Amitav Ghosh: Shadow Lines, 1988
The narrator who does not give his name and his cousin Ila, on childhood memories of
playing together and talking to their uncle, Tridib. Tridib is the focus of the novel – his
genuine interest in the world as an orchestration of details, of comprehending the world
through precise imagining.
“At last, because I could think of nothing else to say, Iasked her whether she
remembered those days when we were children and she and Robi (Ila’s brother) used
to come to Calcutta in the summers, and three of us used to go up to Tridib’s room
whenever we were bored and listen to him, in the still, sultry heat of the afternoons . . . I
asked her, then, whether she had any memory of the stratagems we used to employ to
get Tridib to tell us bout the year he had spent in London, during the war; of how we
used to pore over his photographs when we could persuade him to bring them out; of
how he used to tell us of people in them, pointing out Mrs. Price with May in her arms,
or Alan Tresawsen, her brother, with his bad arm hanging limply at his side, and her
husband Snipe, who used to treat himself with Yeast-Vite tonic for his neuralgia and bile
beans for his blood, … who had once sent Tridib to the chemist’s shop on West End
Lane to buy him a glue called Dentesive so that his dentures would not be shaken out
by the bombs.
Yes, she said nodding, mildly puzzled by my insistence, she did have a fain recollection,
but she could not exactly say she remembered.
But how could you forget? I cried. She shrugged and arched her eyebrows in surprise
and said: It was a long time ago – the real question is, how do you remember? […]
I tried to tell her, but neither then nor later, though we talked about it often, did I ever
succeed in explaining to her that I could not forget because Tridib ahd given me worlds
to travel in and he had given me eyes to see them with; she, who had been travelling
around the world since she was a child, could never understand what those hours in
Tridib’s room had meant to me, a boy who had never been more than a few hundred
miles away from Calcutta.”
[years later in London as students, the narrator always marveling at the Underground, a
talismanic name for him through the memory of Tridib’s tales about London, Ila
impatient with his behvior in the style of a “third-world tapioca farmer”:] “I could not
persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one’s
imagination; that her practical, bustling London was no less invented than mine, neither
more nor less true, only very far apart. […] Tridib was an archeologist, he was not
interested in fairylands: the one thing he wanted to teach me, he used to say, was to
use my imagination with precision. [. . . ] I knew that the sights Tridib saw in his
imagination were infinitely more detailed, more precise than anything I would ever see.
He said to me once that one could never know anything except through desire, real
desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive
desire, a longing for anything that was not in oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried
once beyond the limits of one’s mind to other times and other places, and even, if one
was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one’s image in
the mirror.
What could I say of this to Ila as she sipped her whisky in the Kembles Head? Ila lived
so intensely in the present that she would not have believed that there were really
people like Tridib, who could experience the world as concretely in their imagination as
she did through her senses, more so if anything, since to them those experiences were
permanently available in their memories . . . For Ila the current was the real.” [on
sighseeing in London the narrator spots an old office which turns out to be the Left Book
Club where Alan Tresawsen worked, as reported by Tridib:] “Ila looked at the window
again, with mild interest, and said: Looks like any musty old office, doesn’t it?
To me it didn’t, for having seen it first through Tridib’s eyes, its past seemed concurrent
with its present.” [Tridib on inventing places/things properly – to be free of other
people’s inventions]
[The narrator enacting Tridib’s memories of London – its topography, houses of people
he knew]
[Tridib dies in communal violence in Dhaka, the narrator’s grandmother’s home before
the Partition]
“Every word I write about those events of 1964 is the product of a struggle with silence.
It is a struggle I am destined to lose – have already lost – for even after all these years I
do not know where within me, in which corner of my world, this silence lies. All I know of
it is what it is not. It is not, for example, a silece of an imperfect ememory. Nor is it a
silence enforced by a ruthless state – no barbed wire, no check-points to tell me where
its boundaries lie. I know nothing about this silence except that it lies outside the reach
of my intelligence, beyond words – that is why this silence must win, must inevitably
defeat me, because it is not a presence at all; it is simply a gap, a hole, an emptiness in
which there are no words.” [213]
“The enemy of silence is speech, but there can be no speech without words, and there
can be no words without meanings – so it follows, inexorably, in the manner of
syllogisms, that when we try to speak of events of which we do not know the meaning,
we must lose ourselbes in the silence that lies in the gap between words and the world.
