Fugitive Pieces Research Articles

Between Past and Future: Temporal Thresholds in Narrative Texts

SummaryThis article is concerned with time and temporality in human experience as well as in narrative representation. The focus is directed at the representation of thresholds, threshold experiences, borders and boundaries in narrative texts, but where these concepts are more often than not analysed from a spatial perspective, the temporality of these forms of liminality is foregrounded here. Using Ricoeur's views on time, temporality, historicality and the representation of time as points of departure and referring to Jesse Matz's discussion of the postmodern time crisis, the so-called “era of the nanosecond”, the representation of time-related themes and the aesthetic rendering of threshold experiences in Anne Michaels's novel Fugitive Pieces are explored.

A Poetics of Testimony and Trauma Healing in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces

This essay draws on critical theories of post-Holocaust testimony and postmemory in conjunction with the emerging sociological concept of “empathetic identification” to investigate the implications of trauma healing in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces . The novel features two protagonist narrators—Jacob Beer, a child survivor of the Holocaust, and Ben, a child of Holocaust survivor parents—each acknowledging the moral imperatives to remember the painful past of the Holocaust as well as the need to envision the possibility of coming to terms with the horrors of the past. Contrary to Holocaust literature that focuses on the irredeemable breakdown in the psyche, Fugitive Pieces makes it the central motivating aim to ponder the complex and bewildering experience of healing. With two memoirs—Jacob’s and Ben’s—each addressing the traumatic memory for the dead and to the living, Fugitive Pieces is characteristically structured as a model of the witnessing process, a process that aims to move beyond the isolation imposed by trauma. As a theoretical starting point in my reading of Fugitive Pieces , I turn to the psychoanalytical theory of testimony and postmemory—especially the works of Dori Laub and Marianne Hirsch— to examine how testimony in association with empathetic identification can help sustain life after massive trauma.

“Every Moment Is Two Moments”: Witnessing and the Poetics of Trauma in Fugitive Pieces , by Anne Michaels

“Every Moment Is Two Moments”: Witnessing and the Poetics of Trauma in Fugitive Pieces , by Anne Michaels

Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction: Theorizing Foundling and Lyric Plots by Barbara L. Estrin

Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction: Theorizing Foundling and Lyric Plots. By Barbara L. Estrin. Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2012. 255 pp. Reviewed by Erin Ellerbeck In a seminal essay on Shakespearean adaptation, Charles Marowitz declares Shakespeare “a living presence and a constant stimulus” (468). He proposes that Shakespeare’s plays have become Ur-texts that are “being used as paradigms for new texts”; what modern audiences most desire, he suggests, is not “the routine repetition of [Shakespeare’s] words and imagery,” but instead new works that dissolve and reshape the plays in order to create “that sense of vicissitude, variety, and intellectual vigor with which the author himself confronted the seventeenth century” (478). Marowitz employs a biologicalgenealogical metaphor to express his frustration with critics who want to preserve Shakespeare rather than adapt his works for the present era: Shakespeare’s “‘greatness’ is nothing more than the sperm-bank from which we must spawn our own offspring” (478). Shakespeare thus becomes, in Marowitz’s estimation, the (sometimes anonymous) father of literary children who are the heirs to an artistic achievement that must be adapted continually in order to maintain its vitality. In Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction: Theorizing Foundling and Lyric Plots, Barbara L. Estrin examines the offspring spawned from the Shakespearean sperm bank and uses her interpretations of novels to re-evaluate three of Shakespeare’s plays: she takes Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood, Liz Jensens’s Ark Baby, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, and Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces as “theoretical lenses” to contest received critical opinions about The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. Although the novels are not explicitly Shakespearean adaptations (Estrin terms some of them “Shakespearean re-visions”), their attitudes toward foundlings and familial formation prompt her to “read back” and revisit Shakespeare’s plays (13). Shakespeare’s creative achievements and his ability to adapt and adjust inherited narrative formulas, in other words, are brought to light by an examination of the concerns and accomplishments of his distant artistic descendants. Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction is a substantial contribution to the field of adoption studies. It follows Marianne Novy’s influential Adoption & Culture Vol. 4 (2014) 232 Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama (2005), which analyzes adoption in literature from Sophocles to Barbara Kingsolver, by considering the influence of adoption narratives on the perception of adoptees and “suggest[ing] something of the great range in the possibilities for adoption plots” (2). It explores new territory, however, by deliberately eschewing Novy’s “standpoint theory” and avoiding the personal narratives of nonfictional adoptees in favor of an examination of the “mythological homogeneity” of the foundling plot (xx). Estrin links the continued influence of the foundling plot to contemporary cultural issues, providing readers with a “reverse” literary history of the perceived supremacy of bloodlines. In particular, she ties foundling plots to current immigration crises in Western Europe and the United States, connecting extreme forms of nationalism to the longstanding mythology of the purity of blood and lineage. In the chapters on The Nature of Blood, Austerlitz, and Fugitive Pieces, her focus is on narratives that deal with the Holocaust. The first half of Estrin’s book is dedicated to the four contemporary novels;thesecondhalfusesthemastheoreticalmodelsforunderstanding Shakespeare’s plays. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the study is its analysis of the ancient foundling plot alongside the Petrarchan lyric. Because the Petrarchan lyric speaker “generates” poetry when his beloved rejects him, Estrin proposes, he becomes a self-generator, making himself anew in the face of abandonment. In the same way that orphan or foundling characters are free to recreate their identities, the Petrarchan speaker is liberated from the ties of marriage and family. The four novels that she discusses question not only the supremacy of bloodlines but also the gendered, hierarchical structure of the lyric plot. In Austerlitz and Fugitive Pieces, for instance, the losses of family narratives and thus familial identities spur characters to invert the gender roles typical of Petrarchan love plots. By redefining both foundling plots and lyric plots, Estrin argues, the novels promote an “openness” to a model of culture that is not based in biology. In Shakespeare’s world...

