Cities Under a Sky of Mud: Landscapes of Mourning in Holocaust Texts

Jenni Adams

Abstract: This chapter examines the relationship between landscape, memory and mourning in Holocaust literature, with a particular focus on the work of Anne Michaels. After outlining the spatial disruptions and displacements entailed in both Holocaust experience itself and the Holocaust memory of later generations, it explores the degree to which images of landscape offer a meaningful and ethically-sound means of negotiating these issues.

Key names and concepts: Anne Michaels - Fugitive Pieces - The Winter Vault - ethics - Holocaust memory - landscape - mourning - postmemory.

We do not descend, but rise from our histories. If cut open memory would resemble

a cross-section of the earth’s core, a table of geographical time.

(Michaels, ‘Lake of Two Rivers’ 2000: 9)

Landscape is an often unacknowledged factor in memory: the land-scapes of past experience both populate memory and are populated by it. Not only is place often the subject matter of memory, but the proc-esses of memory and mourning frequently depend upon both the physical context of the rememberer and the degree to which past ex-perience may be located in an image of place. As Juhani Pallasmaa suggests, “[w]e have projected and hidden parts of our lives in lived landscapes and houses, exactly as the orators placed themes of their speeches in the context of imagined buildings” (Pallasmaa 2009: 19-20). But what happens when this relationship between the individual and the landscape is disrupted by displacement or traumatic loss, and when the losses themselves take place in a landscape which appears to retain no trace of these histories?

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This essay aims to address such questions in the specific con-text of Holocaust memory and postmemory, examining the ways in which experiences of the Holocaust and its aftermath challenge a sense of spatial continuity for survivors and their children.1 Focusing on Anne Michaels’ 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces, I examine the ways in which images of landscape may be deployed as a means of responding to these individuals’ dislocated relationships to the places and events of an unwitnessed familial past, through a compensatory yet ethically questionable poetics of preservation, recuperation and plenitude. After tracing the presence of, and resistance to, such uses of landscape im-agery in works including W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2002), Georges Perec’s W or the Memory of Childhood (1975) and Anne Michaels’ recent work The Winter Vault (2009), this essay aims to arrive at a nu-anced and ethically sensitive appraisal of the consolatory and repara-tive role of landscape in postmemory.

1. Landscape and the Holocaust

The Holocaust is frequently interpreted as an event which stands in radical disruption of the necessarily close affiliation between memory and sense of place. As Ulrich Baer notes, “[s]urvivor accounts often recount the deportation to a non-place and the destruction of the sym-bolic notion of a ‘place’ that could hold experience together” (2000: 46). This sense of the spatial and experiential dislocation entailed within concentration camp experience is expressed particularly effec-tively in the words of Charlotte Delbo, who notes of her fellow de-portees that “[s]ome of them have travelled in all the countries in the world, businessmen. They were familiar with all manner of landscape, but they do not recognize this one” (Delbo 1995: 5). Delbo’s articula-tion of the alterity of the Holocaust landscape is further echoed in the following lines from Auschwitz and After, in which the incomprehen-sion of the Holocaust’s victims is sharply contrasted with what Delbo perceives as post-Holocaust culture’s assumption of familiarity with the geography of genocide:

1 As discussed below, postmemory is Marianne Hirsch’s term for the imagina-tive reconstruction of a traumatic familial past by the children and grandchil-dren of its survivors.

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From all the countries of Europe from all the points on the horizon trains converged toward the nameless place loaded with millions of humans poured out there unknowing of where […]burnedwithout knowing where they were. Today people know have known for several years that this dot on the map is Auschwitz This much they know as for the rest they think they know. (1995: 137-8)

Between the individuals “burned/without knowing/where they were” and the people who “know […] that this dot on the map/is Auschwitz” resides an unbridgeable gulf. While those who come after may claim an illusory spatial ‘knowledge’ of Auschwitz in their capacity to iden-tify and name the site, to the survivors and victims of this atrocity – many of whom, as Delbo points out, were killed even before they learned where they had been taken – the experience radically refuses assimilation to any existing conception of place. Delbo powerfully summarizes this abolition of place and place-experience in her de-scription of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück as “an elsewhere/which is nowhere” in the fragment “[Whether you return from war or from elsewhere]” (256).

The radical disruption of space is not only a dimension of con-centration camp experience, but pervades, in different ways, the con-tinuum of experiences during the Holocaust, including the experiences of ghettoization, escape, and hiding. Both escape and hiding form im-portant aspects of the Holocaust experience of Jakob, the protagonist of Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces (1997 [1996]). Jakob escapes the murder of his family through repeated acts of confinement, hiding in a recess as his family are killed, and later burying himself up to the neck during daylight hours to escape discovery by soldiers. He remarks af-ter his rescue that “Jews were filling the corners and cracks of Europe […]. They buried themselves in strange graves, any space that would fit their bodies, absorbing more room than was allotted them in the

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world” (Michaels 1997: 45), powerfully situating his own “strange grave” within a broader context of similar Jewish experiences in war-time Europe.

