The figure of the butler, the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel is a subtle illustration of the ability of human consciousness to deceive itself in what Sartre called “bad faith.” The self-deception is enhanced by being legitimized in the framework of a professional ethics. This ethics of the “dignity” of a job perfectly well accomplished, which  is presented as nothing but blind obedience, not only leads to the character’s failure in his life but, more dangerously, to his serving as an instrument of evil action. Indirect commentary on latter aspect of the novel can be sought in Sartre’s analysis of “bad faith” and Marx’s of the alienated consciousness but also in the experiments in social psychology conducted by Stanley Milgram which point to the mechanisms by which ordinary people can become agents of mass destruction.

Reading some well-known childhood poems by Blake and Wordsworth, the article challenges the accepted opinion that the Puritan and Romantic concepts of the child at the turn of the nineteenth century functioned as opposites. Instead, the article offers a reading that unravels the residues of Puritan and catechetical thinking in texts by two of the earliest advocates of the child’s perspective as a valuable human and poetic quality. Though denouncing authoritarian and catechetical modes of interaction in which the child’s speech is silenced, Blake and Wordsworth, writing at a moment of cultural transition, construct the child in a way that indicates a failure of their own declared purpose of redeeming the child’s perspective and voice as valuably distinct from those of the adult. Although formally and grammatically the voice of Blake’s poetic child is sometimes restored to him, the child is made a spokesman of a sophisticated and emphatically adult discourse of political radicalism. Similarly in Wordsworth, the construction of the child as a necessary layer in the uncovering of the poetic and autobiographical Self denies the child its valuable difference through an adult voice’s ongoing narcissistic ventriloquism. The adult speaker’s idealization of the child’s freedom is ambiguated by the implicit association of freedom with parental neglect, which involves a disregard of the child’s perspective. Thus, in contrast to the declared agenda of the poems, they also imply a desire that the child be less liberated and more regulated by the adult world.

Galia Benziman is Associate Professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and specializes in British literature of the long nineteenth century. Her research focuses on the work of Victorian authors, especially Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, on the history of childhood, and on the English elegy. Her first book, Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture, was published in 2012 (Palgrave Macmillan). Her second book, Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Poetry and Prose: Codes of Bereavement, came out in 2018 (Palgrave Macmillan). Her essays appeared in Partial Answers, Dickens Quarterly, Dickens Studies Annual, Studies in the Novel, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, and other journals.    

Updated in March 2019

The philosopher Berel Lang offers powerful arguments for the conclusion that there can be no useful fictional treatment of the Holocaust. However, he notes that three writers (Celan, Appelfeld, and Borowski) escape the force of these arguments. Lang is prepared to grant that, in such cases, “literary and moral genius” may enable a writer to “transcend” the “supposedly intrinsic” limitations suggested by abstract philosophical argument; but leaves open the question what such “genius” consists in. This essay is an attempt to provide an answer to that question for the specific case of Aharon Appelfeld. Appelfeld’s fictions introduce their readers into the fabric of Jewish life in Central Europe immediately prior to the catastrophe, to the extent of allowing them to feel in propria persona, and thus to attain knowledge-of, rather than merely knowledge-about, the tensions constituting the situational framework within which those lives were lived. Appelfeld’s fictions offer a way of recovering the individuality, as persons rather than numbers, of those whom the Shoah destroyed, because individuality displays itself, inter alia, in the varying of individual response to a common situation. Such recovery is relevant to our moral understanding of the Shoah, it is argued, because what is morally important about the representations of the Shoah is not merely the destruction, but also the nature of what was destroyed. The essay concludes with brief discussions of the relative merits, in this connection, of fiction and memoir, and of the criticisms levelled against Appelfeld’s work by M. A. Bernstein and others.