Canadian literature of ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’: CanLit Balkans

This article examines the use of ‘the Balkan’ as a trope in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion and Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces. Whilst speaking to a well-established inventory of ‘the Balkan’ that invokes the region and its peoples in a range of exoticising and demonising metaphors, the texts under consideration also mobilise the Balkan trope in order to interrogate national myths of homogeneity and essentialist notions of identity - issues central to the political and cultural debates taking place in Canada during the 1980s and 1990s when both novels were published. By drawing on the historical, political and cultural affinities between the Balkans and Canada, in terms of their geopolitical liminality, cultural multiplicity and fraught European legacies, Ondaatje and Michaels redefine ‘the Balkan’ as a mediating and enabling site within a multiplicity of fraught contexts, and thus explore the ethical, critical and political possibilities of a transnational literary positionality.

Holocaust literature and historiography in Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces

This paper examines Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (2007) in the context of Holocaust literature and historiography. It begins with an introduction to the genre of Holocaust literature and the problematic nature of ‘survivor’ testimony. Michaels’ work is then contextualized within this body of literature. The essay goes on to examine the means through which Michaels approaches the act of writing history, specifically the recording of history through alternative means to the hegemonic historiography utilized by the Nazis.

FOLDING BACK THE SKIN OF TEXT: Anne Michaels'S Fugitive Pieces of Trauma, Testimony, and Auto/Biographical Form(s)

A reflection on the processes, limitations, and liberations of genre, Fugitive Pieces insists simultaneously on the absolute failure of—and necessity for—autobiographical and biographical forms. I argue the text calls for the impossibility of separating genres, texts, selves, and stories in the responsibility of telling out of Holocaust trauma.

"The First Negro Novelist": Charles Chesnutt's Point of View and the Emergence of African American Literature

"The First Negro Novelist":Charles Chesnutt's Point of View and the Emergence of African American Literature Michael Nowlin (bio) In 1895, Charles Chesnutt, an aspiring author with a few stories in the Atlantic Monthly to his credit, was asked by a clubwoman named Alice Haldeman to help her with the literary side of a paper she was preparing called "What Has the Negro Done in Science and Literature?" "There are very few American colored men who have written anything which could really be dignified with the name of literature," Chesnutt informed her. He mentioned Phillis Wheatley, Alexander Crummell, and various African American journalists, but concluded, "None of these productions however can be classed as literature in the higher and finer sense of the term. They are efforts in the right direction and constitute the promise I hope of better things to come in a brighter future." He then acknowledged the recent "efforts in the line of pure literature" shown by Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Edwin Campbell, and implied that his own effort would do more than these to bring the brighter future closer to hand: "My works . . . are principally yet unwritten, or at least unpublished. Such fugitive pieces as I have given to the world however, have perhaps gained recognition in higher authors' quarters than the productions of any other acknowledged colored writer in the United States . . . ."1 Charles Chesnutt, I will argue, became the foundational author he became, and thus helped inaugurate African American literature to the extent that he did, in good part because of this dismissive view of writing by African Americans before him, evident elsewhere in his correspondence and journals. It seems hardly accidental that Chesnutt's hopes for a brighter literary future were voiced as such in the year of Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Exposition address and on the eve of the Supreme Court's 1896 decision [End Page 147] on Plessy v. Ferguson, and that they received some confirmation shortly after the case when William Dean Howells recognized Dunbar as "the first instance of an American negro who had evinced innate distinction in literature."2 Such coincidences strengthen Kenneth W. Warren's argument, which I aim here to extend and complicate, that Jim Crow gave new impetus to the project of creating an African American literature, and a new urgency to getting such a literature recognized as "literary."3 We can think roughly of the 1890s—at least from 1892, the year Plessy v. Ferguson began and the year of Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice from the South—as the moment in which an ultimately productive awareness of what Pascale Casanova calls "literary destitution" took root for the most ambitious black literary aspirants, and Chesnutt would capitalize on it, to the detriment even of Dunbar in the long run, in ways that determined his foundational stature and the ambiguous values that would attach themselves to it.4 There is an obvious reason why Jim Crow's legal regime maintaining restrictions on African American economic, educational, and political prospects, in tandem with its cultural regime of maintaining African American "inferiority" under the rubric "separate but equal," should have motivated African American literary production. Insofar as literature's power to advance social justice and broaden human sympathies was a longstanding cultural assumption of the Victorian era, African Americans could use it to combat systematic segregation as they once used it to combat slavery. This view of literature, then, reveals more constancy than discontinuity in writing by African Americans; that Chesnutt committed himself to the "high, holy purpose" of using literature to convince white readers of the immorality, illegitimacy, and irrationality of their ways surely puts him in line with William Wells Brown, whose work he found embarrassing.5 But literary production would also become more valued for reasons that sit uneasily with such purposefulness. For the young Chesnutt teaching at a segregated school in Fayetteville, North Carolina, "literature" meant among other things a shot at professional, middle-class status in a northern "Metropolis," as we see in the remarkable journal entry from 1881 detailing his dream of being "an author": In my present vocation, I would never accumulate a competency, with all...

