Memory and Identity in Modern and Postmodern American Literature

202 Pages·2022·4.402 MB·English

by  Lovorka Gruic Grmusa, Biljana Oklopcic

Lovorka Gruic Grmusa
Biljana Oklopcic
Memory and
Identity in Modern
and Postmodern
American
Literature
Memory and Identity in Modern and Postmodern
American Literature
·
Lovorka Gruic Grmusa Biljana Oklopcic
Memory and Identity
in Modern and Postmodern
American Literature
Lovorka Gruic Grmusa Biljana Oklopcic
Department of English Department of English
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Rijeka University of Osijek
Rijeka, Croatia Osijek, Croatia
ISBN 978-981-19-5024-7 ISBN 978-981-19-5025-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5025-4
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
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Acknowledgements
This book is the result of many years of research and writing, and there are many
persons whom we would like to thank for their assistance, contribution, and interest,
but also for occasionally bringing us into the light of day and reminding us that there
is more to life than memory and identity in the modern and postmodern American
literature.
For funding our research work in the USA and Europe over the past decade or two,
we are indebted to the Fulbright Scholar Program that brought us to the University
of California, Los Angeles, famous for its interdisciplinary studies and a wealth of
titles, including both archive materials and the most recent publications as well as to
the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, the renowned academic community nurturing rigorous scholarship,
critical conversations, and creative expressions for the diverse and changing Amer-
ican South, several substantial grants from Duke University, the John F. Kennedy
Institute in Berlin, the Erasmus+ mobility program, and the courtesy of the Institut
für Amerikanistik in Graz, Ohio State University, the University of Cincinnati, and
the University of Colorado, Denver, for their generous research aid, which proved
priceless in finalizing this book.
In turning the manuscript into a book, we would like to thank the Springer Verlag
for their support and assistance. In particular, we owe a debt to Rebecca Zhu for
her belief in the project and to Rammohan Krishnamurthy and Bhagyalakkshme
Sreenivasan for their superb work as editors, as well as to Prof. Denise Pilato for
proofreading.
There are many people to whom we owe thanks for helping us to complete
this work, but we would like to express particular gratitude to the following: our
readers; our colleagues Sanja Runtic´, Ljubica Matek, Jasna Poljak Rehlicki, Jadranka
Zlomislic´; our mentors Prof. Boris Senker, Prof. Stipe Grgas and Prof. N. Katherine
Hayles; our parents and parents-in-law, Eva and Lovre Gruic´ (post-mortem), Danica
and Franjo Tonc (post-mortem), Marija Oklopcˇic´, and our friends wherever they are.
v
vi Acknowledgements
Finally, to our children, Rebeka Monika and Roko, and our husbands, Mario and
Zoran, we cannot hope to express the thanks that they deserve. Since we began this
research, they have been by our side, offering inspiration, advice, encouragement,
and emotional support when needed. They have always been there to listen to our
thoughts and doubts and have never hesitated to challenge our ideas, always bringing
a new perspective to every issue. We love you.
Biljana Oklopcic
Lovorka Gruic Grmusa
Contents
1 Introduction ................................................... 1
References ..................................................... 11
2 The Great Gatsby: A Memory of the Memory ...................... 15
References ..................................................... 36
3 Light in August: Memory and Identity ............................ 39
References ..................................................... 62
4 A Streetcar Named Desire: Memory, Self, and Culture .............. 67
References ..................................................... 91
5 Gerald’s Party: Embodied Memories and Fluid Identities ........... 93
5.1 Episodic and Embodied Memories ............................ 96
5.2 Fluid, Role-Play Identities and Zombielike, Dehumanized,
and Indiscernible Characters ................................. 109
References ..................................................... 125
6 Everything is Illuminated: Unproductive Memories,
Memorization Through Fictional Yizker and Dialogic
Exchange, and Postmemory ..................................... 129
6.1 Unproductive Memories and Inertness ......................... 132
6.2 The Reverberation of Memory via Fictional Yizker
and Dialogic Exchange Toward ‘Collective Creation’ ............ 139
6.3 Postmemory: Intergenerational and Transgenerational
Transfer of Trauma ......................................... 150
References ..................................................... 158
7 Against the Day: A Mis/Re-membered and Re/Imagined
Pilgrimage and Hybrid Identities ................................ 163
7.1 “A Memory of a Memory” (AtD 84) Against the Backdrop
of Conflicting Historiography and Multiple Identities ............ 169
vii
viii Contents
7.2 The Fluidity and Locomotion of Water: An Analogy
for Meandering Borders, Cultural Creolization,
and Crisscrossed Identities ................................... 177
7.3 Subjugation, Trauma, Disappearance, and Disinterment:
“The Same History of Exile and Migration” (AtD 928); “Four
Hundred Years, We Have Been Exiles in Our Own Land”
(AtD 819) ................................................. 182
7.4 Stereotypes and the Spectacle of Terror: God Preserve
You from the Hands of the Uskoks of Senj, “Already Half
Folkloric” (AtD 870) ........................................ 186
References ..................................................... 190
Index ............................................................. 195
Chapter 1
Introduction
Abstract Apart from self-image and ancestry origins, our memories—our reinter-
pretations of past experiences, cultural contexts, and national his-stories—frame our