2. Landscape and Aftermath

Disruption in the experience of space is hence an integral aspect of Holocaust experience in a number of different contexts. Most signifi-cant for the purposes of this chapter, however, is the endurance of such disruption from the testimonial into the memorial and postmemo-rial eras, profoundly troubling the project of attempting to ‘locate’ Holocaust memory in space as part of the process of mourning at-tempted by later generations.

An insight into this process and its difficulties is presented by Georges Perec’s 1975 work W or the Memory of Childhood, which traces Perec’s attempts to come to terms with the loss of both of his parents, but particularly his mother, during the war. Perec comments of a visit to his father’s grave that:

[There was] something like a secret serenity connected to this rooting in space, […] to this death which had at last ceased to be abstract […] as if the discovery of this tiny patch of earth had at last put a boundary around that death which I had never learnt of, never experienced or known. (Perec 1996: 38)

Perec’s comments highlight the therapeutic necessity of the relation-ship between memory and physical place: rendering the death con-crete through its location in ‘this tiny patch of earth’ enables Perec to encounter it as tangible, bounded and marked by a continuity which reinforces the trace of the event in memory. As Jorge Otero-Pailos states, place possesses a mnemonic value which derives from the fact of its stability (Otero-Pailos 2009: 253). Although Perec’s father died as a soldier rather than as a Holocaust victim, this example under-scores the significance of the physical site to Holocaust memory, if only by contrast with the unplaceable death of Perec’s mother, a Jew-ish deportee, of whom no trace can be located and whose disappear-ance carries no such tangible marker: “We never managed to find any trace of my mother or of her sister.” (Perec 1996: 40) This contrast be-tween placeable and unplaceable losses highlights the degree to which

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the Holocaust memory of later generations frequently lacks a stable and specific geography from which acts of mourning might proceed. In this context, the proliferation of Holocaust memorials in Europe and the United States illustrates strikingly the need to tie memory to place in the face of an attempt to destroy not only large numbers of persecuted individuals but also any trace of how and where this de-struction took place.

Spatial difficulties in post-Holocaust memory arise not only from the frequent unplaceability of Holocaust losses, but also from the sense of disparity between the landscapes of the Holocaust and the horrific nature of these events. Of a trip to the Palmiry Forest near Warsaw – the site of mass killings of the Polish intelligentsia between the years 1939-1943 – during the process of research for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Edward T. Linenthal reflects, for example, that:

These beautiful woods, with the sound of the wind rustling through the trees, made it difficult to visualize the horror that had occurred. Nature softened the impact of the site, and awareness of the tension between beautiful site and historical event heightens consciousness of the precarious nature of the context in which memory works. Not only had the Nazis murdered people, and attempted to erase the physical traces of that murder, they chose places that made it difficult to visual-ize in the mind’s eye what had happened, to feel the horror that was appropriate to the place. (Linenthal 1995: 156)

Linenthal’s comments illustrate the degree to which, as Anne White-head elsewhere comments of Simon Schama’s description of the Pol-ish countryside in Landscape and Memory, the horror of the Holo-caust is for the most part not signified in the sites at which these events took place (Whitehead 2004: 49-50; Schama 1995: 26). Docu-mentary films such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah underscore this in-ability of landscape alone to render visible the atrocities which took place there, as emphasized in the survivor Simon Srebnik’s testimony on his return to Chelmno: “It’s hard to recognize, but it was here.” (Lanzmann 1995: 3) This sense of disparity between the experiential reality of the Holocaust and the signifying capacity of its remains might be considered particularly disturbing given the attempts of the Nazis to obliterate the connection between landscape and event in their efforts to destroy all traces of the genocide at such sites as Treb-linka.

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Such therapeutic linkings of memory and space as those pre-sented in the above passage from Perec are thus both particularly nec-essary and particularly difficult in the context of the Holocaust, an event which entailed a radical disruption both in the spatial experience of its victims and in the attempts of later generations to approach and commemorate these losses. The attempt to re-establish, or ‘re-ground’ the relationship between landscape and memory – enlisting physical space in the marking of a loss which is resistant to the localisations of knowledge – will be the focus of the subsequent analysis, which will examine the unfolding of this process in Anne Michaels’ 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces. In the pages that follow, I explore the consolatory and potentially ethically problematic dimensions of memory’s location in geological terrain in the novel, uncovering the magic realist and other strategies by which Michaels’ spatial poetics of landscape is able to resist a fetishistic approach to traumatic history, while at the same time permitting a necessary link between memory, landscape, and the Holocaust experience of previous generations to be restored.

3. Fugitive Pieces, Postmemory and Exile

Fugitive Pieces presents itself as the memoir of the displaced Polish-Jewish poet Jakob Beer, who as a child overhears from a hiding place the death of his parents and the disappearance of his sister, Bella, at the hands of Nazi soldiers. Jakob is eventually rescued by the Greek archaeologist Athos, who removes him to the relative safety first of Zakynthos, Greece, and later of Toronto. Nevertheless, his life is shaped by these losses, and by his inability to bear witness to his fam-ily’s final moments, as he summarizes in the statement that “I did not witness the most important events of my life” (1997: 17). This failure of memory places Jakob in what might be understood as a postmemo-rial relation to his family’s deaths.

