle, built by some high-dream car maker, was dumped […] into the middle of […] their laps” (16). Such absurdly hyperbolic use of composites, along with the sexualized description of the guys’ equally hyperbolic reaction, is strongly reminiscent of Gogol’s own characteristic use of “grotesque hyperbolism” (Eichenbaum 397). As Boris Eichenbaum explains referring to “The Overcoat”, [t]he style of the grotesque demands, in the first place, that the described situation or event be contained in a world small to the point of the fantastic, of artificial experiences […] completely cut off from the large reality, from the fulness of spiritual life, and in 11

“They all dashed out into the lobby to admire their colleague’s latest acquisition, and started congratulating him and wishing him well” (130).

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the second place, that this be done not in a didactic or satirical intent, but with the aim of giving scope for a playing with reality, for breaking up and freely displacing its elements, so that the usual correlations and connections (psychological and logical) turn out, in this newly constructed world, to be unreal, and each trifle can grow to colossal dimensions. (395, emphasis in original)

If the car lovers’ fixation on the supercharger is clearly cut off from the larger reality, their fetishism seems artificial or even fantastic in its absurdity; fetishism at any rate has connotations of the magic, numinous, or divine (see Bischoff; Roca 105), and the car part assumes a power that seems entirely disproportionate. Such “playing with reality” in the style of the grotesque bestows upon middle sister a power she lacked in her youth in real life, and this is at the core of her use of language and narrative in Milkman in general. 4. Language Games and the Subversion of Monolithic Truth

On the most abstract level of the novel, middle sister employs language in her narrative as a means of protest and self-empowerment against the linguistic, emotional, and social oppression ingrained in her community. In taking control of her own story as the narrator, she is setting her own creativity against her community’s language rules and proclivity for rumour. The fundamental social and ideological dichotomies of her everyday reality shape the use of language, such as the choice of names, many of which “were too much of the country ‘over the water’” (23) and hence forbidden for no obvious reason: “It was the spirit of the community going back in time that deemed which names were allowed and which were not.” (22) Language in this community “is a means of maintaining rigorously policed boundaries of identity” (Darling 315). It is politicized and imbued with the conflicts of the past: The banned names were understood to have become infused with the energy, the power of history, the age-old conflict, enjoinments and resisted impositions as laid down long ago in this country by that country, with the original nationality of the name now not in the running at all. (23)

Perhaps most fatally, this restrictive and repressive politics of language extends to the community’s ways of perceiving the world, which boils down to an almost wilful, habitual ignorance of alternatives and variations. This purposely narrow-minded worldview comes to the fore in middle sister’s description of her French language class, where students and teacher become embroiled in a debate about whether the sky can be described as anything else than the conventional ‘blue’:

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Of course we knew really that the sky could be more than blue, […] but why should any of us admit to that? […] It was the convention not to admit it, not to accept detail for this type of detail would mean choice and choice would mean responsibility and what if we failed in our responsibility? Failed, too, in the interrogation of the consequences of seeing more than we could cope with? (70 f.)

This passage explicitly links the reductive vocabulary prescribed by communal convention to a failure of taking responsibility for potentially deviant choices. The community prescribes how to use language, and accordingly, how to con‐ ceptualize reality; linguistic convention corresponds to ideological position. If such a tendency towards linguistic reduction may entail a failure of recognition, this potentially weakens the subject’s hold on reality. The effects of this restrictive politics of language are exacerbated in Milkman by the proliferation of rumours in middle sister’s community, which is equiva‐ lent in this context to a loss of agency over words. As middle sister explains, I was appalled at how easily an unguided thought, even one not expressed, could get plucked from the topsoil and still manage successfully to get through. And now here it was – out – having a life of its own, and I could only hope that […] eventually this rumour would go to dust and be forgotten, disappearing off the radar as if it had never been. (188)

In a social climate in which almost everything is turned into a political statement, such precarious control over one’s stories is disquieting at best. In persistently highlighting “the twisting of words, the fabrication of words and the exaggeration of words that went on in this place” (54), middle sister foregrounds the extent to which controlling language and narrative is critical to individual agency. Her alleged affair with Milkman in particular is emblematic of how middle sister is living in “a district that thrived on suspicion, supposition and imprecision, where everything was so back-to-front it was impossible to tell a story properly, or not tell it but just remain quiet, nothing could get said here or not said but it was turned into gospel.” (229) Such annihilation of her linguistic agency, which profoundly unsettles her relationship to her world, arguably seems almost more disturbing to middle sister than the physical threat posed by Milkman. This lack of linguistic agency is also at the very core of the novel’s central intertext. What ultimately destroys Akaky Akakievich is not the theft of the coat as such, but the pitiless, annihilating words of the ‘important personage’, and his own failure to use words efficiently. Throughout the entire story and in almost all his encounters with others, Akaky fails to assert himself by efficiently using words, just as middle sister fails to counter the rumours. While Akaky,

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finding himself once again in a “tongue-tied state” (138), is literally struck down by the reproachful words of the important personage and “carried out almost unconscious” (139), the important personage in turn is pleasantly surprised at the shattering effects of his own words, “quite entranced by the idea that his word alone was sufficient to scare the living daylights out of another person” (139). If Akaky, then, must be seen as someone who fatally lacks words to assert himself and his point of view (see Zelinsky 57), this places him “at the mercy of those who use words to significant effect” (Peace xxxi).12 While both middle sister and Akaky Akakievich thus suffer from their lack of control over words, middle sister’s autobiographical narrative in Milkman can be read as the successful attempt to reassert her own agency not just over her story, but simultaneously over her language in a way that establishes a critical, ironic distance. This ironic distance implies a position of narratorial authority diametrically opposed to middle sister’s past situation of not being “sure anymore what was plausible, what was exaggeration, what might be reality or delusion or paranoia” (169). As Siân White puts it, middle sister “is self-aware about the challenge of negotiating between her powerlessness to speak then and her power to tell now. As a result, her narrative is both explanatory and exploratory, spontaneous and unguarded, but also grounded and assertive.” (118) Middle sister’s irony is the keynote of a highly idiosyncratic narrative style geared to overcoming the linguistic and ideological restrictions of her oppressive community. Perhaps most crucially, it derives from the narrator’s refusal to use any of the established political terms for describing the Northern Ireland conflict. In middle sister’s narrative, the Troubles figure only vaguely – and somewhat euphemistically – as ‘the political problems’; loyalists and nationalists appear as ‘defenders of the state’ and ‘renouncers of the state’ respectively, the loyalist quarters are ‘over the road’, and Britain features as ‘over the water’. Besides allowing a more universal reading of the novel (see also Hutton 360) by blurring the situatedness of the narrative (see Nünning, “Fictional Worlds” 223), an effect which Anna Burns herself suggested in an interview (“Rathbones Folio Prize”), these generalized terms imply an ironic distance from the circumstances in which middle sister was previously so deeply embroiled both socially and mentally as well as emotionally. As Clare Hutton illustrates, the “persistent use of these invented terms […] is a neat and ironic means by which she suggests her estrangement from the community in which 12

Peace more specifically argues: “That it is words that finally destroy Akaky Akakievich should not surprise us; all his life he has been obsessed by words – but only their outer form: the letters in which they are clothed. […] Yet the essence of words, their meaning, has always eluded him.” (xxi)

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she lives, and her distaste for everything that community values” (365). By the same token, middle sister’s omission of any personal names, including her own, signals a certain abstraction from the events and people described:13 she refers to all characters simply by their position in the family or community, preferably their relationship to her, such as “third brother-in-law”, “wee sisters”, “longest friend” or “tablets girl”.14 This focus on family relationships simultaneously brings her into focus as the centre of narrative authority. In a manner strongly reminiscent of Nikolai Gogol’s characteristic “narrative excesses and hyperverbality” (Scollins xliii), middle sister asserts this authority through a verbal exuberance profoundly at odds with the linguistic as well as ideological demands of her community. In opposition to the community’s restrictive politics of language, as a narrator middle sister is inclined towards a proliferation of words characterized by varied expressions and unusual phrases, as in her description of the family home: The house, too, was having a go. Raps, noises, movements, agitations of the air, displacement of objects. It was banging and retorting and causing discordance – all to berate me, to warn me, to call attention to the threat that already I knew was surrounding me. (184)

Such verbal creativity and exuberance imbues her style with a rhythmic, almost poetic quality – flags, for instance, are described as “invented to be instinctive and emotional – often pathologically, narcissistically emotional” (25), and the times were “paranoid times, […], knife-edge times, primal times” (27). It is not unlike the expressive quality of Gogol’s narrative, which has the tendency not simply to relate, […] but to reproduce words mimetically and by means of articulation, with sentences chosen and joined not according to the principles of logical speech alone, but rather on the principle of expressive speech (Eichenbaum 380).

Such verbose expressivity effectively undermines the rigid policing of language in middle sister’s community. This strongly comes to the fore in the scene involving the French language class. After debating the colour of the sky, teacher and pupils once more find themselves at odds about the teacher’s choice of words: 13 14

Orlaith Darling moreover elaborates on how names and the use of them are connected in Milkman to patriarchal power (see 315-17). This innovative use of names is one more feature Milkman shares with the works of Gogol, as Eichenbaum emphasizes the “special attitude of Gogol to given names and surnames and his inventiveness in this sphere” (381).

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Teacher started again. This time it was the fugacious (whatever that meant) black appearance of street trees owing to the crepuscular (whatever that meant) quality of the sky behind them, with the others – still in their own struggle – complaining that our town didn’t have fugacity, crepuscules or street trees […]. (78)

While middle sister’s experiencing self actively questions this unusual choice of words, it is precisely words like this, of an antiquated or elevated style, that abound in her narrating self’s vocabulary, such as “behoving of” (13), “opprobrium” (13) and “cumbersome” (96). Such exuberant stylistic activity goes profoundly against the grain of middle sister’s oppressive community, where being inconspicuous is the safest thing to be.15 From this point of view, middle sister’s ‘broken narrative’ really constitutes a poetic act of rebellion against the oppressive order imposed by her community, a function Milkman shares not just with Gogol’s Petersburg Tales, but with the so-called ‘Petersburg text’, a number of artistic works about the city that V.N. Toporov conceptualized as a single ‘text’. Originating in Alexander Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman (Medny vsadnik, 1833), this body of work is, as Kathleen Scollins puts it, “unified not only by common locus but by thematic, structural, and even lexical concerns, as each individual work appears to recycle plot points and even a tightly controlled set of vocabulary from earlier works” (xxi). In her own approach to the concept, Scollins identifies “a pattern of verbal creation, oppression, and rebellion fundamental to the city’s narrative” (xi). From Petersburg’s legendary inception by Tsar Peter the Great, who allegedly founded the city by giving the order “‘Let there be a city here’ [Zdes’ byt’ gorodu]” (ibid. xv f.), its (hi)story has been dominated by varying official and mythical accounts of its early days, as well as widely divergent visions of its future. For Scollins, the conflict between the new social, political, and ideological order decreed by Peter the Great on the one hand and the ‘old’, traditional Russia on the other is crystallized in a battle for narrative authority, a “struggle over language and power” (xii) in which the authors of the ‘Petersburg text’ – Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky above all else – oppose Peter’s oppressive system. According to Scollins, these authors variously inscribe, imitate, contest, and transcend Peter’s logos in order to assert their own narrative authority. By giving voice to the “little man” (in the sense of granting him recognition and public sympathy), Pushkin and Gogol write against Peter’s postulated semiotic order. Although Evgenii, Akakii, and all their literary

15

For more detailed remarks on Milkman’s lexicon, including its use of Hiberno-English, see Hutton (358-66).

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brethren are barred from the Word within their poems, the tradition of inarticulate ‘little men’ they generate paradoxically gains a literary influence in opposition to Peter’s system of ranks and orders. […] This authority refers to the author’s attainment of linguistic agency, his newly achieved ability to verbally create the self and control the world around him. (xlvi)

On the level of narrative mediation, middle sister also defies the semiotic as well as social and political order of her community to attain linguistic agency, which finally allows her, like those authors, to control the world around her, compensating for the utter loss of control of her life and her self represented by Milkman. If Akaky, what with his death from sheer desperation, is a good case in point for Scollins’ claim that “the city’s human occupants – the ostensible ‘heroes’ of these tales – remain almost ostentatiously voiceless, silenced variously by madness, incoherence, or social position” (ix), middle sister has managed to find her own voice and style. From that point of view, middle sister’s “experiencing and telling selves” are not, as Siân White asserts, “separated only by time” (118); on the contrary, there is a decisive difference in agency and experience. As a character within her own story, middle sister tries to defy rumour by simply keeping silent; her silence, she explains, is “my one bit of power in this disempowering world” (205). As the narrator of her own story, however, she manages to turn the tables and reassert her power through shaping her own narrative, thus drawing, just like the authors of the Petersburg text, “attention to the creative word as a potent response to an oppressive political order” (Scollins xii). 5. Conclusion

As part of their response to the oppressive political orders at stake in these texts, Milkman and “The Overcoat” flaunt a discrepancy between story and discourse that radically foregrounds perspectivity and subjectivity. On the level of the discourse, both texts destabilize the reading experience by denying a straightforward narrative. If middle sister’s narration is, as Siân White puts it, “often distressingly digressive, with stories mushrooming within stories, leading many readers to find the novel difficult” (117), this might, on the one hand, be traced back to her mental struggle of coming to terms with the threat posed by Milkman; on the other hand, it is precisely her digressive, exuberant, profoundly subjective style that makes her narrative so alluring. In this regard, middle sister is strikingly reminiscent of her own description of another ‘beyond the pale’, ‘tablets girl’, whose method of secretly spiking people’s drinks middle sister describes as follows:

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Her new method of working […] was to talk incessantly her hypnotic, inventive stories at you. That way she got you, her next victim, hooked and involved. Disquieted yet fixated, you focused on her words, meaning […] you didn’t take in what her hands were up to. That was what she wanted. (234)

What middle sister is depicting here is exactly what she is doing herself, including the effect that her own “hypnotic, inventive stories” (ibid.) have on her audience, the readers. While this once more highlights her position of narrative authority, it also shows the immersive power of narrative in a profoundly ambivalent light as alluring, but also potentially threatening in terms of a distraction from reality. While this is precisely what happens to middle sister as well as Akaky themselves on the level of the story,16 on the level of the discourse both narrators actively confirm the radical perspectivity and subjectivity of their narratives. Where Gogol’s narrator is concerned, he explicitly reveals himself as utterly unreliable (see Eichenbaum 390 f.), switching between apparently omniscient insight, incoherent ramble and open admissions of his own ignorance by stating,17 for instance, that “the old memory is starting to let us down badly and everything in St Petersburg, all its streets and buildings, has become so jumbled around in the head that it is very hard to retrieve anything from it in its proper shape.” (131)18 On top of that, the narrator not only “constantly shifts his tone, defends no apparent norm, and systematically ironizes any possible ‘serious’ message” (Brombert 570), as Victor Brombert illustrates; he also undercuts his own narration in truly diabolical fashion by means of grotesque hyperbolizing, mixtures of realistic and parodistic elements, sudden shifts from the rational to the irrational, and elliptical displacements from epic triviality to unrestrained fantasy (ibid. 573).

There is therefore “no comfortable unequivocal message” (ibid. 574) to “The Overcoat”, just a multiplicity of different, sometimes even mutually exclusive interpretations.19

16

17 18

Akaky’s fixation on ‘letters’ makes him entirely lose touch with reality, and middle sister not only actively uses 19th-century literature to distract herself from her own violent everyday reality; towards the end of the story, she is actually poisoned by tablets girl. Eichenbaum also points out how the narration in “The Overcoat” “is stylized to resemble a special kind of careless, naïve chatter” (390). Moreover, he more than once admits to a lack of crucial information, as with regard to the ‘important personage’: “Exactly what office was held by the important personage and what this entailed remains a mystery to this day.” (136)

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In the upshot, then, the narratives of both Milkman and “The Overcoat” radically counteract the hegemonic essentialist logic of their narrated world by highlighting their own perspectivity and subjectivity. Regarding “The Over‐ coat”, Brombert affirms that “the strategy of destabilization and fragmented diction also has a deeper subversive purpose” (ibid. 573). This purpose, according to Brombert, goes far beyond the story itself: “The non sequiturs and hesitations reveal the arbitrariness of any fictional structure, and in the last analysis subvert any auctorial authority” (ibid.). This is precisely what is at stake in Milkman as well. While middle sister, as a narrator, affirms her own agency and authorial power, her emphasis on non-normativity, subjectivity, and perspectivity is clearly pitted against the authoritarian assumptions of monolithic truth and hegemonic narratives fundamental to her community.20 Ultimately, it is perhaps this resistance to monolithic, authoritative truth that is most fundamental to Milkman and “The Overcoat”, which both texts associate with toxic forms of hypermasculinity. If this foregrounds the general fact “that fictional narratives are polyvalent, that the attempt to tease out several convincing interpretations and layers of meaning forms part of the pleasure of reading literature” (Nünning, “Fictional Worlds” 229), Burns and Gogol take this idea to an epistemological level in their descriptions of oppressive communities in which there is, as Siân White suggests concerning Milkman, a “link between communicative norms and epistemological rigidity” (126). Writing about “The Overcoat”, Vladimir Nabokov famously described it as “a grotesque and grim nightmare making black holes in the everyday fabric of life” (140). Perhaps it is in making us aware of these holes that Milkman and “The Overcoat” unfold their greatest potential for positive change. Bibliography

  Primary Sources

Burns, Anna. Milkman. Faber & Faber, 2018. Gogol, Nikolai. “The Overcoat.” Plays and Petersburg Tales, translated and edited by Christopher English, Oxford UP, 1995, pp. 115-45.

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Brombert (569-72) provides a useful overview of different interpretative approaches to the story. Arguing in a similar vein, White suggests that “[m]iddle sister’s experience suggests that individual, subjective perception might lead away from knowing but toward a truth. That truth contrasts with subject claims to omniscience and objectivity” (127).

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Secondary Sources

Bischoff, Doerte. “Fetisch.” Handbuch Literatur & Materielle Kultur, edited by Susanne Scholz, and Ulrike Vedder, De Gruyter, 2018, pp. 400-02. Böhme, Hartmut. Fetischismus und Kultur: Eine andere Theorie der Moderne. Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2006. Breithaupt, Fritz. The Dark Sides of Empathy. Translated by Andrew B.B. Hamilton, Cornell UP, 2019. Brombert, Victor. “Meanings and Indeterminacy in Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 135, no. 4, 1991, pp. 569-75. Chizhevsky, Dmitri. “About ‘The Overcoat’.” Gogol from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays, selected, edited, translated and introduced by Robert A. Maguire, Princeton UP, 1976, pp. 293-322. Darling, Orlaith. “Systemic, Transhistoric, Institutionalized, and Legitimized Antipathy: Epistemic and Sexual Violence in A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing and Milkman.” Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 15, no. 3, 2021, pp. 307-25. Eichenbaum, Boris. “The Structure of Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’.” The Russian Review, vol. 22, no. 4, 1963, pp. 377-99. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Hackett Publishing Company, 1992 [1978]. Hokanson, Katya. “The Geography of Russian Romantic Prose: Bestuzhev, Lermontov, Gogol and Early Dostoevsky.” The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism, edited by Paul Hamilton, Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 533-54. Hutton, Clare. “The Moment and Technique of Milkman.” Essays in Criticism, vol. 69, no. 3, 2019, pp. 349-71. Kilroy, Claire. “Milkman by Anna Burns review – creepy invention at heart of an original, funny novel.” The Guardian, 31 May 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018 /may/31/milkman-anna-burns-review-northern-ireland. Last accessed 7 Aug. 2022. McKinty, Adrian. “Milkman by Anna Burns review: Impressive, wordy and often funny.” The Irish Times, 12 May 2018, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/milkman-b y-anna-burns-review-impressive-wordy-and-often-funny-1.3484139. Last accessed 7 Aug. 2022. Nabokov, Vladimir. Nikolai Gogol. McClelland & Stewart Limited, 1961. Nünning, Ansgar, and Vera Nünning. “Conceptualizing ‘Broken Narratives’ from a Narratological Perspective: Domains, Concepts, Features, Functions, and Suggestions for Research.” Narrative im Bruch: Theoretische Positionen und Anwendungen, edited by Anna Babka, Marlen Bidwell-Steiner, and Wolfgang Müller-Funk, V&R unipress, 2016, pp. 38-86. Nünning, Vera. Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction. Winter, 2014.

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—. “The Making of Fictional Worlds: Processes, Features, and Functions.” Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives, edited by Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning, and Birgit Neumann, De Gruyter, 2010, pp. 215-43. Nünning, Vera, and Ansgar Nünning. “How to Stay Healthy and Foster Well-Being with Narratives, or: Where Narratology and Salutogenesis Could Meet.” How to Do Things with Narrative: Cognitive and Diachronic Perspectives, edited by Jan Alber, and Greta Olson, De Gruyter, 2017, pp. 157-86. Peace, Richard. “Introduction.” Plays and Petersburg Tales, translated and edited by Christopher English, Oxford UP, 1995, pp. vii-xxxvii. “Rathbones Folio Prize: Anna Burns – Milkman.” YouTube, uploaded by Rathbones Folio Prize, 15 May 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8-0Kn6fgeM. Last accessed 15 May 2022. Roca, Roger. “Fetishism.” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, vol. 9, 2015, pp. 105-10. Scollins, Kathleen. Acts of Logos in Pushkin and Gogol: Petersburg Texts and Subtexts. Academic Studies Press, 2017. Toporov, Vladimir Nikolayevich. “Peterburgskie teksty i Peterburgskie mify [zametki iz serii].” Mif. Ritual. Simvol. Obraz: Issledovaniia v oblasti mifopoeticheskogo, Pro‐ gress-Kul’tura, 1995, pp. 7-118. Volkov, Solomon. Istoria kultury Sankt-Peterburga: Sosnovania do nashikh dnei. Izdatelstvo nezavisimaya gazeta, 2001. White, Siân. “A ‘Hair-Trigger Society’ and the Woman Who Felt Something in Anna Burns’s Milkman.” Genre, vol. 54, no. 1, 2021, pp. 111-37. Zelinsky, Bodo. “Nikolaj Gogol: Der Mantel.“ Die russische Novelle, edited by Bodo Zelinsky, Schwann Bagel, 1982, pp. 54-62.

III. Narratives Promoting Social and Cultural Change

Positive Change in Crime Fiction Genre Renewal and the Politics of Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Cheryl A. Head’s Bury Me When I’m Dead (2016)

Alexander Schindler

1. Introduction: Rebuilding Crime Fiction, Tackling Social Problems

“Social novels […] have gone out of fashion but return now under a new guise in contemporary detective fiction” (Nünning, “Kriminalromane” 3, my translation). As this quotation by Vera Nünning shows, crime fiction has become much more than genre fiction in recent years. As a matter of fact, crime and detective fiction has successively taken over the role formerly carried out by traditional social novels and thus has grown into a place where extensive “critical engagements with political and social problems are possible” (ibid. 4, my translation; see also Bertens and D’haen 53; Lehane xiii; Horsley vi). As such, “[c]rime fiction is often heralded as a barometer for social change” (Kenley 100) by many scholars in the field today. This inherent ability for transformation as well as the remarkable adaptability of the form, which provides an excellent starting point for innovation and forward-looking development, immediately links with the topic of change – positive change in particular – to the extent that the crime novel ensures continuous renewal, yet at the same time persistently reflects back upon its original formula and well-tried tradition. Similar to other literary genres, fictions of crime change over time, depending, for example, on the historical, cultural, and social context in which they are written and received. As an art form in its own right and one of the most prolific manifestations of contemporary popular culture worldwide in terms of readership and commercial success, crime fiction as developed from the mid-19th century onwards occupies a special place in this regard. Having long been deemed conservative both on the level of form and content (see Nünning, “Kriminalromane” 1; Worthington 41; Humann 174), detective narratives by such canonical authors as Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan

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Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dashiell Hammett, to name but a few, more often than not employ narrative strategies that help privilege white heterosexual male characters and hegemonic notions of power and authority, hence fostering – among others – prevalent racial ideologies and gender norms in different societies across the globe (see Naidu 112 f.). It is only in the past few decades that things have gradually started to change. In the second half of the 20th century, an increasingly diverse group of crime fiction writers aimed at abandoning the old ways of thinking, thereby moving the genre forward in a new direction and genuinely taking into account the rapidly changing socio-cultural circumstances of the modern world. As a result, a host of new investigative figures appeared on the international crime fiction scene. By placing detectives that are more diverse with regard to ethnicity, gender, and sexuality at the centre of the action, these narratives shift their emphasis from the pure puzzle solving game to a much more profound treatment of today’s society at large. Cheryl A. Head’s multiperspectival novel Bury Me When I’m Dead serves as an illustrative example in this respect. As the first book in a series that currently spans six novels, Head’s text – while still adhering to and operating in compliance with the basic principles of detective fiction – explores new and challenging territory within the framework of the genre. Far from being escapist literature that is devised for entertainment only, her novel deals with the fundamental social concerns of our times. Her protagonist is Charlene ‘Charlie’ Mack, a bisexual woman of colour and hard-boiled private eye who works in a team with two other investigators in Detroit. With this choice of a female detective and multi-faceted narrative, Head creates an invigorating basis upon which she is able to tackle a vast array of topics, including gender politics, ethnic and racial diversity, as well as sexual identity. My analysis of Head’s novel will focus on all of these points as well as some additional aspects, which will show that crime fiction is indeed a field of contemporary literature with high potential for clearly shaped and ambitious agendas where positive change can happen. 2. Progressive Gender Formations

Bury Me When I’m Dead is the first installment in the highly-acclaimed and award-winning Charlie Mack Motown Mystery Series. With this book, Head once again enters the former white and male dominated sphere of classic gumshoe narratives (see Scaggs 140; Horsley 24) invented by Carroll John Daly, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. Even though female authors and private investigators have abounded in crime fiction since at least the 1980s –

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one just has to think of Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, Val McDermid’s Kate Brannigan, or Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski – it quickly becomes apparent that nearly all of them are white, so that from an ethnic point of view, the white perspective continues to prevail throughout most of mainstream detective fiction.1 The year 1994, however, marks the successful breakthrough of a black female private eye with the creation of Valerie Wilson Wesley’s Tamara Hayle, who has exerted a lasting influence on the crime genre ever since. African-American author Cheryl A. Head builds on this pattern laid out by her predecessor by putting her black female protagonist centre stage, but adds her own distinct touch to the genre by changing it in new and interesting ways. Blending a variety of different forms such as hard-boiled, feminist, and multicultural crime fiction, thus strengthening the scholarly observation that “hybridisation has become […] a widespread narrative strategy” (Gulddal and King 16) in recent crime literature, the character of Charlie Mack lies at the heart of the novel. Unlike Hayle and other (classic) private investigators, however, she is not the first-person narrator of the story. Moving away from the homodiegetic mode of narration and using Charlie as an internal focalizer instead allows Head, in a similar way, to give priority to female experience and emotion and thus endow her protagonist with narrative authority, or as David Geherin aptly states: “Observing the world through the eyes of a female or a minority detective [expands] the perspective of the private-eye novel to include issues related to gender and race.” (163) Even though Head occasionally alternates points of view between Charlie and other characters in the story, the reader sees the fictional world for the most part through her eyes. From the vantage point of feminist narratology, this textual perspective is of great importance with regard to the active role and overall representation of women, since it provides visibility and a considerable counterpoint to the forerunners of the genre, not least because “the male objectifying gaze […] was omnipresent in traditional hard-boiled detectives” (Forselius 126). Dennis Porter is certainly right in his assessment when he speaks of classic American hard-boiled fiction as an “aggressively male genre” (102), and Gill Plain fittingly adds that “no other form of crime fiction so potently insists upon the ‘otherness’ of women” (104; see also Blyth 31-3). As female authors appro‐ priate the form, however, they frequently carry out a radical transformation of genre conventions. Head, for example, dismisses the familiar lone wolf of 1

One popular example of a black male private eye is Walter Mosley’s detective Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins. According to Justin Gifford, Mosley’s works are “the most well-known novels of contemporary black detective fiction” (272).

