Showing papers in "Partial Answers in 2006"

Against Narrative ("A Boring Story")

Abstract: The celebrated ubiquity of narrative in culture is both a fecund premise and, I claim, the bane of narrative theory today. While not outright against narrative, nor against theorizing about narratives, in this paper I nonetheless aim to remain fairly sceptical towards broad, overly eager uses of the notion: not necessarily the most promising stance in a collection devoted to narrative \"as a way of thinking.\" No less ominously, my paper comes with the subtitle \"A Boring Story\" though this is also the title of the story by Chekhov (\"Skuchnaia istoriia,\" 1889) that I shall use to boost my argument, once we are done with theory. Everybody knows the lure of broad notions. One well remembers such early, once eye-opening statements as those by Roland Barthes (1975: 235): \"Like life itself, narrative is there, international, transhistorical, transcultural.\"1 Or by Hayden White (1987: 1): \"To raise the question of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture, and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself.\" Hence, obviously, the

A World Neither Brave Nor New: Reading Dystopian Fiction after 9/11

Abstract: The End without Ending: The Intrusion of the Real 9/11 has been imagined before in countless hijack or terminal disaster films such as Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, and Independence Day. Slavoj Zizek presents the TV coverage of 9/11 as the Hitchcock moment of horror that is actually happening; it is the intrusion of the real into fiction. This is what made similar scenes in horror movies unscreenable in the immediate weeks after 9/11 and sent the CIA scurrying after Hollywood scriptwriters in order to try to understand the terrorists. It is an intrusion, Zizek argues, that is the ultimate marker of the \"passion for the Real\" (2002: 16-20). One instance of this intrusion occurs in the film The Matrix (1999) when the hero awakens from what he thought

Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day: The Discourse of Self-Deception

Abstract: The issue of self-deception has attracted the attention of Anglo-American analytic philosophers, who have attempted to define it1 or discuss it in relation to the structure of the subject2 and the definition of rationality3; some have enlisted literary materials.4 In this essay, I intend to examine the possible contribution of literature to the analysis and comprehension of self-deception, particularly as a means to shape and reevaluate presuppositions about this phenomenon. This attempt leans on Martha Nussbaum, who, following Aristotle, has argued that "a presentation of the mystery, conflict, and riskiness of the lived deliberative situation," as portrayed in fictional works, is indispensable for practical reasoning (1983: 44). Nussbaum's point is reinforced by Tzachi Zamir's claims that "many of the truths relevant for philosophical reasoning are, for the most part, contingent" (1999: 105) and that literature permits a "unique experience of conceptual information" (9). Herbert Fingarette, a philosopher whose discussion of self-deception combines the insights of analytic philosophy with those of existential philosophy (especially Sartre) and psychoanalysis, offers a view of selfdeception that is suitable for a literary analysis of this phenomenon. According to Fingarette (1969), self-deception occurs when the subject has a fundamental reason to avoid spelling out - both to him/herself and to others - some of his or her engagements in the world and forms

Acting, Thinking, and Telling: Anna Blume's Dilemma in Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things

Abstract: Let us begin with some confusion. Anna Blume, the protagonist and primary narrator of Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things (1987), has travelled to a strange and insulated country to find her missing brother, yet his destiny remains a total mystery throughout the novel. The city where Anna has arrived is governed not just by contingency but by an extreme randomness. Things, ways, houses, rules, even words disappear without warning. In this context, Anna says something rather odd and perplexing:

Narrative Lights on Clinical Acts: What We, Like Maisie, Know

Abstract: Narrative knowledge and methods have subverted medical practice. Recent concerns of narrative scholars and practitioners bearing witness to testimony, mourning and loss, the ethics of reading, self-creation through text, and the performativity of language have altered very fundamentally what we doctors, nurses, and social workers think we are doing in the hospital and the clinic. Reflective writing and the reading of literary texts are being used in education and treatment for healthcare professionals and patients, and medicine is paying more attention to such narrative features of its practice as temporality, singularity, intersubjectivity, contingency, and ethicality (see Charon 2006). We are reconceptualizing both the tasks of health care and the skills required to perform them. We are attending not only to the materiality of health and illness but also to the metaphoricity of health and illness. Increasingly, we understand that the body can be the portal of the self and that proximity to the body gives one a shot at proximity to the self. We see that sickness opens doors, and so the one who attends while sick persons tell of themselves needs to be equipped with sophisticated receptive and interpretive skills so as to bear witness to all that is being uttered in this opening in the said, the unsaid, the performed, the suppressed, the corporeal. In the absence of confessors or spiritual advisors, we clinicians are the hearers of doubt, of fear, of guilt, of longing, of regret. How one chooses the register to which to listen or how one schools oneself to not be deafened to one register by virtue of the pressure of the other becomes, now, our urgent challenge. Some

Sameness and Selfhood in Agota Kristof's The Notebook

Abstract: The term "narrative identity" or, in its more conservative version, "narrative unity,"1 suggests that the structure of a narrative or a story is homologous to that of human identity. The connections between narrative and identity, emphasized by scholars such as Alasdair Maclntyre (1984) and Paul Ricoeur (1992), are based on elements that constitute both phenomena, such as temporality, events, characters, and perhaps even authorship.2 Yet these connections are also based on a more specific affinity, which Ricoeur has called "discordant concordance,"3 a unity created by the combination of heterogeneous elements. Both narrative and self-identity are formed and developed as a result of a constant vacillation between sameness (idem) and selfhood (ipse). Sameness implies stasis, namely permanence in time, whereas selfhood implies dynamics and variability in the course of time. Ipse-identity (or selfhood), Ricoeur contends, "involves a dialectic complementary to that of selfhood and sameness, namely the dialectic of self and the other than self (1992: 3). Some degree of sameness is indispensable to any kind of identity, whether narrative or other, such as the identity of an object. On the

Thinking Backward and Forward: Narrative Order and the Beginnings of Romance

Abstract: In recent centuries it has often been thought that any critical assessment of an event involves thinking both backward and forward at once. Especially since the Romantic period, the very understanding of the past has come to seem inseparable from the sense of what it \"will have been\" in the retrospective account of a future time.1 Such thoughts have seriously complicated the notion of an origin, and they have deeply implicated interpreters in the phenomena that they seek to explain. Not every disparate version of these general views, of course, commands intellectual consent. But the contemporary sense of a mind turning backward and forward in its meditation about a subject nearly gives point even to the hapless plight of that self-conscious critic (in the parody by Frederick Crews2) so involved in the apparent intricacies of Winnie-the-Pooh that he breathlessly begins: \"Almost, one does not know where to begin.\" In considering the broad question of \"narrative as a way of thinking,\" I would like to begin by thinking backward for almost a millennium, to the beginnings of one of the formative developments in Western

Aharon Appelfeld and the Problem of Holocaust Fiction

Abstract: The problem many find, with literary fiction about the Holocaust, is that it is fiction. The thought which governs our discomfort with the idea of Holocaust fiction is primarily a moral one; but one with epistemic implications lurking in its depths. We feel ourselves under a duty to those who suffered, to confront as best we can the unvarnished facts of their suffering, and to refrain, above all things, from embroidering them, falsifying them, with any admixture of our own concerns. Here, more than anywhere else, we feel, we stand in need of forms of writing which can stand, to borrow Aharon Appelfeld's phrase in the epigraphic passage above, as "authentic expressions" of reality. And imaginative fiction, we imply, fails that test is not, whatever other virtues it may possess, an "authentic expression" of reality. I was first led into the line of thought developed here by a chapter in Berel Lang's brilliant and searching enquiry into the intellectual roots of the Holocaust, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide. In Chapter 6 of that work, Lang deploys a rather impressive version of the

Narrative Enthymeme: The Examples of Laurence Sterne and James Joyce

Abstract: The technique of the "Aeolus" episode of Joyce's Ulysses is, according to the scheme that Joyce had given Stuart Gilbert, "enthymemic." The common understanding of an enthymeme is as an argument in which, by contrast to a syllogism, one of the premises is either implicit, absent, or non-valid, and the conclusion is, therefore, a matter of probability rather than certainty. A syllogism,1 works as follows:

Danilo Kiš: Factography and Thanatography (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, Psalm 44, The Hourglass)

Abstract: The phantastic in Danilo Kis's poetics somewhat analogous to Dostoevsky's concept refers to a bizarre, paranoid reality. In A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Grobnica za Borisa Davidovica) that reality is the Great Terror of the late 1930s, in The Hourglass (Pescanik) it is the massacre on the Danube in Novi Sad in 1942, perpetrated by Hungarian fascists, and the death of Kis's father in Auschwitz. Though this reality is to be represented by authentic stories rather than fiction, the authentic in his prose texts does intertwine with the phantastic, not an irrealistic phantastic that projects alternative worlds, but a phantastic \"documentation\" of catastrophe. The phantastic is legitimized by authenticity and vice versa.1 Consequently, the documents presented in Kis's novels are, as in Borges's Ficciones, factual as well as fictitious. In his ethical poetics, however, or \"po-ethics,\" as he calls it, Kis distances himself from the ludic erudition of Borges's fictive documents.2 While Borges uses fictive documents in order to denounce the contingency of facts and

Ida Fink's Scraps and Traces: Forms of Space and the Chronotope of Trauma Narratives

Abstract: \"Ja, Das ist der Plaz\" [\"Yes, this is the place\"] Simon Strebnik, the survivor of the Chelmno extermination camp, identifies, in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah,1 a site of innocent \"nothing,\" covering up and silencing an act of annihilation, an act of eradication. A site of absence like this, where you see nothing because you see \"nothing,\" a place that arrests a time of disappearing, of vanishing into nothing, is what I would tentatively call a \"negative\" chronotope. And \"Yes, of course she recognizes it. Why shouldn't she? That was their last ghetto\" (135).2 Yes, this is the place the nameless survivor in Ida Fink's story \"Traces\" identifies in an old photograph as \"their last ghetto,\" reduced \"in the last stage ... to this one little\" snow covered \"street\" ( 136). There are traces of footsteps in the snow in the foreground. Reduced, voided, silenced and covered up, the place stores the time of extinction. The woman, and the reader, are made to look into a void, into a \"non-transcendent emptiness,\" an emptiness that is not a spiritually charged, capitalized \"Nothingness,\" nor a nothing that encapsulates the Human Condition. Neither does it indicate an endless speculation of a deadly serious language-game. It is simply empty. This empty place is an ambivalent space that is and is not itself. It is that \"nothing\" that has not \"been able to fill, or even cover over, the gaping pit.\"3 It marks its radical difference from its own past. It is a trace of itself. Here, again,

The Narrative Facet of the Epic Tradition: Imagining the Past as Utopian Future

Abstract: Under such entries as epic, narrative, and heroic poetry we usually find references to long poems such as the Iliad, the Aeneid, and those that are perceived as later versions of these ancient works - whether Renaissance, Neo-classical, Romantic, or twentieth-century. The perception prevalent in Anglophone scholarship is that these long poems are a continuation of the epic tradition in its narrative or heroic mode.1 This essay foregrounds the element of length, and treats it as more than just a shared basis that forms the epic tradition. In order to perceive a long piece as a single work- to see it as more than a collection of smaller units - we require a strong and consistent connection that creates a comprehensible whole. The length of the poem preserves a certain quality that this tradition wishes to maintain. The term long, I argue, as it functions in the tradition whose historical stages I shall discuss below, is a general term that stands for other concepts, such as narrative, heroic, and epic. Length becomes a qualitative rather than a quantitative feature: the length of the poem, the quantity, mandates the assumptions of unity and wholeness. What is at stake here is our understanding of narrativity. Its relation to length, as is manifest in the epic tradition, and the narrative facet of 1 To contend with the claim that a "romantic epic" or a "modern epic" is no longer possible after the decline of the heroic ideal and after the individual self and individual experience have replaced the hero who represented the community, scholars have endorsed a kind of reversal. According to Brian Wilkie, the epic tradition "operates in an unusual way, for although, like any tradition, it is rooted in the past, it typically rejects the past as well, sometimes vigorously and with strident contempt" (10). But precisely because literature is dynamic, we require another common feature that will enable us to bring together all the long poems that belong to the one tradition of the epic, in its various transformations of the narrative and heroic modes.