Postmemory is Marianne Hirsch’s term for a second generation individual’s relationship to the traumatic experiences of a parent or grandparent, and their compulsion to reconstruct these experiences in memory as a result of what Hirsch terms the “[need] simultaneously to rebuild and to mourn” (1996: 664). The relationship of postmemory is, in its focus on a series of events occurring prior to the experience, and in most cases the existence, of the second generation individual, a

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fundamentally belated one, mirroring the status of traumatic experi-ence itself as that which cannot be fully assimilated as it takes place.2As a result of this belated character, and of the frequent absence of the traces by which these histories may be reconstructed – documentary evidence may be lacking, for example, and survivor relatives may be reluctant or unable to supply narratives of their past – postmemory constructions are often supplemented by what Hirsch refers to as “imaginative investment and creation” (Hirsch 1996: 662).

In Fugitive Pieces, Jakob cannot be categorized straightfor-wardly as a member of the second generation, in the sense that he has experienced the events of the Holocaust first-hand, as detailed above in the discussion of his spatial experience as ‘hidden child’. However, Jakob might nevertheless also be understood as an agent of postmem-ory in his attempts to overcome both the physical ‘distance’ from the event incurred with his removal to Zakynthos, and the temporal belat-edness which surrounds the experience of the familial trauma: Jakob’s ‘missed experience’ of his parents’ death and his painful lack of knowledge regarding Bella’s probable demise.3 In this intermediate position between survivor/witness and descendant of Holocaust vic-tims, Jakob might be located among what Susan Rubin Suleiman terms “the 1.5 generation”, comprised, in Suleiman’s words, of “child survivors of the Holocaust, too young to have had an adult under-standing of what was happening to them but old enough to have been there during the Nazi persecution of Jews” (2004: 372). Such survi-vor-descendants are forced to negotiate not only the traumatic dis-placements which comprise their own Holocaust experience but also the spatial and temporal displacements inherent in their postmemorial relation to familial suffering, as I shall discuss below.4 The member of the 1.5 generation is thus simultaneously troubled by both Holocaust experience itself and by their postmemorial relationship to events.

The degree to which this postmemorial relation involves a dis-ruption at the level of landscape and spatiality is elaborated by Hirsch

2 In Caruth’s definition, for example, trauma is understood as a missed experi-ence which “is not fully perceived as it occurs” (1996: 18).

3 For a discussion of belatedness in Fugitive Pieces, see Kertzer (2000: 205). 4 Other texts which address the experience of the 1.5 generation include Perec’s

W or The Memory of Childhood (1975), Friedländer’s When Memory Comes (1979) and Sebald’s Austerlitz (2002).

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in her use of the intensely chronotopic image of exile,5 a concept which indicates the degree to which temporal belatedness and spatial displacement unfold concurrently to intensify the sense of disorienta-tion surrounding the postmemorial subject. As she explains in the fol-lowing passage:

Holocaust postmemory […] attempts to bridge more than just a tem-poral divide. The children of exiled survivors, although they have not themselves lived through the trauma of banishment and the destruc-tion of home, remain always marginal or exiled, always in the dias-pora. ‘Home’ is always elsewhere, even for those who return to Vi-enna, Berlin, Paris, or Cracow, because the cities to which they return are no longer those in which their parents had lived as Jews before the genocide, but are instead the cities where the genocide happened and from which they and their memory have been expelled. (Hirsch 1996: 662)

In Hirsch’s reading, the children of Holocaust survivors are exiled in both time and space, in a form of displacement that cannot, as a result of its temporal dimension, be resolved by an ostensibly straightfor-ward return to the familial place of origin. Nevertheless, Hirsch pre-sents the possibility of overcoming such displacement in strikingly spatial terms as a ‘bridging’ of the divide of familial trauma. While the architectural register of this formulation is emblematic of a wider tendency in trauma theory to use a concrete vocabulary in the concep-tualisation of that which resists articulation, it also, I suggest, hints towards the constructive role of instrumentation at the level of land-scape, space and their imagination in overcoming the challenges postmemory presents.

Such a reading of postmemory work as potentially employing the imaginative reconstruction of space to negotiate the temporal and spatial disturbances of the postmemorial relationship is implicit in the following passage from Fugitive Pieces, in which Jakob articulates his compulsion to reconstruct his unwitnessed familial past:

Night after night, I endlessly follow Bella’s path from the front door of my parents’ house. In order to give her death a place. This becomes my task. I collect facts, trying to reconstruct events in minute detail.

5 Chronotope is Bakhtin’s term for “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” in literature (Bakhtin 1981: 84).

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Because Bella might have died anywhere along that route. In the street, in the train, in the barracks. (139)

This passage demonstrates both the compulsive nature of Jakob’s ‘task’ and the importance of physical space to this process, with the act of ‘giving a place to’ Bella’s death symbolizing the possibility of gaining the concrete knowledge which might enable both mourning and postmemory to proceed. Yet such concrete knowledge is unavail-able to Jakob, rendering impossible the therapeutic location of Bella’s death in a stable and identifiable geography, as the multiplication of possibilities in this passage underlines. In the failure of this quest for a specific site of loss, Jakob is forced to employ space, and the image of space, in more complex ways, illustrating in an unusual way Hirsch’s suggestion that postmemory deploys the resources of the imagination (through “imaginative investment and creation”) to compensate for such absences in knowledge.