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 tailor workshop in the Lodz Ghetto, and was found in the ghetto’s ruins after the war by a survivor, Abraham Wolf Yasni. Designed in the form of an album for presentation to the Ghetto’s Elder, Chaim Rumkowski, the legend is told from the perspective of those having the good fortune to work in Glazer’s tailor ressort.  However, within the bright illustrations and rhyming, metred verse that carries the legend from start to finish is buried the tragic story of the September 1942 Sperre.  This essay argues that the story that is offered in the spirit of a light-hearted and diverting fairy tale and tribute, fictionalizing the trials and tribulations of the children working in Glazer’s workshop, is in fact a sophisticated memorial act, registering for its creators the trauma of the mass deportations of children, the sick and the elderly which took place over eight days of mandatory curfew in the Ghetto.
        Following a pattern of visual and narrative instabilities in the album's self-presentation, I attend to moments in which The Legend points not only to the events in Lodz Ghetto of which it must not speak but also to familiar works of children's literature, such as Alice in Wonderland and The Pied Piper of Hamelin, which contribute to the "logics" by which the album might be read.

In the short story “Bluebeard’s Egg” (1983), Margaret Atwood simultaneously replicates the form of one Bluebeard tale, “The Robber Bridegroom,” and recapitulates the content of another, “Fitcher’s Bird,” by having her protagonist recall to herself a tale about three sisters and a sorcerer she recently heard in a course on “Forms of Narrative Fiction.” The recollection of the Grimms’ story of “Fitcher’s Bird” within “Bluebeard’s Egg” is structurally analogous to the climactic scene in their “Robber Bridegroom” in which the robber’s bride is called upon to regale her wedding guests with “a good story.” She gives a first-person account of prior events that is nearly identical to the sequence already described by the third-person omniscient narrator. In other words, the bride whose experiences were the object of narration (at the diegetic level) now engages in narrating the events in which she took part (at the hypodiegetic level). For Atwood, as I propose, the mise en abyme in “The Robber Bridegroom” serves as a point of departure in both senses of the phrase: her text deviates from the structural model it imitates. The hypodiegetic narration in “Bluebeard’s Egg” – namely, the embedded tale of “Fitcher’s Bird” – does not verge on identity with events previously narrated; rather, Atwood literally realizes the rhetorical device of mise en abyme in her story. Things are put into an abyss. Nothing mirrors nothing. Through this inventive deployment of intertextuality, Atwood’s variant of the Bluebeard motif presents a case of negative mise en abyme.

One of the functions of literary fiction, in particular narrative fiction, is the construction, circulation and maintenance of world-models.  Literature, Lotman taught us, is a secondary modeling system: using the primary modeling system of language as its vehicle, it constructs models of and models for reality.  It also models itself: narrative fictions regularly embed within their own continuums secondary worlds – inset narratives, found manuscripts, ekphrastic descriptions, remediations of non-verbal media, micro-worlds and paraspaces, etc. – that mirror the primary worlds framing them.  Such structures en abyme have typically been treated as uncanny disruptions, fatally compromising fiction’s world-modeling function, at worst summoning up the specters of crippling paradox and infinite regress.  In fact, world-modeling and self-modeling are interdependent functions of fiction; they complement and sustain each other.  Internal scale-models make the “outer” fiction’s model of the world salient.  Far from disrupting the primary world, they hold a mirror up to it, providing the reader with a kind of schematic diagram of it, or an instruction manual for its proper operation. Moreover, the relationship between the “outer” world and the internal scale-model, the way one maps onto the other, can itself serve as a model for the relationship between the fictional world as a whole and the real world – the world “out there,” beyond the text.  So internal scale-models yield knowledge of the fictional world, but also of how the fictional world models the real.

          The paper revisits the literature on mise en abyme, as well as Jameson’s powerful notion, derived from the urban planning literature, of cognitive mapping.  Case-studies include Cervantes’ Don Quixote, read in the light of Fernand Braudel’s cognitive mapping of the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II; micro-worlds and scale-models en abyme in science fiction (Gibson, Sterling), and in the American mega-novel (Sorrentino, Pynchon, Barth).

