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Contemporary Trauma Narratives

This book provides a comprehensive compilation of essays on the relation-

ship between formal experimentation and ethics in a number of generi-
cally hybrid or “liminal” narratives dealing with individual and collective
traumas, running the spectrum from the testimonial novel and the fictional
autobiography to the fake memoir, written by a variety of famous and more
neglected contemporary British, Irish, US, Canadian, and German writers,
including Margaret Atwood, Sebastian Barry, Jenny Diski, Lawrence Dur-
rell, James Frey, Anne Karpf, Jon McGregor, Daniel Mendelsohn, Anne
Michaels, David Mitchell, W. G. Sebald and Will Self.

Building on the psychological insights and theorising of the fathers of

trauma studies (Janet, Freud, Ferenczi) and of contemporary trauma crit-
ics and theorists, the articles examine the narrative strategies, structural
experimentations and hybridizations of forms, paying special attention to
the way in which the texts fight the unrepresentability of trauma by per-
forming rather than representing it. The ethicality or unethicality involved
in this endeavor is assessed from the combined perspectives of the non-foun-
dational, non-cognitive, discursive ethics of alterity inspired by Emmanuel
Levinas, and the ethics of vulnerability. This approach makes Contempo-
rary Trauma Narratives an excellent resource for scholars of contemporary
literature, trauma studies and literary theory.

‘An original collection, which will make a significant contribution to the

study of literature and trauma.’
—Susan Derwin, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center,
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Susana Onega is Professor of English at the University of Zaragoza, Spain.

She is a member of the Academia Europaea, a former Honorary Research
Fellow at Birkbeck College, and the Head of a research team currently
working on the rhetoric and politics of suffering in contemporary narra-
tives in English.

Jean-Michel Ganteau is Professor of British literature at the University of

Montpellier 3, France. He is the main editor of the journal Etudes bri-
tanniques contemporaines and the co-editor of the ‘Present Perfect’ series
(PULM) and he currently works on the ethics of vulnerability in contem-
porary British fiction.
Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

1 Environmental Criticism for the 8 The Gothic in Contemporary

Twenty-First Century Literature and Popular Culture
Edited by Stephanie LeMenager, Pop Goth
Teresa Shewry, and Ken Hiltner Edited by Justin D. Edwards and
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet
2 Theoretical Perspectives on
Human Rights and Literature 9 Wallace Stevens and
Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Pre-Socratic Philosophy
Alexandra Schultheis Moore Metaphysics and the Play of
Violence
3 Resistance to Science in Daniel Tompsett
Contemporary American Poetry
Bryan Walpert 10 Modern Orthodoxies
Judaic Imaginative Journeys of the
4 Magic, Science, and Empire in Twentieth Century
Postcolonial Literature Lisa Mulman
The Alchemical Literary
Imagination 11 Eugenics, Literature, and
Kathleen J. Renk Culture in Post-war Britain
Clare Hanson
5 The Black Female Body in
American Literature and Art 12 Postcolonial Readings of Music
Performing Identity in World Literature
Caroline A. Brown Turning Empire on Its Ear
Cameron Fae Bushnell
6 Narratives of Migration and
Displacement in Dominican 13 Stanley Cavell, Literature, and
Literature Film
Danny Méndez The Idea of America
Edited by Andrew Taylor and Áine
7 The Cinema and the Origins of Kelly
Literary Modernism
Andrew Shail 14 William Blake and the Digital
Humanities
Collaboration, Participation, and
Social Media
Jason Whittaker and Roger
Whitson
15 American Studies, Ecocriticism, 24 Class and the Making of
and Citizenship American Literature
Thinking and Acting in the Local Created Unequal
and Global Commons Edited by Andrew Lawson
Edited by Joni Adamson and
Kimberly N. Ruffin 25 Narrative Space and Time
Representing Impossible
16 International Perspectives on Topologies in Literature
Feminist Ecocriticism Elana Gomel
Edited by Greta Gaard, Simon C.
Estok, and Serpil Oppermann 26 Trauma in Contemporary
Literature
17 Feminist Theory across Narrative and Representation
Disciplines Edited by Marita Nadal and
Feminist Community and Mónica Calvo
American Women’s Poetry
Shira Wolosky 27 Contemporary Trauma
Narratives
18 Mobile Narratives Liminality and the Ethics of Form
Travel, Migration, and Edited by Susana Onega and
Transculturation Jean-Michel Ganteau
Edited by Eleftheria Arapoglou,
Mónika Fodor, and Jopi Nyman

19 Shipwreck in Art and Literature

Images and Interpretations from
Antiquity to the Present Day
Edited by Carl Thompson

20 Literature, Speech Disorders,

and Disability
Talking Normal
Edited by Chris Eagle

21 The Unnameable Monster in

Literature and Film
Maria Beville

22 Cognition, Literature and

History
Edited by Mark J. Bruhn and
Donald R. Wehrs

23 Community and Culture in

Post-Soviet Cuba
Guillermina De Ferrari
This page intentionally left blank
Contemporary
Trauma Narratives
Liminality and the Ethics of Form

Edited by
Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau

NEW YORK LONDON

First published 2014
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
The right of Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau to be identified as
the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Contemporary trauma narratives : liminality and the ethics of form /
[edited by] Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau.
pages cm. — (Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature ;
27)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Psychic trauma in literature. 2. Liminality in literature. 3. Ethics
in literature. I. Ganteau, Jean-Michel. II. Onega, Susana.
PN56.P93C66 2014
809'.93353—dc23
2013045919
ISBN13: 978-1-138-02449-6 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-1-315-77453-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by IBT Global.
Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction: Performing the Void: Liminality and the

Ethics of Form in Contemporary Trauma Narratives 1
JEAN-MICHEL GANTEAU AND SUSANA ONEGA

PART I
Ethics and Generic Hybridity

1 Learning from Fakes:

Memoir, Confessional Ethics, and the Limits of Genre 21
LEIGH GILMORE

2 “ . . . with a foot in both worlds”:

The Liminal Ethics of Jenny Diski’s Postmodern Fables 36
MARIA GRAZIA NICOLOSI

3 Witnessing without Witnesses: Atwood’s Oryx

and Crake as Limit-Case of Fictional Testimony 53
MARIE-LUISE KOHLKE

4 “I do remember terrible dark things, and loss, and noise”:

Historical Trauma and Its Narrative Representation
in Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture 70
RUDOLF FREIBURG
viii Contents
PART II
Ethics and the Aesthetics of Excess

5 Vulnerable Form and Traumatic Vulnerability:

Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs 89
JEAN-MICHEL GANTEAU

6 Ethics, Aesthetics, and History in

Lawrence Durrell’s Avignon Quintet 104
DIANNE VIPOND

7 The Ethics of Breaking up the Family

Romance in David Mitchell’s Number9Dream 120
GERD BAYER

8 “circling and circling and circling . . . whirligogs”: A Knotty

Novel for a Tangled Object Trauma in Will Self’s Umbrella 137
GEORGES LETISSIER

PART III
Ethics and Structural Experimentation

9 Family Archive Fever: Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost 159

MARC AMFREVILLE

10 “The Roche Limit”: Digression and Return

in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn 176
IVAN STACY

11 “Separateness and Connectedness”:

Generational Trauma and the Ethical Impulse in
Anne Karpf’s The War After: Living with the Holocaust 193
SILVIA PELLICER-ORTÍN

12 Hybridity, Montage, and the Rhetorics and Ethics

of Suffering in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces 210
SUSANA ONEGA

Contributors 231
Index 239
Acknowledgements

The idea for this book originated in at least three academic events convened
by the editors of the present volume: the Trauma and Ethics in Contem-
porary British Literature seminar hosted by the ESSE 2008 conference in
Aarhus, the Trauma and Romance seminar hosted by the 2010 ESSE con-
ference in Turin, and the Ethics of Limit-Case Trauma Narratives seminar
hosted by the 2012 ESSE conference in Istanbul. The three events were
concerned with ethics, a dimension that seeps into most of the chapters in
the present collection, the alliance between trauma and ethics being fairly
well documented in contemporary criticism and theory.
The seminars themselves were part of the wider ongoing research activi-
ties carried out by the editors in the last decade. The co-authorship of the
introduction and the co-editing of the book by Jean-Michel Ganteau are
part of a project funded by the French Ministry of Education through the
laboratory to which he belongs (EMMA-EA 741). The co-authorship of the
introduction and the co-editing of the book by Susana Onega is part of a
project fi nanced by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness
(MINECO) (code FFI2012–32719). Susana Onega is also thankful for the
support of the government of Aragón and the European Social Fund (ESF)
(code H05).
We would like to thank the editors of the journal Etudes britanniques
contemporaines for their kind permission to reproduce part of Jean-Michel
Ganteau’s article on Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs.
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction
Performing the Void:
Liminality and the Ethics of Form
in Contemporary Trauma Narratives
Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega

In an article entitled “Art and Trauma,” published in 1995, Dori Laub and
Daniel Podell drew attention to the emergence of a new type of art triggered
off by the need to “act as an antidote” (991, italics in the original) to the col-
lective psychic trauma caused by the atrocities of the Second World War and
other twentieth-century armed conflicts. As they forcefully argued, “[o]nly
a special kind of art, which we shall designate ‘the art of trauma,’ can begin
to achieve a representation of that which defies representation in both inner
and outer experience” (992). The birth of a new art form in response to the
specific demands of an age dominated by the trauma paradigm presupposes
not only that art is a privileged vehicle for the expression and transmission of
psychic trauma but also that it can provide mechanisms of resilience aimed
at ensuring the survival of the traumatised subject.1
As Laub and Podell explain, when the wish for life of the victim elicits
no response from the executioner, the latter is denying the existence of
a primary empathic bond between human beings that is essential for the
individual’s sense of self:

The erasure of this primary empathic bond, the refusal of this most
basic human recognition is always at the nidus, the source, of mas-
sive psychic trauma. The breakdown of trust in a functioning empathic
external dyad le[ads] directly to the [victim’s] loss of internal commu-
nication with the ‘other’ in himself. Without this internal ‘other’, there
can be no representation. [ . . . ] The feelings of absence, of rupture, and
of the loss of representation that essentially constitute the traumatic
experience all emerge from the real failure of the empathic dyad at the
time of traumatisation and the resulting failure to preserve an empathic
tie even with oneself. (991)

Laub and Podell’s words echo Freud and Breuer’s path-breaking contention
in “On the Psychic Mechanisms of Hysterical Phenomena” (1893) that what
produces the characteristic state of affective numbing, fright, anxiety, shame,
2 Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega
or physical pain in traumatised subjects is not the atrocity of the experience
itself, but the lack of adequate reaction to it, that is, the repression of affects
(5–6, 8). Consequently, the goal of Freud and Breuer’s psychotherapy was to
enable the ideas produced by the repressed affects to reach consciousness, so
that the patient could give adequate expression to the shocking event, either
in deeds or words, since, as they argued: “language serves as a substitute
for action; by its help, an affect can be ‘abreacted’ almost as effectively” (8).
In order to facilitate this process of abreaction or purging of the emotional
excesses of the traumatic memories stored in the unconscious, Freud and
Breuer’s patients were invited to talk about their symptoms while under hyp-
nosis.2 But soon Freud abandoned hypnosis and started asking patients to
talk freely about whatever ideas or memories occurred to them through the
“free association” of ideas.3 This clinical practice facilitated the establish-
ment of an ongoing dialogue between analysand and analyst which involved
a process of transference, or displacement onto the analysts of the patients’
feelings and ideas derived from previous figures in their lives. Although this
phenomenon could affect the patients’ objectivity and interfere with the pro-
cess of remembering, Freud came to see it as an essential part of the thera-
peutic process. As an affectively charged dialogue between analysand and
analyst, Freud’s psychoanalytic method may be said to possess the capacity
to restore the patient’s affective bonds with the internal and the external
Other. According to Laub and Podell, the traumatised subjects’ spontaneous
engagement in artistic expression has a similar restorative purpose: “survi-
vors of a trauma or children of survivors often become involved in an ongo-
ing dialogue with the trauma, which leads them to engage consciously or
unconsciously, in artistic expression” (993).
The repression of affects that lies at the heart of trauma is manifested
in the impossibility of knowing and communicating the traumatic event or
experience in cause-and-effect, rational terms. This incapacity to know and
to put this knowledge into words is the result of the dissociation of cogni-
tive knowledge (usually produced by the left hemisphere of the brain) and
sensorial knowledge (produced by the right hemisphere of the brain) that
takes place as a defence mechanism when the subject is forced to cope in the
short run with the shock produced by an overwhelming event or situation
(Bloom 2010, 200, 202; Onega 2012). As Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno
van der Hart have pointed out, Pierre Janet, the contemporary of Freud
who worked with Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière, already distin-
guished “narrative memory” from “automatic synthesis or habit memory.”
While the latter is “a capacity humans have in common with animals,” nar-
rative memory is “a uniquely human capacity [ . . . ] consist[ing] of mental
constructs, which people use to make sense out of experience” (160). As
they further explain:

Janet thought that the ease with which current experience is integrated
into existing mental structures depends on the subjective assessment of
 Introduction 3
what is happening [ . . . ]. Under extreme conditions, existing meaning
schemes may be entirely unable to accommodate frightening experi-
ences, which causes the memory of these experiences to be stored dif-
ferently and not be available for retrieval under ordinary conditions: it
becomes dissociated from conscious awareness and voluntary control
[ . . . ]. When that occurs, fragments of these unintegrated experiences
may later manifest recollections or behavioural reenactments. (160)

