Narrative Desire and Historical Reparations by Timothy Gauthier

Author:Timothy Gauthier [Gauthier, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415803380
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2009-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

Loss of Innocence: Global and Personal

The Holocaust brought about a profound shift in Western civilization’s sense of itself. It challenged the “identity” that Western civilization had constructed for itself over centuries, and in which it had so much invested. In the light of acts of atrocity carried out in the name of science, rationalism and order, we are obliged to rethink precisely what it means to be “enlightened.” As Lawrence Langer observes, the Holocaust “still mocks the idea of civilization” (183). The sense that things have reached an impasse and that the original conception can never be recuperated is bound to elicit nihilistic preoccupations and overwhelming feelings of disenchantment. The contrast with life before the Fall is simply too drastic, too harsh to bear. What is needed to counteract this inevitable pessimism is a reconceptualization that does not deny the past but incorporates it into a new version of a Western self. If this is the “age of camps,” Zygmunt Bauman contends, it is also by necessity the age of revaluation (Life 193).

The traumatic events in Black Dogs lead the characters to undergo precisely this kind of personal revaluation. Bernard and June are thrown back upon their beliefs and find them wanting. McEwan presents this experience as a loss of innocence. The recurrent theme of loss in McEwan’s fiction is often dramatized as a trauma rather than a positive step in the maturation process. The knowledge acquired through these experiences changes these individuals—when it doesn’t kill them—and effectively cuts off any return to their pre-trauma condition. McEwan’s fiction frequently contains the motif of the individual striving to recapture that lost innocence and the bliss once conferred by ignorance.6 In all of these cases, however, the futility of such a quest is apparent and psychic survival depends upon an incorporation of the trauma into a new conception of self.

This maneuver, however, is not so easily effected since it requires the assimilating of characteristics that are alien to one’s previous conception of self as well as coming to terms with what may be repulsive aspects of one’s personality. As Steven Cohan observes, “a consciousness of lost innocence— of imperfection and corruption and, hence, of guilt—frequently underlies the accomplishment of maturity” (6). This accomplishment is usually brought about through the construction of a narrative that formulates potentially positive outcomes from an otherwise horrible event, and the Holocaust is no exception in this regard. In order not to feel entirely alienated from one’s previous conception of self, the individual must create a narrative that accounts for it as well as the most recent changes induced by the trauma. Cohan contends that historically the English novel has presented a series of characters “who struggle for selfhood in a world that assaults and yet encourages their egoism, and whose experience leads them to growth and knowledge, to comprehension of and integration with the world beyond the self” (2). But the knowledge gained may serve to awaken in the individual a sense of the flawed status of the world and self.

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