Gail Jones Five Bells Analysis
The Individualism and Collectivism of Memory in Gail Jones’ Five Bells and W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants
Introduction
“What is past is prologue,” from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest adorns The National Archives in Washington D.C., where the United State’s foundational, formative documents are housed. Within the walls of the Archives, the nation’s past are housed for today and tomorrow’s citizens to view, analyze and reflect on the way these documents and the nation’s history have led to the present and may impact the future. This connection to the past and the way the past can place the elements of the present in context is a theme explored in both Gail Jones’ Five Bells and W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. In both novels, the authors explore …show more content…
the relationship between a person’s past as seen through traumatic memory and the impact it has on their psyche and ability to function in the present, a prologue to a future of uncertainty and likely torment. Five Bells opens with an except from Kenneth Slessor’s poem “Five Bells: Where have you gone? The tide over you, The turn of midnight water’s over you, As time is over you, and mystery, And memory, the flood that does not flow. (quoted in Jones, prologue)
An elegy for a life lost, Slessor utilizes symbols of flooding water and darkness to express the tumultuous grief caused by the death of a contemporary and the added burden of being unable to retain the vividness and clarity of the memories of the person as they are slowly eroded through the ebb and flow of time. Like the poem, Five Bells functions as an elegy for the characters’ dead loved ones and the way each seeks to either hold onto or erase their memories. Whether to remember or to forget the relationship, Jones’ protagonists’ traumas are tied to the present, physical world around them and the way in which the collective memory of their pasts may offer solace between the tidal effects of their trauma. “And so they are ever returning to us, the dead” (Sebald 23). The Emigrants weaves a narrative filled with allusions to death, ghosts and hauntings as told by narrator determined to make connections between people, their decisions and their pasts but being challenged by the limits of consciousness and memory. As Jones’ protagonists struggle with both remembering and forgetting past traumas, so do Sebald’s characters as they seek to find a balance between repressing the catastrophes of their past, particularly in the Holocaust, in order to survive with allowing the memories to engulf the psyche in order to reconstruct the past and find a direction for the future. This balancing act between forgetting and remembering is reflective of Sebald’s belief that in order to free oneself of the shackles of burdensome memory and trauma, one must be overpowered by memory, revisit the past and relive the trauma through introspection and connection with others. Sebald and Jones force the reader to reevaluate his or her conceptions of memory and trauma by exploring the omnipresence and overpowering hold the past has on the present and future. Both novels’ character-driven narratives using short vignettes demonstrate the person and unique relationship memory has with the minds of individuals. In understanding that no memorial relationship is the same from one person to the next, each author requires that an analysis of memory and an understanding of its impacts must be conducted from a unique and different perspective for each individual. Additionally, the hybrid narrative structure and unusual absence of a central plot line in both novels further demonstrates the individualistic aspect of each character’s relationship to memory. Each of these relationships becomes a single piece of a larger collective memory that more closely reveals the true past memory even if this truth brings no relief to the individual. Further, both authors’ narrative structure break from traditional rules of storytelling so as to show that the rules of logic and rationality do not apply in the world of traumatic memory. Instead, truth and the understanding of trauma is found only through incomplete pieces of information and different sometimes conflicting perspectives, which gives the collective memory such a powerful place in understanding and reflecting on individual traumatic memory. In piecing together these varied, individualistic relationships with memory, the authors explore the connection between external, physical stimuli and memory so as to demonstrate the inescapabilty of remembrance when one lives in a world full of memory cues. Further, the presence of these talismans that bring forth memories of past traumas are inescapable and thus, the authors show, require the individual to come to terms with the past in order to find peace in the present and future. By looking within and piecing together the past or looking externally to others for aid in reconstructing memories long suppressed or uncontrollably intense and overpowering, individuals may learn to suppress the tidal wave of grief or at least cope with the constant stream of memory. By using character vignettes, a hybrid narrative structure, and an analysis of the connection between external stimuli and remembrance, Sebald and Jones illustrate the tenuous relationship between truth and memory, the inescapabilty of the grief that emerges from post-memory and the characterization of death as the only possible release from this burden.
The Unique Relationship Between the Character and Traumatic Memory The Emigrants and Five Bells are stories composed by vignettes of the main characters whose stories as one unit reveal the meaning of memory in the minds of both Sebald and Jones. In The Emigrants, Sebald talks to four different characters each of which has a story deeply intertwined with the Holocaust. The characters share not only a connection with the traumatic events of the Holocaust but also share a common vow of silence as to the memories they have yearned to suppress for fear of being engulfed by the trauma and grief they generate. For each of these individuals, their traumatic experiences permanently changed them so that. It is through Sebald’s questioning and investigations that these previously repressed memories are unearthed and revealed to the reader, showcasing the way the Holocaust and their memories of the epoch have shaped the way in which they have lived their lives and, in some cases, the way in which they choose to end them. The first of these narratives is Sebald’s visit with Dr. Henry Selwyn. Selwyn, living as a hermit, is a man who has sought a life as a recluse in order to escape the memories of his abandonment of his cultural roots and of the loss of his alpine guide, Johannes Naegeli. The disappearance of Naegeli sent Selwyn into a “deep depression” that made him feel as if he was “buried under snow and ice” (Sebald 15). This language evokes the language used in describing Naegeli’s remains having bee “released by the Oberaar glacier” after being buried under snow and ice for 72 years (Sebald 23). Sebald’s diction in these two phrases show how Selwyn’s memory of Naegeli’s disappearance and the uncertainty surrounding his presumed death made Selwyn incapable of letting go of these memories and thus, being unable to properly grieve for the loss. Instead, choosing to suppress that memory, Selwyn was effectively “buried” under the burden of his loss, consistently being visited by the memory of Naegeli “ever returning” to him (Sebald 23). The words “snow and ice” are evocative of cold and death, which further reveals how the memory of this disappearance slowly extracted his very desire to continue to live. Particularly telling is the fact that Naegeli’s remains were released only after Selwyn’s suicide. Essentially, Selwyn was “released” from this burden of traumatic memory only in death—his death and the death of the remnants of his memory. While the suppression of the memory of this loss was a factor that led Selwyn to find a permanent escape from this traumatic burden, Selwyn’s betrayal of his cultural heritage in shedding his first name and surname was also a source of trauma for him. Temporally, after creating his new identity, Selwyn found his academic abilities, which had come to define his identity, “seemed to have slackened” so that progressively as he continued to conceal his “true background” he lost this central aspect of his identity (Sebald 20). Without an identity to ground him, his experiences in the Second World War, for which words fail to describe the atrocities he witnessed, precipitated his decision to sever his ties with “the real world” and become a hermit (Sebald 21). Thus, it is Selwyn’s intentional discarding of his roots that leave him without a true name or a place in the world that further exacerbates his inability to cope with his traumatic memories predating the war. Despite his attempts to isolate himself physically from the world as a way to protect himself emotionally from these repressed memories, the trauma of his past seeps into his life as visible by Sebald’s description of the garden Selwyn spends his life tending to and accompanying photograph of a depressed and overgrown garden. “He sensed that Nature itself was groaning and collapsing beneath the burden we placed on it” (Sebald 7). The decay and degradation are evoked by the personification of nature, demonstrated in the capitalization of the word as well as the way in which it groans and collapses under the weight placed on it by the inhabitants of the house. Here, the garden that Selwyn so diligently tends to is symbolic of his memory that he tediously attempts to keep suppressed. Yet, as his garden groans and threatens collapse from its burden to produce, so does he under the burden of his traumatic memory of voluntarily shedding his identity and his guilt at the death of Naegeli. In The Emigrants, Selwyn’s narrative demonstrates the way in which his memories specifically shaped his decisions later in life. The other narratives Sebald provides share this common theme of the burden of memory acting as an invisible hand in the character’s later life. Yet, each of the other narratives provides a deeply personal retelling of the individual’s memories and their relationship with their pasts. For example, Paul Bereyter’s trauma surfaces from his prohibition to teach during the Third Reich because of his Jewish heritage, his ultimate grief resting in his identity as an exile. He, like Selwyn, is burdened by the pain of these memories and he too chooses death as the ultimate relief from the grief. Thus, while both men respond to their burdens of memories in the same way, their narrative relationship between memory and grief stem from two unique experiences and perspectives. Similarly, Jones’ characters each bring a unique story of death and tragedy into their present lives. Like in The Emigrants, however, these different relationships with the traumas of their past have a singular impact on the way the characters are able to be fully present in their present. One of Jones’ main characters, Catherine, is haunted by the memory of her brother Brendan. Despite her