Unable to narrativise the traumatic experience in logical terms, the sub-

ject gives expression to his or her trauma by means of sensorial images
instead of words. Unlike words, sensorial images are emotionally charged
and symbolic, so that when they emerge from the unconscious during the
process of acting out, they are experienced by the subject as overwhelming
and incomprehensible. According to Freud, the compulsive repetition of the
traumatic experience that takes place during this phase, often triggered off
or accelerated by psychoanalysis, though not healing in itself, constitutes a
necessary cathartic stage in the difficult process of abreaction prior to the
integration of these traumatic memories in the conscious mind and their
transformation into logically arranged and meaningful narrative memories
(Freud 2001a, 267–8; 2001b, 154–5). Laub and Podell’s contention is that
the art of trauma has a similarly integrative and restorative function.
As they argue, the art of trauma is essentially dialogic, containing as
it does “a latent but powerful address that requires the viewer or reader
to become engaged in a dialogue of his own with the trauma” (993). This
dialogism of the art of trauma suggests an affi nity not only with the analy-
sand–analyst relationship required by Freud and Breuer’s talking cure, but
also with the I–you relationship of narrator–narratee in autobiographical
and testimonial writings. According to Laub and Podell, the establishment
of this dialogue is aimed at the creation of sensorial and affective meanings
capable of reconnecting the bonds with the internal and external Other and
of revealing pain in indirect ways: “In essence, it is only through its indirect
and dialogic nature that the art of trauma can come close to representing
the emptiness at the core of trauma while still offering the survivor the pos-
sibility of repossession and restoration” (993).
This capacity of art to create and transmit unspeakable knowledge indi-
rectly is set into question, however, by the ethical demand to represent the
traumatic experience faithfully. As Shoshana Felman has noted, the poet
Paul Celan, after his release from the Moldavian camp where he had been
interned by the Nazis, refused to reprint his much acclaimed work “Todes-
fuge” (German for “Death Fugue”), “regarded by many as the canonical
poem about the Holocaust in any language,”4 and he changed his highly
musical poetic style for “a less explicit, less melodious, more disrupted and
disruptively elliptical verse” (qtd. in Laub and Podell 994). Celan’s rejection
of the aesthetic elements that conferred beauty on his poem points to his
bafflement at its reception by the critics, who profusely praised its poetic
4 Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega
richness, musicality, and structure while failing to take into consideration its
atrocious subject matter. As María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro has pointed out:

Something that particularly hurt Celan in the 1950s and 1960s, and
surely influenced his evolution as a poet, was the fact that Theodor
Adorno’s famous dictum about the barbarism of writing poetry after
Auschwitz was thought to be a veiled reference to “Deathfugue,” and
there were even German critics who accused Celan of eliciting aesthetic
pleasure from the Holocaust, presumably feeling their interpretation
backed by the authority of Adorno’s views. (273)