This is a silence that is proof against any conceivable act of scorn or courage; it lies
beyond definace – for what means have we to defy the mere absence of meaning?
Where there’s no meaning, there is banality, and that is what this silence consists in,
that is why it cannot be defeated – because it is the silence of an absolute,
imprenetrable banality” [214]
[discovering that the riots in Dhaka and the riots in Calcutta he experienced as a child
must have been connected, the narrator is surprised by his and other’s inability to
remember – and describe – the event that they experienced as utter terror. They all
remember the war with China of 1962 as an event, the riot seems insignificantly local in
comparison]
“Surely you remember, I said. There were terrible riots in Calcutta in 1964.
I see, said Malik. What happened?
I opened my mouth to answer and found I had nothing to say. All I could have told them
about was of the sound of voices running past the walls of my school, and of a glimpse
of a mob in Park Circus. The silent terror that surrounded my memory of those events,
and my belief in their importance, seemed laughably out of proportion to those trivial
recollections.
There was a riot, I said helplessly.
…
And so, fifteen years after his death, Tridib watched over me as I tried to learn the
meaning of distance.
J.M. Coetzee Foe, 1986
[Susan on the island – monotony of the wind is the most disturbing expeirence: ] “In
time the rain ceased and the sun came out, drawing wisps of steam from the earth, and
the wind resumed and blew without respite till the next lull and the next rain. Wind, rain,
wind, rain: such was the pattern of the days in that place, and had been, for all I knew,
since the beginning of time.”
Later, when I had grown freer with him, I told him of my surprise."Suppose," said I, "that
one day we are saved. Would you not regret it that youcould not bring back with you
some record of your years of shipwreck, so that whatyou have passed through shall not
die from memory? And if we are never saved, butperish one by one, as may happen,
would you not wish for a memorial to be leftbehind, so that the next voyagers to make
landfall here, whoever they may be, mayread and learn about us, and perhaps shed a
tear? For surely, with every day thatpasses, our memories grow less certain, as even a
statue in marble is worn away byrain, till at last we can no longer tell what shape the
sculptor's hand gave it.What memories do you even now preserve of the fatal storm, the
prayers of yourcompanions, your terror when the waves engulfed you, your gratitude as
you werecast up on the shore, your first stumbling explorations, your fear of
savagebeasts, the discomforts of those first nights (did you not tell me you slept in
atree?)? Is it not possible to manufacture paper and ink and set down what
tracesremain of these memories, so that they will outlive you; or, failing paper andink, to
burn the story upon wood, or engrave it upon rock? We may lack many thingson this
island, but certainly time is not one of them."'I spoke fervently, I believe, but Cruso was
unmoved. "Nothing isforgotten," said he; and then: "Nothing I have forgotten is worth
theremembering."'
“I do not wish to dispute, but you have forgotten much … there is no shame in
forgetting: it is our nature to forget as it is our nature to grow old and pass away. But
seen from too remote a vantage, life begins to lose its particularity.All shipwrecks
become the same shipwreck, all castaways the same castaway,sunburnt, lonely, clad in
the skins of the beasts he has slain. The truth thatmakes your story yours alone, that
sets you apart from the old mariner by thefireside spinning yarns of sea-monsters and
mermaids, resides in a thousandtouches which today may seem of no importance, such
as: When you made your needle(the needle you store in your belt), by what means did
you pierce the eye? Whenyou sewed your hat, what did you use for thread? Touches
like these will one daypersuade your countrymen that it is all true, every word, there was
indeed once anisland in the middle of the ocean where the wind blew and the gulls cried
from thecliffs and a man named Cruso paced about in his apeskin clothes, scanning the
horizon for a sail.”
[Back in England, Susan teaching Friday language, no sign of comprehension in his
eyes]
“Then there is the matter of Friday’s tongue. On the island I accepted that I should
never learn how Friday lost his tongue, as I accepted that I should never learn how apes
crossed the sea. But what we can accept in life we cannot accept in history. To tell my
story and be silent on Friday’s tongue is no better than offering a book for sale with
pages in it qietly left empty. Yet the only tongue that can tell Friday’s secret is the
tongue he has lost!”
“The unnatural years Friday had spenet with Cruso had deadened his heart, making him
cold, incurious, like an animal wrapt entirely in himself.”