4. The Spatial Poetics of Postmemory

One way in which Jakob employs space to negotiate this crisis in postmemory is in his use of geological data as a substitute for the ab-sent knowledge the process of mourning pursues. The attraction held to Jakob by images of geological transition, for example, is illustrated in the following passage, in which he reflects on the education pro-vided by Athos during his time in hiding:

During the long months, I listened to Athos recount not only the his-tory of navigation […] but the history of the earth itself. He heaped before my imagination the great heaving terra mobilis: “Imagine solid rock bubbling like stew; a whole mountain bursting into flame or slowly being eaten by rain, like bites out of an apple…”. (21)

The possibility that such vividly-imagined natural histories function for Jakob as substitute for a missing postmemorial knowledge is strongly implied by his acknowledgement that “[e]ven as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history” (20). The geological nature of this “second history” is significant in its pro-vision not merely of distraction for the grieving Jakob, but of a substi-

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tute knowledge whose concrete nature provides a consolatory alterna-tive to the indeterminacy surrounding Bella’s disappearance, a surro-gate geography for the uncertain landscape of her death. The content of this concrete knowledge, furthermore, enables a displaced articula-tion of Jakob’s losses, through the earth’s subjection to catastrophic processes metaphorically comparable to those he has undergone, as Dalia Kandiyoti has observed (2004: 322). Such parallels are under-lined in Jakob’s statement that the geologist and the elegiac poet share the same task: the exploration of what Jakob terms “buried and aban-doned places” (49), or the pursuit of the past from a position subse-quent to its destruction.

Jakob’s use of geological and landscape imagery to implicitly give voice – in a manner simultaneously more concrete and more oblique than might otherwise be possible – to his own situation as both an agent of postmemory and a traumatized refugee is elsewhere exemplified in the importance he attaches to the properties of natural materials. One anecdote given particular weight is Athos’s report of a Greek Jewish stevedore’s remark that “[t]he great mystery of wood is not that it burns, but that it floats” (28), with the Jewish identity of the stevedore and the evocation of the Holocaust in the reference to con-flagration suggesting the image’s function for Jakob as a metaphor of Jewish resilience and survival. Natural imagery in this sense enables the shaping and articulation of constructive responses to loss, indicat-ing its function in permitting both an escape from and an implicit en-gagement with trauma and postmemory.

A comparison might be made on this point between Jakob and the eponymous protagonist of another fiction of postmemory, W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2002). A former Kindertransport child, the adult Austerlitz employs architectural knowledge as “a substitute or com-pensatory memory” which simultaneously allows both a protective “self-censorship” (198) of his psyche and an emergence of the dis-tressing contents of the past within the less threatening context of ar-chitectural research. One example of this is Austerlitz’s stated “early fascination with the idea of a network such as that of the entire rail-way system”, an “obsession with railway stations” (44-45) which functions as a displaced articulation both of the protagonist’s re-

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pressed experience of childhood evacuation and of the unwitnessed deportation of his mother.6

In Sebald’s novel, Austerlitz implicitly ‘works through’ his dis-placement through both an engagement with architecture in general and a specific fixation upon such sites as Liverpool Street Station in London, to which he is “irresistibly drawn” and which turns out to have been the site of his arrival in England (180, 193). Just as Auster-litz makes use of both specific and non-specific architectural images in this process of sublimation and evasion, Jakob too employs not only a knowledge and imagination of macro-geographic processes but also an attention to specific landscapes as a means of both compensating for and explicitly engaging with Bella’s unplaceable death. Travelling through the ravaged landscape of Greece after the end of the war, for example, Jakob states:

The landscape of the Peloponnesus had been injured and healed so many times, sorrow darkened the sunlit ground. All sorrow feels an-cient. Wars, occupations, earthquakes; fire and drought. I stood in the valleys and imagined the grief of the hills. I felt my own grief ex-pressed there. It would be almost fifty years and in another country before I would again experience this intense empathy with a land-scape. (Michaels 1997: 60)

In this passage, the specific landscape of the Peloponnesus functions as a means of encounter, with Jakob confronting his own sorrow through the process of projection.7 The landscape offers a concrete site in which the emotional excesses of traumatic loss might be accommo-dated, both as a means of imaginatively engaging with that which, in its traumatic magnitude, cannot be directly examined or worked through; and as a means of overcoming the protagonist’s sense of iso-lation and displacement by positing a personal relationship to post-Holocaust landscape and place: “I felt my own grief expressed there.” Jakob’s sense of loss is, similarly, articulated in the Greek landscape in the villagers’ practice of signposting villages destroyed during the war (“This was Kandanos”, “This was Skines” [70]), with such signs

6 For a brief discussion of Austerlitz in relation to Fugitive Pieces, see also Kandiyoti (2004: 309).

7 On this point, see also Kandiyoti (2004: 316-7).

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implicitly enacting Jakob’s own need to render visible that which has been lost.

