21 - A Nest in the Air: Phantom Pain and Contemporary Narrative

Summary

Choose imagination radically, radically build one's nest in the air.

Imre Kertész, Gályanapló

Nothing, nothing. That is how I elicit my ghosts.

Kafka, Journal

In the late twentieth-century European novel, the writing of history clearly favored the ‘evidential paradigm’ (C. Ginzburg) according to the model I have previously termed ‘the transcription of history’: the exercise of possible memories of history would tend to foreground the ‘research process,’ or the historia in the strict sense (investigation, plus its written account) of a single subjectivity devoted to reaching back into time starting in the present, working back toward a virtual (unrecoverable) text of historical experience. Within this pattern, there was systematic emphasis on the trace (as sign of absent causes and arkhē of the present), which would appear in most novels as a material trace (ichnos), an imprint (tupos) and judiciary clue to the past (tekmērion), becoming written trace (sēmeion) and functioning as a mnemonic trace, an ‘engram’ intended to be recognized in reading.

Yet, within this general model, it is possible to grant particular attention to the slight gap that the ‘hauntological’ motif (as we might say after Derrida) of the phantom limb introduces into writing about disappearance: this notion of a ghostly sensation like that provoked by a missing limb is deployed by certain contemporary authors to evoke the power of mnemonic trace that functions as the palpable presence of an absence incorporated into the physical-mental space of the author, or of the author's narrator. These writers qualify as direct descendants of Georges Perec and Raymond Federman—the two authors that Susan R. Suleiman includes in ‘the 1.5 generation’—and have used the contemporary novel form as a means of regaining authority over its past, and as a site for reinventing the novel as a ‘mirror box.’

Novel as Mirror Box

For, in my view, while the evidential paradigm in today's writing of history has begun to give way to something new (particularly to the istoric novel, one ostensibly conceived as fiction based entirely on eyewitness), I feel that the phantom limb motif (in keeping with its nature) remains vital in the body of contemporary fiction.