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 TIME, HISTORY AND
CULTURAL SPACES

This volume brings together critical essays on time, history and ­narrativity
and the explorations of these concepts in philosophy, music, art and
literature.
The volume provides a comprehensive introduction to narrative theories
as well as philosophical discourses on time, memory and the self. D ­ rawing
insights from western and eastern philosophy, it discusses themes such as­
­subjectivity and identity in historical narratives, theorization of time in
­cinema and other arts and the relationship between the understandings
of existence, consciousness and concepts such as Kala, Aion and yugas.
The v­olume also looks at the narrativization of history across cultures
by ­exploring modern fiction from China and India, murals of martyrs in
­Northern Ireland, music and films set against the canvas of the Second
World War and the Holocaust, as well as diasporic cultural histories.
This volume will be an interesting read for scholars and researchers of
comparative literature, history, philosophy of history, cultural studies and
post-colonial studies.

Jayita Sengupta is Professor of English at Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma

­University, India. She was a British Council Fellow, United Kingdom in
2000, a Fulbright-Nehru Teaching Fellow at Stanford University, United
States, and a teaching fellow to National Kaosiung Normal University
and Soochow University in Taiwan in 2013. As a member of the Society
for Activities and Research on the Indian World (SARI), France, she has
received travel grants for presentations at their Annual Colloquium s­ everal
times. Her research interests include gender, cultures of memory, n ­ arrative
and ­translation studies. Besides academic essays and books, she has also
published her visual storybook, comprising four short stories with her
­
paintings, titled Shivelight and Other Stories, 2020. Her English t­ ranslation
of Bani Basu’s novel, titled Gandharvi: Life of a Musician, 2017, was
­nominated for the Muse India Translation Award in 2018. Jayita is also
a mentor of the Indian Knowledge Systems, a division of the Ministry of
­Education and is actively engaged in guiding the short research projects
of the scholars selected for IKS ­Internships Programme.
TIME, HISTORY AND
CULTURAL SPACES
Narrative Explorations

Edited by Jayita Sengupta

First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Jayita Sengupta; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of Jayita Sengupta to be identified as the author 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.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-28748-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-31827-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-31153-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003311539
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
 CONTENTS

Prefacevii
Acknowledgementsx
List of Contributorsxi

Introduction: Narrative, Narrativity and Narrativization

of Time, History and Culturescapes 1

PART ONE
Narratives of Life, Time and History: Some Reflections
on Theory and Cultural Traditions 23

1 Life: A Critique of Historical Reason 25

SAITYA BRATA DAS

2 On Time and History: A Philosophico-Literary Hermeneutic 34

MOUSUMI GUHA BANERJEE

3 Deleuzean ‘Difference’: The ‘Sense’ of Flows in Cinema 44

DEB KAMAL GANGULY

4 Vaastu Shaastra: Continuum of Time Space and Existence 62

DIVYA JOSHI

5 Undying Death: A World View of Shamanic vis-à-vis

Indigenous Philosophic Traditions 71
SANCHITA CHOUDHURY

v
 C ontents

PART TWO
Narrativizing History and Memory in Literature 81

6 Painting – Whitewashing: Liminal and Ephemera (l)

Memories of the Martyr in the Mural Literature of Ireland 83
KUSUMITA DATTA

7 “Beaten, Humiliated, and Cannibalized”: Representations

of China in Chinese Fiction, 1917–1966 97
HARISH C. MEHTA

8 Narrative and History in Lawrence Durrell’s Avignon Quintet109

CORINNE ALEXANDRE-GARNER

9 Trailing Through Trauma: Musical Narratives of the Holocaust 122

SAGNIK CHAKRABORTY

10 History, Memory and Time: A Study of Qurratulain

Hyder’s River of Fire129
NISHAT HAIDER

PART THREE
Narrativizing Diasporic Cultural History 145

11 Journeys of the Travelling Tongue to Imaginary

Homelands: Rectifying Asian Food History in the National
Narrative in Canada 147
JULIE BANERJEE MEHTA