Cognition En Abyme: Models, Manuals, Maps

Abstract: When Don Quixote, in Part Two of Don Quixote, becomes aware of the existence of Part One; or when Hamlet stages a play that mirrors his uncle's crime; or when Roderick Usher's friend, in Poe's \"The Fall of the House of Usher,\" reads aloud a tale that duplicates Roderick's own situation; or when Edouard, in Gide's Les Faux-monnayeurs, reflects on his plans for the novel he is writing, also entitled Les Faux-monnayeurs; when self-embeddings of this type occur in a work of narrative fiction, a play, or a film, we recognize that we are in the presence of the figure that goes by the name of mise en abyme. ' While the figure itself is an old one much older than Don Quixote or Hamlet, with examples attested from ancient and medieval literatures its identification and analysis belong to the twentieth (and now the twenty-first) century. A high-water mark in the research on mise en abyme was achieved in or about the year 1982. In that year there appeared in the journal Poetics Today (of which I was then assistant editor) a characteristically lucid and incisive article by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan on mise en abyme and other metaleptic figures in a novel by the scandalously underrated postmodernist novelist, Christine Brooke-Rose. RimmonKenan's article belonged to a second wave of scholarship on mise en abyme. The first wave began with André Gide's identification and naming of the figure just before the turn of the nineteenth century, and was extended down to the mid-century through the efforts of the French critic Claude-Edmonde Magny (1950). The second wave began

The Book of Laughter and "Unforgetting": Countersigning the Sperre of September 1942 in The Legend of the Lodz Ghetto Children

Abstract: Written in Polish in the form of a long poem accompanied by 17 illustrations, The Legend of the Prince was created in Leon Glazer's tailoring workshop in Lodz Ghetto, and was found in the ruins of the Ghetto after the war by a survivor, Abraham Wolf Jasny. Ostensibly a laudatory tale of the happy events (or diverting hardships) in a small village under the caring leadership of a prince, The Legend offers itself as a chronicle of the lives of the children who laboured in Glazer's workshop, the adversities they faced in learning their task, and their eventual triumph overthese adversities. Designed in the form of an album for presentation to the Ghetto's Elder, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the work purports to convey the perspective of those having the good fortune to work in Glazer's tailor ressort (\"workshop\"). However, buried within its bright illustrations and rhyming, metered verse is the tragic story of the Sperre (\"curfew\") which took place on September 5-12, 1942. All the factories in Lodz Ghetto were closed, and the residents had to stay at home while patrols of the Ghetto police and later Nazi

Dandies, Acolytes and Teddy Boys: Ambiguous Treatment of Male Sexuality in Barbara Pym's Novels of the 1950s

Abstract: Barbara Pym's novels of the 1950s realistically depict the lives of educated upper middle-class women at that time. Pym, however, seems largely uninterested in developing conventionally masculine and \"eligible\" male characters. Instead, her novels contain a wide array of men who do not seem to conform to contemporary ideas of masculinity. Almost all of them are part of the Anglo-Catholic Church a form of High Anglicanism that places particular value on Catholic traditions within the Church of England. This paper will examine Pym's ambiguous treatment of male sexuality and her approach to the historical connection between Anglo-Catholicism and homosexuality. In its ambiguous representation of masculinity Pym's fiction evokes cultural dispositions, stereotypes and clichés that were popular in the English upper-middle-class and around in the Anglo-Catholic environment. Many statements that might seem obscure to the modern reader were transparent to her original reader; they formed a subtext which Pym's target audience would have sensed. I shall demonstrate that Pym's literary use of these stereotypes neither compromises the individualization of her male characters nor implies moral judgment or religious condemnation on the author's part. Pym's attempts to represent homosexual tendencies appear as early as Crampton Hodnet (1939, published posthumously in 1985) which is set in North Oxford before World War Two. The cast of

Pseudo-Real Referents and Their Function in Santa María de las flores negras by Hernán Rivera Letelier and Amuleto by Roberto Bolaño

