Reading behind the lines: Postmemory in contemporary British war fiction

By Natasha Alden

This book takes the concept of postmemory, developed in Holocaust studies, and applies it for the first time to novels by contemporary British writers. Focusing on war fiction, Alden builds upon current scholarship on historical fiction and memory studies, and extends the field by exploring how the use of historical research within fiction illuminates the ways in which we remember and recreate the past.

Using postmemory to unlock both the transgenerational aspects of the novels discussed and the development of historiographic metafiction, Alden provides a ground-breaking analysis of the nature and potential of contemporary historical fiction. By examining the patterns and motivations behind authors’ translations of material from the historical record into fiction, Alden also asks to what extent such writing is, necessarily, metafictional. Ultimately, this study offers an updated answer to the question that historical fiction has always posed: what can fiction do with history that history cannot?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781526102614

Natasha Alden

Natasha Alden is Lecturer in Contemporary British Fiction at Aberystwyth University

Book preview

1

Introduction

‘Flickering at the edge of my childhood’: postmemory, history, story

¹

Andrew Greig’s 2000 novel, That Summer, set between June and October 1940, begins thus:

To the vanishing generation

FIRSTWORD

Above my bed, when I was young, the Airfix kits, the Hurricane, Spitfire, Messerschmitt, spun on their threads in the draught.

One by one they will return, throttling down over perimeter wires of forgotten airfields, then taxi up to abandoned huts. Down the bramble-choked lane come the women and men on bicycles, others on foot, the sound of their voices light and drifting as a summer swarm as they pass through the rusting gates, waving to the CO gliding by in his Lagonda.

The pilots jump down from their planes, knees bending as they hit the ground . . . Some wave, some call, but their voices are so light they are borne away on the summer breeze. A faint rain is starting to fall and clings, shimmering, to their grey-blue uniforms.

The two groups meet and mingle. Handshakes and pats on the back. A hug and a light kiss on the cheek, postponed for sixty years . . . Others look around in the rain at the rutted grass, the cracked concrete where the youth of the town race motorbikes and go-karts at weekends, the husks of Nissen huts. The control tower still stands though its windows are blank, the aerials bent and rusting . . .

Nearly all smoke. They pass cigarettes between them like benedictions, like tokens of belonging. After all, they need take no heed of health warnings, even if there were any on the packets they slip from breast pockets . . .

They talk in small groups. The pilots gesture with their hands, showing how it happened. They argue still over numbers and formations. One shows with the side of his hand dropping earthwards how he had peeled away, then steadied and came up behind his other hand, flying level. Then both start to shake. The others nod and laugh, quiet but persistent as memory . . .

There are some radio telephone signals from that summer – pilots taking directions from the women who controlled them from the ground, or screaming at each other to get in formation – that have become trapped between the ground and the Heaviside layer. They bounce back and forward like tennis balls in some endless rally, for they don’t decay. Once in a while a radio ham, idly skimming the airwaves late at night, will suddenly be listening to men and women controlling, flying, singing, cursing, dying. All present in the headphones though they are long gone.

And among the few trees that are left beyond the rusting perimeter fence, there is a trunk with large distorted letters bearing a name and a date. It was carved by the other one, the lanky tired one who stands half in, half out the bedroom window of a house in the post-war estate, his tan boots sunk a foot below the floor. The one with his long back turned, whose right arm hangs slightly crooked, who is always starting to turn round, who never fully turns round, whose face would be so familiar. Who speaks in the dark . . .²

Greig’s novel is, in effect, an attempt to ‘speak’ this generation; to bring back the men and women of this airfield and recreate their experience of five months from the summer to the autumn of 1940. The perspective of the narrator witnessing this revisitation is made clear at the beginning of the quotation: ‘above my bed, when I was young, the Airfix kits, the Hurricane, Spitfire, Messerschmitt, spun on their threads’.³ The list of aircraft gives Greig’s opening the sound of an incantation, and it must be an effective one, as it leads straight into the ghostly return of the air crew as well as to the eerie description of the snatches of radio signals trapped in the Heaviside layer, the echoes of which will never die away. We do not know who our narrator is, but we know that this generation lingers for them. We will not find out their identity until the final page of the novel, either; Greig takes us from this distinctly unheimlich (‘unhomely’) moment in our present straight into the late June of 1940, introducing us to the novel’s protagonists, Len and Stella. The novel traces their romance, beginning in June and ending with Len’s death in October 1940. The final page of the novel reveals, without comment, that the narrator of the ‘firstword’ is their child, born after Len’s death, and that the preceding narrative was his imagining of his parents’ brief relationship.

