Narrative and its Discontents
Keynote address at the Sage Hill Writing Experience
Fall Fiction Colloquium
November 1-15, 2005by Warren Cariou
I’ll begin with a story.
I lived in Gemany for three months this past summer. I had never been there before, and as I began to get to know a few parts of the country, I immediately began reading a particular kind of history into everything I saw. It seemed to me, as I wandered in Berlin or Stralsund or Greifswald, that every old fence we encountered might once have been a prison compound, every tower a guard’s observation post. I knew this was ridiculous even as I thought it, but I had been programmed by my education to look beyond the surfaces of this beautiful country to find something evil beneath. I had seen the film The Nasty Girl many years earlier, and I remembered how an entire town had conspired to keep its Nazi past a secret in the post-war era. I had read about Martin Heidegger’s infamous refusal to mention the Holocaust after the war was over, and I had read about Paul De Man’s long-kept secret: the pro-Nazi writings he had published in his youth. I wanted to find the secret histories there, to read my historical knowledge back into the very landscape of the place.
Of course, the legacy of Nazi Germany was not really hidden there at all. The country seems obsessed, and rightly so, with documenting the history of the Nazi era. There may well still be some secrets left in Germany, but many Germans have made extraordinary efforts to expose and document this most shameful episode in the nation’s history. We encountered the results of such work one afternoon, when our German hosts took us to visit the Prora, an astounding example of Nazi architecture along the Baltic sea coast on Rugen Island. The Prora is a staggering building, a colossus more than four kilometers long, stretching from one end of a beautiful semicircular beach to the other. It was built as a vacation resort for the German Volk, the common people. It was to be a megalith of German cultural identity and celebratory physical pleasure, and in the early years of the Third Reich the beaches were advertised to be “Jew free”. Replete with Casinos, terraces and rows of Ionic columns, the Prora was meant to impress all viewers with the might of the German nation, the Reich that was meant to last a thousand years.
Construction on the Prora began in 1936, but it was not entirely completed by the end of the war, and was never used for its intended purpose. After the war, it was used as a military base by the East German army. It remains now in a semi-ruined state, some parts of it rented out as commercial space, other parts used as storage, and a few rooms rented as beachfront apartments. But most of it is not being used at all. Some people say the building is simply too big, too imposing to be useful, but I think the problem is clearly more than scale. It is memories that have doomed it. It now means the opposite of what it was intended to mean, and no amount of upkeep is going to change that. It inspires shame and dismay rather than awe.
One small part of the Prora, however, has been put to a powerful and affecting purpose: it has been transformed into a museum. We visited this museum along with our hosts, Hartmut and Ruth. It contained a common enough history of the Third Reich, with some fascinating details about the place of the Prora in relation to Hitler’s plans for nation-building. For some reason I thought about that word, fascinating, while looking at some old photographs of the Prora in the museum, and I was reminded of something that my graduate school professor Charles Lock had once told me: the root word of fascination and fascism is the same. Both come from the latin fasces, meaning “to bind together,” and this can be seen in the fascist symbol of the bound sheaf of grain. My professor also added a particular bibliographical detail to this etymology, explaining that the same word, fasces, is also the root of “fascicle”, a section of pages folded together and then sewn into the binding of the book. Fascination, fascism, fascicle, I remember repeating to myself as we wandered through the exhibits.
Much of what we saw in the museum was at least somewhat familiar to me: the rallies, the posters, the advertisements—all the things that reminded me of the astonishing media-savvy of the Nazi propagandists. But this time I was seeing these things in the company of two German friends—and indeed I was seeing it with their assistance, since they were translating many of the exhibit blurbs for me. I felt not only the horror and fascination that I had felt before when reading about the Nazi movement, but I also registered the growing shame and distress of our hosts, who nevertheless seemed to feel morally obligated to show us every last detail in the museum. Both of them were born after World War II, but still they were consumed by shame and regret when they had to show this history to us. I remember thinking: this shame is their national identity.