As a child the Serbian-Jewish author Danilo Kiš witnessed the massacre of the so called “cold days” in Novi Sad in 1942, when thousands of Jewish and Serbian inhabitants were executed by the fascists and their corpses thrown into the Danube, and the disappearance of his father who perished in Auschwitz. As an adult he was witness to the dictatorship of Titoist Yugoslavia. His narratives focus on Fascism and Stalinism insisting on their purely literary representation. Relying on the documentary character of autobiographical testimony (Karlo Stejner’s Seven Thousand Days in Siberia), the “real” story of mystifications (Protocols of the Elders of Zion), the semantic energy of fictive documents, and the charm of story-telling, Kiš creates a multilayered, highly artificial narrative compositum. He combines the literary experience of Russian avant-garde “factography” (literatura fakta, 1929) with the puzzling effect of documentary simulacra without resuming the ludistic implication of this procedure, which – as he is well aware – is an integral element of Borges’s poetics. Without ignoring the intertextual orientation of Kiš’s text, the paper concentrates on the mnemonic dimension of his narratives, on the stylistics of anti-pathos and litotes, on the semantic coalition of “factography” and “thanatography,” and discusses the problem of hyperbole/understatement in virtual documents.

The essay creates a dialogue between two disciplines that are rarely brought together: narratology and analytical philosophy. In interpreting Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, it points to similarities between the recent interest of analytic philosophers in self-deception and the interest of literary scholars in narrative unreliability, showing that a better understanding of self-deception can be achieved by a mutual illumination of philosophy and literature: the reading of Ishiguro’s novel relies on distinctions used in analytical philosophy, but the novel, in its turn, provides a further contribution to philosophical discussions.   

As Ishiguro’s novel shows, narratives in which the narrating character is self-deceived tend to create an oscillation between (at least) two tenable versions of the story: one that imputes self-deception to the narrating character and one that accepts the plausibility of his version. They also tend to give rise to two hypotheses concerning the motivation of the narrating character to perform the narrative act. One hypothesis is that the motivation is to reinforce self-deception; the other is that the act of narration is motivated also by a (partly unconscious) desire to reveal the truth and comprehend the course of events that has led to self-deception.

When both motivations of a self-deceiver’s narration are operative, the verbal expression of self-deception is considerably complicated. The butler Stevens’ words, like the words of self-deceivers in general, both disclose and conceal, express guilt and deny it, try to comprehend the incoherence of his beliefs and to blur it. Works of literature remind us that self-deception is not a constant state of mind or the final stage of a process but a constituent of many mental processes that may be transitional and dynamic.

This essay discusses the element of length as the shared basis that forms the epic tradition in its various transformations of the narrative and heroic modes. Length preserves a certain quality that other terms (such as “heroic” or “narrative”) are meant to express. What is at stake here is our understanding of narrativity, its relation to length in the epic tradition, and the narrative facet of the tradition itself. The article delineates a tentative narrative of a tradition of long poems that narrate past values as an ideal. Latent in the question of these poems’ length is the question of multiplicity and unity: what are the relations between the poem’s parts and how – or whether – they create one poem. The long poem of the epic tradition is the fruit of the attempt to contend with the relationship between multiplicity and unity; it is the expression of this attempt — either by searching for an option that does not make these two concepts mutually exclusive or by pointing to another world, where such a worldview apparently existed. In this sense, the narrativity of the long epic poem preserves the past and turns it into a utopian future.

At the odd intersection of narratology and clinical medicine can be found some fresh postings of old questions about the consequences of representational acts for tellers and listeners. The simple practice of guiding health care professionals to write in non-technical language about what they witness patients to go through and what they themselves undergo in caring for the sick has led us contemplate the acts of attention and representation in primal and primary ways. We see the intersubjective affiliation born of narrative transactions, as it were, unadorned, right there in front of us as doctors, nurses, and social workers discover, through acts of writing, what on earth they know and how what they know connects them to their patients.

Like arboreal and nocturnal tarsiers in the Malay Archipelago with their enormous eyes, we are open collecting retinae for the impressions and the assault of that which might be seen. The seer attends—absorbs, composes, puts himself or herself in the way of things to be seen. The simultaneous act of representation expresses, with muscular force, the value of what is seen as if expressing juice from a lemon or, more saliently for my writers, milk from a nipple or secretions from a gland. My conceptual examination of clinical representations rely on Henry James’s theoretical and formal practices that suggest that the self (or consciousness) is constituted by, and not simply made visible by, acts of attention and representation. If indeed the self is the most powerful therapeutic instrument, we need intensive means whereby doctors and nurses, who owe sick people authentic attention and care, can constitute and inhabit that self. Narrative training can expose these fundamental aspects of self to health care professionals, if only so that they can use that self on behalf of the ill.