Looking at a box of his mother’s momentos, the narrator thinks

All that’s left are the letters, his diaries, the stories she told near the end. The long-delayed stories . . . this silver framed photo [of Len], gathering dust and glances over the years. And three dusty yet gaudy bangles [which had belonged to a friend killed in a bombing raid]. They gleam on the table . . . and at last you know what they mean.⁴

This study asks in what ways, and using what techniques, contemporary British writers born after the Second World War, but whose parents were involved, remember and re-imagine the world wars in their fiction. It also asks what analysing the author’s use of historical source material can tell us about the nature of the contemporary historical novel: what truth-claims does it make, and how? How does it relate to its parent genres of history and fiction in a ‘post-postmodern’ context? Further to this, how does this kind of fiction fit into the ongoing collective memory of the wars, and how are these memories, as acts of vicarious witnessing, different from other types of culturally mediated memory? Through tracing and analysing how creative writers use historical research in their work it is possible to explore in what ways, and on what terms, we remember and re-imagine the world wars now, or to ‘record the historically evolving relation of individuals and communities to sites and the associated transmutations of memory and identity’, as Anne Whitehead puts it.⁵ This book uses this procedural, archival analysis to ask a number of questions. What factors have shaped how, and what, we remember about the wars in the last twenty years? What factors – such as being the child of a veteran – affect the authors who choose to write about the period?

The study will investigate whether it is possible to move from these questions to devising a taxonomy of the uses of the past in contemporary historical fiction. Each chapter offers detailed analysis of how a specific author adopts, adapts, appropriates, elides, re-orders, augments, edits and transposes elements found in historical source material, asking whether there is a pattern of usage in the way they transpose, re-imagine, supplement and re-arrange events, and to what extent such writing is, necessarily, metafictional.

The study of second-generation fiction is largely a result of the exponential growth of Holocaust studies since the 1970s. Eva Hoffman suggests that Helen Epstein’s influential study of secondgeneration trauma, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors, marked the beginning of serious academic study of the second generation.⁶ Marianne Hirsch coined the now widely used term ‘postmemory’ to describe the ‘experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can neither be understood nor recreated’.⁷ In Hirsch’s reading,

postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection [which is to say, postmemory is not memory in the sense that we usually mean the term] but through an imaginative investment and creation. This is not to say that memory itself is unmediated, but that it is more directly connected to the past.⁸

Clearly, for the vast majority of British people born after 1945, the inherited trauma of the Second World War is of a very different order to that of the children of Holocaust survivors, the group Hoffman and Hirsch are describing. The experience of ‘coming after’ undergone by the British second generation is related to a sense of belatedness, of having missed the most intense experience of their era, rather than the sense of loss following atrocity dominating the experience of the children of the victims of the death camps, particularly the Jewish survivors. However, there are clear parallels between the way second-generation Holocaust survivors and the children of British servicemen react to their parents’ experience, particularly in the fiction they write about their parents’ generation. In an article in the Quaker journal The Friends Quarterly, William West, born in 1950, describes his emotions as he types up his father’s war stories, feeling they should be preserved. After finishing one story about the sailors on his father’s ship disobeying orders and feeding a ship full of refugees they come across at sea, West finds himself deeply upset:

More tears as I type this. I have written five of the stories now and shed a lot of tears and I feel washed out . . . [I] wonder what the point of all this was and whose tears I was shedding and what the heck I am supposed to do with these stories. It feels as if these stories are some kind of legacy from my Dad which I am carrying maybe for him . . . I do know from my understanding of the psychodynamics in families that some children do end up wrestling with problems that don’t really belong to them.⁹

