АНАЛИ ФИЛОЛОШКОГ ФАКУЛТЕТА
У Н И В Е Р З И Т Е Т У Б Е О Г Р А Д У Ф И Л ОЛ О Ш К И Ф А КУЛ Т Е Т
Б Е О Г РА Д , 2 0 2 0
U N I V E R S I T É D E B E L G R A D E
ANNALES
DE LA FACULTÉ DE PHILOLOGIE
TOME XXXII 2020 Volume I
BELGRADE 2020
У Н И В Е Р З И Т Е Т У Б Е О Г Р А Д У
АНАЛИ
ФИЛОЛОШКОГ ФАКУЛТЕТА
Књига XXXII 2020 Свеска I
БЕОГРАД 2020
Главни и одговорни уредник др ВЕСНА ПОЛОВИНА, редовни професор
Филолошки факултет у Београду Чланови уређивачког одбора
др ПЕТАР БУЊАК (Филолошки факултет у Београду) др РАДОЈКА ВУКЧЕВИЋ (Филолошки факултет у Београду)
др ЈАГОДА ГРАНИЋ (Свеучилиште у Сплиту) др РАЈНА ДРАГИЋЕВИЋ (Филолошки факултет у Београду)
др ЦЕНКА НИКОЛОВА ИВАНОВА (Великотърновския университет „Св. св. Кирил и Методий“) др ЕКАТЕРИНА ИВАНОВНА ЯКУШКИНА (МГУ)
др БОРКО КОВАЧЕВИЋ (Филолошки факултет у Београду, секретар редакције) др ИГОР ЛАКИЋ (Универзитет Црне Горе)
dr АNDREW SMITH (Emporia State University) др ДАЛИБОР СОЛДАТИЋ (Филолошки факултет у Београду)
dr АLOJZIJA ZUPAN SOSIČ (Univerza v Ljubljani) др ВЕРАН СТАНОЈЕВИЋ (Филолошки факултет у Београду)
др БОШКО СУВАЈЏИЋ (Филолошки факултет у Београду) др ДАРКО ТАНАСКОВИЋ (Филолошки факултет у Београду)
dr ЈUNICHI TOYOTA (Osaka City University) др АЛЛА ГЕННАДЬЕВНА ШЕШКЕН (МГУ)
Издавачки савет
др Слободан Грубачић , редовни професор, Филолошки факултет у Београду др Душан Иванић , редовни професор, Филолошки факултет у Београду др Александра Вранеш , редовни професор, Филолошки факултет у Београду
др Љиљана Марковић , редовни професор, Филолошки факултет у Београду Рецензенти
др ВЕСНА ПОЛОВИНА, редовни професор, Филолошки факултет у Београду др ЉИЉАНА МАРКОВИЋ, редовни професор, Филолошки факултет у Београду др МАРИЈА БУДИСАВЉЕВИЋ ОПАРНИЦА, редовни професор, Arizona State University др АЛЕКСАНДАР ДИМЧЕВ, редовни професор, Универзитет Свети Климент Охридски у Софији
др РАДОЈКА ВУКЧЕВИЋ, редовни професор, Филолошки факултет у Београду др ЈУЛИЈАНА ВУЧО, редовни професор, Филолошки факултет у Београду др СНЕЖАНА ГУДУРИЋ, редовни професор, Филозофски факултет у Новом Саду
др ЕНДРУ СМИТ, редовни професор, Emporia State University др БОШКО СУВАЈЏИЋ, редовни професор, Филолошки факултет у Београду др ЖАРКО БОШЊАКОВИЋ, редовни професор, Филозофски факултет у Новом Саду др ЗОРКА КАШИЋ, редовни професор, Факултет за специјалну едукацију и рехабилитацију
др КИОМИЦУ ЈУИ, редовни професор, Kobe University
др АЛОЈЗИЈА ЗУПАН СОСИЧ, редовни професор, Филозофски факултет у Љубљани дрЂУНИЋИ ТОЈОТА, редовни професор, Osaka City University
др ИГОР ЛАКИЋ, ванредни професор, Универзитет Црне Горе
др СОФИЈА БИЛАНЏИЈА, ванредни професор, Филолошки факултет у Београду др АНА КУЗМАНОВИЋ ЈОВАНОВИЋ, ванредни професор, Филолошки факултет у Београду
др МАЈА МИЛИЧЕВИЋ ПЕТРОВИЋ, ванредни професор, Филолошки факултет у Београду др МИЛИЦА СПРЕМИЋ КОНЧАР, ванредни професор, Филолошки факултет у Београду
др АЛЕКСАНДРА ЈОВАНОВИЋ, ванредни професор, Филолошки факултет у Београду др НЕНАД ТОМОВИЋ, ванредни професор, Филолошки факултет у Београду
др ОЛГА ПАНИЋ КАВГИЋ, доцент,Филозофски факултет у Новом Саду др ВЛАДИМИР ЂУРИЋ, доцент, Филозофски факултет у Нишу др ДРАГАНА РАДОЈЕВИЋ, доцент, Филолошки факултет у Београду
др КСЕНИЈА ВРАНЕШ, доцент, Филолошки факултет у Београду др ТАЊА ТОМАЗИН, Филозофски факултет у Љубљани
С А Д Р Ж А Ј - T A B L E D E S S M A T I È R E S
Sanja M. Gligorić
UNLOCKING TRAUMA IN JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER’S
EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE 11
OTKLJUČAVANJE TRAUME U DELU IZUZETNO GLASNO
I NEVEROVATNO BLIZU DŽONATANA SAFRANA FORA 26 Marija Č. Letić
THE “SMALL WORLD” OF MALCOLM BRADBURY 27
“MALI SVIJET” MALKOLMA BREDBERIJA 38
Марија М. Ђорђевић
ТОНИ МОРИСОН КРОЗ ПРИЗМУ ЏОНА БАРТА:
ДА ЛИ ЈЕ ВОЉЕНА РОМАН ПОСТМОДЕРНЕ? 39
TONI MORRISON THROUGH THE PRISM OF
JOHN BARTH – IS BELOVED A POSTMODERN NOVEL? 53 Наташа В. Нинчетовић
ДЕЛИЛОВО ПОДЗЕМЉЕ: ПРОБЛЕМ ЧОВЕКА ДАНАШЊИЦЕ И ПРУЖАЊЕ ОТПОРА СИСТЕМУ
ПУТЕМ ПОПУЛАРНЕ КУЛТУРЕ 55
DELILLO’S UNDERWORLD: THE PROBLEM OF
THE CONTEMPORARY MAN AND PROVIDING RESISTANCE
TO THE SYSTEM BY MEANS OF POPULAR CULTURE 72
Росанда В. Бајовић
ИСТОРИЈСКА ПОЗАДИНА УСМЕНОГ ЕПСКОГ
НАРАТИВА О ЗИДАЊУ СКАДРА НА БОЈАНИ 73
THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF
“THE WALLING OF SKADAR (SCUTARI)” ORAL EPIC NARRATIVE 99
Марија Љ. Ивановић
ПРЕВОЂЕЊЕ СРПСКЕ НАРОДНЕ (ЕПСКЕ) ПЕСМЕ У
СРПСКУ ИСТОРИЈСКУ ДРАМУ: МНОГОСТРУКОСТ ЗНАЧЕЊА
У ДРАМСКОМ СТВАРАЛАШТВУ АТАНАСИЈА НИКОЛИЋА 101
TRANSLATION OF SERBIAN FOLK (EPIC) POETRY INTO SERBIAN HISTORICAL DRAMA: THE AMBIGUITY