attempts to run away from these memories, she has still “dragged her past” with her and memories of her family still “h[a]ng around” (Jones 51). The word “drag” effectively evokes feelings of weight, suppression and constraint. Indeed, Catherine is tormented throughout the novel with fleeting flashes of memories of the past that are constantly interrupting her present awareness. As she watches a child with her father, the “swaying dress and her bare legs” stir “some scrap of memory” that “she could not quite capture” (Jones 13). Her ability to stay in the moment in her present is hampered by memories that she is unable to bring into focus. This challenge stems from her failure to rid herself of the memory of her brother. She marvels at how “powerfully the dead continue, and how much space they [take] up with their not-here bodies” (Jones 51). No matter her strongest attempts to flee from one physical space to another, Catherine still fails to be free of her brother’s memory. He is inextricably linked to her, “trapped in her atoms and in the folds of her brain.” Jones carefully differentiates positive remembrance of the dead from the burden of negative remembrance by comparing Catherine’s memories to “clammy rooms “ in “stinky flats” that leave “blotches like blossoms and streaks going nowhere” (Jones 51). Jones shows how inescapable traumatic memories are, leaving no escape or respite for those weighed down by them. The word “clammy” evokes weight that presses down, making one unable to adequately breath, which is an adequate description of Catherine’s relationship to her traumatic memories. Additionally the way the memories are described as “blotches” that leave a bad scent behind them reveal how these memories pollute her mind, her body and her everyday actions. Despite Catherine’s attempts to evade her memories, as the novel progresses, the language used to describe her physical surroundings in Sydney and the way Jones describes her emotional responses to streaming memories of her brother reveal Catherine’s acceptance of this past trauma and allude to a possible release from her burden in the future. For example, Catherine’s impromptu decision to take a ferry ride for “no reason other than to cross the Harbour and come back again in such splendid weather” (Jones 157). The absence of a reason behind her trip is magnified by her thoughts of Brendan and “how he would have loved this, the mysterious paintings, the light, the unruly adventure of Sydney (Jones 157). The positive connotations of “splendid” and “sunshine” used to describe the weather so closely positioned to a vivid memory of her brother that is associated with something positive he would have enjoyed, demonstrate Catherin’s evolving relationship with her trauma that continues to move her toward resolution and peace rather than continued avoidance and denial. Additionally, it is during this ride on the ferry that she remembers her family’s trip to Italy after her brother’s death as a means of healing after the death. The fact that this memory coincides with Catherine’s own journey and that both are precipitated by Brendan’s death reveals Catherine’s desire to find solace and peace from her grief as her family did in the trip to Italy. Further, Catherine “smiles to herself” as she “watches the wake on the water, the decoration of where they had been, the backwards vision of any journey” (Jones 161). It is as if Catherine realizes that she is on a backwards vision of a journey since the time of her brother’s death until now were she is seeking relief from her grief. The change in her temperament demonstrated by her smiling and her willingness to allow memories of Brendan to seep into her consciousness show her progression in the grieving process that until this point in the novel, she had impeded by her constant reluctance to face the reality of her brother’s death. In Five Bells as in The Emigrants each character has a very different relationship to their grief and memories. Catherine, Pei Xing and James are all dealing with burdens of their past which traumatize them in the present. Yet each character has a vastly different approach to dealing with the burden of their memories, reflected in the language Jones uses to characterize their actions and their physical surroundings as well as their final choices in the novel. Both authors thus showcase the individuality of a person’s relationship with their past and traumatic memories while still reflecting on the similar impact these memories have as a form of mediation on the present, distorting reality and inhibiting resolution to grief.
The Physical World as a Stimulus for Traumatic Memory To further the concept of traumatic memory as a burden, both authors explore the connection between external stimuli and past experiences. In so doing, Sebald and Jones show the inescapability of remembrance when an individual lives in a world filled with memory cues. In The Emigrants, the memories evoked from physical stimuli are particularly present in Sebald’s journey through his teacher Paul Bereyter’s life. The opening prologue to the section speaks to a “mist that no eye can dispel.” The word “mist” evokes concepts of partial blindness, numbness and dreariness. This mist functions as the blindness that inhibit the ability of the individual to clearly see themselves and their futures as they are hampered by the grief of their traumatic memories. Further the reference to sight in this prologue point to the importance of external stimuli in the form of physical objects that had special importance to Bereyter and that are emblematic of the trauma he was burdened by and his subsequent suicide. Railroad tracks are a key symbol interwoven throughout Bereyter’s story. The section opens with a black-and-white photography of mist-covered tracks curving in away into infinity, past the line of sight. Sebald’s first association with the tracks come in the form of news that Bereyter had committed suicide by laying himself down in front of the train onto the trucks. Thus the tracks initially are strongly tied to the concept of death and suicide. As Sebald further investigates Bereyter’s life and reconstructs the memories that troubled him, these tracks resurface and become symbolic of Bereyter, his trauma and Sebald’s association of them with Bereyter’s ultimate death. Sebald imagines him “stretched out on the track” after he had taken off his “spectacles and put them on the ballast stones by his side” (Sebald 21). The act of taking the time to remove his glasses before laying across the tracks for his suicide demonstrate how Bereyter welcomes death as a means to quiet the demons of his past. The fact that his suicide itself occurs as a “blur before his short-sighted eyes, smudge out in the gathering dusk” harkens back to the prologue’s quote and furthers the analogy of blindness arising from traumatic memory. Yet in the moments instant to his death, his vision regains “needle-sharp” focus and he is able to discern the “snow-white silhouettes of three mountains” (Sebald 21). It is telling that in the moment prior to death, the mist is dispelled from Bereyter’s eyes, and he is once again able to see. Only in the moments prior to death, when the burden of memory will lift permanently, is Bereyter able to see with focus again. This rebirth is echoed in the snow-white color of the mountains evocative of innocence and un-doctored life. Bereyter in death is finally able to find peace and a life free from the darkness of his Holocaust demons. The centrality of the railway to Sebald’s conception of Bereyter’s life, trauma and death is reiterated as the model railway Bereyter had owned and displayed became “the very image and symbol of Paul’s German tragedy” and a symbol for the ravages traumatic memory has on an individual (Sebald 44). Jones likewise uses physical objects and images to stimulate the flooding of memories in each of her characters’ minds. This is particularly evidenced in the disparate ways each of her four characters visualize and experience the Sydney Opera House. The characters’ reactions are reflective of each character’s relationship with their own traumatic memories. Ellie, who is resilient and consistently joyful throughout the novel, “gawk[s] lie a child” (Jones 2), her heart “open[ing] like that form unfolding into the blue” and filing with “corny delight and ordinary elation” (Jones 3) as she first glimpses the turrets and curves of the Opera House. The architecture simulates a positive memory of a grade school teacher whose physical characteristics “always soothed and reassured her.” The positive connotations of Jones’ diction in describing Ellie’s reaction reflect Ellie’s seeming imperviousness to trauma and grief. In contrast, James sees the Opera House as “perpetual[ly] devouring” with its white shark-like teeth, alluding to death by drowning (Jones 5). James in fact sees himself as less than human and rather just “a shape to be ravaged, just a drifting, edible nothing in blood-blurry water” by the Opera House’s teeth (Jones 5). The images of drowning, water and blood are all physical manifestations of James’ traumatic memory of the drowning of his student, which is recalled by the physical characteristics of the architectural aspects of the Opera House. It is no coincidence that the reader’s first introduction to James is of such a dark quality and so emblematic of death, grief and trauma as these same images are carried forward to the very end when James plunges into the quay, committing suicide. James is the most powerful encapsulation of the hold trauma has on an individual and the inability of a person to face the trauma in order to move past it, and thus his death is a necessary relief to the constant remembrances of his trauma touched off by the physical world around him. To other characters such as Catherine the connection between one physical object and a traumatic memory is tenuous. When seeing water drops falling from the fountain, Catherine is reminded “obliquely of snow” which in turn triggers her to the passage in The Dead describing the snow falling over Ireland—a passage that her brother used to love. In remembering his funeral, she recalls how the snow fell “upon all the living and the dead,” realizing that Brendan haunts her by intruding upon her in “unexpected moments” and making it impossible to extricate memories of his death from her memory (Jones 56). The physical world can elicit memories of her dead brother with such spontaneity that in one moment she may be “walking in the sunshine in another country entirely” or may have arisen in a “good mood” when intrusions of her grief of losing him are suddenly brought forth by the “intimate presence of snow.” At the end of the novel, Catherine remains enveloped in her grief as these physical manifestations of her past make it impossible for her to repress her memories and avoid dealing with her sorrow. As illustrated by the use of language and symbolism, Sebald and Jones utilize external stimuli to reveal individual’s relationship with their trauma, their ability or more often, their inability to deal with their grief and the inescapability of memory as an inherent aspect of the physical world that compels some to find solace in death.