This use of one landscape to implicitly articulate one’s own lost landscapes (in both a literal and a metaphorical sense) recalls the at-tempts of Marco Polo in Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1997 [1974]) to invoke his own lost Venice through the invention and narration to the Khan of the cities encountered on his travels (Calvino 1997: 78). Both examples underscore the integral role of landscape in the externaliza-tion of human memory, indicating landscape’s constructive and re-parative potential in the creative response to exile, displacement and loss. As Howard states, “imaginative reconfigurations of the natural world […] may serve as vehicles for the expression of grief, the con-struction of memory and the writing of historical narratives either sub-jective or cultural in scope” (2003: 47).

5. The Invisible World

I have thus far examined the way in which images of landscape and narratives of geological history become a form of substitute memory for Jakob, providing both an escape from and a sublimation of the task of postmemory. This attempt to find both comfort and a means of mourning in images of land is taken further, however, in the sugges-tion of a form of memory residing in the earth itself. This idea origi-nates in the novel in Jakob’s fixation on the practice of archaeology as described to him by Athos. Archaeology presents a chronotope, or im-age of the relationship between time and space, in which these dimen-sions are similarly layered: time becomes spatialized in the sense that digging deeper into the earth allows the partial reconstruction of in-creasingly distant periods from the present. Such a layering is, indeed, expressly imagined by Jakob in his statement, of his studies with Athos, that “I was transfixed by the way time buckled, met itself in pleats and folds” (Michaels 1997: 30), with the allusion in this image to the earth’s strata, the buckling and folding of rock seams with the movement of tectonic plates, presenting the operations of time as structurally analogous to those of space.

Such spatialization of time is, interestingly, also to be found in Sebald’s Austerlitz, in which, for example, the protagonist states his growing feeling that “time [does] not exist at all, only various spaces

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interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, be-tween which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like” (2002: 261). In both texts, and particularly in the archaeological model presented by Michaels and Jakob, the notion of spatialized time introduces the possibility that lost events may be recovered through a process of spatial excavation, an idea elsewhere exploited metaphori-cally in the Freudian method for recovering ‘buried’ memories (see King 2000: 145). The comfort this idea provides for Jakob, and the degree to which the notion of archaeology is consequently distorted to this end, may be illustrated by a glance at the following passage:

The Zohar says: “All visible things will be born again invisible.” The present, like a landscape, is only a small part of a myste-

rious narrative. […] Athos confirmed that there was an invisible world, just as real

as what’s evident. Full-grown forests still and silent, whole cities, un-der a sky of mud. The realm of the peat men, preserved as statuary. The place where all those who have uttered the bony password and en-tered the earth wait to emerge. (48-9)

The mention of bog people here, both in the historically-located sense and as an allusion to Jakob’s survival in the bog at Biskupin, under-lines the very real possibilities for preservation offered by the land-scape’s geological depth. Nevertheless, Jakob and Athos’s construc-tion of archaeology manipulates these prospects in a way that is obvi-ously consolatory, most notably in its suggestion of the totality of that which is preserved. The images of “whole cities under a sky of mud” and “full-grown forests” – indeed, of an entire “invisible world” – use a vocabulary of plenitude to suggest that nothing whatsoever is lost, that the dead are merely transported, intact, to a world beneath the ground, where they await the attentions of archaeologists. The quota-tion from the Zohar, and the absolute terms in which it describes the invisible rebirth of ‘all things’, likewise suggests totality, whilst also serving to signify the mystical nature of archaeology in Jakob’s eyes.

Archaeology thus provides Jakob with a fantasy of preservation, in which time is stratified in geological space and consequently re-mains available to recovery. This fantasy is represented most potently in the following, oft-quoted passage, in Jakob’s insistence that:

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It’s no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world, just as it’s no metaphor to hear the radiocarbon chronometer, the Geiger counter amplifying the faint breathing of rock, fifty thousand years old. […] We long for place, but place itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment. Eskers of ash wait to be scooped up, lives reconstituted. (53)

In this passage, geological space becomes fully attributed with human characteristics, with Jakob’s longing for knowledge inverted into the desire of this spatialized knowledge for its gathering by human hands. Such a process of gathering is imagined in Jakob’s assertion that pris-oners forced to exhume the dead from mass graves were able to take on the memories of the deceased, as, in Jakob’s words, “the dead en-tered them through their pores and were carried through their blood-streams to their brains and hearts. And through their blood into an-other generation” (52). Memory here becomes fully distinct from hu-man minds through its projection onto the landscape itself, with the implication being that Bella’s memory is not lost, regardless of its ab-sence from human consciousness. Thus while Jacob cannot himself bear witness to Bella’s death, the possibility remains that these memo-ries may be recovered, and even transmitted to future generations “through their blood”.

