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L. Muravieva (Nizhny Novgorod)
MISE EN ABYME AS A REPRESENTATION OF TRAUMA ("The White Hotel" by D.M. Thomas)
Abstract. The article refers to the problem of representing traumatic experience by means of mise en abyme narrative figure. A methodology for this study was formed at the intersection of rhetorical narratology, cognitive narratology, trauma studies and literary theory. Mise en abyme, specially known as a device creating the self-reflexivity in text, gets new functional impulse in the postmodernist fiction. In particularly, authors resort to the mise en abyme in order to represent individual and collective trauma in narrative. For what purposes this figure is used in the postmodern literary discourse? In which way postmodern narrative practices involve and interpret the historical context of the 20th century? In this article, we develop the assumption that there exist several special models of mise en abyme, one of which aims to reflect the trauma in narrative. Some relevant characteristics of this model are described and illustrated on the example of "The White Hotel" by D.M. Thomas (1981), they are compositional structure; semantic relations; intermedial and modal realization of the mise en abyme.
Key words: mise en abyme; trauma studies; narrative; cognitive narratology; rhetorical narratology; "The White Hotel".
Л.Е. Муравьева (Нижний Новгород)
Mise en abyme как репрезентация травмы («Белый отель» Д.М. Томаса)
Аннотация. В статье рассматривается проблема репрезентации травматического опыта в нарративе посредством фигуры mise en abyme. Методологический вектор исследования сформирован на пересечении риторической нарратологии, когнитивной нарратологии, trauma studies и теории литературы. Mise en abyme, традиционно известная как фигура, задающая авторефлексивное измерение в тексте, приобретает новый функциональный импульс в литературе постмодернизма. В частности, авторы прибегают к ней для воссоздания в нарративе индивидуальной или коллективной травмы. С какой именно целью фигура начинает использоваться в постмодернистском литературном дискурсе? Каким образом постмодернистские нарративные практики участвуют в культурном контексте осмысления и интерпретации истории ХХ в.? В статье разворачивается предположение о существовании нескольких особых моделей mise en abyme, одна из которых направлена на отражение травмы в нарративе. На материале «Белого отеля» Д.М. Томаса (1981) рассматриваются и описываются основные характеристики данной модели: композиционная структура, семантические отношения, средства индермедиального и модального воплощения mise en abyme.
Ключевые слова: mise en abyme; исследование травмы; нарратив; когнитивная нарратология; риторическая нарратология; «Белый отель».
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In present day interdisciplinary researches devoted to trauma studies, a special attention is given to the forms of its reflecting in culture. The object of studying is no longer limited by clinically observed cases of traumatic and
posttraumatic neurosis but also includes representations of individual and social traumatic experience based on either real or fictional events and represented in language and discourse as well as in literature and art. The so-called problem of "the language of trauma" is closely connected with its representation in a narrative as in a special discourse form, which most vividly depicts the unity of memory and history.
The connection between trauma and narrative representation is tackled upon in basic works of specialists of various disciplines: from psychoanalysis and anthropology to historiography and literary criticism; from E. Santer1 and D. LaCapra2 to S. Felman3 and C. Caruth4. Despite all the differences in approaches, the scholars unanimously recognize the issue of measuring a narrative, which in trauma studies is regarded to be one of the most important tools for a traumatized conscience to build a new identity.
On the other hand, within the narratology itself there appear tendencies preconditions for interdisciplinary studies of trauma. After uniting different points of view on narrative's functioning in social and cultural context, the postclassical paradigm is now searching for the grounds for analyzing and interpreting various forms of narrative interpretation of experience, including marginal and traumatic experience.
Generally speaking, in postclassical (cognitive) narratology (in works by M. Fludernic5, D. Herman6, M.-L, Ryan7, D. Shiffrin8 and others) narrative is understood as the representation of personal or somebody else's living experience given by the protagonist or other participants of the storyworld. Another valuable approach, however, consists in the idea that any narrative is an anthropological fact that registers in discourse facts and events, which are turning into various narrative practice9. Therefore, on the one hand, a narrative text projects knowledge about the world and the subject into the culture, thus shaping and reconstructing life experience. On the other hand, a narrative functions as a certain filter of some events, which acquire historical or cultural context. That is why, along with evident and stable narrative models, ways of representing experience that deviate from norm also arise interest. Traditionally such models constitute the sphere of research of rhetorical narratology, which studies narrative figures, violating traditional narrative model. Here an interesting intercourse of cognitive and rhetorical narratology may be observed, as, breaking the bars of rhetorical paradigm, a narrative device is regarded to be not only a stylistic or rhetoric device but also a model of representation of a certain border experience. Nevertheless, this sphere does not yet abound in a lot of achievement as far as the diversification of a research field in postclassical narratology tends to broaden itself rather than to integrate heuristic models.