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the hard-boiled variety and groups together a team of detectives consisting of men and women instead – a feature most often found in the police novel. Furthermore, she invents a woman PI who runs her own detective agency and functions as the leader of the entire group. On the one hand, this rejection of pure individualism seems to imply that only a team of private investigators is capable of dealing with any sort of criminal activity in our cities. Yet, personal expertise and individual competence are maintained and are essential for criminal investigation when they serve all members of the group. On the other hand, Head’s character constellation provides a fertile ground for an in-depth debate about stereotypical notions of gender that are frequently negotiated in contemporary feminist crime fiction (see Messent 89-95). As head of her investigative team with two male partners, Charlie Mack is depicted right from the start as an ambitious and determined woman, who, at the age of 33, has already achieved a great deal in her life: “She’d owned and operated two successful businesses – a PR firm and a karate school – and gained a reputation as a savvy entrepreneur.” (Bury Me When I’m Dead 13)2 Charlie is asked to acquire knowledge – a task traditionally assigned to male characters in crime fiction – when her former mentor Leonard Abrams hires her and her team to find his employee Joyce Stringer, who is accused of having stolen inventory from his company. The missing person case unexpectedly takes on a new direction, though, when Charlie discovers that Joyce’s brother Paul has seemingly fallen victim to murder. Regarding her two male colleagues, Charlie is fully aware of her advantages during the course of the investigation, as the following quote indicates: “[B]eing a woman had often been the key to getting a recalcitrant witness to open up.” (23) Consequently, she also claims the right to conduct the interview with Rona Dietrich, one of the accomplices in the inventory theft, when she tells her partner Don Rutkowski “[s]he’s a woman, so maybe it should be me” (20). Her insistence on taking the lead owes much to her sensitive nature and her ability to show sincere empathy towards the person she is talking to. This stands in stark contrast to Don, who is at times prone to macho behaviour and whom Charlie ironically calls “Mr. Sensitivity” (22). Even though Charlie is now and then subjected to sexist remarks (see 12), she retains her confident posture towards men (“You two stop babying me”, 135), as in the case of Joyce Stringer’s father Grant Freeman, Jr.: “You’ve tried controlling everything and everyone, but you certainly will not control me.” (233, emphasis in original) With her attitude, Charlie sets an example as a role model

2

In the following, references to Bury Me When I’m Dead will be given without repeating the title.

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as Joyce later on stresses: “Charlene Mack is an attractive woman, energetic and passionate.” (260, emphasis in original) Being a woman also has its potential downsides for Charlie, for instance when she is faced with gender prejudices pertaining to her qualities as a detective, which Nünning views as a central component of the feminist subgenre (see “Kriminalromane” 18). These prejudices range from Jonathan Fitzgerald’s comment “[w]ell, I imagine being a lady private eye does require someone with serious intentions” (131), to much more heavy preconceptions that bring to light the strong bias deeply rooted in people’s consciousness and institutions when it comes to gender expectations: “When they dealt with law enforcement in other jurisdictions, Don always took the lead, not just because he had been a cop but because he fit most people’s idea of what an investigator looked like.” (23) At various times during the action, Charlie experiences a threat to her autonomy as a woman and as a detective, with far-reaching consequences for the progress of the plot. After she is attacked by a gang of criminals, Charlie is hospitalized and forced to pass the investigation to her male colleagues on a temporary basis: “The doctor said you had to limit physical activity for at least a week […]. Acosta and I will take over the field work” (114), Don tells her. This loss of female agency marks a significant turning point in the novel, since Charlie must now try to regain her position of power. Against all official directions and not without meeting resistance from her team, she continuously asserts her will to participate in the ongoing investigation (see 152, 190, 249). When it is later discovered that the FBI is in search of the same perpetrators and even starts to interfere with her case, the authority of Charlie’s team is once more dramatically undermined. Tapping the phones of the private investigators, Agent James Hasani Saleh exerts his institutional power by intruding into their privacy and ordering them to cooperate with the Board, so that “the partners of the Mack agency resign[…] themselves to the FBI’s superior hand” (211). Power relations are carried to the extreme when it is made clear that “Charlie, Don and Gil were to share anything they learned with James and […] Agent Goodman. Agents Saleh and Goodman would share nothing, and that’s just the way it was” (211). Charlie is the only one in her team who finds the courage to criticize the forced hierarchy and express her discomfort with patriarchal authority that reduces her autonomy: “James had his orders, but she also had a client and her own agenda.” (167) Moreover, she highlights the value of her independence, which forms an integral part of her personality and work, when she stresses the opposing interests of the FBI and her agency and complains to Agent Saleh that “I know you have a job to do but I have one, too” (168, see also 233).

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In contrast to the FBI’s inconsiderate behaviour and the corrupt nature of the criminals, Charlie’s personality has a strong ethical dimension to it. Proceeding from the assumption that “fictional narratives establish moral values” (Nünning, “Fictional Worlds” 239) and that all “[c]rime fiction novels are morality tales” (Sim 3), one can say that Charlie’s character supports the observation that “the fictional detective is typically a positively connoted one” (Gregoriou 168). Whereas classic hard-boiled novels by male authors largely ignore women’s issues, Head invites the reader to share in and identify with the value system of her female PI.3 Even though Charlie “[had] stopped being surprised by malicious greed, disregard for life and the inhumanity of man a very long time ago” (161 f.), she is totally dedicated to her work and driven by an intense ethical force to bring closure to the family of the victim (see 90). Thus, her “ambitions to help people, her sense of justice, and her curiosity about the way people operated in the world and why they did the things they did” (131, see also 189) underpin the claim made by Rachel Haliburton that “[d]etectives […] are moral cartographers who map out features of the ethical landscape for readers” (83). Situating Charlie at the centre of the narrative gives Head ample opportunity to foreground female consciousness and at the same time provide ethical values that “might [also] be of importance with regard to our moral development” (Nünning, “Fictional Worlds” 239).4 To the same extent that Charlie fights hegemonic structures and gender discrimination, so do other female characters struggle with and try to find ways of combatting the limitations of their role as women in a patriarchal society. Although Head does not portray every woman in her novel as emotionally strong and tough (see 33, 179), she skillfully manages to accentuate even small details of gender equality (see 85, 88). From a feminist narratological standpoint it is interesting to note that Charlie’s father John Mack is mostly absent on the story level and only now and then mentioned in passing (see 6, 130, 161, 264), while her mother occupies a key role in the text. Ernestine Mack, a former school teacher whom Charlie lovingly describes as a “curious […] [and] vital woman who was her best friend” (36), suffers from the early stages of Alzheimer’s 3

4

The consistent feeling of sympathy that the reader has towards Charlie is not affected by her being an occasional liar, either (see 18, 26, 41, 89, 152, 155, 262). Charlie uses her unreliability solely for a good cause and never with malicious intent, which may be one of the reasons why “crime fiction readers tend to be far more tolerant of detectives’ rule-breaking than that of the criminals they pursue” (Gregoriou 169). Haliburton expands on the subject by explaining that “[t]he role played by the detective offers a moral education to readers” (83) and that “crime fiction […] can contribute to the moral development of its readers […] because it encourages them to view the world in ethical terms and to recognize the moral worth of other human beings” (6).

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disease. However, she functions as a reflector figure in some of the chapters, and giving voice to her character enables Head to explore a socially relevant topic from this individual perspective. Charlie’s mother has always displayed strong feminist attitudes throughout her life, as becomes clear when she explained her choice of partner to her daughter in younger years: “Charlene, I may marry again if I can find a man who loves me enough to let me put you first, my work second, and him third.” (37) Independence, self-determination, as well as active citizenship are among the crucial components for Ernestine’s way of life (see 228). But as holds true for many women in the novel, she is not immune to hostility and violence against her femininity either, for example when she is robbed and kidnapped by petty thieves and in desperate need of rescue (see 242-45). This in turn seems to affirm the notion that “[f]eminist crime fiction presents violence as a masculine performance that affects women in a long-lasting way, through bodily harm […], and psychologically through an understanding of the effects on society” (Pâquet 179). Generally speaking, tender and affectionate male-female relationships are scarce in the text. However, Joyce and Paul Stringer represent a notable excep‐ tion in this regard. Throughout the action it becomes clear that Joyce truly cares for her younger brother and feels a constant need to protect him from danger and the criminal activities he is involved in (see 151, 190), even to the point where she puts her own life at risk. When it is revealed that it is in fact Paul and not Joyce who was party to the inventory theft, the FBI confirms that “she tried to shut it down” (166) in order to avert the impending doom from her brother. This emphasizes the close family bond between the siblings. Conflicts related to gender, however, arise mainly between male characters. These relationships can either be characterized as utterly pragmatic, yet at the same time full of distrust and free from emotions – as in the case of criminal mastermind Owen Owens and his sidekick Walter Barnes (see 197-99, 278) – or as highly dysfunctional and based on mental harm and psychological distress, as the tense relationship between Grant Freeman, Jr. and his son strikingly illustrates (see 64 f.). By contrast, female relationships between primary characters frequently appear in a positive light, for example the loving and warm relationship between Charlie and her mother, which underlines Mary Hadley’s statement that an “important trait of the female hard-boiled detective is her relationship with family” (363). Charlie even manages to establish a personal bond with Joyce Stringer, so that Joyce finally agrees to help her with the investigation: “I’ve decided to trust you, Ms. Mack. I have to trust someone.” (205) Issues related to gender, however, are but one of several topics with which Head challenges the traditionally male

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dominated genre of hard-boiled crime fiction. Race and ethnicity play an equally significant role in this regard, as will be shown in the next section. 3. Racial Diversity and Politics

According to Gifford, “African-American crime and detective fiction is currently one of the most popular genres of black literature in the United States” (263). By not only making her hard-boiled private investigator female but also a person of colour, Head creates an ideal starting point from where one can “critique both […] [the] masculinity and the normative whiteness of the genre” (Reddy, “Women” 202), two features that are regarded as constitutive of the classic private eye story.5 While Head captures essential aspects of social reality through her “examination of the potential flexibility of gender roles” (Hoffman 81), using the crime fiction genre as a vehicle for multi-faceted discussions about racial politics and ethnic diversity lends additional weight to her agenda, or, as Messent aptly elaborates: “If to be a woman in Western culture is to be marginalized in certain ways, subject (to varying extents) to male hegemony, to be black is to be even more so – but subject to the hegemonic power of whiteness.” (96) Reddy accurately points out that “[r]ace is ubiquitous and powerful in American crime fiction” (“Race” 135), and this holds especially true for Af‐ rican-American authors of the genre. Head immediately grabs the reader’s attention by invoking various images of slavery. Not only does the front cover of the book show the bound hands of a black person, close-up, but the first chapter introduces Charlie Mack as she finds herself in a life-threatening moment of danger: “Charlie’s chest clenched. Her lungs fought violently for air. Can’t breathe.” (1, emphasis in original) Robbed of her ability to speak – which of course in this context is highly symbolic – Charlie’s hands are also tied together behind her back (see 1), and the reader must follow her desperate but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to “loosen her bindings” (3) in the hauntingly written opening pages of the narrative. The scene, which is both extremely dramatic and full of tension, as well as reminiscent of classic slave narratives, is continued 5

With respect to the broader topic of positive change, John Gruesser reminds us of the fact that “because the genre requires the detective to solve the crime or crimes and thereby restore the established order, the mystery is notoriously conservative. As a result, the question for black crime writers becomes how to preserve the integrity of their detectives. No matter how brilliant or brave they are, black sleuths in the pay of white clients or the white power structure risk coming off as lackeys. In short, African-American mystery writers must strike a difficult balance between genre conformity and genre subversion.” (531)

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later in the book and the reader also learns that as a consequence of the attack by Walter Barnes “[Charlie’s] ankles were tied, locked together like a mermaid ice sculpture” (105). On the level of content, Head provides yet another indication for the impor‐ tance of racism in her novel. Here, I am referring to the recurring white/black binary that has always played – along with other binary divisions such as male/female, gay/straight or good/evil – a major role in numerous varieties of the genre. Head uses the words ‘black’ and ‘white’ more than one hundred times combined during the text and carefully loads them with symbolic significance. Both colours serve more than decorative purposes and are endowed with specific meaning in relation to racial presuppositions. The reader needs to be attentive in order to fully grasp the author’s hidden messages and to appreciate the effort Head makes in colouring certain objects and people. Then they might be able to realize that it can be important whether a black woman drinks white wine, drives a white car, or whether or not a white man wears black clothes (see 29, 80, 197). Thus, Head’s creative use of colour schemes creates an additional level of communication with which she firmly rejects the “racial binary of white superiority and black inferiority that dominated the discourse of race” (Gifford 264) for such a long time. With regard to genre and form, Head turns the traditional hard-boiled pattern upside down by implementing racial diversity within the team of investigators. Not only does she replace the tough private eye figure – made famous by Hammett’s Continental Op and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe – by an African-American female investigator, but she teams her protagonist up with Don Rutkowski, who is of Polish descent, and Gil Acosta from Mexico. This ingenious alteration and substantial change of genre conventions highlights the importance of racial politics right from the beginning, and the reader soon learns how the detectives use their different ethnic backgrounds to their advantage: As a white male, there were doors Don could more easily walk through than Charlie. […] But Charlie could visit any black business or organization, Don at her heels, playing up the ‘sister in charge’ act and information would pour like syrup on pancakes. (23)

For Charlie and her team, the one constant companion in their daily routine is how to deal with all sorts of different forms of racial discrimination. Even though other black people like Joyce Stringer show their respect and admiration for Charlie’s professional career (“That’s kind of an unusual path for a Black woman”, 189), Charlie is perfectly aware that working as a black private eye “was a tricky balancing act in the socio-racial-political rubric of Detroit’s

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culture” (13). The setting of the novel switches constantly between Detroit and Birmingham/Alabama, and Head proves to be an astute observer of the socio-political landscape, as her description of Charlie’s hometown shows: “In the last three decades, Detroit’s decline had been tragic and highly public with a broad array of factors to blame. Bad policies, bad leadership, bad tax base, bad race relations” (5, see also 18). At the same time, however, sending a positive sign to the reader in the midst of such a strained atmosphere is important for her, for example when she highlights Charlie’s flexible nature and her ability to adapt to the situation: “She skillfully maneuvered the one-way streets named after dead white men from Detroit’s past.” (5) The two cities nonetheless appear to be almost interchangeable in many ways (“Like Detroit, Birmingham was racially polarized when it came to schools, neighborhoods and churches”, 58, see also 125), with strong effects on the characters in the novel. This illustrates once again, as Stephen F. Soitos already pointed out at the turn of the millennium, that “a growing number of African American detective authors […] use the form to explore cultural and social issues” (108). While operating in a black neighbourhood in Birmingham, Charlie easily starts conversations with the locals, who are quickly convinced that “this lady knows something about the struggles of our people” (96) and happily provide all kinds of information about Joyce Stringer and her family. Don, on the other hand, does not blend in at all in the new and unfamiliar surroundings, as is made clear from the comment that “[h]e was the only white guy walking about on this street” (101) and the indisputable statement by one of the shopkeepers that “[y]ou don’t fit in” (102). During a visit to Joyce’s aunt Jennifer Meadows, the image of Don as outsider is reinforced by Jennifer’s grandchildren, who show themselves tremendously “fascinated by the white man at their dining room table” (75). Don’s uneasiness is also reflected in his inappropriate choice of words during the interview, so that Charlie needs to save him from the situation with her distinct sense of race-sensitive language (see 77).6 Apart from tackling race and racism, Head is also a decidedly class-conscious author. Resonating with intersectional debates, her novel emphatically shows how “[q]uestions of class are inextricably connected with the problems of race” (Soitos 110). A good example of this is Jennifer Meadows’ house and the area around it, which the narrator describes as depressing and uninviting: “The house’s infrastructure matched the neighborhood’s deterioration. […] Paint shards stood out from the house frame like cat claws and there was a broad 6

The use of language as an effective means to discriminate against other ethnicities is found in other cases, too, for example when characters utter derogatory phrases such as “this crazy-ass white man” (109) or “Damn Arab” (158).

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hole in the porch awning.” (74 f.) The same holds true for the neighbourhood in which Paul Stringer and his cousin Andrew live, which is depicted in a similar state of dilapidation: “The area was rundown. Houses with boarded windows hinted at discarded domesticity and the overgrown lots that surrounded them had become the dumping grounds for their unwanted furnishings and other debris.” (40) Most striking in this regard is the fact that the living conditions in Birmingham’s “[m]ostly white, mostly rich” (98) suburbs form a complete contrast to this, as does the decadent and luxurious lifestyle of (white) criminal Owen Owens in Detroit (see 196). In addition to socio-political grievances, which repeatedly become an issue in the discussions between the investigators (see 78), racist attitudes in the US police force are depicted as a widespread phenomenon. When questioned by law enforcement officials after a gunfire attack on Charlie’s team, Gil Acosta is forced to explain in great detail his family relations and ethnic background to Deputy Police Chief Robert Lowenstein, since the Deputy Chief makes blatantly clear that “[Gil] was ‘other’” (170). Nünning’s cogent observation that quite frequently “[ethnic] detectives are subjected to prejudice by white police officers” (“Kriminalromane” 16, my translation) is yet again confirmed when Charlie and Don are stopped by the police in their car. The incident, which leaves Charlie with shaking hands, reminds her of the “dangers Birmingham’s black citizens faced from white police officers […], especially in places where they didn’t belong” (68). Even the overall sympathetic character of Don Rutkowski is shown to be racially biased at times, thereby serving as a reminder for the deep structure of racist stereotypes and thinking in American society. In these instances, Charlie functions as a corrective to his behaviour. Moreover, Don’s xenophobic attitude makes clear how “racial difference has frequently been part of the construction of criminality” (Worthington 74; see also Gregoriou 170 f.): “He had spotted a well-dressed man of indeterminate nationality who carried an oversized briefcase and Don considered him suspicious.” (39) The same happens when Don confronts a “middle-aged man with bulging eyes, salt-and-pepper hair and a thick, black beard” (102) who speaks Arabic. Don quickly realizes that in order to calm his suspicions, “in the old days, [he] would have demanded the man show a green card and a photo ID” (102). At the same time that Charlie fights structural racism and advocates for the appreciation of cultural and ethnic diversity, the novel explicitly articulates her ambivalent position when it comes to racial discrimination and injustice, making clear that “[s]he resented being the defender of all Black people, a burden she had taken upon herself” (78). With regard to all the difficulties that

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members of minority groups currently face in US society, Charlie time and again demonstrates socio-cultural and political awareness for the situation of her people, even at the risk of being nostalgic or romanticizing the past: [I]n some way Black folks didn’t have it so bad in the Fifties. I mean those of you who lived through it were second-class citizens but it seems to me some things were better than they are now. You had closer-knit neighborhoods with little or no drugs, parents took their children to church, there was no misogynistic hip-hop music, no assault weapons and no 9/11. (131)

Writing within “the ideological predisposition of the hard-boiled novel, an ideology that proves to be essentially racist” (Crafton 16 f.), Head critically addresses the urgent social and cultural issues of our time, but refrains from offering simple solutions to them. The effect is a thought-provoking novel that encourages readers to reflect on and reconsider their own (unconscious) mindset in relation to the problems of racism in our world. As I intend to stress in the next and final section of this article, dealing with questions of (sexual) identity enables Head in yet another way to further stimulate thinking in the reader. 4. Queering the Detective Novel: Identity as Mystery

Concepts of identity have become ubiquitous in contemporary public discourse, and it is fair to say that they are also pivotal to fictions of crime. As Marieke Krajenbrink and Kate Quinn observe, “[q]uestions of identity have traditionally been central to crime and detective fiction” (1), and this virtually across all subgenres and national boundaries for almost 200 years. Since basically every crime novel concerns itself with identity somehow – albeit to a varying extent – crime fiction studies have equally generated a vast amount of international scholarship on the subject. In Bury Me When I’m Dead, notions of identity play a prominent role on a number of different levels. Before turning to the topic of sexual identity regarding the protagonist Charlie Mack, I will briefly sketch out some other areas in which Head tackles problems of identity so as to illustrate the wide range of possible approaches to the subject matter. From the very beginning of the text, identity becomes a key concept for Charlie, for example when the narrator refers to her investigator’s ID, which displays Charlie’s “PI license number, her company name and the embossed seal of the State of Michigan under the photograph” (4). However, at the same time that her ID represents an officially approved document with clear-cut individual parameters, it gives the false and deceptive impression of a stable and fixed identity. As can be derived from the previous sections of my article, forming a

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professional identity is anything but easy for Charlie, not least because of her constant negotiation with issues of gender and race. Even though Bury Me When I’m Dead is not a ‘whodunit’ in the narrow sense of the term, uncovering and verifying the identity of the perpetrator forms an integral part of the storyline. Perhaps even more challenging than solving the murder case are the implications of one of Charlie’s other cases, where a woman has fallen victim to identity theft. Talking to Betsy Davenport over the phone, Charlie genuinely sympathizes with her client as she knows from her daily experience how it feels to be deprived of one’s own identity, as well as the exhausting and never-ending struggle for individual identity (see 161-63). Given “the genre’s preoccupation with identity” (Stewart, “Queer” 5), Cheryl A. Head also comes up with some further exciting ideas on the topic. On the level of the story, Head playfully deceives the reader by creating various plot twists based on false identities. For roughly one third of the book, for instance, she has a character cunningly slip into the role of store clerk Yusef – thereby leading the reader to believe that Yusef is merely cast in a supporting role – before revealing his true identity as FBI Agent James Saleh. Even more surprising is the twist that Head saves for Joyce Stringer’s brother Paul, whom the reader assumes to be dead. Andrew M. Hakim emphasizes that “[o]ne of the foremost difficulties readers face in any detective fiction […] is how to respond to the body” (18). Head skillfully places a red herring for her readers when it is revealed towards the end of the novel that Paul is not only alive but also physically unharmed (see 230). As a consequence, the genre expectations that the story supposedly promised to fulfil are effectively undermined, thereby moving the text in the direction of anti-detective fiction with regard to the murder case. Identity in this case reveals itself as highly elusive and ambiguous, and the disturbing question arises as to what we can actually know about our own identity and that of other people, when even Joyce confuses her brother’s identity with that of another person at the police morgue (see 232). With her focus on sexual identity, Head adds a supplementary component that proves crucial for this and subsequent books in the series. Whereas in traditional hard-boiled novels women such as the infamous femme fatale were denied and devoid of individual identity or the opportunity for personal development, Worthington remarks that in contemporary appropriations of the form “the female investigator […] [has] a sexual identity which is expressed and explored” (113). For a woman to define herself in sexual terms thus signifies a fundamental change and marks a “dramatic shift in sexual attitudes and practices between the early and modern hard-boiled detective novels” (Moore 214).