IN ATANASIJE NIKOLIĆ’ S DRAMATIC WORKS 119
Nataša D. Šofranac
SHAKESPEARE’S THREE SHADES
OF SERBIAN – DID HE WRITE ABOUT US? 121
ШЕКСПИРОВЕ ТРИ НИЈАНСЕ СРПСКОГ
– ДА ЛИ ЈЕ ПИСАО О НАМА? 132
Velimir D. Mladenović
LOUIS ARAGON ET LA RÉCEPTION DE SON ŒUVRE DANS
LE MILIEU YOUGOSLAVE ET SERBE DE 1945 À NOS JOURS 133 LUJ ARAGON I RECEPCIJA NJEGOVIH DELA NA JUGOSLOVENSKOM
I SRPSKOM KULTURNOM PROSTORU OD 1945. DO DANAS 147 Весна З. Дицков
ПРЕВОДНА РЕЦЕПЦИЈА ПРИПОВЕДАКА ГАБРИЈЕЛА ГАРСИЈА
МАРКЕСА НА СРПСКОМ ЈЕЗИКУ: ПОСЕБНА ИЗДАЊА 149
LA RECEPCIÓN DE LAS TRADUCCIONES DE LAS ANTOLOGÍAS DE
CUENTOS DE GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ EN EL IDIOMA SERBIO 170 Danijela S. Đorović
ULOGA PREVOĐENJA U NASTAVI JEZIKA STRUKE 171
THE ROLE OF TRANSLATION IN LSP TEACHING 187
Mina S. Suknović
MYTHS AND ARCHETYPES IN RUSHDIE’S POSTCOLONIAL WORLD 189 MITOVI I ARHETIPOVI U POSTKOLONIJALNOM SVETU RUŽDIJA 205 Dragoslava N. Mićović
UTICAJ FONDA USVOJENIH REČI NA RAZUMEVANJE PROČITANOG STRUČNOG TEKSTA NA ENGLESKOM
JEZIKU – PILOT ISTRAŽIVANJE 207
INFLUENCE OF VOCABULARY SIZE ON READING
COMPREHENSION OF ESP TEXTS – PILOT STUDY 220
Ivana M. Marinković Dragana D. Pešić
THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE LEARNING
STRATEGIES IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 221 ЗНАЧАЈ СТРАТЕГИЈА УЧЕЊА ЈЕЗИКА
У УСВАЈАЊУ СТРАНОГ ЈЕЗИКА 239
Pau Bori
LA ENSEÑANZA DEL CATALÁN EN EL MUNDO
Y LA CATALANÍSTICA INTERNACIONAL 241
НАСТАВА КАТАЛОНСКОГ У СВЕТУ И
МЕЂУНАРОДНА КАТАЛАНИСТИКА 258
Branko M. Rakić
PROZODIJSKI MEĐUJEZIK: ISTRAŽIVANJE NA KORPUSU
FRANCUSKIH I SRPSKIH PROSTIH IZJAVNIH REČENICA 259
INTERLANGUE PROSODIQUE: RECHERCHE EXPÉRIMENTALE SUR UN CORPUS DE PHRASES
DÉCLARATIVES SIMPLES FRANÇAISES ET SERBES 282 Јелена Д. Пухар
ДЕЛИМИЧНА СУБЈЕКАТСКА КОНТРОЛА ИНФИНИТИВНИХ ДОПУНСКИХ КОНСТРУКЦИЈА СА ФИНАЛНОМ ВРЕДНОШЋУ
У ИТАЛИЈАНСКОМ ЈЕЗИКУ 283
CONTROLLO PARZIALE DEL SOGGETTO NEI COSTRUTTI INFINITIVI COMPLETIVI CON VALORE
FINALE IN LINGUA ITALIANA 300
Nataša L. Janićijević
IZRAŽAVANJE ANTERIORNE BUDUĆE RADNJE
U ITALIJANSKOM I SRPSKOM JEZIKU 301
THE EXPRESSION OF ANTERIOR FUTURE TIME
SITUATIONS IN ITALIAN AND SERBIAN 315
Јована Д. Вурдеља
СОМАТСКИ ФРАЗЕМИ СА КОМПОНЕНТОМ
BLOD/КРВ У НОРВЕШКОМ И СРПСКОМ ЈЕЗИКУ 317
SOMATIC PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS IN NORWEGIAN
AND SERBIAN WITH COMPONENT BLOD/KRV 333 Marina V. Jović Đalović
ŠOTOKU TAIŠI – RODONAČELNIK JAPANSKE DRŽAVNOSTI 335
SHOTOKU TAISHI – FOUNDER OF THE JAPANESE STATEHOOD 341 Приказ / Review
Radojka Vukčević
GOJKO ĐOGO: POEZIJA U PREVODU 343
Sanja M. Gligorić*1 Ph.D. Student
University of Belgrade Faculty of Philology**2
UNLOCKING TRAUMA IN JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER'S EXTREMELY LOUD
AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE
13The paper presents an analysis of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in terms of the representation of trauma caused by the September 11 attacks that took place in New York in 2001. The novel's nine- year-old narrator Oskar Schell loses his father in the horrid event, which incites a traumatic experience. Aiming to mark the development of this experience, the paper employs the two following concepts: acting out and working through, which have been reintegrated into the field of trauma studies as such by Dominick LaCapra, and were initially Freudian terms (melancholia and mourning). The paper also comments on the belatedness in Oskar's experiencing trauma, an occurrence in realization that was explained by Sigmund Freud and reiterated by Cathy Caruth in her work concerning trauma. Following the analysis of Oskar's experience of trauma, the paper confirms his moving from the stage of acting out to that of working through, and concludes by confirming LaCapra's viewpoint, that a full closure might never occur.
Key Words: trauma, 9/11 novels, Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, acting out, working through.
Introduction
In her seminal study, Linda Hutcheon claims that "postmodernism attempts to be historically aware" and elaborates on its "inexhaustible
* gligoricsanja4@gmail.com
** Final paper submitted by the Ph.D. student as part of the course Contemporary American Novel (taught by prof Radojka Vukčević, Ph.D.)
1 The paper was presented at the 10th Constructions of Identity Conference:
History, Memory, Accomplishment held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania on October 25, 2019, https://doi.org/10.18485/analiff.2020.32.1.1
821.111(73).09-31 Originalni naučni rad Primljen: 02.03.2020.