One of the most poignant things about that afternoon was a comment Hartmut made as we were leaving the museum. We had seen how Goebbels, the propaganda minister, had appropriated ancient symbols and myths in order to lend an air of power and magnificence and “civilization” to the Nazi movement. Hartmut said that one of the many disastrous legacies of the Nazis for German people was that the Nazis took the folk songs and the traditional stories of Germany itself and they tainted them with their hideous agenda. “Wherever we look now,” Hartmut said, “for an old story or an old song that is German, we find that the Nazis have already been there and have ruined it by turning it into propaganda.”
I had known that the Nazis were incredibly powerful storytellers, but I hadn’t really considered how their retellings and distortions of certain stories could alter these narratives forever, so that no one could see them in quite the same light again. What Hartmut expressed, it seemed to me, was a deep suspicion of the power of stories, but at the same time a mourning for their lost potential, a longing for the good things they might represent. Narratives can bind communities together, but they are susceptible to manipulations and distortions which can give them very different meanings over time, even meanings that are the opposite of the originally intended ones. The Bible might be seen as a good example of this, or any number of other religious texts that have been used to justify wars or pogroms or enslavements. And of course, the act of binding people together is one that seems to necessitate or at least imply exclusion as well as inclusion. The symbol of fascism, after all, is a binding. Narratives of community are precious to many of us, but they are also very contentious and potentially dangerous ground.
I think Hartmut’s words expressed what Walter Benjamin meant when he wrote in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that “Every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism.” Benjamin’s words have a particular historical resonance, since he wrote them as a Jew in Europe during the rise of Nazism. His understanding of the instability of words and images and concepts seems extraordinarily relevant to his own time, a time of stark contrasts and ideological fundamentalisms—but I would argue that it is equally relevant to our own time. For Benjamin, the very categories of “civilized” and “barbarous” blend into each other, so that it is impossible to be purely one or the other. The Nazis’ essentialist appropriation of Roman art and architecture, for example, makes such art barbarous, even though it is usually considered to be foundational to the very idea of western civilization. For Benjamin, the ideas of “civilized” and “barbarous” become de-essentialized: he suggests that people are not civilized or barbarous by their nature, but by their actions, and by the consequences these actions have in the world. I think Benjamin would say the same thing about stories.
In other words, Hartmut’s dilemma is not a uniquely German problem. I think we all look to certain narratives to give us a sense of who we are and where we belong, and yet many people are also, rightly, frightened of that very impulse, or skeptical of it. The Nazi era has taught us that. The polarized ideologies of the Cold War have taught us that. The myths of imperialism and racial superiority, which led to the devastation of individuals and cultures all over the globe and which continue to do so, have taught us that. And writers certainly do participate in the creation and dissemination and buttressing of such myths. Robert Calder’s work on British writers as propagandists in World War II shows this very pointedly, and postcolonial criticism has also revealed it in a broad spectrum of literature from the eighteenth century onward.
A certain strand of modernism urged writers to create “Myths to Live By,” as Joseph Campbell said, or to do what Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus dedicated himself to doing at the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “I go forth to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” In the early Seventies, writers like Margaret Atwood and Northrop Frye called upon all Canadian writers to do something similar, to forge a Canadian identity out of the contradictory and multiple stories that have coexisted so uneasily in our nation. This sounds like a laudable, even heroic goal, but it also seems terribly naïve and dated now, the product of a strident nationalism that was driven by economic euphoria, first-world egotism, cold-war paranoia and anti-Americanism. Today, it seems, we cannot muster the energy to believe in a national myth anymore. But perhaps that is not a bad thing for us as individuals, and perhaps it is not a bad thing for the nation, either.