Departing from Traditional Narrative Schemes Both Sebald and Jones intentionally omit a broad and single overarching theme and plot structure in these two novels. In doing so, the novelists use the very structure of their stories to demonstrate the complexities and difficulties in comprehending the traumatic past and the reliance on collective memory, the only tool to guide a search for understanding. In The Emigrants, Sebald acts as a fact-finder who through questioning and investigation attempts to construct his subjects’ pasts. As a whole, the novel itself lacks a central plot that carries the stories forward and connects the vignettes into one central theme. Instead, Sebald himself acts as the unifying thread connecting the characters’ stories and memories into one piece that speaks to the inability of traditional narrative rules, memory and language to understand catastrophic events, such as the Holocaust. In essence, the characters too are moving through this journey with Sebald, and as he constructs their pasts and their stories it reveals an explanation for the premature madness and self-inflicted deaths these characters descended to as a result of having no framework and no guideline to help them deal with the burden of their traumatic memories. Sebald early on realizes the limitations of post-memory and language in understanding a grief-stricken life in his exploration of Paul Bereyter’s life. Sebald begins this section by drawing from his own memories of Bereyter as a schoolteacher and from pieces of information that have reached him throughout the years. From these pieces of information and past experiences, Sebald places himself as an observer at the scene of Bereyter’s suicide and imbues meaning into the image he has painted of his death within his mind. However, realizing the lack of knowledge and understanding of Bereyter’s life and thus his incapacity become “any closer to Paul” and subsequent suicide, Sebald ends his mental musings in order to “to avoid this sort of wrongful trespass.” In so doing, Sebald reveals that Bereyter himself had engaged in a similar investigation of his past in order to find some meaning for his life and discover his identity—“it seemed to me…as if Paul had been gathering evidence, the mounting weight of which, as his investigations proceeded, finally convinced him that he belonged to the exiles and not to people of S” (Sebald 59). Ironically, it is Bereyter’s desire for truth and understanding of his grievous experiences in the Holocaust that lead him further down into a state of confusion and grief essentially adding to the “mounting weight” of his trauma. In similar fashion, Sebald’s quest for and explanation for Bereyter’s actions fails to provide any truth or insight. While Sebald may know the actual cause of Beretyer’s death, despite his best efforts he fails to understand or recreate the traumatic events that led to Bereyter’s succumbing to his memories. Instead, Sebald recognizes the truth of Mme Landau’s words that “in the end it is hard to know what it is that someone dies of.” Indeed, Sebald fails to understand Bereyter’s reasons for ending his life and for the depressive spiral that characterized the second part of his life. What is unclear is whether Sebald himself recognizes that this failure stems not from the shortcomings of a retrospective investigation of a person’s life, marked by second-hand accounts of words spoken and actions taken, but rather, the failure to understand that traumatic post-memory stems from an inability to ever truly understand trauma and grief. This truth is further emphasized as Sebald himself remembers an interaction he had with Bereyter during which he shared a story that ended with the expression “end up on the railways” (Sebald 63). While at the moment, Sebald felt that the story was “perfectly harmless,” only in retrospect does he realize that phrase was “darkly foreboding” and that an “image of death” passed him by at that moment before he was able to recognize the gravity of those words and their prediction of the future (Sebald 63). This realization, of course, occurs only later when Sebald has full knowledge of the way Bereyter’s life developed. And yet, it is a statement to the reality that at all times, human understanding is limited. It is a statement that in life every person can miss the moment where “an image of death” passes by before we are able to truly understand its significance (Sebald 63). Similarly, Sebald visits the other characters or those that knew them, takes notes and travels to the homes and locations they frequented in order to gather facts and information in the hopes of creating a framework to understand the characters’ decisions. In effect, Bereyter’s story acts a microcosm of the piecemeal narrative approach the entire novel takes, reflecting Sebald’s belief that trauma can never be understood and only through collective memory may one move toward an ever-eluding truth. Jones also utilizes a hybrid narrative structure to demonstrate the importance of a collective memory in shedding light on traumatic experiences. The narrative structure provides two valuable insights. First, because of Jones’ characters are consumed by their own grief and the burden of their pasts, their singular accounts elicited by the police in trying to find the missing girl are useless as they are one-dimensional and distracted by the external stimuli that control their mental thoughts and capabilities. For example Pei Xing, lost in contemplation over the death of her parents and her traumatic imprisonment was an “unreliable witness” and had dragged down a “surer knowledge of what might have happened” eventually “clos[ing] her eyes on her way back from the police state (Jones 190). The physical closing of her eyes is symbolic of the blindness her grief over her parents’ death has on her ability to see the world around her. Similarly, Catherine too feels like a failure at the recognition of her own emotional blindness as she is questioned regarding the child’s disappearance: “…she had raised her hand with eager confidence and had no answer. It was nothing like television. There was no resolution and no plot” (Jones 176). Catherine’s realization that her own traumatic memories that had involuntarily been infiltrating her consciousness throughout the day had precluded her providing any insight or truth in the disappearance is parallel to Jones’ message that traumatic memory has no resolution, and therefore, no plot or conventional storytelling technique will adequately explain the trauma and provide an effective resolution. As a result of this an understanding of the traumatic event of a missing child cannot be understand through an individual memory but rather through collective memories and perspectives. Thus, like Sebald, Jones identifies the importance of cultivating information from various sources in order to be any closer to finding an explanation for trauma. Yet, as in The Emigrants, Five Bells, by providing no solution to the mystery of the missing girl to end the novel, also demonstrates that despite the best efforts to understand trauma truth will always allude the one searching for it. Drawing the analysis into a more character-specific reference, the importance of collective memory in building a more accurate picture of a trauma and increasing one’s understanding of grief is reflected in the relationship between Ellie and James. Through flashbacks, the reader learns one of the sources of James’ grief and depression—his polydipsia for Ellie. He must tell Ellie how he had carried her, all these years, how through everything there persisted the residue of her affinity and understanding. She was a voice in his head; she was a passenger he transported. (Jones 105). His desire for reunification with Ellie became an obsession, a necessity as she acted as his Rock of Gibraltar through the ebbs and flows of his trauma after the death of his mother and student. Her presence haunted him and was like a ghost that he voluntarily “carried” with him in order to draw strength from her “affinity and understanding.” Ellie to James is as inescapable as his grief, always the voice present in his head and a “passenger he transported” at all moments in his consciousness. Despite James’ obsession and dependence on Ellie’s memory, Jones aptly provides opportunities for the reader to discern the true nature of their relationship and the reality that their relationship with traumatic post-memory are so vastly different that they are incompatible as lovers. This is particularly visible in James’ failure to share his trauma with Ellie when they first cross paths after being separated for many years. “What James did not tell Ellie: the drowned child…What he could not disclose: his own dissolution” (Jones 142). Even when presented the chance to share his burden with she who had been his guidepost throughout the grief, James is still unable to divulge. James equates the death of his student to his own “dissolution” or his own ending, the moment in which he collapsed into nothing. Since that spiritual and emotional ending, James could “barely remember the happy part” while still being certain