Prihvaćen: 11.06.2020.
12
Sanja Gligorić
historical and social curiosity" (1988: 30). Malcolm Bradbury, too, asserts this standpoint by claiming that American fiction from 1960 and onwards has been "particularly obsessed with its own past – literary, social, and historical" (1983: 186). Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, regarded as a work of postmodernist fiction, incorporates a steady awareness of American history by using points in time at which tragic events took place to represent trauma, as experienced by the novel's protagonists – Oskar Schell and his paternal grandparents.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close deals with the aftermath of the terrorist attacks which took place in New York on September 11, 2001, during which architectural sites came to be demolished, "together with a whole (Western) value-system and a world order" (Baudrillard, 2003: 38).
According to Irene Kacandes, "being able to move from this threat [the one caused by trauma] to the self involves in part accepting the fact that what seemed impossible did actually happen by telling a narrative about it and feeling the appropriate affect for such an occurrence" (2003: 171), which is precisely what Foer does in this book. The novel's nine-year- old protagonist Oskar Schell loses his father during that horrendous event, which becomes a traumatic experience for him.
Foer's characterization and representation of trauma is such that a set of corresponding concepts from the field of trauma theory can be used to discuss what happens to persons witnessing horrendous events, which cause trauma. In Freudian terms, as restored into trauma studies by Dominick LaCapra, reaction to traumatic events is two-fold : the witnesses and victims express the states of 'acting out' or melancholia and 'working through' or mourning, a dichotomy that applies to memory, which "has become the default theoretical groundwork for working with trauma in literature" (Uytterschout and Versluys, 2008: 216). Additionally, in her work concerning trauma, Cathy Caruth discusses the "belatedness" of such an experience, an idea she draws from Sigmund Freud's concept of latency (1996: 17).
The mentioned theoretical concepts will be applied to the way the narrator Oskar experiences the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in the aim of providing an analysis of how trauma is represented in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and whether or not it is possible for Oskar to fully recuperate from the mentioned tragic event.
UNLOCKING TRAUMA IN JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER’S EXTREMELY LOUD ...
Trauma Theory
Psychological trauma has become an essential issue that has been elaborated on in literary works, as well as in works of popular culture, all of which aim to discuss the shocking moments of witnessing acts of terrorist power and their aftermath. As Baudrillard states regarding the omnipresence of these events,
Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere. There is a global perfusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system of domination as though it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double agent. We can no longer draw a demarcation line around it. It is at the very heart of this culture that combats it (2003: 10).
The increasing occurrence of these events has perpetuated individuals' facing their vulnerability when attempting to come to terms with such horrendous occurrences, causing them to experience trauma, which in itself represents "an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena" (Caruth, 1996: 11). The overwhelming aftermath of witnessing these events is that they "produce profound and lasting changes in psychological arousal, emotion, cognition, and memory" (Herman, 1997: 34), and it is the violence that resides at the epicenter of such attacks that makes it impossible for the person witnessing the event to register it in its totality and fit it into "existing referential frameworks" (Uytterschout and Versluys, 2008: 217).
Although Herman points out that, "no two people have identical reactions, even at the same event" (1997: 58), Caruth states that individuals surviving trauma do go through a similar process, and goes on to discuss Freud's analysis presented in his work concerning the Jewish past titled Moses and Monotheism, whose confrontation with trauma she considers to be "deeply tied to our own historical realities" (1996: 12), and in which Freud defines the term latency relating to the fact that events that are overwhelming in nature are suppressed after they take place unexpectedly, which she considers to explain "the belatedness of historical experience"
(1996: 17) stating that,
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Sanja Gligorić
The experience of trauma, the fact of latency, would thus seem to consist, not in the forgetting of a reality that can hence never be fully known, but in an inherent latency within the experience itself. The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all (Caruth, 1996: 17).
What Caruth is aiming at is precisely the state of any bystander of such tragic events, who is not able to fully grasp what he or she is in fact experiencing. LaCapra shares Caruth's opinion about the belatedness in realization, claiming that "trauma is a disruptive experience that disarticulates the self and creates holes in existence", which "has belated effects that are controlled only with difficulty" and it might be true that such outcomes are "perhaps never fully mastered" (2001: 41).
When LaCapra reintegrated the Freudian dichotomy consisting of melancholia and mourning, he elaborated on the distinction using the following two concepts: acting out and working through, whereby the former is defined as follows:
In post-traumatic acting out (…) one is haunted or possessed by the past and performatively caught up in the compulsive repetition of traumatic scenes-scenes in which the past returns and the future is blocked or fatalistically caught up in a melancholic feedback loop. In acting out, tenses implode, and it is as if one were back there in the past reliving the traumatic scene. Any duality (or double inscription) of time (past and present or future) is experientially collapsed or productive only of aporias and double binds. In this sense, the aporia and the double bind might be seen as marking a trauma that has not been worked through (2001: 21).
By discussing the state of traumatized victims being trapped in a melancholic loop, LaCapra is referring to their inability to let go of the past, for they become haunted by the event, which blurs the line between present and past and persist in repeating what had happened, i.e. memories of the past resurface and victims become trapped in reliving the past unconsciously. Thus, not only does the experience of traumatic events occur
UNLOCKING TRAUMA IN JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER’S EXTREMELY LOUD ...
with belated effect, but also in a manner that is "highly fragmentary" and in no way presented as a coherent narrative, i.e. in the form of nightmares and flashbacks (Uytterschout and Versluys, 2008: 217) pertaining to the constellation of symptoms which the American Psychiatric Association ties to the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD; some other symptoms associated with trauma are the following: "increased rates of Major Depressive Disorder, Panic Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Social Phobia", etc. and "these disorders can either precede, follow, or emerge concurrently with the onset of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder" (Levers, 2012: 9). Victims of such events can often not consciously leave the stage of acting out, but keep reliving the trauma, and can experience additional symptoms resulting in that they
"take longer to fall asleep, are more sensitive to noise, and awaken more frequently during the night" (Herman, 1997: 36). According to Levers, victims responding to the event during this stage of trauma share the following symptoms: "intense fear, helplessness, or horror", "persistent re-experiencing of the traumatic events", and "the disturbance must cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning" (2012: 9).
On the other hand, LaCapra defines the other stage of trauma, working through, in the following manner:
Working through is an articulatory practice: to the extent one works through trauma (as well as transferential relations in general), one is able to distinguish between past and present and to recall in memory that something happened to one (or one's people) back then while realizing that one is living here and now with openings to the future. This does not imply either that there is a pure opposition between past and present or that acting out- whether for the traumatized or for those empathetically relating to them-can be fully transcended toward a state of closure or full ego identity. But it does mean that processes of working through may counteract the force of acting out and the repetition compulsion (2001: 22).
