Abstract
This article addresses the issue of ruinous memory and testimony in The Gathering, the 2007 novel by the Irish writer Anne Enright. It starts with a consideration of the rhetoric of failure at work in the narrative and concentrates on such categories as tentativeness, stammering and contradiction as ethical devices. In conformity with Caruth’s contention that trauma can only be grasped in the “inaccessibility of its occurrence,” these devices help map out a vision of remembrance as impossible, so much so that the only possible truth is in the act of remembrance, not in the irretrievable memory itself. The second part of the article focuses on the ways in which irretrievability triggers off the compensatory powers of invention. Thanks to family archives and photographic material, the narrator creates the past, which allows her to move beyond the mere act of remembrance to capture some memorial content. Yet, in the process, invention contaminates testimony, as if the invented content acted as a complement to the act of remembrance in a backward movement not unlike that of Nachträglichkeit, when the past is somehow repeated in the present even while the present allows for a refashioning of the past. The last part of the article demonstrates that what is at stake in The Gathering is perhaps less remembrance as act than remembrance as event, when the narrator’s actions are translated into passivity or vulnerability to the radical other that the traumatic content is. The definition of event to be borne in mind is not so much dependent on the traditional vision of event as rupture or innovation as on the Levinasian idea that the meeting of alterity (and of the radical alterity that the other’s trauma and the narrator’s trauma represent) is determined by a surrendering of the self or disinterestedness. In Levinasian terms, the ethical event implies that the subject becomes a hostage to the other, which is seen as opening, exposure and passivity. This is how Levinas defines subjectivity: as passivity and vulnerability. From this point of view, the main figure of remembrance as event is that of the ghost, and the text represents vulnerability (the individual’s, the family’s, the nation’s) even while building up a poetics of vulnerability that owes much to the fraying, tentative, precarious nature of testimony, that hallmark of trauma fiction.
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Notes
- 1.
Constanza del Río, “Trauma Studies and the Contemporary Irish Novel,” in In the Wake of the Tiger: Irish Studies in the Twentieth-First Century, ed. David Clark and Rubén Jarazo Álvarez (La Coruña: Netbiblo, 2010), 5–6.
- 2.
Ibid., 5. Morrison calls “re-memoring” the continued presence of that which has disappeared or been forgotten, as when Sethe, the protagonist, is troubled by the realisation that she was remembering something she had forgotten she knew. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), 61.
- 3.
Del Río, “Trauma and the Irish Novel,” 6.
- 4.
Ibid., 7.
- 5.
Ibid., 8.
- 6.
Carol Dell’Amico, “Anne Enright’s The Gathering: Trauma, Testimony, Memory,” New Hibernia Review 14, no. 3 (Autumn 2010): 68, 66.
- 7.
Anne Enright, The Gathering (London: Vintage, 2008 [2007]), 66.
- 8.
Ibid., 168; see also 173.
- 9.
I am not using the phrase in its traditional English acceptation, the English state-of-the-nation novel being the descendant of the Victorian “condition-of-England” novel, to take up the phrase invented by Thomas Carlyle in Past and Present, Book I, Ch. I “Midas,” 1843 (Project Gutemberg EBook#13534. 27 September 2004), n.p., http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/13534/pg13534.html/. What I have in mind here is the fact that the narrative lends itself to a fairly comprehensive radioscopy of the nation, surveying its economic, social, political and cultural state. From this point of view, the state-of-the-nation novel provides a fictional testimony of the nation’s evolution.
- 10.
Cathy Caruth, ed., “Introduction,” Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 8.
- 11.
Jane Gardam, “‘Default[ing] to the Oldest Scar’: A Psychoanalytical Investigation of Subjectivity in Anne Enright’s The Gathering,” Études irlandaises 34, no. 1 (2009): 3.
- 12.
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 151.
- 13.
Del Río, “Trauma and the Irish Novel,” 6.
- 14.
Enright, The Gathering, 3.
- 15.
Ibid., 59.
- 16.
Ibid., 60.
- 17.
Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, History Beyond Trauma, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2004), 157.
- 18.
Enright, The Gathering, 163–70.
- 19.
Ibid., 134, 221–24.
- 20.
Ibid., 252.
- 21.
Ibid., 223, 234.
- 22.
Ibid., 45, 215.
- 23.
Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 7.
- 24.
Dori Laub, “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,” in Trauma, ed. Caruth, 64.
- 25.
Enright, The Gathering, 223.
- 26.
Ibid., 1.
- 27.
Ibid., 99.
- 28.
Ibid., 144.
- 29.
Laub, “Truth and Testimony,” 64.
- 30.
Enright, The Gathering, 144.
- 31.
Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 1920, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XVIII, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 7–64; Pierre Janet, “L’amnésie et la dissociation des souvenirs par l’émotion,” Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique 5 (September–October, 1904): 1–37.
- 32.
Whitehead, Trauma Fiction, 3.
- 33.
Shoshana Felman, “Education in Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in Trauma, ed. Caruth, 17.
- 34.
Laub, “Truth and Testimony,” 61–63.
- 35.
Adam Philips, Trois capacités negatives (Paris: L’Olivier, 2009), 88–117.
- 36.
Janet, “L’amnésie et la dissociation,” 11.
- 37.
Jacques Press, La perle et le grain de sable. Traumatisme et fonctionnement mental (Laussane: Delachaux and Niestlé, 1999), 69.
- 38.
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 5.
- 39.
Marianne Hirsch , “Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 109.
- 40.
Enright, The Gathering, 13.
- 41.
Ibid., 13.
- 42.
Ibid., 14.
- 43.
Ibid., 30.
- 44.
Ibid., 66–67.
- 45.
Ibid., 142.
- 46.
Ibid., 224.
- 47.
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 18.
- 48.
Sigmund Freud , “From the History of Infantile Neurosis” (“The Wolf-Man”), in The Complete Psychological References of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1964), 7–122.
- 49.
Jean Laplanche, Problématiques IV. L’après-coup (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), 171.
- 50.
Andrew Gibson , “‘Thankless Earth, But not Entirely’: Event and Remainder in Contemporary Fiction,” in On the Turn. The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English, ed. Bárbara Arizti and Silvia Martínez Falquina (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 5.
- 51.
Emmanuel Levinas , Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, 1978 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 75; emphasis added.
- 52.
Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 136; emphasis added.
- 53.
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 151.
- 54.
Davoine and Gaudillière, History Beyond Trauma, 157.
- 55.
Enright, The Gathering, 150.
- 56.
Ibid., 38.
- 57.
Ibid., 132.
- 58.
Ibid., 138.
- 59.
Enright, The Gathering, 49.
- 60.
Ibid., 51.
- 61.
Ibid., 76, 121, 143.
- 62.
Ibid., 43.
- 63.
Ibid., 153.
- 64.
Ibid., 228.
- 65.
Davoine and Gaudillière, History Beyond Trauma, 28.
- 66.
Ibid., 167.
- 67.
Enright, The Gathering, 223.
- 68.
Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political and Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
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Ganteau, JM. (2017). Remembrance Between Act and Event: Anne Enright’s The Gathering . In: Onega, S., del Río, C., Escudero-Alías, M. (eds) Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55278-1_8
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