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As Soitos put it bluntly some twenty years ago, “[c]reating a black female detective who is a lesbian is a daring move” (108). But what if these binary and clear-cut notions of sexuality are even further troubled by a detective who is bisexual? Two decades into the 21st century, lesbian crime fiction is well-established in the field of mystery writing and according to Judith A. Markowitz, “detective stories […] with overt gay and lesbian main characters […] are among the most dynamic and diverse novels of the genre” (5). Before looking at Cheryl A. Head’s text in more detail, I would like to point out two indicators that may help shed additional light on her agenda. First of all, Head publishes all of her Charlie Mack novels with Bywater Books, a lesbian press that intends to appeal, although not exclusively, to a certain audience. Besides this, Head creatively deals with the rainbow flag throughout every single chapter, a famous “symbol of pride for the LGBTQ+ community” (Bitterman 118) which was designed by Gilbert Baker in 1970 and has increasingly gained public recognition in recent years. Head does not depict the symbol in its entirety in the story, though, so that her use of the rainbow flag is not too obvious at first glance, but only shows itself upon closer inspection. Rather, as with the black and white scheme mentioned above, she continuously spreads the seven colours of the rainbow and some additional colour shades widely over the whole text, which as a consequence makes it become extremely colourful and vivid. Within the context of the present chapter, it is important to note that the rainbow colours are also closely connected to questions of gender identity, emphasizing the demand that every person should be able to live their own sexual identity freely and without ill will, so that Head’s adaptation of the rainbow flag once again “visually demonstrate[s] inclusivity for all identities under the LGBTQ+ umbrella” (ibid.).7 With regard to sexual identity, Phyllis M. Betz is certainly right to say that “[s]omething more than just the typical working out of the solution to the crime appears in lesbian detective fiction” (18). This holds true for queer detective Charlie Mack as well, who is recently divorced and struggles with her new found sexual orientation, confronting, as other lesbians and bisexuals do, “[the] dilemma of how to establish an identity that balances the notions of proper sex/gender behavior as delineated by mainstream, heterosexual culture and [her] own interpretations of that range of possible models” (ibid. 22). While 7

In Head’s novel, inclusivity for people of colour is marked for instance by the colour brown (see 25, 47, 48, 56, 121, 172), whereas transgender inclusivity is, among others, represented by the colours light blue and rose/pink (see 27, 46, 66, 76, 82, 83, 88, 110). For additional colour shades see, for example, 11, 15, 28, 33, 40, 42, 70, 80, 137, 181, 185, and 235.

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other characters like Don Rutkowski and Charlie’s office manager Judy Novak seem to have found a way of dealing with their (hetero-)sexual identity (see 6, 48 f.), Charlie’s relationship with police officer Mandy Porter is marked by a distinct sense of insecurity and fear on her part, quite in contrast to Mandy, who has no such feelings: “She knew she was in love with Mandy and the idea scared her. Mandy was fearless about everything, her job, her finances, her politics. Even her love life.” (28) Time and again during the action, Charlie admits to Mandy that “I’m afraid of what I’m feeling” (193). At some point she even confesses that she would not have to be “self-conscious about public displays of affection” (192) if Mandy were a man, thereby reminding the reader not only of the “heterosexual world […] of hard-boiled fiction” (Scaggs 100), but also of the dominant ideological thinking in our own society. “[V]esting the sleuth with sexual subject status” (Stewart, “Girls” 200) and thus promoting generic innovation, however, can cause various problems for the main character when it comes to an in-depth discussion of the topic. Charlie, for instance, is totally unable to explain her ambivalent emotions towards Mandy through rational thinking and she frequently gets the anxious impression that she is increasingly losing control over her feelings (see 47). Finding herself in a situation that feels so different from anything she has ever experienced before and hence longing for stability, Charlie engages in casual sex with her ex-husband Franklin, telling him that “I need something familiar” (146). While Charlie can only express her sexuality with utmost caution towards Mandy at this point, there are moments such as the familiar bathing ritual with Franklin where Charlie “allow[s] herself to be completely vulnerable” (147). Betz claims that usually “the lesbian [and bisexual] detective faces two distinct problems during the course of the investigation – solving the crime and resolving a developing passionate relationship” (25). By the end of the novel, Charlie successfully manages to solve the criminal case, but still “wasn’t sure she was ready to have a conversation with her mother about her sexual orientation” (284). The case is closed then, whereas the major changes in her love life continue to be explored in the following novels of the series, but, as Charlie remarks with a wink, “change is what happens when you’re still alive” (275). 5. Conclusion

With her Charlie Mack Motown Mystery Series, Cheryl A. Head presents herself as an exciting new voice in American hard-boiled crime fiction. As Winter S. Elliott reminds us with an insightful look back in time, a lot has changed over the years in the field of crime fiction: “It used to be easy to identify, and define, the

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detective in a crime novel. He was easy to spot, after all, marked by his gender, race, and, if not class, at least social position.” (211, emphasis in original) But as Head’s novel Bury Me When I’m Dead impressively shows, things are not what they used to be. It is perhaps one of the greatest achievements in mystery writing of recent years that “those previously marginalized [are] given greater voice and visibility in and by the genre” (Saval 331). In fact, by being female, black, and bisexual, Charlie Mack is marginalized thrice according to the hard-boiled formula, and Head uses her protagonist to critique and transform the genre she writes in by reshaping it in different and innovative ways. As Tanja Välisalo et al. emphasize, “the genre is flexible, malleable and mobile” (399) and allows for generic change both on the level of form and on the level of content. In general terms, Head contributes to an increased appreciation of genre literature by highlighting the former marginalized perspective of her main character, which now is at the centre of attention. Even though Nicoletta Vallorani is correct in saying that in the first half of the 20th century “the hard-boiled novel had already gained popularity through its direct and provocative engagement with social issues” (408), contemporary private eye stories by female and black authors deal with these issues in radically different ways. Most striking in this regard are, among others, progressive conceptions of identity as they relate to questions of gender, race and ethnicity, and sexuality. All of these are discernible in the character of Charlie Mack, and seen as a whole they make clear that “detective fiction can present readers with insightful and sharp social commentary about the societies in which they are set” (Haliburton 84). Andrew Pepper asserts that crime fiction “remains the most politically minded of all literary genres” (17), and Bury Me When I’m Dead confirms this notion especially with regard to its treatment of gender and racial politics. Female private investigator Charlie Mack combines a large number of character traits that are usually attributed to men, such as willpower, courage, and physical strength. Taken together, and in connection with her insistence on female autonomy and independence, these characteristics reveal that the “detective novel can become a space for […] the renegotiation of gendered roles” (Wezner 61). Concerning the topic of racism, the novel also serves as an effective vehicle for socio-political criticism. Focusing on black private eye Charlie Mack and her sidekicks, the text points out the injustices and racial discrimination that black people and other marginalized groups still face in the US today. Indeed, as Vera Nünning reminds us with regard to the overall potential for social criticism inherent in the crime novel, “[t]he discrimination against minorities can be brought to the fore by dealing creatively with the traditional outsider position of the detective figure” (“Kriminalromane” 3, my translation).

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Moreover, Gifford sees “black female identity itself [as] a significant source of artistic representation and political critique” (273) and claims further that “in the hands of black female writers […], the detective fiction genre was remade to entertain black female readers and to underscore the racial and gendered chauvinism of the detective form and society at large” (ibid. 272, emphasis in original). Overall, I share the positive opinion of Monika Müller, who views both the “feminist and ethnic genre modifications [as] productive extensions in relation to the parameters of the crime novel” (164, my translation). Dealing with questions of sexual identity, the novel demonstrates that “[t]he detective figure in contemporary crime fiction is often depicted as troubled or problematic” (Beyer 11). The character of Charlie Mack makes apparent that questions of sexual orientation and identity formation are never straight‐ forward, but are instead heavily loaded with profound and deep emotional experience, as they touch the most intimate parts of one’s personal self. If Leonard Cassuto regards “[t]he lesbian variation of the female hard-boiled detective [as] a […] possibility for evading the conventional gender oppositions of the genre” (194), then Cheryl A. Head does this even more so with her innovative negotiation of bisexual gender identity. As I have argued throughout this article, Bury Me When I’m Dead is part of a genre that “is continually reinventing itself with vigor and ingenuity” (Beyer 1). In this respect, not only does the novel help to make a significant contribution towards changing crime fiction literature in positive ways, but it also more generally points to the “crucial role that art and ideas play in the struggle for progressive social change” (Ammons 3). And as our world continues to turn and change so will authors from around the globe find their ways of altering and adapting the form with originality and resourcefulness in ways that particularly crime fiction, as one of the most popular and successful literary forms, is capable of doing.

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Head, Cheryl A. Bury Me When I’m Dead. Bywater Books, 2016.

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Ammons, Elizabeth. Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save The Planet. U of Iowa P, 2010. Bertens, Hans, and Theo D’haen. Contemporary American Crime Fiction. Palgrave Mac‐ millan, 2001. Betz, Phyllis M. Lesbian Detective Fiction: Woman as Author, Subject and Reader. McFarland & Company, 2006. Beyer, Charlotte. “Contemporary Crime Fiction: A Surfeit of Riches.” Contemporary Crime Fiction: Crossing Boundaries, Merging Genres, edited by Charlotte Beyer, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021, pp. 1-17. Bitterman, Alex. “The Rainbow Connection: A Time-Series Study of Rainbow Flag Display Across Nine Toronto Neighborhoods.” The Life and Afterlife of Gay Neighbor‐ hoods: Renaissance and Resurgence, edited by Alex Bitterman, and Daniel Baldwin Hess, Springer, 2021, pp. 117-38. Blyth, Caroline. Reimagining Delilah’s Afterlives as Femme Fatale: The Lost Seduction. Bloomsbury, 2017. Cassuto, Leonard. Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories. Columbia UP, 2009. Crafton, Robert E. The African American Experience in Crime Fiction: A Critical Study. McFarland & Company, 2015. Elliott, Winter S. “Neither Victim nor Vixen: Reading the Female Detective’s Receding Body and Textual Violence.” Murdering Miss Marple: Essays on Gender and Sexuality in the New Golden Age of Women’s Crime Fiction, edited by Julie H. Kim, McFarland & Company, 2012, pp. 211-29. Forselius, Tilda Maria. “The Impenetrable M and the Mysteries of Narration: Narrative in The Shape of Snakes.” Minette Walters and the Meaning of Justice: Essays on the Crime Novels, edited by Mary Hadley, and Sarah D. Fogle, McFarland & Company, 2008, pp. 118-36. Geherin, David. “Detectives.” The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Andrew Pepper, Routledge, 2020, pp. 159-67. Gifford, Justin. “African-American Crime and Detective Fiction.” A History of American Crime Fiction, edited by Chris Raczkowski, Cambridge UP, 2017, pp. 263-75.

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Gregoriou, Christiana. “Criminals.” The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Andrew Pepper, Routledge, 2020, pp. 168-76. Gruesser, John. “Walter Mosley (1952-).” A Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Charles J. Rzepka, and Lee Horsley, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 531-38. Gulddal, Jesper, and Stewart King. “Genre.” The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Andrew Pepper, Routledge, 2020, pp. 13-21. Hadley, Mary. “Detective Fiction.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature: Volume 1, edited by Jay Parini, Oxford UP, 2004, pp. 359-65. Hakim, Andrew M. “Troubling Bodies of Evidence: Gender, Detection, and the Problems of Self-Reinvention in Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake and Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods.” New Perspectives on Detective Fiction: Mystery Magnified, edited by Casey A. Cothran, and Mercy Cannon, Routledge, 2016, pp. 15-31. Hoffman, Megan. “Assuming Identities: Strategies of Drag in Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell Series.” Murdering Miss Marple: Essays on Gender and Sexuality in the New Golden Age of Women’s Crime Fiction, edited by Julie H. Kim, McFarland & Company, 2012, pp. 81-100. Horsley, Lee. The Noir Thriller. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Humann, Heather Duerre. Gender Bending Detective Fiction: A Critical Analysis of Selected Works. McFarland & Company, 2017. Kenley, Nicole. “Women in World Crime Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction, edited by Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Alistair Rolls, Cambridge UP, 2022, pp. 100-16. Krajenbrink, Marieke, and Kate M. Quinn. “Introduction: Investigating Identities.” Inves‐ tigating Identities: Questions of Identity in Contemporary International Crime Fiction, edited by Marieke Krajenbrink, and Kate M. Quinn, Rodopi, 2009, pp. 1-9. Lehane, Dennis. “Preface.” Whodunit? A Who’s Who in Crime and Mystery Writing, edited by Rosemary Herbert, Oxford UP, 2003, pp. xi-xiii. Markowitz, Judith A. The Gay Detective Novel: Lesbian and Gay Main Characters and Themes in Mystery Fiction. McFarland & Company, 2004. Messent, Peter. The Crime Fiction Handbook. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Moore, Lewis D. Cracking the Hard-Boiled Detective: A Critical History from the 1920s to the Present. McFarland & Company, 2006. Müller, Monika. “Hard-Boiled Domestic(s)? Die Kriminalromane von Valerie Wilson Wesley und Barbara Neely.” Frauen auf der Spur: Kriminalautorinnen aus Deutschland, Großbritannien und den USA, edited by Carmen Birkle, Sabina Matter-Seibel, and Patricia Plummer, Stauffenberg Verlag, 2001, pp. 163-78.

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Naidu, Sam. “Race and Ethnicity.” The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Andrew Pepper, Routledge, 2020, pp. 111-19. Nünning, Vera. “The Making of Fictional Worlds: Processes, Features, and Functions.” Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives, edited by Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning, and Birgit Neumann, WVT, 2010, pp. 215-43. —. “Britische und amerikanische Kriminalromane: Genrekonventionen und neuere Entwicklungstendenzen.” Der amerikanische und britische Kriminalroman: Genres – Entwicklungen – Modellinterpretationen, edited by Vera Nünning, WVT, 2008, pp. 1-26. Pâquet, Lili. Crime Fiction from a Professional Eye: Women Writers with Law Enforcement and Justice Experience. McFarland & Company, 2018. Pepper, Andrew. Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State. Oxford UP, 2016. Plain, Gill. “Gender and Sexuality.” The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Andrew Pepper, Routledge, 2020, pp. 102-10. Porter, Dennis. “The Private Eye.” The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, Cambridge UP, 2003, pp. 95-113. Reddy, Maureen T. “Race and American Crime Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, edited by Catherine Ross Nickerson, Cambridge UP, 2010, pp. 135-47. —. “Women Detectives.” The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, Cambridge UP, 2003, pp. 191-207. Saval, José V. “Crime Fiction and Politics.” The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Janice Allan, Jesper Guddal, Stewart King, and Andrew Pepper, Routledge, 2020, pp. 327-34. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. Routledge, 2005. Sim, Stuart. Justice and Revenge in Contemporary American Crime Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Soitos, Stephen F. “Queering the ‘I’: Black Lesbian Detective Fiction.” Multicultural Detective Fiction: Murder from the ‘Other’ Side, edited by Adrienne Johnson Gosselin, Garland Publishing, 1999, pp. 105-21. Stewart, Faye. German Feminist Queer Crime Fiction: Politics, Justice and Desire. McFarland & Company, 2014. —. “Girls in the Gay Bar: Performing and Policing Identity in Crime Fiction.” Tatort Germany: The Curious Case of German-Language Crime Fiction, edited by Lynn M. Kutch, and Todd Herzog, Camden House, 2014, pp. 200-22. Vallorani, Nicoletta. “Crime Fiction and the Future.” The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Andrew Pepper, Routledge, 2020, pp. 406-13.

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Välisalo, Tanja, Maarit Piipponen, Helen Mäntymäki, and Aino-Kaisa Koistinen. “Crime Fiction and Digital Media.” The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Andrew Pepper, Routledge, 2020, pp. 397-405. Wezner, Kelley. “Repopulating the Margins: Rhys Bowen’s Treatment of Gender, History, and Power.” Murdering Miss Marple: Essays on Gender and Sexuality in the New Golden Age of Women’s Crime Fiction, edited by Julie H. Kim, McFarland & Company, 2012, pp. 61-80. Worthington, Heather. Key Concepts in Crime Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Maps and Narrative Mobilizing and Connecting Perspectives in a Space of Encounter

Corinna Assmann

1. Introduction: Perspective-Taking and Spatial Positioning

In these divisive times, one of the most important functions of literature is arguably that of bringing people together, of bridging divides, by enabling empathy and understanding for others – other forms of thinking, feeling, and being. Much has been written on the processes behind this phenomenon – not least by Vera Nünning herself (see e.g. “Ethics”; “Cognition”; “Value”; Reading Fictions). One of the aspects that is often highlighted in this regard is the role of ‘perspective-taking’, generally seen as a prerequisite for readers to cultivate empathy and understanding (see Nünning, Reading Fictions 19). As defined by Nünning, perspective-taking entails “[t]he combination of empathy and theory-of-mind abilities” (ibid. 26) in order to imaginatively engage with a character’s perspective. Such “an ‘imagine-other’ perspective [… means] imagining what the other (and not oneself) would feel in the given situation” (ibid.), and is considered to be particularly prone to enhancing prosocial behav‐ iour and other-directed attitudes (see ibid.). Although perspective is closely affiliated with space, this interconnection plays a subordinate role in cognitive readings of literature. By foregrounding questions around the spatial nature of perspective and narrative, this contribution aims to illuminate how the process of perspective-taking hinges on spatial relations, positioning, and mobility. The spatial dimension of perspective is, of course, not alien to narratological analysis in general, as the often synonymously used term ‘point of view’ indicates. A basic definition of perspective in literature describes it as “the way the representation of the story is influenced by the position, personality and values of the narrator, the characters and, possibly, other, more hypothetical entities in the storyworld” (Niederhoff n.p.). By offering different character perspectives, literary texts not only enable readers to follow events through

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their eyes and thus from a particular position in space, but also to get insight into their thoughts and emotions, their subjective impressions, and evaluations. This cognitive dimension is what discussions of perspective-taking usually focus on, and I want to show in this contribution that it can be fruitfully complemented by taking the spatial dimension of perspective into consideration. The particular emphasis on spatial positionings helps us gauge the way perspective-taking may forge connections by putting elements into relation with one another, which, in turn, functions as a prerequisite for community, understanding, and social cohesion. In light of the spatial dimension of perspec‐ tive and the cognitive mobility that it demands, I want to couple narrative with another medium that enables movement and establishes connections in space, namely maps. Importantly, both narrative and maps are significant cultural ways of worldmaking (see Nünning, “Worldmaking”), a connection that the analysis focuses on with the help of two novels that both carry maps in their title: Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography (2002) and Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004). Although the plots of these two novels revolve around conflict, violence, and trauma, both highlight a quality that maps and narratives have in common – that of connecting people and creating a common ground, a world or reality that can be shared. Thus, they become media through which positive change is envisioned. In order to understand these specific functions of maps and narrative, the second section of this article offers a theoretical assessment of the two media of worldmaking and explores the way that they relate to perspective. The analyses in sections three and four explore the potential of narrative and mapping for promoting a sense of connectedness and community across ethnic, religious, and social boundaries in the two novels. Finally, in the conclusion, these findings are brought into a comparative perspective. 2. Perspectivity in Cartography and Narrative

In the wake of the spatial turn in literary studies, narrative cartography has developed into a growing field of research that subsumes such vastly different approaches as Franco Moretti’s distant-reading project of mapping European literary history on the one hand, and close reading analyses of the representation and semanticization of space in literature on the other (see Ryan, “Narrative” 1-4). In her overview of the field, Marie-Laure Ryan differentiates the ways in which the relationship between narrative and mapping is explored within narrative cartography, mainly distinguishing between ‘narrative cartography

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as mapping of imaginary worlds’ and ‘literary texts as maps’ (ibid.).1 These cat‐ egories correspond roughly with Sébastien Caquard and William Cartwright’s distinction between ‘mapping stories’ and ‘the narrative of maps’ as two separate approaches, the first one dealing with maps as a way to “represent the spatio-temporal structures of stories and their relationships with places”, and the second being more interested in “the potential of maps to tell stories” (101).2 This aspect, which indicates the possible overlap between maps and narratives, is also the focus of this contribution; it looks at how maps are thematized or evoked in literary texts, the functions that are connected with them, and their relationship with narrative. This means not only inquiring into the specific ways in which maps as images or as a motif are integrated into the narrative text (on the story as well as the discourse level) and the meanings they develop in relation to the text as a whole; it also calls for an inquiry into the semiotics of maps and narrative respectively as systems of representation and meaning-making, in short, the ways in which both function as cultural ‘ways of worldmaking’. This concept, first introduced by Nelson Goodman, was elaborated by Ansgar and Vera Nünning as a pivotal key to understanding culture, and the way “a wide array of symbol systems, modes of organisation, media and social practices are involved in making worlds” (2).3 By comparing cartographic and narrative structure, we can see some fun‐ damental differences between the two that are helpful in exploring their relationship and the specific ways in which they build worlds and use per‐ spectivity. Per definition, a map is a visual representation or diagram of a spatial area that serves the primary function of enabling orientation within and navigation through space. Maps use projections and scales to transform

1 2

3

A third group suggested by Ryan (“Narrative” 1-4), ‘narrative cartography as decorative art’, e.g. maps of literary London, is not relevant for the present purposes. As a sub-group of this second category, Caquard and Cartwright propose “the narratives of mapping” (104 f.), thereby stressing the importance of critically analysing the stories behind the production of maps from a post-representational cartographic perspective. Cognitive approaches to ‘mapping literature’ at first sight fall into the first category, dealing with the question of “[h]ow essential a part of the experience of a literary work is the way in which we spatialise, and visualise (externally or internally) the place and space of the fictional world” (Bushell 1). When such approaches are closely examined, however, they also show that these categories may become blurred, because the cognitive processes that map the imaginary world of a literary text always rely on the narrative potential of maps as well. In literature, maps are often employed to augment the storyworld built by the narrative and thus aid the reading process. In the two texts analysed here, by contrast, maps play a role as symbol systems and sources of meaning-making on the level of story as well as discourse.

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a three-dimensional geography and the physical features of a territory onto the flat surface of paper or a screen (see “map, n.”, def. 1.a). Through these devices, maps create the impression of a non-perspectival view of the land that contrasts with the perspectivity that is inherent to narratives.4 However, the rules and calculations behind such cartographic projections never yield a representation that is as objective as it purports to be: Maps “create models of the world that influence people’s beliefs and actions” (Nünning, “Worldmaking” 51). Although the semiotics of maps are highly complex, “[l]ike any semiotic model, maps simplify and abstract” (ibid.). They make use of all the processes of worldmaking: “composition and decomposition, weighting (i.e., emphasis or ratings of relevance), ordering (and reordering), deletion and supplementation, and deformation” (Nünning and Nünning 2) in order to create an image of the world that is heavily endowed with cultural beliefs, aims, values, and norms (see Nünning, “Worldmaking” 52). Thus, as maps provide a view of the world, they also convey, however implicitly, a specific and biased world view. Denis Wood and John Fels state that a map not only functions as index to a real or imaginative geography,5 it also “refers to itself and to its makers, and to a world seen quite subjectively through their eyes” (52); they identify this ‘politicized’ level of meaning in a map as its “propensity toward myth” (ibid. 54). This dimension of myth as a feature of how maps create meaning points to‐ wards a convergence of maps and narrative that prompts us to look more closely at where these two systems of representation overlap. In comparing maps and narrative, we can state that maps organize information in a spatial arrangement, whereas narratives create a temporal (and, often only by implication, causal) order. In this way, both create a world that can be cognitively understood and therefore imaginatively inhabited and explored. On a more abstract level, narrative, as a fundamental ‘tool for thinking’ and a way of ‘constructing reality’ (see Nünning, Reading Fictions 15, with reference to Herman and Bruner respectively), offers direction and orientation, not unlike how maps do in a more literal sense. However, the use of maps is not restricted to navigation; mapping may refer to cognitive processes as well: Like narratives, maps are also an integral part of our thinking, they shape the way we conceive space and the way we spatialize our thoughts, for example, in mind maps. In this latter sense, maps have become a ubiquitous metaphor that focuses on their primary function of organizing information and putting different elements in relation with one another (see Ryan, “Narrative” 4). Such derivative uses of the word

4 5

See Nünning (“Narrativität”) for a concise overview of the features of narrative. See Wood and Fels (51-54) for a comprehensive semiotic reading of maps.

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suggest that the formal rules of mapping can be applied to the representation of all kinds of objects, including mental images or abstract concepts. In such cases, the points on the map, rather than corresponding to an “actual geographical position” (“map, n.”, def. 1.a), serve to structure abstract themes and ideas. As ways of worldmaking, both maps and narrative also function as powerful ways of meaning-making, and may serve as vehicles for an ideological world‐ view (see Harley, “Power”). Perhaps the most striking example of this are the colonial maps of the imperial age, which served to construct the world as an object of discovery and conquest, and whole continents and their inhabitants as resources to be claimed and exploited. A deconstructive look at imperial maps6 reveals how values, ideologies, and meanings are embedded in the fundamental features shared by all maps, even where they appear less obvious. Rather than being non-perspectival, maps use projections that distort the world in a way to create hierarchical proportions. The map of the British Empire uses the by now very common Mercator projection, which increases in size those regions that are located further away from the equator and collapses those that are closer to it, exaggerating the size of countries and continents of the global north in comparison to the global south. The map is, moreover, centred on the Greenwich meridian with the overall effect of highlighting the unity and size of the Empire while “obscuring the territorial fragility of British imperial power” (Driver 147; see also Laidlaw). The Mercator projection has since become so common that its distorted perspective has largely shaped our view of the world. In the imperial age, projections that charted the world in a system of coordinates created a basic grid that was open for augmentation. This was a crucial precondi‐ tion for the enterprise of discovery, because it provided a model of the world that could easily accommodate and disseminate new knowledge. This understanding of cartography is also the basis of the image of the world as a yet incomplete map with areas of blank spaces to be filled with new information, ‘new’ countries and regions – which only come into full existence through the act of mapping. Seen as a work in progress, cartography was closely connected to the narrative of invention, discovery, civilization, and progress. In the 19th century, maps gained great importance as a political instrument – if not weapon – of imperial power (see Harley, “Power” 57). With their blank spaces that were read as an invitation to penetrate unknown lands, maps first anticipated the Empire, and then legitimized the acquisition of territory and the reality of conquest. 6

The nexus of cartography and power, particularly with regard to imperial and colonial maps, has been researched widely since the 1980s in deconstructionist and decolonial approaches in critical geography. Seminal and exemplary texts are Huggan (“Decolo‐ nizing”), and Harley (“Deconstructing”; “Power”).