Frontiers of mise en abyme
In the range of rhetorical and narrative figures creating fiction, mise en abyme is one the most recurrent devices in modernism and postmodernism. Traditionally mise en abyme is studied as a narrative figure that stimulates a self-reflexive dimension in the text. Basically, this device may be defined as
a reduplicating structure or technique of splitting a narrative utterance into a number of similar structures with the aim of influencing the reader in a certain way. This implies that self-reflexive elements interact with each other either as embedded storyworlds or as fragments of diegesis interconnected by similarity. Therefore, the text recreates within itself the elements of its own structure, thus reflecting in some part the language, theme, function or process of its creation. Mise en abyme turns out to be efficient almost in every remarkable tendency of the 20 century: from a Nouveau roman to magic realism, a unique number of meanings, however, being revealed by European postmodernism starting with late 70es.
There's no single meaning in interpreting the functional and semantic potential of mise en abyme. While in a French Nouveau roman - a chief ground for experiments with this structure - mise en abyme is used to state the impermeability and insularity of meanings as well as to make the text an infinite "play of sign-substitutions"10, the interpretation of the device becomes more complicated with the broadening of empirics. Taking into consideration that in present day scientific discourse mise en abyme is understood mainly with reference to the only existing typology offered by L. Dâllenbach more than 40 years ago (his essay Le récit spéculaire: essai sur la mise en abyme11 was published in the collection "Poétique" in 1977), the question of its relevance seems really acute nowadays. Particularly disputable appears the statement that mise en abyme is but an operator of ludic poetics and is narrowed to a mere process of creating a metafictional effect in a narrative.
The thing is, that the existence of such texts as The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas (1981) questions the established interpretation of mise en abyme in conventional scientific discourse. Why would D.M. Thomas turn to the logic of reduplicating structure in a novel devoted to the description of Jew genocide during WWII?
The analyses of the device in modernist and postmodernist text shows that mise en abyme implies differentiated semantic relations in the narration rather than simply presents the rigid structure. The types of mise en abyme in the text of the 20 century may be depicted by several schemes and models combined by the similarity of the functions performed and the configuration of attributes. The notion of "model" allows to broaden the empirics and to analyze various texts, which are built on the basis of narrative reduplication, in a single time perspective as well as to reveal a certain "formula" used by the authors for narrative text producing in the 20 century. The model may be based on the following principles:
• Composition structure;
• Intermedial and/or modal realization of mise en abyme;
• Semantic relations between the fragment en abyme and the text;
• Narrative representation of mise en abyme (reduplication at the level of story or at the level of discourse).
Studying modernist and postmodernist text by these principles allows to single out a number of models functioning in the fiction of the 20 century. One of them is model of representing a trauma.
HOBUU jмnоnогицecкиu BecmHUK. 2016. №4(39).
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The model of representation of trauma in narrative
A wide historiographical, psychoanalytical and anthropological material devoted to the study of social and individual trauma receives a kind of reasoning in the research of self-reflexive forms of narration. As a cultural model containing and representing living experience, narrative cannot but undergo a change under the influence of these or those traumatic factors, i.e. trauma necessarily defines a turning point in history, which affect the means of its verbal representation.
As stated by I. Kalinin, there may be two basic ways of absorbing painful events by the person, which constitute an unsolvable psychological dilemma: it is either that the trauma becomes isolated and ousted from conscience or it is absorbed by the person with the upcoming restructuring of their identity and accepting traumatic experience as a rejected part of their "Self'12. In this respect, even more significant is the search for special ways of representing traumatic events which appear either to be concealed and ousted from a person's discourse as painful experience or to become means of transformed perception.
In the first case there appears a "literature silence". It was for a good reason that N. Sarraute claimed that after the tragedies of the 20 century fiction became short of stories for "what story might compete with the narration about concentration camps or the Stalingrad battle?"13 In the second case special ways of representing trauma in discourse are looked for, which are connected with reshaping a personality and a painful search for new links between present and past experience. One of these means is concealing a trauma, i.e. an attempt to present the events in a way that painful experience is not reveal up to the very
Representing painful events in discourse operates according to certain laws, such as in attempt to stay apart from severe reality a literature piece focuses on itself and turns to the self-reflexive dimension. That is why M. Lipovetskiy high lightens the "incredibly productive connection between trauma and esthetic reflection on the topic of terrible and unpredictable power of and over language appropriated by a postmodernist writer"14. Self-reflexive poetics becomes a way of new self-identification, an attempt to analyze the experienced events and to speak about them.