While pointing out that the two stages counteract, LaCapra also points out that it is not a rule for working through to follow immediately
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Sanja Gligorić
after the stage of acting out (2001: 22). However, the stage of working through demands of the sufferer of trauma to begin grasping the reality of the situation and coming to terms with what had happened, whereby he or she moves from the state of melancholia to that of mourning, and thus begins rising above the traumatic experience.
Oskar's Experience of Trauma : Acting Out
The nine-year-old narrator, Oskar Schell, is both an ordinary boy and a very complex and intelligent character. The latter is visible in the way he enjoys reading literature concerning the field of physics (Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time), his love of French language, the worldly knowledge he possesses at such an early age, like calling himself a pacifist while "most people [his] age don't know what that means" (Foer, 2018: 2), as well as in the pristine figurative language that he employs in abundance. Therefore, when Oskar mentions being sad due to what he has gone through, he uses the phrase "wearing heavy boots" (Foer, 2018: 2), whereas when he is happy, he says that it makes him "feel like one hundred dollars" (Foer, 2018: 7). The date of 9/11 becomes "the worst day" (Foer, 2018: 11), and many more examples follow.
It becomes clear at the very beginning of the novel that Oskar has experienced something magnanimously upsetting, which has created in him the need to find flight from it, which he cannot manage to do, for there is a certain heaviness wearing him back down. At one point he says: "there are so many times when you need to make a quick escape, but humans don't have their own wings, or not yet, anyway", after which he says that he is interested in taking up jujitsu classes "for obvious reasons" (Foer, 2018: 2), that being self-defense. The former statement in fact relates to his way of thinking about his Dad's death, which is something elaborated on later when Oskar mentions his following idea:
The fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn't because there aren’t enough skulls!
So what about skyscrapers for dead people that were built down? They could be underneath the skyscrapers for living people
UNLOCKING TRAUMA IN JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER’S EXTREMELY LOUD ...
that are built up. You could bury people one hundred floors down, and a whole dead world could be underneath the living one.
Sometimes I think it would be weird if there were a skyscraper that moved up and down while its elevator stayed in place. So if you wanted to go to the ninety-fifth floor, you'd just press the 95 button and the ninety-fifth floor would come to you. Also, that could be extremely useful, because if you’re on the ninety-fifth floor, and a plane hits below you, the building could take you to the ground, and everyone could be safe (Foer, 2018: 3).
Boys his age do not normally concern themselves with the toil a death can bring, nor do they obsess with ways a tragedy that was as grave as the 9/11 attacks could be prevented – it is precisely the experience of losing his father, coupled with the fact that on the day of his death Thomas Shell left five messages on the answering machine to which Oskar could not answer due to the excessive amount of shock, that make the nine-year-old narrator experience trauma, which is why he soon afterwards "embodies most of the symptoms of trauma, those normally attributed to adults as well as those specific to children" (Uytterschout and Versluys, 2008: 229), an instance of which is his abovementioned string of thoughts and the way he "desperately clings to the memory of his father" (Uytterschout and Versluys, 2008: 232). One night, following an episode of fear, Oskar enters his Dad's closet hesitantly holding "the doorknob for a while before [he] turned it" (Foer, 2018: 36). The very realization of the fact that "even though Dad's coffin was empty" due to the fact that the body was never retrieved after the tragedy, "his closet was full", "and even after more than a year, it still smelled like shaving" (Foer, 2018: 36) brings Oskar in a state of fiercely attempting "to remember every tiny detail" about his father, for
"what the boy wants above all is to piece together an image of his father"
(Uytterschout and Versluys, 2008: 232), which is why the narrative in the present becomes intertwined with his memories of his father,
I touched all of his white T-shirts. I touched his fancy watch that he never wore and the extra laces for his sneakers that would never run around the reservoir again. I put my hands into the pockets of all his jackets (I found a receipt for a cab, a wrapper from a miniature Krackle, and the business card of a diamond
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Sanja Gligorić
supplier). I put my feat into his slippers. I looked at myself in his metal shoehorn. The average person falls asleep in seven minutes, but I couldn't sleep, not after hours, and it made my boots lighter to be around his things, and to touch stuff that he had touched, and to make the hangers hang a little straighter, even though I knew it didn't matter (Foer, 2018: 36-37).
During the stage of acting out, as defined by LaCapra, and visible here in the way Oskar cannot get rid of the image of his father, but keeps returning to the physical remnants of his now gone presence, i.e. his possessions, the narrator manifests further symptoms characteristic of trauma victims, such as taking longer to fall asleep, awakening frequently at nighttime (Herman, 1997: 36), or not being able to seek slumber at all.
Moreover, Oskar expresses a myriad of symptoms which, according to Levers, pertain to the behaviour of victims responding to traumatic events.
He senses "intense fear" of which he is acutely aware, he is caught in a constant "re-experiencing of the traumatic events" (2012: 9):
Even after a year, I still had an extremely difficult time doing certain things, like taking showers, for some reason, and getting into elevators, obviously. There was a lot of stuff that made me panicky, like suspension bridges, germs, airplanes, fireworks, Arab people on the subway (even though I'm not a racist), Arab people in restaurants and coffee shops and other public spaces, scaffolding, sewers and subway grates, bags without owners, shoes, people with mustaches, smoke, knots, tall buildings, turbans. A lot of the time I’d get that feeling like I was in the middle of a huge black ocean, or in deep space, but not in the fascinating way. It's just that everything was incredibly far away from me. It was worst at night. I started inventing things (Foer, 2018: 36).
His state of fear relates to what Kacandes terms the breach between a pre-traumatic and post-traumatic worldview (2003: 180) and it shows that "traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life"
(Herman, 1997: 33). Moreover, "exposure to certain kinds of events may transform one's view of the world, and, consequently, one simply cannot
UNLOCKING TRAUMA IN JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER’S EXTREMELY LOUD ...
be in the world in the same way as prior to exposure (Kacandes, 2003:
171), which is precisely what Oskar is going through seen from the fact that the circle of 'frightening' things has enlarged to a great extent, even including an obsessive "lookout to avert lurking dangers" (Uytterschout and Versluys, 2008: 230), such as entering the Empire State Building, or any skyscraper in general.
Oskar's response to the fact that the tragic event took place is two- fold, for he is "at the same time able and unable to share what he is going through" and thus articulate what happened, pointing towards his "selective inability to testify to his (traumatic) experiences" (Uytterschout and Versluys, 2008: 231), which represents an instance of what Brison (1999) elaborates on as being able to say what happened but failing to register the full impact of the occurrence in question. Such state of suppressing feelings leads to "sudden outbursts of anger towards people" (Uytterschout and Versluys, 2008: 231), mostly those that are closest to him: his mother and Grandmother. At one point in the novel, Oskar shows strong feelings of animosity towards his mother claiming (without wanting to) that if he had any say in the matter, he'd rather have her die than his father,
"Promise me you won't fall in love." "Why would you ask me to promise that?" "Either promise me you'll never fall in love again, or I'm going to stop loving you." "You're not being fair."
