School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemPresent past, past present: history, memory and identity in six contemporary historiographic novels( 2010)This thesis examines a selection of novels, published from 1990 onward, which engage with past-present relationships, considering the roles history and memory play in connecting us to the past. Examining a range of texts including Amin Maalouf’s Ports of Call (1999), A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), Margaret Scott’s Family Album (2000), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1994), Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong (1994) and Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader (1997), I argue that each of my chosen novelists recognizes the socio-political manipulation behind historical narratives and that they affirm the importance of the past to characters in the present, who seek an understanding of their identities in relation to their heritage. Taking issue with Kerwin Lee Klein and Pierre Nora’s idea that history and memory are utterly antithetical and mutually exclusive, I argue that my selected novelists present both history and memory as subjective narratives. In the texts, the conflicts between historical accounts and memories reveal the inevitable discords between socio-political analyses and personal perception. Employing Hayden White’s argument of subjective history and key memory theories by Sigmund Freud, Dori Laub, Annette Kuhn, Louisa Passerini and E. Ann Kaplan to examine the contradictions between history and memory in each novel, I contend that the novelists regard the conflict as a form of positive disagreement. Each novel features characters who are stimulated to delve into the past to trace secrets and to solve mysteries, at the same time entering into a broader critique of the recording of ‘official’ histories. Importantly, while my chosen writers reveal doubts about the reliability of history, they do not attempt to supplant it with memory. Instead, they move towards a process of reconciliation, whereby history and memory complement and inform one another. In this thesis, I contend that by representing a sequence of quests to uncover the past, the novelists do not seek to assert historical certainty. What they foreground in the novels is the importance of building an emotional connection between the past and the present. Bringing readers to participate in their characters’ very private experiences—their struggles, their quests for the past and their reconfiguration of social and personal identities, these writers emphasize and celebrate the gap between history and memory. Each of my chosen novelists explores how history and memory teach us empathy with those who have come before, animating history and heritage so that far from being consigned to the past, they can inform the present.