Performing the function of concealing a trauma, the mise en abyme is based upon the representation in the secondary narrative such traces of trauma that establish the relations of similarity with the concealed event. The echoes of trauma appear in various modal and discourse projections and precede the direct representation of the traumatic event in the composition structure, thus postponing it shaping a certain receptive "horizon of expectation".
One of the most vivid examples of this model is The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas (1981). Built on the basis of reduplication, the structure ofnarration masterfully operates on contrasts including the private into the historical and the imaginative in the process of creating fiction as well as including a private trauma into a collective one. The magic fight of Eros and Thanatos is taking place in historical context, while the interpretation of a single clinical case is backed
by the appearance and development of psychoanalysis. An elaborate play with narrative labyrinths, and a narrative box, which seems to fit the postmodernism pattern, turns out to be a concealed representation of a historical and social trauma. D.M. Thomas builds his narration by such amazing concentric circles that each preceding circles turns out to be the reflection of the following, while each new circle serves to explain and decipher the previous one. In the end the pile clinical nonsense, love anguish and psychoanalytical comments brings the reader to a stunningly realistic story about mass extermination of Jews, to chaos and death in order to present a hope for salvation in the epilogue.
The central part of narrative is given to the fate of Lisa Erdman, Sigmund Freud's patient and an opera singer of Russian origin, who has become a victim of slaughter of Jews in Babiy Yar. The most part the story is devoted to the main character's anticipation of death, which is disguised as delirious ravings and is falsely explained by a psyche disorder. The course of treatment makes Lisa Erdman undergo a therapy in Gastein sanatorium in the mountains ("the white hotel") where she experiences hallucinations and describes them in prose and poetry. The Gastein journal become the main resource for mise en abyme as the white hotel becomes a symbol of delving into the recesses of her soul from the depth of which Lisa receives the signals of the coming catastrophe. The traces of trauma turn out to become a premonition but, though terrible events are disguised as hallucination and neurosis, the real reason for the delirium is the premonition of her own death. While Sigmund Freud (another participant of the storyworld), who is trying to cure her, is looking for the connection between his patient's disorder and a trauma from her past, the trauma actually belongs to the future, to the very end of Lisa Erdman's life. This is how D.M. Thomas endows his character with the gift of a foreseer, her delirious letter being the power to transcend time ("the unpredictable power over language" M. Lipovetskiy).
The trauma conceal principle is, first and foremost, expressed by the peculiarity of the narrative composition. The mise en abyme structure is created by the gradation of self-reflexive elements in the text, which disguise the magnetic epicenter of the Babiy Yar trauma by establishing a net of cross-reference. The novel consists of six independent parts. The first three parts reproduce Lisa's psychological experience, which she has received in Gastein hotel. Developing V. Shklovskiy's comparison to an inverted cone, it may be assumed that the narration resembles beaded heterogenic circles ofreduplications that grow on a sertain fictional scale, i.e. from a complete fictional illusion to a scientific explanation. The first and the second chapter are devoted to magical events, which have allegedly happened to Lisa Erdman in the sanatorium, the third chapter is comments to the previous ones and, actually, is an article on psychoanalysis written as if by Sigmund Freud. The forth and the fifth chapters constitute the main line of primary narration and are devoted to the description of life and death of Lisa Erdman, presented by a third person diegetic narrator. The sixth part of the novel, the epilogue, brings the narration to the magical sphere by describing life after death as the author's unique concept of "out-of-timeness"15 (G. Yaropolskiy) and forgiveness.
The peculiarity of narrative composition is strengthened by medial means
of expressing reduplication: the description of events of the "white hotel" in the first three chapters is given in various discourse representations (the scientific discourse of Freud's article is opposed to "schizophrenic" discourse of the patient, the genre of the article is opposed to the genre of a private diary etc.) and various modal representation (a dream, a delirium, a vision).
There are certain auto referent relations established within the primary narrative, i.e. between the Gastein diary and Sigmund Freud's article. Thus, for example, the traumatic event of shooting Jews in Babiy Yar and throwing their bodies in a deep ditch (chapter five) is disguised in Lisa Erdman's diary as a hallucination about men and women bodies falling from broken funicular (chapter one):
the women fell more slowly, almost drifting, because their petticoats and skirts were galing, the men fell through them, my heart was breaking, the women seemed to rise not fall, a dance in which the men were lifting in light hands light ballerinas high above their heads, the men were first to come to ground, and then the women fell into the lake or trees, silently followed by a few bright skis16.