From Cohen to Carson: The Poet's Novel in Canada (review)

Reviewed by: From Cohen to Carson: The Poet's Novel in Canada Robert McGill (bio) Ian Rae . From Cohen to Carson: The Poet's Novel in Canada. McGill-Queen's University Press. 2008. 400. $95.00 Why have so many contemporary Canadian novelists started out as poets? Ian Rae poses this question at the outset of his book but spends little time speculating about an answer, preferring to focus not on why authors have made the shift but on how they've done so. As successive chapters treat Leonard Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, and Anne Carson, Rae makes it clear that those who study these writers' fiction ignore the poetry at some peril. Tracking each author's transition from short lyrics to long poems and thence to the novel, Rae deftly illustrates how the writers' early preoccupations with language and narrative structure metamorphose along with changes in form, such that strategies and techniques first adopted for poetry are then productively brought to bear on fiction. Accordingly, From Cohen to Carson offers a persuasive map of continuities as well as innovations for each writer's career. However, what emerges even more strikingly is an implicit argument for a distinctive national tradition of the poet-novelist, one stretching at least as far back as A.M. Klein's 1951 [End Page 327] novel The Second Scroll. Rae is careful to emphasize that his authors don't form a 'monolithic school,' but he evokes amply a shared sense of artistic community and aesthetic mission. While recognizing biographical connections between the writers, Rae's interests are primarily formalist. He sees in his chosen authors a fascination with deconstructing varieties of narrative 'frames,' as well as a penchant for reiteration rather than chronological order. Rae's readings of novels such as Cohen's Beautiful Losers, Ondaatje's Coming through Slaughter, and Marlatt's Ana Historic are sturdy pieces of criticism building upon established scholarship. The book's highlight is a bravura reading of Carson's Autobiography of Red, a text that in this study could have been the fly in the ointment, since the book isn't self-evidently a novel. However, Rae argues Carson's text into relevance through the force of his analysis, offering exegesis that is at once impressively learned, keen to locate Carson in a Canadian poetic lineage, and scrupulously devoted to close reading. Having said that, most of Rae's book will be compelling principally for scholars studying the respective authors to whom each chapter is devoted. The exception is the final section, which offers a robust defence of Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces and Ondaatje's The English Patient against Stephen Henighan's now rather notorious charge in 2002 that such novels amount to little more than politically dubious purple prose. Rae takes a laudably even-handed approach in his response, identifying certain limitations of Fugitive Pieces even as he insists, pace Henighan, that these books must be understood not as shapeless products of aesthetic decadence, but rather as participants in a growing national tradition of novels that are conspicuously self-conscious about their use of form and language. Indeed, the possibility of reading From Cohen to Carson as a rigorous refutation of Henighan's polemic might be taken as a sign of success of both critics. Henighan has proven the galvanizing value of provocation, while Rae has demonstrated that academic monographs can serve as a manner of literary senate where sober second thought might hold the day. Robert McGill Robert McGill, Department of English, University of Toronto Copyright © 2011 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

Metaphors of pain: the use of metaphors in trauma narrative with reference to <i>Fugitive pieces</i>

This article is a contribution to the recent interdisciplinary discourse between psychoanalysis, trauma theory and narrative by discussing the traumatic experiences of characters in the novel “Fugitive pieces” by Anne Michaels, with a specific focus on the metaphorical style of this novel. The article addresses the role of metaphor in the memory of trauma while comparing the relation between trauma, narrative and memory with reference to the work of Cathy Caruth, Van der Kolk and Margaret Wilkinson. Recent neurobiological research in the working of the brain during trauma and the insights of Borbelly in the role of metaphor during therapy are discussed. Insights of Lacan, Modell and Laplanche are integrated with those of psychologists like Knox, Borbelly and Van der Hart to counter arguments against the criticism brought against some of the metaphorical themes in “Fugitive pieces”. Metaphor is seen as one possible way of saying the inexpressible and the progression in the use of metaphor by patient and character alike is seen as one of the signs of healing from trauma.