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This example of imperial cartography illustrates how maps are suffused with narrative elements and how much of their meaning and imaginative potential relies on narrative. Initially, the map may be described as a ‘plotless text’, as Yuri Lotman (239) suggests,7 “defined by static boundaries which, in themselves, do not allow for movement, change or development. In this sense, mapping excludes narrative” (Döring 98). As sweeping as this argument may sound, it already points to the forms in which mapping may approximate narrative. With their promise of discovery and progress, the blank spaces on the map invite narrative elements such as agents, movement, and change, which become constituents of the meaning created in the reading process of the map. Speaking to the imagination, maps may thus acquire a plot and invite the reader to take on the perspective of the colonizer or explorer, as Joseph Conrad famously describes in The Heart of Darkness (1899), where the narrator Marlow remembers, how, as a child I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say: When I grow up I will go there. (11)8

The most famous example for the narrative potential of the map itself is Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Map of Treasure Island’, from which the plot for his adventure novel developed (see Stockhammer 62). Here, like the blank spaces, the treasure introduces the element of directionality to the map, and with it a temporal as well as spatial perspective; the marked destination implies an end point, and therefore also a beginning; it entails change and purpose. Although the map is in itself plotless, as Lotman suggests, “if we draw a line across the map to indicate, say the possible air or sea routes, the text then assumes a plot: an action will have been introduced which surmounts the structure” (Lotman

7

8

This categorization stems from Lotman’s book The Structure of the Artistic Text, and more specifically, his interest in plot and the question of “what counts as an event in a narrative” (Schönle 51). For more on the characteristics of plotless texts and how they might relate to narrative see Lotman (236-39). This quote from the novel reads very similarly to a passage from Conrad’s own auto‐ biographical recollections and his ‘addiction’ to “map-gazing” (Conrad, “Geography” 145; see also “When I Grow Up”); see Frank (341-47) for a contextualization of Conrad’s novella within his personal writings and essays, with a focus on the imaginative potential of the blank spaces on maps. See Brantlinger for the relationship between such maps and the creation of the myth of Africa as a ‘dark continent’.

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239; see also Huggan, Disputes 5). With the indication of a route, process and temporality enter the map. In other words, [t]ext on the map describes dramatic events within the narrative [in this case the uncovering of the treasure] and so ties together the hermeneutic codes of map and text as the simultaneity of the map anticipates and stimulates interest in the temporal unfolding of the story (Bushell 9).

The colonial maps of discovery derive their dynamic character from the blank spaces, which function not unlike the ‘gaps’ of the literary text (sensu Iser). The illustrations that embellish early maps of the adventures of seafarers and colonial expeditioners are only manifestations of the imaginative and narrative potential inherent in the general layout of the map. The nexus of cartography and hegemonic power that imperial maps paradig‐ matically represent is important to understand in order to fully appreciate the ways in which maps can be adapted – in their semiotic structure and in their meanings – to stand for something completely different, namely the transgres‐ sion of those boundaries that colonization and decolonization inscribed onto the maps of the 19th and 20th century. While these boundaries and classifications established a hierarchical world order based on subjection, structural inequality, and exploitation, the language of maps proves flexible and malleable enough to convey a counter message of unity and togetherness in diversity as an instigator of positive change. As critical geography has shown, the semiotics of maps can be deconstructed to reveal the mechanisms of worldmaking that create the appearance of a non-perspectival, objective worldview, the truth of which cannot be challenged. In her theory of ‘situated knowledges’, Donna Haraway debunks this illusion of absolute objectivity in favour of an understanding of all knowledge as situated that fosters objectivity based on a “commitment to mobile positioning” (585) and a “politics and epistemology of partial perspectives” (584). Objectivity, in this sense, means the “ability […] to translate knowledges among very different – and power-differentiated – communities” (580). This is only possible if the element of perspective in all processes of meaning-making is taken seriously. As Haraway states: “So, not so perversely, objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility.” (582 f.) This particularity of embodied perspective is what narrative especially is able to transmit. The following analyses illustrate how it is in connection with narrative, and specifically the perspectivity of narratives, that maps can be made to incorporate multiple and partial perspectives instead of employing what Haraway calls the “god trick of seeing everything from nowhere” (581).

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Recognizing the partiality of all perspectives logically entails the mobility that Haraway demands, because no single perspective will do. This idea calls for ‘mobilization’ in the sense of Mabel Berezin and Michèle Lamont, who point to “the ways in which collective action promotes social transformation that directly or indirectly affects health”, based on the inextricable connection of “values of wellbeing, solidarity, and recognition” (202).9 In both novels, the protagonists are suffering from conflicts that narrative maps promise to resolve, thus creating a vision of positive change for these communities. 3. Mapping History and Memory in Kartography

The relationship between maps and narrative as two seemingly opposed forms of understanding and relating to place is a main theme in Kamila Shamshie’s novel Kartography. With regard to the typology of narrative cartography, the novel contains what Ryan calls ‘internal maps’. In this function, “[t]he map fulfils a double role: it is both textual referent, and a guide to the plot; it functions on the intra-diegetic as well as on the extra-diegetic level. In both roles however it is intra-textual, since it is physically included in the novel” (Ryan, “Visual” 339). On the intra-diegetic level, maps are established in the novel as a medium of communication, a specific code that allows the characters to process and transmit information that they cannot otherwise communicate. Besides the maps that are incorporated as images into the text, cartography is a central motif of the novel, whose title blends the name of the city Karachi with the act of mapmaking. Kartography condenses the aftermath of colonialism on the Indian subcontinent into a portrait of the city of Karachi as rife with ethnic violence and defined by class and ethnic boundaries. With this symbolic quality to Karachi, the novel suggests the city to be a key to overcoming these social divisions and creating community by forging a unified understanding of and access to place. In this vision of surmounting disparities by creating an overarching unity that does not overwrite but acknowledges difference, the city, or rather the (narrative) map of the city, functions as shared ground and basis for commonality. Against the background of persisting ethnic violence in Karachi, Raheen as the homodiegetic narrator tells the story of the complicated relationship of Karim and herself, who turn from crib companions to best friends in childhood and eventually potential lovers as young adults. Their relationship is repeatedly referred to as “destined” (Kartography 31),10 as it is linked to the

9 10

See “Introduction” in this volume. In the following, references to Kartography will be given without repeating the title.

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story of their parents ‘swapping fiancés’ in 1971, the year of the Bangladesh War of Independence and two years before Karim and Raheen were born. Consequently, their lives appear inseparably connected: “[I]f I wasn’t me, you wouldn’t be you” (4), Karim tells Raheen. Having grown up together since infanthood, they share a great intimacy, but their friendship is at the same time threatened by estrangement and distance, which is enforced when Karim and his parents emigrate to England and the friends’ experiences of Karachi become desynchronized. The novel is prefaced by a short scene that establishes the act of writing as one of remembering, imaginatively going back in time to retrieve the experiences, emotions, and sensations of bygone events. In this scene, Raheen wills memory to transport her to the beginning of the story of their friendship. The irruption of memory is depicted as a travel in time and space; Raheen is propelled forward by a spinning globe and the sensation of a cuttlebone in her hand: The globe spins. Mountain ranges skim my fingers; there is static above the Arabian Sea. Pakistan is split in two, but undivided. This world is out of date. […] I unscrew a jar of ink. Scent of smudged words and metal fills the air. Do all tentacled creatures produce ink, Raheen? Does the cuttlefish? Can you write on the waves with cuttleink? I close my eyes, and wrap my fingers around a diamond-shaped bone. I still hear the world spinning. I spin with it, spin into the garden. At dusk. And yes, those are shoulder pads stitched into my shirt. 1986. (n.p., emphasis in original)

This preface emphasizes the connection between maps and storytelling: The spinning globe instigates the act of narration. As it spins, the lines that delineate the borders on the map become blurred, the boundaries lose their stasis, and movement and change become possible in Lotman’s sense. The “static above the Arabian Sea” can be read as a conceit, with the polysemy of the word ‘static’ hinting at this internal tension between movement and the formal fixedness of the map. The charged atmosphere as well as the out-dated border delineations that run across the South Asian subcontinent point towards the colonial heritage of cartography as imperial knowledge, and the political instability of the region in the aftermath of decolonization, highlighting the Bangladesh War of Independence and sectarian violence in its wake. The spinning movement in this opening conveys a sense of dizziness and confusion, which is put to a sudden stop by the arrival at the scene in the garden, firmly placed in a spatial-temporal grid: 1986, “located where all our beginnings, Karim’s and mine, are located: Karachi” (3). The coordinates of time and space

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of the opening scene, by contrast, are only revealed at the very end of the novel, when Raheen arrives back at that same moment of the spinning globe. This identity of beginning and ending, as well as the out-datedness of the pre-Civil War globe suggest circularity and simultaneity that challenge the idea of a linear and coherent narrative that Raheen strives for, having – as she tells Karim in an internal dialogue – “melded the memories into a story beginningmiddlend, and don’t you dare interrupt with your version of what-really-came-first and that-was-cause-not-effect.” (4) The preface synchronizes the three major time levels of the narrative: Raheen’s narrative of Karim and her friendship, which concentrates on the years 1986/87 and 1994/95, and their parents’ story, set in 1970/71 just before the onset of the Civil War, which intersects the main narrative. In a time when “the Civil War was treated as a long-distant memory that had nothing to do with our present lives” (44), this interweaving of different time levels illustrates the continuing presence of the past and the way Raheen and Karim’s lives are inextricably entwined with those of their parents and, consequently, with Pakistan’s silenced post-Partition history. While the preface ties narrative and cartography together, the two forms of mapping and storytelling are counterposed in the novel through their embodiment by the two protagonists, Karim and Raheen, respectively. Although Raheen in several meta-narrative comments recognizes the pitfalls of memory and narration (e.g., 21, 23, 58 f., 89) – for instance, with regard to how meaning is imposed on events with the benefit of hindsight (4, 63) –, she is nevertheless firmly set on her narrative enterprise, because she believes in stories. Karim, on the other hand, believes in maps. In Raheen’s eyes, his decision to become a mapmaker marks the first instance of estrangement between the two, and it remains the issue over which all of their disagreements are argued out. Forging a connection between history and place, maps and narrative are the ways in which Karim and Raheen understand and come to terms with the entanglements and aftermath of their country’s violent history and present, represented in their respective ideas of Karachi. The struggle over maps and narrative that is carried out by the protagonists reflects larger issues of (trans-)national memory as well as individual and communal political responsibility. In its contrast between maps on the one hand and stories and memory on the other, the novel presents two opposing systems of charting personal and collective experience. While Raheen forms a highly subjective and sensory image of the city, composed of a variety of idiosyncratic stories she connects with different places, Karim aims to conceptualize the city through maps, aiming for an objective and comprehensive understanding devoid of such a personalized perspective. In Raheen’s view, maps, with their scientific claim, destroy the

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experiential quality of the city, which (only) as long as “no one defines it or maps out its co-ordinates, […] can be anything and everything we dream a city should be” (126). Putting places on a map means to dislodge them from people’s imagination and experience, and to divest them of the stories and memories they hold. In this view, narrative, with its power to convey experience, to speak to the imagination, to embrace ambiguity and polysemy, is a live and dynamic medium, whereas maps, as scientific form of representation, fix meaning in an abstract and rigid structure. Constructing her own cognitive map of Karachi through lived experience and memories of the city, Raheen is irritated with Karim’s interest in street and place names prior to his family’s emigration: “what need was there for him to call the road by its official name, when he’d no part in the naming, when he had no memories stored in the curves of its official consonants?” (65 f.), Raheen asks herself. She rejects official street names in favour of stories that mark her personal city landmarks and names that reflect her own movement in and perspective of the city. As Karim’s family moves to England and leaves Karachi, however, Raheen’s stories begin to exclude him and he is no longer able to share her perspective, which becomes increasingly limited. In the car to the airport, Karim draws a map as a goodbye present for Raheen, a map that reflects their movement through the city on this last trip together and is embellished with memories of their friendship and his emotions at leaving home. In the form of an itinerary, his map combines the qualities of cartography with characteristics of narrative. A clear starting point is defined (home, marked with the directive “START HERE!!”, 112, emphasis in original), as well as a destination, the airport, where “I won’t know how to say goodbye” (ibid.). Alternative routes of Karim and Raheen’s past life together cannot be followed because the streets are discontinued on the map, these places thus relegated to the past and memory. The linear logic of the route is disrupted by these memories as well as by leaps ahead to the future (see Herbert 167): The home that will be “someone else’s by tomorrow”, and the question “will I forget Urdu?” (112) anticipate Karim’s displacement and loss of home. The map is thus a subjective rendering of Karim’s experience of the city determined by the pain of leaving. As Caroline Herbert shows, his anxieties around memory, forgetting, and belonging also connect to broader questions of a unified national identity that is represented on the map by, for instance, the “Three Swords” monument. The question about Urdu linked to this monument “gestures towards the centrality of language to formations of Pakistani identities” and “the repression of the Bengali language” (Herbert 167) as part of national “narratives that censor 1971 in order to construct a continuity

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between the nation’s founding values and its contemporary identity” (ibid. 165). As the son of a Bengali mother, Karim expresses a deep-seated uneasiness about the possibilities of belonging accessible to him in a city – and nation – that fails to confront its history and the legacy of the civil war. With its combination of narrative and visual elements, the map invites Raheen, the intended reader of the map, to take on Karim’s perspective as one that is different from her own. Following the itinerary instructions, she can re-enact his way to the airport, where she arrives at a belated goodbye, which, in turn, was anticipated by Karim in drawing the map. Their moment of parting is thus desynchronized; it is located at the same time in the future and in the past, and only present on the map itself. Rather than functioning as a prolonged goodbye, however, the map only serves to irritate Raheen; she feels deprived of their last moments when Karim was too busy drawing to pay any attention to her. In Raheen’s view, the map is thus an incomplete substitute for a ‘proper’ goodbye; it represents the absence of the practice itself.11 Although she takes on Karim’s perspective in a spatial sense, following his movement through the city, she misses the emotional undertones of Karim’s map and its political implications, remaining fixed within her own subjective experience. At this point, she is unable to see where their perspectives diverge based on their ethnic difference and social positioning. When Karim returns for the first time in 1994, he puts his knowledge of the city to a test: “Ask me directions from here to somewhere I used to know” (160). Raheen at once corrects his version using official street names with her own: “Or, in Karachispeak, go straight straight straight straight straight and then turn right just after the Metropole, and when you see a church, stop.” (Ibid.) Marking her own version as ‘Karachispeak’, she makes clear that she considers his way of giving directions as inauthentic, betraying, as it does, the perspective of the outsider he has become during his absence from the city. Raheen’s cognitive map of the city, however, renders a highly idiosyncratic representation that can only be understood and read from her own position and perspective and increasingly works as a mechanism of exclusion for Karim, who no longer shares her stories or her location.

11

Following Michel de Certeau, who writes that in the attempt to trace people’s trajecto‐ ries on city maps, the “curves only refer […] to the absence of what has passed by. […] These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substituted for the practice.” (97) This parallel suggests that Raheen sees the map not as a mnemonic device, as might have been intended by Karim, but as a medium for forgetting, whereas her stories are closely connected to memory and remembering.

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The second map that is inserted into the novel is a reprint from the Lonely Planet that Karim sends to Raheen in a letter from England. Removed from Karachi and the lived experience of the city, Karim studies maps and the statistics of violence in an obsessive desire to understand the city and remain connected to it. While Raheen’s perspective becomes more and more exclusive of Karim, he deploys the Lonely Planet map to show that maps, by contrast, offer an intersubjective image of the city that surpasses the immediate realm of personal experience and subjective perspective. Although, as his caption states, “[t]his is not a map of Karachi” (134, emphasis in original) but only of Karachi South, Raheen’s sphere of movement only covers a minor fraction of even this partial map, as he points out. Later, he explains that I wanted you to find a way to see beyond the tiny circle you live in, I wanted you to acknowledge that you’re part of something larger. Maps, Raheen, are amazing things. They define a city as a single territorial unit, they give a sense of connectedness, and you don’t want to admit you’re connected to anything that’s painful or uncomfortable. (324)

By excluding those who are not in her circle, the subjectivity of Raheen’s perspective leaves no room for other perspectives and their relevance to her. Raheen thus manages to feel extremely intimate with Karachi at the same time as she blots out from her consciousness the ethnic conflicts, the daily killings, and bloodshed. As members of the highly privileged English-speaking elite, she and her friends move in small circles, socially as well as geographically. She acknowledges that [p]rivilege erased the day-to-day struggles of ethnic politics, and […] I couldn’t pretend I was sorry that I had been born on ‘this side of Clifton Bridge’ where class bound everyone together in an enveloping, suffocating embrace, with ethnicity only a secondary or even tertiary concern. (175)

Outside the borders of her own neighbourhood, she feels utterly lost and disconnected from people, as an excursion to another part of the city that leaves her stranded shows (172-81). It is Raheen’s desire to obliterate difference by emphasizing sameness that informs her narrative approach to the city and its logic of linearity and cause-and-effect relations that suggest coherence and closure (‘beginningmid‐ dleend’). At the end of the novel, she recognizes the limitations of this approach when she wonders “[w]hat happens to all those streets that hold no stories for us?” (331). Exploring unknown areas of the city and listening to other stories means acknowledging difference as an integral part not only of her

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own life and of her relationship with Karim, but of Karachi and of Pakistan as a country. Recognizing Karim’s ethnic difference, where before Raheen had preferred to see only their sameness, means facing the painful truth of their parents’ story. As she finds out towards the end of the novel, the innocuous anecdote of “waltzing couples changing partners” (48) obscures a more serious and complex story, which is that her father separated from Karim’s mother in 1971 because he could not stand the social pressure, ostracism, and abuse connected with being engaged to a Bengali woman at the onset of the civil war. As Herbert explores in her reading of the novel, “the reduction of national events into a highly personalized ‘four-line story’ ([…] 311) has the effect of mimicking the state censorship of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in relation to West Pakistan’s actions in East Pakistan” (163). By laying bare the younger generation’s lack of knowledge about the civil war, the novel shows that these events have no place in the national narrative and collective memory. The “personalized stories make war personal […] in a way that excludes everything and everyone who was not part of that […] story” (311), and thus work in a similar way to Raheen’s “personal narratives and memory-maps that privatize city-space” (Herbert 164). The assumed unchartability of the city (131) reflects the difficulty of reconciling its incoherencies and conflicting stories. “[T]he linear logics of nationalist narratives which censor the loss of Bangladesh in favour of a reconstructed continuity between the founding of Pakistan in 1947 and its contemporary identity” (Herbert 179) are built on a system of silences and repressed memory. What Karim wants to show Raheen is that by defining a unit, maps also create unity (244): They connect people and lives that in the everyday reality of the city remain completely separate. In providing direction and orientation, maps allow people to “wander out of the comfort of [their] own streets and […] stories” (181). The “sense of connectedness” (244) that Karim wants to achieve is not only spatial but also temporal – it raises an awareness of the intergenerational entanglement of personal life stories and national history. At the end of the novel, he suggests a project of collective mapmaking that combines narrative and cartography in an attempt to capture the dynamics of Karachi, the “city that’s always changing” (338), and the different stories and perspectives that it holds. His idea of an interactive map of Karachi on the internet, where anyone can supply their own personal stories to enhance the cartographic image of the city, is a combination of both of their views of Karachi; it is a map that allows the dimension of time and multiperspectivity to enter and thus transform the medium of the map toward a narrative form, and vice versa. In incorporating stories, memories, graphics, and other media, the multimedial

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and multiperspectival map does not give a false impression of objectivity or closure; it embraces the variety of experience of the city with an emphasis on inclusion rather than exclusion. 4. Displacement, Disorientation, and Loss in Maps for Lost Lovers

The titular maps in Maps for Lost Lovers do not feature as prominently in the novel as maps do in Kartography. Instead, they have a more metaphorical meaning that has to be derived from the novel’s thematization of space and the characters’ relationship to their environment. In this novel, Nadeem Aslam gives a poignant impression of migration as an experience that leaves people feeling displaced and disoriented in time and space – a condition that calls for maps as remedy. Consequently, the migrants’ settlement is accompanied by a process of remapping that overwrites the English town with the coordinates of memories and home: As in Lahore, a road in this town is named after Goethe. There is a Park Street here as in Calcutta, a Malabar Hill as in Bombay, and a Naag Tolla Hill as in Dhaka. Because it was difficult to pronounce the English names, the men who arrived in this town in the 1950s had re-christened everything they saw before them. They had come from across the Subcontinent, lived together ten to a room, and the name that one of them happened to give to a street or landmark was taken up by the others, regardless of where they themselves were from. But over the decades, as more and more people came, the various nationalities of the Subcontinent have changed the names according to the specific country they themselves are from – Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan. Only one name has been accepted by every group, remaining unchanged. It’s the name of the town itself. Dasht-e-Tanhaii. The Wilderness of Solitude. The Desert of Loneliness. (Maps for Lost Lovers 29)12

The only thing that remains over the years of the initial unifying map that underscores the universality of the diasporic experience is the name of the town, which expresses the emotional quality of the migrants’ experience of place and

12

The name Dasht-e-Tanhaii is a quote from the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose poem “Yad” (‘memory’) uses this image to convey the sense of loss, memory, and longing desire felt by the lover in separation of their loved one (see Yaqin n.p.). The fact that Faiz functions as a shared referent for the divided group of immigrants emphasizes the unifying and healing power ascribed to “a living tradition of lyric poetry” (Yaqin n.p.) in the novel. In the following, references to Maps for Lost Lovers will be given without repeating the title.

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displacement. Soon enough, the conflict between the ethnic groups is revived once they form separate communities, re-establishing the borders that had been drawn on the Indian Subcontinent since the fall of the British Raj in 1947. Like a palimpsest, the diasporic experience of the immigrants is superimposed onto the town; the way in which it eludes the longitudes and latitudes of English maps reflects the feeling that they do not belong to the country and illustrates their determination to gain some control over what remains utterly strange to them.13 The translation of Pakistani place names into the English surroundings functions not only as an act of remembrance; it also entails the transferral of a whole system of values, norms, social relations, and codes of behaviour. It attests to a more general act of worldmaking: The different place names indicate that life in the immigrant community is organized along a completely different grid of coordinates than that of mainstream British society.14 The act of renaming furthermore echoes the process of imperial cartography, which overwrote indigenous place-names or adjusted their sound to fit English phonetics. Once more, the act of renaming is an act of appropriation, failing, however, to provide a real sense of belonging.15 In order to make the disorienting experience of migration palpable for the reader, the novel makes use of what Erin James describes as the “world-creating power of narratives” as a catalyst for “an imaginative relocation of readers to a new, often unfamiliar world and experience” (James xi). As seen through the perspective of the Pakistani-British community, the Northern English industrial town with its rural surroundings turns into an unfamiliar and alienating experience for the reader. The alternative name given to the town by the migrant community, Dasht-e-Tanhaii, encapsulates this palimpsestic effect that overrides the – to a British or European readership – familiar environment in a way that it appears strange, thus recreating the effect of alienation experienced by the migrants themselves. The new name emphasizes the emotional quality of the experience of place and displacement. This effect is heightened through the specific way in which the storyworld is created in this novel: Through internal focalization, the environment is rendered in such detail and texture 13 14

15

Other than the migrant community’s name, the town remains nameless in the novel and its location is only roughly indicated, which gives it a certain exemplary quality. The process of renaming indicates a cognitive map that is both a map of memory, which keeps in the present what is past and absent, i.e. lost, and a map that offers each person an alternative reality that follows more familiar codes. Through the designation of street names, clear boundaries are drawn and order is restored. The reference to cartographic practices under British imperial rule is explicit in the colonial place names that are re-migrated such as Goethe Road and Park Street (see also Moore 6).

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that it speaks to all senses, stressing the embodied nature of experience and of relating to one’s surroundings. This mode of narration brings across the losses that the characters have endured as wounds that live on in their bodies, and their emotional struggles in the face of estrangement and deprivation. Moreover, it conveys a detailed sense of the practices of ‘homing’ that they commit to as bodily practices that create a specific texture of life:16 Perspective tricks the eyes and makes the snowflakes falling in the far distance appear as though they are falling slower than those nearby, and he stands in the open door with an arm stretched out to receive the small light pieces on his hand. A habit as old as his arrival in this country, he has always greeted the season’s first snow in this manner, the flakes losing their whiteness on the palm of his hand to become clear wafers of ice before melting to water – crystals of snow transformed into a monsoon raindrop. Among the innumerable other losses, to come to England was to lose a season (5).

In this way, the first scene of the novel establishes the emotional quality of the diasporic experience; it intricately links home and loss in a layered reality in which different levels of time and space are blended. It emphasizes the embodied nature of perspective, while at the same time inviting readers to submit to the perspectives adopted by the narrative in the novel, and to engage with their difference. The central theme of loss – of absences and disappearances – permeates the whole narrative and presents the emotional core of the novel. This theme finds most direct expression in the honour killing of the novel’s eponymous lovers five months prior to the beginning of the narration. An unmarried couple, Chanda and Jugnu, had set up house together in Dasht-e-Tanhaii and were consequently murdered. Shaken by this event, the community lives in expectation of the results of the police investigation and court proceedings. The trial against Chanda’s brothers constitutes the end of the one-year arc of the novel. Located at the centre of the panoramic narrative is the family of Jugnu’s elder brother Shamas and his wife Kaukab, who serve as the main focalizers. Shamas’s liberal views clash with the religious orthodoxy of his wife and the

16

The term ‘homing’ refers to the processes and practices of home-building, and empha‐ sizes the affective and meaning-related qualities of home (see Ahmed et al. 9; see also Brah). The (delicate) fabric of home is reflected on by Kaukab, one of the protagonists, who concedes towards the end of the novel that “[i]t had taken her decades to rebuild the happiness she had lost when she moved to England: she had built it around her children, and, yes, around Jugnu, but she had never realized how loosely woven a thing it was, how easily torn” (296).