Celan’s move to a more elliptical and bare sort of poetry was the result,
then, of a conscious struggle to represent and transmit his atrocious Holo-
caust experience ethically, avoiding the danger that aesthetic pleasure
might work to diminish the pain of the victims or condone the guilt of the
perpetrators. At the same time, the poet’s turn towards a more inchoate
and elliptical style signals indirection as a key element in the achievement
of this ethical aim. Paradoxical though it may seem, indirection is essential
for the overcoming of traumatic self-fragmentation and alienation, since,
as Laub and Podell, explain, “By pointing to what is ‘between the lines’
and beneath the main surfaces of the event, Celan’s poems, Kiefer’s paint-
ings, Lanzmann’s fi lm, and other examples of the art of trauma may serve
to re-establish narrative and connection, thus defying the overpowering
forces of fragmentation inherent in trauma” (996). What is more, as Marc
Amfreville has forcefully argued, indirection is intrinsically ethical as it
produces contradictory feelings of empathy and alienation that preclude
the readers’ unlawful identification with the victims of trauma (23). It is
through indirection, then, that the art of trauma attempts to re-establish
the severed empathic dialogue with the internal and external Other without
which there can be no representation.
The importance of restoring this double dialogue might explain the pro-
liferation of autobiographical and testimonial writings in the late twentieth
century. In The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (2001),
Leigh Gilmore draws attention to the upsurge of hybrid narrative forms
combining “scholarship and life writing and memoir proper” that took
place in the Western world “in the skittish period around the turn of the
millennium” (1). As she explains, this boom of hybrid autobiographical and
testimonial narratives has displaced “the historical description of autobi-
ography as a Western mode of self-production, a discourse that is both a
corollary to the Enlightenment and its legacy, and which features a rational
and representative ‘I’ at its center” (2). Though she admits that “the tradi-
tion was never as coherent as it seemed to appear” (2), Gilmore consid-
ers that this unprecedented generic transformation of the autobiography is
an effect of “trauma’s centrality to contemporary self-representation” (3).
Roger Luckhurst endorses this view when he describes the decade of the
 Introduction 5
1990s as dominated by a “memoir boom” prompted by the sheer difficulty
of narrativising the collective traumas of our post–World War II age (117).
A striking phenomenon related to this process of generic hybridisation is
the ever-growing collaboration of contemporary trauma narratives with
the romance. As we argued in an earlier work (Onega and Ganteau 2012,
1–14), contemporary trauma narratives seem to evince a formal affi nity
with the romance as a mode whenever realism fails to evoke extreme situ-
ations. If, following Barbara Fuchs, we envisage this mode as a strategy,
among other things, it is easy to see why trauma narratives feel so com-
pelled to adopt the malleability, iterability, and ubiquity of the romance.
Its urge to transcend groupings based on criteria such as period, form, and
theme allows this mode to permeate texts of all sorts and generic labels,
endowing them with the power of saying/complementing what other types
of narratives, including history, cannot say. What is more, in its darkest
forms, the romance also provides unparalleled mechanisms for the expres-
sion of the melancholic and elegiac drives of mourning.
The new perspectives on and possibilities of narrativising trauma opened
up by this mode’s fluidity and excessiveness are in keeping with the ethical
demands of Levinasian excendance (Levinas 1982, 73), 5 that is, the self’s
powerful need for/of evasion—literally, the self’s need to “climb out of”
being (93)—provoked by the contemplation of its shortcomings and the
realisation that there is no way out of being from within being. As John
Caruana explains, this need to exit being is “the very manifestation of
our being, presenting itself as inordinate and excessive, and therefore, as
impossible to address adequately” (16). In his later works, Levinas char-
acterised the Other not only in terms of alterity but also of excessiveness.
Thus, in Totality and Infi nity, he presents the Other as the persecutor of the
self and foregrounds its traumatic intensity and vehemence in the relentless
accusation of the self as guilty (1969, 244–7). Levinasian ethics involves
the rejection of the temptations and peril of being for oneself and the move
not towards the annihilation of the self but towards the reach beyond the
self towards the being-for-the-Other/the infi nite (1981, 161). This ethical
move, compared by Levinas to a sacred experience and, we may add, to
the creative madness of the Romantic poet/prophet or shaman, can only be
achieved if the self is no longer in possession of itself and becomes instead
possessed by affective forces outside its control.
In summary, the complex modal and generic destabilisation that has
materialised in the upsurge of a plethora of new hybrid forms reinforces
Laub and Podell’s contention about the birth of a new art of trauma in
the late twentieth century, characterised by dialogism, indirection, and, we
may add, the fluidity and excessiveness of the romance as well. Our conten-
tion is that these formal characteristics of trauma narratives thematise and
perform the wounded self’s vision of the void in a colossal creative effort
to assimilate and work through the traumatic event or experience that has
provoked this void.
6 Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega
Autobiography has always been an essentially dialogic genre, as the nar-
rator/character invariably addresses his or her life story to an explicit or
implicit reader/witness. Consequently, the fact that this genre should have
undergone a process of hybridisation in order to meet the demands of rep-
resenting the traumas of our contemporary age points to the complexity of
these demands. In this sense, the fact that Gilmore should present autobiog-
raphy as “a corollary to the Enlightenment and its legacy” suggests that the
transformation of the genre is informed by the post–World War II distrust
in the Enlightenment ideology of rationalism, endless progress, and infi nite
perfectibility of mankind, whose excesses abutted in Nazism. Among the
“ancestors” of this subgenre is to be found what the French writer Serge
Doubrovsky termed “autofiction” back in 1977. Autofiction is a liminal
subgenre as in it the referential and the fictional collaborate systematically,
and the self is by defi nition envisaged as not only double, but also multiple.
If autobiography is a genre closely associated with the Enlightenment in
that it places a rational “I” at its centre, yet another staple of the rational-
ist ethos is the Hegelian concept of history as endless progress through
empty time. As Michael Rothberg explains in Traumatic Realism: The
Demands of Holocaust Representation, Walter Benjamin, in his efforts
to counteract this Enlightenment concept of history that had failed to pre-
dict or combat the forces of Nazism, argued for a relational interpretation
of history in terms of “constellations” (10), that is, “a sort of montage in
which diverse elements are brought together through the act of writing
[ . . . ] meant to emphasize the importance of representation in the inter-
pretation of history” (10, emphasis in the original). Benjamin’s anti-lineal
and self-conscious approach to history constitutes an excellent model for
the sort of imaginative refashioning required to cope with the perplexities
of understanding and representing the Shoah. According to Rothberg, this
involves responding to three fundamental demands: “a demand for docu-
mentation, a demand for reflection on the formal limits of representation,
and a demand for the risky public circulation of discourses on the events”
(7). His main contentions are that the need to respond to these demands
has brought about a rethinking of “the categories of realism, modernism,
and postmodernism [ . . . ] not only as styles and periods [ . . . but also] as
persistent responses to the demands of history” (9),6 and that, by thinking
of the historical event in terms of these three categories simultaneously,
rather than sequentially, a complex system of understanding is created that
forces readers to perceive the relationship between archival documenta-
tion, aesthetic form, and public circulation. Like Benjamin’s constellation,
Rothberg’s montage of realist, Modernist, and postmodernist elements cre-
ates an anti-linear tension that counteracts the progressiveness of Hegelian
world history. Just as the hybridisation of autobiographical and testimonial
narratives studied by Gilmore produces a new hybrid genre conversant with
the plastic subgenre of “autofiction” (Colonna), specifically aimed at the
representation of trauma, and just as the atrocity and unutterability of the
 Introduction 7
traumatic experience forces authors towards the elegiac and the dark poles
of the romance, so Rothberg’s montage of contradictory modes creates a
new literary mode that, following Hal Foster, he calls “traumatic realism,”
and which, by setting its own discourse into question, effectively blurs the
boundaries between reality and fiction, history and story-telling, the col-
lective and the individual.
The chapters contained in this volume are aimed at analysing this com-
plex phenomenon through the close reading of a representative number
of contemporary narratives in English that have recourse to the generic
hybridisation of autobiographical and testimonial narratives pointed out
by Gilmore, the combination of realistic and romance forms, and/or the
modal montage of realist, Modernist, and postmodernist elements theo-
rised by Rothberg, in the attempt to transform traumatic memories into
narrative memories and, in the case of collective traumas like the Shoah,
to create a relational discursive system aimed at providing an imaginative
alternative to the teleological discourse of history. The fi nal target of the
volume is to establish whether the formal features of these paradigmatic
examples of the dialogic and indirect art of trauma, identified by Laub and
Podell, really succeed in offering a faithful and ethical representation of
the various traumas portrayed in them and by what means. The question
of faithfulness and of its link to ethics is central to our purposes and is at
the heart of traumatic realism. It is precisely because of the difficulty to
represent trauma through the idiom of traditional realism, on account of
the inaccessibility of the causes of trauma and of its absent memory, that
new forms have been devised so as to achieve faithfulness perhaps not of
representation—a term associated with duplication and a more traditional
aesthetics—but of presentation. Tentativeness of presentation seems to be
the condition of faithfulness to the symptoms of trauma. The fact that such
evocation is generally provided from inside implies a great deal of attentive-
ness to the vulnerable subject. This subject is not envisaged from a domi-
neering, totalising position, thus favouring an ethical treatment.
The narratives addressed in this volume are concerned with traumas
of various types, whether individual or collective, whether concerning the
Shoah, as indicated above, or evoking other historical episodes of collective
duress. Given the variety of the corpus, the chapters are grouped in three
parts linking various forms of generic hybridisation and/or narrative strat-
egies with ethics: Part I, “Ethics and Generic Hybridity”; Part II, “Ethics
and the Aesthetics of Excess”; and Part III, “Ethics and Structural Experi-
mentation.” Put together, the chapters in the three parts provide a fairly
comprehensive view of the complex ways in which the formal specificities
of the narratives collaborate in the expression of an ethical and political
position. In this sense, the chapters may be said to respond to the chal-
lenges set by the shift in critical perspective arising from the “double ‘turn’
to ethics and literature” (Eskin) that took place in the 1980s as a reaction
of academia against the cultural radicalism and relativism propounded by
8 Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega
extreme forms of postmodernist thought. As is well known,7 this ethical
turn brought about two antagonic ethical modes: a nostalgic neo-humanist
ethics, of a rather normative, deontic type, defended by critics like Walter
Jackson Bate, René Wellek, Wayne C. Booth, or Marshall Gregory, that
reaffi rmed the traditional function of literature as a transparent transmitter
of moral values and took for granted the stability of the characters’ egos as
represented in classic realist texts, and a newer type of “discursive ethics,”
as Andrew Gibson calls it (1999, 54–55), that defi nes itself as non-deontic
(in concurrence with meta-ethics, error theory, and the postulations of J.
L. Mackie and G. E. Moore), non-foundational (in line with Emmanuel
Levinas’s ethics of alterity), non-cognitive (in agreement with the ethics of
truths), and above all non-ontological. This new type of ethical approach
was expounded by critics and philosophers such as Zygmunt Bauman,
Andrew Gibson, Robert Eaglestone, and Drucilla Cornell, among others.
To these may be added other related types of ethics that are relevant for
the analysis of trauma narratives, such as the ethics of care (concrete and
political) and the ethics of vulnerability (against the fictions of an ethics
of autonomy and an ethics of productivism). All these types of discursive
ethics are interested in experimentalism rather than realism and have come
to be identified with the practice of postmodernism to such an extent that
some critics have called it “a postmodern ethics” (Bauman).
The analysis of literature from the combined perspective of ethics and
aesthetics lies at the heart of several new critical approaches emerging in
the 1980s and 1990s out of this ethical turn, the most relevant of which
are trauma studies, memory studies, the theory of affects, and the theory
of resilience. A common defi ning trait of these new critical currents is
their strong inter- and transdisciplinary character, combining as they do
elements of history, philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and soci-
ology, among others. Our reading of the trauma narratives in this volume
partakes of the insights provided by these critical approaches and is fi rmly
based on the notion of a discursive ethics reserved for experimental nar-
ratives that strive to express “what the text cannot say,” precisely (Gibson
1999, 55).
In a number of essays and books published in the past twenty years,
Andrew Gibson has developed an innovative and useful theory on the ways
in which narrative might indicate, render, or bear witness to “the event,”
defi ned, in line with Alain Badiou’s famous characterisation of the term,
as “the chance occurrence of something that had no existence beforehand,
could not be predicted or foreseen and had no prior name” (Gibson 2007, 3).
Unlike accidents or disasters, the event has unpredictable and long-lasting
consequences, as it is the occasion of the disruption and “transformation of
forms, the transformation of the world” (2007, 3). Thus, for example, “in
the case of Galilean physics, Mallarmé’s inauguration of Modernist poet-
ics, the French Revolution or the relatively commonplace event of falling in
love, the event arrives to transform a situation that not only was blind to
 Introduction 9
it but could not have predicted its coming” (2007, 6). This defi nition can
easily be applied to the events that, according to Ronald Granofsky, provide
the main subject matter of contemporary trauma literature: “the collective
disasters of the contemporary world—the Nazi camps, nuclear weapons,
the dehumanization of the Soviet Gulag, the catastrophic environmental
pollution, and others” (3). Yet, together with this type of collective and/or
cultural traumas, there are also cases of rape, incest, and gender violence
which, though individual, also bear on the institutional and the political.
And there are also those less spectacular though no less damaging forms
of trauma, induced by patriarchy’s formation of identity, related to gender,
social class, and racial identity, which have been socially sublimated by
means of systematic practices and continued behaviour patterns, so that
we do not perceive their deeply traumatising character even though, or
precisely because, they are interwoven within the very mechanisms that
function to perpetuate our societies. All these types would also qualify as
events in Gibson’s and Badiou’s senses of the term, as they can all be the
occasion for an unexpected transformation of the world, with long-lasting
and imperfectly understood consequences.
As Gibson explains, unlike lyric, narrative “is a literary form that is
seemingly not open and even inimical to the event [ . . . ] because the rep-
resentational relation on which narrative is commonly founded implies an
originating instance, a reality already known and given which narrative is
constrained to duplicate” (2007, 3). This fact has forcefully contributed to
the perpetuation of a sceptical tradition, running from Bergson and Hei-
degger to Levinas and Lyotard, about the capacity of narratives to represent
the event ethically, without neutralising or pacifying it (2007, 3). Oppos-
ing this view, Gibson argues that “certain modes of narrative or narrative
instances [are concerned] with the radical singularity or incalculable haz-
ard of the event, the event as instantaneous surprise” (2007, 3), and that
what is needed in order to perceive this capacity of narrative to capture the
unpredictable and ungraspable nature of an event is “a careful, precise,
discriminating analysis of the modes, conditions and instances of articula-
tion of the narrative event” (2007, 3–4). In Postmodernity, Ethics and the
Novel, Gibson explored the ethical dimension of the narrative event with
reference to Samuel Beckett’s writings. Drawing on Levinas’s Otherwise
than Being, he developed an “ethics of the event,” understood as the event
of literary language, that is, “the possible [ethical] disruption of the order
of what Levinas called the Said, in which language has always proposed,
ordered, constructed experience beforehand, by what he called the Saying,
the sheer radicality of the event of language itself” (2007, 4). Rejecting the
Heideggerian tradition that defined the event as ubiquitous and omnipres-
ent, and in line with Walter Benjamin, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Ran-
cière, Gibson characterised the event as a rare and punctual occurrence
“appear[ing] as a rupture or break with an established order (aesthetic,
political, psychic etc.),” that brings about a sequence of unpredictable,
10 Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega
open-ended, and intermittent consequences (2007, 5). From this, Gibson
went on to explain the experimentalism of much Modernist literature in
terms of the difficulty of thinking or continuing to think the event and
its “remainder,” that is, “what the event appears to disrupt” (2007, 6).
This new perspective allowed Gibson to see the work of Beckett, and also
Proust, as key examples of an “aesthetics of intermittency,” aimed at rep-
resenting the events that defi ne modernity, not as a series of historical facts
arranged in a structure of progression, but by conceiving “the possibility of
pure, aleatory, originary historical beginnings, by interruptions of existing
series and inaugurations of new ones” (2007, 8). This notion of event as an
intermittent and non-lineal structure of “historical striations” (2007, 8)—
evocative of Walter Benjamin’s “catastrophe in permanence”—allowed
Gibson to explain why, in Beckett’s works, the event appears only “in
second-order, muted, veiled, distorted, equivocal or compromised forms”
(2007, 10). Beckett’s representation of the event of modernity in these indi-
rect and equivocal terms is ethical, as it conveys the strong suspicion that
the project of modernity is extremely problematic.
In the light of Gibson’s characterisation of Beckett’s aesthetics of inter-
mittency, the duplicity, indirection, liminality, and anti-progressiveness of
trauma narratives pointed out by Laud and Podell, Leigh Gilmore, and
Michael Rothberg may be read as evidence of a widespread need among
the post–World War II generations of writers to (re)present the event of
(individual and collective) trauma and its remainder in similarly elusive and
distorted terms. Indeed, the fact that, in these narratives, trauma and its
long-lasting and unpredictable consequences can only be evoked indirectly
and dialogically, begs for a study of these narratives’ ethical position from
the perspective of the “liminal ethics” arising out of the ethical turn that
relies on the “irreducible restlessness” (Gibson 1999, 117) exemplified by
Gibson’s reading of Beckett’s works.
Now, if some measure of critical attention has been paid to narrative
ethics and the ethics of trauma literature,8 no full-length study has been
devoted so far to the conversation between discursive ethics and the form
of liminal trauma narratives. This is all the more striking as the discursive
ethics of narratives, bent on expressing what the text cannot say, seems to
have a natural affi nity with the workings of trauma that drills a hole in
the victim’s psyche, bringing along a “collapse of [ . . . ] understanding,”
in Cathy Caruth’s famous words (1995, 7). Of course, trauma narratives,
fictional or not, are often seen to be characterised by the inability to voice
a trauma, and they tend to limit themselves to indirect evocation, beating
about the hole that they must be content to circumscribe, short of describ-
ing it. More often than not, trauma narratives must renounce the possibility
of describing the unassimilated traumatic memory and build their impos-
sibility into the textual fabric, performing the void instead of anatomising
it. What is meant by “perform” here is akin to what Michael G. Levine
argues in his study of witnessing as speech act: an “illocutionary speech
 Introduction 11
act which must be performed each time, as though for the fi rst time, on the
contingency of an act that in each instance tests—and contests—the limits
of narration” (4). The trauma narratives addressed in this volume precisely
test the limits of representation by testifying to a traumatic content and
through an act of witnessing. In such circumstances, they may be said to
present or perform (poiesis)—as opposed to represent (mimesis)—some
radical Otherness, as when the subject is no longer related to some alien-
ated part of him-/herself, that is, when the internal Other has become some
internal foreign body (Press 69). Paradoxically, this provides the condition
for a ceaseless soliciting of the Levinasian ethical relation, predicated as a
non-violent encounter with the Other, or a continuous departure from the
self, the refusal—or impossibility—of totality, the better to privilege open-
ness to the Other, be it internal or external.
Through the reality of the separation from some inassimilable memory,
trauma provides the conditions for some ceaseless movement towards
Otherness, and liminal trauma narratives build up the textual modali-
ties of such openness. This is tantamount to suggesting that the narratives
addressed in this volume are characterised by an open, hole-ridden, vulner-
able form that may be said to be the expression or symptom of some ethical
sensibility to the Other of trauma and to the traumatised Other. Further,
one could claim that trauma narratives are ethical precisely because they
are relational apparatuses allowing the principle and concerns of the eth-
ics of form and the ethics of affects to meet. As suggested above, there is a
sense of the limit in the way in which trauma narratives reach towards the
pole of anti-mimesis (predicated on the impossibility to represent directly
the void of trauma) without completely relinquishing the claims of mimesis
(Rothberg 140), since, as we argued elsewhere, “these ever-growing con-
temporary trends never completely jettison the mimetic even while they tap
the incommensurable powers of the inassimilable” (Onega and Ganteau
2012, 7). Such a contradiction or tension warrants the asymptotic nature
of what cannot be represented—the radical alterity of trauma—which is
at the heart of the poetics of liminality and liminal ethics as defi ned, for
instance, by Drucilla Cornell.
The working hypothesis on which most chapters contained in this vol-
ume develop is that the trauma narratives selected for analysis resort to
strategies of excess to react to the openness of the wound, but also to per-
form an openness to the wound, that is, to the intergenerational wander-
ings of the ghost, to the internal foreign body of traumatic states, to the
Other’s wound. In these texts, what obtains is the power to be affected,
which is also a defi nition of Levinasian sensibility or vulnerability. What
is more, such vulnerability generates responsibility for the Other at the
individual and communal or social levels, which directs our attention to
the political edge of the ethics of trauma, as foregrounded in the chapters
devoted to Anne Karpf, Jenny Diski, Anne Michaels, or Jon McGregor,
for instance. The collaboration among the violence of trauma, the opening
12 Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega
powers of ethics, and their liminal presentation may well belong to the
cultural, epistemological, and critical Zeitgeist which promotes a critique
of totality. It also brings about, in Jacques Rancière’s terms, a dissensus
that reconfigures norms and rejects the totalising powers of harmonisation.
It may also be argued that what characterises the discursive ethics at
work in the following chapters is a difference from what were considered
to be the dominant moral languages till the advent of the ethical turn in
the 1980s, that is, the idiom of Kantian and utilitarian models in which
motives and the power of reason are granted priority over a consequen-
tialist model that gives pride of place to the ethical role of emotions (Held
58–60). The idiom privileged in contemporary trauma narratives may be
said to emanate from a second perspective or, better said, to be spoken “in
a different voice,” to refer to Carol Gilligan’s highly influential study. Such
an ethical perspective, grounded in feminist theorising, ceases to envisage
the individual as autonomous and independent—in other terms as hero-
ically invulnerable—and thus . . . total. On the contrary, what the trauma
narratives that we are concerned with here seem to promote is a model
of humanity—individual and collective—defi ned through openness to risk
and suffering, thus interdependence (Gilligan 47). One step further, the
spectacle of the Other’s pain and vulnerability is a reminder of some form
of community of suffering that defi nes a common denominator of human-
ity and solicits responsibility for the others that depend on us (Held 10).
In other terms, trauma narratives privilege an ethics that defi nes human-
ity as inherently relational, which takes us back full circle to the original
conception of an ethics of alterity based on the non-violent relation to the
Other. Envisaging ethics through the prism of contemporary trauma narra-
tives makes us adhere to a Levinasian inquiétude and restlessness (Levinas
1982, 47) in our sensibility to the Other, while moving beyond to an atten-
tiveness to the wound of the Other, or to the Other as wound. Attention
would thus become the ethical mainspring of the narrative dynamics, from
author to reader, through narrator and character.
At the heart of the trauma narratives addressed in this volume, whether
they are concerned with overtly or more discreetly experimental forms,
there is a sense of intensification performed through non-mimetic, defamil-
iarising devices or through some more empathic soliciting that may verge
on the melodramatic, the elegiac or the melancholic. And it will come as
no surprise that the literary in general, and trauma narratives in particular,
whether fictional, nonfictional, or both, should appear as especially apt to
voice the cognitive and ethical power of affects. The liminal trauma nar-
ratives, as envisaged in this volume, educate us ethically by catching our
attention and whetting our attentiveness.
The following chapters present readers with a great variety of topics
and perspectives: while all of them analyse texts dealing with individual or
collective traumas and delve into the relationship between aesthetic form
and ethicality, some of them focus on the generic limits of fictional and
 Introduction 13
testimonial forms (Ganteau, Kohlke, Nicolosi); others are concerned with
the fictional representation of trauma by fi rst- or second-generation wit-
nesses (Freiburg, Onega, Pellicer-Ortín) or with the questions of authen-
ticity and (un-)ethicality raised by the fake memoir (Gilmore). Yet others
privilege the analysis of the mechanisms at work in the evocation of direct
or indirect, secondary trauma (Stacy, Vipond) and/or the representation of
various stages of trauma like “acting out” or “working-through” (Freud
2001b) (Amfreville, Bayer, Letissier). The various perspectives provide
illuminating complementary insights into the formal and stylistic devices
privileged by trauma narratives to secure an ethical distance from overi-
dentification while ensuring an ethical empathic relation to the story and
the protagonist (LaCapra 41). From a generic and modal point of view, the
chapters demonstrate that the British, Irish, US, and Canadian texts under
analysis resort to sundry forms, like the Holocaust fictional memoir, the
survivor’s testimony, the fake, Gothic, fantasy, the fairy tale, the fable, the
picaresque, and, more astonishingly, the pastoral or kitsch, among others.
The combination of these theoretically incompatible forms points to the
complexity of the phenomenon, which is forcefully contributing to enlarge
the trauma narrative subgenre, even while being symptomatic of the vigour
and stabilisation of the trauma paradigm.
Yet, as the analyses demonstrate, beyond such diversity all these trauma
narratives share a community of interests and concerns: they are fuelled by
anti-totalising claims;9 they promote paroxystic affect as a stand in favour
of openness; they make a point of staging moments of encounter with
the vulnerable Other; they are highly conversant with the ruin of being
(through the traumatic figures of the hole, of the double, and of the ghost,
for instance) and/or with history as catastrophe; and, in so doing, they call
on the authors’, narrators’, readers’, and more often than not the charac-
ters’ attentiveness to and accountability for the vulnerable Other. In the
end, they help defi ne the human as suffering, dependent, and relational,
hence inherently ethical. At work in those texts is the specificity of litera-
ture in general and fiction in particular, conveyed in the precarious form
of the liminal trauma narrative, to thematise and perform responsibility. In
this way commitment is redefi ned in ethical terms.
Ultimately, within the general framework of a Levinasian-inspired, dis-
cursive ethics, as indicated above, this volume seeks to provide evidence
for a shift from an abstract ethics of the Platonic type, concerned with uni-
versals, to a more concrete ethics of an Aristotelian inspiration, in which
dialogue, the negotiation of forms, attentiveness to singular situations, and
relationality are given pride of place.10 Such a move can be seen at work
in the hybrid, liminal texts and genres used as instruments for the literary
performance of trauma: the hybrid autobiographies in which the dialogue
between referentiality and fiction is acutely at work; the liminal historical
narratives, in which once again the referential and the poetic are made to
collaborate without the ironic stance of historiographic metafiction; the
14 Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega
meeting of realism and romance (in the case of dystopias, and also of sev-
eral narratives that reject the constraining idiom of realism so as to figure
out excruciating events). Whether considered in terms of genre or mode,
the hybrid, liminal forms that harness their representational powers to the
evocation of trauma help illustrate and extend the meaning of testimony
as “[s]peaking beyond understanding” (Whitehead 7). More specifically,
they remind us of Caruth’s remark that, whether addressed in theoreti-
cal or literary form, trauma raises questions that “can never be asked in a
straightforward way, but must, indeed, also be spoken in a language that
is always, somehow, literary” (1996, 5). This volume aims to contribute
to the idea that the mode of testimony—whether it is fictional, or not, or
both—favours the practice of dialogue and indirection as staples of a dis-
cursive ethics lending itself to the evocation of trauma.
Working within the general frame of Levinasian ethics of alterity, this
volume aims at promoting our alertness to testimony as ethical form, which
implies a discursive, dialogic ethics. The narratives under scrutiny here pro-
vide literary presentations of trauma that never renounce ethical performa-
tivity. In fact, by resorting to liminal, impure, rhetorically excessive forms,
they tap the powers of what Derek Attridge has defi ned as “the singularity
of literature,” that is, “a transformative difference, a difference, that is to
say, that involves the irruption of otherness or alterity into the cultural
field” (136, emphasis in the original). This difference Attridge analyses in
terms of inventiveness and, he is quick to specify, it cannot be separated
from performance, that specificity of the literary:

Among all the inventions that can be so characterized, works of

art are distinctive in the demand they make for a performance, a
performance in which the authored singularity, alterity, and inven-
tiveness of the work as an exploitation of the multiple powers of
language are experienced and affi rmed in the present, in a creative,
responsible reading. But performance in this sense [ . . . ] is a matter
both of performing and of being performed by the work: hence the
eventness of the reading—and thus of the work—is crucial. (136,
emphasis in the original)

In line with the preceding evocation, it could be said that the trauma
narratives in this volume all seek to perform the alterity of trauma.
Through their attentiveness to the singularity of the traumatic event, they
get the readers to open themselves to the violence of experience, to train
their attentiveness and responsiveness, and to favour risk-taking over non-
involvement. In this respect, the liminal, vulnerable form of trauma nar-
ratives iconically performs an ethics of alterity that is also an ethics of
vulnerability. Turning its back on the Kantian, utilitarian, and liberal views
of individual autonomy, the contemporary text expresses and performs the
contemporary subject’s inherent frailty as dependence on the Other and
 Introduction 15
on circumstances (Maillard). Vulnerable trauma narratives articulate and
perform this new vision of contemporary subjectivity as intrinsically vul-
nerable, which might very well explain why they have elicited such popular
and critical interest over the last few decades.

NOTES

1. Concurring with Theodor Adorno, George Steiner, and Giorgio Agamben,

Roger Luckhurst has signalled “Auschwitz as the determining catastro-
phe that inaugurates the trauma paradigm, for after 1945 all culture must
address this question” (Luckhurst 5). Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman
reach the same conclusion about the advent of the trauma paradigm, focus-
sing on the suspicion against shell-shocked soldiers during the First World
War and assessing the evolution towards the general acceptance of the reality
of trauma in the last decades of the twentieth century (Fassin and Rechtman).
2. It was Breuer’s patient, Anna O, who coined the phrase “talking cure” for
her treatment (Freud 1995, 8–9).
3. The method was progressively refi ned between 1892 and 1895 (Jones, Trill-
ing and Marcus 214).
4. The poem was written between 1944 and 1945 and fi rst published in 1947
in an anthology, translated into Romanian, with its original title, “Death-
tango” (“Tangoul Mortii”). See Martínez-Alfaro on the reasons for and
implications of the change of title.
5. See Gibson (1999, 36–42); Ganteau.
6. “In the representation of a historical event [ . . . ] a text’s ‘realist’ component
seeks strategies for referring to and documenting the world; its ‘modernist’
side questions its ability to document history transparently; and its ‘post-
modern’ moment responds to the economic and political conditions of its
emergence and public circulation” (Rothberg 9).
7. See Ganteau and Onega (1–9); Onega (2008, 57–64; 2009, 195–203).
8. See for instance, Gibson (2007) or Onega and Ganteau (2007).
9. This does not imply that the traumatised subjects are not striving to recap-
ture their lost psychic totality, which is precisely what they attempt to do to
various degrees, whether they actively go into therapy or are simply aware
of loss and dispersal. What we mean here by “anti-totalising” narratives is
to be understood in the Levinasian acceptation of the term as texts that do
not make didactic claims and are not produced from a position of authority
but rather choose to report on the traumatic experience from inside—one of
the privileges of fiction. The anti-totalising precautions of traumatic realism
express the loss of subjective integrity and the subject’s groping towards lost
totality.
10. For more information on the shift from Platonic towards a more Aristotelian
dimension in Levinasian ethics, see Morgan (54).

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Ganteau, Jean-Michel. “The Logic of Affect: Romance as Ethics.” Anglia.
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Martínez-Alfaro, María Jesús. “Fugal Repetition and the Re-enactments of
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Classics, 2004. Print.
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Oxford: Clarendon P, 2005. Print.
18 Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega
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Part I

Ethics and
Generic Hybridity
This page intentionally left blank
1 Learning from Fakes
Memoir, Confessional Ethics,
and the Limits of Genre1
Leigh Gilmore

In 2006, A Million Little Pieces (2003) brought memoir to the forefront of

debates about authenticity and life-writing when the Smoking Gun exposed
how author James Frey had invented facts and misrepresented events. Frey’s
memoir, one of a handful of contemporaneous falsified or embellished
memoirs, took on a larger-than-life quality: not only had it been selected
by Oprah Winfrey for her Book Club and reached a huge audience; it exem-
plified the popularity of memoirs based on personal experiences of hard-
ship. 2 Frey’s fraudulence seemed to make all self-representation of trauma
newly vulnerable to charges of hoaxing. In this chapter, I will argue that
fake memoirs tell us less about the line dividing fiction from nonfiction,
and its putative correspondence to facts and truth, and more about the lim-
its of our current response to representations of life, especially when they
involve trauma, the complex affective demands trauma imposes, and the
insufficiency of genre to underwrite an adequate ethic of engagement with
truth-telling in memoir.
Although it is difficult to quantify the pervasiveness of fakery in contem-
porary life-writing, embellished, invented, or falsified memoirs represent a
fraction of texts published. Their influence has less to do with actual num-
bers than with the claims staked through them about widespread mischief
and even the depravity of the form itself. The representative subset of fakes
most frequently cited includes four fake Holocaust memoirs, one by an
actual survivor, Herman Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence: The True Story of
a Love That Survived (February 2009, cancelled by Penguin Group USA),
Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years (1997), Bin-
jamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments (US edition, 1996), and Helen Demiden-
ko’s The Hand That Signed the Paper (Australia 1994); fake South Central
LA gang memoir, Margaret Seltzer’s Love and Consequences (2008); and
Frey’s ubiquitous A Million Little Pieces. The texts cited most frequently as
examples of fakery take trauma as the central story and induce readers to
identify with a narrator who suffers and survives. Frey invites the reader to
gaze voyeuristically at James’s self-infl icted damage, to root for his appli-
cation of tough self-love, in short, to identify with the redemption of the
addict and criminal he used to be. Similarly, Margaret Seltzer invents an
22 Leigh Gilmore
autobiographical persona of mixed race ancestry through which to engage
readers in the plight of gangs. After her sister saw a photo of Seltzer in
a story about Love and Consequences, she called Riverhead Books and
alerted them to the fraud. Following her exposure, Seltzer explained why
she chose memoir as the vehicle for eliciting identification:

For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my oppor-
tunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to [ . . . ]. I was
in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us
because nobody else is going to let us in to talk [ . . . ]. I just felt that
there was good that I could do and there was no other way that some-
one would listen to it. (Rich A1)

Fragments, Binyamin Wilkomirski’s fi rst-person account of surviving Aus-

chwitz as a child, offers the suffering child’s “I” as a means of empathic
identification for readers. Wilkomirski, like Frey, won accolades, mounted
a successful book tour, and generally presented himself as the persona of
his fake memoir for three years before being exposed as an impostor. In all
cases, trauma memoirs were the site of fakery and the fakery capitalised on
readers’ trust that books marketed purposefully as memoirs by publishers
were written by people in whom they could believe.
Earlier fakes suggest that fakery is a product of its time and part of
larger discursive formations of power. They emerge in specific and contin-
gent historical moments, within particular discourses, and our susceptibil-
ity to them is partly attributable to the politics of particular time periods.
As Gillian Whitlock notes: “A literary hoax is a defi nitive event: it brings
to light social, political, and ethical investments of narrators, readers, and
publishers of life narrative” (165). Whitlock identifies Norma Khouri’s For-
bidden Love (2003) as precisely such a text. It portrayed honour killing in
Jordan and was marketed to a Western audience primed to consume stories
of Arab backwardness following 9/11 (Whitlock). Similarly, The Education
of Little Tree was exposed as a fraudulent chronicle of a Native American
boyhood written by notorious racist Asa Carter and released twenty-five
years later by the University of New Mexico Press as a “classic.”3 Published
in 1976, The Education of Little Tree extolled the virtues of simple living
in accordance with the land and certainly worked to counter the version of
Native American genocide put forward by the American Indian Movement.
In the face of increased awareness about US history as well as a resur-
gent Native American political movement, readers were drawn to a fake
Romantic tale to sustain an image rendered unavailable by political action.4
Fake memoirs create a placebo effect. Just as an inert agent one believes
to possess certain properties can induce actual effects, a fake memoir can
take readers to the same places as the real thing. Yet fakery also dilutes the
capacity of memoir to produce its characteristic effects, not only because
it cuts the referential tether of real life to its representation, but because it
 Learning from Fakes 23
de-authorises memoir as a dominant discourse in which to represent truth
and identity. That is, fakes degrade the discourse of self-representation as a
mode in which one can say “I” with legitimacy and derive the correspond-
ing social authority of the form. Frey’s exaggerated drug rehab memoir
generated an overcorrection. To safeguard against future fakes, memoir
would be henceforth held to the same standards as its nonfiction neigh-
bour journalism and managed by similar protocols, including fact check-
ing.5 Certainly, due diligence is reasonable. But fakery exists whenever it
is possible to tell the truth. Further, fakery thrives when the agreed upon
approach to autobiography is to cede credulity as soon as the author and
protagonist share the same name.6 Drawing a bright line between fiction
and nonfiction and placing memoir fi rmly on the side of nonfiction fails to
address the ongoing appeal of certain kinds of stories and the identificatory
desire they elicit.
Instead of taking fiction and nonfiction as representing the two best
categories through which to understand fake memoirs, I propose we
take instead the literary and the testimonial as twin properties of mem-
oir broadly. Instead of saying that fakes threaten memoir because they are
unlike it, that they are fiction rather than nonfiction, that they are lies
and not facts, we would say, instead, that fakery teaches us about vulner-
abilities at the heart of memoir. In this reading, fakes threaten memoir’s
testimonial qualities not only when they deceive, but when we respond
by attacking memoir’s literary qualities as the root of deception. This is
because the two are intertwined and draw power from their co-presence.
Moreover, they generate complex and mingled reading practices. In staring
at the self in memoir, we often consume it as another version of ourselves.
We are induced to identify as we would with many “I’s” no matter the
genre in which they emerge. In reading life-writing, readers often interpret
identification as empathy and even ethical witnessing. In learning to read
fakes more sceptically, we engage with our own credulity. This is hardly
bad news because it also offers the opportunity to engage with the literary
capacities of the form, what Derek Attridge calls the singularity of litera-
ture and Derrida cites as the core of testimony. To assert that fakes should
be understood in relation to the co-presence of the literary and the testimo-
nial in memoir (rather than as fictional texts misrepresented as nonfiction)
is to say that they teach us less about what is external to life-writing (all of
fiction) and more about life-writing itself.
In what follows, I examine the current response to fakery and its conse-
quences. Instead of reading specific fakes or offering a history of hoaxes,
I place fakery in conversation with the ethical turn in life-writing studies.
In so doing, I explore what fakes teach us about memoir and the critical
discourse about it; namely, that in analysing fakery, we do not find the alien
threat but the hybrid heart of self-representation. I take a series of memoirs,
fake and not, as limit-cases that ultimately prompt a rereading of ethics and
life-writing.
24 Leigh Gilmore
All life-writing harbours a fundamental tension between transparency
and opacity, between what can be openly stated and documented about a
life and what cannot, between a requirement to confess and an invitation
to tell a good story. Although fakes force these tensions to the surface, they
exist in life-writing broadly. Fakes are not simply testimony’s opposite, the
lie in the place of the truth; instead, they are the vehicle of identificatory
desire. Fakes call attention to three topics within life-writing that theorists
and critics consider crucial to the form: the figural and representational
aspects of language, the norms and ethics of consuming life story, and the
role of readers’ responses in the production of truth and legitimacy. Prob-
lems arise in each of these areas that are equally relevant to fakes and life-
writing as a whole. In some ways, the simplest claim here is also potentially
the most troubling: that it is not only truth that determines the difference
between memoir and a fake, but the dispositions of taste and power around
truth, who may speak it, and in what form.