From Cohen to Carson: The Poet’s Novel in Canada (review)

Ian Rae. From Cohen to Carson: The Poet's Novel in Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's up, 2008. 388 pages. $85.00. The poet's novel holds a rather liminal position in Canadian literature; in some ways, it has helped to shape the Canadian canon, poet's novels by Michael Ondaatje, Daphne Marlatt, Leonard Cohen, and others are regularly taught in English departments across the country. These texts helped to substantiate postmodernism in CanLit, providing an alternative in Canadian to the realist tradition epitomized by Hugh MacLennan and carried on by Mordecai Richler, Alice Munro, and a great many other Canadian writers. On the other hand, the poet's novel has also come under considerable attack in recent years, with critics such David Solway and Stephen Henighan attacking the poet's novel lacking in structure, needlessly metaphorical, and overly fragmented. In his careful study of poet's novels in Canada, Ian Rae works to discount these attacks by arguing two intertwined points: that critics of the poet's novels have unfairly viewed the texts according to the conventions of realist and that Canadian poet-novelists have crafted a distinct style of literature with its own subtle set of conventions. At the heart of Rae's discussion is the relationship between the poets' poetry and their fiction. Rae sets the stage in the first chapter, he examines a narrative progression from lyric poetry to serial poetry to long poems, arguing that as the long poem attempts to novelize the traditional lyric sequence by introducing competing voices and styles, it has radically transformed concepts of narrative coherence and sequence in the Canadian novel by adapting the devices of contemporary poetry to prose fiction (3). The resulting poet's novels therefore reject the causal connections of realist fiction, instead modify[ing] serial strategies to create narratives out of seemingly discrete units. These units [...] are primarily connected through patterns of iteration (of diction, symbolism, and myth) (25). Rae goes on to argue that the poet-novelists hold their narratives together through a series of devices that provide a narrative framework; these frames, however, also simultaneously point out their artificial and subjective nature, thus providing the narrative with a frame that unframes itself. Rae uses the term (un)framing throughout his study to refer to this double move of presenting while refuting. Rae moves from this more theoretical discussion to discussing specific examples of the poet's novel in Canada. He devotes each of the following five chapters to a particular poet's novel, focusing on how each performs its act of unframing. The first poet's novel Rae examines is Leonard Cohen's The Favourite Game, which Rae convincingly shows is both heavily indebted to and also written against A.M. Klein's The Second Scroll. The chapter also goes on to provide careful exegesis of the novel, while explaining the narrative relationship between the novel and Cohen's own poetry, all the while arguing that Cohen works in his novel to (un)frame the narrative. This basic template reoccurs throughout the following chapters, Rae looks at, in turn, Michael Ondaatje's Coming Trough Slaughter (which (un)frames the poetic series), George Bowering's A Short, Sad Book (which (un)frames the serial novel), Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic (which (un)frames the quest narrative), and Anne Carson's Autobiography in Red: A Novel in Verse (which (un)frames myth). The study ends with a discussion of Ondaatje's The English Patient and Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces, both of which Rae uses bulwarks against the attacks on the poet's novel by several critics. From start to finish, Rae makes sure that his arguments are both very clearly presented and extremely well researched. He offers a series of sharp exegetical readings of the texts, both poetry and fiction, with which he deals. …