"I don't have to be fair! I'm your son!" She let out an enormous breath and said, "You remind me so much of Dad." And then I said something that I wasn't planning on saying, and didn’t even want to say. As it came out of my mouth, I was ashamed that it was mixed with any of Dad's cells that I might have inhaled when we went to visit Ground Zero. "If I could have chosen, I would have chosen you!"
She looked at me for a second, then stood up and walked out of the room. I wish she'd slammed the door, but she didn't.
She closed it carefully, like she always did. I could hear that she didn’t walk away (Foer, 2018: 171).
The verbal exchange is followed up by Oskar asking his mother for forgiveness, and her claiming that she was never mad at him, but hurt (Foer, 2018: 172). This is when Oskar is stuck somewhere between
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"feeling and not feeling" establishing a state of mind which is "a 'mixture' of melancholia and mourning" (Uytterschout and Versluys, 2008: 231).
Oskar's Working Through His Trauma
According to the philosopher Susan Brison, "at least in the case of a single traumatic event, the event is experienced at the time and remembered from that time, although the full emotional impact of the trauma takes time to absorb and work through" (1999: 210). In order to mourn and move away from the belatedness of such a realization, as voiced by both LaCapra (2001: 41) and Caruth (1996: 17) and present in Oskar's stage of acting out, Oskar has to actively realize that he has lost his father in the September 11 attacks, thereby reaching the stage of working through.
What serves as an aid to this stage is the form of the detective tale, which the narrative initially takes. One day, upon rummaging among his father's things, Oskar stumbles upon an envelope containing an unknown and strange-looking key, "fatter and shorter than a normal key" (Foer, 2018: 37). Upon realizing that his attempts to match it with a lock within the apartment are futile, Oskar embarks upon a quest to find the proper lock somewhere in the city of New York, the total number of which he approximates to be "about 162 million locks, which is a crevasse-load of locks" (Foer, 2018: 41). Then he decides to visit every person whose last name is Black and attempt to find the lock in question.
Therefore, there seems to be a puzzle to be resolved, clues to be understood and an answer to be found. However, as it happens in postmodernist works, the purpose of the detective tale resides in something entirely different from resolving a mystery. In his famous essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" (1967) John Barth points out, and confirms later in "The Literature of Replenishment" (1980), that modernism and realism have exhausted the form of the novel and that it "could be revivified by stitching together the amputated limbs and digits in new permutations", i.e. by using pastiche, which "arises from the frustration that everything has been done before" and represents "a kind of permutation, a shuffling of generic and grammatical tics" (Lewis, 2001: 125-126). Lewis also stresses that this particular drive to bring the novel back to life by using pastiche is the reason that contemporary novels "borrow the clothes of different forms", which, in the case of Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly
UNLOCKING TRAUMA IN JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER’S EXTREMELY LOUD ...
Close, has to do with his use of the form of the detective tale, whereby his "impulse behind this cross-dressing is more spasmodic than parodic";
authors of the postmodernist genre also love employing "the pursuit of clues" characteristic of the detective tale due to the fact that "it so closely parallels the hunt for textual meaning by the reader" (Lewis, 2001: 126).
Foer does not employ the dress of the detective tale for the sole purpose of haunting for meaning, which surely is one of its functions, but he adds a further one: that of serving as a means of enabling the novel's protagonist Oskar to find a way to move towards "unlocking his trauma" caused by his father's death, which is, thus, "on a symbolic level" (Uytterschout and Versluys, 2008: 230) being tentatively aided by his quest to find the right lock fitting the key he found among his father's things.
The role of the quest is to help Oskar communicate and verbalize what he has gone through, because it "helps him speak the unspeakable"
(Herman, 1997: 2), which he does, and to complete strangers that he meets upon embarking on it. Oskar does not confide in his mother, or Grandmother and is not willing to share his view of the traumatic event with them (Uytterschout and Versluys, 2008: 231), which is why it can be stated that the symbolic aspect of the quest is located in the fact that there is a door to be unlocked, just not a physical NY front door, but a door leading to Oskar unlocking his trauma and beginning to realize the tragic loss of his father, and thus embarking on working through his pain. As Kacandes points out, numerous critics, academics and psychotherapists
"emphasize the critical act of creating narratives about what has happened in order to 'absorb and work through the trauma'" (2003: 171), which might be the case with the novel's protagonist, who embarks on a seemingly detective narrative, and through that quest manages to find a way to "recall in memory that something happened" to him, and thereby "counteract the force of acting out" (LaCapra, 2001: 22). On one such occasion, Oskar decides to visit Abe Black in Coney Island travelling in a cab, after which Abe offers to give him a ride to the next 'Black', and they embark upon the following conversation:
While we were in the car I told him all about how I was going to meet everyone in New York with the last name Black. He said, "I can relate, in my own way, because I had a dog run away
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Sanja Gligorić
once. She was the best dog in the world. I couldn't have loved her more or treated her better. She didn't want to run away. She just got confused, and followed one thing and then another." "But my dad didn't run away," I said. "He was killed in a terrorist attack (Foer, 2018: 149).
Briefly before this exchange, Oskar mused about driving in a roller coaster and feeling "intense fear" (Levers, 2012: 9), in itself a symptom of trauma and acting out,
Obviously I'm incredibly panicky about roller coasters, but Abe convinced me to ride one with him. (…) In my head, I tried to calculate all of the forces that kept the car on the tracks and me in the car. There was gravity, obviously. And centrifugal force.
And momentum. And the friction between wheels and the tracks.
And wind resistance, I think, or something (Foer, 2018: 147).
Regardless of his fear, Oskar does become able to verbalize, to talk to the stranger, and put into "articulatory practice" (LaCapra, 2001: 22) what he is working through: the act of accepting that his father has died, the source of his trauma, by pronouncing the sentence "he was killed in a terrorist attack" (Foer, 2018: 149).
Regardless of the fact that Oskar shies away from those closest to him but turns to the ones who are unknown to him, his family is always there for him. At first, that might not be obvious, for who would in their right mind let their child wander around an urban landscape as vast as New York without asking any questions? It is only at page 291 that it is revealed that his mother was in on it the whole time,
It didn’t make any sense.
Why hadn't Mom said anything?
Or done anything?
Or cared at all?
And then, all of a sudden, it made perfect sense.
All of a sudden I understood why, when Mom asked where I was going, and I said "Out," she didn't ask any more questions.
She didn't have to, because she knew (Foer, 2018: 291).
UNLOCKING TRAUMA IN JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER’S EXTREMELY LOUD ...
That is precisely why Mr. Black, the old neighbour, behaved as he did when Oskar knocked upon his door, he "was part of it" and his Mom probably told him to go around with Oskar and provide help and assistance during the quest concerning the key found in the blue vase (Foer, 2018:
291). It is her who remains silent in order to help her son because she is aware that he has to go through this stage in order to prepare himself for the possibility of recovering from the trauma he had experienced.