that there “must have been a happy part” (Jones 142). The connotation of these words draws on images of isolation, amnesia and separation. James’ trauma forces him to shut off a part of his humanity so that he can no longer experiences happiness or joy and further, he cannot even remember ever feeling those sensations. In contrast, Ellie’s humanity has not been extinguished by a traumatic experience. Indeed, James describes her as having a “compulsively joyful disposition” while still remaining grounded in reality without being “naïvely or always happy” (Jones 130). It is this realism of her personality and her disposition to liveliness that served James as a talisman in their years apart as he dealt with his grief and guilt. Yet, the only real reference to Ellie feeling pain is in reference to James leaving to move to the city, which had left her “hurt and confused” (Jones 130). This concrete reference to a negative emotional response from a character that has been resolutely joyful is feeling in foreshadowing her possible reaction to James’ suicide. Her last thoughts, and indeed the last words of the novel, are her repeating again and again, “must ring James, must ring James, must ring, ring…” (Jones 209). Temporally this is significant as she is invoking his memory and calling out to him after his self-inflicted death. Yet, she has no knowledge that he has passed and succumbed to his traumatic memory. In this way, the reader is transported as an actor in the collective memory of the novel. The reader is aware of the dramatic irony of Ellie seeking James when James is already gone and never recoverable. The fact that Ellie never finds out this truth is consistent with Jones’ argument that an individual perspective on memory cannot suffice; rather, to understand post-memory and the present it is the perspective of many that allow truth to become more attainable. Additionally this closing aptly requires consideration that Ellie may in fact lose her joy as she is faced with what is likely to be the first test of her ability to deal with trauma and the creation of traumatic memory. The absence of an answer to this idea suggests once again that clear answers and distinct resolutions are outside the realm of possibilities in traumatic post-memory.
Finding Freedom from Traumatic Memory By using suicide as a symbol demonstrate the futility of repressing traumatic memories Sebald and Jones both create a pessimistic depiction of traumatic memory and its inescapability so that no sanctuary exists for an individual to find solace from grief. Sebald’s most graphic portrayal of this theme comes through the experiences of Ambros Adelwarth, the third character Sebald investigates in The Emigrants. Adelwarth is the representation of Sebald’s contention that traumatic memory haunts the living until they are destroyed to a point past recognition, whether it be physically, emotionally or both. Rather than find memory as a mechanism to uncover truth in order to be free of its bond, Ambros went to the sanatorium of his own free will. So ravaged was he by the images of mass death he encountered during the war that the doctor himself said there was never “a more melancholy person” that Ambros so that every “utterance, every gesture, his entire deportment was tantamount to a constant pleading for leave of absence” (Sebald 111). The trauma of his memories had literally made him the physical manifestation of trauma itself. Sebald purposefully chooses to explain in graphic detail the electroshock therapy Ambrose endured while in the institution: “I see him lying before me, said Dr. Abramsky, the electrodes on his temples, the rubber bit between his teeth, buckled into the canvas wraps that were riveted to the treatment table like a man shrouded for burial at sea” (Sebald 115-16). Ambros did in fact voluntarily make himself a “man shrouded for burial at sea” by seeking death or at least complete oblivion in order to find peace from the recurring images of death, destruction and desolation that had driven him mad and into a state of perpetual depression. These therapies left Ambros in “an extinction as total and irreversible as possible of the capacity to think and remember” (Sebald 114) literally having removed any ability to think and to be in a state of perpetual “dumbness” caused by memory (Sebald 145). Thus, only in a state of complete destruction is Ambros able to find a release, to “look down on earth from a great height” signaling a release to another world where is not tethered down to the reality of life but rather is up in the clouds, unburdened by his trauma (Sebald 145). In Five Bells, James seeks a similar solution to his trauma, finding peace in physical death.
Of all her characters, James is the most melancholy of the individuals, consistently controlled by his traumatic memories so that not a single vignette of him is provided without connotations of death and flashbacks to his distressing experiences. The reader’s initial introduction to James is of a man that constantly feels the “downward tug of time” and is enveloped by memories “of a history he” does not want (Jones 4). James attempts self-medication in order to “change his errant chemistry.” Rather than describe his depression in terms of emotions, Jones instead utilizes the word “chemistry” to connote a scientific and detached expression of his sickness. In this way, the fact that James appears disconnected not only to his trauma but to any positive emotion as well. James is thus an empty shell, devoid of a soul and of human emotion. Even thoughts of his lost love, Ellie, border on the clinically obsessed, being compared to polydipsia, excessive thirst and dipsomania or drunkenness. It is evident that James’ grief has transformed any opportunity at his engulfment in positive emotions into yet another chance for James to lose himself completely in the typhoon of his
emotions. The symbolism of drowning and incessantly, flowing water are reflective of James’ obsessive tendency to dwell on his melancholy and traumatic burden. Like Ambros, James throughout the course of the book’s single day finds this obsession and servitude to his trauma more than he can bear. This idea of complete servitude to his grief is picked up in Jones’ use of the word act rather than decision to describe James’ suicide. It is in fact James’ grief that compels him to act so that it is not a decision made of his own volition. The water subsumes him almost instantly, entering his body, filling chest so that all he felt was the “sad sinking of giving up and letting go” (Jones 201). The water essentially leaves no other room in his body for his trauma to penetrate and continue to control him. Instead, James feels only “a release, a release” and finally finds peace in his death (Jones 201).
Conclusion
Sebald and Jones’ narratives of individual memory and traumatic burdens redefine the traditional notion of memory as a positive source of information for growth and renewal. Instead, the characters both authors create display the ravages of trauma on the human psyche as each teeters precariously on the edge of mental oblivion. Many of these characters voluntarily succumb to their burdens by seeking release in their death. Others are driven into depression and madness by recurring images that are impossible to silence. Even characters such as Sebald and Ellie, both who seem to lack a traumatic burden of their own, are found at the end of the novels to be in contemplative states. Ellie’s last words are hopeful, but they are uttered without the realization that he who she calls to has taken his own life. Sebald too, after exploring in depth the traumas of the four different men, has now in some way transferred their grief and trauma into his own as it has penetrated his psyche, leaving eh reader to wonder if his unearthing of their collective trauma will lead him to suffer under this collective trauma himself. The endings of both novels serve as a reminder that what has been learned about these characters and what the reader has seen, heard and experience with and through them is simply a prologue to their future, which continues to be shrouded in mystery but which unquestionably carries forward the trauma that characterized each of them throughout the novel. Thus, the novels come full circle having first introduced the reader to flawed, traumatized and burdened beings and leaving these characters in either the same state or in a state of perpetual oblivion. It is this lack of closure and this abrupt departure from traditional forms of storytelling that emphasizes each author’s claim that there is no future without first reconstructing the past and even when this reconstruction is pursued, traumatic memory is so indefinable, obscure and all-encompassing that understanding its impact is unmanageable. It is likely that the final memory the authors desire the reader to take away from these novels is the realization that the human mind is enslaved to the burden of trauma and the only release from such a burden is death or the acceptance of a life of mental enslavement to these memories.
Works Cited
Jones, Gail. Five Bells: A Novel. New York: Picador, 2012. Print.