Flyting in the Declaration of Independence and The Vision of Judgment

Though they both lived through the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon and the birth of a new form of English verse, Thomas Jefferson and Lord Byron took little notice of one another. Not much has been written about their relationship, for academic disciplines, departments of literature and political science, conspire to keep them apart. In part, this is justified. In his correspondence and poetry, Byron mentions Jefferson only once, though Jefferson presided over a country that clearly interested him. 'He must have meant to quiz the three presidents or at least two - Jefferson & Madison', Byron wrote of Washington Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York. 'One of them had a wooden leg like Peter Stuyvesant.'1 This fragment of a letter to John Murray, possibly written in 1821, is hardly a promising observation by Byron: it was Governor Morris, not Jefferson or Madison, who used a wooden leg. Unlike Thomas Moore, who wrote about Jefferson and the United States disparagingly, however, Byron admired the country that had produced George Washington, Daniel Boone and Washington Irving. 'Whenever an American requests to see me - (which is not unfrequently) I comply', Byron wrote. '1stly. Because I respect a people who acquired their freedom by firmness without excess - and 2dly. Because these transatlantic visits few and far make me feel as if talking with Posterity from the other side of the Styx.'2 Jefferson had one of the most wide-ranging book collections in the United States, numbering roughly 6,487, but not a single volume by Byron. Jefferson's lack of interest in Byron between 1800 and 1808 is somewhat understandable, for Fugitive Pieces (1806), Hours of Idleness (1807) and English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) were not widely quoted in American newspapers during the years when Jefferson, as America's third president, clipped verse from the papers for his poetry scrapbooks. But Jefferson also ignored Byron after the poet awoke to find himself famous with the publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Apparently, Byron's fame had not reached Monticello. Jefferson, like Byron, preferred poets such as Moore, Campbell and Rogers (not to mention Scott and Burns) to Wordsworth and Coleridge.3 For his poetry scrapbooks, compiled between 1801 and 1809, for example, Jefferson clipped Thomas Moore's 'Song', 'Rondeau', 'Stanzas', 'A Ballad', 'Love and Reason', 'The Lake of the Dismal Swamp', 'translations' from Anacreon and selections from his Irish Melodies. With the exception of John Wolcot (Peter Pindar), who has seventeen entries, Moore is the poet most often represented in Jefferson's poetry scrapbooks, with over ten poems. Jefferson also clipped Rogers' 'A Sketch of the Alps at Day-Break' and 'Farewell' and Campbell's 'To The Evening Star', 'To Caroline', 'Hohen Linden' and 'Exile of Erin'. Though they agreed about Moore, Campbell, Rogers and Scott, they disagreed about Robert Southey. Jefferson admired Southey's shorter poems, clipping no fewer than six of them: 'Oak of Our Fathers', 'Hymn to Content', 'The Death of W. Wallace', 'The Old Man's Comforts' and 'The Widow'.4 The possibility of a literary reckoning between Byron and Jefferson is brought tantalisingly close by the 24-year-old Thomas Moore's visit to Washington DC in 1803. According to one account, Moore was 'the first British traveler to mention Jefferson in print'.5 Moore stayed with the British Ambassador, Anthony Merry, who felt slighted by the republican President when Jefferson failed to greet him in full diplomatic dress.6 'The Merry's have been treated with the most pointed incivility by the present democratic president', Thomas Moore dutifully reported to his mother.7 Moore was received 'in the same homely costume, comprising slippers and Connemara stockings in which Mr. Merry had been received by him, much to that formal Minister's horror'.8 After staying with Merry and his wife, Moore then visited the Federalist editor of the Port Folio, Joseph Dennie (later jailed for sedition), who further poisoned his mind against Jefferson. …

Blood and Soil in Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces: The Pastoral in Holocaust Literature

Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces diverges from earlier literature of the Holocaust in its engagement with the pastoral tradition. While the pastoral had been appropriated by the Nazis as part of their Blood and Soil ideology, Michaels reclaims and revises the pastoral and its sister genre, the elegy. She creates a traumatic pastoral focused on geological cataclysm and redefines Blood and Soil through images of soil soaked with blood. Michaels allows an anthropomorphized nature to grieve, but by presenting images of infertility rather than fertility she refuses the traditional compensatory apparatus of the elegy.

