Proverbs, Tales, and the Narrative of Memory

Moderator: DeWitt Clinton

University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

clintond@uww.edu

Memory as Fairytale, Fairytale as Holocaust Horror: Fictional Representation in Holocaust Art

The fairy tales, “Sleeping Beauty {Briar Rose} and Hansel and Gretel have become

two of the most charming and mesmerizing fairy tales for children, providing guidance and insights into the moral tribulations of a future life as an adult. Imagining these fairy tales as Holocaust motif is quite impossible, yet novelists are beginning to use the Holocaust in challenging “representational” ways that survivors and witnesses would have found shocking and disturbing.

Why do artists, especially writers, use the Holocaust in creative and imaginative ways to re-tell the horror of the Nazi hatred toward European Jews, Gypsies and other ethnic and political groups? In fact, Theodor Adorno, European post Holocaust critic and philosopher, warned all artists to avoid writing about Auschwitz for it would be barbarous to make art from such a horror. Yet much to his chagrin, thousands of artists have resisted his instructions and have made extraordinary “imagined” memories out of the Holocaust.

Two contemporary novelists have improvised and adapted the German fairy tales of

Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretel creating a representation of the Holocaust by creating memories that do not, of course, exist, yet they have become compelling narratives of danger, resistance, escape, flight and survival that reflect not only the fairy tales, but the real imagined Polish characters who do survive and tell others “never to forget.”

Jane Yolen and Louise Murphy, authors of Briar Rose and The True Story of Hansel and Gretel, reflect this growing need and desire of artists to find artistic subtexts as a way of re-telling the Holocaust through fiction and fairy tale. This presentation will focus on the psychological impact of making a Holocaust memory out of fiction and fairy tale, yet it will also address the larger issue of Holocaust “representation” and how memory can be as compelling and truthful even when it is only a literary motif, structure or adapted narrative device, creating the most provocative and controversial art that has developed out of the Holocaust.

DeWitt Clinton

Univ. of Wisconsin-Whitewater

clintond@uww.edu

We Sacked Rome: Primitivism and the Production of Whiteness in Janet Fitch’s White Oleander

In this paper, I will explore the role that a mythical, remembered history plays in the construction of whiteness, sexuality, and definitions of primitivism and civilization in Janet Fitch's White Oleander. In the novel, the memory of a gloriously primitive past is

intimately linked to the present realities of a young girl struggling to construct herself both in relation to its haunting presence and in resistance against its influence. Regardless of her attempts to escape from its legacy, however, this utopian, savage past hovers over her life, continuously informing the development of her racial, sexual, individual, communal, and historical identity. In this paper, I will explore how the memory of a past that never happened, or is only vaguely recalled as myth and folklore, constructs the present and future realities of Fitch's characters, and how the impossible desire to return to or reenact that historical memory places Ingrid and Astrid Magnussen in a difficult negotiation with time, space, and identity.  Astrid, a blossoming adolescent artist, is the daughter of Ingrid, a Scandinavian poetess who prides herself on descending from what is cast in the novel as a fiercely independent race of barbarians---the Vikings, conquerors of Rome.  Through Ingrid's stories, poems, and lessons Astrid learns of her "ancestors" and the wars they waged with the heart of civilization, a war that Ingrid daily reenacts.  Astrid has savage blood running through her veins, blood which carries the memory of "her" ancient battle, and thus she attempts to negotiate her present reality with the history written on and in her body.  The bodies of mother and daughter become history books,

pages upon which the bloody victories of the Vikings are inscribed.

Throughout the novel, the memory of this history in emphasized as the key component in the construction of Astrid's identity, and the primary motivation underlying Ingrid's vengeful actions.  Ingrid's tyranny over Astrid's character development doubles for the overpowering influence that history and memory wield, specifically as the reader watches Astrid's inability to escape her mother's all-encompassing voice.  No matter how much Astrid desires to rid herself of her mother's influence, and no matter how differently Astrid attempts to construct herself in opposition to that influence, she is never able to fully gain autonomy and create a life for herself in the present minus her mother.  Ingrid, then, is not only a metaphor for this primitive history, but she is also the embodiment of it---she is the link between Astrid's future and her primitive, violent past.

Ashley Hetrick

Beloit College

hetricka@stu.beloit.edu

Proverbs, Signifying and the Origins of Fiction

The paper is a critical response to the theory of 'Signifying' as expounded by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his work "The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique on Sign and the Signifying Monkey". It examines "Signifying" among the black people in the Diaspora and locates it within the rhetorical strategies of the Yoruba people in Nigeria."Signifying" as a critical strategy is then critiqued with a view to establishing its strength and weak points.

The paper contends that "Signifying" is still alive among the Yoruba people in Nigeria and offers the Yoruba proverb as a major rhetorical strategy the Yoruba use to pun, trope, parody, attack through indirection, and perform other functions the black in the Diaspora associate with "Signifying". This assertion is illustrated by copious examples which are analysed to shed light on their signifying functions. The insight obtained from this exercise justifies the claim by Allan Dundes that the origin of  signifying could "lie in African rhetoric".

Apart from the function of signifying, the paper equally contends that the proverb is structurally similar to the narrative fiction in that it makes use of characters, plot and theme.It concludes that since the narrative text behaves like the proverb, the proverb is one of its remote origins.

Kunle Okesipe

Independent Scholar

ogunnian@yahoo.com

Stringing the Words, Weaving the Story: Storytelling as the Mythic Form of Preserving the Pacific Communal Memory

In my presentation, I will describe storytelling in the Pacific women fiction, Potiki by Patricia Grace and Where We Once Belonged by Sia Figiel, as the mythic form of preserving the communal memory.

In the first part of my presentation, I will discuss the distinction between the “historical” and “mythic” memory and their function in the post-colonial discourse. While the “historical” memory represents the logic and linearity of the Western written thought, the “mythic” memory implies the orality of the communal, indigenous and post-colonial cultures.

In the Pacific literature, the mythic memory is preserved in the form of spiral narration. The repetitive and symbolic qualities of the linked vignettes resemble the meticulous act of su’ifefiloi, the indigenous tradition of stringing flowers to make a lei, a wreath. In the Pacific literature, the symbol of the wreath becomes most significant in the mythic process of linking the past, the present and the future of the indigenous community.

The second part of my presentation will focus on storytelling as the representation of how the past, particularly in the form of religious beliefs and practices, legends and artistic expressions, shapes the understandings of the present; and as in a spiral or circle, how present constitutes the understanding of the community’s past.

In the last part of my presentation, I will discuss storytelling as the cultural and historical palimpsest. In both novels, stories function as the space for expression of the past and the explanation for the present cultural "inscriptions" (memories) that have remained upon the Maori and Samoan communities.

Kasia Rozanska

Univ. of Northern Iowa

krozanska@yahoo.com