The notion of an externalized memory located in a specific site – and hence distinct from the contingencies of human witness and re-membering – is a prevalent one in Fugitive Pieces’ treatment of the Holocaust, with Jakob suggesting both geological depth (“In the holy ground of the mass graves, the earth blistered and spoke” [143]) and cosmological distance (“If sound waves carry on to infinity, where are their screams now? I imagine them somewhere in the galaxy” [54]) as possible landscapes of absent Holocaust memory. The redemptive ca-pacities of landscape in both a specific and an abstract sense are, in-terestingly, elsewhere imagined by Jakob to intervene not merely in the unfolding of memory and postmemory but also at the point of the unwitnessed genocide itself, as the following passage illustrates:

Geography cut by rail. The black seam of that wailing migration from life to death, the lines of steel drawn across the ground, penetrating straight through cities and towns now famous for murder: from Berlin through Breslau; […] from Vilna through Grodno and ód ; from Athens through Salonika and Zagreb. Though they were taken blind, though their senses were confused by stench and prayer and screams,

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by terror and memories, these passengers found their way home. Through the rivers, through the air. (51-2)

Landscape is here explicitly opposed to the technological machina-tions of Nazism, with the railway system by which Jews were de-ported presented as a form of assault or even rape upon the country-side of Europe, “cut[ting]” and “penetrating” the terrain. The passen-gers’ return through death takes place not along these inhospitable railtracks but “[t]hrough the rivers, through the air”, in a reappropria-tion8 of pastoral imagery which firmly positions landscape as the sympathetic medium of the dead. In terms of both the preservation of memory and the possibility of an afterlife, landscape and its imagina-tion in Fugitive Pieces thus permit a profoundly comforting response both to the absence of postmemorial knowledge and to loss of life it-self.

6. The Ethics of (False?) Consolation

The idea of geological memory is thus a consolatory one, which at-tempts to reinstate the materials necessary for mourning through its displacement of time onto geological and archaeological space. This consolatory dimension has been viewed as problematic by a number of the novel’s critics. Nicola King, for example, compares FugitivePieces unfavourably with Perec’s W, another text in which memory and land are deeply intertwined through the alternation of Perec’s autobiographical fragments with an adventure narrative of a voyage to the island of W, a fictional place which increasingly resembles the concentration camps in which Perec’s mother disappeared. In Perec’s refusal to integrate the narrative of the camps with his personal ac-count, King reads a recognition of the dimensions of the past unavail-able to recovery, even as the island of W provides a concrete site for their imagining (King 2000: 24, 120).

8 As Coffey (2007: 38-44) suggests, the Nazi appropriation of the pastoral in the ideology of ‘blood and soil’ renders the use of the mode in Holocaust lit-erature problematic unless these disturbing associations are first acknowl-edged and undercut, a process Coffey identifies in Fugitive Pieces in such in-stances as the novel’s engagement with the deception present in the Nazi ap-propriation of such archaeological sites as Biskupin.

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In contrast, King suggests, Michaels fetishistically recuperates the unknown, using language to “‘suspend time’ rather than acknowl-edging the impossibility of fully restoring the past” (King 2000: 148).9To borrow, and to a certain extent take out of context the typology proposed by Pierre Nora (1989), the island of W might be viewed as a lieu de mémoire, a ‘site of memory’, arising in the absence of the mi-lieu de mémoire, the real environment of memory, and standing as a symbol of the incompleteness and artificiality of memory in the after-math of the traumatic break.10 In contrast, Fugitive Pieces may be viewed as attempting to reinstate the possibility of milieux de mé-moire, environments of memory, by literalizing this idea so that the landscape itself remembers, even where human memory is necessarily fragmented by loss.11 The traumatic basis of the break in memory is thus obscured by Michaels’ novel, and it is this element of what Eric Santner would term narrative fetishism – “the construction and de-ployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously designed to ex-punge the traces of the trauma or loss that called that narrative into be-ing in the first place” (Santner 1992: 144) – that renders the novel ethically questionable.

I’d like to argue against this judgement of the novel, however, first by addressing the context and ontological status of these consola-tory images of landscape, and finally through a discussion of Michaels’ most recent novel The Winter Vault (2009), another text ex-tensively preoccupied with memory and landscape and which might, in many ways, be read as an extended clarification of Michaels’ views on memory, land and consolation in the face of the criticism met with by Fugitive Pieces. To begin with Fugitive Pieces itself, any debate about consolation in the novel must first recognize that the text pre-

9 For discussion of the falsely consolatory nature of Michaels’ novel, see also Kertzer (2000: 199) and Vice (2000: 9).

10 In Nora’s original formulation, what renders milieux de mémoire no longer possible – and hence what precipitates our interest in lieux de mémoire – is not the experience of historical trauma, but is instead the onset of modernity and postmodernity, and in particular the increasing historical and historiographical consciousness of the contemporary era, which Nora views as displacing the cultural traditions and rituals which constituted the living practice of memory.

11 This is a divergent application of Nora’s ideas to the novel to that advanced by Whitehead (2004: 58), who focuses on the novel’s manifestation of the “will to remember” identified by Nora with the formation of lieux de mémoire.

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sents a first-person narration of a traumatized character; it does not position itself as a model for how such trauma should be negotiated by post-Holocaust culture at large. Jakob’s use of landscape in his repara-tive response to absent familial knowledge might thus be understood as a personal and therapeutic intervention into the project of post-memory rather than a statement of objective validity. Indeed, Jakob himself acknowledges the wistful nature of these imaginings, linking the experience of mystical belief to desperation in the statement that “[s]ometimes the body experiences a revelation because it has aban-doned every other possibility” (53), and explicitly stating his doubts regarding memory’s preservation in the words “I long for memory to be spirit, but fear it is only skin” (170).