Sebald, W. G. The Emigrants. New York: New Directions, 1997. Print.
Introduction
“What is past is prologue,” from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest adorns The National Archives in Washington D.C., where the United State’s foundational, formative documents are housed. Within the walls of the Archives, the nation’s past are housed for today and tomorrow’s citizens to view, analyze and reflect on the way these documents and the nation’s history have led to the present and may impact the future. This connection to the past and the way the past can place the elements of the present in context is a theme explored in both Gail Jones’ Five Bells and W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. In both novels, the authors explore …show more content…
the relationship between a person’s past as seen through traumatic memory and the impact it has on their psyche and ability to function in the present, a prologue to a future of uncertainty and likely torment. Five Bells opens with an except from Kenneth Slessor’s poem “Five Bells: Where have you gone? The tide over you, The turn of midnight water’s over you, As time is over you, and mystery, And memory, the flood that does not flow. (quoted in Jones, prologue)
An elegy for a life lost, Slessor utilizes symbols of flooding water and darkness to express the tumultuous grief caused by the death of a contemporary and the added burden of being unable to retain the vividness and clarity of the memories of the person as they are slowly eroded through the ebb and flow of time. Like the poem, Five Bells functions as an elegy for the characters’ dead loved ones and the way each seeks to either hold onto or erase their memories. Whether to remember or to forget the relationship, Jones’ protagonists’ traumas are tied to the present, physical world around them and the way in which the collective memory of their pasts may offer solace between the tidal effects of their trauma. “And so they are ever returning to us, the dead” (Sebald 23). The Emigrants weaves a narrative filled with allusions to death, ghosts and hauntings as told by narrator determined to make connections between people, their decisions and their pasts but being challenged by the limits of consciousness and memory. As Jones’ protagonists struggle with both remembering and forgetting past traumas, so do Sebald’s characters as they seek to find a balance between repressing the catastrophes of their past, particularly in the Holocaust, in order to survive with allowing the memories to engulf the psyche in order to reconstruct the past and find a direction for the future. This balancing act between forgetting and remembering is reflective of Sebald’s belief that in order to free oneself of the shackles of burdensome memory and trauma, one must be overpowered by memory, revisit the past and relive the trauma through introspection and connection with others. Sebald and Jones force the reader to reevaluate his or her conceptions of memory and trauma by exploring the omnipresence and overpowering hold the past has on the present and future. Both novels’ character-driven narratives using short vignettes demonstrate the person and unique relationship memory has with the minds of individuals. In understanding that no memorial relationship is the same from one person to the next, each author requires that an analysis of memory and an understanding of its impacts must be conducted from a unique and different perspective for each individual. Additionally, the hybrid narrative structure and unusual absence of a central plot line in both novels further demonstrates the individualistic aspect of each character’s relationship to memory. Each of these relationships becomes a single piece of a larger collective memory that more closely reveals the true past memory even if this truth brings no relief to the individual. Further, both authors’ narrative structure break from traditional rules of storytelling so as to show that the rules of logic and rationality do not apply in the world of traumatic memory. Instead, truth and the understanding of trauma is found only through incomplete pieces of information and different sometimes conflicting perspectives, which gives the collective memory such a powerful place in understanding and reflecting on individual traumatic memory. In piecing together these varied, individualistic relationships with memory, the authors explore the connection between external, physical stimuli and memory so as to demonstrate the inescapabilty of remembrance when one lives in a world full of memory cues. Further, the presence of these talismans that bring forth memories of past traumas are inescapable and thus, the authors show, require the individual to come to terms with the past in order to find peace in the present and future. By looking within and piecing together the past or looking externally to others for aid in reconstructing memories long suppressed or uncontrollably intense and overpowering, individuals may learn to suppress the tidal wave of grief or at least cope with the constant stream of memory. By using character vignettes, a hybrid narrative structure, and an analysis of the connection between external stimuli and remembrance, Sebald and Jones illustrate the tenuous relationship between truth and memory, the inescapabilty of the grief that emerges from post-memory and the characterization of death as the only possible release from this burden.
The Unique Relationship Between the Character and Traumatic Memory The Emigrants and Five Bells are stories composed by vignettes of the main characters whose stories as one unit reveal the meaning of memory in the minds of both Sebald and Jones. In The Emigrants, Sebald talks to four different characters each of which has a story deeply intertwined with the Holocaust. The characters share not only a connection with the traumatic events of the Holocaust but also share a common vow of silence as to the memories they have yearned to suppress for fear of being engulfed by the trauma and grief they generate. For each of these individuals, their traumatic experiences permanently changed them so that. It is through Sebald’s questioning and investigations that these previously repressed memories are unearthed and revealed to the reader, showcasing the way the Holocaust and their memories of the epoch have shaped the way in which they have lived their lives and, in some cases, the way in which they choose to end them. The first of these narratives is Sebald’s visit with Dr. Henry Selwyn. Selwyn, living as a hermit, is a man who has sought a life as a recluse in order to escape the memories of his abandonment of his cultural roots and of the loss of his alpine guide, Johannes Naegeli. The disappearance of Naegeli sent Selwyn into a “deep depression” that made him feel as if he was “buried under snow and ice” (Sebald 15). This language evokes the language used in describing Naegeli’s remains having bee “released by the Oberaar glacier” after being buried under snow and ice for 72 years (Sebald 23). Sebald’s diction in these two phrases show how Selwyn’s memory of Naegeli’s disappearance and the uncertainty surrounding his presumed death made Selwyn incapable of letting go of these memories and thus, being unable to properly grieve for the loss. Instead, choosing to suppress that memory, Selwyn was effectively “buried” under the burden of his loss, consistently being visited by the memory of Naegeli “ever returning” to him (Sebald 23). The words “snow and ice” are evocative of cold and death, which further reveals how the memory of this disappearance slowly extracted his very desire to continue to live. Particularly telling is the fact that Naegeli’s remains were released only after Selwyn’s suicide. Essentially, Selwyn was “released” from this burden of traumatic memory only in death—his death and the death of the remnants of his memory. While the suppression of the memory of this loss was a factor that led Selwyn to find a permanent escape from this traumatic burden, Selwyn’s betrayal of his cultural heritage in shedding his first name and surname was also a source of trauma for him. Temporally, after creating his new identity, Selwyn found his academic abilities, which had come to define his identity, “seemed to have slackened” so that progressively as he continued to conceal his “true background” he lost this central aspect of his identity (Sebald 20). Without an identity to ground him, his experiences in the Second World War, for which words fail to describe the atrocities he witnessed, precipitated his decision to sever his ties with “the real world” and become a hermit (Sebald 21). Thus, it is Selwyn’s intentional discarding of his roots that leave him without a true name or a place in the world that further exacerbates his inability to cope with his traumatic memories predating the war. Despite his attempts to isolate himself physically from the world as a way to protect himself emotionally from these repressed memories, the trauma of his past seeps into his life as visible by Sebald’s description of the garden Selwyn spends his life tending to and accompanying photograph of a depressed and overgrown garden. “He sensed that Nature itself was groaning and collapsing beneath the burden we placed on it” (Sebald 7). The decay and degradation are evoked by the personification of nature, demonstrated in the capitalization of the word as well as the way in which it groans and collapses under the weight placed on it by the inhabitants of the house. Here, the garden that Selwyn so diligently tends to is symbolic of his memory that he tediously attempts to keep suppressed. Yet, as his garden groans and threatens collapse from its burden to produce, so does he under the burden of his traumatic memory of voluntarily shedding his identity and his guilt at the death of Naegeli. In The Emigrants, Selwyn’s narrative demonstrates the way in which his memories specifically shaped his decisions later in life. The other narratives Sebald provides share this common theme of the burden of memory acting as an invisible hand in the character’s later life. Yet, each of the other narratives provides a deeply personal retelling of the individual’s memories and their relationship with their pasts. For example, Paul Bereyter’s trauma surfaces from his prohibition to teach during the Third Reich because of his Jewish heritage, his ultimate grief resting in his identity as an exile. He, like Selwyn, is burdened by the pain of these memories and he too chooses death as the ultimate relief from the grief. Thus, while both men respond to their burdens of memories in the same way, their narrative relationship between memory and grief stem from two unique experiences and perspectives. Similarly, Jones’ characters each bring a unique story of death and tragedy into their present lives. Like in The Emigrants, however, these different relationships with the traumas of their past have a singular impact on the way the characters are able to be fully present in their present. One of Jones’ main characters, Catherine, is haunted by the memory of her brother Brendan. Despite her attempts to run away from these memories, she has