West himself compares this type of transgenerational memory (‘[I wonder] whose tears I was shedding’) with the transmission of memory between generations in Jewish families. Whilst being careful not to claim the same kind or degree of trauma for his family, he does suggest that a similar dynamic has been created between himself and his father’s generation. In another example, compare Eva Hoffman’s description of the way she understood her parents’ history as a small child with Jenny Diski’s semi-autobiographical description of Frances’s feelings in Like Mother. Hoffman states that

in childhood, the awareness of loss and death was not yet philosophy, instead, like all children, I took the character of the recent past entirely for granted; that is, I took the conditions of the war and the Holocaust as a kind of mythology and the norm.¹⁰

Diski has described her sense of the war period, before her birth, as a time when ‘heroes, . . . villains . . . and great figures stalk[ed] the earth’ and there is an important similarity between the way that the children of both sets of survivors conceive of the period before their births.¹¹ As Hoffman puts it,

although we post war children were the closest to wartime events in time and in primal feeling, we were the furthest removed from their grounded, worldly – that is, political, social, historical – meanings . . . The generation [that comes after a period of violence] . . . receives its first knowledge of the terrible events with only childish instruments of perception, and as a kind of fable.¹²

Because the postwar generation came to consciousness of the war as children, their understanding of it was inevitably childish, couched in terms often reminiscent of fairy tales and based on mythic archetypes; Hoffman explains that she ‘knew [the war] as mythology and had no way of grasping it as actuality’.¹³ This had a significant effect on the way her understanding of the war evolved even after the end of her childhood. Growing up with family stories constantly told and re-told, or with an awareness of the silences and gaps left in the family by death, the events of the war become ‘[that generation’s] meaningful history, the history it is urgent to know because it belongs to one’s life, because it shapes ancestral fate and one’s own sensibility’.¹⁴ Compare this to Andrew Motion’s description of the ‘war flickering at the edge of [his] childhood’, or McEwan’s description of ‘your parents’ stories [as] . . . just sort of there, like the weather’.¹⁵

This generation are near to the war in terms of time, but also far removed in terms of first-hand knowledge, and have to think and empathise their way back into the history they missed, or, like Hoffman, ‘discover and put [her parents’ war’s] . . . real-life components together.’¹⁶ Haunted by the war, their knowledge of it is fragmentary and mythical, hence the need, in this generation, to go back to historical source material and research their way back into a factual understanding of the stories they grew up with. There is a striking similarity in the way that second-generation British writers and second-generation Holocaust survivors choose to write about the war. Unlike their parents, they cannot write about the war from their own memory; as Hoffman says, memories of the material and psychological reality of the war form the ‘brunt of survivor’s mostly realistic narratives’.¹⁷ Their children’s fiction is often about memory itself, foregrounding issues of veracity and the nature of narrative:

In . . . literature by children of survivors, intimate history is not so much given as searched for; the processes of overcoming amnesia and uncovering family secrets, of reconstructing broken stories or constructing one’s own identity, are often the driving concerns and the predominant themes.¹⁸

Although Hoffman is referring to second-generation Holocaust fiction here, this analysis also describes precisely the concerns present in the fiction of the second-generation British writers I will examine in the following chapters, particularly the use of protagonists whose quest to understand or recreate the past mirrors the reader’s and the author’s, or of narrative forms which force the reader directly into the questing role. These narrative tropes, as Marianne Hirsch notes, are all typical of ‘postmemorial fictions’. Although she conceived of this model in relation to Holocaust fiction, it is possible to transfer Hirsch’s concept of postmemory – the term she coins for the second-hand knowledge of the past experienced by the children of survivors of traumatic events – to a postwar British context, in relation to the children of British combatants.¹⁹ These British authors are exploring what it means to write about a period which has overshadowed your life but which you yourself did not experience. The fascination with fragmented and forgotten narratives, and with storytelling and the transmission of truth and memory, that Hirsch argues characterise postmemory, fictions, when examined in texts by British ‘baby boom’ authors, allows us to modify and extend our definition of postmemory.