Hours of Idleness

No person is exposed to ridicule till he has deserved it, and if the noble lord had not published his Hours of Idleness, no human being would have guessed the quantity of time he had spent doing nothing. (The Satirist, 1807) At first sight life would appear to have been very pleasant for middle- and upper-class young people around 1800 - so long as the proceeds from tenants, trade, investment and slavery kept flowing in.1 But boredom was an ever-present enemy, and the popularity with both sexes of the craze for decorating furniture, print rooms, albums and screens is hardly surprising. Printsellers such as Rudolph Ackermann were kept busy supplying everything from decorative borders to caricature prints. In Pride and Prejudice Mr Bingley exclaims: 'It is amazing to me [...] how young ladies can have patience to be so very accomplished [...]. They all paint tables, cover skreens, and net purses.'2 Beau Brummell whiled away his exile in France making a six-panel screen (now lost). His biographer, Captain Jesse, describes how the picture of Byron on the screen, surrounded by flowers, had a wasp at his throat. As Jesse comments, this 'was base ingratitude on the part of Brummell, for the noble lord spoke of and would have pasted him with more charitable feeling'.3 And Byron himself, of course, owned a four-panel screen celebrating pugilism and the theatre, which was rescued by John Murray when Byron's effects were being sold in 1816, and can now be seen at Newstead Abbey. For the past two years I have been studying a small, double-sided firescreen (in a private collection) displaying a collection of scraps, poems, songs and riddles. It was made by Elizabeth Pigot who, as Byronists will know, lived in Southwell, near Nottingham, with her three brothers and their widowed mother. The family was related to several comfortably-off neighbouring families including the Bechers, Lowes and Leacrofts. In 1803 the life of this small market town was suddenly enlivened by the arrival of new neighbours, renting the recently built Burgage Manor - Mrs Catherine Byron, the fifteen-year-old Byron and their pet dogs. Readers of this journal will recall that Byron's relations with his mother were so stormy that he often sought refuge across Burgage Green at the Pigot home. Although Elizabeth was six years older, there is evidence in Byron's letters of a blossoming friendship. In August 1804 he wrote to thank her for copying bookplates with his family coat of arms and urged her to knit a watch ribbon and purse for him. In 1805 John Pigot and Byron took leading parts in the Southwell amateur theatrical productions of Richard Cumberland's The Wheel of Fortune and John Allingham's The Weathercock. Byron wrote a witty prologue and flirted with Miss Pigot's cousin, Julia Leacroft. Elizabeth had quickly discovered Byron's talent for writing poetry. They exchanged verses. She made fair copies of his poems, correcting his spelling and punctuation and encouraged him to publish them during summer 1806 as Fugitive Pieces. Elizabeth was proud of this friendship and happy to share her memories in later life with Thomas Moore and John Murray. Megan Boyes, in her invaluable book Love Without Wings, says Elizabeth regretted having 'cut up original manuscripts in Byron's own handwriting' and sending off the fragments to collectors.4 She never married and stayed in Southwell until her death in 1866. The screen consists of two double-sided, glazed panels, each 24 inches square. It is in remarkably good condition, despite water and light damage. At first sight it presents a random collection of poetry, riddles, music manuscript, quirky caricatures and watercolour sketches. Hand-coloured shells, moths and butterflies are scattered around. In the centre of one panel there is a pastoral scene. The other three each feature a 'fancy' picture by Francis Wheatley: The Rustic Lovers, The Industrious Cottager Mending Cabbage Nets and an untitled one showing a boy stealing washing from a sleeping laundress. …

COMFORT AND SCANDAL OF MEMORY

On the threshold of the twenty‐first century, two remarkable novels were published. They differed widely and originated in different societies (Canada and Israel), yet they had something in common too. Anne Michaels, born and educated in Canada and known as a poet, published Fugitive Pieces in 1997. The novel Our Holocaust by the Israeli writer Amir Gutfreund appeared in 2000. Both authors belong to the generation whose knowledge of the Holocaust is based on remembered history—that is, on the memorial narratives of those who went through the experiences themselves. Anne Michaels tells the story of loss, describing the pain, necessity and healing power of memory. At the end of Amir Gutfreund's quest, the knowledge the protagonist had longed for so strongly has become a burden, full of cognitive and emotional dissonance and a disillusion. My analysis of the novels is followed by a critical discussion where the acceptability of the conflicting views offered by these authors is compared.

Contemporary Jewish Writing in Canada: An Anthology (review)

Contemporary Jewish Writing in Canada: An Anthology, edited by Michael Greenstein. Jewish Writing in Contemporary World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 232 pp. $60.00. What is distinctive about contemporary writing? In Contemporary Jewish Writing in Canada: An Anthology, part of Jewish Writing in Contemporary World series edited by Sander L. Gilman, Michael Greenstein provides two answers. first answer appears in an introduction subtitled Sambation to Saskatchewan. Citing Mordecai Richler's description of Canada as of north, Greenstein adapts this Jewish version of many truisms that foreground Canadian inadequacy in relation to USA by asserting, Jewish writing in Canada is doubly ghettoized and regionalized between Montreal and prairies. Montreal dominates; cross looming over Mount Royal contrasts with the welcoming words of Emma Lazarus on Statue of Liberty. In a nine-part introduction, five parts are devoted to writing produced in Montreal: first its Yiddish sources; then work of A. M. Klein, the father of literature; followed by Klein's relationship to Montrealers Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen; Montreal's other major Jewish Mordecai Richler, writer who, until recent international success of Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces, is likely writer best known outside Canada; and finally French connections. Greenstein's geographical introduction then leaps over Ontario to Winnipeg and work of Jack Ludwig, Miriam Waddington, and Adele Wiseman, continuing its westward trek in next subheading, West of Winnipeg: Eli Mandel and Henry Kreisel. Only last two subheadings, Ontario's Outsiders and The Drift of New Voices, allow for possibility of other stories, something Greenstein does acknowledge: there are a number of distinctive voices during course of twentieth century who find mythologies outside of national boundaries. These distinctive voices challenge introduction's reliance upon two well-worn generalizations about Canadian writing. first is myth that Canada has no mythology, a view expressed by Sacvan Bercovitch: Canada's status as a colonial country without a mythology in contrast to 'America' with its indigenous, imperialist sense of identity. second adapts Northrop Frye's garrison mentality metaphor. Admitting that a garrison is not a ghetto, Greenstein appears reluctant to abandon metaphor completely even though many critics of Canadian writing have done so: Canadian-Jewish writing internalizes ghetto-garrison mentality as each writer seeks a means of escaping ghetto while adhering to its traditions. Obviously series of which Contemporary Jewish Writing in Canada is a part requires that editor offer his readers a pithy statement that sums up his subject, even if thesis seems both too grand-does each writer really seek a means of escaping ghetto?-and also not specific enough. Surely such generalizations about escaping ghetto/adhering to traditions might also apply to other countries' contemporary Jewish writing. In contrast to grand narrative of his introduction, in which A. M. Klein remains source and mouth of Jewish writing in Canada, seventeen writers Greenstein includes in anthology represent more than tributaries of A. M. Klein, and in that sense, offer a different story about literature, which is less coherent, and more interesting. Although male authors dominate discussion in introduction, anthology includes writing by nine men and eight women. Greenstein offers no explanation for his editorial choices. …