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majority of the tightly-knit Pakistani-British Muslim community into which their family is embedded. The internal relationships within this ‘enclave’ are governed by ideological fundamentalisms, social control, suspicion, and anxiety, which makes the community resemble a “cage of permitted thinking” (110). This atmosphere is conveyed impressively through the multiple internal focalization of the novel, which, while it features a heterodiegetic and partly overt narrator, closely follows the viewpoints of the main characters, whose range of motion and action remains within the social and spatial constraints of the community. The narration enhances this extremely dense, often claustrophobic, world of the novel with an additional layer of meaning that highlights this fusion of loss and dislocation and, at the same time, provides a web of relations, references, and connections that function like a map, a system of orientation in a disorienting situation. Along with the lost lovers, similar stories of tragic love are interwoven into the main plot of the novel, illustrating how closely the states of ‘having lost’ and ‘being lost’ are entwined and condition one another.17 These stories that take place or are circulated among the community are supplemented with further “stories of unrequited love, family honour and forced marriages” (Yaqin n.p.). They evoke a rich artistic, poetic, and literary tradition that is decidedly transcultural and thus not only transcends the confined realm of experience of the characters, but also the rigid cultural and religious boundaries that they are imprisoned in. The interrelated motifs and connections create a richly-spun web in which all stories are connected and all lovers are one. They combine to tell a syncretic story of love that merges different strands of tradition: from Hindu mythology, Moghul, Sufi or Pakistani poetry to the Koran and the Bible, emphasizing both the plight of stunted love through the ages in the face of intolerance and fundamentalism and the power of love to prevail. As Shamas muses during a concert by the Pakistani Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Sufi poets have always drawn attention to the vulnerability of women […] to portray the intolerance and oppression of their times: in their verses the women rebel and try bravely to face all opposition. They – more than the men – attempt to make a new world. And, in every poem and every

17

Although the lovers’ stories more obviously connect to the story of Chanda and Jugnu, familial and parental love also play a large role in the novel and are shown to be similarly disrupted by the rigid constraints of religious and social norms among the community. Beloved family members are lost to their parents either through death (as Chanda and Jugnu are to their families) or through the irreconcilability of their values and perspectives (as Shamas and Kaukab’s children are to their parents, especially their mother; see Assmann 141-65).

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story, they fail. But by striving they become part of the universal story of human hope (191 f.).

What is said here about the role of women can be extended to the tragic lovers in the novel, whose stories align with this transcultural memory. These narratives with their message of hope and universality can thus be read as creating an alternative compass for the characters in the novel to navigate their lives in the face of displacement and the emotional desolation of exile, at least in their imagination. Instead of a map, a poem by the contemporary Punjabi poet Abid Tamimi is inserted into the novel, which strengthens this link between the network of intertextual references and the maps alluded to in the novel’s title: You ask for my address – The name of my town is Loneliness District: The Relating of Tales Sub-district: Longing And its post office is Condemnation and Disrepute. The road leading to it is Devoted Thought, and its famous monument is Separation. That’s where Abid, the writer of these lines, can be found nowadays – There he sits, attracting everyone to a lively spectacle of pain. (271, italics in original)

Like the name of the town, the place-names in the poem echo the experiences and emotions of the characters in the novel. A deep feeling of longing in a state of un-belonging is overwhelming, as is the despair of separation and loneliness. In these basic human experiences, the different groups and single characters are united in spite of their profound isolation as in a shared system of coordinates. Here, the different perspectives of the characters that fail to be aligned on the level of the plot are brought together and merged in the unity created by the system of the map.18 In a similar way, the omnipresent ‘Relating of Tales’ encompasses the different characters, living or dead. The net of narrative that is woven by the many stories of mythical or real lovers catches the ‘lost lovers’, who have disappeared and fallen out of the world. Within a few weeks of their disappearance, Chanda and Jugnu have already inspired new wondrous stories that are told among the people of the town. Thus, they find their way into the growing stock of stories that form maps to help to regain what is lost.

18

This can be observed in Shamas and Kaukab’s family, whose disintegration can be traced by a failure to create a coherent family narrative and identity that includes the different perspectives of its members (see Assmann 186).

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5. Conclusion

The two novels analysed in this contribution show the different ways in which cartography may be appropriated by postcolonial literature to take on new, positive, and transformational meanings. As key political instruments of imperial expansion and power, maps resonate strongly with the history of colonialism and its aftermath. Not only did maps play a prominent role in the Scramble for Africa, the dissolution of the European imperial powers and the British Empire in particular involved an enormous process of re-mapping as well as migration across newly drawn borders. Communal violence in Karachi attests to the persistence of these processes. Karim’s interactive map, however, subverts the logic of imperial map-making by democratizing the power of definition, naming, and narration. The project demonstrates how memories and stories are tied to places and bound together in the spatial grid of a map that creates diverse relations between the single pieces without striving for the logic, causality, and coherence of an overarching narrative. The map, moreover, emphasizes how the city – as a symbol of shared space and communal living – relies on collective processes of meaning making. The cartographic project makes use of the map’s grammar of relationality, where every point is defined in its relation to other points on the map, to connect viewpoints and stories that seem irreconcilable, and to create a vision that reconnects the space of the city to the convoluted and entangled histories of its diverse inhabitants. The possibility for movement that the map affords is an invitation to the citizens of Karachi to leave their customary routes, to explore less known quarters and, importantly, to take on different perspectives and learn about those dimensions of the city that had formerly been invisible to them. This project is also an act of political responsibility, because it means engaging with others beyond one’s close social circle, acknowledging difference and creating a space where differences can come together. In Maps for Lost Lovers, the map drawn by the relating of tales and the universality of love creates a unity among the people of the town that transcends their difference in a way that is similar to Karim’s interactive map project in the novel Kartography. As in Kartography, the map serves as an image for a web of individual stories that form an overarching narrative, in which the religious and ethnic boundaries that map out social conflict are overcome. It embeds the individual in a larger framework of meaning and a network of ties that spans across the social divisions that govern the characters’ lives. Both maps are comprehensive and inclusive, offering a place even for the lost and disappeared, and thus counteracting violence and death. In both novels, mapping and narration are brought together in order to create a utopian vision

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of a world in which the boundaries that separate characters in the storyworld are softened and a universal space of encounter becomes possible. In merging these two ways of worldmaking, the narrative maps of the two novels make use of their specific structural elements in order to move beyond the possibilities of either. Within the framework of the disembodied totalizing view of the map that creates a sense of unity, Karim’s project stresses the multiplicity and specificity of perspective as represented in narrative form. The maps made up of stories in the two novels illustrate Haraway’s sense of objectivity, which derives its power from the arrangement of the different per‐ spectives that it encompasses. The growing collection of stories from different backgrounds that make up or augment these maps transform the cartographic system to make it dynamic, multiperspectival, and mobile. At the same time, the two novels perform what they advocate, and thus show how literature enables readers to adopt different perspectives and retain the cognitive mobility to leave one’s own frame of mind in order to connect with others in a shared environment. In this way, the novels create a space of encounter, and may function like a map that arranges different perspectives in spatial unity. Bibliography

  Primary Literature

Aslam, Nadeem. Maps for Lost Lovers. Faber & Faber, 2005 [2004]. Conrad, Joseph. The Heart of Darkness. Edited by Robert Kimbrough. Norton 1988 [1899]. Shamsie, Kamila. Kartography. Bloomsbury, 2003 [2002].

  Secondary Literature

Ahmed, Sara, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier, and Mimi Sheller. “Introduction: Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration.” Uprootings/Reground‐ ings: Questions of Home and Migration, edited by Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier, and Mimi Sheller, Berg, 2003, pp. 1-19. Assmann, Corinna. Doing Family in Second-Generation British Migration Literature. De Gruyter, 2018. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. Routledge, 2005 [1996]. Brantlinger, Patrick. “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, 1985, pp. 166-203. Bruner, Jerome. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 18, no. 1, 1991, pp. 1-21. Bushell, Sally. Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text. Cambridge UP, 2020.

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Caquard, Sébastien, and William Cartwright. “Narrative Cartography: From Mapping Stories to the Narrative of Maps and Mapping.” The Cartographic Journal, vol. 51, no. 2, 2014, pp. 101-06. Conrad, Joseph. “Geography and Some Explorers.” Heart of Darkness: Backgrounds and Sources, edited by Robert Kimbrough, Norton, 1988 [1926], pp. 143-147. —. “When I Grow Up I Shall Go There.” Heart of Darkness: Backgrounds and Sources, edited by Robert Kimbrough, Norton, 1988 [1912], p. 148. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Randall. U of California P, 1984. Döring, Tobias. Caribbean-English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition. Routledge, 2002. Driver, Felix. “In Search of the Imperial Map: Walter Crane and the Image of Empire.” History Workshop Journal, vol. 69, no. 1, 2010, pp. 146-57. Frank, Michael C. “Reisen durch Raum und Zeit: Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness und die Vernetzung der Welt um 1900.“ Arcadia, vol. 43, no. 2, 2008, pp. 332-57. James, Erin. The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives. U of Nebraska P, 2015. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575-99. Harley, John B. “Maps, Knowledge, and Power”. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, edited by Paul Laxton, The Johns Hopkins UP, 2001, pp. 51-81. —. “Deconstructing the Map.” Cartographica, vol. 26, no. 2, 1989, pp. 1-20. Herbert, Caroline. “Lyric Maps and the Legacies of 1971 in Kamila Shamsie’s Kartog‐ raphy.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 47, no. 2, 2011, pp. 159-72. Herman, David. “Stories as a Tool for Thinking.” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, edited by David Herman, CSLI Publications, 2003, pp. 163-92. Huggan, Graham. Territorial Disputes: Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction. U of Toronto P, 1994. —. “Decolonizing the Map: Post-Colonialism, Post-Structuralism and the Cartographic Connection.” Ariel, vol. 20, no. 4, 1989, pp. 115-31. Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. The Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. Laidlaw, Zoe. “Das Empire in Rot. Karten als Ausdruck des Britischen Imperia‐ lismus.“ Kartenwelten: Der Raum und seine Repräsentation in der Neuzeit, edited by Christof Dipper, and Ute Schneider, Primus, 2006, pp 146-59. Lotman, Jurij. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Translated by Ronald Vroon, Brown UP, 1977. “map, n.”. Oxford English Dictionary, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/113853?rskey=i H26mL&;result=3#eid. Last accessed 24 Aug. 2022.

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Moore, Lindsey. “British Muslim Identities and Spectres of Terror in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers.” Postcolonial Text, vol. 5, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1-19. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900. Verso, 1998. Niederhoff, Burkhard. “Perspective – Point of View.” the living handbook of narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid, Interdisci‐ plinary Center for Narratology, 2013, https://www-archiv.fdm.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/n ode/26.html. Last accessed 29 Aug. 2022. Nünning, Ansgar, and Vera Nünning. “Ways of Worldmaking as a Model for the Study of Culture: Theoretical Frameworks, Epistemological Underpinnings, New Horizons.” Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives, edited by Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning, and Birgit Neumann, De Gruyter 2010, 1-25. Nünning, Vera. “Cultural Ways of Worldmaking.” Key Concepts for the Study of Culture: An Introduction, by Vera Nünning, Philipp Löffler, and Margit Peterfy, WVT, 2020, pp. 43-84. —. “Cognitive Science and the Value of Literature for Life.” Values of Literature, edited by Hanna Meretoja, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Saija Isomaa, and Kristina Malmio, Rodopi, 2015, pp. 95-116. —. “The Ethics of Fictional Form: Persuasiveness and Perspective Taking from the Point of View of Cognitive Literary Studies.” Arcadia, vol. 50, no. 1, 2015, pp. 37-56. —. “Narrative Fiction and Cognition: Why We Should Read Fiction.” Forum for World Literature Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2015, pp. 41-61. —. Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction. Winter, 2014. —. “Narrativität als interdisziplinäre Schlüsseldisziplin.” Forum Marsilius-Kolleg, vol. 6, 2013, pp. 85-104. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Narrative Cartography.” The International Encyclopedia of Geog‐ raphy, edited by Douglas Richardson et al., John Wiley, 2020, pp. 1-8. —. “Narrative Cartography: Toward a Visual Narratology.” What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, edited by Tom Kindt, and Hans-Harald Müller, De Gruyter, 2003, pp. 333-64. Schönle, Andreas, editor. Culture and Communication: Signs in Flux. An Anthology of Major and Lesser-Known Works by Yuri Lotman. Translated by Benjamin Paloff, Academic Studies Press, 2020. Stockhammer, Robert. Kartierung der Erde: Macht und Lust in Karten und Literatur. Fink, 2007. Wood, Denis, and John Fels. “Design on Signs / Myth and Meaning in Maps.” The Map Reader: Theories of Mapping Practice and Cartographic Representation, edited by Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin, and Chris Perkins, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 48-55.

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Yaqin, Amina. “Cosmopolitan Ventures During Times of Crisis: A Postcolonial Reading of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ‘Dasht-e tanhai’ and Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers.” Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 2013, n.p.

‘United in Positive Intention’ Self-Transcendence Values and the Negotiation of Crises in George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)

Nina Gillé

1. The Importance of (Self-Transcendence) Values in Literature

Literature has long been said to have the power to transform people’s lives and to promote positive change. According to Vera Nünning’s study Reading Fictions, Changing Minds, it may have a variety of beneficial cognitive effects on readers. Scholars such as Hanna Meretoja have also highlighted its possible function of  “produc[ing] new insights into some of our most fundamental eth‐ ical questions” by providing readers with a safe space for grappling with these questions and for encountering alterity (142). An important factor contributing to this positive effect is the power of literature to engage with a society’s values, prompting readers towards reflection and potentially contributing to the promotion or dissemination of particular values (see e.g. V. Nünning, “Ethics”; Reading Fictions; Baumbach et al.). The question of values is particularly salient in the context of literary crisis narratives. Novels may reflect existing crises society is facing in the 21st century, such as increasing divisions along political or ideological lines, and offer solutions, for example by pointing to ways in which particular values might contribute to both effective crisis management and overcoming conflicts or at least negotiating them more constructively (see e.g. Nünning and Nünning). Values that are likely to play a particularly important role in this context belong to a group that Shalom H. Schwartz, in his model of basic human values, calls self-transcendence values: this group can be subdivided into the values of benevolence and universalism, and encompasses concepts such as understanding, tolerance, and compassion towards others (see Schwartz 7). According to recent research, many people in different cultures consider these values to be important, and they have been demonstrated to correlate with

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co-operative, pro-social, or altruistic behaviour (see Sagiv et al. 634; V. Nünning, “Values” 333). Hence, these values may make beneficial contributions to the resolution of various crises, which makes it well worthwhile to explore the representation of self-transcendence values in crisis narratives. An interesting example for a novel that very clearly positions itself with regards to the importance of self-transcendence values is George Saunders’s Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). Lincoln in the Bardo can be read as a fragmentary “neo-historical novel”, but one with a supernatural twist (Moseley, “Historical” 1; see also Selejan): it is set in a graveyard in Wash‐ ington, D.C., one night in 1862, shortly after Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie has died of a fever. Willie’s ghost manifests in this graveyard, the bardo of the title, which “refers to an intermediate zone between life and death” (Gioia, “Lincoln” n.p.). The bardo is populated by many other ghosts, who have not yet moved on to the afterlife proper because they are in denial about their deaths and cling to the memories of their former lives (see Ní Éigeartaigh 74). The souls of children are not supposed to linger in this way, though, because this state corrupts them for unexplained reasons, so three older ghosts who have been staying in the bardo for years try to persuade Willie to move on to save himself before it is too late. Despite the novel’s plot relying on supernatural elements, Lincoln in the Bardo never loses sight of the historical backdrop of a divided US society in the early phase of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s role in it, as well as the way the burden of that responsibility and the grief for his son intertwine and render him paralysed (see Moseley, “Historical” 2; Baskin n.p.). Lincoln, who eventually visits the graveyard, is thus present in two roles, namely that of a grieving father and that of the nation’s president, and his presence, as will be illustrated later, links the many personal crises the characters are facing to the larger crisis presented by the war (see Baskin n.p.). In the end, all of these crises are solved through empathy and compassion, concepts closely related to Schwartz’s self-transcendence values. Lincoln in the Bardo thus clearly places a focus on these concepts, which has been highlighted as notable by reviewers and scholars alike. Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh, for example, contends that the novel’s “central argument” is “that it is only through empathy that society can build a harmonious future” (76; see also e.g. Basseler, “Value of Literature” 287; Strehle 186; Kunzru n.p.). This article aims to shed a new light on the role that empathy and related concepts play in Lincoln in the Bardo: I will read Lincoln in the Bardo as a crisis narrative and demonstrate that the novel employs different strategies that all centre self-transcendence values and mark them as crucial for overcoming the different crises depicted. In order to do so, I will first clarify both the theoretical

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framework and why the novel can be read as a literary crisis narrative in the first place. Next, I will show that different facets of Lincoln in the Bardo as a crisis narrative – the novel’s structural elements, such as setting, characters, and narration, and most importantly the novel’s crisis plot, which includes the protagonists’ gradual prioritization of self-transcendence – all contribute to its centring of self-transcendence values. The combination of these aspects, when considered in tandem with the novel’s supernatural elements, make a strong case for the importance of self-transcendence values in times of crisis.1 2. The Representation of Values in Fictional Crisis Narratives

In order to explain why the representation of values is so interesting in fictional crisis narratives, some key terms and concepts need to be clarified. A ‘fictional crisis narrative’ is a literary work centring on one or several crises, either personal crises affecting individuals or ones affecting larger groups of people, including e.g. entire nations (see Nünning and Nünning 262 f.). The term ‘crisis’, in turn, can be defined – following Nünning and Nünning’s recent work – as a “latency period” that always includes a state of uncertainty and suspension (251, my translation), with things slowly and inexorably moving towards a “critical turning point at which a decision about the further progress of a situation has to be made” (Kovach et al. 7; see also Nünning and Nünning 251 f., 255).2 Fictional crisis narratives are consequently distinguished by certain key features and possible functions: beyond just depicting a crisis, they usually involve certain actors who have to try and manage the crisis, and they tend to follow a certain crisis plot, which moves towards a positive or negative resolution and is “characterised by […] the interplay between diagnoses about the present, interpretations of the past and visions for the future” (Nünning and Nünning 255, my translation; see also Nünning and Nünning 254; Kovach et al. 7; A. Nünning 132 f.). By reflecting and engaging with manifestations of crises in ‘real life’, crisis narratives may, in turn, also have an impact on the way readers perceive and react to extraliterary crises and crisis narratives (see Nünning and Nünning 264). An important part of this is the ability of literary crisis 1

2

For an article that explores Lincoln in the Bardo and the question of the value of literature from a different angle, see Michael Basseler’s 2020 contribution to volume 36 of REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (see Basseler, “Value of Literature”). It is worth noting that “[c]rises are not simply givens” (Kovach et al. 4), but that they are the result of observers interpreting events in a certain way and creating a coherent, teleological crisis narrative out of these events (see Nünning and Nünning 252; A. Nünning 130; Kovach et al. 5).

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narratives to point towards alternative ways of overcoming crises and towards more positive “ways of visualizing our future”, enhancing readers’ “sense of the possible” (Nünning and Nünning 267, my translation; see also Kovach et al. 12; Fenske et al. 8; Meretoja). As a corollary, the representation of values is likely to be particularly salient in fictional crisis narratives, since fictional characters, for example, may be shown “to seek out alternative epistemological and ethical frameworks” in order to deal with the crisis at hand (Horton 42). This may manifest itself, for example, as a re-evaluation of values previously held and the prioritization of certain values over others (see V. Nünning, Reading Fictions 55; “Values” 341). The values that different characters adhere to are not the only factors at play, however. As Vera Nünning points out, it is necessary to consider how “the values and moral principles embodied in a fictional world […] are constructed and conveyed by the [entire] narrative” (“Fictional Worlds” 231). Thus, a variety of aspects, such as the novel’s plot, may be relevant, e.g. if the characters’ adoption of new values brings about the resolution of the crisis at hand (see Nünning and Nünning 249, 265; V. Nünning, Reading Fictions 55). This shows that fictional crisis narratives may function as “valorization laborator[ies]” that can illustrate the function of values in crises and encourage readers to reflect on prevalent norms and values and their hierarchies (Nünning and Nünning 265 f.; see also Kovach et al. 9). For a detailed analysis of the representation of values in a novel such as Lincoln in the Bardo, Shalom H. Schwartz’s model of the ten basic human values provides fruitful theoretical grounding: following Schwartz and Sagiv et al., values can be “defined as broad, trans-situational, desirable goals that serve as guiding principles in people’s lives” and form “a core aspect of [their] identity” (Sagiv et al. 630, 636; see also Schwartz 3 f.). Schwartz’s model distinguishes between ten different values and provides an explanation for how they are related to one another (see Schwartz 3 f.). They can, for example, complement or conflict with each other, and people may have individual “hierarch[ies] of value priorities” (Sagiv et al. 630; see also Schwartz 8). While these personal values and their configurations tend to be “relatively stable over time”, they may change during “major life transitions” (Sagiv et al. 636), and crises that directly impact an individual can likely be counted among these – it may thus be interesting to analyse the way such a ‘reconfiguration’ of values can be represented in literature. As indicated earlier, the focus of this article is on self-transcendence values specifically:3 self-transcendence is one of Schwartz’s “four higher-order values”

3

Other values will be briefly explained as they become relevant in the analysis.

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and encompasses the subordinate basic values of benevolence and universalism (Sagiv et al. 631). Both of these self-transcendence values “emphasize concern for the welfare and interests of others” (Schwartz 8) – benevolence aims at “preserving and enhancing the welfare of those with whom one is in frequent personal contact”, while universalism widens that scope and focuses on “understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature” (Schwartz 7; see also Sagiv et al. 631). These values are therefore closely connected to those concepts that are so often highlighted by scholars discussing Lincoln in the Bardo, namely compassion, understanding, and empathy. Due to this connection, I will, while discussing how Lincoln in the Bardo as a whole promotes self-transcendence values, also analyse strategies that are often discussed as enhancing empathy and perspective-taking in the reader (see e.g. V. Nünning, Reading Fictions; “Ethics”; Meretoja).4 Just like self-transcendence values, perspective-taking “has been shown to correlate with altruistic behavior”, which already points to the fact that adhering to these values can have a concrete, positive impact and may be useful for resolving crises both on an immediate, personal level and on a larger societal one (V. Nünning, “Ethics” 41; see also Sagiv et al. 634). 3. Lincoln in the Bardo as a Fictional Crisis Narrative

Lincoln in the Bardo features a convergence of three different identifiable crises on several levels of magnitude, from the personal to the national, with the most immediate crisis being that which Willie Lincoln finds himself in (see Gioia, “Lincoln” n.p). As the older ghosts explain, children “are not meant to tarry” in the bardo and usually move on to the afterlife after only a few minutes (Lincoln in the Bardo 31).5 Willie, however, who is in denial about his death like the other ghosts, feels that “[he is] to wait” for his parents to come and take him home and therefore clings to this liminal state, triggering a process of gradual corruption (29, see also 33). While this process stretches over hundreds of pages, the novel establishes quite early on what is at stake: the final stage of a ghost child’s deterioration is vividly illustrated by Elise Traynor, the ghost of a girl who refused to move on and has now been stuck in one spot of the graveyard

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Perspective-taking can be defined as a “combination of affective and analytical pro‐ cesses […] which are involved in the complex imaginative act of understanding others” that “entails both empathy and theory-of-mind abilities” (V. Nünning, Reading Fictions 177). In the following, references to Lincoln in the Bardo will be given without repeating the title.

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for years, manifesting as a series of grotesque creatures and objects (36 f.). This makes it clear that the three ghost protagonists, Roger Bevins III, Hans Vollman, and the Reverend Everly Thomas, will either save Willie by inducing him to move on, or he will succumb to the corruption and meet a fate similar to Elise Traynor’s. Over the course of the novel, it is revealed that there are two further crises at play. It becomes increasingly evident, for example, that the other ghosts in the bardo are supposed to be moving on as well (89-101; see also Moseley, “Historical” 5) and that their clinging to their former lives requires a lot of willpower (103, 113, 123). Should they stay in the bardo for too long, it is implied, they too might eventually become corrupted (133 f.). They are thus in a situation similar to Willie’s – while they clearly have more time than he does, as some of them have already spent years in the graveyard, they too are only delaying the inevitable (174 f.). Finally, when the character of Abraham Lincoln is introduced, the reader is reminded that the US as a whole could be said to be in a state of crisis at that time as well, since there are seemingly insurmountable divisions within society and the country is embroiled in a long and drawn-out civil war. This war’s outcome hinges on Abraham Lincoln’s actions, and he is paralysed with indecision by this responsibility, which is intermingling with his grief (see Moseley, “Historical” 2; Baskin n.p.): “Must keep on with it. May not have the heart for it. […] What to do. Call a halt? Toss down the loss-hole those three thousand? Sue for peace?” (155, emphasis in original, see also 307 f.) These three situations, then, can be counted as crises according to the criteria discussed earlier: the characters involved are suspended in a state of uncertainty and tension, as the situation they find themselves in slowly worsens and it is unclear whether they will be able to take the steps necessary to resolve the crisis (see Kovach et al. 7; Nünning and Nünning 251 f., 255). Interestingly enough, these crises do all have a positive resolution, pointing towards the possibility of crises being “used as a chance to move towards a better and crisis-free future” (Nünning and Nünning 255, my translation; see also Kovach et al. 6 f.; Fenske et al. 7). Through prioritizing self-transcendence values, the three ghost protagonists help Willie move on and trigger a process that both enables the other ghosts to leave the bardo as well and that gives Abraham Lincoln closure, helping him to once again focus his attention on the Civil War (see Moseley, “Historical” 2).