At this point, upon realizing that he did not partake in a detective quest, but something entirely different, Oskar talks to his mother and shares his feelings, which is when he "becomes more of a mourner", as opposed to "the beginning [when] Oskar had more in him of a melancholic"
(Uytterschout and Versluys, 2008: 233), and it is the stage of mourning or working through that helps him realize what had happened in the past, and be aware that he is living in the present moment,
Slowly but certainly, the process of mourning enables traumatized people to develop a narrative memory of the traumatic event. It allows them to remember what happened to them at a certain point in the past, while at the same time realizing that they are living now (Uytterschout and Versluys, 2008: 218).
Oskar embarked upon the quest in order to get closer to his father again, but it ended up bringing him closer to his mother (Uytterschout and Versluys, 2008: 234). However, the final pages of the novel make up a flipbook showing pictures of a falling body that were found online, and by reversing the initial order of these pictures, an image of a body returning back into the building is created, a body that is returning to safety. By doing so Oskar shows again a grave desire to change the past and save his father's life, which relates to an idea explained by LaCapra - that victims and those traumatized might never be able to become "fully transcended toward a state of closure" (LaCapra, 2001: 22). It is precisely these final pages that John Updike (2005) mentions in a New Yorker article when he discusses the novel's "hyperactive visual surface" and stresses that:
The book's graphic embellishments reach a climax in the last pages, when the flip-the-pages device present in some children's books answers Oskar's yearning that everything be run backward
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Sanja Gligorić
– a fall is turned into an ascent. It is one of the most curious happy endings ever contrived, and unexpectedly moving (para. 10).
This climax might indicate that Oskar will never be able to fully recuperate from the horrid events which took place on September 11, or stop missing his father, but the maturity he shows when he reveals his thoughts to his mother are a steady indication of him being prepared to move from the stage of melancholia to the stage of mourning, i.e. from acting out to working through.
Conclusion
Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close partakes in the arena of contemporary literary works that endure in their attempt to speak of what might seem unspeakable, and thereby manage to find a way to properly communicate the traumatic experiences caused by horrendous events, which is how the September 11 attacks have been perceived since their occurrence in 2001.
As the paper shows, Oscar, the novel's protagonist, embarks on a quest in which he manages to unlock the trauma caused by the tragic loss of his father. By employing LaCapra's reintegration of Freudian concepts of melancholia and mourning as acting out and working through, the paper sheds light on particular places in the novel where Oscar exhibits symptoms characteristic of the two stages, and elaborates on the process in which the narrator is seen as hesitantly moving in-between the two, until he crosses to mourning, a point which is also marked in the paper.
The layer of the detective quest is shown to aid the protagonist's process of unlocking his traumatic experience, which in certain places in the novel occurs during the verbal exchanges he has with other characters. The paper exhibits its concluding remarks by shedding light on the narrator's moving from the stage of acting out to that of working through during the course of the novel, while also acknowledging Dominick LaCapra's standpoint regarding the fact that it is uncertain whether Oscar will ever fully recover from the horrifying experience.
UNLOCKING TRAUMA IN JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER’S EXTREMELY LOUD ...
REFERENCES
Baudrillard, J. (2003). The Spirit of Terrorism. New York: Verso.
Bradbury, M. (1983). The Modern American Novel, Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press.
Brison, S. (1999). The Uses of Narrative in the Aftermath of Violence. In C. Card (ed), On Feminist Ethics and Politics (pp. 200-225). Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.
Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed Experience, Trauma Narrative and History.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Herman, J.L. (1997). Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Book.
Hutcheon, L. (1988). A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge.
Kacandes, I. (2003). 9/11/01 = 01/ 27/ 01: The Changed Posttraumatic Self. In J. Greenberg (ed), Trauma at Home: After 9/11 (pp. 168-187). Lincoln, Nebr.:University of Nebraska Press.
LaCapra, D. (2001). Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Levers, L.L. (2002). An Introduction To Counseling Survivors of Trauma:
Beginning to Understand the Context of Trauma. In L.L. Levers (ed), Trauma Counseling. Theories and Interventions (pp. 1-22). New York:
Hamilton Printing.
Lewis, B. (2001). Postmodernism and Literature. In S. Sim (ed), The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism (pp. 121-134). London: Routledge.
Updike, J. (2005, March 14). Mixed Messages. The New Yorker. https://www.
newyorker.com/magazine/2005/03/14/mixed-messages [8.11.2019]
Uytterschout, S., & Versluys, K. (2008). Melancholy and Mourning in Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close". Orbis Litterarum, 63(3), 216-236.
Sources:
Foer, J.S. (2018). Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. London: Penguin Books.
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Sanja Gligorić
OTKLJUČAVANJE TRAUME U DELU IZUZETNO
GLASNO I NEVEROVATNO BLIZU DŽONATANA SAFRANA FORA Sažetak
Rad predstavlja analizu romana Izuzetno glasno i neverovatno blizu Džona- tana Safrana Fora u pogledu načina na koji je u njemu prikazana trauma izazvana terorističkim napadima, koji su se odvili u Njujorku 11. septembra 2001. godine.
Otac devetogodišnjeg naratora Oskara Šela izgubio je život u tom strahovitom događaju, čime otpočinje traumatično iskustvo protagoniste. Sa ciljem da se utvrdi razvoj traumatičnog iskustva, u radu se koriste sledeći koncepti: izvođenje (acting out) i rad-kroz-traumu (working through), koje je Dominik Lakapra uključio u polje studija traume, a koji izvorno jesu Frojdovi pojmovi (melanholija i tuga). U radu se razmatra i zakašnjenje u pogledu Oskarove spoznaje traume, što je ideja koju je najpre izneo Sigmund Frojd, a potom istakla i Keti Karut, u delima u ko- jima se bavi pitanjem traume. Nakon analiziranja Oskarovog doživljaja traume, u radu se iznose zaključni komentari, u kojima se povrđuje da Oskar prelazi iz faze izvođenja u fazu rada-kroz-traumu, i potvrđuje Lakaprino stanovište o tome da se iskustvo traume možda nikada neće zaključiti u potpunosti.
Ključne reči: trauma, književnost nakon 9/11, Džonatan Safran For, Izu- zetno glasno i neverovatno blizu, izvođenje, rad-kroz-traumu.
Marija Č. Letić*1
University of East Sarajevo Faculty of Philosophy
English Language and Literature Department
THE “SMALL WORLD”
OF MALCOLM BRADBURY
Malcolm Bradbury’s novel The History Man (1975) represents one of the most famous campus novels in English. His interest in the university setting started in the fifties with his first novel Eating People is Wrong (1959) and it was finalized with his most famous university novel The History Man. In this paper we will pay attention to Bradbury’s satirical perspective on the university life.
Key words: campus novel, satire, humour, university.