Abstract: A trend in post-modernism is to blur the borders that separate, for example, fiction from reality, history from literature, and literary genres from each other. But if post-modernism is to achieve the rupturing effect it seeks, I believe that it is fundamental for that border to remain, thus preserving the distinction between the spheres it keeps apart. To give a particular example, the effect of metalepsis (see Genette 23436) requires a clear awareness of the different levels whose borders are being trespassed: extradiegesis, diegesis, metadiegesis. I attach the highest importance to the demarcation, in my opinion ontologically sound, between reality and fiction a boundary that bases the differentiation between history and literature. In line with Martinez-Bonati (1981), I consider literary works to be fiction and believe, as this critic does, that the fictional nature of the literary text stems from the imaginary character of the language that constitutes it. Thus, I assume the principle of ontological homogeneity espoused by Dolezel:

Judgment, Progression, and Ethics in Portrait Narratives: The Case of Alice Munro's "Prue"

Abstract: ethics are intertwined phenomena, that narrative is an excellent site for explorations of and inquiries into ethics. Narrative, in this view, is a way of thinking about ethics and ethical action. In this essay, I want to extend some of my own work on these issues, work that I have elsewhere called "rhetorical literary ethics" (Phelan 2004) by looking at the relation between rhetorical form and ethics in a hybrid genre that I call portrait narrative, with Alice Munro's "Prue" as my test case. As I describe the hybrid form, I shall explain what I mean by both rhetorical form and rhetorical ethics, and I shall argue for the central place of narrative progressions and narrative judgments in our understanding of form, ethics, and their interrelation. Furthermore, I shall use my account of the portrait narrative and of the interrelation of rhetorical form and rhetorical ethics in order to elucidate Munro's

Erasing Narration: Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies and Texts for Nothing

Abstract: A poem by John Hollander begins with the line \"nothing makes something happen.\" Any negating gesture must nullify something, and will be governed by an intention, motive, or impulse, all of which remain virtual and can only be inferred from what is negated or from the way in which negation operates. Thus negation makes virtual realities emerge, but these are usually hard to grasp. One of the most telling examples of the interrelationship between negation and emergence is provided by Beckett. Approaching his work from this angle entails breaking away from the main categories that guide most of the prevailing Beckett criticism. On the one hand, the multifarious negations of Beckettian texts are taken for an all-encompassing demolition of what has come down from the past. On the other hand, they figure as a stimulus to the reader's imagination. In other words, the two categories have either representation or reception as their framework. If reception allows us at least to say something about what the text makes the reader do, representation makes these texts verge on senselessness. Consequently, what we have to focus on is the performative character of the Beckettian text, which tends to be ignored when viewed in terms of both representation and reception, since the latter only gives the reader something to \"perform.\" It may well be the hallmark of literature that it is performative by nature, as it brings hitherto non-existent phenomena into being. In Beckett's case it is all the more essential to spotlight the emergent character of literature in contradistinction to representation and reception. This gives a different slant to the negations in his texts. Negation becomes an agent that makes things happen in the sense that

Narrative as a Way of Being: Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist

Abstract: employing the tools of a European-conceived realism to a writer fully identified with her South African materials, forging an African artistic identity, and evolving an individualized technique; from, moreover, rendering individuals whose worlds are shaped by the realities of being South African to rendering characters seen as representing and embodying historical and political forces and processes. It is the aim of this paper to suggest that, contrary to prevailing critical opinion, the shift described is not unequivocal: in the delineation of the protagonist in The Conservationist, the vision of the individual on a personal inner quest has not been wholly superceded by this character's representing and playing out the inevitable destiny of his class and status. Rather, these two visions exist side by side, expressing, perhaps, ambivalence on the part of Gordimer herself. The bulk of the narrative of The Conservationist involves the visits