still “dragged her past” with her and memories of her family still “h[a]ng around” (Jones 51). The word “drag” effectively evokes feelings of weight, suppression and constraint. Indeed, Catherine is tormented throughout the novel with fleeting flashes of memories of the past that are constantly interrupting her present awareness. As she watches a child with her father, the “swaying dress and her bare legs” stir “some scrap of memory” that “she could not quite capture” (Jones 13). Her ability to stay in the moment in her present is hampered by memories that she is unable to bring into focus. This challenge stems from her failure to rid herself of the memory of her brother. She marvels at how “powerfully the dead continue, and how much space they [take] up with their not-here bodies” (Jones 51). No matter her strongest attempts to flee from one physical space to another, Catherine still fails to be free of her brother’s memory. He is inextricably linked to her, “trapped in her atoms and in the folds of her brain.” Jones carefully differentiates positive remembrance of the dead from the burden of negative remembrance by comparing Catherine’s memories to “clammy rooms “ in “stinky flats” that leave “blotches like blossoms and streaks going nowhere” (Jones 51). Jones shows how inescapable traumatic memories are, leaving no escape or respite for those weighed down by them. The word “clammy” evokes weight that presses down, making one unable to adequately breath, which is an adequate description of Catherine’s relationship to her traumatic memories. Additionally the way the memories are described as “blotches” that leave a bad scent behind them reveal how these memories pollute her mind, her body and her everyday actions. Despite Catherine’s attempts to evade her memories, as the novel progresses, the language used to describe her physical surroundings in Sydney and the way Jones describes her emotional responses to streaming memories of her brother reveal Catherine’s acceptance of this past trauma and allude to a possible release from her burden in the future. For example, Catherine’s impromptu decision to take a ferry ride for “no reason other than to cross the Harbour and come back again in such splendid weather” (Jones 157). The absence of a reason behind her trip is magnified by her thoughts of Brendan and “how he would have loved this, the mysterious paintings, the light, the unruly adventure of Sydney (Jones 157). The positive connotations of “splendid” and “sunshine” used to describe the weather so closely positioned to a vivid memory of her brother that is associated with something positive he would have enjoyed, demonstrate Catherin’s evolving relationship with her trauma that continues to move her toward resolution and peace rather than continued avoidance and denial. Additionally, it is during this ride on the ferry that she remembers her family’s trip to Italy after her brother’s death as a means of healing after the death. The fact that this memory coincides with Catherine’s own journey and that both are precipitated by Brendan’s death reveals Catherine’s desire to find solace and peace from her grief as her family did in the trip to Italy. Further, Catherine “smiles to herself” as she “watches the wake on the water, the decoration of where they had been, the backwards vision of any journey” (Jones 161). It is as if Catherine realizes that she is on a backwards vision of a journey since the time of her brother’s death until now were she is seeking relief from her grief. The change in her temperament demonstrated by her smiling and her willingness to allow memories of Brendan to seep into her consciousness show her progression in the grieving process that until this point in the novel, she had impeded by her constant reluctance to face the reality of her brother’s death. In Five Bells as in The Emigrants each character has a very different relationship to their grief and memories. Catherine, Pei Xing and James are all dealing with burdens of their past which traumatize them in the present. Yet each character has a vastly different approach to dealing with the burden of their memories, reflected in the language Jones uses to characterize their actions and their physical surroundings as well as their final choices in the novel. Both authors thus showcase the individuality of a person’s relationship with their past and traumatic memories while still reflecting on the similar impact these memories have as a form of mediation on the present, distorting reality and inhibiting resolution to grief.
The Physical World as a Stimulus for Traumatic Memory To further the concept of traumatic memory as a burden, both authors explore the connection between external stimuli and past experiences. In so doing, Sebald and Jones show the inescapability of remembrance when an individual lives in a world filled with memory cues. In The Emigrants, the memories evoked from physical stimuli are particularly present in Sebald’s journey through his teacher Paul Bereyter’s life. The opening prologue to the section speaks to a “mist that no eye can dispel.” The word “mist” evokes concepts of partial blindness, numbness and dreariness. This mist functions as the blindness that inhibit the ability of the individual to clearly see themselves and their futures as they are hampered by the grief of their traumatic memories. Further the reference to sight in this prologue point to the importance of external stimuli in the form of physical objects that had special importance to Bereyter and that are emblematic of the trauma he was burdened by and his subsequent suicide. Railroad tracks are a key symbol interwoven throughout Bereyter’s story. The section opens with a black-and-white photography of mist-covered tracks curving in away into infinity, past the line of sight. Sebald’s first association with the tracks come in the form of news that Bereyter had committed suicide by laying himself down in front of the train onto the trucks. Thus the tracks initially are strongly tied to the concept of death and suicide. As Sebald further investigates Bereyter’s life and reconstructs the memories that troubled him, these tracks resurface and become symbolic of Bereyter, his trauma and Sebald’s association of them with Bereyter’s ultimate death. Sebald imagines him “stretched out on the track” after he had taken off his “spectacles and put them on the ballast stones by his side” (Sebald 21). The act of taking the time to remove his glasses before laying across the tracks for his suicide demonstrate how Bereyter welcomes death as a means to quiet the demons of his past. The fact that his suicide itself occurs as a “blur before his short-sighted eyes, smudge out in the gathering dusk” harkens back to the prologue’s quote and furthers the analogy of blindness arising from traumatic memory. Yet in the moments instant to his death, his vision regains “needle-sharp” focus and he is able to discern the “snow-white silhouettes of three mountains” (Sebald 21). It is telling that in the moment prior to death, the mist is dispelled from Bereyter’s eyes, and he is once again able to see. Only in the moments prior to death, when the burden of memory will lift permanently, is Bereyter able to see with focus again. This rebirth is echoed in the snow-white color of the mountains evocative of innocence and un-doctored life. Bereyter in death is finally able to find peace and a life free from the darkness of his Holocaust demons. The centrality of the railway to Sebald’s conception of Bereyter’s life, trauma and death is reiterated as the model railway Bereyter had owned and displayed became “the very image and symbol of Paul’s German tragedy” and a symbol for the ravages traumatic memory has on an individual (Sebald 44). Jones likewise uses physical objects and images to stimulate the flooding of memories in each of her characters’ minds. This is particularly evidenced in the disparate ways each of her four characters visualize and experience the Sydney Opera House. The characters’ reactions are reflective of each character’s relationship with their own traumatic memories. Ellie, who is resilient and consistently joyful throughout the novel, “gawk[s] lie a child” (Jones 2), her heart “open[ing] like that form unfolding into the blue” and filing with “corny delight and ordinary elation” (Jones 3) as she first glimpses the turrets and curves of the Opera House. The architecture simulates a positive memory of a grade school teacher whose physical characteristics “always soothed and reassured her.” The positive connotations of Jones’ diction in describing Ellie’s reaction reflect Ellie’s seeming imperviousness to trauma and grief. In contrast, James sees the Opera House as “perpetual[ly] devouring” with its white shark-like teeth, alluding to death by drowning (Jones 5). James in fact sees himself as less than human and rather just “a shape to be ravaged, just a drifting, edible nothing in blood-blurry water” by the Opera House’s teeth (Jones 5). The images of drowning, water and blood are all physical manifestations of James’ traumatic memory of the drowning of his student, which is recalled by the physical characteristics of the architectural aspects of the Opera House. It is no coincidence that the reader’s first introduction to James is of such a dark quality and so emblematic of death, grief and trauma as these same images are carried forward to the very end when James plunges into the quay, committing suicide. James is the most powerful encapsulation of the hold trauma has on an individual and the inability of a person to face the trauma in order to move past it, and thus his death is a necessary relief to the constant remembrances of his trauma touched off by the physical world around him. To other characters such as Catherine the connection between one physical object and a traumatic memory is tenuous. When seeing water drops falling from the fountain, Catherine is reminded “obliquely of snow” which in turn triggers her to the passage in The Dead describing the snow falling over Ireland—a passage that her brother used to love. In remembering his funeral, she recalls how the snow fell “upon all the living and the dead,” realizing that Brendan haunts her by intruding upon her in “unexpected moments” and making it impossible to extricate memories of his death from her memory (Jones 56). The physical world can elicit memories of her dead brother with such spontaneity that in one moment she may be “walking in the sunshine in another country entirely” or may have arisen in a “good mood” when intrusions of her grief of losing him are suddenly brought forth by the “intimate presence of snow.” At the end of the novel, Catherine remains enveloped in her grief as these physical manifestations of her past make it impossible for her to repress her memories and avoid dealing with her sorrow. As illustrated by the use of language and symbolism, Sebald and Jones utilize external stimuli to reveal individual’s relationship with their trauma, their ability or more often, their inability to deal with their grief and the inescapability of memory as an inherent aspect of the physical world that compels some to find solace in death.