According to Paul Ricoeur’s concept of “narrative identity,” both narrative and self-identity are formed and developed as an outcome of a constant vacillation between sameness and selfhood. The theoretical discussions of narrative identity, including Ricoeur’s, underestimate the threat posed by a radical shift to the pole of sameness, stasis, and stagnation. After clarifying some of the reasons for the asymmetry between the two facets of identity, the paper explores the possibility of sameness taking over selfhood in the constitution of self-identity and narrative. It briefly examines techniques by which such narrative identity is formed and deals with its implications for both self and narrative in Agota Kristof’s The Notebook (Le Grand cahier).

It is assumed that today the novel is the predominant form of narrative. There are many ways that the novelist may use his narrative to think for him. One obvious way is through narratorial commentary, as for instance, in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Another way is through structural manipulation, as in the two narratives of Dickens’s Bleak House. A third possibility, the one to be investigated in the case of Conrad, is to use the sjuzhet to disrupt thoroughly the chronology of the fabula. This is not done merely to enhance the mysteriousness of the text, but to make it think for the novelist by evoking central thematic concerns. This mode of thinking will be discussed in relation to Lord Jim and Nostromo.

The paper argues for a post-metaphysical reading of Jorge Luis Borges, a reading that would situate the writer’s work in a dimension of substance, presence and space, instead of understanding it exclusively in terms of discursive, metaphysically-anchored meaning. Borges’s poetry is viewed as anticipating the current turn in the humanities, from hermeneutics to the study and cultivation of a sense of the presence of the world and of art -- visual, verbal, or other.

“Because you cannot act, you find yourself unable to think,” says Anna Blume in Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things. This idea is discussed in connection with thinkers who connect action and narrative, such as Arendt, Ricoueur and Fludernik. If narrative indeed is a way to perceive and interpret action, a world reduced to hazard and behavior seems to leave neither space nor frameworks for thinking.  Looking from this perspective, the narrative way of thinking is a prerequisite for other modes of thinking as well. The discussion of the extreme situation of no narrative and no thinking is related to Dominick LaCapra’s work on trauma and narration.

The celebrated ubiquity of “narrative” in culture is both a fecund premise and the bane of narrative studies today. While not outright against narrative, nor narrative studies, the present paper aims to remain skeptical towards broad, overly enthusiastic uses of the notion: not necessarily the most promising stance in a narratological conference. What is more, and no less ominously, the paper might just as well be subtitled “A Boring Story” – though this is in fact the title of the Chekhov text (“Skuchnaia istoriia” 1889) using as an illustration.

The articles surveys some exemplars of the broad usage – albeit briefly: this has been done before – with special regard for repercussions on the domain of literary narratology. This is where the skepticism comes in: either (1) the notion of narrative is stretched disproportionately (“it is simply there, like life itself,” Barthes), becoming synonymous, say, with fiction (e.g. Palmer 2004: “in a sense we are all novelists,” an empty phrase); or (2), conversely, the expansion of narratological approaches to domains such as cultural studies or social sciences may lead to a narrow privileging of the “natural” or quotidian, linear, causal, realistic type of narrative (a bias discerned by Rimmon-Kenan 2002 in her work on illness narratives).

This may be all right for cultural studies. But for literary narratology the way to go seems to be in the opposite direction. Is not it the role of literary narratives to subvert, transgress, make problematic in a thousand and one ways the generalizations thought up by theorists? Chekhov’s “A Boring Story,” an illness narrative in its own right, displaying precisely those anti-linear, anti-causal, iterative features that are ignored by more sweeping definitions. Aside from being a poignant tale of a burnt-out professor, Chekhov’s story also emerges as a meditation on narrative and, if you will, narratology itself. Such subversive narrative tactics add up to what has been termed “weak” narrativity (by McHale 2001, 2004, with regard to a very different set of texts), narrativity sous rature. Possibly, this tendency is always already there, underlying not only post-modernist texts, but seemingly realistic, linear fiction.