12 The Zebra Finch (Short Story) 163

CÉCILE OUMHANI

13 In Conversation 168
GEETHA GANAPATHY DORE AND CÉCILE OUMHANI

Bibliography177
Index190

vi
 PREFACE

It is commonly believed that when Vyas Dev dictated The Mahabharata and
Shri Ganesh penned it down, there has been a semiotic transference of the
former’s desire for words, images and texts to the latter. This is not history
surely as we understand it or Itihaasa but pertains to mithas, which is a
collective memory of culture creating stories, myths and images. This myth
acts as a metaphor for a narrative that is first created in the mind before
it finds symbolic representation. Somehow this myth has always brought
to my mind images and clips from films from a very different cultural per-
spective. Say, for example, I could find connections between this myth and
the last scene of Amadeus (1984 drama film by Milos Forman, adapted by
Peter Shaffer from his stage play in 1979). This is the scene where Amadeus
Mozart is composing The Last Requiem, and Salieri is making notations of
the same. Much of the music is semiotically transferred, and it is important
for the two musicians to connect mentally before the notes are on the sheets.
This is one instance of a semiotic rendition of a narrative, which when
viewed by the spectators are meant to create resonances or echoes of a story,
where music and images together construct a “text” or a fictionalized ver-
sion of history. The second clip is from the 2004 Spanish film Mar Adentro
(The Sea Inside, by Alejandro Amenabar), where Ramón Sampedro, the
protagonist of the story, fights a campaign for euthanasia. Sampedro was a
swimmer, but on a diving venture, he meets with an accident which maims
him for life. There is a scene, – “And I came flying”, where Sampedro men-
tally flies out of his window to meet his beloved on the sea beach. The music
that accompanies the scene is “Nessun Dorma”, from Glacomo Puccini’s
opera, Turandot. The text Turandot has a history of its own through a long
chain of connections, for narrative connects with narrative across time and
cultural spaces, and all of this finds association and condensation in the
scene in the film, or rather in Sampedro’s desire for a kiss. To dredge up the
referential index, Puccini’s reading of Schiller’s 1801 adaptation led him
on to the earlier version of the play by Count Carlo Gozzi, who had prob-
ably adapted his version from the original story among the seven stories in
a twelfth-century Persian epic poem, Haft Peyker by Nizami. Sampedro’s

vii
 P reface

desire becomes a metaphor across time, space and history to a point of

intensity where all time collapses. Such could be the power of a narrative,
which moves from the semiotic to symbolic representation. And in all the
three instances cited earlier, across cultures, the keywords are “to connect
and connect”. Narrativity then is an art of articulation through associations
of memory and history across time to understand the riddle of our existence.
The thrust of this volume is on narrative theories in western philosophy
chiefly, though there are contributions from other cultures for opening up
avenues for a comparative study. There would be a second volume to fol-
low, which would concentrate on South Asian narratives chiefly. This one
includes contributions which write about narratives of history and memory
in different cultures like Chinese, Canadian, Irish, French, German, etc. The
chief objective of this anthology and the second one to follow soon after has
been to explore how narratives of history, memory and time are constructed
in different cultures. It has also been my idea to explore narrative possibili-
ties in literature, art, murals and music from a historical perspective.
There has been an extensive theorization of Narrative in western philoso-
phy from the time of Aristotle to the present day. The Introduction to this
anthology is meant to create a framework for studies in Narratology to offer
a comprehensive idea to the reader about various points of view and various
approaches in this field of study. It has been my attempt to include a brief
overview of the theories of the narrative in the twentieth century and touch
on some contemporary ideas on narrative and history as a flow of thought
in western theory. Writings on the philosophy of Time in western thought
and in Indian and Shamanistic thought in this volume have been a kind of
a challenge to note the points of resonance rather than just the points of
departure. Ultimately all theories, all kinds of narratives, which construct
stories of identity, self and the meaning of existence, are attempts to under-
stand different shades of reality. In other words, a narrative connects to
“storytelling”; it is also a careful construction of words and ideas, colours
and musical shades to depict what one in Indian thought would refer to
as “Shabda Brahman” and “rupantar”. The method of articulation creates
patterns in the mind of one who tells the story and the listener, who is on
the receiving end. Perceptions flowing from the speaker may have different
connotations in the mind of the listener.
While I would be discussing orality and memory in the second volume,
here in this anthology, it has been my endeavour to include essays which
would discuss narratives of history and memory in literature, art and cul-
ture. If narrativization of history in art and music has semiotic connotations
of culture and nuances of the historical context(s) in which they are deliv-
ered, narrativity becomes a complex terrain of ideas moving beyond history
to the realms of psychology and power structures that operate in societies.
So, the gendering of a narrative is bound to happen, say for example, the
associations that follow with Wagner’s music, as a kind of an unforgettable

viii
 P reface

painful memory of the Holocaust. Music and art become, in such cases,
semiotic metaphors of a memory, historicizing the context. If in literature,
there is a fictionalization of history at a given point in time, in the case of
murals and music, narrativity has its own techniques and purposes of its
“storytelling”.
With such ideas on narrativity and narrativization, this anthology I hope
will provoke the readers to a comparative and analytical understanding of
life and reality and storytelling about the same.

ix
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge my debt to all the contributors to this volume.