TYING GENRE TO ETHICS

According to author Bill Roorbach, rules of genre distinguish fiction from

memoir. Readers can count on writers to know which genre’s rules they
are playing by. In other words, the touchstone of autobiographical truth is
writerly expertise and fidelity. For Roorbach, who has written fiction, mem-
oir, and Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth, “[b]etween
fiction and memoir, no genes are shared” (6). He describes a “good faith”
bargain between reader and writer on the issue of genre, but also tasks the
reader with an “understanding of the differing rules and traditions and
emphases of the subgenres under the wide and inclusive and elegant rubric
of creative nonfiction” (6). Readers in this system should no more call foul
when they fi nd they have read fiction as memoir than they should impose
standards of journalistic accuracy on memoir, which neither memory nor
the conventions of telling a good story can support. Roorbach’s bright line
between memoir and fiction is traced in the transactional spaces between
the writer and the work, the reader and the work, and the reader and the
writer, all of which are contained in an Eliotian universe of tradition. In
Roorbach’s flexible and sensible contextualisation, fakery would be best
regulated by smart readers crying foul only when authors practice the stud-
ied deception of a hoax, and not when they, say, fi ll in for faulty memory
with dialogue that is true to the speaking styles of those whose conversa-
tions are rendered. Michael Chabon’s comment on reading James Frey’s
A Million Little Pieces is apt. In an interview, Chabon describes reading
Frey’s book as fiction because he had placed it in a stack of books he was
judging for a prize in fiction. When he learned it was a fake memoir, he
was unperturbed because he had read it as fiction from the start. No harm,
no foul, Chabon concluded. In Roorbach’s analysis, “the spell of the real
 Learning from Fakes 25
is different from the spell of fiction” (6). Yet, Chabon’s unwitting reading
(albeit by a smart reader) suggests a stranger transaction is taking place,
one regulated by a regime of names (fiction, memoir) and their capacities to
cast the spell Roorbach describes independently of the text and the author’s
intention. Within the ecosystem of life-writing, a hoax can take a reader to
the same places a true story can as an effect of textuality.
Early in the scholarship on autobiography, Paul de Man approached
autobiography as an especially thorny example of how language appears
to offer a mode of transparent representation it cannot achieve. The per-
formative aspect of life-writing—the capacity of utterance in an autobio-
graphical speech act to materialise the “I” narrated—intertwines with the
constative aspect of autobiography—its capacity to describe past aspects
of one’s life. Both are part of a textual system—language, broadly, but
self-representational speech acts more narrowly—in which telling the truth
necessarily emerges within a tropological system of substitutions involving
the “I.”7 For de Man, the fundamental tension between the transparency
autobiography seems to offer and the impossibility of making good on this
offer is inescapable. These operations imply not only futility, but fatality
to de Man. He argues that Rousseau confronts “the lethal quality of all
writing” (296) when he writes autobiographically: Rousseau represents his
life by omitting huge swaths of it. Rousseau does not include, for example,
stories that cast him in too favourable a light, thereby marring transpar-
ency by omission, or he embellishes with inflated claims—“I have never
said less, but I have sometimes said more”—and errs on the side of excess.
While neither of these statements amounts to painting Rousseau’s Confes-
sions as fakery, they represent for de Man precisely the aspects of language
that all autobiographers confront and through which self-representation
emerges. De Man’s critique points to the problem of the integrity (297)
of the autobiographical venture broadly. Fakes do not make autobiogra-
phy fall apart; instead, autobiography harbours its own undoing because
its performative rhetoric (in some sense, what the author wishes, intends,
essays within life-writing) and its cognitive rhetoric (the author’s material:
the rhetoric of tropes) “fail to converge” (300). The linguistic predicament
requires us to acknowledge that the seeds of memoir and fakes alike are
equally contained within this moment of failed convergence.
The ethics of memoir entail relations of obligation between writers and
people at varying degrees of proximity to them: friends, family members,
and many others, all of whom have differing abilities to consent to their
portrayal or to challenge it. It also includes the relation of writers and read-
ers. Like Roorbach, scholars Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson raise the issue
of ethics in the transaction between reader and writer. In their Reading
Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Smith and Wat-
son cast the ethical issue in terms of material consequences: “real conse-
quences upon the writer’s or other people’s lives may ensue from publishing
a narrative and from reading it” (178). These are not only the harms that
26 Leigh Gilmore
follow from a fake in which someone portrays herself or others falsely.
These concerns are intrinsic to any autobiographical narrative and refer to
revelations that violate standards or preferences around privacy, decorum,
tact, and a host of other variable social mores. Smith and Watson are con-
cerned with disclosures of “compromising details of personal life” (178),
which for them are governed by ethics as norms, even as they astutely raise
a countervailing question: “What purposes or motives might the narrating
‘I’ have in violating these norms?” (178). Where do manners, social norms,
and ethics diverge, especially in the representation of trauma? How ought
autobiographers to be bound by norms and still engage with the literary
and testimonial promise of witnessing? What would Augustine, Rousseau,
and even Proust make of such a potential interdiction, not to say Kathryn
Harrison, whose memoir about adult incest and its branching harms and
conflicts, The Kiss, provoked divergent reactions (see Eakin 2001; Gilmore
2003; Marshall)? What Smith and Watson target is that the criteria used to
judge fakes are the same that attach to any autobiography, not only those
that transgress the borders of truth and deception.
Writing specifically within the ethical parameters described by Smith
and Watson, Paul John Eakin, too, observes how issues of privacy are
raised by narrating lives lived in relation to others (Eakin 1999; Gilmore
1994). Few lived situations prove sufficiently isolating to let autobiogra-
phers off this hook. In writing about one’s life, one inevitably writes of oth-
ers, discloses aspects of their lives they themselves have not chosen to make
public, and places one’s family, relationships, and communities on view as
a necessary part of self-representation. For Eakin, the crux is whether the
legal protections already in place through libel laws and privacy protections
are sufficient or whether some additional nuances—properly understood
as ethical—also obtain. Like Smith and Watson, Eakin weights decorum
highly, even tasking autobiographers with guarding their own privacy in
addition to the privacy of others. This suggests that living in relation to
others carries the obligation not to violate social norms around transgres-
sion and disclosure, or, at least, to behave responsibly, to weigh the cost to
others, including readers, and to exercise restraint in deference to others.
Yet such concerns themselves implicate norms about where, precisely, such
lines should be drawn. That is, the ethical harbours within the common-
sensical—that is, being sensitive about placing information about others in
the public sphere—regulatory impulses that would hold life-writers respon-
sible for not violating conventions on self-disclosure.
Drawing together the ethical and linguistic predicaments associated not
only with fakery, but with life-writing generally, Eakin and de Man rep-
resent different ways of addressing concerns they see as inescapable. For
Eakin, these concerns are related to a central ethical dilemma: autobio-
graphical narration requires autobiographers to reconstruct and represent
interactions with others, to put words in their mouths. This is precisely
de Man’s concern about autobiography, which he addresses by reading
 Learning from Fakes 27
prosopopoeia as the central trope of life-writing.8 For de Man, the problem
with autobiography lies in giving voice to the self in history and thereby
compelling it to appear in the text as if it were materialising by other than
textual means. Eakin fi nds the attribution of conversation by the auto-
biographer to vex readers and writers of autobiography alike. He cites
Janet Malcolm’s transposition of her notes from an interview with Jeffrey
Moussaiff Masson into quotations attributed to Masson, and the ensuing
claim Masson successfully brought against her. The attribution of voice to
another is a “special power” (180) in Eakin, while for de Man, the prior
problem is the attribution of voice and presence through prosopopoeia to
the self. It is a problem not only when such representation goes wrong, as
in the Malcolm–Masson case, but when it is exercised with extreme fidelity
to the form. For Eakin, the ethical crux confi nes the text to the status of a
medium through which one can represent life transgressively, coercively, or
with tempered restraint. Although “there is no getting around the fact that
ventriloquism, making the other talk, is by definition a central rhetorical
phenomenon” (181), and goes to the heart of the ethical problem in life-
writing, its regulation lies outside the text.
Sometimes it seems that propriety and ethics are interchangeable terms.
That it is unethical to represent what is conventionally private, off stage.
Much of what disturbs Eakin’s construction of the ethical entails the body:
excrement, genitals, sex acts, violence. Anthropologist Mary Douglas
reminds us that “dirt is matter out of place” (44), and the “dirty linen” or
“TMI” of life-writing leads many to invoke privacy as a way of staunching
the flow of disclosure. The absence of a morbid shocker like O. J. Simpson’s
If I Did It, in which he hypothetically describes how he might have mur-
dered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, is no great loss, but the
problem remains that political speech that is both testimonial and trans-
gressive of norms around taste, propriety, race, sexuality, and gender is
often policed via the same conventions that constrain TMI in life-writing.
Whether or not readers, critics, and scholars fi nd a memoir transgressive of
ethical boundaries is not a reliable index of whether it is fake. The critical
response toward transgression applies to all life-writing, including fakes.
If ethics in life-writing has neither emerged from encounters with fakes,
hoaxes, and deceptions nor been used yet to diagnose or predict fakes, is it
the right term for the problem?

CONFESSIONAL ETHICS

As recent work on “giving an account of oneself” shows, ethics are not

primarily about good manners (Butler). Nor can the full scope of ethics be
confined to how memoirists broach normative propriety and privacy. The
rhetorical and the ethical are triangulated with the political, and point to
the dynamism of reception in a public sphere that may be moulded into
28 Leigh Gilmore
witnessing publics. Eakin contextualises the representation of trauma in
memoir as an ethical issue. He is concerned about how disclosing trauma
violates privacy, including the privacy of unwilling participants in the mem-
oir and those potentially exposed without recourse to defence. Sidonie Smith,
however, sees the extremities that Eakin casts in ethical terms as primarily
about representation, both in terms of how the story is told (representation)
and the status it confers on the one who testifies (political representation).9 In
her analysis of “comfort women” narratives by Korean women interned as
sex slaves by the Japanese army in World War II, Smith examines how expo-
sure can be wielded as political rhetoric. Smith finds autobiography to be a
dynamic tool for displacing the truths it is supposed to provide evidence of.
Indeed, in Smith’s canny reading, autobiography can dislodge and transform
normative expectations about testimonial evidence in surprisingly political
ways. In Smith, the ethics of life-writing are dynamic, unprescribed, and
mobile because ethics are political ideas that impose normativity, regulate
dissent, permit violence and harm, veil perpetrators, and entrap victims in
testimonial protocols that silence them. Smith is concerned less with how to
prevent autobiographical narrative from disturbing public sensibilities than
with how such sensibilities can be shifted through autobiographical narra-
tive used as political speech. The tensions within autobiography, including
its capacities to decentre the personal and, in the narratives of the Korean
women, to dislodge the “grammar” of victimisation, arise through a rhetori-
cal view of autobiography’s confessional ethics. Autobiographical narration
has the capacity to change the game. Those who narrate their experiences
may fail to comply with norms, or may resist them, and may introduce as
evidence experiences that confound the very truths they had previously been
compelled to sustain. Autobiographical acts are disruptive. They disturb
norms about national character and make claims of violation, even as their
“impropriety” conflicts with the proprieties lodged in the name of ethics.
Ethics and norms are necessarily related in the production, circula-
tion, and evaluation of life-writing. What standards of accountability best
enable the circulation of testimonial speech in the face of self-censorship,
shame, and the barred constitution of witnessing publics? When the ethi-
cal response strengthens norms around propriety that stand in for political
judgements about the value and permissibility of nonnormative life-writing,
its application is at odds with the potential of life-writing as a testimonial
vehicle. This is significant in a discussion of fakes because it may be pre-
cisely the version of ethics that would privilege, if unintentionally and as a
consequence of good intentions, normative life narrative. Such life-writing
may be invigorated in response to riding herd on fakery, with the net effect
of imposing constraints on all life-writing. It might be that the fake that
delivers what a readership wants and expects is less likely to trigger scepti-
cism than the nonnormative life narrative that challenges it.
Given the value of ethical considerations in life-writing and the chal-
lenges posed by testimonial acts, on one hand, and the varied impulses of
those who produce them, on the other, what insights might strengthen our
 Learning from Fakes 29
ethical frameworks? In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler traces
Adorno’s critique of how social norms and conventions rise to a level of
universality and present as a collective ethos a set of principles and thought
that prevent dissent. Without the possibility of challenging this ethos, social
norms and the silencing they entail amount to ethical violence. Whereas for
Eakin, the relevant relation is between a self and others to whom she is
bound by norms of discretion, Butler asserts that “the ‘I’ has no story of its
own that is not also the story of a relation—or set of relations—to a set of
norms” (8). These norms govern any account an “I” offers, and, while this
means that “the ‘I’ is always to some extent dispossessed by the social con-
ditions of its emergence” (8), the dispossession is productive. As in Sidonie
Smith’s analysis of the testimonial surprise effects of the “comfort women,”
Butler poses the negotiation, even the contention, between the subject and
norms as ethical deliberation and moral inquiry.
Because subjects emerge in specific and contingent historical moments,
within particular discourses, and before a variety of audiences (more or less
disposed to hearing nonnormative life narrative, for example), Butler argues
that the conditions for giving a full and transparent account of oneself do
not exist. This is not because people are duplicitous or lying is unavoidable,
but, rather, because the conditions for offering such an account do not simply
exist, transparency should not be the standard. We should pause before this
statement to consider the obvious: has such a standard ever been met in life-
writing? While testimonial and documentary accounts have often sought to
provide evidence of harm that is verifiable and actionable, they have not man-
aged to “tell all.” Nor is it the case that a longer work or serial autobiography
will meet the standard of transparency, as works as diverse as The Educa-
tion of Henry Adams (Adams 2000) and Jamaica Kincaid’s œuvre attest.10
If we have a standard of judgement (i.e. transparency) that is at odds with
the account one can offer of oneself, what follows? This mismatch represents
an ethical problem that cuts at least two ways for Butler: it harms those who
offer and those who receive accounts, which is all of us. It obscures where
the opacities exist in self-representation when elucidating these would be of
inestimable use. It cannot be ethical to hold persons to an impossible stan-
dard of fullness and transparency in accounts of the self. With the standard
of transparency in place, blame, censure, and gullibility abound. Following
Roorbach, we might ask whether Butler’s argument only applies when there
is good faith on all sides. Or does the site of negotiation between the “I” and
the conditions of its emergence name the precise location where both fakes
and other accounts of the self emerge? Does the demand that such accounts
be transparent—along with the claim that fakes and memoir, like fiction and
memoir, are non-identical—permit fakery to take hold?
Following Butler, it is clear that judgement informs the ethical scene, gives
it structure and legibility through the imposition and maintenance of norms,
and even describes the arena the autobiographical subject enters as she nego-
tiates social norms (including those governing literary compacts of good
faith). Butler’s cautionary remarks about holding up an unmeetable standard
30 Leigh Gilmore
as the measure of ethical behaviour illuminate the impossible claims staked
in the name of autobiography around transparency. We should also note that
if autobiography were to meet such standards, it might still fail to convey
something stranger and more compelling about the opacities of conscious-
ness and experience, which describes the form’s renewable promise.
Philippe Lejeune’s pact is one model that governs truth-telling as a social
relation in life-writing, and Paul Eakin’s ethics another. Both focus on the
obligations entailed by autobiography as speech act and thus tend to dis-
solve the textual in favour of a social contract model. Another model that
describes the relation of life narratives to social order is the claim by some
narrative theorists and cognitive psychologists that humans are hard-wired
to tell stories and that this evolutionary habit toward story-telling expresses
itself in autobiography. Following this logic, one should also say that
humans have evolved to lie and to malinger, as well as to entertain, to ear-
nestly represent, and to cry out for justice and for blood. Yes, all of this. But
the value of the normative life story, while held out as a marker of a healthy
self, and even as a therapeutic aspiration for persons to order violent and
incoherent experience, is assumed rather than at stake in these studies. It is
not exactly that this is wrong as much as that it is at odds with what people
in a variety of ways and in diverse social circumstances frequently seize the
rhetoric of self representation for. These challenges to normative life narra-
tive arise within life-writing as surely as fakes do and are often policed by
the same standards. What norms of judgement are operating, what prac-
tices have become habitual such that a fake and a genuine account alike can
be challenged as running afoul of the same rules?
My argument is that fakery brings to the fore in a mode of crisis the judge-
ments that always circulate around uses of the autobiographical “I”; that the
normativity in these judgements contains and reproduces hierarchies of value
around gender, race, and sexuality because these are the very discourses
through which norms are established and maintained; and that fakery does
not defile the truthfulness of autobiography so much as challenge the unspo-
ken values on which it rests, namely, a hostility to otherness at the normative
core of life-writing, masking now as at other times (if in different ways) as an
admirable desire to engage with transparent and knowable others.