'"Oh, Friday, how can I make you understand the cravings felt by those of uswho live in
a world of speech to have our questions answered! It is like ourdesire, when we kiss
someone, to feel the lips we kiss respond to us. Otherwise would we not be content to
bestow our kisses on statues, the cold statues of kingsqueens and gods and
goddesses? Why do you think we do not kiss statues, and sleep with statues in our
beds, men with the statues of women and women with the statuesof men, statues
carved in postures of desire? Do you think it is only because marble is cold? Lie long
enough with a statue in your bed, with warm covers overthe two of you, and the marble
will grow warm. No, it is not because the statue iscold but because it is dead, or rather,
because it has never lived and never will.”
[on the island Friday rowed his boat to the place where the ship was wrecked] “It is for
us to descend into the mouth … It is for us to open Friday’s mouth and hear what it
holds: silence, perhaps, or a roar, like the roar of a seashell held to the ear”
“Speech is but a means through which the word may be uttered, it is not the word itself.
Friday has no speech, but he has fongers…. None is so deprived that he cannot write.”
“I turned to Friday, still busy at his writing. The paper before him was heavily smudged,
as by a child unused to the pen, but there was writing on it, writing of a kind, rows and
rows of the letter o tightly packed together. A second page lay at his elbow, fully written
over, and it was the same. [Friday’s writing on Foe’s paper dressed in Foe’s clothes, at
his desk]
“Friday, I say, …. what is this ship?” But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it
comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies are
their own signs/ It is the home of Friday.He turns and turns till he lies at full length, his
face to my face. The skin is tight across his bpnes, his lips are drawn back. I pass a
fingernail across his teech, trying to find a way in.”
Toni Morrison, Beloved, 1987.
Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory.
You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places,
places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it-stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a
picture floating around out there outside my
head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or
saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened."
"Can other people see it?" asked Denver.
"Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear
something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it's you thinking it up. A
thought picture. But no. It's when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody
else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It's never going away. Even if
the whole farm--every tree and grass blade of it dies.
The picture is still there and what's more, if you go there--you who never was there--if
you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for
you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can't never go there. Never. Because even though
it's all over--over and done with-it's going to always be there waiting for you. That's how come I had to get all my
children out. No matter what." Denver picked at her fingernails. "If it's still there, waiting,
thatmust mean that nothing ever dies."
Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name.
Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking
for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don't know her
name? Although she has claim, she is not claimed. In the place where long grass
opens, the girl who waited to be loved and cry shame erupts into her separate
parts, to make it easy for the chewing laughter to swallow her all away.
It was not a story to pass on.
They forgot her like a bad dream. After they made up their tales, shaped
and decorated them, those that saw her that day on the porch quickly and
deliberately forgot her. It took longer for those who had spoken to her, lived
with her, fallen in love with her, to forget, until they realized they couldn't
remember or repeat a single thing she said, and began to believe that, other
than what they themselves were thinking, she hadn't said anything at all. So,
in the end, they forgot her too. Remembering seemed unwise. They never knew
where or why she crouched, or whose was the underwater face she needed like
that. Where the memory of the smile under her chin might have been and was not,
a latch latched and lichen attached its apple-green bloom to the metal. What
made her think her fingernails could open locks the rain rained on?
It was not a story to pass on.
So they forgot her. Like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep.
Occasionally, however, the rustle of a skirt hushes when they wake, and the
knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep seem to belong to the sleeper. Sometimes the
photograph of a close friend or relative--looked at too long--shifts, and
something more familiar than the dear face itself moves there. They can touch
it if they like, but don't, because they know things will never be the same if
they do.
This is not a story to pass on.
Down by the stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and
go. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they
will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked
there.
By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the
footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather.
Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves,
or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather.
Certainly no clamor for a kiss.
Beloved.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: „Polityka przekładu”, w Heydel, Bukowski, Współczesne
teorie przekładu, Znak 2009. [przeł. Dorota Kołodziejczyk]
[przekład jako uleganie tekstowi, intymne czytanie, eros jako etos przekładu:] „Przekład
jest najintymniejszym aktem czytania. Ulegam tesktowi, gdy tłumaczę. Pieśni te,
chóralnie śpiewane w rodzinie jeszcze przed początkami pamięci, są mi szczególnie
bliskie. Czytanie i uleganie nabierają w tym przypadku nowych znaczeń. Tłumaczka
uzyskuje pozwolenie na dokonanie transgresji od śladu innego – sprzed pamięci – do
najbliższych miejsc ja. [406]
„Retoryczna natura każdego języka zaburza w pewien sposób jego logiczną
systematyczność. Jeśli będziemy akcentować logiczność kosztem owych retorycznych
zakłóceń, pozostanimy w bezpiecznej sytuacji” [406]
„Tłumaczka musi więc przede wszystkim ulec tekstowi. Musi dołożyć starań, aby teskt
ukazał granice swojego języka, ponieważ ów retoryczny aspekt wskaże ciszę
absolutnego wystrzępienia język, którą tekst w specyficzny sposób stara się odeprzeć.