Furthermore, Jakob’s focus on the intact preservation of past events in the land strata is countered by an emphasis upon transition, both in discussions of geological processes (“But at what moment does wood become stone, peat become coal, limestone become mar-ble?” [140]) and in the discussion of past events themselves, with Ja-kob asking, for example, “How many years pass before the difference between murder and death erodes?” (54). Such utterances as the latter highlight the degree to which the past’s interpretation depends upon the present conditions of its reading or remembering, in the process of Nachträglichkeit identified by Freud (in contrast to the archaeological model of memory most commonly identifiable with psychoanalysis).12

An extreme example of such ‘afterwardsness’ is, indeed, presented by the novel’s references to the SS-Ahnenerbe’s falsifications of archae-ology at the site of Biskupin, in an emphasis upon the operation of subjective motivation in contemporary reconstructions of the past.13

The relationship between landscape and memory in Fugitive Pieces is hence qualified by both the subjective nature of Jakob’s nar-

12 For a discussion of these alternative models of memory, see King (2000: 11-32).

13 Such an emphasis is also present in Michaels’ The Winter Vault, in Lucjan and Jean’s discussion of the deceptions brought about by the Soviets at the site of Katyn (2009: 219).

For a more detailed discussion of the significance of Biskupin to the novel, see Kandiyoti (2004: 310-312), and for a discussion of the work of the SS-Ahnenerbe, see McCann (1990) in Gathercole and Lowenthal (eds). Gath-ercole and Lowenthal’s edited volume is one of the historical sources listed by Michaels in her “Acknowledgements”.

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rative and this narrative’s simultaneous emphasis upon transition, in-stability, and a lack of neutrality in the retrospective construction of events. To turn next to the ontological status of Michaels’ images of memory and landscape, it might also be argued that the magic realist nature of the novel’s engagement with landscape prevents these im-ages from functioning fetishistically. Magic realism may be briefly de-fined as a literary mode in which, as Spindler suggests, “two contrast-ing views of the world (one ‘rational’ and one ‘magical’) are pre-sented as if they were not contradictory” (1993: 78). While this blend-ing of ontological registers is most frequently associated with the work of such Latin American or postcolonial writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie and Ben Okri, magic realist strategies also form an identifiable tendency in recent representations of the Holo-caust. Such works as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon (1997) and Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (2005) use magic realist techniques to negoti-ate the complex ethical and representational difficulties which sur-round the representation of the Holocaust, creating fictions which strive to engage productively with these events while acknowledging their ethical and experiential distance from the real. Far from present-ing an inappropriate, kitsch or falsely consolatory vision of Holocaust history, magic realist Holocaust fictions offer an innovative means of foregrounding the limits of Holocaust representation, through the use of supernatural motifs resistant to assimilation into a realist concep-tion of history.

Viewing Fugitive Pieces as magic realist means appraising it in precisely this context, paying attention to the ontological differences it includes and approaching its images of geological memory not as merely implausible or excessively reassuring images, but as images which stand in a relationship of radical alterity to the historical realism of the novel’s plot and setting. From such a perspective, the super-natural or mystical status of the idea that the memories of the dead might be preserved in, and transmitted through the earth stands as a signifier of these events’ irreconcilability with the historical real, a disavowal that takes place even as this therapeutic fantasy unfolds. Magic realism thus allows an ontologically and epistemologically di-vided narrative to emerge that is comparable to the more clearly de-marcated narrative(s) of Perec. In the case of Fugitive Pieces, this di-vided narrative is one which simultaneously articulates Jakob’s fanta-

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sies of recovery and indicates the presence of that which is not recu-perable to historical and postmemorial knowledge, defusing the possi-bility of narrative fetishism by incorporating a recognition of post-memory’s absences into its otherwise consolatory constructions.

7. Conclusion

I would like to conclude by taking a brief look at the relationship be-tween landscape, memory and consolation in Michaels’ recent novel The Winter Vault (2009), which explores the concepts of exile and loss with a particular focus on the displacement of communities dur-ing the building of the Aswan High Dam and the St Lawrence Seaway Project in Ontario. The novel traces the relationship between Jean and her husband, Avery, an engineer who participates in both the seaway project and the scheme to transport the Abu Simbel temple to a site not threatened by the dam. Following the still-birth of Jean and Avery’s first child during their time in Egypt, Jean returns to Toronto and begins an affair with Lucjan, an exiled Polish Jew, who relates his experiences both of the war itself and of the post-war rebuilding of Warsaw.

In its focus on two acts of resurrection – the piecemeal recon-struction of the Abu Simbel temple in a different location, and the re-building of Warsaw’s Old Town exactly as it had been before the bombing – The Winter Vault continues on a more literal level a dia-logue opened in Fugitive Pieces as regards the degree to which the past can and should be made present at the level of landscape. Michaels’ treatment of the Abu Simbel project addresses the fetishis-tic possibilities inherent in this insistence on continuity and preserva-tion, with Avery reflecting, for example, that “[i]f one could be fooled into believing he stood in the original site, by then subsumed by the waters of the dam, then everything about the temple would have be-come a deceit” (Michaels 2009: 4). As the novel progresses, however, Avery moves towards the realization that the problem with the tem-ple’s reconstruction lies not in the fetishism of its transplantation but instead in the human cost of the Aswan Dam itself, as he acknowl-edges in the statement that “[m]oving the temple was not the lie […], but moving the river was” (332). Like the St Lawrence Seaway pro-ject, in which “even the dead were dispossessed, exhumed to church-