“TRANSMISSIBLE GIFTS”

Fakery causes epistemological unease. How do we know what we know

about life-writing, truth-telling, and other people’s lives (or our own)? On
what grounds do declarations of such knowing rest, and how are the limits
of such knowledge best understood so that they do not become barriers to
self-representation? Is there a more porous notion of truth-telling and iden-
tity that is more ethical than the rule-governed normativities that enshrine
gendered notions of privacy and protect raced and sexual violence within
 Learning from Fakes 31
social norms of power? Fakery represents a stress test for memoir’s legiti-
macy. According to sales and numbers of new memoirs published, recent
fakes have failed to turn readers and publishers away from life narratives.
By other measures, however, including the disparagement of the genre as
narcissistic and exploitative, memoir has absorbed some of the stigma
directed toward individual fakers. How, then, are we to sort the proximi-
ties and simultaneities that make fakery so perplexing?
In Touching Feeling, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers a path through this
conundrum when she evokes the sensual attractions of “cognitive frustra-
tion” (24). Sedgwick captures the visceral attraction of an idea shaped and
articulated by another as it arises imperfectly in oneself. As it hovers at the
edge of cognition, it represents “the promising closeness of transmissible
gifts” (24). This phrase captures the co-presence in autobiography of life
story and hoax. Hoaxes hide within the folds of the plausible; they capi-
talise on hope. They rely on the currency of the genre and therefore can
be seen as doing it harm, but also, rather more diagnostically, they reveal
what autobiography can be thought to offer, what lives are valued and with
what limitations on their claims to authority or truth, and what stories are
desired in the mode of life-writing. What can a “we” constituted as a mar-
ket be said to want from autobiography now? What if fakery is a predica-
ment within the project of life-writing, rather than primarily an instance
of bad faith within an autobiographer? Then fakery represents a perversion
that reveals the path of life narrative by swerving from it. Autobiography
is a genre in which one may tell the truth, but it cannot guarantee truth; its
path is toward cultural authority more than truth.
Life-writing studies have worked over the border issues raised by mem-
oir’s situation at the intersection of life and writing. At this intersection,
memoir represents a discourse overwritten by numerous and nonidentical
boundaries.11 These boundaries have been theorised in terms of reference and
mimesis, but also in terms of genre in order to specify what constitutes the
specificity of an autobiographical act, including the ways in which it touches
fiction and history but is meaningfully understood as not identical to them
(Bruss, Benstock). Memoirists themselves have long described the tempta-
tions of story-telling. Scholars of life-writing have theorised the constitutive
co-presence of fiction and nonfiction, as well as the normal constraints on an
eyewitness getting any story wholly accurate. Fakery flickers at the edge of
these issues, but has not yet been construed as capable of illuminating them.
Instead, fakes have drawn primarily regulatory impulses. But must it be so?

LEARNING FROM FAKES

Fakes expose how a readership can be constituted as a collective in order

to respond to deception. The revelation of fakery becomes an occasion
for reaffirming certain rules and norms, toughening tolerances at the edge
32 Leigh Gilmore
where autobiography shears off into fiction, and specifying the conditions
under which the nonfictional enterprise exceeds autobiographical license
and breaks faith with a collective’s sense of fair play. This way of approach-
ing fakery makes us mindful of the legalistic edge of the terrain, that is,
of fraud, where deception begets profit. In a way, readers are vulnerable
to deception and autobiographical fakery because of the conventions of
autobiographical form. Autobiographical discourse exists in relation to
norms and rules around truth-telling as they are established across time
and within communities. Although these are not uniform, and derive from
a range of self-representational practices, such norms and rules constitute
a social reality in which autobiographical “I’s” and the “you’s” to whom
they are addressed take up self-narration. Fakes threaten our capacities to
engage with these possibilities because they tempt us to draw bright lines
between the falseness of the fake and the truthfulness of other memoirs. We
err by crafting defi nitional and ethical armour from the fraudulent when
we sacrifice our productive uncertainties in the face of self-representation
for the hardened certainties of those who will not get fooled again.
What we want/get from autobiography is the same thing we want/get
from fakes . . . almost. Fakes and memoirs belong to, arise, circulate, and
are consumed within (and in turn influence) the same cultural processes.
What enables us to consume and take pleasure in personal stories is consis-
tent across ones that turn out to be fake and ones that remain (or are proved
to be) true. Indeed, without fakes, the pleasure in true stories would differ.
Publics celebrate the truth-tellers and shame the fakers. Thus fakes are not
the opposite of the true story. The effort to make such a pairing is part of
the ideological formation we must pry apart here. Instead of threatening
ideological certainties, fakes strengthen them.
I have used Butler to question whether the transparency desired from
memoir, or required in its name, ought to represent the horizon of our
ethical desire for what can be accomplished in and through the discourses
of self-representation. If we can be fooled by hoaxes, what forms of judge-
ment serve us best in remaining open to the potential for producing and
testifying to truth in autobiography and transforming identity through
writing, while reserving and even sharpening our faculties for articulating
the harms of fakes? Are the legalistic terms of contract (between writer
and reader, between writer and those represented in an autobiographical
text, etc.) or even Lejeune’s autobiographical pact complicit in eliding the
place of the unconscious in self and self-representation that forms a neces-
sary topos of the autobiographical, wherever and whenever it becomes a
text? And if legalisms fail to produce appropriate forms of and language
for judgement, what can take their place? Drawing on Butler, we can see
that the always-active opacities of life-writing do not simply disable ethi-
cal inquiry and action, or moot the importance of truth in autobiography
and the searching activity of judgement in the public sphere. Instead, they
necessarily inhabit any autobiographical text, any place where the “I” is to
come, and any utterance of truth, especially where the stakes appear in the
 Learning from Fakes 33
mode and moment of the political. More broadly, they defi ne the cultural
politics in which personal stories circulate, as the examples of Forbidden
Love and The Education of Little Tree illustrate.
Rather than blame fakery for ruining memoir, we should acknowledge
that a certain amount of suspicion about claims of truth-telling is not a bad
thing, especially if such suspicion tempers readerly enthusiasm for optimis-
tic and normative tales of overcoming and redemption. After all, fakes are
less memoir’s alien double than a reminder that self-representation, doubt,
and authority are bound together. I propose, then, a new scepticism, but not
of the kind that would overshoot literature, land in journalism, and bring
back fact checking as probative cure. Instead, the transmissible gifts of the
hoax might take the shape of critical reading rather than identification, in
which one does not take the other for one’s self, but holds open an interval
of regard, even poise in the face of the affective demand of life story.

NOTES

1. I am grateful for several years of thinking together on hoaxes with Gillian

Whitlock, Sidonie Smith, and Julia Watson. Thanks to Finn Pounds for a con-
versation about how fakes do and do not threaten the entire enterprise of mem-
oir. Deep appreciation to Beth Marshall for her acute reading of the fi nal draft.
2. See Gilmore (2010) for discussion of Oprah and the Frey scandal.
3. See Gates (1991) for a discussion of the controversy.
4. For discussion of issues central to the construction of the social legitimacy of
AIM and Wounded Knee, see Meister and Burnett.
5. Among many such articles, see as representative Thompson.
6. In 1975 Philippe Lejeune described this agreement as the autobiographical
pact. Although he has revised his view, it is consistently repeated and invoked
in autobiography criticism as a standard.
7. Scholars of autobiography have churned over these dilemmas and agreed:
life-writing is not as simple as it appears. See Smith and Watson for deft
summaries.
8. See Michael Riffaterre for an analysis of de Man’s use of this trope; for its
significance to autobiography, see my Autobiographics (Gilmore 1994).
9. Spivak’s elucidation of these two meanings of representation in “Can the
Subaltern Speak?” is helpful here (Gilmore and Marshall).
10. Adams did not mention his wife’s suicide and his grief. Kincaid stretches
autobiographical narration over many texts without dissolving the knot of
transparency and opacity (Gilmore 2001).
11. In an earlier work, I described these intersections in terms of categorical
limits (e.g. between fiction and nonfiction, but also between one person’s
autobiography and another’s biography, etc.) that are relevant in different
ways for specific texts (Gilmore 2001).

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Bruss, Elizabeth. Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Status of a Literary Genre.
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Carter, Forrest. The Education of Little Tree. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P,
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Defonseca, Misha. A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Gloucester, MA: Mt. Ivy,
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Demidenko, Helen. The Hand That Signed the Paper. Crows Nest: Allen and
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Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and
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Eakin, Paul John. Making Selves: How Our Lives Become Stories. Ithaca, NY:
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. “Breaking Rules: The Consequences of Self-Narration.” Biography 24.1
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Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: Random House, 2003. Print.
Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. “‘Authenticity’ or the Lesson of Little Tree.” Review of
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Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Represen-
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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
over it. The line was carried forward to the bow, and to it was
attached a harpoon. To this line, at some distance from the harpoon,
another short warp was attached, with a harpoon secured to the
end. The purpose was for the boat-steerer or harpooner to throw
the second iron after he had thrown the first or, if this were
impossible, to toss the second iron overboard, as otherwise it might
catch in a man’s clothing or endanger the other occupants of the
boat.
The third day the work on the whaleboats was pushed vigorously.
The oars were examined to see if there were flaws, and were then
laid in the boats; the whale line was coiled down into tubs, new
harpoons were fitted to poles, and these and the lances were placed
in the boats. The whaleboat carried a sail, which was set when the
wind was favorable, and was then steered by a rudder. At other
times it was propelled by five great oars.
The boat also carried a hatchet, a water keg, a keg containing a
few biscuits, candles, lanterns, glasses, matches, a compass, two
knives, two small axes, a boat hook, waif flags, fluke spades, canvas
buckets, a “piggin” for bailing, and paddles. A rudder hung outside
by the stern.
The ordinary whaler carried four boats on the davits—three on the
port side and one aft on the starboard side. Some whalers carried a
fifth boat forward on the starboard side.
The first mate’s boat was the one aft on the port side. This was
the one to which I was assigned. It was called the “larboard” boat.
And now it is to be noted that no whaleboat ever had a name. It
even did not have painted on it the name of the ship to which it
belonged.
On the fourth day the weather was mild and the sea calm. In the
morning the order came to lower the boats. The lookouts were in
the hoops at the mastheads, but there were no whales in sight. The
truth is, the greenies needed practice and training to prepare them
for the encounter with whales. Lakeum said to me:
“Did you ever handle an oar?”
 “Oh, yes,” I said. “I can not only handle an oar but I can do two
things which my father told me most merchantmen can’t do. I can
swim and sail a boat.”
“You may have to do both before this voyage is over,” was the
reply in rather a stern tone.
Each boat carried six men. If, when in pursuit of whales, the wind
were favorable, the sail was set; if light, oars were used together
with the sail; if not favorable, the oars alone were used.
And now we were not to seek whales, but have our first practice
in the imaginary pursuit. I had the stroke oar, which was nearly
fourteen feet long. If this were regarded as heavy and clumsy, what
would one say of the steering oar held by Lakeum, which was
twenty feet long? When the boat was lowered, we scrambled into
her and took our places. Another man and I were the only greenies
in the mate’s boat, and it turned out that he had never handled an
oar before; as for myself, I was only used to light oars of moderate
length. The sea looked very calm from the ship’s deck, but when we
had pushed off, we found that our great whaleboat was tossed
about considerably, and this made rowing more difficult. I was
anxious to do my best and I think Lakeum was aware of it, but he
gave suggestions and orders in a tone which made me realize that
he was my master.
The mate always helps the stroke oarsman. As Lakeum steered
with his left hand, he pushed with his right hand on the handle of
my oar. The other greenie blundered more than I did and in such a
way as to interfere with the others. The men made him the object of
their ridicule, but Lakeum told them to be quiet. Take it all in all,
some progress was made that morning, and we returned to the
vessel with an appetite for dinner.
This suggests the food that was served to us. There were three
messes,—cabin, steerage and forecastle. Meals were served at
seven-thirty A.M., at noon, and at five P.M. As to the forecastle, the
food was dumped in bulk into large pans and carried from the galley
to the forecastle, where the men ate it from small pans. For drink we
had tea and coffee sweetened with a kind of molasses. We had salt
junk and also hard bread which was improved by soaking it to
flabbiness, frying it in pork fat and deluging it in black molasses.
Lobscouse, a favorite dish, was a mixture of hard-tack, meat and
potatoes. Duff was made of flour, lard and dried apples. It was
boiled in a bag and served with molasses.
We ate our food in the forecastle while sitting on benches in front
of our bunks. Sometimes the meat was divided into as many parts
as there were men. Then, as the carver asked, “Who’s this for?” a
man who had turned his back called another man’s name and the
portion was given to him. This was repeated until all the men were
served. Now let me say that during the voyage I never saw among
the men a single act of selfishness or greediness. Often those who
are uneducated and have had no social advantages are, in their
relations with others, the most considerate and gentlemanly.
That afternoon the first vessel was sighted since leaving port. The
captain was out with his glasses, and I heard him say, “It’s a whaler,
and I know the managing owner’s streamer at the mainmast. The
vessel’s the Rhoda, for she’s due about now and has made a
splendid voyage according to the last report.” I asked one of the old
hands how you could tell a whaler in the distance, irrespective of the
owner’s flag, and he said, “Always by the boats. Can’t you see with
your naked eye the three boats hangin’ at the davits on the port
side?” This held good the world over. A whaler was always known by
her boats.
While the whaler was a small vessel, she carried three or four
times as many men as a merchantman of the same size, because a
large number of men was necessary when whales were pursued and
captured. Besides the captain there were generally three or four
mates or officers, four boat-steerers or harpooners, a cooper,
carpenter, blacksmith, steward, cook, cabin boy, four shipkeepers or
spare men, and sixteen to twenty seamen. Sometimes the same
person was carpenter and cooper and often there was no
blacksmith, the work of sharpening irons and so forth being done by
others. On many whalers there was no cabin boy. On the Seabird
there was neither blacksmith nor cabin boy, and a man named Jonas
was both carpenter and cooper.
Of the four boat-steerers, I shall mention only the one on our
boat. He was a Portuguese from St. Michaels, and his name was
Manuel—a broad-shouldered, stalwart fellow, with a long, powerful
arm. And he was also a fine fellow—kind-hearted and good-natured.
We had several other Portuguese in the crew, natives of the Azores,
one or two blacks from the Cape Verdes and also one Kanaka from
the Hawaiian Islands.
One member of the crew deserves especial mention. His name
was Israel Kreelman, a native of Vermont. He was getting along in
years and had followed the sea since his sixteenth year. He had
never got above the berth of seaman, for while he did his work
faithfully and well, he was not qualified for any higher position.
Kreelman seemed to me, at first, rather austere, but in time I found
him generally kind and companionable, and he took a real interest in
me. I have spoken of the hard-looking American seaman who talked
to me savagely and jostled me the first day out. His name was Jake,
and in a few days everybody was afraid of him. He talked little, and
when he did he was profane and abusive. I think it was just a week
to a day from the day of sailing, when an event occurred which
nearly ended in a tragedy.
Jake was ugly as usual and had some words with the fourth mate.
He was cautioned in an emphatic tone. He did not seem inclined to
retort, but directed his abuse against the food served to the men,
which he called slush.
 Jake partly lost his balance, and the captain seized him.