Introduction
When the name of Malcolm Bradbury (1932-2000) is mentioned, one remembers his famous scholarly works on literary history, such as The Modern American Novel (1983), The Modern British Novel (1993), or the study of modern fiction called No, Not Bloomsbury (1997). Moreover, he was a university professor for more than three decades, which provides him with an excellent point of view on university issues. So, the famous historian of literature, university professor, and writer tells a story about a reformed university in England.
Our aim is to see the university life in the novel The History Man (1975) through the lens of “a writer in an age of challenged humanism”
(Knapp 345: 1989), as Bradbury referred to himself. The title of the paper
“small world” we borrowed from David Lodge’s article “Lord of Misrule.”
Lodge, a theoretician of literature and a novelist himself, implies that this novel should be put in historical context because its “small world of the university is a stage for the dramatization and examination of larger issues”
(Lodge 2008, internet).
https://doi.org/10.18485/analiff.2020.32.1.2 821.111.09-31 Originalni naučni rad Primljen: 10.02.2020.
Prihvaćen: 15.05.2020.
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Marija Č. Letić
The History Man is Bradbury’s third novel. This novel grew from two previous university novels, Eating People Is Wrong (1959) and Stepping Westward (1965). These novels depicted various phases in transitional periods in higher education and trends in society in general. So the university settings in these novels is at the same the illustration of the social history of the decade: Eating People Is Wrong illustrates the fifties, Stepping Westward illustrates Europe’s turning to America and its popular culture trends in the sixties, and The History Man is about the radical freethinking of the seventies. The image of the university is the reflection of the society due to the increased public interest in university life.
The final university novel, The History Man, became popular immediately and reviewers mainly emphasized its humorous aspect,12 but the story within the story was a grim image of higher education and its social role. There is a catch in the title: the first impression would be that it is a novel about a historian, or some historical figure, but on the first pages we find out that it is about a professor of sociology at the fictional University of Watermouth. In a smart and humorous manner, The History Man questions issues of traditional values of history, culture, and education versus modern sociological interpretation through the prism of the university.
In his first novel, Eating People Is Wrong, apart from the humorous aspect, Bradbury tried to provide “the first realistic attempt to deal realistically with life at a red-brick University” (Shaw 1981: 62). It is the novel of the fifties. The second novel Stepping Westward (1965) deals with the English writer who visits a Middle-Western American University. It opens some political and national issues. The third and final university novel is The History Man about Howard Kirk, “a radical sociologist”
(Bradbury 1977: 3). Bradbury explains the relation between sociology and history. It all started with the influential book in the fifties The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills:
Mills proposes the ‘sociological imagination’ as a form of what we would call, in another hideous word culled from the wreckage, ‘empowerment.’ He was offering, in a sense, a form of
1 Reviewers mainly defined the novel as “the funniest,” “extremely witty,” “a ruthless satire,” among others.
THE “SMALL WORLD” OF MALCOLM BRADBURY
Marxism without a manifesto, a social critique in the form of a science, a view of history where history already is powered with a well-guided sense of where it’s supposed to go.
Mills was right: his age had turned to the sociological viewpoint. It was the time of the embracing cultural analysis, the handy social textbook. Postwar society was different from pre- war, and required new reporting. In Britain, at this time, Richard Hoggart was publishing The Uses of Literacy, Raymond Williams’
The Long Revolution, the New Left analyzing such forces of social change as youth culture, sport, pop music. (Bradbury, internet)
This new sociological reading of society, tradition, and historical values resulted in a sort of gap between so called social interpretations of society and history and culture. The leftist interpretation found in the university fertile soil. However, this novel, according to Stan Cohen, “says a great deal more about the state of British liberal intelligentsia than it does about the state of sociology” (Cohen 1977: 533). Bradbury said that the subject of the book was “the great radical dreams [that] swept through Western-Europe, through France, Britain, the United States” (Rácz, Bradbury 1990: 99).
What happened to the university?
This novel for sure may be regarded as a university fiction. Of course, within the genre there are stylistic and thematic differences. The conditio sine qua non for the university fiction is the “familiarity with the university background” (Shaw 1981: 45). In general, university fiction relies upon a university setting, students, and professors. The best known novelistic settings of that period were the most famous English universities – Oxford and Cambridge. Accordingly, the setting was often labelled as
“Oxbridge,” usually referring to “the romanticized academic novels of the early nineteenth century” (Womack 2005: 326). Patricia Shaw defines this novelistic interest in universities as a “genre” called the “university novel,”
indicating the term’s inadequacy, since it was related to the Oxford setting till the period after 1945 (Shaw 1981: 44). After the Second World War, the university novel became the campus novel: romantic became satirical.
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Marija Č. Letić
From the 19th century till today, the university fiction has been related to certain social changes, which have affected higher education. One of the first was admittance of women to universities. The second would be the
“increasing public’s interest in the business of higher education” (Womack 2005: 327). The third would be the so called “1944 Education Act,”3 which meant the expansion of higher education, and the fourth would be liberalization of the university in the 1970s. These huge changes in the university system resulted in different attitudes. After 1944, the universities in Great Britain were not elitist intellectual institutions. All of the sudden, the universities grew in the industrial cities (Leicester, Birmingham, Manchester, etc.). Since the universities got the mass of new students, there was a need for new academic staff. The new, red-brick universities resided on inept academicians and confused students. Although the situation was serious, the authors mainly showed it in a humorous manner. The absolute beginner of this humorous, satirical genre was Kingsley Amis with his novel Lucky Jim (1954). In the same decade, Bradbury appears with his Eating People Is Wrong (1959). Some of the famous intellectuals were concerned about the future of higher education. The most famous example is W. Somerset Maugham’s statement expressed in his review of Lucky Jim:
I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house
2 “The Education Act required students to pursue their secondary education to at least the age of 15, while also creating a system of free secondary education consisting of distinct kinds of school, largely ‘‘grammar’’ and ‘‘secondary modern’’ schools. During the decades that followed, the Education Act accomplished its intended goal of producing a greater quantity of college-bound working-class students. Accommodating this influx of grammar-school students likewise necessitated the wholesale expansion of the British university system and resulted in the construction of an assortment of provincial redbrick institutions and new universities across Great
Britain” (Womack 2005: 331).
THE “SMALL WORLD” OF MALCOLM BRADBURY
and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious. They are scum. They will in due course leave the university. Some will doubtless sink back, perhaps with relief, into the modest class from which they emerged; some will take to drink, some to crime, and go to prison. Others will become schoolmasters and form the young, or journalists and mould public opinion. A few will go into Parliament, become Cabinet Ministers and rule the country.
I look upon myself as fortunate that I shall not live to see it. (W.