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yards north of the river” (44), the dam displaces individuals and com-munities on a large scale, a fact that goes unacknowledged within the official discourse of technology and progress which surrounds its con-struction (35). The resettled Nubians are irretrievably severed from their past, as the commissioner Hassan Dafalla observes: “It was he who felt the acute, breath-taking, shock of defeat; and saw that life can be skinned of meaning, skinned of memory.” (108)

It is by this same yardstick that the rebuilding of Warsaw’s Old Town is examined by Lucjan, as a process whose ethical status resides precisely in its complex and ambivalent human impact:

Walking for the first time into the replica of the Old Town, said Lucjan, the rebuilt market square – it was humiliating. Your delirium made you ashamed – you knew it was a trick, a brainwashing, and yet you wanted it so badly. […] It was a brutality, a mockery – at first completely sickening, as if time could be turned back, as if even the truth of our misery could be taken away from us. And yet, the more you walked, the more your feelings changed, the nausea gradually di-minished and you began to remember more and more. (309)

This passage perfectly glosses the sense of desired falsification sur-rounding Jakob’s construction of landscape in Fugitive Pieces, with Lucjan’s comments indicating both the dangerous nature of such con-solation – the status of the rebuilding as an effacement of loss in pre-cisely the sense intended by Santner (“It was a brutality, a mockery”) – and its function in the citizens’ necessary ‘grounding’ in their past: “the more you walked, the more your feelings changed”. It is perhaps for this reason that Lucjan notes, after discussing the debate surround-ing the project, that “even those who disagreed understood the neces-sity” (228), and for this reason that he rather cryptically remarks that “any consolation is true” (235).

The Winter Vault might hence be seen as a confrontation and clarification of the consolatory approach to landscape that proved the focus of a great part of the critical response to Fugitive Pieces. In this recent text, Michaels acknowledges such ethical difficulties whilst also emphasizing the relatively greater importance of both human suf-fering (for example, the displacement resulting from the destruction of landscapes in the building of the Aswan Dam) and the potentialities of healing (as illustrated in the psychological necessity of Warsaw’s re-building) rather than the rights and wrongs of representation and mis-

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representation in a more abstract sense. This human focus is often used to highlight the necessity of letting go of the past as well as at-tempting to preserve it, with the titular image of the winter vault – the place in cold countries where bodies are stored while the earth is still too frozen to dig their graves – used to indicate the necessity of relin-quishing one’s hold on the dead. In this image, the idea of geological depth is employed not to advance the possibility of the past’s preser-vation, but instead to indicate the necessity of both the living and the dead moving on, as Jean herself recognizes in her statement of her own mother’s interment in such a vault that “even a grave can be a kind of redemption” (243).

Anne Michaels’ fiction thus presents a sustained engagement with the redemptive and therapeutic possibilities of instrumentation at the level of landscape, imagination and spatial practice, examining both the ethical dangers of this consolatory spatial poetics and its sometimes necessary role in response to the spatially and temporally exilic relation of postmemory. Incorporating both the metafictional techniques of magic realism and a self-conscious engagement with the possibility of narrative fetishism, these practices in themselves stand as signifiers of the traumatic break represented by the Holocaust in both personal memory and the collective (post)memory of the family. Such strategies as the landscape’s supernatural preservation of unwit-nessed events in Fugitive Pieces function in this sense as eloquent compensations for the losses entailed in the Holocaust, compensations that nevertheless make the boundaries of these losses – and the impos-sibility of their recuperation – painfully visible.

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Notes on Contributors

Jenni Adams is Lecturer in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her research addresses the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in Holocaust literature, with recent publications including essays on the work of Jonathan Safran Foer and Markus Zusak in the journals Clio and Children’s Literature in Education. Her first monograph, Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature: Troping the Traumatic Real was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011.

Christine Berberich is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth. Her research specialism is Englishness and the creation of National Identity. She has published book chapters and journal articles on Englishness as well as the authors W.G. Sebald, Julian Barnes, James Hawes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Siegfried Sassoon, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. Her book The Image of the Eng-lish Gentleman in Twentieth Century Literature: Englishness and Nostalgia was published by Ashgate in 2007. She is co-editor (with Prof. Arthur Aughey) of These Englands. Contemporary Conversa-tions on Englishness (forthcoming, Manchester University Press, 2011) and is currently at work on a new monograph dedicated to identity formation in the contemporary English Home Tour.

Neil Campbell is Professor of American Studies and Research Manager at the University of Derby, U.K. He has published widely in American Studies, including the books American Cultural Studies(with Alasdair Kean), American Youth Cultures (as editor) and (as co-editor) Issues on Americanisation and Culture. He has published articles and chapters on John Sayles, Terrence Malick, Robert Frank, J.B. Jackson and many others. His major research project is an interdisciplinary trilogy of books on the contemporary American West. The first two are The Cultures of the American New West(Edinburgh, 2000) and The Rhizomatic West (Nebraska, 2008) and he

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