podmiot postkolonialny – outsider z wnętrza języka: Coetzee Foe – „Powieść ta
pokazuje, jak niestosowne jest pragnienie dominującego, aby dać głos tubylcowi z
kolonii. ... Coetzee jako biały Kreol dokonuje przekładu Robinsona Crusoe,
przedstawiając Piętaszka jako czynny podmiot wycofania.” [421] Umiłowana Toni
Morrison – „Przedstawienie tego przesłania [wycofanego z pamięci wraz z językiem, w
jakim było wypowiedziane] gdy przechodzi przez niepamięć śmierci do Umiłowanej,
córki-ducha Sethe, również jest wycofaniem: ‘To nie jest historia do opowiedzenia” [422]
Bella Brodzki can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory,
Stanford UP, 2007
[translation after Benjamin “The Task of the Translator”:] “translation is a redemptive
mode that ensures the aurvival, the living on, of an individual text or cultural narrative,
albeit in a revised or altered form” [1-2] Derrida – the scene of translation is insciribed
within a scene of inheritance” – Benjamin’s notion of translation as survival … is to be
understood as implying, not the extension of life, but an infusion, a transfusion, of
otherness” [2]
[relationship between survival and cultural memory] “translation [is] a kind of critical and
dynamic displacement…” [2]
“We are most accustomed to thinking of translation as an empirical linguistic maneuver,
but excavating or unarthing burial sites or ruins in order to reconstrict traces of the
physical and textual past in a new context is also a mode of translation, just as
resurrecting a memory or interpreting a dream are acts of translation” [4] [GHOSTS in
ethnic literature, see Toni Morrison] In the process of being transferred from one realm
or condition to another, the source event or idea is necessarily reconfigured; the result
of translation is that the original, also inaccessible, is no longer an original per se; it is a
pretext whose identity has been redefined.” [4] [REWRITING in postcolonial fiction such
a redefinition of the original, rerouting the memory carried on or represented with the
narrative]
[memory articulated, time-lag of the act of translation as the vehicle of transformation]
[Benjamin:] “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it
actually was. It means to seize the hold of memory as it flashes up at a moment of
danger.” […]
“rememberance as a corrective flash of insight that emerges in times of crisis, and in
response to political and cultural persecution, to the threat of erasure of the voices of
resistance, disruption, and heterogeneity by totalitarian regimes. “ [5]
[translation as survival:] “survival as a cultural practice and ymbolic action, and above all
as a process that extends life, but one that also prolongs the meaning traces of deathin-life, life after death, and life after life. […] To cross the threshold from life to death and
from death to afterlife is to be translated… Through the act of translation, remnants and
fragments are inscribed – reclaimed and recounted as a narrative – and then
recollected collectively; that is, altered and reinscribed into history that also undergoes
alteration transformation, in the process. [6]
[translator’s transparency – invisibility – ambivalent:] at once acknowledged as
pervasive, while effectively ignored…. [the translator, as well as cultural translator – a
writer restoring memory/reinventing history – ghosting after an original, hanuting the
original with what comes after]
[problem of transmission] “the construction of identity and difference [is] a problem of
translation – not only temporal – between generations, but also spatial – across
cultures. [as in postcolonial context the intergenerational transmission happens over a
breach, a gap, is discontinuous and necessarily multidirectional]
[memory as an intersubjective, social realm, not an individual event or subjective force:]
“memory’s dependence on external stimuli. … Involuntary memories … are
metonimically associated and rooted in the sensorial and the unexpected [Proust] ….