Departing from Traditional Narrative Schemes Both Sebald and Jones intentionally omit a broad and single overarching theme and plot structure in these two novels. In doing so, the novelists use the very structure of their stories to demonstrate the complexities and difficulties in comprehending the traumatic past and the reliance on collective memory, the only tool to guide a search for understanding. In The Emigrants, Sebald acts as a fact-finder who through questioning and investigation attempts to construct his subjects’ pasts. As a whole, the novel itself lacks a central plot that carries the stories forward and connects the vignettes into one central theme. Instead, Sebald himself acts as the unifying thread connecting the characters’ stories and memories into one piece that speaks to the inability of traditional narrative rules, memory and language to understand catastrophic events, such as the Holocaust. In essence, the characters too are moving through this journey with Sebald, and as he constructs their pasts and their stories it reveals an explanation for the premature madness and self-inflicted deaths these characters descended to as a result of having no framework and no guideline to help them deal with the burden of their traumatic memories. Sebald early on realizes the limitations of post-memory and language in understanding a grief-stricken life in his exploration of Paul Bereyter’s life. Sebald begins this section by drawing from his own memories of Bereyter as a schoolteacher and from pieces of information that have reached him throughout the years. From these pieces of information and past experiences, Sebald places himself as an observer at the scene of Bereyter’s suicide and imbues meaning into the image he has painted of his death within his mind. However, realizing the lack of knowledge and understanding of Bereyter’s life and thus his incapacity become “any closer to Paul” and subsequent suicide, Sebald ends his mental musings in order to “to avoid this sort of wrongful trespass.” In so doing, Sebald reveals that Bereyter himself had engaged in a similar investigation of his past in order to find some meaning for his life and discover his identity—“it seemed to me…as if Paul had been gathering evidence, the mounting weight of which, as his investigations proceeded, finally convinced him that he belonged to the exiles and not to people of S” (Sebald 59). Ironically, it is Bereyter’s desire for truth and understanding of his grievous experiences in the Holocaust that lead him further down into a state of confusion and grief essentially adding to the “mounting weight” of his trauma. In similar fashion, Sebald’s quest for and explanation for Bereyter’s actions fails to provide any truth or insight. While Sebald may know the actual cause of Beretyer’s death, despite his best efforts he fails to understand or recreate the traumatic events that led to Bereyter’s succumbing to his memories. Instead, Sebald recognizes the truth of Mme Landau’s words that “in the end it is hard to know what it is that someone dies of.” Indeed, Sebald fails to understand Bereyter’s reasons for ending his life and for the depressive spiral that characterized the second part of his life. What is unclear is whether Sebald himself recognizes that this failure stems not from the shortcomings of a retrospective investigation of a person’s life, marked by second-hand accounts of words spoken and actions taken, but rather, the failure to understand that traumatic post-memory stems from an inability to ever truly understand trauma and grief. This truth is further emphasized as Sebald himself remembers an interaction he had with Bereyter during which he shared a story that ended with the expression “end up on the railways” (Sebald 63). While at the moment, Sebald felt that the story was “perfectly harmless,” only in retrospect does he realize that phrase was “darkly foreboding” and that an “image of death” passed him by at that moment before he was able to recognize the gravity of those words and their prediction of the future (Sebald 63). This realization, of course, occurs only later when Sebald has full knowledge of the way Bereyter’s life developed. And yet, it is a statement to the reality that at all times, human understanding is limited. It is a statement that in life every person can miss the moment where “an image of death” passes by before we are able to truly understand its significance (Sebald 63). Similarly, Sebald visits the other characters or those that knew them, takes notes and travels to the homes and locations they frequented in order to gather facts and information in the hopes of creating a framework to understand the characters’ decisions. In effect, Bereyter’s story acts a microcosm of the piecemeal narrative approach the entire novel takes, reflecting Sebald’s belief that trauma can never be understood and only through collective memory may one move toward an ever-eluding truth. Jones also utilizes a hybrid narrative structure to demonstrate the importance of a collective memory in shedding light on traumatic experiences. The narrative structure provides two valuable insights. First, because of Jones’ characters are consumed by their own grief and the burden of their pasts, their singular accounts elicited by the police in trying to find the missing girl are useless as they are one-dimensional and distracted by the external stimuli that control their mental thoughts and capabilities. For example Pei Xing, lost in contemplation over the death of her parents and her traumatic imprisonment was an “unreliable witness” and had dragged down a “surer knowledge of what might have happened” eventually “clos[ing] her eyes on her way back from the police state (Jones 190). The physical closing of her eyes is symbolic of the blindness her grief over her parents’ death has on her ability to see the world around her. Similarly, Catherine too feels like a failure at the recognition of her own emotional blindness as she is questioned regarding the child’s disappearance: “…she had raised her hand with eager confidence and had no answer. It was nothing like television. There was no resolution and no plot” (Jones 176). Catherine’s realization that her own traumatic memories that had involuntarily been infiltrating her consciousness throughout the day had precluded her providing any insight or truth in the disappearance is parallel to Jones’ message that traumatic memory has no resolution, and therefore, no plot or conventional storytelling technique will adequately explain the trauma and provide an effective resolution. As a result of this an understanding of the traumatic event of a missing child cannot be understand through an individual memory but rather through collective memories and perspectives. Thus, like Sebald, Jones identifies the importance of cultivating information from various sources in order to be any closer to finding an explanation for trauma. Yet, as in The Emigrants, Five Bells, by providing no solution to the mystery of the missing girl to end the novel, also demonstrates that despite the best efforts to understand trauma truth will always allude the one searching for it. Drawing the analysis into a more character-specific reference, the importance of collective memory in building a more accurate picture of a trauma and increasing one’s understanding of grief is reflected in the relationship between Ellie and James. Through flashbacks, the reader learns one of the sources of James’ grief and depression—his polydipsia for Ellie. He must tell Ellie how he had carried her, all these years, how through everything there persisted the residue of her affinity and understanding. She was a voice in his head; she was a passenger he transported. (Jones 105). His desire for reunification with Ellie became an obsession, a necessity as she acted as his Rock of Gibraltar through the ebbs and flows of his trauma after the death of his mother and student. Her presence haunted him and was like a ghost that he voluntarily “carried” with him in order to draw strength from her “affinity and understanding.” Ellie to James is as inescapable as his grief, always the voice present in his head and a “passenger he transported” at all moments in his consciousness. Despite James’ obsession and dependence on Ellie’s memory, Jones aptly provides opportunities for the reader to discern the true nature of their relationship and the reality that their relationship with traumatic post-memory are so vastly different that they are incompatible as lovers. This is particularly visible in James’ failure to share his trauma with Ellie when they first cross paths after being separated for many years. “What James did not tell Ellie: the drowned child…What he could not disclose: his own dissolution” (Jones 142). Even when presented the chance to share his burden with she who had been his guidepost throughout the grief, James is still unable to divulge. James equates the death of his student to his own “dissolution” or his own ending, the moment in which he collapsed into nothing. Since that spiritual and emotional ending, James could “barely remember the happy part” while still being certain that there “must have been a happy