Apart from establishing auto referent connections between various diegetic levels, the mise en abyme figure is supported by specific self-reflexive semiotic mechanism of connecting narrative elements into a syntagmatic chain. D.M. Thomas's authorial poetics is characterized by a specific feature: each new image is created by a previous one, the semiotic mechanism of creating a sign being actualized on the basis of analogy with the neighboring sing. This mechanism works on the full scale in the "White Hotel", thus, for example, the character dreams about bullets piercing her shoulder, while in the following episode a conductor shakes her by the shoulder. Another example would be a maple leaf drawn into the room of lovers by the wind, while in the following episode they watch the stars falling from the sky as fallen leaves:
He held his friend by the waist, and they watched the storm clouds part, revealing stars larger than they had ever seen. And every few moments a star would slide diagonally through the black sky, like a maple leaf drifting from the branch ,..17
According to G. Yaropolskiy, the "White Hotel" translator, the author is interested in a mysterious way by which one image creates another connected with the original one but still an independent one18. The process of creating sense by analogy in a narrative sequence becomes another factor of concealing the traumatic outcome, i.e. instead of naming a direct resource of mise en abyme, self-reflexive elements create an allusion of cross reference to the fictional depths of narration.
Thus, the model of mise en abyme representing trauma is set by the following parameters:
• Gradation of reduplications in the composition and representation of the traumatic event, which is the epicenter of mise en abyme, at the end of the narrative structure;
• Building reduplication on the basis of elements of story;
• Distortion and modification of traumatic events by means of its representation in various discourse and modal planes;
• Establishing semantic relations between reduplication and primary narrative by means of concealing the meaning.
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When speaking about The White Hotel, it is important to mention that is a highly ambiguous novel (the ambiguity being mainly caused the contradiction of constructing the strategies of interpreting the novel, rather than by difficulties in reception, open dislike of criticism, an uneasy integration into the literary contexts of the 80es or difficulties in screaning etc.). This ambiguity comes from a special kind of combination of literary, historical and intellectual means, which, apart from other ways, are represented in narrative configurations of the text. It is evident, for instance, that the "hotel in the mountains" topos as well as time and death connotations connected with it, remind of well-known 20 century texts, while including into the novel the factual event of Babiy Yar massacre implicitly actualizes certain ideological models, connected with the historical memory of European culture of the 20 century. However, as opposed to the traditional postmodernist poetics of play, the rhetoric of the "White Hotel" is not limited to the recombination and reconstruction of ready-made storylines. The novel turns to an active "hyper coding of topic"19 (as suggest by U. Eco) with the aim of uniting the contradictory phenomena, which belong to different planes, as well as to evaluate the events, which are impossible to realize. With this aim being taken into consideration, the literary context is interwoven with the historical one, the historical context is interwoven with the intellectual one. At the same time social trauma is represented via the prism of a private story, the narrative becoming a means of creating new identity.
It may be imagined that the convergence of the narrative theory with the theory of trauma should become the point of further development of contemporary humanitarian research. Admitting the fact that there is no narrative language of trauma as well as there is complex method of analyzing traumatic experience, we may assume that studying it by applying the notion of a narrative figure seems promising, especially with the search for new integral conceptions coinciding with the general contemporary humanitarian pursuit of meta analysis.
NOTES
1 Santner E. History beyond the Pleasure Principle: Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma // Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution / ed. by S. Friedländer. Cambridge, Mass., 1992. P. 143-154.
2 LaCapra D. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, 2001.
3 Felman S. Writing and Madness: Literature / Philosophy / Psychoanalysis. Stanford, California, 2003.
4 Caruth C. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, 1996.
5 FludernikM. An Introduction to Narratology. New York, 2009.
6 Herman D. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln, 2002.
7 Ryan M.-L. Toward a Definition of Narrative // The Cambridge Companion to Narrative / ed. by D. Herman. Cambridge, UK, 2007. P. 22-35.
8 Schiffrin D. In Other Words: Variation in Reference and Narrative. Cambridge, UK, 2006.
9 Schaeffer J.-M. Le traîtement cognitive de la narration // Narratologies contemporaines. Approches nouvelles pour la théorie et l'analyse du récit / J. Pier et F. Berthelot (dir.). Paris, 2010. P. 215-231.