These attempts at mythopoeic nation-building in the Seventies were based at least partly on a Jungian psychoanalytic theory which claims that all stories are essentially manifestations of the same structures in the collective unconscious. Jung argued that we could get an idea of this deep structure of all cultures by comparing stories from various traditions and fitting them into a map of certain story-types that he constructed. He tried to bind all humans together through his claim that all stories are just versions of the same universal story (or the same four stories, as some of his followers claimed). But when Jung did this, he also erased much of the “otherness,” the strangeness and particularity, of the stories from traditions that were different from his own. He distorted these stories to fit them into his pseudo-scientific, Eurocentric system. What he claimed to be universal about stories was really only an architectural system of his own devising, one that revealed little more than a reflection of itself.
We have now lived through an extended critique of this kind of mythopoeic thinking, and that critique is called postmodernism. Postmodern writing aims at dismantling the so-called “grand narratives” of history, identity and genre, and one of the ways it does this is by disrupting our expectations of narrative itself, questioning its received forms, pulling the rug out from under us as readers. All of this is in the service of pointing out how deluded all readers of narrative are, how susceptible to the wiles of story-makers. Postmodernism is very much about skepticism, but it is also about exuberance and play and excess. If postmodern writers engage in the myth-making enterprise (and many of them do), they do so with a strong sense of irony.
And it is not only myth-making and grand narratives that have been questioned by postmodernism, either. I have been intrigued and even a little taken aback to see a group of poets emerging in Canada for whom the suspicion of narrative—all kinds of narrative—is something of an aesthetic principle. These are writers like Christian Bök, Steve McCaffery, and Jeff Derksen, who enact a radical rejection of narrative strategies in favour of other structuring elements such as scientific, mathematical and visual forms. Jeff Derksen expresses his commitment to this methodology in a recent interview with Pauline Butling. When asked to discuss when and why he started writing, he simply says, “You know, I’m not very interested in narrative.” While he does go on to answer the question, in his initial response he expresses resistance to even the most basic narrative of a writer’s beginnings.
Such skepticism is valuable, I think, especially to those of use who write narratives and who have a hard time conceiving what a non-narrative understanding might be. These poets remind us that the arc of any story involves certain unstated expectations—such as, for example, the notions of causality and sequentiality—which might perhaps have become too automatic for us, blinding us to certain ways of conceiving ourselves and the world around us.
On the other hand, I would not want to argue that narratives are completely untrustworthy as receptacles of culture or as touchstones of community identity. Native people in North America have had their stories stolen, forbidden, distorted, broadcast, and bowdlerized for many generations, but in many Native communities, these stories still remain a vital link to the life of these cultures. Many Native elders claim that the perpetuation of their stories into the future is necessary for the continued existence of their people. Some even suggest that the stories are what have brought them through the onslaught of colonialism, that the stories are cultural life-lines. I find this a very compelling point of view.
However, there is an interesting tension in much Aboriginal literature on the value of particular stories. Stereotypes are stories, too: they are narratives with certain built-in, essentialized expectations that “X” kind of people are “always like this or like that”. Jeannette Armstrong mounts a ferocious critique of colonial stereotypes of Native people in her poetry and novels, but she also writes very essentialistically about her homeland and her Okanagan storytelling traditions as the explicit and unequivocally trustworthy sources of Okanagan culture. In her well-known essay, “Land Speaking,” she writes, “Our language is given to us by the land we live within.” So, for Armstrong, some stories are to be trusted, but others are to be distrusted, and she draws a clear line between these two groups: the “traditional” stories are to be seen as a source of the culture, something which must be returned to, but the “colonial” stories are pernicious influences which should be deconstructed and discarded.
I have a great deal of sympathy for this approach in some ways, because I have seen the extent to which racist stereotypes have damaged Native people, and I have seen how their traditional cultures have been sources of strength and pride in Native communities. But still, I wonder about the basis of this absolute distinction between those stories that should be trusted and those that should not. I wonder if this distinction is somewhat disingenuous, if it imposes a double-standard that may in the end lead to a dangerous kind of thinking. I can’t help asking: if the essentialism of colonial stereotypes is damaging, then why should essentialism in relation to traditional stories be helpful? In any case, how do we really know what is “traditional” and what is not?