part” (Jones 142). The connotation of these words draws on images of isolation, amnesia and separation. James’ trauma forces him to shut off a part of his humanity so that he can no longer experiences happiness or joy and further, he cannot even remember ever feeling those sensations. In contrast, Ellie’s humanity has not been extinguished by a traumatic experience. Indeed, James describes her as having a “compulsively joyful disposition” while still remaining grounded in reality without being “naïvely or always happy” (Jones 130). It is this realism of her personality and her disposition to liveliness that served James as a talisman in their years apart as he dealt with his grief and guilt. Yet, the only real reference to Ellie feeling pain is in reference to James leaving to move to the city, which had left her “hurt and confused” (Jones 130). This concrete reference to a negative emotional response from a character that has been resolutely joyful is feeling in foreshadowing her possible reaction to James’ suicide. Her last thoughts, and indeed the last words of the novel, are her repeating again and again, “must ring James, must ring James, must ring, ring…” (Jones 209). Temporally this is significant as she is invoking his memory and calling out to him after his self-inflicted death. Yet, she has no knowledge that he has passed and succumbed to his traumatic memory. In this way, the reader is transported as an actor in the collective memory of the novel. The reader is aware of the dramatic irony of Ellie seeking James when James is already gone and never recoverable. The fact that Ellie never finds out this truth is consistent with Jones’ argument that an individual perspective on memory cannot suffice; rather, to understand post-memory and the present it is the perspective of many that allow truth to become more attainable. Additionally this closing aptly requires consideration that Ellie may in fact lose her joy as she is faced with what is likely to be the first test of her ability to deal with trauma and the creation of traumatic memory. The absence of an answer to this idea suggests once again that clear answers and distinct resolutions are outside the realm of possibilities in traumatic post-memory.
Finding Freedom from Traumatic Memory By using suicide as a symbol demonstrate the futility of repressing traumatic memories Sebald and Jones both create a pessimistic depiction of traumatic memory and its inescapability so that no sanctuary exists for an individual to find solace from grief. Sebald’s most graphic portrayal of this theme comes through the experiences of Ambros Adelwarth, the third character Sebald investigates in The Emigrants. Adelwarth is the representation of Sebald’s contention that traumatic memory haunts the living until they are destroyed to a point past recognition, whether it be physically, emotionally or both. Rather than find memory as a mechanism to uncover truth in order to be free of its bond, Ambros went to the sanatorium of his own free will. So ravaged was he by the images of mass death he encountered during the war that the doctor himself said there was never “a more melancholy person” that Ambros so that every “utterance, every gesture, his entire deportment was tantamount to a constant pleading for leave of absence” (Sebald 111). The trauma of his memories had literally made him the physical manifestation of trauma itself. Sebald purposefully chooses to explain in graphic detail the electroshock therapy Ambrose endured while in the institution: “I see him lying before me, said Dr. Abramsky, the electrodes on his temples, the rubber bit between his teeth, buckled into the canvas wraps that were riveted to the treatment table like a man shrouded for burial at sea” (Sebald 115-16). Ambros did in fact voluntarily make himself a “man shrouded for burial at sea” by seeking death or at least complete oblivion in order to find peace from the recurring images of death, destruction and desolation that had driven him mad and into a state of perpetual depression. These therapies left Ambros in “an extinction as total and irreversible as possible of the capacity to think and remember” (Sebald 114) literally having removed any ability to think and to be in a state of perpetual “dumbness” caused by memory (Sebald 145). Thus, only in a state of complete destruction is Ambros able to find a release, to “look down on earth from a great height” signaling a release to another world where is not tethered down to the reality of life but rather is up in the clouds, unburdened by his trauma (Sebald 145). In Five Bells, James seeks a similar solution to his trauma, finding peace in physical death.
Of all her characters, James is the most melancholy of the individuals, consistently controlled by his traumatic memories so that not a single vignette of him is provided without connotations of death and flashbacks to his distressing experiences. The reader’s initial introduction to James is of a man that constantly feels the “downward tug of time” and is enveloped by memories “of a history he” does not want (Jones 4). James attempts self-medication in order to “change his errant chemistry.” Rather than describe his depression in terms of emotions, Jones instead utilizes the word “chemistry” to connote a scientific and detached expression of his sickness. In this way, the fact that James appears disconnected not only to his trauma but to any positive emotion as well. James is thus an empty shell, devoid of a soul and of human emotion. Even thoughts of his lost love, Ellie, border on the clinically obsessed, being compared to polydipsia, excessive thirst and dipsomania or drunkenness. It is evident that James’ grief has transformed any opportunity at his engulfment in positive emotions into yet another chance for James to lose himself completely in the typhoon of his
emotions. The symbolism of drowning and incessantly, flowing water are reflective of James’ obsessive tendency to dwell on his melancholy and traumatic burden. Like Ambros, James throughout the course of the book’s single day finds this obsession and servitude to his trauma more than he can bear. This idea of complete servitude to his grief is picked up in Jones’ use of the word act rather than decision to describe James’ suicide. It is in fact James’ grief that compels him to act so that it is not a decision made of his own volition. The water subsumes him almost instantly, entering his body, filling chest so that all he felt was the “sad sinking of giving up and letting go” (Jones 201). The water essentially leaves no other room in his body for his trauma to penetrate and continue to control him. Instead, James feels only “a release, a release” and finally finds peace in his death (Jones 201).
Conclusion
Sebald and Jones’ narratives of individual memory and traumatic burdens redefine the traditional notion of memory as a positive source of information for growth and renewal. Instead, the characters both authors create display the ravages of trauma on the human psyche as each teeters precariously on the edge of mental oblivion. Many of these characters voluntarily succumb to their burdens by seeking release in their death. Others are driven into depression and madness by recurring images that are impossible to silence. Even characters such as Sebald and Ellie, both who seem to lack a traumatic burden of their own, are found at the end of the novels to be in contemplative states. Ellie’s last words are hopeful, but they are uttered without the realization that he who she calls to has taken his own life. Sebald too, after exploring in depth the traumas of the four different men, has now in some way transferred their grief and trauma into his own as it has penetrated his psyche, leaving eh reader to wonder if his unearthing of their collective trauma will lead him to suffer under this collective trauma himself. The endings of both novels serve as a reminder that what has been learned about these characters and what the reader has seen, heard and experience with and through them is simply a prologue to their future, which continues to be shrouded in mystery but which unquestionably carries forward the trauma that characterized each of them throughout the novel. Thus, the novels come full circle having first introduced the reader to flawed, traumatized and burdened beings and leaving these characters in either the same state or in a state of perpetual oblivion. It is this lack of closure and this abrupt departure from traditional forms of storytelling that emphasizes each author’s claim that there is no future without first reconstructing the past and even when this reconstruction is pursued, traumatic memory is so indefinable, obscure and all-encompassing that understanding its impact is unmanageable. It is likely that the final memory the authors desire the reader to take away from these novels is the realization that the human mind is enslaved to the burden of trauma and the only release from such a burden is death or the acceptance of a life of mental enslavement to these memories.
Works Cited
Jones, Gail. Five Bells: A Novel. New York: Picador, 2012. Print.
Sebald, W. G. The Emigrants. New York: New Directions, 1997. Print.