10 Derrida J. La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines // Derrida J. L'écriture et la différance. Paris, 1967. P. 409-429.
11 Dällenbach L. Le récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris, 1977.
12 Калинин И. Историчность травматического опыта: рутина, революция, репрезентация // Новое литературное обозрение. 2013. № 6. С. 18-34.
13 Sarraute N. L'Ère du soupçon, essais sur le roman. Paris, 1956. P. 82.
14 Липовецкий М.Н. Паралогии: трансформации (пост)модернистского дискурса в русской культуре 1920-2000-х годов. М., 2008. С. 73.
15 Яропольский Г. Постояльцы отеля «Вечность» (Заметки на полях перевода) // Томас Д.М. Белый отель. СПб., 2014. С. 305-317.
16 Thomas D.M. The White Hotel [a novel]. [7th impr.]. London, 1981. Р. 28-29.
17 Thomas D.M. The White Hotel [a novel]. [7th impr.]. London, 1981. Р. 43.
18 Яропольский Г. Постояльцы отеля «Вечность» (Заметки на полях перевода) // Томас Д.М. Белый отель. СПб., 2014. С. 306.
19 Eco U. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington, 1979.
References (Articles from Scientific Journals)
1. Kalinin I. Istorichnost' travmaticheskogo opyta: rutina, revolyuciya, reprezentaciya [The Historicity of the Traumatic Experience: Routine, Revolution, Representation]. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2013, no. 6, pp. 18-34. (In Russian).
(Articles from Proceedings and Collections of Research Papers)
2. Santner E. History beyond the Pleasure Principle: Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma. Friedländer S. (ed.) Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution. Cambridge, Mass., 1992, p. 143-154. (In English).
3. Ryan M.-L. Toward a Definition of Narrative. Herman D. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge, 2007, pp. 22-35. (In English).
4. Schaeffer J.-M. Le traîtement cognitive de la narration. Pier J., Berthelot F. (eds.) Narratologies contemporaines. Approches nouvelles pour la théorie et l'analyse du récit. Paris, 2010, pp. 215-231. (In French).
5. Derrida J. La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines. Derrida J. L'écriture et la différance. Paris, 1967, pp. 409-429. (In French).
6. Yaropolskiy G. Postoyal'tsy otelya "Vechnost" (Zametki na polyah perevoda) [Roomers of "Eternity" Hotel: Translation Marginallias]. Tomas D.M. Beliy otel' [The White Hotel]. Saint-Petersburg, 2014, pp. 305-317. (In Russian).
7. Yaropolskiy G. Postoyal'tsy otelya "Vechnost" (Zametki na polyah perevoda) [Roomers of "Eternity" Hotel: Translation Marginallias]. Tomas D.M. Beliy otel' [The White Hotel]. Saint-Petersburg, 2014, p. 306. (In Russian).
(Monographs)
8. LaCapra D. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, 2001. (In English).
9. Felman S. Writing and Madness: Literature / Philosophy / Psychoanalysis. Stanford, California, 2003. (In English).
10. Caruth C. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, 1996. (In English).
11. Fludernik M. An Introduction to Narratology. New York, 2009. (In English).
12. Herman D. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln, 2002. (In English).
13. Schiffrin D. In Other Words: Variation in Reference and Narrative. Cambridge, UK, 2006. (In English).
14. Dallenbach L. Le récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris, 1977. (In French).
15. Sarraute N. L'Ere du soupçon, essais sur le roman. Paris, 1956, p. 82. (In French).
16. Lipoveckiy M.N. Paralogii: transformatsii (post)modernistskogo diskursa v russkoy kul'ture 1920-2000-kh godov [Paralogs: Transformations of (Post)modernist Discourse in the Russian Culture of 1920-2000]. Moscow, 2008, p. 73. (In Russian).
17. Eco U. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington, 1979. (In English).
Larissa Muravieva - lecturer at the Department of Literature and Intercultural Communication of National Research University - Higher School of Economics, Nizhny Novgorod.
Research interests: narratology, literary semiotics, Romance languages, theory of literature, French theory and critics of 20th century.
E-mail: lemuravieva@hse.ru
Лариса Евгеньевна Муравьева - преподаватель департамента литературы и межкультурной коммуникации Национального исследовательского университета «Высшая школа экономики» - Нижний Новгород.
Сфера научных интересов: нарратология, семиотика, романские языки, теория литературы, французская теория и критика ХХ в.
E-mail: lemuravieva@hse.ru