This study argues that postmemory also works through sociocultural influences as well as through families. Through analysing the uses of the past in these texts, I ask how this sense of connection is fostered, how it manifests itself in a text and whether it can be called ‘postmemory’ or not. I further this discussion through my analysis of Sarah Waters’s novel The Night Watch.²⁰ Waters’s fascination with recovering lost lesbian histories is, I show, also shaped by postmemory, that is, her position as one of the first writers to be able to write openly about a traumatic, repressed past that has to be imaginatively recovered and shapes contemporary lesbians’ sense of their heritage and identity.

The potential of postmemory as a conceptual frame has, as yet, not been fully explored. Expanding our definition of generational transmission beyond a literal parent–child definition to encompass generations within social groups, forming and maintaining collective memory, illuminates the prevalence of this form of memory, as well as the key differences between postmemory and other forms of culturally mediated memory (such as Landsberg’s prosthetic memory).²¹ The effects of the postmemorial consciousness in fiction and in society, and the full potential of postmemory as a conceptual frame, thus become clearer. Looking at how secondgeneration authors use fiction to imaginatively re-enter the war years can tell us much about both the shadow the war has cast over the postwar period, about collective memory and the current state of historical fiction.

Approaches to the discipline of history have developed radically during the postwar period, particularly in the wake of postmodernism. Hostility to history’s claim to offer an empirical and objective representation of the past has meant that much critical work has focused on how history functions as subjective narrative. Foremost amongst the theorists in this field is Hayden White, whose work since the 1970s has suggested that history is a subjective cultural construct that is affected by ideological, political and moral functions.²² As a result of this type of thought, much contemporary theoretically oriented history focuses on previously marginalised points of view, or self-consciously foregrounds its own subjectivity. Although this has had the effect of making history a more diverse and a broader, larger discipline, there are also widespread concerns about the tendency to relativism which a rejection of the concept of ontological certainty entails. As Laurence Lerner has argued,

It has become a commonplace to argue that history cannot give us direct access to objective facts, since the ideology and the verbal strategies of the historian will determine what he chooses to notice and how he describes it, to say nothing of the connections between events that he then establishes.²³

White, and theorists influenced by him, maintain that the truth about the past lies not in a rationally organised, empirically based sequence of static facts taken from a stable reality, but in the chaotic dialogue between competing narratives. The idea of historical fact becomes extremely slippery; although facts – such as historical dates – can be said to exist and not to be open to multiple interpretations, the interpreters themselves are ultimately caught in a relativistic trap where their own interpretation is only ever as valid as the other competing narratives. These issues are particularly relevant to the study of historical fiction because Hayden White’s belief that historians rely on emplotment as much as writers of fiction do inevitably raises the question of how works of literature reflect historical realities. Linda Hutcheon’s 1988 study, The Politics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, was an early and extremely influential analysis of recent novels which had self-consciously attempted to redefine the relationship between fiction and history. Drawing on the insights into the constructed, textual nature of historical narrative offered by poststructuralist historiography, she termed these novels ‘historiographic metafictions’:

Historiographic metafiction incorporates all three of these domains: that is, its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past.²⁴

This is in contrast to the traditional historical novel which, as Frederick Holmes defines it,

Sustains throughout the pretence of supplying direct access to the past in all its fullness and particularity. Such novels employ the methods of formal realism, such as ‘solidity of specification’, to combine as seamlessly as possible wholly fictional ingredients with information garnered from actual historical sources.²⁵

Holmes then goes on to contrast this type of historical fiction unfavourably with Hutcheon’s historiographic metafictions, whose ‘flaunting of the seams of [their] narrative’ he views to be superior, given that it shows its awareness of its own instability.²⁶ The novels under discussion here are neither historiographic metafictions, nor naively unaware of the ontological significance of the truth claims they make; they utilise the aspects of postmodern narrative theory they find useful, but do not ascribe to historical relativism.