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4. Structural Elements in Lincoln in the Bardo: Setting, Characters, and Polyphonic Narration

The different facets of Lincoln in the Bardo as a crisis narrative mentioned above each serve to highlight the importance of self-transcendence values – the novel’s structural elements, such as the selection of its setting and the characters, as well as its fragmentary, polyphonic narration, have a crucial part in contributing to this effect. The selection of a novel’s setting and characters, to start with, roughly corresponds to one of Nelson Goodman’s ways of worldmaking, namely ‘deletion and supplementation’ (14-16; see also V. Nünning, “Fictional Worlds” 218). As Vera Nünning puts it, the process of deletion and supplementation refers to a “selection of what is relevant”, while “what we do not deem necessary or approve of” can be deleted (“Worldmaking” 45; see also Herman 78). In a next step, the elements of a fictional world may be weighted by emphasizing some aspects and de-emphasizing others (see V. Nünning, “Fictional Worlds” 219; “Worldmaking” 45). These seemingly basic elements of narrative worldmaking are particularly interesting with regard to the genre of historical fiction, and Lincoln in the Bardo is a case in point. As detailed above, the novel is set during the US Civil War, and focuses on the historical figures of Abraham Lincoln and his son Willie, as well as the way the latter’s death influenced the former in his decisions regarding the war. However, while the story of Lincoln and his son does play a central role in the novel, Abraham Lincoln is not, as one might perhaps expect given the novel’s premise, the protagonist (see Moseley, “Historical” 8). Instead, most of the story is told from the perspectives of the many ghosts lingering in the bardo (see ibid.; Kunzru n.p.), who, as they span different social classes and races, almost form a cross-section of US society at that time (see Moseley, “Man Booker” 159; Gatti n.p.). The selection of this particular setting and these particular characters thus clearly points towards a particular crisis, the Civil War, and throws light on the US as a divided nation grappling with seemingly insurmountable social and racial inequalities (see Moseley, “Historical” 2; Baskin n.p.). This focus is even further accentuated by the weighting, as the shift of emphasis from Abraham Lincoln to the diverse community of ghosts serves to give readers a more direct insight into the divisions of mid-19th century US society. Many (though not all) of the ghosts of white people, for example, are shown to be prejudiced against those of black people, and there are conflicts between the ghosts of slave-owners and those of slaves (see Ní Éigeartaigh 78). This vividly illustrates the conflict at the heart of the Civil War, which would not have been possible

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to the same degree if the novel had purely or mainly focused on Lincoln. This shift in focus from a single to a plural perspective can also be seen as relating to the novel’s promotion of self-transcendence and compassion, which are seen as a step towards “moving beyond the divisions of the past” (Ní Éigeartaigh 79, see also Baskin n.p.). The unusual form of the novel supports this reading, as it emphasizes the plurality of perspectives and voices, and thus challenges the notion of the independent and self-contained subject (see Strehle 184). Lincoln in the Bardo can be described as a fragmentary, polyphonic novel (see e.g. Selejan; Gioia, “Lincoln” n.p.), thereby employing an aesthetic which has often been shown to “exhibit[…] a particular affinity to crises” (Nünning and Nünning 263, my translation; see also Horton 32). 21st-century fragmentary novels, according to Ansgar Nünning and Alexander Scherr, “celebrate fragmentation, disruption and formal experimentation” (484) while still “creating coherent narratives out of initially fragmented parts” (487; see also Gioia, “Rise” n.p.). Ted Gioia, in an essay on fragmentary fiction, links the formal device to what Michael David Lukas has described as ‘polyphonic novels’, as these similarly combine “a multiplicity of distinct, often conflicting voices” in order to “create a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts” (Lukas n.p.; see also Gioia, “Rise” n.p.). Lincoln in the Bardo certainly fits this pattern with its “radical polyphony and typographic unrest” (Selejan 104). The novel consists of over a hundred chapters, and while some of them combine quotations from genuine historical and scholarly sources on the Civil War and Lincoln’s life with quotations from sources that were invented by Saunders, most of the chapters are conveyed by the different ghosts inhabiting the bardo (see Gioia, “Lincoln” n.p.; Moseley, “Man Booker” 159 f.). These ghosts co-narrate the story together, a process which is perhaps best illustrated by quoting an example from the beginning of the book (see Ní Éigeartaigh 68): An exceedingly tall and unkempt fellow was making his way toward us through the darkness. hans vollman This was highly irregular. It was after hours; the front gate would be locked. the reverend everly thomas The boy had been delivered only that day. That is to say, the man had most likely been here– roger bevins iii Quite recently. hans vollman

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That afternoon. roger bevins iii Highly irregular. the reverend everly thomas (43).

The majority of the novel is presented in this way, with different ghosts supplying parts of the narration – here, a description of Abraham Lincoln’s unexpected arrival in the graveyard – “in a way that approximates a single, coherent narrator” (Thompson 300). While, as demonstrated above, the three ghostly protagonists function as the main narrators (see ibid.; Kunzru n.p.), other ghosts in the graveyard frequently contribute as well, which means that altogether, readers have to contend with 166 different voices (see Selejan 109). All of this may contribute to promoting self-transcendence values: fragmen‐ tary and polyphonic narratives have been theorized to foster perspective-taking and understanding of others because the frequent “shifts in focalization” or narration induce readers to engage with a variety of different perspectives (V. Nünning, “Ethics” 47 f.; see also Meretoja 302 f.). In Lincoln in the Bardo, it is not only the sheer quantity of perspectives that is remarkable, but its diversity and range, which includes men and women of different classes and races (see Basseler, “Value of Literature” 289; Moseley, “Man Booker” 159; Gatti n.p.). While most of these characters only appear briefly, many of them do get to tell their own stories and relate their individual experiences both to the newcomer Willie Lincoln and, by extension, to the reader (see Ní Éigeartaigh 68). These narratives exhibit a great deal of stylistic variation – some ghosts relate their story in quite an ordered and coherent way, whereas other narratives, such as that of Elise Traynor, exhibit idiosyncratic spelling and syntax and read more like an interior monologue: Younge Mr Bristol desired me, younge Mr Fellowes and Mr Delway desired me, of an evening they would sit on the grass around me and in their eyes burned the fiercest kindest Desire. In my grape smock I would sit in the wikker chair amid that circle of admiring fierce kind eyes even unto the night when one or another boy would lie back and say, Oh the stars, and I would say, O yes, how fine they look tonight, while (I admit) imagining reclining there beside him […] What I am doing, if I only cary on fathefully, will, I am sure, bring about that longed-for return to Green grass kind looks. (38 f.)

This illustrates that, in Lincoln in the Bardo, the reader is confronted with “a wide range of heterogeneous characters” (V. Nünning, “Ethics” 48; see also Basseler, “Narrative Empathy” 158, 166), many of whom are given enough space to allow “seemingly immediate” (V. Nünning, “Ethics” 44) and “‘authentic’ insights into

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the[ir] world-view” (Basseler, “Narrative Empathy” 162), which may lead to a deeper understanding of the variety of human experience on the part of the reader. Moreover, the fragmentary nature of novels like Lincoln in the Bardo also re‐ quires readers to slow down in order to be able to follow the unfolding narrative, an effect that has been attested to by several different scholars and reviewers of the novel, with Ní Éigeartaigh, for example, calling the “reading experience […] both disorientating and stimulating” (68; see also Selejan 109 f.; Farsi 315 f.). This deceleration of the reading process is another factor that has been argued to have beneficial effects on empathizing and perspective-taking (see V. Nünning, “Ethics” 47 f.; Basseler, “Narrative Empathy” 158, 166). Taking all of these factors into account, it becomes clear that the novel’s fragmentary and polyphonic form is a crucial component of its dissemination of self-transcendence values, since it may foster closely related characteristics such as understanding and a willingness to engage with different perspectives in its readers. 5. Prioritizing Self-Transcendence Values in Lincoln in the Bardo

The value of self-transcendence, which has been shown to be supported by the narrative as a whole through structure and form, can also be traced on the level of story, by taking a closer look at the different components of typical crisis plots. This chapter will focus on the present as a moment of decision, exploring the core values of the three ghosts and showing that they respond to the crisis of Willie Lincoln’s corruption by moving from more self-centred values towards prioritizing self-transcendence (see Nünning and Nünning 255; V. Nünning, “Fictional Worlds” 231).6 This development is underscored by the novel’s supernatural or fantastical elements, namely the various ways in which values are visualized or embodied. In the beginning of the narrative, the value of security, which places a focus on “safety, harmony, and stability” (Schwartz 6), is evidently very important for Bevins, Vollman, and Reverend Thomas, as well as for most of the other ghosts. They are clinging to their former lives and are desperate to stay in the

6

This specific crisis will be focused on because it is given the most room in the narrative and because it exemplifies the characteristic components of crisis narratives described by Nünning and Nünning: the crisis itself (Willie endangering himself by lingering in the bardo) is tackled by some crisis managers (the three older ghosts, who, after a slightly reluctant start, leave nothing untried to save him), and the resulting “teleological development” or plot leads to the eventual resolution of the crisis (as the ghosts finally help Willie to move on) (Nünning and Nünning 255, my translation).

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comparatively safe and stable liminal state that they are currently in instead of moving on (see Ní Éigeartaigh 74). This is demonstrated very clearly by an incident during which strange beings, presumably psychopomps, arrive at the graveyard, taking on forms that the different ghosts would find particularly persuasive (such as the shapes of angels, or loved ones) and attempting to convince the ghosts to accompany them to the afterlife (92-101). Their seductive efforts, which include “[b]eautiful singing” and rains of “[r]ose petals” (97), are nevertheless desperately resisted by the ghosts, who are experiencing all of this as “a merciless assault” (103) by cruel “tormentors” (101). The ghosts’ determination to stay safely in the bardo is also highlighted by the fact that, somewhat later on, it is revealed that they have to be careful to “conserve [their] strength”, as any exertion might weaken them and compromise their ability to remain in the bardo (123; see also Selejan 109). In the past, this has actually led to the three protagonists failing to help Elise Traynor, leaving her to her fate because they were too “much preoccupied with the challenges of staying” (113) and “felt [they] must conserve [their] resources” (332; see also Strehle 176). The narrative thus goes to some lengths to highlight the importance that the three ghosts place on acting in accordance with the value of security. As Elise’s example illustrates, they actively prioritize their own security – which Schwartz tellingly groups as one of the “self-protective values” (14) – over self-transcendence. Beyond this collective focus on security, many of the different ghosts are initially characterized by individual core values. These can generally be inferred from the ghosts’ narration and their actions, and are often additionally high‐ lighted by the ghosts’ manifestations, which reflect or embody their core values – this is one of the many fantastic elements playing into the representation of values in Lincoln in the Bardo.7 Roger Bevins III, one of the main characters, is an excellent example: he is the ghost of a young man whose male lover left him due to a wish “to henceforth ‘live correctly’” (25). In despair, Bevins committed suicide, but regretted doing so almost immediately, as he realized how many more beautiful things life would have had to offer. Bevins evidently values stimulation, i.e. “excitement, novelty, and challenge in life” (Schwartz 5), and this is illustrated by his narration, which often tails off into reveries consisting of enumerations of different impressions:

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The ghosts’ appearances can be read in different ways; others have variously interpreted them as “analogues to their various moral failings” (Kunzru n.p.) or embodiments of their respective “preoccupations that occupied their attention in the world of the living” (Ní Éigeartaigh 75; see also Strehle 175).

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I […] intend to devoutly wander the earth, imbibing, smelling, sampling, loving whomever I please; touching, tasting, standing very still among the beautiful things of this world, such as, for example: a sleeping dog dream-kicking in a tree-shade triangle; a sugar pyramid upon a blackwood tabletop being rearranged grain-by-grain by an indiscernible draft; a cloud passing ship-like above a rounded green hill, atop which a line of colored shirts energetically dance in the wind, while down below in town, a purple-blue day unfolds (the muse of spring incarnate), each moist-grassed, flower-pierced yard gone positively mad with – (27, see also e.g. 140 f.).

The importance of stimulation for Bevins is also reflected in the way his ghostly form looks, as he is described as having “several sets of eyes [a]ll darting to and fro”, as well as “several noses [a]ll sniffing” and “multiple sets of hands”, all the better to see, smell, and feel things with (ibid.; see also Thompson 303 f.). This pattern holds true for many of the other ghosts as well. The Reverend Everly Thomas, for instance, is especially focused on security, perhaps because he is the only ghost who is aware both of the fact that he is dead and of the divine judgment that awaits the ghosts in the afterlife – he initially readily moved on to the afterlife, but then did not dare to face his judgment and fled back to the bardo (187-94). He is the one to remind the others, for example, that “[their] ability to abide [is] far from assured” and that they “must conserve [their] strength, restricting [their] activities to only those which directly serve [their] central purpose” of staying in the bardo (123). This fixation on security is again reflected in his manifestation, which is an embodiment of anxiety, with “eyebrows arched high […], hair sticking straight up, mouth in a perfect O of terror” (28). These initial value hierarchies, however, eventually start to shift, as in the course of trying to resolve the crisis at hand, the three ghosts start acting according to different values. Interestingly, they do not prioritize self-transcen‐ dence immediately: while they do try to help Willie as soon as it becomes clear that he may be in danger, they initially do so without jeopardizing their own safety and merely take him to meet Elise Traynor so that she can serve as a cautionary example (33-40). What does bring about a change, however, is the ghosts’ realization of how much their fixation on security has made them stagnate. This is brought on by the disruption of Willie’s arrival and the resulting crisis – after years in the bardo, the ghosts are “so very bored, so continually bored” and hence “crave[…] the slightest variation” and “long[…] for any adventure” (124 f.; see also Ní Éigeartaigh 68). Thus, when Bevins and Vollman hear that Abraham Lincoln has returned to the graveyard in the middle of the night, they throw caution to the wind and go to find out what is happening, even though, as Reverend Thomas points out, this will consume

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some of their precious energy and jeopardize their ability to stay (ibid.). As a result, in this instance, the two ghosts prioritize what Schwartz calls “openness to change”, an umbrella term for values such as self-direction and stimulation, which “emphasize independence of thought, action, and feelings and readiness for change” (8). Bevins’ and Vollman’s decision to rank openness to change higher than other values, along with their resulting encounter with Lincoln, could be said to set in motion the process of their re-orientation towards self-transcendence – crucial to this is another of the novel’s fantastical elements, namely the ghosts’ ability to ‘merge’ with others (146; see also Thompson 300; Strehle 177). This process, which enables the ghosts to completely and perfectly understand and empathize with somebody else, is described by them as becoming “one” with the other (ibid.) and can therefore be read as an embodiment of the concept of self-transcendence (see Strehle 177; Kunzru n.p.; Taylor n.p.). Bevins and Vollman actively decide to make use of this ability in order to merge with Abraham Lincoln, which allows them to share his current state of mind (146) – they learn, among other things, that the image of Willie “being in some bright place, free of suffering” is the only thing that currently gives Lincoln hope in his grief (158, emphasis in original). This insight, gained through an act of self-transcendence, helps them understand that the solution to Willie’s problem would be to reunite him with his father: if the two of them could be induced to merge and Willie could read his father’s thoughts, he might be encouraged to move on to the afterlife, as that is what his father would want for him (158, 161 f.). Consequently, Bevins and Vollman start to “persuade” Lincoln to return to his son by focusing all their willpower on this endeavour (165). Beyond bringing them one step closer to solving their crisis, this “co-habitation” with Lincoln (and, by extension, one another) has also helped the two friends understand each other on a more intimate level, and they are delighted to realize that they now “would be infused with some trace of one another forevermore” (172 f.; see also Thompson 301; Strehle 178). The two ghosts’ merging with Lincoln helps them understand just how important and beneficial self-transcendence values, i.e. understanding, caring for one another, and working together, can be (see Thompson 302). This ‘lesson’ is reinforced later, when, in their efforts to help Willie, they enlist the help of the other ghosts in the graveyard to merge with Lincoln to try to persuade him once more to return to Willie (250-59). While this does not actually work, the fact that all of the ghosts are “[u]nited in common purpose” for once, forming “[o]ne mass-mind, united in positive intention”, has a beneficial effect on them (253 f.). It helps them remember the acts of compassion and self-transcendence that they

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witnessed in their previous lives, which in turn influences their manifestations: they now appear less grotesque and more human than earlier (254 f.; see also Strehle 180; Thompson 303 f.; Ní Éigeartaigh 78). As a result, this key scene is plainly marked as another crucial factor in the ghosts overcoming their previous self-centredness. Finally, the new understanding the ghosts have gained through merging with others like this (see Thompson 302) leads them to prioritize self-transcendence even over their own security: Reverend Thomas, for example, overcomes his fears of moving on. Prioritizing Willie’s welfare over his own (272-75), he actively sacrifices himself to help Willie when he tries to carry him to a chapel to reunite him with his father. As Willie is not yet safe when Reverend Thomas is forced to depart the bardo, Bevins and Vollman take over and carry him to safety, even though they have seen what has happened to their fellow ghost (275-77) – they, likewise, have started acting according to benevolence values rather than security values. In the course of the narrative, the ghosts thus come to rank their personal values differently and start acting according to self-transcendence values to try and save Willie,8 with their ability of merging with others playing a central role. The fact that the narrative is conveyed largely through first-hand accounts by the different ghosts enables readers to witness this development from up close, and likely makes it easier for them to relate to what the protagonists are going through (see V. Nünning, “Ethics” 51 f.). This representation of the ghosts’ prioritization of self-transcendence, then, provides readers with an example of how to grapple with ethical quandaries and tackle crises and “may lead to a reflection on and appraisal of” self-transcendence values (ibid.; see also Meretoja 28; Baumbach et al. 3, 8). Of course, the fact that this prioritization of self-transcendence is what finally solves the different crises of the novel is especially crucial for how the novel disseminates this value.

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In this, Lincoln in the Bardo conforms to a pattern Michael Basseler has identified in Saunders’s short fiction, namely that “many of Saunders’s stories feature suspenseful, often lethal situations in which characters are forced to regard another character’s misfortune and act on that basis, either by […] pursuing self-serving goals, or by acting altruistically, even if this may have fatal consequences for themselves” (“Narrative Empathy” 159).

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6. Self-Transcendence as a Solution to the Crises of Lincoln in the Bardo

Ultimately, the climax of Lincoln in the Bardo, in which the effects of the three ghosts’ actions ripple outwards and contribute to solving each of the novel’s crises, pivots around self-transcendence, pointing towards its instrumental role for overcoming divisions and starting to build a better future (see Ní Éigeartaigh 76; Strehle 166; Nünning and Nünning 255). Most prominently, the three ghosts, having transcended their individual fixations and their collective prioritization of their own security, manage to help Willie move on by reuniting him with his father, which leads to Willie’s realization that he is dead and thus gives him closure (see Ní Éigeartaigh 76; Farsi 316). Once aware of what is happening, he is eager to move on, “hopping with joy” (298). That acceptance has an effect on the other ghosts in the bardo as well: when Willie “shout[s], almost joyfully” (296), that he is dead, the others cannot deny their own deaths any longer and, willingly or unwillingly, “succumb[…]” and move on to the afterlife proper as well (318 f.; see also Ní Éigeartaigh 76). Bevins and Vollman are initially able to resist, but then decide that it is time to move on out of their own free will – the process of personal growth they have gone through has clearly enabled them “to shed the layers of self-deception and self-pity that are keeping them in the bardo” (Thompson 302). This growth is illustrated by the fact that both of them apologize to Elise Traynor for having failed to help her years ago, and by Vollman actively utilizing the energy released by his leaving the bardo to free Elise from where she is stuck, turning his departure into one last act of self-transcendence (331-34; see also Strehle 182). Once the two of them have moved on, only a few of the most self-centred or stubborn ghosts are left in the bardo (336-39; see also Ní Éigeartaigh 80). Thus, the fact that Bevins and the others have prioritized self-transcendence over other values has not only saved Willie, it has also, in turn, helped the ghosts and solved their crisis of being unable or unwilling to move on (see Ní Éigeartaigh 78; Basseler, “Value of Literature” 290; Strehle 178). An unintentional side-effect of the ghosts’ involvement in trying to help Willie to the afterlife is that they also influence Abraham Lincoln in the world of the living. While their “mass-cohabitation” did not actually succeed in helping Willie (256), the presence of all of the ghosts opens Lincoln’s mind to their various sufferings – the fact that they, as explained earlier, form a cross-section of US society, including the ghosts of former slaves (251), is crucial for this effect. They “ma[ke] him sadder, with [their] sadness”, which puts his own grief into perspective (312; see also Ní Éigeartaigh 78): Lincoln comes to understand

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“that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), […] that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his” (303; see also Ní Éigeartaigh 76; Strehle 181). The impact of this experience is strongly implied to give him a new perspective on the Civil War as well, as Lincoln realises that his pursuit of the war contributes to this universal sorrow (305-07). He therefore determines to set aside his own grief and to focus on winning the war as quickly and efficiently as possible, even if this, paradoxically, means that he will “end suffering by causing more suffering” (306 f.; see also Ní Éigeartaigh 76; Moseley, “Historical” 2). In the fictional world constructed by the novel, the events in the graveyard and especially the ghosts’ act of embodied self-transcendence have made Lincoln recognize the importance of self-transcendence values himself and have consequently influenced the further course of the Civil War (see Moseley, “Historical” 2). The novel goes one step further, however: one of the ghosts, that of a black man called Thomas Havens, stays merged with Lincoln and decides to leave the graveyard with him (311 f.; see also Ní Éigeartaigh 79; Strehle 181). He has understood that the president, after the ghosts’ earlier intervention, is “an open book”, or rather, “[a]n opening book” (312, emphasis in original), and decides to take that opportunity to influence Lincoln further: I thought, then, as hard as I could, of Mrs. Hodge, and Elson, and Litzie, and of all I had heard during our long occupancy in that pit regarding their troubles and degradations, and called to mind, as well, several others of our race I had known and loved […], and all the things they had endured, thinking, Sir, […] endeavor to do something for us, so that we might do something for ourselves. (Ibid., emphasis in original)

This shows that the novel links the ghosts’ communal act of self-transcendence – and the determined actions of the ghost of one black man in particular – to Lincoln’s future efforts to address the racial inequalities entrenched in his nation, such as his issuing the Emancipation Proclamation later that year (see Moseley, “Historical” 2; Ní Éigeartaigh 79; Strehle 171). The different crises in Lincoln in the Bardo are thus closely connected and practically intertwined with one another, as the ghosts’ actions are, directly or indirectly, responsible for solving them all. The events of the novel therefore suggest that understanding, empathy, and compassion can not only solve per‐ sonal, immediate crises, but may also be an important starting point for resolving large-scale, systemic conflicts or crises, such as divisions and inequalities within a society (see Ní Éigeartaigh 76; Strehle 166).

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7. Conclusion

According to Lincoln in the Bardo, self-transcendence values such as benevo‐ lence and universalism, which both focus on tolerance, understanding, and “concern for the welfare and interests of others” (Schwartz 8), may be instru‐ mental in solving crises. While the novel also points towards the limits of the potential of self-transcendence values (see e.g. Baskin n.p.; Gatti n.p.; Farsi 319), it does become clear that the resolution of the different crises (both personal and political) is brought about by the characters abandoning their self-centred points of view, recognizing the importance of benevolence and universalism, and acting accordingly. Aspects such as the poignant setting and choice of characters, the fragmentary nature of the novel, and many of its supernatural elements serve to underscore this effect. The central role played by the ghosts’ ability of merging with others in solving the different crises is worth highlighting as particularly salient, especially because this ability represents an embodiment of self-transcendence. As a result, self-transcendence permeates the entire narrative, which likely makes its dissemination all the more effective (see V. Nünning, Reading Fictions 232). With the novel published in February 2017, shortly after Donald Trump was inaugurated, it is not hard to see how Lincoln in the Bardo’s promotion of self-transcendence values might have had timely implications for contemporary US society (see Ní Éigeartaigh 80). In fact, the novel strongly resonated with readers in the US when it was first published: one reviewer reflected that “Saunders couldn’t have known how directly his themes would speak to an America and a world in which contradictions are becoming increasingly stark and oppositions are being set in stone” (Kelly n.p.), and several other reviewers make similar observations (see e.g. Baskin n.p.). Saunders himself reportedly also felt the effects of this during a promotional reading tour for his novel, when he met with many readers who were unsettled by the events of the previous months (see Gatti n.p.). Those readers may well have been affected by the case Lincoln in the Bardo makes for self-transcendence potentially being instrumental in overcoming divisions and inequalities. Even though it is, of course, not possible to telepath‐ ically merge with others in real life, the novel does demonstrate potential ways of productively dealing with and perhaps resolving crises by opening yourself to the experiences of others and showing compassion. Lincoln in the Bardo, like other fictional crisis narratives, thus expands its readers’ “sense of the possible” by pointing towards alternative “ways of visualizing our future” (Nünning and Nünning 267, my translation; see also Meretoja): it posits that individuals are not

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powerless, but can actively shape their future and effect real, positive change (see Nünning and Nünning 265 f.). Bibliography

  Primary Sources

Saunders, George. Lincoln in the Bardo. Random House, 2017.