I would want to thank each one of them for their patience, for this volume
did take a long time to materialize. Among some friends who are perhaps
from very different professions and yet have helped me, if not directly but
indirectly, by way of discussions, I would like to mention Professor Shant-
anu Bhowmik, the Astrophysicist at Amrita University, Coimbatore. Discus-
sions with him on Theoretical Physics and Vedanta enriched my perception
immensely. I am ever so grateful to him for readily clarifying my queries
and explaining concepts so lucidly to one who is from pure Humanities
background. My discussions with my friend Saitya Brata Das in JNU have
always been an enriching experience. Many of my perceptions owe to my
discussions with him here in the volume. I am equally indebted to Professor
Deb Kamal Ganguly (former faculty in Pune Film Institute) for sharing his
perceptions on philosophy with me.
Research materials collected during my Fulbright Teaching fellowship in
the Department of Comparative Literature, Stanford University, became
useful years later for this volume. I am ever so grateful to Shevanti Narayan
at USEFI, Eastern Region, for helping me to connect with some contributors
in this volume.
Last but not the least, I would want to thank Dr Shashank Shekhar Sinha,
historian and the Publishing Director of Routledge, India, for helping me to
organize my ideas and essays in the volume. I am immensely grateful to him
for his patience and understanding.

x
 CONTRIBUTORS

Corinne Alexandre-Garner is an Emeritus Research Accredited Associate

Professor of English at Nanterre University, formerly attached to the
Department of Social Sciences and Administration as well as the Depart-
ment of Anglo-American Studies. She is the director of the Research
Group on Space and Writing (GREE within The CREA, EA 370). Former
Head of The Lawrence Durrell Research Library, she directs two collec-
tions at The Nanterre University Press, including the transdisciplinary
collection of human sciences called “Crossroads”, revolving around the
themes of otherness, borders, migration and exile. Her literary biography
of Lawrence Durrell, Lawrence Durrell. Dans l’ombre du soleil grec, was
published in the “Voyager avec . . .” collection of La Quinzaine L ­ ittéraire/
Louis Vuitton in 2012. Among her numerous publications devoted to
migrant writing feature: “Penser ailleurs” in Frontières, marges et con-
fins, C. Alexandre-Garner (ed.), (13–27), 2008; “When Elsewhere is
Home: Mapping Literature as Home in Lawrence Durrell’s ‘Cities, Plains
and People’ ” (with I. Keller-Privat) in Études britanniques contempo-
raines, n°37, December 2009; “Étranges mots étrangers et langue han-
tée” in L’étranger dans la langue, E. Eells, C. Berthin, J.-M. Déprat (eds.),
2013; “Weaving otherness in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s ‘Rawalpindi 1919’
and ‘Toronto 1962’: The Text as Transitional Space” in India in Canada,
Canada in India, A. Navarro Tejero and T. Gupta (eds.), 2013;”L’objet
migratoire dans La Grande maison de Nicole Kraus” in Multicultures
et écrits migratoires, E. Sabiston (ed.), 2014; “Le récit comme lieu de
l’hospitalité” in Migrations/Translations, M. Ahmed, C. Alexandre-­
Garner et al., (eds.), 2015. Her most recent article published in the Journal
of Psychoanalysis Le Coq-Héron (2017) is titled “Lorsque migre l’objet:
le bureau de l’exil dans le roman de Nicole Krauss, à propos de La grande
maison” (142–149, issue no 230 devoted to Exile and Migration).
Mousumi Guha Banerjee is currently an Associate Professor and Head of the
Department of English Literature, The English and Foreign Languages
University (EFLU), Regional Campus, Shillong. Her teaching career spans