This is where these authors’ use of historical source material becomes important. Revisions of Hutcheon’s theory, notably Amy J. Elias’s Sublime Desire: History and Post 1960s Fiction, have both updated the catalogue of historiographic metafictions Hutcheon provided and also pointed to developments and subtleties within the field.²⁷ Elias’s most significant contribution is to show that there is a spectrum of ontological doubt within the genre of historiographic metafiction, ranging from the profound radicalism of novels by authors such as John Fowles to an apparent acceptance of the possibility of a verifiably historically accurate historical novel. Elias observes that the most ironic and deconstructive novels are very often by ‘first-world’ authors, while at the other end of her proposed spectrum, the novels using a ‘reconstructed secularsacred belief’ are likelier to be by postcolonial writers. This, Elias suggests, is because postcolonial authors are often using the opportunities postmodernism affords to challenge existing grand narratives which exclude the perspectives of minorities or oppressed groups.²⁸ The reason that the authors I discuss find new ways of using history and fiction is that, like the postcolonial authors Elias discusses, each of them has a strong personal and political commitment to a certain interpretation of one or more aspects of the war, springing, in their case, from their postmemorial relationship. J. J. Long, writing about second-generation Holocaust fiction, argued that a grounding in historical research was imperative to ensure that postmemorial writing kept its political, memorial function and did not become free-floating fantasy: ‘the mental constructions of postmemory must exist in some kind of dialogue with the empirical, must be open to confirmation or contestation by the real’.²⁹ These authors use the fictional form to go beyond what they see as the limits of historical narrative, using their novels to reject relativism and assert their own interpretation of events not as one competing narrative amongst many, but as an accurate revisioning of a forgotten aspect of the war. Pat Barker writes about the persecution of a number of minority groups during the last year of the First World War, showing how a hysterical society turned on homosexuals, conscientious objectors and women. Graham Swift’s Shuttlecock explores the long-term results for the next generation of having a veteran as a father, while Sarah Waters illustrates – painfully – how the brief burst of relative freedom for lesbians in the Second World War was followed by a reassertion of heterosexual norms. Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement is perhaps the most personal of the three; in it, McEwan represents a hypocritical and morally bankrupt world on the brink of war, but also depicts, very vividly, aspects of the evacuation of the British from Dunkirk in 1940 which have not survived in the cultural memory of Dunkirk. This fits with the shift in the British novel, observed by Peter Childs, from a preoccupation with historiography towards a more ‘historical’ approach, focusing on the past itself, over the last decade; paradoxically, the form this shift takes, with these novels, is a development of historiographic metafiction.³⁰

The novels I have selected – Atonement, the Regeneration trilogy, Shuttlecock and The Night Watch – because they are written by members of the second generation who are committed to bringing forgotten aspects of the wars which haunt them to light, focus on ways of retelling lost narratives (which could, of course, be said to be postmodern in itself) more than on exploring narrative subjectivity. Barker, Swift, Waters and McEwan emphatically do not believe in relativism and, as I will show from their use of source material, they all believe that using historically researched factual material can give their novels at the very least a strong underlying element of historical veracity, though they use this type of material in varying ways.

Steven Connor has described contemporary historical fiction as being either historical or historicised.³¹ A ‘historical’ novel, Connor argues, ‘seems to assert in its form and language the capacity of the present to extend itself to encompass the past . . . and enacts the possibility of a knowable, narratable and continuous history’.³² By contrast, ‘historicised’ fiction is more self-conscious about its claim to historical veracity. It ‘suggests a discontinuous history, or the potential for many, conflicting histories; unlike [the historical novel] it seems to disallow any perspective on history other than those contingently available within history’.³³ I will argue that a detailed close reading of each text, closely analysing the authors’ use of material traces, or source material, demonstrates that these novels partake of both of Connor’s definitions and resist his binarised view. While the novels under consideration explore the nature of history, or the nature of writing about history, they also assert, simultaneously, their commitment to a particular view of an event, or series of events which their novels put forward as an accurate account. LaCapra describes this affect as ‘empathic unsettlement’; we are allowed, encouraged, to empathise with the characters in the text, but the structure of the text itself frustrates our attempt.³⁴ It reminds us, in Levinas’s terms, of the otherness of these people, be they fictional or historical or (a distinction Levinas’s point renders somewhat redundant). The fragmentary nature of the historiographical metafiction, as we have seen, encourages the