  Secondary Sources

Baskin, Jon. “In the Sick-Box.” The Nation, 3 May 2017, https://www.thenation.com/arti cle/archive/in-the-sick-box/. Last accessed 17 Aug. 2022. Basseler, Michael. “The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction: Listening to the Ghosts of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo.” REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, vol. 36, 2020, pp. 277-95. —. “Narrative Empathy in George Saunders’s Short Fiction.” George Saunders: Critical Essays, edited by Philip Coleman, and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 153-71. Baumbach, Sibylle, Herbert Grabes, and Ansgar Nünning. “Values in Literature and the Value of Literature: Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating and Constructing Norms and Values.” Literature and Values: Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating and Constructing Norms and Values, edited by Sibylle Baumbach, Herbert Grabes, and Ansgar Nünning, WVT, 2009, pp. 1-15. Farsi, Roghayeh. “Reading Strategies and Impossible Worlds in Fiction: With Reference to Lincoln in the Bardo.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 68, no. 3, 2020, pp. 311-27. Fenske, Uta, Walburga Hülk, and Gregor Schuhen. “Vorwort.” Die Krise als Erzählung: Transdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf ein Narrativ der Moderne, edited by Uta Fenske, Walburga Hülk, and Gregor Schuhen, transcript, 2013, pp. 7-8. Gatti, Tom. “Trump as an Agent of Mayhem: An Interview with George Saunders.” The New Statesman, 29 Oct. 2017, https://www.newstatesman.com/culture /books/2017/10/trump-agent-mayhem-interview-george-saunders. Last accessed 17 Aug. 2022. Gioia, Ted. “Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders.” Conceptual Fiction: Exploring the Non-Realist Tradition in Fiction, 26 Mar. 2018, http://www.conceptualfiction.com/linc oln_in_the_bardo.html. Last accessed 17 Aug. 2022. —. “The Rise of the Fragmented Novel: An Essay in 26 Fragments.” Fractious Fiction, 17 July 2013, http://fractiousfiction.com/rise_of_the_fragmented_novel.html. Last accessed 17 Aug. 2022. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Hackett Publishing, 1978.

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Herman, David. “Narrative Ways of Worldmaking.” Narratology in the Age of Cross-Dis‐ ciplinary Narrative Research, edited by Sandra Heinen, and Roy Sommer, De Gruyter, 2009, pp. 71-88. Horton, Emily. Contemporary Crisis Fictions: Affect and Ethics in the Modern British Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Kelly, Adam. “George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo Is a Genuinely Startling Novel.” The Conversation, 18 Oct. 2017, https://theconversation.com/george-saunderss-lincol n-in-the-bardo-is-a-genuinely-startling-novel-85917. Last accessed 17 Aug 2022. Kovach, Elizabeth, Ansgar Nünning, and Imke Polland. “Where Literature and Crises Meet: Coming to Terms with Two Complex Concepts and Their Interfaces.” Literature and Crises: Conceptual Explorations and Literary Negotiations, edited by Elizabeth Kovach, Ansgar Nünning, and Imke Polland, WVT, 2017, pp. 1-27. Kunzru, Hari. “Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders Review – Extraordinary Story of the Afterlife.” The Guardian, 8 Mar. 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/books/201 7/mar/08/lincoln-in-the-bardo-george-saunders-review. Last accessed 17 Aug. 2022. Lukas, Michael David. “A Multiplicity of Voices: On the Polyphonic Novel.” The Millions, 15 Feb. 2013, http://www.themillions.com/2013/02/a-multiplicity-of-voices-on-the-p olyphonic-novel.html. Last accessed 17 Aug. 2022. Meretoja, Hanna. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford UP, 2018. Moseley, Merritt. “Lincoln in the Bardo: ‘Uh, NOT a Historical Novel’.” Humanities, vol. 8, no. 2, 2019, pp. 1-10. —. “On the 2017 Man Booker Prize.” Sewanee Review, vol. 126, no. 1, 2018, pp. 146-60. Ní Éigeartaigh, Aoileann. “Liminal Spaces and Contested Narratives in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Parámo and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo.” IJAS Online, no. 8, 2018, pp. 66-83. Nünning, Ansgar. “Krise als Erzählung und Metapher: Literaturwissenschaftliche Bausteine für eine Metaphorologie und Narratologie von Krisen.” Krisengeschichte(n): „Krise“ als Leitbegriff und Erzählmuster in kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive, edited by Carla Meyer, Katja Patzel-Mattern, and Gerrit Jasper Schenk, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2013, pp. 117-44. Nünning, Ansgar, and Vera Nünning. “Krise als medialer Leitbegriff und kulturelles Erzählmuster: Merkmale und Funktionen von Krisennarrativen als Sinnstiftung über Zeiterfahrung und als literarische Laboratorien für alternative Welten.” Germa‐ nisch-Romanische Monatsschrift: Krisennarrative und Krisenszenarien, vol. 70, no. 3-4, 2020, pp. 241-78. Nünning, Ansgar, and Alexander Scherr. “The Rise of the Fragmentary Essay-Novel: Towards a Poetics and Contextualization of an Emerging Hybrid Genre in the Digital Age.” Anglia, vol. 136, no. 3, 2018, pp. 482-507.

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Nünning, Vera. “Cultural Ways of Worldmaking.” Key Concepts for the Study of Culture: An Introduction, by Vera Nünning, Philipp Löffler, and Margit Peterfy, WVT, 2020, pp. 43-84. —. “Culture and Values.” Key Concepts for the Study of Culture: An Introduction, by Vera Nünning, Philipp Löffler, and Margit Peterfy, WVT, 2020, pp. 321-56. —. “The Ethics of Fictional Form: Persuasiveness and Perspective Taking from the Point of View of Cognitive Literary Studies.” Arcadia, vol. 50, no. 1, 2015, pp. 37-56. —. Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction. Winter, 2014. —. “The Making of Fictional Worlds: Processes, Features, and Functions.” Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives, edited by Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning, and Birgit Neumann, De Gruyter, 2010, pp. 215-43. Sagiv, Lilach et al. “Personal Values in Human Life.” Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 1, no. 9, 2017, pp. 630-39. Schwartz, Shalom H. “An Overview of the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values.” Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, vol. 2, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-20. Selejan, Corina. “Fragmentation(s) and Realism(s): Has the Fragment Gone Mainstream?” Anglica Wratislaviensia, no. 57, 2019, pp. 103-12. Strehle, Susan. Contemporary Historical Fiction, Exceptionalism and Community: After the Wreck. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Taylor, Bryce A. “Lincoln in the Bardo.” First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, no. 277, 2017, p. 63. Thompson, Lucas. “Method Reading.” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation, vol. 50, no. 2, 2019, pp. 293-321.

Optimism in the Anthropocene Cultivating Hope in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2012)

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[I]f you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world. (Chomsky 355)

1. A Climate of Hope

It is the year 2022. Our wells of optimism are almost depleted, and our lives have completely changed over the last two years. In 2020, the world was hit by a deadly pandemic. Handshakes became a ritual of the past, trips to the supermarket involved medical masks, and for the longest time, we could not hug our loved ones without a pang of guilt. The vaccine has brought some relief; however, in certain parts of the world, pandemic control was made more difficult as natural disasters ravaged the planet. In 2021, we saw horrific wildfires destroy the Brazilian Amazon (see Bowman n.p.), parts of Argentina (see Goñi n.p.), South America’s Pantanal region (see Mega n.p.), and large sections of the US-American West Coast (see Migliozzi et al. n.p.). A powerful cyclone made landfall in West Bengal in India, affecting the lives of more than 10 million people (see Singh n.p.), and a hurricane left great devastation after sweeping over Nicaragua (see Phillips n.p.). And lastly, since February 2022, the fear of nuclear war is now back on the table after Russia invaded Ukraine. This list paints a picture of despair, destruction, and devastation. What sounds like the post-apocalyptic beginning of a climate fiction novel is our harsh reality –

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a reality that will most likely worsen as the effects of humanity’s impact on this planet are becoming more and more visible: natural disasters, pandemics, refugees, displacement,1 and species extinction are now – and will be – integral parts of our lives. In the Anthropocene,2 we cannot only see the effects that humans are having on the planet, but we also feel these effects ourselves. Besides the physical harms, the continuous confrontation with the destructive consequences of anthropogenic climate change is wearing out our mental health. Thus, “the American Psychological Association [has now] validated ‘ecoanxiety’ as a clin‐ ically legitimate diagnosis” (Schlanger n.p.). All in all, these bleak circumstances are not promoting a climate of hope; quite the contrary: “Climate despair is a growing phenomena [sic], noted in the popular media and in academic research in public health, education, ethics and philosophy.” (Hoffmann n.p.) One might think people would try to escape this abject state of affairs and take a break by, for instance, reading uplifting books – or at least books that do not revolve around the climate crisis. But the increased awareness of the climate emergency in the 21st century and the rise of (dystopian) climate fiction seem to have gone hand in hand. In a time of overwhelmingly negative news, catastrophes, and general bleakness, why are people turning to climate fiction, and what does it do to its readers? One of the incentives for reading climate fiction is to find a language that helps express a new type of grief we are experiencing in the Anthropocene: the grief for an ecosystem. On a daily basis we are confronted with loss, but we have not yet established a vocabulary that helps process this grief more 1

2

The UN Refugee Agency officially talks of ‘climate change and disaster-related displa‐ cement’ (see “Climate Change and Disaster Displacement” n.p.) rather than ‘climate refugees’ as we often see in the media. According to the 1951 Refugee Convention, people displaced due to natural disasters are not counted as ‘refugees’, as the term specifically refers to people with a “fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion” (“5 Facts on Climate Migrants” n.p.). The term ‘Anthropocene’ was initially borrowed from the field of geology and was coined by the Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen. According to him and others, “we are now living in a geological time when human activities are altering global processes on such a scale that this can be compared to the changes taking place at the turn of previous geological epochs” (Bracke 16). By now, the word ‘Anthropocene’ seems to have slowly been integrated into regular language use and keeps appearing in more and more contexts. And the term’s popularity endures, although “[t]here are now at least 80-90 proposed alternatives” (Chwałczyk 1), most popular amongst them being Jason Moore’s ‘Capitalocene’, a term that emphasizes the detriment “of the Human/Nature binary, and its reluctance to consider human organizations – like capitalism – as part of nature” (Moore 594).

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productively. Writer Zadie Smith lamented this deficiency in an essay in 2014: “There is the scientific and ideological language for what is happening, but there are hardly any intimate words” (Smith n.p.). By creating an intimate language for ecological grief, we might be able to find ways of dealing with the expected and unexpected effects of a changing environment.3 Another supposed incentive is that climate fiction spreads awareness and thus motivates people to take action: “Research suggests that narratives are easier to comprehend and audiences find them more engaging than traditional logical-scientific communication.” (Dahlstrom 13614) Large newspapers like The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Guardian regularly publish articles discussing the ability of cli-fi to save our planet,4 implying that “climate fiction has a role to play in shaping societies’ responses to climate change” (Milkoreit 177).5 But the persuasiveness of climate fiction is a more complicated matter, and the exact long-term effects of cli-fi have yet to be determined. While we know that narratives are powerful devices and that “the persuasiveness of stories [in general] has been demonstrated in several empirical studies during the last fifteen years” (Nünning 11), Matthew Schneider-Mayerson found in his empirical survey on the influence of climate fiction that “most works of climate fiction [lead] readers to associate climate change with intensely negative emotions, which could prove counterproductive to efforts at environmental engagement or persuasion” (473). So, while climate fiction leaves an impression, it might be one that inhibits action by disseminating a feeling of hopelessness and helplessness.

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A first step in this direction was taken by the psychologists who coined the term “‘solastalgia’ to denote distress caused by environmental damage and loss” (Hoffmann n.p.). It is not difficult to find articles with catchy headlines, like this Guardian article from 26th June, 2021 that reads: “Stories to Save the World: The New Wave of Climate Fiction.” It appears obvious that these types of headlines are just as problematic as the ones predicting the end of the world. It is therefore not unsurprising that researchers publicly call for more nuance in newspaper writing, as Matthew Schneider-Mayerson promptly did in his tweet directed at the article mentioned above: “Can we please have a moratorium on the idea that literature, or any other single thing, might ‘save the world’? Nuance is not only possible but necessary. Even, or perhaps especially, in headlines.” (@schneidermayers) In one of the first quantitative studies on this subject, Matthew Schneider-Meyerson asks the question whether climate fiction can “have a positive ecopolitical influence” on its readers – not only by showing them what a future climate might look like, but also by making them aware of “the gravity and urgency of climate change” (Schneider-Mayerson 473).

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Both of these incentives – while noble – rely on a negative outlook on the state of the planet. However, as I want to argue in this contribution, even though our future appears grim, and even though the media prefers negative and catastrophic headlines, we cannot and should not lose hope: “The news on climate impacts and climate science may feel like a march of doom, but climate scientists argue that it’s not too late to act” (Hoffmann n.p.). However, that does not mean that we can simply ignore the issue, it rather means that we: first, need to accept our responsibility, second, recognize that mitigation and adaptation strategies are slowly being implemented in some areas (and that they work), and third, that we should use our imagination to continuously improve and create better solutions – a positive outlook is important for working towards an improved future. Only if we are hopeful will we be able to create a ‘good Anthropocene’. The term ‘good Anthropocene’ stems from the project “The Seeds of a Good Anthropocene”,6 which was established to “counterbalance current dystopic visions of the future that may be inhibiting our ability to move towards a positive future for the Earth and humanity” (“About Us” n.p.). One of the project’s founders, Elena Bennett, emphasized in a TEDx talk: We know that people make choices based on what they believe about society and what they expect for the future. It’s like steering a car: you’re going to steer towards what you’re looking at. So if the only visions that we have of the future are ones that look like this [shows picture of post-apocalyptic cityscape], we are more likely to steer towards those negative visions – even if we know that they are not the ones that we want. (01:54-02:19)

Because storytelling is such a powerful tool, the same applies to the depiction of climate change in novels. They can potentially be a convincing means of spreading hope. Thus, we need more books that “explore how people might sustain their optimism and hope in the face of the often bleak news of a steadily warming world” (Svoboda n.p.). As Noam Chomsky states in the epigraph of this contribution: if you know there is a possibility for improvement, you will work towards creating a better world. Narratives can help sustain this hope and optimism to work towards a good Anthropocene.

6

This project is a collaborative effort between three institutions: the “McGill University in Canada, the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University in Sweden, and the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition (CST) at Stellenbosch University in South Africa” (“About Us” n.p.). The project’s founders are Elena Bennett, Gary Peterson, and Reinette Biggs.

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In my contribution, I will analyse a novel that disseminates hope without downplaying the serious effects of global heating: Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behaviour (2012), a New York Times bestseller and “Book of the Year” according to The Washington Post and USA Today. 7 In the novel, Dellarobia Turnbow, a 28-year-old housewife from Tennessee, encounters millions of monarch butterflies on her (in-laws’) property – an impressive view under normal circumstances,8 but an alarming sight in this case. Due to a change in temperatures, the butterflies have altered their flight behaviour and stopped in Tennessee instead of flying back to Mexico. In the novel, they are at risk of dying in the Appalachian winter, causing the extinction of the entire species. Although the novel does not shy away from the disconcerting reality of the climate crisis, its tone is not overly pessimistic or despairing. All in all, “[t]he future does not have to be bleak. The continuing emergence of new thinking, innovative ways of living, and different means to connect people and nature are vital in overcoming critical local and global challenges” (Bennett et al. 441). Good storytelling contributes to the distribution of these new ideas and optimistic thinking, as do fictional narratives. In order to show how stories about the climate crisis can be permeated by hope and how this might influence the reader, I want to ask the following questions: what effect does the narrative of the endangered butterfly have on the community in the novel, and in which ways does the fight for its survival engender hope in the novel’s characters? Can Barbara Kingsolver create a narrative of hope and positive change amidst a planetary crisis, and how might this affect the reader? This contribution will first elaborate on the psychological approach of hope theory in order to attempt an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of the novel, which will follow in the subsequent section. Finally, I will briefly explore the effects the cultivation of hope might have on the readers of Flight Behaviour by drawing on insights made in Vera Nünning’s Reading Fictions, Changing Minds.

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Besides its commercial success, the novel may have even already had a tangible educational effect: “The eminent lepidopterist Lincoln Brower, who co-submitted a petition to the government asking that the monarch be listed as endangered […] is convinced that Kingsolver’s novel has ‘influenced and educated many folks.’ While dealing with the petition, he was impressed by ‘the wide-spread awareness of the problems facing the butterfly.’” (Martyris n.p.) This underlines the fact that fiction is able to reach and teach a wide audience. The journey of the monarch butterfly is a hot topic: The New Yorker published an impressive portfolio piece on the monarch butterfly in February 2021 with absolutely stunning pictures from Mexico that can be seen on the article website (see Ko and Kormann). The events related to Tennessee are fictional, but the descriptions of millions of butterflies hanging in trees are a real part of their flight behaviour.

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2. Empathy, Hope, and Positive Change

Hope and optimism are integral parts of life. Identifying personal sources of hope can improve one’s mental health and outlook on life, but current events have spurred an effort to manifest positive action taken on a communal level, which is specifically centred on our planet’s future. “Seeds of Good An‐ thropocenes”, the large ecological project mentioned above, maps the location of so-called ‘bright spots’ and ‘hope spots’ online, successful environmental initiatives to inspire people around the world to continue making positive contributions to the planet’s future. These inspirational visions highlight pos‐ sible paths to sustainability and thus help to create and explain a more viable reality (see Bennett et al. 442). If we are continuously reminded of sustainable transformations around the world, positive change will seem more feasible. Another way of inspiring hope and creativity is through the means of narra‐ tive. Particularly literary narratives, such as novels, allow readers a privileged access to fictional minds, emotions, and experiences, and may thus generate feelings of hope. In Reading Fiction, Changing Minds, Vera Nünning argues that “fiction can change readers’ minds in at least two important ways: First, reading fiction is associated with greater interpersonal skills” and second, these stories can “induce readers to alter and adjust their beliefs” (10). Both of these statements are founded in the production of empathy,9 the fact that we are capable of sharing the feelings of others. In other words, what we read influences our own emotions. Determining an exact list of empathic responses triggered through fiction is difficult, but “it seems that joy, hope, relief, fear, pity, disappointment, and anger are the major types of empathic emotion activated in response to characters in a narrative” (Schneider 136). We can therefore assume that (as a result of our empathic capabilities) the reader can restore their waning hope vicariously through the characters of a story. Elizabeth Ammons has written about the role hope plays in the liberal activist tradition in American literature in her book, Brave New Words: How Literature Can Save the Planet. She identifies a contagious effect through which individuals might not only be able to change their own lives but also influence others to do the same: this tradition is one of “profound hope and

9

In her book, Nünning differentiates between empathy and ‘theory of mind’. While showing empathy means sharing a feeling or feeling like someone else, ‘theory of mind’ only “refers to beliefs about the thoughts and feelings of others” (10). In this article, I will only be focusing on the idea of empathy, as a shared feeling of hope between the characters and the reader might induce the reader to imagine a ‘good Anthropocene’.

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idealism, belief that the people can and will hear, think, and take action to bring positive change” (38). What exactly is hope and how is it cultivated? How can the study of hope be connected to literary studies in a useful manner? As these questions are closely connected to the functions of the human mind, I want to look for answers in the field of psychology. I will therefore ground my analysis of Flight Behaviour in the psychological approach of ‘hope theory’. This psychological foundation helps to highlight the connection between real-life cognitive dynamics and narrative. Furthermore, it might even give some space to explore how the cultivation of hope on the story level can impact the reader. The American Psychological Association (APA) defines hope as the expecta‐ tion for a positive experience to occur (see “Hope” n.p.), turning hopefulness into a synonym for optimism.10 Another popular definition that has been circulating since the mid-20th century states that hope is the “perception that one can reach desired goals” – in other words, “hopeful thought reflects the belief that one can find pathways to desired goals and become motivated to use those pathways” (Snyder et al. 257). American psychologist Charles Snyder and his colleagues further add that in this way, hope “serves to drive the emotions and well-being of people” (ibid.). This definition contains useful layers for this contribution, as it offers a way to provide a road map to the cultivation of hope. It also mentions the tangible effects that hope can have on humans, namely well-being. Moreover, as this definition centres around the idea of ‘action’, it seems an appropriate theoretical foundation for an exploration of climate fiction. In order to analyse how hope is rendered in the novel, we must first of all arrive at an understanding of what hope is exactly, and how it can be discerned in the text. Is it an emotion, a value, or something else? How is it cultivated in people and how does it manifest itself? While the APA, for example, explicitly classifies hope as “an emotion” (“Hope” n.p.), Snyder et al. emphasize, contrary to what most researchers have done before them, that they do not characterize hope as an emotion (see 258). Rather than putting the focus on hope as a feeling as such, they highlight “that positive emotions should flow from perceptions of successful goal pursuit” (ibid.). Phrases like “she felt hopeful” tempt us to classify hope as a feeling, but Snyder et al.’s definition is more fruitful within the framework of a literary analysis. For instance, it is highly unlikely that we can repeatedly find the phrase “she felt hopeful” within the story. Instead, viewing perceived success in the pursuit of one’s goal as a generator of hope

10

This definition coincides with the one provided by Charles Carver and Michael Scheier, who define ‘optimism’ as “the expectations of good outcome” (233).

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seems to be a more useful approach: it gives us the chance to closely look at the events within the novels, how these events influence the characters and their actions, and how they propel the story forward. A hopeful narrative, in this sense, is one that endows the characters with courses of action and agency. As this approach puts the focus on the degree of agency and efficiency in characters’ relation to their environment, it is well suited to addressing the broader questions in ecocriticism surrounding the relationship between humans and the non-human world. Furthermore, providing the reader with a tangible pursuit of goals simplifies the reader’s anchoring process to the characters’ path to success. In the Anthropocene, in the middle of the climate crisis, this might immensely impact the reader’s level of optimism, as real life can often feel too large and too uncontrollable for the individual. Goals are the main cognitive component of hope theory. Generally speaking, human action is goal oriented, and goals allow people to progress on many different levels in life. “Without having a goal that matters, people have no reason to act.” (Carver and Scheier 231) People’s goals can “be short- or long-term, but they need to be of sufficient value to occupy conscious thought” (Snyder et al. 258). If we are not somehow constantly reminding ourselves of our goals, we are much less likely to achieve them. At the same time, we need to ensure that goals are attainable, although “they also typically contain some degree of uncertainty” (ibid.). Studies have shown that “hope flourishes under probabilities of intermediate goal attainment” (ibid.). This is further complemented by two types of thinking: pathway thinking and agency thinking. In other words, it is not enough for one’s goals to be attainable in the abstract. People must perceive “themselves as being capable of generating workable routes to those goals” as well as believe that they have the “capacity to use one’s pathways so as to reach desired goals” (ibid.). In narrative, we can thus examine the cultivation of hope by looking at goal setting, as well as pathway and agency thinking. The next section will transfer this theory onto a fictional framework and analyse how hope is cultivated within the story of Flight Behaviour. In the subsequent section, Nünning’s thoughts on the power of narrative will be looked at in the context of hope. 3. Butterfly Beacon: The Cultivation of Hope in Flight Behaviour

The monarch butterfly is the central pillar around which the plot of Flight Behaviour is constructed. Its appearance and presence are intricately interwoven with the life of the protagonist, Dellarobia, as well as the lives of the other characters in the novel. This section explores the question of how the narrative

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of the butterfly functions within the novel as a cultivator of hope. First, I am going to take a closer look at Dellarobia and what the appearance of the butterflies means to her. Then I will examine the meaning of the butterflies for the rural community, as well as for people from the outside. The arrival of the butterflies is an ambivalent event. It is a beautiful occur‐ rence in and of itself, and the rich, detailed language of this passage reads like a magical event unfolding in front of Dellarobia’s eyes: Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. For her alone these orange boughs lifted, these long shadows became a brightness rising. It looked like the inside of joy, if a person could see that. A valley of lights, an ethereal wind. It had to mean something. (Flight Behaviour 21)11

And she is right: the appearance of the butterflies has a meaning, albeit not the divine sign she had expected. The butterflies turn out to be one of the har‐ bingers of climate change,12 and despite their beauty, they “represent appalling, unfathomable ecological harm” (Garrard 309). Later, the reader will find out that the survival of a whole species is on the line, evoking the planet’s sixth global extinction event.13 Kingsolver manages to convey the seriousness of the climate crisis while also realizing that our conventional ways of understanding nature and its beauty clash with the terrifying events we are likely to experience in the Anthropocene. Despite the dismal reason for their appearance, the arrival of the butterflies brings positive change into Dellarobia’s life and engenders hope. The beginning of the novel, however, emanates a sense of hopelessness: we are introduced to Dellarobia on her way to meet a man;14 in this moment, she is tempted to

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In the following, references to Flight Behaviour will be given without repeating the title. The town had already seen weird weather and seemingly endless amounts of rain that endangered their livelihood: “They’d lost the late-summer cutting because three consecutive rainless days were needed for cutting, raking, and baling a hay crop. All the farmers they knew had leaned into the forecasts like gamblers banking on a straight flush: some took the risk, mowed hay that got rained on, and lost.” (49) The changing climate affects their lives and jobs. Nevertheless, they tend to explain these phenomena away by directing their gaze at God: “Weather is the Lord’s business.” (361) This also means that they pass off their own responsibility and agency to God: if the weather is God’s business, then it is not theirs and there is nothing they can do about it. Thus far, our planet has experienced five mass extinction events, “all caused by dramatic but natural phenomena. It has been claimed that the Sixth Mass Extinction may be underway, this time caused entirely by humans” (Cowie et al. 640). Her inner desperation is mirrored in her surroundings, more specifically in a fallen tree she encounters while walking to meet the other man. “The tree was intact, not cut or broken by wind. What a waste. After maybe centuries of survival it had simply let go

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cheat on her husband, as her whole life feels monotonous, desolate, and full of unprocessed trauma, which has even caused her to have suicidal thoughts. She ruminates about the possible reaction of the community to the potential affair, creating a distance between her own struggles and their lives: “How they admired their own steadfast lives. Right up to the day when hope in all its versions went out of stock […] and the heart had just one instruction left: run.” (1) The detailed description, the proximity between the heterodiegetic narrator and Dellarobia as the focalizer, and the “free indirect discourse [that] ensures [that] the protagonist’s own language pervades the narrative voice” (Garrard 303) all convey her sense of hopelessness in a tangible manner. Here, the idea of hopelessness is rooted in her feeling of being trapped: there is not much she can do with her life, which had, so far, resulted in a paralyzing inaction. This feeling is tied to her husband and his family after an unexpected pregnancy forced Dellarobia and Cub to marry. Consequently, Dellarobia can describe her life in a single sentence: “The sheep in the field below, the Turnbow family land, the white frame house she had not slept outside for a single night in ten-plus years of marriage: that was pretty much it.” (3) At this point though, she sees no other way out than radically uprooting her life by having an affair, thus ending years of inaction. To Dellarobia, the only way of breaking free from her entrapment is an immoral act – even though this decision might entail even more hopelessness, as it could potentially destroy her whole family. However, Dellarobia’s self-destructive course of action is interrupted by the discovery of the butterflies in the forest. This discovery brings a renewed purpose into her life and changes it radically. Her inner state switches from hopeless to hopeful when she discovers a new sense of agency (see Murphy 158; see also Garrard 302). She becomes an assistant of Ovid Byron, one of the scientists camping out near her house to observe the butterflies after their arrival was broadcasted in the media. Dellarobia is hopeful about the survival of the butterfly and tries to learn more about them to find out how they can be saved. Her hopeful mindset is juxtaposed with Ovid’s, who is ruled by pessimistic thinking due to his scientific knowledge. Because of his profession, he seems excluded from any type of goal-drafting with regard to saving the butterflies. He is just there to observe – intervention is not an option, even though butterflies are his central interest: “We are scientists. Our job here is only to describe what exists.” (203) This lack of agency impedes his development of pathway thinking. Ovid is convinced: “[s]urvival wasn’t possible” (581). of the ground, the wide fist of its root mass ripped up and resting naked above a clay gash in the wooded mountainside. Like herself, it just seemed to have come loose from its station in life.” (7)

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Even though Dellarobia gains these new insights into “the slow, tedious, and detail-oriented process of data gathering” of scientists “and also learns how far removed this process is from developing and implementing solutions to the problem of climate change” (Milkoreit 182), it still leads her to discover a new goal to pursue: she wants to go back to college and start a career as a scientist, as she is inspired by the scientists’ dedication to the cause. Even though she now knows that “science is both necessary yet insufficient, powerful yet impotent” (ibid.), this path instils new hope in her: “Despite everything, the end of the world impending, Dellarobia had a glimpse of strange fortune. The sun was well up now and the sky clear, suggesting some huge shift was under way.” (590) Hope theory can also be applied to the activists that appear within the story: a man passing out leaflets on how to reduce one’s carbon footprint, and the mother-daughter team knitting butterflies. They are setting attainable goals for themselves. The mother-daughter team, for instance, knits butterflies from donated sweaters. It gives them hope because they not only keep their fingers occupied and feel like they are doing something (“The impulse to keep the hands moving, feeding tiny answers to vast demands.”, 469), but their goal is to call attention to the butterflies, at which they are very successful (people from all around the world send them messages, see 470). Yet, these activities need to be looked at critically too. The leaflet distributor, for instance, works as a reminder that there is no universal path to improvement, and that the respective circumstances of individual communities needs to be taken into account as not everything applies to everyone: “solution sets need to account for human experience and structural constraints” (Milkoreit 182). The points on the “sustainability pledge” he tries to get everyone to sign do not apply to Dellarobia, for instance: she never flies, buys everything second hand because of financial limitations, cannot switch to environmentally friendly stocks for lack of money, and more (451-53). This shows that the cultivation of hope can also be a very subjective and personal undertaking. The dynamics that can be observed on the community level are very intri‐ guing, and as mentioned above, the arrival of the butterflies is a double-edged sword: the people read it as a divine sign to help the community by giving rise to butterfly tourism. However, the arrival of the monarch pits their religious beliefs against the incoming wave of science: “The appearance of the scientists confronts the town with a whole new set of questions, challenging not just daily routines but deeply rooted ideological and religious values.” (Milkoreit 181) Up until then, whenever the discussion had fallen onto the topic of climate change, the conversation “ended with the same line: The Lord moves in mysterious ways.” (204) “Religion [thus] emerges as a form of [climate change] denial.”