‘Strong Enough to Carry Experience’: The Holocaust, Multilingualism and the Problem of English

This article examines the special status of the English language in representing the Holocaust. To this end, I look first at three authors who wrote in the late 1940s—David Boder, John Hersey and Ruth Chatterton—and argue that they, in different ways, evoke anxiety in writing about the Holocaust in English. I contrast this early post—war writing with the more recent approach of Anne Michaels in Fugitive Pieces, where one finds a celebration of English as a language of the Holocaust. The move from anxiety to celebration takes place, however, only at the expense of other languages, particularly Yiddish. More generally, I submit that attention to the specific role of a language in representing the Holocaust points to a multilingual approach to language and the Holocaust.

Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800–1876

The separate chapters in this book, according to the author’s avowal, are fugitive pieces from the research that led to his earlier Yucatán’s Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War (Univ. of Texas Press, 1996). Presented as a composite sketch of salient aspects of Yucatecan popular culture during a 75-year time span, the discussions often arrive, in one way or another, at the Caste War, although the book by no means completely orbits around that major historical spasm of nineteenth-century Yucatán. Neither, on the other hand, is it a unified exposition of religion. Rather, it is a more dispersed exhibition of nineteenth-century Yucatecan manners.Sources include a substantial number of archives, but also local ethnographies, secondary accounts, and more theoretical treatments of Latin American and European history. Stories are everywhere, as specific cases punctuate more generalized discussions. Treatments of religious beliefs and practices abound, their intertwined Spanish and Mayan elements forming what is described as “an unwritten almanac of folk knowledge” (chap. 1), but with its various elements multiple and not infrequently in opposition.Nor are these beliefs and practices confined to rural folk: a broad survey chapter includes a sketch of urban piety, fraught with social display and public consumption, with conservatism, elitism, fiestas, processions, bullfights, bailes, lotteries, and rowdiness. In this case, the discussion is carried briefly through the Porfirian period to the revolution and the impacts of mass communication. The chapter that follows provides the folk contrast; the convergence of Spanish and Indian notions there leads to a discussion of the importance and cults of religious images. This climaxes with the fetching story of the Virgin of Tabi—stolen from Tabi by Caste War rebels and then recovered, but still coveted by nearby Sotuta—and ends with references to the Speaking Cross of the Caste War rebels and their relative lack of destruction of churches.Both urban and rural cofradías come in for attention (the latter covered in their relation to local prelates, for whom they were financial assets), culminating with a brief history of the hacienda cult of San Antonio de Padua de Xocneceh. This painting of the saint, which was held by the hacienda of Xocneceh and supported by a cofradía in the beeswax business, was coveted by the nearby town of Oxkutzkab, kidnapped at one point by a band of women, and involved with a rebellion against the cult’s mayordomo. The painting finally does end up at Oxkutzkab as the hacienda deteriorates.The relationship of people to priests involves a discussion of anticlericalism in Yucatán, where local individualism was fueled by economic growth and demographic realignments and exacerbated by an alleged decline in the caliber of the priesthood during the century. In rural areas especially, resentment against the priesthood was related to taxes and money.Perhaps the most attractive sections of the book are those that hang most fully on strong narratives. Padre Doctor Don Raymundo Pérez was born in outlying Bacalar in the eighteenth century. Through brains and luck, he managed to receive an education in Mérida and then became a priest, first in Tabasco and then at Hoctún, near Mérida. He parlayed remunerative curacies into a fortune, and his native shrewdness brought him high standing in the eyes of both the church and the state. A conservative representative of an age that was ceding to an onslaught of liberalism, he survived strains of the Caste War as it came briefly to the west. Like many other churchmen of the time and place, he left two well-educated sons (carrying their mother’s name) and evidently a fortune. Yet he died in 1856, virtually forgotten.A second, contrastive story is that of Padre Amado Belizario Berreiro. In the hope of advancement, he volunteered for the Petén curacy of the bishopric of Mérida, aligned himself for a time with the Petén corregidor, Modesto Méndez, and became involved in altercations with a rogue priest that he finally excommunicated. He witnessed the cashiering of Méndez, resorted to forged alterations of an intercepted letter from Mérida bishop Guerra to the new corregidor, and was banished home to prison—as the bishopric of Guatemala added the Petén to its spiritual realm.Both of these, however, are simply more sustained narratives in a collection of chapters that sparkles with stories of various shades. Like these two, the shorter ones illustrate characteristic nineteenth-century Yucatecan actions, both folk and urban, reflecting the author’s wide acquaintance with the time and place, and in a context of analytical comments drawn widely. The book stands foremost as a contribution to nineteenth-century Yucatecan costumbrismo.