identity and constitute our subjective selfhood. Using this idea as a starting point, the
book attempts to show how American literary modernism and postmodernism inter-
connect memory and identity, what approaches to memory and identity modernists
and postmodernists utilize in their works, and if, and how, the intertwining of memory
and identity has been related to the dominant socio-cultural trends in the United
States of a particular decade or era and informed by specific historical contexts else-
where in the world. Impacted by turbulent social, political, and cultural changes
and upheavals on a regional, national, and global scale, the identity formation in
the modern era was mostly bound to the retrieval of individual (episodic and auto-
biographical) and shared (collective and cultural) memories and mediated through
sensory, material, and historical cues. Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Williams explored
the peculiarities of individual and shared memory retrieval processes, turning recol-
lections into a traumatic memory of individual and collective identity. In the age of
globalization and pervasive technological mediation, both memory and identity are
constituted through the experiences of immediacy, simultaneity, instantaneity, and
positioning, revealing fragmented, mediated, fluid, and unstable subjects. Pynchon,
Coover, and Safran Foer observed these dynamics and depicted memory as contin-
gent, process-dependent, and constructed, inclined to both official amnesia and the
indoctrinated and re-mediated remembrance (in service of implicit political agendas);
and characterized identity as precarious and unsettled, process or context-dependent
phenomena.
· · · ·
Keywords Modernism Postmodernism Memory Iidentity Memory
·
retrieval American literature
This book came about as the joint (ad)venture into the exploration of memory
and identity in the American literature of the twentieth and twenty first century.
In our initial discussions of these issues, we, each from our own perspective: Biljana
Oklopcˇic´’s being modernist and Lovorka Gruic´ Grmuša’s postmodern, noticed with
some alarm that the scope of our writing had significantly expanded. Yet, the more
we thought about it, the more we became aware of what we should do, and in what
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 1
L. G. Grmusa and B. Oklopcic, Memory and Identity in Modern and Postmodern
American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5025-4_1
2 1 Introduction
ways we should express ourselves. This book is the expression of these thoughts
and ideas. Coming from a non US-Americanist perspective, this contribution to the
scholarly production about memory and identity in American literature of the twen-
tieth and early twenty first century discusses how American literary modernism and
postmodernism interconnect the two phenomena, what approaches to memory and
identity modernists and postmodernists utilize in their works, and if, and how, the
intertwining of memory and identity has been related to the dominant socio-cultural
trends in the United States of a particular decade or era (in which the analyzed works
were published), and informed by specific historical contexts elsewhere in the world
(the Holocaust and Southeastern Europe), narrated in the chosen texts.
Diversified phenomena engaging encoding, storage and retrieval processes can be
classified under the term memory. Recollection of any sort includes remembrances
of the past for memory is a mode of neural re-presentation of information to which
a person was previously exposed and which can be reactivated for use in the present
(Baddeley 2000, 292–304). Thus, remembering always happens in the present, while
its referent is of the past—absent but (re)articulated from the present point of view
(Hutcheon 1988, 88; James 1950, 627; Ratnam 2018, 1/10) as the residues of the past
linger for “the past is indissolubly woven into the present” (Adorno 1978, 166) and
memories are “functionally important in shaping present constructs of the self” and to
“the cohesion of self over time” (Gutman et al. 2010, 2). Apart from self-image and
ancestry origins, our memories, our reinterpretations of past experiences, cultural
contexts and national his-stories frame our identity, they constitute our subjective
selfhood.
Following the grain of the prevailing theories of what memories are—“knowledge
from the past... not necessarily knowledge about the past” (Margalit 2002, 14,
emphasis in the original), “the capacity to remember, to create and re-create our
past” (Rodriguez and Fortier 2007, 1), “an experience of time” (Nalbantian 2003,2),
the book’s opening chapter, titled “The Great Gatsby: A Memory of the Memory,” is
the interrogation of the narrator, Nick Carraway’s, memories of Jay Gatsby and his
own life in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). The chapter looks at how
the narrator combines not only individual but also shared memories, which are in
his case founded on tradition, legacy, heritage, and nostalgia and attached to spatial,
emotional, and material factors, composes the story about his family, his hometown,
his Middle West, and his 1922 New York experience. Unlike Nick’s familial and
regional memories that testify to his deep emotional attachment to his family and
hometown/home state, his New York memories are traumatic in essence because he
is revealed to be a triple failure: he failed in business, interpersonal relationships,
and writing Gatsby’s story. The major part of the chapter analyzes how Nick writes
Gatsby in his recollections: through voluntary memory production, dependence on
visual perception and specific spatial (e.g., East Egg and West Egg), material (e.g.,
house and photographs) and temporal (the Jazz Age) factors, utilization of hearsay,
fist-hand and second-hand memories, biographical memories, fictionalized narra-
tive, rememory, (re)living of emotions, chronicle, history proper, and a whole array
of different memory conveyors (Nick himself, Jordan Baker, Gatsby’s guests, Meyer