It seems to me that any kind of essentialism, when attached to stories, does not take account of the fact that stories, in different contexts, can have radically different meanings. Essentialism, like fundamentalism, tends to insist upon singular meanings, and simple distinctions: us/them, inside/outside, etc. But that kind of thinking does not account for the fluidity of stories, and the multiplicity of their interpretation. We can see this in the history of the Prora. The Nazis believed that the Prora would represent the essential greatness of their version of “civilization,” that it would tell a story of manifest destiny and the strength of racial purity. But now, the Prora means something very different. It has become a colossus of irony, a gigantic refutation of the ideology that created it. I think Walter Benjamin would suggest that the same thing can happen to any story.
At this point I would like to shift this discussion toward another thinker who lived through the rise of fascism and who had a great deal to say about stories and their consequences: Sigmund Freud. In the late phase of his career, Freud wrote a number of books and articles on subjects of culture and religion, which is particularly interesting in relation to his biography because, while he identified himself as Jewish, he was also completely unreligious. The tensions between his Jewish cultural identity and his lack of faith in Judaism may well have contributed to his interest in larger questions of cultural identity. One of the books in which he tackles these questions is called in English, Civilization and its Discontents. In this book he shows himself to be an extraordinarily supple and complex thinker when it comes to the ways in which narratives can bind people together and also separate them. Freud conceived of civilization as essentially a series of narratives which human beings employ to prevent us from destroying each other with our own egotistical drives and desires. Civilization, or rather culture (which is a better translation of the German word Kultur in this context), binds us together, but to Freud we always feel a level of discomfort in this situation. We are never fully “inside” culture, for Freud; we are only uneasily attached to it. This theory may well derive from Freud’s own uncomfortable relationship with his Jewish identity.
Freud’s main interest in Civilization and its Discontents is to show that our unconscious desires, resident in the id, rebel against the constraints of culture. His own suggestion for the English title of the book was “Man’s Discomfort in Civilization.” This title might give us the idea that Freud sees culture as a necessary evil, a Hobbesian crutch by which humans mitigate their egocentric desires in the interest of a more enlightened kind of self-interest. However, I think he sees the possibility of a more constructive kind of cultural discomfort as well, one which suggests a model of cultural identity that posits belonging without suggesting an essentialist and inherent attachment. And it seems to me that the idea of “discomfort in culture” is something that our fiction and nonfiction writers have been obsessed with lately.
I think many of our writers in Canada have been trying to negotiate how we attach ourselves to stories and to communities, given our existence in multicultural and highly fragmented collectives. We are faced, as writers, with the problems and possibly the opportunities of multiple cultural narratives co-existing within a political entity that we may or may not call our own. For many people, this situation leads to questions about who they are and where they belong. I think this might partly explain our current mania for tracing our family roots: we are searching for a stable identity to cling onto. But as I found in my own such journey, that search is not likely to lead us to a single, stable, unitary answer. My own response in Lake of the Prairies was finally that I am many things, I am “a child of the heterogeneous multitudes.” Is that a comforting thing? Sometimes I think so, but other times I don’t think so at all. To belong in a multicultural and pluralistic society, as opposed to just belonging to just one part of it, we must maintain a difficult sense of identitarian eclecticism, a sense of culture as a provisional and shifting and always contingent thing. But we would prefer the task to be easier than that. I think many of our recent narratives in Canada approach the question in a way that refuses to give us the easy, comfortable answers that we might hope for. They seem to aim instead for what Freud might call cultural discomfort.