"Our Foothold in Buried Worlds": Place in Holocaust Consciousness and Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces

"Our Foothold in Buried Worlds":Place in Holocaust Consciousness and Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces Dalia Kandiyoti (bio) "What is a man who has no landscape? Nothing but mirrors and tides," reflects Athos Roussos in Anne Michaels's novel Fugitive Pieces (1996). Athos is about to embark on the journey from postwar Athens to Toronto with the Jewish Polish refugee boy Jakob, whom he has hidden in his Greek island home throughout the war (86). That a novel of the Holocaust like Fugitive Pieces makes place central to consciousness is one of its most compelling as well as one of its more unsettling features. How can a narrative of the Holocaust like Fugitive Pieces resurrect the idea of place for survivors, when place is equated with death and absence? Next to the importance of time and history, what is the meaning of place in the context of the Holocaust and its aftermath? How is the perception and experience of place represented in the writing of the Holocaust? These questions are crucial to understanding the narrative of disaster, even though the Holocaust, as Ulrich Baer has observed, following Simon Schama, "appears both geographically and conceptually placeless to us" (46). Death and destruction permeate places; places that were are no more, cutting off survivors from place-based moorings forever. But it is precisely because the disaster annihilated place that we need to consider how place figures in [End Page 300] fictions of the Holocaust and of its survivors. The range of spatialized representations of Holocaust experiences includes predisaster villages and cities, ghettos, places of hiding, transitional spaces of the postliberation period, and sites of exile and resettlement. In many works, the subjects' relationships to these places shape the representation of disaster in significant ways, yet such places have not been extensively treated in literary criticism, for reasons I shall specify. I am most interested in exploring literary treatments of exile and refugee experiences, and particularly the depiction of the child exile-survivor's relationship to his or her places of banishment. Much of Fugitive Pieces concerns the life of Jakob, a hidden child, refugee, and, later, a survivor. The distinct experiences and memory patterns of child survivors of the Holocaust have been of increasing interest to scholars and documentary filmmakers, as Susan Rubin Suleiman has noted in a recent article, in which she refers to such survivors as the "1.5 generation." The differential perspective of the younger hidden child, whose strongest awareness of place might be not that of home but of exile, is at the heart of Fugitive Pieces.1 Through its emphasis on the importance of geography to the child survivor, the novel confronts the problem of post-Holocaust spatiality—the problem of how to relate to place in the context of the event—by affirming the possibility of place-based consciousness even within the framework of destruction and exile. In Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels paradoxically conceives of place both as a site of loss and as a ground of belonging, even though belonging is usually associated with plenitude, a fullness of being in social, spatial, and other contexts. Places of exile allow partial belonging in the novel not least because Michaels shows us how their palimpsestic construction mirrors the survivor's losses. Fugitive Pieces emphasizes the spatial consciousness of the displaced child survivor. Jakob adopts "surrogate" places of partial belonging through spatial doublings and translations, all of which facilitate an imagined continuity between past and present places. In making the places of exile signify with the refugee's own loss, Michaels both extends Holocaust consciousness to places not [End Page 301] usually associated with the event and affirms the survivor's need for continued place-based experience. Moreover, through immersion in the history of his exilic places, the survivor connects his own losses with those of others. The meanings and mirrorings Michaels's protagonists find in their sites of displacement indicate that places are not only what Claude Lanzmann calls non-lieux, or nonplaces, in the narrative of the Holocaust. In Fugitive Pieces, post-Holocaust consciousness claims many topoi, in both senses of the Greek word topos, as recurrent literary theme and as place. Through its emphatic spatial...

"Our Foothold in Buried Worlds": Place in Holocaust Consciousness and Anne Michaels's "Fugitive Pieces"

"Our Foothold in Buried Worlds": Place in Holocaust Consciousness and Anne Michaels's "Fugitive Pieces"