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(Goodbody 53) As a consequence, the religious community’s internal motivation for saving the butterfly is an inherently different one. Waiting for God’s plan to reveal itself takes away people’s agency, but even the Turnbow family realizes that the butterflies are better off alive than dead. Some of the characters thus set small goals toward saving the butterflies, like Hester helping Dellarobia find nectar flowers (see 431). Others set bigger goals, like the church group that convinces Dellarobia’s father-in-law Bear not to sell the forest for logging.15 “‘That land was bestowed on us for a purpose.’ […] ‘And I don’t think it was to end up looking like a pile of trash.’” (555) They thus appropriate their own way of looking at their environment – the beauty of nature that God made and their task to protect it – to find motivation for saving the butterflies, rather than having to be convinced by science. This way, Kingsolver manages to respectfully integrate the community’s way of living as well as their values without alienating anyone. All in all, the butterflies create a situation that fosters pathway thinking among the people who set themselves attainable goals. Furthermore, although decimated in numbers, the butterflies survive and the community is validated for its efforts.16 While for some people, the arrival of the butterflies was a constant factor for worry (as, for instance, Ovid), for other people, these butterflies were a great source of hope (e.g., Dellarobia) or a motivation to take action (e.g., the knitting ladies). All in all, Flight Behaviour has a very rational, balanced ending: neither religion nor science are muted or given undue weight. In the end, this conveys a strong sense of teamwork, as everyone is motivated to work on the goal for their own reasons. Even people with different values might thus find a common theme that helps them work together and promote positive change.

15

16

This is a good example of the individual struggles that communities face and that need to be integrated into climate solutions: “This clear-cutting is just one example of short-term and short-sighted solutions to systemic economic problems. It also becomes an example of how people can be persuaded by the consumerist culture in which they live to make decisions that run counter to their own personal long-term interests, as well as the long-term health of their human communities, their ecoregional communities, and the biosphere.” (Murphy 159) At the end of the novel, everyone is rewarded: the butterflies survive. “The highest ones were faint trails of specks, ellipses. Their numbers astonished her. Maybe a million. The shards of a wrecked generation had rested alive like a heartbeat in trees, snow-covered, charged with resistance. Now the sun blinked open on a long impossible time […]. The sky was too bright and the ground so unreliable, she couldn’t look up for very long. Instead her eyes held steady on the fire bursts of wings reflected across water, a merging of flame and flood. Above the lake of the world, flanked by white mountains, they flew out to a new earth.” (596 f.) The language of this scene is reminiscent of the very first time that Dellarobia sees the insects, and the novel seems to come full circle.

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Getting humans to do something about the climate crisis is not always easy, as it often presents itself as an intangible phenomenon that is hard to tackle: climate change is too large with regard to time and space for humans to grasp and see in relation to their own lives. The environmental processes are so tightly connected that it is quite hard to figure out where exactly individual activism should start. As a result, everything can seem overwhelming and escapist fantasies or denial seem like an easier solution to the problem. Moreover, it is hard to break the chain once destruction is set in motion: “Hundreds of factors came into play. Fire ants, for example, had now come into Texas, where the monarchs were vulnerable. Ants ate the caterpillars. And farm chemicals were killing the milkweed plants, another worry he mentioned.” (202) A range of other novels “address the issue of human will and inertia”, such as Ian McEwan’s Solar, Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries, or T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth, but they usually “reveal a more pessimistic attitude about human behaviour” (Murphy 149). In Flight Behaviour, however, we can recognize a different strategy of looking at the processes of climate change: “the problem is not one of means but one of recognition, acceptance, and will to act” (ibid.). 4. Cultivating Hope in the Reader: An Outlook on Creating a Good Anthropocene

There are countless quotes by famous authors about the joy of reading books, but barely any about how reading fiction leads to hopeful thoughts or optimism. Which conditions would have to be present in a novel to cause such hopeful thoughts? In order to explore the cognitive effects a fictional narrative centred around hope might have on the reader, this section will briefly summarize the narrative features present in Flight Behaviour that help the reader empathize with Dellarobia. In Reading Fictions, Changing Minds, Vera Nünning presents us with a set of narrative strategies through which we are more likely to develop empathy for the characters of a story and adopt their perspective. What follows is a brief exemplary analysis, in which these strategies are explored in relation to Dellarobia.17 We adopt Dellarobia’s perspective and follow her ups and downs while also celebrating her successes as she finds new hope in life. In the end,

17

This section will only mention an excerpt of the narrative strategies mentioned by Vera Nünning. To read more about the other strategies (e.g., explicit comments by the narrator or the likeability and attractiveness of the characters), consult Nünning (see 199-233).

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when she leaves the farm with a new goal in mind and motivated by agency thinking, the reader might be just as hopeful for the future as she is. Dellarobia is the character through which we experience the story of Flight Behaviour. Using her as the sole focalizer allows the narrative to directly transmit her “impressions, beliefs, feelings and opinions” (Nünning 199), thus lessening the distance between her and the reader. The use of free indirect discourse approximates the narration to Dellarobia’s own language and voice, creating a sense of immediacy and intimacy. We therefore get direct “access to the plans, hopes, [and] wishes” of the protagonist, which can have an “especially powerful [effect]” on the reader (Schneider 137). Importantly, in the context of climate fiction, it also makes the knowledge around the arrival and rescue of the butterflies more accessible, as scientific information is filtered through a lay person’s understanding. Dellarobia and her thoughts have a privileged position within the novel: she perceives, interprets, and evaluates (see Nünning 213) the events within the story, which gives “readers the opportunity to share these perceptions and interpretations” (ibid.), including the hopeful thinking around the survival of the butterflies and her future life as a scientist. Another means of promoting an empathetic connection with a character is putting them “in a precarious position” (Nünning 201). This mode of writing keeps the reader’s interest and renews their concern for a character’s fate: it “provides an incentive for spending the cognitive effort of caring about (or bothering with) the mental processes of the character in question”, which also intensifies the affective response of the reader (ibid. 203). One such example is Dellarobia’s attempt at uprooting her life’s apparent stability at the beginning of the novel by pursuing a potential affair. Most people would classify adultery as morally wrong, but the framing of Dellarobia’s circumstances makes the reader emotionally invested in the intricacies of her life. She finds herself in a rather hopeless situation, stuck in a marriage that is the result of a shotgun wedding,18 with in-laws she cannot stand and no way of leaving the community due to financial instability. The reader feels Dellarobia’s hopelessness acutely, and although having an affair is not an actual solution to her problems, we can understand her motivation for doing so. By the novel’s end, the reader feels as if they had ‘lived through’ these hardships together with Dellarobia. In this way, Dellarobia’s path to hopefulness 18

Shortly after birth, however, the baby dies. This specific passage in the book is kept vague and cold in the beginning, and the reader becomes a witness to the pain that was never processed. “The baby that never quite was, that she never got to see, a monster. The preemie nurse said it had strange fine hair all over its body that was red like hers.” (14)

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becomes our own. Due to the positive ending, Goodbody categorizes Flight Be‐ haviour as a Bildungsroman: Dellarobia’s story is a “narrative of an individual’s awakening to environmental risk and simultaneous realisation of their potential as an active member of society” (Goodbody 48). In the end, she separates from her husband and moves away with her children to get a new job (with the help of Ovid) and a college degree: “Ecological enlightenment is thus mapped onto female emancipation” (ibid. 48), and Dellarobia is able to explicitly identify her positive feelings as hope (see 582 f.). Besides the narrative strategies that aid in adopting Dellarobia’s perspective, there are other factors that help the reader become immersed in the story and are relevant for an ecocritical reading. First, the plot of Flight Behaviour is set in present rural Tennessee rather than a dystopian, futuristic place. This keeps the story on a more local level in the here and now, a world that is much easier to immerse in due to a high degree of “perceived realism” (Nünning 220).19 Second, centering the novel around human experiences and values makes the story more relatable. There is no space for “renewable energy sources, carbon pricing, or the green economy in this story” (Milkoreit 181). Instead, the novel shows the (very human) struggle of a conservative community that comes to terms with the reality of climate change. These two factors make “the reader feel discomfort, potential loss and sadness, frustration” but also generate “a desire for a better world” (ibid. 187). In conclusion, the reader is able to empathize with Dellarobia through narrative conventions such as focalization, as well as other factors such as perceived realism and an invested interest in Dellarobia’s well-being. When Dellarobia feels hopeless in the beginning, the reader does too. When Dellarobia is optimistic about the future and is looking forward to positive change in her life, there is a potential for the reader to feel hopeful as well. Overall, this short examination only focused on Dellarobia’s hopes about her personal life, but even that specific fraction is deeply connected to the climate crisis: being able to be optimistic about the future – despite the fact that we know it is going to get worse – means that it is worth persisting.

19

While this perceived realism is a successful immersion strategy, against the backdrop of climate fiction it is important to point out that it might also trigger inhibition in the reader. The end of the book explicitly states that “[t]he sudden relocation of these overwintering colonies to southern Appalachia is a fictional event that has occurred only in the pages of this novel” (598); however, due to the perceived realism as well as our radically changing environment, this event (in one variation or other) does not seem very unlikely.

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Nevertheless, we cannot make any definitive statements about the exact strength or duration of the reader’s hopefulness. Not even a more detailed analysis may have been able to give comprehensive answers to the long list of questions that surrounds this topic. Yet, I hope this contribution might still initiate a discussion about the fictional cultivation of hope – perhaps even inspiring other scholars to start exploring the cultivation of hopefulness and its impact on the reader in a quantitative study, along the lines of Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s study on the persuasive impact of climate change fiction. 5. Conclusion

“[I]sn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?” (Montgomery 214) Within the context of the Anthropocene and the omnipresent effects of the climate crisis, this quote seems tainted. We have already made sure that tomorrow carries the mistakes we have implanted in it yesterday – and the day before, and the day before that. Nevertheless, what this contribution has tried to show is that it is crucial to believe that we can work towards a day where tomorrow contains at least fewer mistakes than the day before: by providing a pathway that lessens the human impact on earth through setting attainable goals and following them – which, in turn, cultivates the hope we need to continue on this path. This article certainly does not want to suggest that climate fiction can literally “save the planet”, as has been suggested by newspaper headlines before. Rather, it wants to claim that climate fiction could have a positive influence on us by implanting a hopeful outlook on the fate of our planet, which might then motivate us to change our behaviour as well as improve our (mental) well-being. The novel Flight Behaviour does not show a radically altered world full of either climate catastrophes or climate change solutions. Instead, it provides a realistic glimpse into the present, the local. The novel depicts relatable people and their experiences, struggles, and emotions. When it comes to illustrating the consequences of global heating, “[i]t is not facts that people primarily believe, as Kingsolver shows us, but other people; Dellarobia is swayed as much by Byron’s charisma as by anything he tells her” (Garrard 305). This is an important foundation for the contagious effect of hope: rather than using statistics and scientific models, the reader is inspired by the hope cultivated within the characters of the story through the pathways and actions they have chosen in response to the situation. At the same time, if we consider narratives as ‘tools for thinking’ (see Herman) that help us make sense of the world, fiction can help us think about the future more productively: “the ability to think of

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something – some place, ecosystem, company or community – as possibly being different than it is today is absolutely necessary to provide us with the mental source material and motivation for creating change” (Milkoreit 175). If we can see a different outcome, like we saw in certain parts of Flight Behaviour, we can try to establish achievable goals to get there. In the novel, hope is made tangible. As shown above, through the means of hope theory, it is possible to determine what triggers hope, for instance, in the case of Dellarobia, and what does not, for example in the case of Ovid Byron. Within this approach, hope does not figure as a vague emotion; instead, a clear pathway to optimism can be identified: the reader is able to follow the protagonist’s path to saving the butterflies and improving her own life, which highlights the sense of hopefulness cultivated in the process. The narrative of the butterfly thus serves as a trigger for goal setting, feelings of hope, and positive change. At the same time, it is important to note that Kingsolver manages to establish this narrative of hope while still emphasizing the threat that comes with a changing climate: It is a radical message that cannot be repeated too often: ecological harm can be beautiful, and ‘natural beauty’ is no index of health. While the mood of the conclusion is unmistakably elevated, there are enough reminders of the ‘wrecked generation’ […] of butterflies that has survived, just barely, that we must read of it flying out ‘to a new earth’ as precarious endurance, not biblical redemption. (Garrard 310)

The hope that is generated within the story does not ‘romanticize away’ the harmful effects of the climate crisis and thus still acts as an important reminder to work on ways to reduce the human footprint on earth. The actual short-and long-term effects of the cultivation of hope within the cli-fi reader still need to be examined. However, studies outside of the field of literature have already proven that hope positively changes the outcome of people’s actions: one can find improvements and enhanced success in areas such as academia, athletics, physical health, psychological adjustment, human connection, and psychotherapy (see Snyder et al. 263-67). An interesting path for further research is the nexus of narrative studies and health – a field that is as yet mostly unexplored (see Nünning and Nünning). In their article on salutogenesis, Vera and Ansgar Nünning examine, among other questions, “what narratives can do for us to stay healthy and well” (173). This link might be especially interesting to explore against the backdrop of the climate crisis and, as was mentioned in the introduction, the mental health issues that come with it, such as eco-anxiety. We need to work towards a good

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Mannheimer Beiträge zur Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft herausgegeben von Christine Bierbach, Hans-Peter Ecker, Werner Kallmeyer, Susanne Kleinert, Jochen Mecke, Ulfried Reichardt, Meinhard Winkgens

Bisher sind erschienen: Frühere Bände finden Sie unter: http://narr-starter.de/magento/index.php// reihen/mannheimer-beitraege-zur-sprach-undliteraturwissenschaft.html Band 50 Antje Kley Das erlesene Selbst in der autobiografischen Schrift 2001, 410 Seiten €[D] 49,– ISBN 978-3-8233-5650-9 Band 51 Ralf Schuster Antwort in der Geschichte Zu den Übergängen zwischen den Werkphasen bei Reinhold Schneider 2001, 359 Seiten €[D] 49,– ISBN 978-3-8233-5651-6 Band 52 Werner Reinhart Pikareske Romane der 80er Jahre Ronald Reagan und die Renaissance des politischen Erzählens in den U.S.A. 2001, 681 Seiten €[D] 74,– ISBN 978-3-8233-5652-3 Band 53 Kerstin Wiedemann Zwischen Irritation und Faszination George Sand und ihre deutsche Leserschaft im 19. Jahrhundert 2003, 604 Seiten €[D] 89,– ISBN 978-3-8233-5653-0 Band 54 Eva Raffel Vertraute Fremde 2002, 330 Seiten €[D] 48,– ISBN 978-3-8233-5654-7

Band 55 Christa Grewe-Volpp, Werner Reinhart (Hrsg.) Erlesenes Essen Literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zu Hunger, Sattheit und Genuss 2003, 369 Seiten €[D] 69,– ISBN 978-3-8233-5655-4 Band 56 Eva Hänßgen Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick und das antike Epos 2003, 290 Seiten €[D] 48,– ISBN 978-3-8233-5656-1 Band 57 Lars Heiler Regression und Kulturkritik im britischen Gegenwartsroman Kulturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zu Romanen von Ian McEwan, Jim Crace, Irvine Welsh und Will Self 2003, 260 Seiten €[D] 54,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6017-9 Band 58 Christa Grewe-Volpp Natural Spaces Mapped by Human Minds Ökokritische und ökofeministische Analysen zeitgenössischer amerikanischer Romane 2004, 427 Seiten €[D] 58,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6024-7 Band 59 Harald Zapf, Klaus Lösch (Hrsg.) Cultural Encounters in the New World Literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zu kulturellen Begegnungen in der Neuen Welt 2003, 457 Seiten €[D] 68,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6044-5

Band 60 Elke Klemens Dracula und ‘seine Töchter’ Die Vampirin als Symbol im Wandel der Zeit 2004, 324 Seiten €[D] 58,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6061-2

Band 66 Marion Hebach Gestörte Kommunikation im amerikanischen Drama 2006, 246 Seiten €[D] 58,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6208-1

Band 61 Stefan Glomb, Stefan Horlacher (Hrsg.) Beyond Extremes Repräsentation und Reflexion von Modernisierungsprozessen im zeitgenössischen britischen Roman 2004, 398 Seiten €[D] 68,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6097-1

Band 67 Peter Hohwiller Hof- und Herrschaftskritik in den Sonetten Thomas Wyatts 2006, 209 Seiten €[D] 49,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6244-9

Band 62 Sigrun Meinig Witnessing the Past History and Post-Colonialism in Australian Historical Novels 2004, 394 Seiten €[D] 68,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6116-9 Band 63 Christian von Zimmermann, Nina von Zimmermann (Hrsg.) Frauenbiographik Lebensbeschreibungen und Porträts 2005, 388 Seiten €[D] 48,90 ISBN 978-3-8233-6162-6 Band 64 Stefan Horlacher Masculinities Konzeptionen von Männlichkeit im Werk von Thomas Hardy und D.H. Lawrence 2005, 721 Seiten €[D] 78,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6170-1 Band 65 Susanne Bach Theatralität und Authentizität zwischen Viktorianismus und Moderne Romane von Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde und Wilkie Collins 2006, 400 Seiten €[D] 68,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6203-6

Band 68 Nicole Schröder Spaces and Places in Motion Spatial Concepts in Contemporary American Literature 2006, 257 Seiten €[D] 58,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6253-1 Band 69 Konstanze Jungbluth, Christiane Meierkord (Hrsg.) Identities in Migration Contexts 2007, 179 Seiten €[D] 39,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6317-0 Band 70 Heidi Fleckenstein Der französische Werbefilm Entwicklung ästhetischer und narrativer Verfahren im 20. Jahrhundert 2007, 248 Seiten €[D] 58,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6324-8 Band 71 Sarah Heinz Die Einheit in der Differenz Metapher, Romance und Identität in A.S. Byatts Romanen 2007, 453 Seiten €[D] 68,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6345-3

Band 72 Dagmar Schmelzer Intermediales Schreiben im spanischen Avantgarderoman der 20er Jahre Azorín, Benjamín Jarnés und der Film 2007, 327 Seiten €[D] 58,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6359-0 Band 73 Folkert Degenring Identität zwischen Dekonstruktion und (Re)Konstruktion im zeitgenössischen britischen Roman Peter Ackroyd, Iain Banks und A. S. Byatt 2008, 235 Seiten €[D] 58,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6427-6 Band 74 Philip Griffiths Externalised Texts of the Self Projections of the Self in Selected Works of English Literature 2008, 245 Seiten €[D] 58,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6460-3 Band 75 Klaus Lang Von Frau von Staël zu D.H. Lawrence Literarische Bilder von Natur- und Kulturlandschaften Italiens und ihre englandkritische Funktionalisierung in repräsentativen Romanen 2009, 523 Seiten €[D] 68,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6487-0 Band 76 Christian Schwägerl Language contact and displays of social identity The communicative and ideological dimension of code-mixing in a business setting 2010, 195 Seiten €[D] 48,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6565-5

Band 77 Sarah-Jane Conrad, Daniel Elmiger (Hrsg.) Leben und Reden in Biel/Bienne. Vivre et communiquer dans une ville bilingue Kommunikation in einer zweisprachigen Stadt. Une expérience biennoise 2010, 220 Seiten €[D] 49,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6589-1 Band 78 Isabell Ludewig Lebenskunst in der Literatur Zeitgenössische fiktionale Autobiographien und Dimensionen moderner Ethiken des guten Lebens 2011, 229 Seiten €[D] 58,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6672-0 Band 79 Stella Butter Kontingenz und Literatur im Prozess der Modernisierung Diagnosen und Umgangsstrategien im britischen Roman des 19. ̶ 21. Jahrhunderts 2013, XVI, 496 Seiten €[D] 78,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6801-4 Band 80 Maurus Roller Krise und Wandel: Das britische Drama im 20. Jahrhundert Untersuchungen zum Verhältnis von Identität, Autonomie und Form-Inhalt-Relation 2014, X, 510 Seiten €[D] 78,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6860-1 Band 81 Nora Kuster, Stella Butter, Sarah Heinz (Hrsg.) Subject Cultures: The English Novel from the 18th to the 21st Century 2016, 276 Seiten €[D] 58,– ISBN 978-3-8233-6932-5

Band 82 Kerstin Frank, Caroline Lusin (Hrsg.) Finance, Terror, and Science on Stage Current Public Concerns in 21st-Century British Drama 2017, 275 Seiten €[D] 68,– ISBN 978-3-8233-8142-6 Band 83 Caroline Lusin, Ralf Haekel (Hrsg.) Community, Seriality, and the State of the Nation: British and Irish Television Series in the 21st Century 2019, 304 Seiten €[D] 68,– ISBN 978-3-8233-8249-2 Band 84 Annika Gonnermann, Sina Schuhmaier, Lisa Schwander (Hrsg.) Literarische Perspektiven auf den Kapitalismus Fallbeispiele aus dem 21. Jahrhundert 2021, 275 Seiten €[D] 68,– ISBN 978-3-8233-8343-7 Band 85 Annika Gonnermann Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction 2021, 352 Seiten €[D] 68,– ISBN 978-3-8233-8459-5 Band 86 Corinna Assmann, Jan Rupp, Christine Schwanecke (Hrsg.) The Transformative Power of Literature and Narrative 2023, 283 Seiten €[D] 68,– ISBN 978-3-8233-8573-8

Corinna Assmann · Jan Rupp · Christine Schwanecke (eds.)

ISBN 978-3-8233-8573-8

The Transformative Power of Literature and Narrative

www.narr.de

Band 86

Assmann · Rupp · Schwanecke (eds.)

Narrative plays a central role for individual and collective lives – this insight has arguably only grown at a time of multiple social and cultural challenges in the 21st century. The present volume aims to further substantiate the case for literature and narrative, taking inspiration from Vera Nünning’s eminent work over the past decades. Located at the intersection of cognitive and cultural narratology, the book is concerned with the way literature affects individuals, how it works at an intersubjective level, enabling communication and community, and how it furthers social and cultural change.

The Transformative Power of Literature and Narrative Promoting Positive Change Band 86