I would like to end with some brief comments on three novels which to me exemplify this focus on cultural discomfort. There are many I could talk about here, such as Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, and Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter. But for now I will mention some that I have been reading very recently. One is Camila Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly. This novel is very much about discomfort in culture, and it shows such discomfort to be spread over many different cultural situations. The main character, Lily, is a white Muslim woman raised in Harari, Ethiopia into a strictly gender-segregated culture, a culture in which female circumcision (also called female genital mutilation) is practiced. Lily remains a devout Muslim, but she refuses to undergo the circumcision ceremony. This is a difficult decision for her. But later, when she moves to London and begins living among recent Muslim immigrants from Africa, she is not willing to give up her Muslim practices and beliefs, even though she has entered a secular multicultural state. This novel pits deep faith and the idea of cultural sovereignty against the notions of secularism, skepticism and cultural relativism that are the binding stories of most multicultural nations. It narrates a struggle that all multicultural communities today have to address immediately, because it is the reality of so many of their members.
David Bergen’s novel The Time in Between is also a narrative of cultural discomfort in several ways. In this novel, an American Vietnam veteran named Charles Boatman returns to Vietnam many years after the war because, as Bergen says in an interview, “He wants to find out what happened to him.” Boatman is haunted by memories of the atrocities committed by himself and his fellow soldiers. He decides to return to Vietnam after reading a novel by a Vietnamese writer—a story of the Vietnam war written from the point of view of a Viet Cong soldier. This narrative bears a number of striking similarities to Boatman’s own experience of the war, and perhaps these similarities are what cause his guilt to intensify: this novel-within-the-novel brings home to him the fact that the enemy is not different from himself, is not a faceless “other”. So he returns to Vietnam with a vague sense that he must come to terms with his own personal transgressions in the country, as well as the legacy of his country’s interference there. However, when he gets to Vietnam, he finds very little to assuage his sense of cultural discomfort.
So The Time in Between is a narrative of national guilt, but it is also about being between cultures, between identities, between times. After Charles Boatman disappears, two of his adult children come to Vietnam to search for him. The main character of these later sections of the novel, Ada, finds many things in her search for her father, but perhaps the most important of her finds is Vu, a Vietnamese artist who becomes her lover. This transcultural relationship is not something that either participant is ever completely comfortable in, but it emerges by the end of the novel as something important, however brief it may be: some transient thing that can be salvaged from the wreckage of history and the personal losses they have both suffered. In their love relationship, the two of them seem to be between cultures, setting aside for a while their erstwhile identities in an attempt to create something new. In this novel, desire is what brings people outside of themselves, what shakes their certainties but also gives them some relief from the narrow cages of their cultural identities.
Ian McEwen’s novel Atonement is similar to The Time in Between in that it evinces discomfort with a disastrous mistake of the past, but its focus is more clearly upon history than upon cultural difference. The narrator and putative author of the novel, Briony Tallis, attempts to reconstruct her own history in such a way that she can make amends for a horrible mistake she made in her youth. She recreates a past in which she can feel more comfortable, because it includes not only the story of her mistake but also the story of her atonement for it. However, at the end of the novel, we realize that the narrative of her atonement is a convenient lie. Like Charles Boatman, she has tried to make this one terrible part of her past go away. Also like Charles Boatman, she is finally unsuccessful, since the devastating legacy of her mistake reasserts itself at the end, throwing the whole previous narrative into question and making readers wonder about all the narratives of restitution and redress we have heard in the last number of years. Can any story, any apology, really atone for the wrongs of the past? Who might these narratives of atonement serve? Do they simply make the perpetrators—which we can read as powerful mainstream culture—feel better about themselves, feel “civilized” again? McEwen seems to be arguing that certain narratives of history are in danger of playing this role, of being a sop to the consciences of readers who would like to believe that the present is more fair and just and morally enlightened than the past was. That kind of comfort, he suggests, is dangerous. It is ironic that our contemporary age is obsessed with historical novels and films which address the moral failings of the past, and yet the ones of our own era seem to garner so little attention.
And so what we are left with, in all three of these novels, is the dilemma of discomfort, the idea that we need stories but we should never fully trust them. It seems to me that narratives themselves are, at their best, powerful purveyors of that ambiguous but necessary message.