About a Post-Metaphysical Reading of Borges and the Form of Thinking

Abstract: Everybody, I imagine, who has ever read a text by Jorge Luis Borges, especially any of his narrative texts, and who, in addition, works as a teacher of literature, must be familiar with the fear that overcomes me each time that I am expected to say something about this author in public. It just feels so very hopeless, so very unlikely that one could have anything to say but tautologies about somebody as awe-inspiringly cultivated and intelligent as Borges, who, to make things worse for the critic, has also pushed the tone of mildly self-ironic reflexivity to its possible limits. Whenever I mention Borges in a class or in a lecture, therefore, I become obsessed with the nightmare of him walking through the door or appearing at a window only to look at me with that both understanding and desperate smile which wise people reserve for very small children and for complete idiots. Things do not get any better if you check the books available under "Borges" on the on-line catalogue or in the on-shelf presence at your university library. For not only will you find all those (more or less) "definitive" editions of his texts that Borges published during his lifetime, with the clear intention and obvious pleasure of confusing the scholars among his readers; you will also realize that there are more books and articles written on Borges than on probably any other author of the later twentieth century. The knowledge and culture with which Borges' texts abound seem to have produced the impression (or, rather, the confusion) in the average erudite that Borges would have liked to engage in a conversation with her or him, and much of the literature on his work indeed reads as if it had been written in preparation for or in reaction to such private conversations among scholars. A more distant way of describing the same intuition and the effect that this impression produces is to say that it seems very difficult, if not straightforwardly painful or even impossible, to gain an outside position and an analytic perspective once you have developed an intellectual fondness for Borges' work.

Character: Under Erasure?

Abstract: The paper you are reading now is very different from the one I set out to write. In that paper I had hoped to find a way of going beyond the Glance beyond Doubt (1996) which Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan casts in that book. There, Rimmon-Kenan affirms the possibility - albeit a highly limited possibility - of talking about subjectivity in literature, as well as about representation, and of doing so from within the highly skeptical terms of structuralist and post-structuralist discourse. I had hoped to affirm more than that, and to reinstate character as a central - nay, as an indispensable - feature of the literary text. In doing so, I was meaning to ride an old hobby horse: the conviction that responsiveness to characters is the royal road into the vast majority of the works we study and teach, and that to divert our attention from them is, in effect, to block access to the vital life of those works. The challenge, I thought, was to find a way to affirm them in terms appropriate to the discourse within which Rimmon-Kenan worked so productively. Rather quickly I found this task both pointless and beyond my powers. The more I pondered the issues the more I came to feel that the grounds for the neutralization of character within the terms of the relevant discourse were too complex and closely reasoned for me to engage here. Beyond that, I felt that my own position could best be argued by engaging a work in which the centrality of character cannot be elided. Sophocles' Oedipus Tyranus came to mind as ideal for this purpose.1 It struck me, for the umpteenth time, that without entering into the 1 It will of course be objected that Oedipus is a drama and therefore not relevant to narratology. My view is that, despite the radical difference in the mode of presentation, drama and narrative share essential structural elements, and that there are contexts in which the two can be, if not conflated, treated in similar terms. For an excellent analysis of the fate of character in drama since the end of the nineteenth century, and a study of how its treatment in drama has paralleled, in substance and often in form, its denigraton (or dissipation) in fiction, see Elinor Fuchs (1996).

The Sjuzhet as a Conradian Mode of Thinking

Abstract: There are countless ways in which novelists may make narratives think for them. One obvious and direct way is through the use of narratorial commentary. George Eliot in Middlemarch, for instance, after a sustained and powerfully dramatic representation of her heroine in a narrative of nearly 900 pages, cannot refrain finally from telling us, through her narrator, what she thinks about the life depicted, and, moreover, from generalizing the thought: Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of a young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. (896) Charles Dickens, though he too is much inclined to narratorial commentary, uses a complex structural strategy to make his narrative think for him in Bleak House. He employs an alternating, contrasted, double narrative, one with an external, third-person narrator and the other with an internal, first-person narrator, the former using the historic present and the latter the retrospective past. The divided narrative as a whole evokes pronouncedly separate social worlds. But the two narratives move slowly closer and closer together until they finally become one, and thus what the narrative emphatically thinks is the inescapable oneness of the various groups presented, a oneness that is Dickens's large implicit theme. Joseph Conrad's mode of thinking in the two texts I propose to discuss, Lord Jim and Nostromo, is through his manipulation of the sjuzhet} The 1 In what follows, I draw in a few instances on my analysis of these texts in my book,