xi
 C ontributors

more than 18 years now. She has earned her PhD from Jadavpur Univer-
sity, Kolkata. Her research interests include literary theories, postmod-
ern criticisms, Western philosophy, text, language, hermeneutics, poetic
language, women’s writing and writings about women, film discourse,
twentieth-century art and cross-cultural interfaces. Besides being invited
to a number of national and international academic events, she has sig-
nificantly published in national and international journals, magazines and
anthologies, has organized several academic programmes in the organ-
izations she has served and has acted as a resource person to various
institutions. Her books include Writings across Genres: Indian Litera-
ture, Language and Culture (2015), Daring to Write: The Two Creative
Daughters of Victorian England (2015) and Emily Dickinson: Writing as
a Woman (2017) and, currently, she has two ongoing book-length pro-
jects: one on Gitanjali: An Exalted Manifestation of Buddhist Aesthetics –
a research as a current associate of the UGC-Inter University Centre at
the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla, India – and the
other on “A thought went up my mind today – ”: An Inquiry into a Post-
Kantian Transcendental Philosophy in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry. She has
been awarded the Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
2019–2020 by the United States-India Educational Foundation (USIEF),
the Fulbright Commission of India, to pursue her postdoctoral research at
Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts, United States, for her work on
the book on Dickinson. Besides, she received an invitation from Amherst
College for a visiting scholarship during her Fulbright tenure. While in
the United States, she was been invited by WorldBoston, a member of
the World Affairs Councils of America, to participate in “A Discussion
with Fulbright Scholars: The Legacies Two New England Trailblazers”, in
which she primarily talked about Emily Dickinson’s work, her experience
of a visit to the Bunker Hill Community College, Boston, M ­ assachusetts,
and community education in India. She was also invited by the Emily
Dickinson Museum to lead a Poetry Discussion session on “Emily
­
­Dickinson and the Mind”. In addition to this, she has visited Harvard
University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, the University of Minnesota and
St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota, to attend several programmes,
including seminars, that were held in these institutes. She received an invi-
tation from Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, to carry out
her Fulbright research and offer lectures to the Smith community. She was
invited, as well, by the Department of Philosophy at Suffolk University,
Boston, Massachusetts, to deliver a public lecture on “Philosophy and Lit-
erature: A Cognitive Understanding of the Two ­‘Cultures of the Mind’ ”.
She is a member of the Library of the ­American A ­ ntiquarian Society,
Worcester, Massachusetts, the Jones Library, Amherst, M ­ assachusetts,
Philosophy Club, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts, Five C ­ ollege
Women’s Studies and Research Center, Mount Holyoke College, South

xii
 C ontributors

Hadley, Massachusetts, a Life Member of the National Library, Kolkata,

West Bengal and the American Library, Kolkata, West Bengal. She was
also a member of the Robert Frost Library, Amherst C ­ ollege, Massa-
chusetts, and a visitor to the Archives and Special Collections, Mount
Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts. She has had the honour
of receiving a letter from the President of the United States, The White
House, Washington, in appreciation of representing the country as a
member of the Department of State Exchange Programme.
Sagnik Chakraborty has a Master of Arts in English from Presidency
University (2017) and has completed his MPhil degree as a junior
­
research fellow in the Department of English under the supervision of
Dr Sinjini Bandyopadhyay from the University of Calcutta (First Class,
First, 2020). His research area includes post-Partition pogroms, trauma
and incidents of violence against women in India. He has published arti-
cles in refereed journals and has presented papers in both international
conferences and UGC-sponsored seminars. Presently, he is a lecturer at
Calcutta Girls’ College, Kolkata.
Sanchita Choudhury is the Director and founding member of HUM Nishād,
an Institute of Music, Culture and Education. She has got her PhD degree
from IIT Kharagpur in ethnomusicology. Dr Choudhury teaches English
literature and Language, Ethnomusicology, Soft Skills, Personality Devel-
opment and Organizational Behaviour. She has been a certified trainer
of UGC on its “Capacity Building of Women Managers in Academics’
Programme”. She has the experience of teaching in premier institutes of
India like IIT Kharagpur and NIT Rourkela. She has headed the Depart-
ment of Humanities in Padmanava College of Engineering and has taught
there for around 15 years. Dr Sanchita Choudhury’s book Bāul Fusion
Music-making A New Musical Genre was published in 2013. She has
widely published articles and technical papers in different national and
international journals and books across the globe. Besides her contri-
bution to academics, Sanchita has been a Faculty of Hindustani Vocal
Music at Shankar Mahadevan Academy. She is an ardent music lover
and has represented India in many academic and cultural exchange pro-
grammes. Sponsored by Rotary International, she represented India as
a GSE member and went to West Indies and the United States in 2013.
Saitya Brata Das teaches literature and philosophy at the Centre for English
Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is the author of
The Political Theology of Kierkegaard (2020).
Kusumita Datta is a research scholar (PhD), in the Department of English,
Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and an Assistant Professor in the Depart-
ment of English, Behala College, Kolkata, West Bengal. She has worked
on Irish Adaptations of Sophocles, and her current research is on a