“There’s the coffee,” he said, “the captain and officers get the best
of it in the cabin. Then they add water to what’s left, and this is
what the boat-steerers and others get in the steerage. Then they
add more water to what’s left and that’s what we get in the
forecastle. It’s nothin’ but the captain’s slops.”
There was some truth in Jake’s remarks, but the language used
might have been more moderate. The captain was standing near by,
and his face flushed rapidly.
“Look here, Jake,” he exclaimed, “let me hear no more language
of that kind. If I do, I’ll put you in irons.”
“You’re a coward. You couldn’t hurt a fly.”
Before the captain could move or reply, Jake whipped out a knife
and made a lunge for him. I thought the knife was going into the
captain’s shoulder, but by a quick movement of the body he
escaped. Jake partly lost his balance, and the captain seized him.
The vessel was pitching and the outcome was uncertain. The captain
seized the wrist of Jake’s right arm, and just then Lakeum grabbed a
marlinespike and knocked the knife out of Jake’s hand. The men
struggled fiercely for a moment, when Jake slipped a little; this put
him at a disadvantage, and down they went, the captain on top.
They say you mustn’t strike a man when he’s down, but it may be
that it depends on the man and the circumstances. At any rate, the
captain gave Jake an awful mauling, and when he let him up and the
mates took him away to put him in irons, his face looked like jelly.
For several days everything went on smoothly and everybody
seemed subdued. The only comment was made to me by Kreelman.
“Boy,” he said, “I’m a common sailor and will never get any higher,
but there are always two sides to a case. I’ve seen captains and
officers do some awful cruel things, and when I was younger, I’ve
suffered myself. But in this matter the captain was right. Jake’s a
bad man. I didn’t like him from the first. What they want to do is to
get rid of him, and they’ll do it, too. Keep your eyes open.”
“How will they do it?” I asked.
“Never mind, keep your eyes open.”
I had heard of hanging men at the yardarm, and I assumed that,
when Kreelman said they would get rid of Jake, he meant they
would take his life in some way. I was uneasy and distressed.
However, I had little time for reflection, as I was constantly kept at
work.
We had several days of pleasant weather and each day we took to
the boats, and the greenies began to show great improvement in
handling the oars. The thirteenth day from home was a memorable
one. I supposed that the vessel was well on her way south, but a
great surprise was in store for me. It was a beautiful morning, and it
was not far advanced before a hazy outline appeared in the
distance. As we approached, it grew more distinct, and I was so
surprised and bewildered that I didn’t even think of seeking
information. Soon the object developed into a huge mountain, rising
right out of the sea—in fact from six to seven thousand feet in
height. It was evidently at one end of an island. Before long the
vessel was put in stays. Then came the order to lower the larboard
boat. The greenie who belonged in the boat was told to remain on
the ship, and then Jake appeared in the custody of the mates, and
was told to take the greenie’s place in the boat. Jake’s face was
covered with scabs and scars, and he didn’t appear so bold and
defiant as he did before his encounter with the captain. Lakeum
steered for the shore, which wasn’t over five hundred yards away,
and I wondered what it was all about and particularly where we
were going. My curiosity increased when on our arrival Lakeum
shouted, “Twenty minutes shore leave.” The men scrambled out of
the boat—Jake, despite his beating, the most agile of all. In a minute
Lakeum and I were alone.
“Aren’t you going with the boys?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “I’d rather stay here. Will you tell me where we are?”
“Where do you think?”
“I haven’t any idea.”
“Well, young man, this is one of the Azores. They call it Pico, and
that mountain rising right out of the sea is one of the most
wonderful things in the world.”
I wanted to ask why we were there, but I knew that that was
none of my business. Lakeum helped me out.
 “There are two reasons why we are here. You’ve noticed that
we’ve had no second mate. We are going to have one in a few
minutes. It is no uncommon thing now for a Portuguese to ship in
New Bedford sometime ahead, and then go over to the Azores in the
packet to see the folks and wait for the ship. This is our case. Mr.
Silva’s his name and he must live pretty near here, for our captain
had his instructions just where to put the ship in stays. Now then,
don’t you see how Mr. Silva’s helped us out?”
Lakeum, usually rather serious, laughed heartily.
“Puzzled again? Well, just hear me. Don’t you see this is the way
to get rid of Jake?”
“He’ll come back, won’t he?”
“Come back? We’ll never see him again, and we never want to. As
a rule we don’t want a man who’s in debt to the ship to desert, but
this man is dangerous, and nobody’s safe when he’s around. We are
only too glad to get rid of him. We’ve given him a chance, and he’s
taken it already.”
“Why didn’t the captain put back to New Bedford when the fracas
was over and have Jake arrested?”
Again Lakeum laughed.
“Why, boy, that would never do. Some of us would be called as
witnesses, and the rest would disappear. The voyage would be
broken up and the owners would be the losers. When the captain
gave Jake his licking he gave him his judge and jury and everything
else.”
We were at a little landing, and a road led up from it into the
island. On each side of the road was a wall made of large blocks that
looked like brown stones. Lakeum told me that these blocks were
pieces of lava, that the island was volcanic and that there were on it
many extinct craters. For the first time I saw oranges on the trees,
and it seemed to me as if I had entered into a new world. Pretty
soon down the road came a cart driven by a boy. In it was a man
seated on a chest. The cart was unlike any I had ever seen. It was a
crude affair, and the wheels were of solid wood. Lakeum greeted the
newcomer as follows:
 “Well, Mr. Silva, I never saw you before, but there’s no need of an
introduction. I know who you are. I’m Lakeum, the first mate. Let’s
get your chest aboard.”
Silva showed a row of dazzling teeth and Lakeum continued, “I
gave the men leave. There they are up the road, coming this way.
They’ll all be here in a minute, except one.”
Silva showed his teeth again and said, “Hard ticket, eh? Got a
good poundin’, did he? But he’s better off. The ship must stand it.
He’s spent the money the outfitter let him have—spent it before he
came aboard, and he has got on a new suit, such as it is, and it ain’t
cost him nothin’.”
Silva grinned again. Then the smile vanished, and lowering his
tone he said, “I feel almost like desertin’, too. I come back here to
get married, and I’ve just left my little wife. I’ve been married only
two weeks. She wanted to see me off. I couldn’t stand it. It’s a hard
life we whalemen lead.”
Though a boy, I was touched by the brave fellow’s words. All the
men showed up but one, and Silva took his place. As we pulled for
the ship I knew that it would be many months before we should
again pull for the shore.
 CHAPTER III
ABOUT WHALES