Leon Trotsky's Family Romance

Abstract: One need not, however, be a mystic or a Pythagorean to doubt this intimation. It is hardly probable that such an \"oddity\" remained beyond Trotsky's awareness even on the very day of the coup or, rather, next morning: the October coup took place in the late hours of October 25, old style (corresponding to November 7, new style the main official Soviet holiday). Trotsky was born on October 26. He allegedly noticed the coincidence as late as 1920 (\"three years after the coup\"), the year when Lenin's 50th anniversary was celebrated with pomp. The book itself was written on the eve of another no less pompous celebration, that of the 50th birthday of Stalin who was already preparing to become \"the Lenin of today.\" Trotsky, Stalin's coeval, claimed this position for himself.2 His memoirs were a not unexpected but a highly efficacious declaration of his spiritual right of inheritance.

The Narrative of Persecution

Abstract: The touchstone and point of departure of narratives of persecution, as of most narratives of catastrophe, is a violated state of equilibrium. Persecution is a disruption of the regular movement of history and the norms and ceremonies of any given social body or state of mind. In a passage from his major post World War I novel A Guest for the Night (published 1939), anticipating World War II and the Holocaust, S. Y Agnon describes this transition from normalcy to the insecure, frightened state of the victim of a historic catastrophe in the following terms:

A Case of Negative Mise en Abyme: Margaret Atwood and the Grimm Brothers

Abstract: In 1697 Charles Perrault published a tale entitled \"La Barbe bleue\" \"Bluebeard\" in his Histoires ou contes du temps passé. It was a gothic kind of fairy tale with only one fée or magical element: a small telltale key. The key belonged to a mysterious gentleman endowed with great wealth, a splendid many-roomed mansion, and a dreadful blue beard that \"made him look . . . ugly and terrible\" (732). This gentleman, despite the aforementioned beard, succeeded in persuading several beautiful women to marry him. But each one in turn disappeared, and \"nobody knew what had become of them\" (732). In fact, after a month or so of marriage, Bluebeard always put his brides to the test and, unhappily, they all succumbed to an epistemological drive or, less grandiosely, to curiosity a fatal flaw in women and opened the door to a room they were expressly forbidden to enter: \"the floor was all covered with clotted blood that reflected the dead bodies of several women suspended from the walls\" (733). Bluebeard never let his disobedient brides off the hook, as the last one discovered when she, too, failed the bride-test and dropped the small key on the floor: \"In vain she washed it.... But the blood remained, for the key was enchanted\" (733). With this tangible evidence of her insubordination (or, if we follow the Freudian devotions of Bruno Bettelheim, with this proof of her sexual infidelity), Bluebeard sharpened his saber and determined that she should take her place among the other wives in his collection. And so she would indeed have done, had it not been for the timely arrival of her brave brothers who put an end to Bluebeard's career: \"they passed their swords through his body and left him dead on the

In Search of the Story: A Friendship between Critic and Writer

Abstract: It was only a short time after I had returned from my doctoral studies in Paris. My surface agenda was to look for friends, for conversation. Underneath, however, what I brought to the meeting was a \"disruption of the self (to start borrowing from Shlomith's conceptual framework). I had left my emotional and intellectual life, my loaded relationship with Europe and its buried legacy, in Paris. In an act of cultural rebellion, a complex move of betrayal-in-fidelity, and an urge to expose a repressed voice, whether individual, cultural, or communal, I had returned not to Tel Aviv, the city of my youth, but to Jerusalem. On the way to the café my palpitations came from a still deeper source. At that time I had already chosen literary writing as a way of life. Even if this remained unsaid, in meeting Shlomith I was hoping to find a partner for a kind of a secret esoteric sect. True to her notorious Yekke (German-Jewish) precision, the analytic star of the Hebrew University was already waiting for me at the café. To my surprise and delight, she was frank, direct, and humorous; she immediately legitimized the radical rebel in me. And the laughter that kept erupting from some intense energy would become a major part of the narrative that connects us.