Somerset Maugham 1955: 4)
The shock, which Lucky Jim provoked in the fifties, is benign in comparison to The History Man from the seventies. The changes of the concept of the university were rapid. From the sixties on, Lodge and Bradbury were university professors and they were part of the new university complexes built “on landscaped sites at the edge of cathedral cities and county towns” (Lodge 2008, internet). That is the scenery where the story of Howard Kirk happened. The new university campuses became the parallel world, in which “[s]tudents herded together and suddenly removed from parental control, were ripe for ideological awakening and sexual experiment, which sometimes turned into indoctrination and exploitation by their teachers” (Lodge 2008, internet).
The “Small World” of Red Brick and Concrete and Glass
This Bradbury novel is often labelled as a campus novel. The campus novel genre or academic satire genre was popular in the UK and the USA in the fifties. The aim of the British government was to occupy the youth with studying since there were no jobs for them. That resulted in huge changes in higher education: everyone could enter the university, regardless of their previous knowledge and hard work, and almost everyone could become a university professor. These new colours of the universities were funny and serious at the same time, so “someone had to do something with it,” as Kingsley Amis said when he visited the senior room at the University of Leicester, where his good friend Philip Larkin worked as a librarian. The result was the academic comedy of manners, or campus novel Lucky Jim:
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Marija Č. Letić
I looked round a couple of times and said to myself, ‘Christ, somebody ought to do something with this.’ Not that it was awful—well, only a bit; it was strange and sort of developed, a whole mode of existence no one had got at from the outside, sort of like the SS in 1940. (Jacobs 1995: 143)
This “whole mode of existence no one had got at from the outside” is the best definition of the “small world” of the university. It is closed, funny, weird, cynical, and hypocritical, and it is different in each of the campus novels. There is a similar scene of the University meeting in Bradbury’s novel:
‘May I point out, Mr Chairperson, that of the persons in this room you are addressing as “gentlemen”, seven are women?’ says Melissa Todoroff. ‘May I suggest the formulation “Can we come to order, persons?” or perhaps “Can we come to order, colleagues?”’
‘Doesn’t the phrase itself suggest we’re somehow normally in a state of disorder?’ asks Roger Fundy. ‘Can I ask whether under Standing Orders of Senate we are bound to terminate this meeting in three and a half hours? And, if so, whether the Chairman thinks an agenda of thirty-four items can be seriously discussed under those limitations, especially since my colleagues will presumably want to take tea?’ (Bradbury 1977: 154)
This is just a part of the whole. The meeting scene is in a form of complex, almost a chapter long multi-dialogic form. Everyone who has experienced the departmental or university meeting finds this chapter very familiar and realistic. In this scene one can notice “pedantry, time-wasting and petty power-mongering of many meetings” (Lippitt 2005: 87). The meeting is long and exhausting, but first of all, it is futile and senseless. It indicates the satirical aspect of both professors and the higher education within the integrated university system. In this excerpt we cast a glance upon the professors. They are a relevant segment of the campus novel form and the main protagonists of this novel.
In this novel the academic setting at the “red-brick” universities became the setting at the “concrete and glass” universities. Such a university is the fictional University of Watermouth: “That bright place of glinting glass and high towers” (Bradbury 1977: 57). Ironically, even in
THE “SMALL WORLD” OF MALCOLM BRADBURY
that bright place of science and academism, there is rain: “It rains on the shopping precinct, as the Kirks do their early-morning shopping; it rains on the terrace, as they unload the wine and the glasses, the bread, the cheese, the sausages; it rains even on the University of Watermouth” (Bradbury 1977:57). This refined example of cynical satire Tory Young picked out as an illustrative example for the use of trope and schemes in literature (Young 2008: 65-66). From the other side, such detailed description of the university campus captured the attention of numerous reviewers. A majority of them indicated the importance of the university buildings as a
“still expanding dream in white concrete glass, and architectural free form”
(Bradbury 1977: 3). These were designed by fictional Finnish architect Jop Kaakinen. Bradbury paid particular attention to the description of the campus interior and exterior. The modern and monumental campus was originally housed in an Elizabethan mansion. This ironic travesty implies the radical change of values in the intellectual, cultural, and academic milieu. It is interesting to say that this was the topic of the architectural paper by Jonathan Hill, in which he explains how “red-brick” universities were replaced by the “plate-glass” universities, as described in the novel The History Man (Hill 2012: 6).
The network of the university of the seventies is based on paradoxes:
big buildings, but with small university minds, and the old Elizabethan cosiness replaced by modern architectonic megastructures. The first thing one can notice is how the social scene at the universities in society in general was changed in just twenty years. Drinking, misbehaviour, fights among the professors were replaced with anarchical freedom, wild parties, promiscuity, and drugs. If Jim Dixon was anti-hero, what one can say for Howard Kirk or for any character from the novel The History Man?
Howard Kirk is unspeakably realistic. That is probably because the novel was based on Bradbury’s own university experience: “He was an entirely familiar figure on every modern campus – if, like me, you happened to teach in one of those bright concrete-and-glass new universities that sprang up over the Sixties in Britain, and right across Europe and the USA”
(Bradbury, internet). He is the naturalistic picture of the modern university Dorian Gray, mildly introduced in the first chapter:
Howard is a sociologist, a radical sociologist, a small, bright, intense, active man, of whom you are likely to have heard,
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Marija Č. Letić
for he is much heard of. He is on television a good deal, and has written two well-known and disturbing books, urging new mores, a new deal for man; he has had a busy, literary summer, and a third book is on its way. He also writes articles in the papers, and he lectures at the local new university, a still expanding dream in white concrete, glass, and architectural free form, spreading on a hillside just to the west of, and just outside, the south-western sea-coast town in which they live. (Bradbury 1977: 3)
According to the words of author Howard Kirk, he is “the more duplicitous, cunning and radical hero-villain of The History Man”
(Bradbury, internet). Howard is married to Barbara and they have two children. Children and family are completely in the second plan: “They have produced, by prophylaxis, two children, bright, modern creatures, both now of school age, of whom they are reasonably fond” (Bradbury 1977: 4). Both Barbara and Howard are promiscuous and they live in a sort of free marriage: “They are experimental people, intimates with change and liberation and history, and they are always busy and always going” (Bradbury 1977: 4). Howard wants radical freedom, so he calls his students by their Christian names and he is called by them the same way. He is also sexually involved with his female students and colleagues.
His great belief in liberty and human rights is tested when he confronts one of the students, George Carmody, who “had the reputation of being appalling” (Bradbury 1977: 130). Howard is, however, “eternally on the side of the students against the fascistic institution that paid his salary, and always against those who were over thirty, even if he was himself 35”
(Bradbury, internet). George believed that Howard’s assessment system was not proper. Here appears the new hypocritical face of the “student protector.” Howard feels uneasiness when George was reading his paper because he was “a glimpse from another era; a kind of historical offense”
(Bradbury 1977: 131). The problem occurred because George was over- prepared:
‘You asked me to look at Mill, Marx and Weber, and make a report,’ says Carmody. ‘I asked you to go away and read their works, over the vacation,’ says Howard, ‘and then to make a spontaneous verbal statement to this class, summing up your