We now bore away south—all hands anxious to see whales. One

morning the captain called us aft and addressed us as follows:
“I want to tell you about the prizes. Every man who sights a
whale that is captured gets a prize. If the whale makes fifty barrels
or less, a flannel shirt; if over fifty barrels, five dollars. These are the
prizes given away during the voyage. Then at the end of the voyage
the owner will give two gold watches—and good gold watches, too—
one to the man who raises the largest sperm whale during the
voyage, and the other to the man who raises the largest bowhead,
that is the whales that stow down the greatest amount of oil. Keep
your eyes open.”
The name I went by was “Fancy Chest”, and it stuck to me to the
end of the voyage. As we walked away, Kreelman said:
“Well, Fancy Chest, what do you think of it?”
“Fine.”
“Not so fine as you think. The flannel shirt isn’t good for much,
and you can’t spend the five dollars at any of the few places where
we stop, for they don’t know that kind of money. I went on a voyage
once and got a so-called gold watch when we got home. It was
pinchbeck. I had to shake it to make it go, and I shook it so hard it
made my arm ache.”
This was discouraging, and I was pretty well disillusioned. It was
to be my fortune during the voyage to draw a watch, but I must
withhold the story about it till the end of the book.
Kreelman continued, changing the subject, “It’s about time to
have fresh meat. I’m about tired of hard bread and lobscouse.”
“Do they keep it on board?”
 “Fancy Chest, you are still a greenie. Look in the sea and see
what you see.”
We had seen porpoises before, but never so many as there were
now. They were dancing all about the vessel, as if bent on a frolic.
One of the boat-steerers went forward and rigged a platform just
over the bow. Then he took his stand on it, with harpoon in hand.
Two or three of the graceful creatures came up as if to encourage
advances, and then disappeared beneath the surface. They were not
near enough for the boat-steerer’s purpose. Then a daring fellow
leaped up as if to defy the harpooner, only to fall a prey to his iron.
Soon another porpoise was captured. I looked at the pretty
creatures lying on the deck—each about five feet in length—with
some pity, which gave way to the pleasant thought of the
approaching repast.
As I went by the galley the cook said, “You’ll get something at
dinner to make you feel good.” And we did. The meat was boiled
with “doughboys” or dumplings, and nice it tasted, too. This change
in diet cheered us all, and that afternoon there was more
contentment than I had seen any day since we sailed.
I had now learned to box the compass, and I knew the ropes.
There used to be an impression that the duties of a whaleman were
light. This is far from the truth. The labor was incessant. There was
no limit to the hours, and the work was often carried on in the night
watches. Contrary to the general impression, the whaler was cleaner
and more trim than the merchantman. And now a few words about
whales, as we were soon to have our first chase.
Whales have lungs and warm blood, and their bodies do not differ
much from those of a cow or a horse. There are several kinds, but in
the good old whaling day only two kinds were of real value—the
sperm whales or cachalots and the whales which yielded bone. The
largest cachalot ever captured was nearly ninety feet long and nearly
forty feet in circumference, and weighed about ninety tons! Think of
it! One hundred and eighty thousand pounds! Now, if we say that
thirteen men weigh a ton, a whale of this kind will weigh more than
the entire population of a village of over eleven hundred inhabitants.
It is also said that a large sperm whale weighs a good deal more
than a hundred oxen, and has the strength of several hundred
horses. The head is blunt and flat, and the skull sometimes
measures more than twenty feet in length. The eye is near the angle
of the jaw; it has no lashes, and is about as large as the eye of a
colt. The creature can see ahead or to either side, but the eyes are
separated by the immense head, so that each eye seems to work on
its own account; and this is thought to be the reason why sperm
whales act so queerly at times. The most curious organ is the ear. It
is just behind the eye and is so small that a pencil can hardly be
inserted in it.
The lower jaw, which contains the teeth, is far smaller than the
upper jaw, but it was regarded in whaling days of considerable
value, for the posterior part called the “jawbone” and the teeth,
which weighed about a pound and a half each, furnished the
material out of which sailors made so many curious articles.
The sperm whale has no nose, but a substitute in a spouthole on
top of the head.
The interior of the mouth is white, and the tongue is small and
the throat large.
The head is, in size, about one third of the body, and in it is what
is called the “case” containing spermaceti, formerly used in the
manufacture of candles. It is dipped out with buckets, and
sometimes fifteen barrels are taken from a single head. What is this
great oil case for? Some think that the animal draws upon it for
nourishment during periods of food scarcity, just as bears store upon
their bodies great quantities of fat to draw on later. The whales are
covered with what is called blubber, which keeps them warm in cold
water and relieves the pressure when they “sound,” that is, go down
to great depths.
The flippers, one on each side of the body, are not like the fins of
a fish, but are the limbs of land mammals, covered with blubber to
form paddles, and are supplied with bones, blood vessels and
nerves.
 The tail of the whale divides into two flukes, the distance across
which is fifteen feet. This great weapon is used for a number of
purposes—for motion, as a weapon when pursued by enemies, for
play, called lobtailing, whereby he throws his tail high in the air and
then, lowering it, smites the sea with terrific force, and for peaking,
which is the tossing of the entire flukes with a part of the body in
the air before plunging below.
When the whale so plunges below he is said to “sound,” and, as
he breathes like any other animal, he must take in for his dive a
great supply of air; otherwise he would drown. This great creature
can hold his breath for a long time, and, when he comes up, the air
in his lungs is heated, and, hence, as it is expelled into the cooler air,
it condenses and forms a vapor. This is what one sees when the
whale spouts. If this vapor touches the human skin, it stings. Now
the spout of the sperm whale is rather a poor one. It doesn’t go
straight up, but goes forward for a short distance. The blowings are
repeated sixty or seventy times at a rising, and then the whale goes
down again, and remains below for fifteen to forty-five minutes, and
occasionally for an hour or more.
Now what does the cachalot do when he is under water? It is
believed that he goes to a great depth in search of cuttlefish or
squid. Some of these dead cuttlefish thrown up on the shore are
known to be forty to fifty feet in length, and, while some say that
live cuttlefish of great size have been seen on the surface of the
ocean, the statement may well be doubted. But it is known that
fierce battles take place under water between them and the whales;
and it is a fact that dead whales have been found floating with their
bodies badly cut and bruised. But the cachalot is generally the victor.
The cuttlefish is not the only food. It is a fact that pieces of sharks
have been found in the stomachs of sperm whales.
The most curious thing about the sperm whale is that in rare
cases it produces ambergris, often worth its weight in gold; and this,
it is said, is due to the cuttlefish. This material is solid, is generally
ash-colored, is lighter than water and is fragrant when heated. It is a
growth in the intestines of the sperm whale, produced, it is thought,
by indigestion caused by the whale not being able to assimilate
beaks and other pieces of cuttlefish so often found in the ambergris.
Ambergris is generally found in cutting up the whale. Its chief use is
in manufacturing perfume. It is not the perfume itself, but the
substance which prevents evaporation.
The sperm whale is a great wanderer. He keeps away from the
cold water of the extremities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, but
travels all over the rest of the watery world. How do we know all
this? Because the whale himself has told us. Harpoons had stamped
in them the names of the ship’s owner and sometimes the name of
the ship. Often a whale with the harpoon in him would make his
escape, when the line parted, and afterwards be captured six or
seven thousand miles away from the place of encounter with the
harpoon still in his body.
Some of the antics of the sperm whale are striking. He will rise in
the water and turn to look around him. Again he will raise his head
above the surface and remain for some time in that position,
bobbing up and down amid the waves. Then, suddenly turning, he
will raise his flukes in the air and beat them upon the water with
great violence. The sound caused thereby may be heard for many
miles. This, as I have said, is called lobtailing. Then he will spring
from the water so as to show a large part of his great frame. This is
called breaching.
The female or cow cachalot is only about a third of the size of the
male or bull. The mother goes far out to sea with her baby calf,
apparently fearing no enemy, and her affection for the little creature
is very strong; so whalemen would kill the calf first, for they knew
that the mother would not forsake her offspring. The cow is said to
show affection for the bull, for when the bull is killed the cow will
stay by, only to be captured herself.
How do whales sleep? It is generally thought that it is when they
are floating on the surface, either during the day or night. Both
whalers and merchantmen are known to have run on to whales with
a result similar to that occasioned by striking a rock or reef. If the
whales had been awake they would doubtless have avoided the
vessels. A famous case of collision was that of the Union, Captain
Gardner, which sailed from Nantucket in 1807. At ten o’clock at
night, when running at seven knots, she struck a whale with such
force as to smash in the timbers on the starboard bow. The pumps
were started, but the water gained rapidly and in a couple of hours
the vessel began to sink. Three boats left the ship, one of which was
abandoned, and the men were divided equally in the other two.
There was a heavy sea, and the Azores were over six hundred miles
away. They rigged sails which were carried away by the gale, and
the two boats were finally lashed together and for a time allowed to
drift. They had little water, and the men were put on scant rations.
When suffering intensely from thirst and hunger Flores was sighted.
Captain Gardner and his men made six hundred miles in seven days
and eight nights. This young master was only twenty-four years of
age. He followed the sea for many years. In one of his voyages his
encounter with a sperm whale resulted in a badly bruised body and
a mutilated hand. This injured member is shown in the photograph
of the old gentleman in the rooms of the Old Dartmouth Historical
Society in New Bedford.
Now a few words about the whales which yield whalebone or
baleen. It used to be said that the whale which yielded excellent
bone and a generous quantity of oil was called the “right whale” to
capture, and hence the name. Later its larger relative was found in
the Arctic regions and called the bowhead, because of the structure
of the fore part of the head, which is shaped like a half-circle. The
whalebone of the bowhead is much larger than that of the right
whale, and in former days was more valuable. The slabs are in the
upper jaw, and in a bowhead are often a dozen feet or more in
length. When the mouth is closed these slabs slant back and lie
between the two jaws. When the mouth opens they hang almost
perpendicularly along the sides of the mouth, presenting the
appearance of a screen, which, as the inner side of each slab is
furnished with bristles or hairs, serves as a sieve. A bowhead once
captured had two hundred and eighty-six slabs of bone on one side
of the mouth and two hundred and eighty-nine on the other. The
lower lip supports and holds in place the lower edge of the sieve,
while the upper lip is drawn up. The right whales subsist on
crustaceans, called “brit,” which are taken in great quantities
through the mouth and are strained out by means of the bristles on
the inner side of the whalebone. The water flows out and the “brit”
is caught by the sieve. The brit is yellow and so abundant in some
latitudes as to give the appearance of extensive fields of golden
grain. The right whales are said to eat fish, if “brit” is not obtainable.
The rushing of a right whale through a field of “brit” has been
compared to a snowplow passing through a drift. He leaves behind
him a trail of blue water, spouts with great force and is difficult to
capture. Here we should note that the whalebone whales cannot see
ahead of them.
While the bowheads are very heavy, they are not more than sixty-
five feet in length. The tail is about twenty-five feet broad and six
feet deep. One of these whales, taken in 1855 in the Okhotsk Sea by
the ship Adeline of New Bedford, yielded two hundred and fifty
barrels of oil, and another taken in 1861 by the General Pike of the
same port produced two hundred and seventy-four barrels. The
whalebone whales carry their nostrils on the summit of the head.
There are two spout holes; they are f-shaped, close together, and
are located about eighteen feet from the end of the head. As they
are nearer the lungs than in the case of the sperm whale, the vapor
shoots up straight, spreading as it rises. These whales are encased
in a layer of blubber which is from a foot to two feet in thickness. It
is softer, more oily and also more sticky than that of the sperm
whale. The tongue is thick and soft, is glued to the floor of the
mouth, and generally contains about six barrels of oil, although it is
said that the tongue of a very large bowhead has been known to
yield twenty-five barrels. Such a tongue is equal to the weight of ten
oxen. The flesh of the animal is coarse, firm and red in color. The
flukes are very powerful. Hence the maxim, “Beware of a sperm
whale’s jaw and a right whale’s flukes.” While the sperm whale is a
great traveler, the right whale never crosses the equator.
 The female right whale is much larger than the female sperm, and
at the breeding time she frequents shallow waters. Her affection for
her young is very strong. It is said that she will clasp the calf with a
fin very much as a human mother holds her child. The young of the
bowhead mother is seldom seen, and it is thought that she keeps it
under the ice until it is weaned.
The bowhead’s method of feeding is like that of its relative, the
right whale. The crustaceans in the North Atlantic and Arctic, called
“slicks”, give the water the appearance of oily streaks. They are
produced by different kinds of jellyfish and range in size from a pea
to six inches or more in diameter. When the bowhead is feeding, the
spread of the lips is about thirty feet, and the method of feeding is
the same as that of the right whale.
Now what happened as the result of the pursuit of all these
creatures, well called the leviathans of the deep? Let any boy or girl
take the map and see where the whalemen cruised and captured
whales. Not content with Baffin’s Bay, Hudson’s Bay, the waters
along the coast of Greenland and in the North Atlantic, around the
Azores, Madeira, the coast of Africa, Ascension, Tristan da Cunha,
the Falkland Islands, the Cape of Good Hope and the Rio de la Plata,
the venturesome whalemen sought the Indian Ocean and more
particularly the great stretches of the Pacific and the Arctic Oceans.
Now let the boy or girl look carefully at the map of the Pacific Ocean
and see the multitude of islands in that great stretch of water. It is
said that more than four hundred islands were discovered in the
Pacific by American whalemen; and, when one sees the names of
Nantucket, Howland, Gardner and Starbuck, he need not be told that
the names were given by either Nantucket or New Bedford
whalemen.
 CHAPTER IV
THE FIRST CHASE

From early morn, when the men took their places in the hoops, to
look for whales, there followed the regular order of the day. If the
weather were good, the captain took his observations; the watches
changed at proper times, and the men at the wheel and the lookouts
were relieved every two hours. In the afternoon, usually at about
four, the pumps were tested and the decks scrubbed. There was no
noise in the ship save that occasioned by wind and wave and orders
to the men. However, in the second dogwatch, which was generally
about twilight, some fun was permitted. The men gathered, chatted
and smoked. Rude strains were drawn from a battered accordion,
while all the time the boat-steerers were at the bench aft the try-
pot, engaged in whetting harpoons.
We had, in our day, the old-fashioned log to determine the
rapidity of the ship’s motion, but it wasn’t used very much, as in
cruising for whales the speed of the vessel was of little consequence.
On the approach of a storm the merchantman sometimes failed to
make preparations in season. Not so with a whaler. Only a few days
after leaving Pico we encountered a storm. As the gale bore down
upon us from the windward blackness, and the long range of wave
crests grew larger and the situation became more serious, we were
quick to shorten sail and, under storm staysails, met the gale
without any fear. Higher blew the wind, heavier pounded the sea,
our staunch boat shipped little water, though tossed about like a
shell.
A week or more passed, and the men in the hoops saw not a
single spout. Kreelman said to me, “Fancy Chest, the sperm whale,
you know, is a low spouter—just a little bushy spout forward—and
it’s not easy to see unless the whale’s near. The men with the
sharpest eyes are the Gay Head Indians, and we’ve got one of ’em
on board, and he’s up in the hoops now. He can see a sperm spout if
any one can.”
Within half an hour came the gladdening cry from aloft, “B-l-o-w-
s! b-l-o-w-s! b-l-o-w-s! There he breaches! There he white-waters!”
The captain called out, “Where away?” “Two points on the lee bow.”
“How far off?” “Two miles, sir.” “Keep your eye on him. Sing out
when we head right.”
The captain gave orders to call all hands, get the boats ready,
square the mainyard, put the helm up, keep her off, stand by the
boats and lower away. Then he took his glasses and climbed to the
main crow’s nest. The braces, sheets, and halyards were thrown
from the pins, and then, while the men reached and hauled, the
mates slacked away, the yards swung and the vessel came about.
The boats quickly took to the water, and the crew swarmed down
the falls and dropped into their places. The boat-steerers went
forward, the officers aft. There was suppressed excitement, but no
disorder. The wind was favorable, the masts were stepped in all the
boats, the sails hoisted and peaked and the sheets paid out; and
away we went. Each boat, of course, carried six men. As it
happened, we were headed for a “pod” or “school” of sperm whales.
All the boats were in the chase, and the men left on the ship were
the captain, the four sparemen or shipkeepers, the cook, the
steward and the carpenter. The vessel fortunately was to windward
and could easily bear down on a boat if it made fast to a whale.
Here I should say that every whaling house had its private code of
signals. As the vessel was often a long distance from the boats
engaged in the chase, signals gave needed instructions. The signals
were generally about fifteen in number. They consisted of the
position of colors and of the sails. Thus the men were told of the
location of whales they could not see from the boats, of an accident
to their companions, such as a stove boat, or the need of their
presence on the ship.
We had not gone a quarter of a mile before the wind shifted and
we had to take in sail and resort to the oars. My feelings are so well
told by Captain Robbins, an old whaleman, in his book called the
“Gam” that I propose to quote his exact language. The captain says:
“I shall never forget the dazzling sensations of that first moment—
the tall ship, with her checkered sides and her huge white davits;
the two sharp-bowed clinker-built boats—five long oars in each—two
on one side, three on the other; the sun-glint upon the oar-blades as
they lifted above the surface, the white splash when they dipped
again; the rapid, nervous, brutal stroke; the pose of the officers as
they stood in the stern-sheets of the boats, each with his lifted left
hand holding the steering oar, and each with his right hand pushing
upon the stroke oar; and, yet more vivid, the one figure I could see
in our own boat. For the mate stood last, steering with one hand
and helping me row with the other.”
Just as Captain Robbins describes, Lakeum steered with his left
hand and pushed on the handle of my oar with his right. He was an
interesting figure as he urged the men on in a low tone, telling them
at the same time not to make any noise. “It’s a pretty good pod and
we ought to get a good-sized bull,” he declared. Of course, Lakeum
was the only one in the boat who could see ahead. The rowlocks
were thumbed with greased marline, to prevent any noise of the
oars. Soon came the order to take in the oars and use the paddles.
Then I knew that we were close to a whale. In a few minutes we
were told to take the oars again and await orders. I turned my head
and beheld just in front of the bow of the boat a low black mass,
and I saw the boat-steerer leaning forward as if awaiting the mate’s
order. The fateful moment had come and my feelings were intense.
The boat moved ahead very slowly, and, just as the bow touched the
monster, Lakeum shouted, “Up and let him have it.” The boat-steerer
rose in a moment and pushed his left leg into the clumsy cleat in the
forward thwart. Then he rested the top end of the harpoon handle in
the palm of his right hand, steadying it with his left. He hurled the
iron with all his force and saw it bury itself in the blubber up to the
hitches. Seizing the second harpoon, he threw it with equal success.
Lakeum shouted, “Stern—stern—all, and get out of the suds!” He
and the boat-steerer changed places,—he to enter into a fight with
the whale, and the boat-steerer to become the boat-steerer in fact.
The whale threw up his flukes and brought them down with terrific
force. The sea was white with suds, but we got out of them safely.
Down went the whale and out went the line with a whizzing sound
which soon became a regular roar. The line went out so fast that it
set fire to the loggerhead, and I put out the fire by pouring water on
it.
“I never saw a whale get away so fast,” said Lakeum. “This boat’s
nose may be under water any moment.”
The bow was then pretty close to the surface. In a moment
Lakeum shouted, “All hands scramble aft!” This was to save us from
disaster by balancing the boat.
I was somewhat alarmed and instinctively took the knife from the
cleat on the thwart. The men rushed aft in disorder, due to the
pitching of the boat, when a voice rang out, “Man caught; cut the
warp!” I didn’t have to hack twice; the knife was as sharp as a razor,
and one motion severed the line. A sharp cry came from the man
who was apparently caught, and overboard he went. Despite my
excitement and fright, I was foolish enough to think myself a hero,
but I wasn’t. The whale was gone for good, but we were temporarily
happy in the thought that we had saved the man from a terrible
death. The supposed averted tragedy, however, was more of a
comedy. My severing the line hadn’t helped the man any, for it
happened that his foot had pressed on the warp and he had been
merely thrown into the water, and, as he had hit a man on the way
and knocked him over, the order was given by some one to cut the
warp. The man in the water struck out for the boat and we soon
pulled him aboard.
Lakeum’s face changed color. He looked daggers at me. There
were no whales now in sight, and he gave orders to pull for the ship.
As he pushed on my oar our countenances were close together. For
a time nothing was said. As we neared the vessel, the expression of
anger and disappointment passed from his face. Lowering his voice
he said:
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