provoked and solicited by speech acts of others, and are thus dialogical and
metaphorical in nature. [153]
Pheng Cheah: Spectral Nationality. Passages of freedom from Kant to postcolonial
literatures of liberation, New York: Columbia UP, 2003
“Spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist or that the past )and maube
even the future they ffer to prophesy) is still very much alive and at work, within the
living present; all it says, if it can be tought to speak, is that the living present is scarcely
as self-sufficient as it claims to be… (pp.38-9) [Tom Lewis in Ghostly Demarcations:
SM’s specter figurally represents the inherent instability of reality. Granting only a
fleeting modality to material being, it serves as the sign of an ‘always already’
unrealized and unrealizable ontology, within both the social and the natural domains’
[140] ontology then replaced with “hauntology’ “To haunt does not mean to be present,
and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very constrcution of a concept. …
Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism’ (SM161). Lewis: “The specter thus
may be said to represent more than the instability of the real; it also represents the
ghostly embodiment of a fear and panic provoked by intimations of an impossible state
of being. … Thees responses inevitably produce intractable libidinal investments in
ontologies. [Ghostly…140]
Bishnupriya Ghosh: When Borne Across: literary Cosmopolitics in Contemprary India,
Rutgers Uni Press, 2004.
Concept of cosmopolitics - LOCALIZING PRACTICES OF COSMOPOLITICAL
WRITERS - the local is reinstalled by the outsiders – it’s always a cosmopolitan act of
prying into somewhere where one does not – already, any more –belong. A
reconstruction has to happen through a fascinated alien.
[58] from Clifford on diasporas – migrant cultures that share originary narratives of
dispersal and metonymically reach for forms of gathering. Such attachments outside the
current countries of residence are necessarily imaginary loci. From Gilroy – a diaspora
performs through a transnational social imaginary reconstituting historical memory.
The uncanny in cospomopolitical novels has a crucial role of restoring the vernacular (!!
Very important for me) [153] the cosmopolitical novel’s participation in national
spectrology … a phenomenon arising from ruptures in official history – [hence the
persistence of magic realist techniques] textual grafting – incorporation of local popular
memory in cosmopolitical novels requires translation for global autdiences [here – any
translocal/urban audiences] .. the political imperative to vernacular restoration that such
grafting implies Ghosh’s The cacutta Chromosome … dramatizes ethical spectrology as
a postcolonial imperative.
[then – uncanny discourse as a vehicle for restoration of the local and vernacular,
always also already translated for the non-local audience, thus never authentic and
original, represented as mediated through writing, nostalgic hindsight, distorting memory
– several levels of distance.]
[154 the narrative modes operating in Ghosh’s novels, but also in many cosmopolitical
novels – allegorizing the process of retrieving knowledge – here archiving vernacular
cultural material. Ghosts jolt realist narration, and grafts (cutting, splicing, recombining
of otherness) suggest the healing of an epistemological loss”] Ghosting and grafting
function [obviously] metatextually.
Vilashini Cooppan: Worlds Within – National Narratives and Gobal Connections in
Postcolonial Writing, Stanford UP, Stanford, 2009
[xvi] More than entombing the nation, the present enjoins on us the task of reanimating
it. This means learning to see nations in more places and in more ways, as less
bounded by their borders and more inextricably connected to all that seems to lie
outside them, as well as all that lies inside: the alien, the unheimlich (uncanny), the
other within. …[xvii] Naitons, this book argues, are fantasmatic objects knotted together
by ambivalent forces of desire, indentification, memory, and forgetting, even as they
simultaneously move within, across, and beyond a series of spatial and temporal
borders (us/them, territory/flow, present/past, life/death). The space of nations is never
simply their own. What the structure of national identigication conceives of as the
outside – the world beyond the border, the cultural other outside the compact – is in fact
always already inside, always already present in the very moment and process of
national formation.
[xix] on Conrad’s HD – the novella shares with the Freudian uncanny an oscillating
temporality that renders the present continuous with the past and the self coincident
with the other. [xx] literary texts are subject to a ghostly life of return and reanimation,
just like the narratives of nation and psyche.
[15] Freud’s uncanny returns as the double of the messianic temporality Derrida calls
spectrality. … Visually, the uncanny appears as the problematic of apparitional
knowledge, knowledge that appears … in the guise of a ghost. Temporally, the uncanny
emerges in the instant when past and present are linked in an untimely, noncontinuous
fashion. [also an autoimmune incorporation in which a certain outside is introjected into
a certain inside] … Derrida proposes the ghost itself as the “cause of the knowledge
and the [16] search, the motive of history or of the episteme.” […] “ phantom – a
presence that comes back from the past to generate the promise of the future (a
hauntology) [18] phantasm - a double , a ghost.” [17]