xiii
 C ontributors

metanarrative of martyrdom in Anglo-Irish literature and the literature

of Bangladesh, exploring the role of religious and political ephemera and
its constructive paradigms. She is interested in non-Eurocentric modes
of comparativist studies, especially the literatures of conflict zones and
fluid borders. She has been a UGC-NET Research Fellow (India) from
3 March 2014 to 17 April 2017 and has been granted the Charles ­Wallace
India Trust (CWIT) Research Grant to visit the libraries and archives in
Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom, on 25 March 2020.
Geetha Ganapathy Dore is a Research Accredited Associate Professor of
English at the Faculty of Law, Political and Social Sciences, ­University
of Paris 13, Sorbonne Paris Cité. She is the author of The Postcolonial
Indian Novel in English (2011). She has coedited several books, includ-
ing, On the Move, The Journey of Refugees in New Literatures in­
English (2012) and Heritage and Ruptures in Indian Literature, Culture
and Cinema (2017). Comme la pluie qui tombe sur la terre rouge is the
title of her translation of some ancient Tamil poems published in 2016.
Her recent research revolves around India’s EU relations, human rights
issues and postcolonial cinema. She is one of the founder members and
former President of SARI (Society for Activities and Research on the
Indian World).
Deb Kamal Ganguly is an alumnus of Satyajit Ray Film and Television Insti-
tute, Kolkata, independent filmmaker, video artist, media practitioner
and researcher. His video work got published under a special curator-
ship from Lowave, Paris. Video art has been featured in the exhibition
‘Indian Highway” and showcased in galleries in various cities of Europe
and Asia, like Serpentine Gallery, London, Astrup Fearnley Museum
of ­Modern Art, Oslo, etc. Video and film work done in the capacity of
an editor, scriptwriter and sound designer have been shown in competi-
tive sections of various national and international festivals (Rotterdam,
Oberhausen, Vladivostok, etc.) and received several awards. Presently, he
is a faculty of film editing at Film and Television Institute of India, Pune.
He presented papers at various international and national seminars and
conferences on various themes related to cine-academics (Johannesburg
2018, Moscow, 2019) and cinema, Deleuze studies, visual art, interfaces
of art practices, translation studies, collective memory, Bengal studies,
Media studies, Sound-scape, immersive sound, etc.
Nishat Haider is a Professor of English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi
(India). She is the author of Tyranny of Silences: Contemporary Indian
Women’s Poetry (2010). She has held numerous administrative and schol-
arly positions on boards and committees and has also served as the direc-
tor at the Institute of Women’s Studies, University of Lucknow. Recipient
of Meenakshi Mukherjee Prize (2016), C. D. Narasimhaiah Award

xiv
 C ontributors

(2010) and Isaac Sequeira Memorial Award (2011), she has presented
papers at numerous academic conferences, and her essays have been
included in a variety of scholarly journals and books. She has conducted
numerous workshops on gender budgeting and gender sensitization. She
has lectured extensively on subjects at the intersection of cinema, culture
and gender studies. Her current research interests include Postcolonial
Studies, Translation, Popular Culture and Gender Studies.
Divya Joshi is an Associate Professor in the P.G. Department of English at
Government Dungar College, Bikaner.
Julie Banerjee Mehta was born in Calcutta and educated at Loreto House
and Loreto College and then studied at Jadavpur University Calcutta,
where she received her first master’s degree in English literature. She
worked as a literary reviewer, interviewer and features editor in Aus-
tralia, Singapore and Bangkok and went on to earn her second master’s
and doctoral degrees in English Literature and South Asian Studies at
the University of Toronto. A specialist in Postcolonial and World Litera-
tures, Mehta conceptualized and taught the Chancellor Emerita Vivienne
Poy endowed course: “On Asian Literatures and Cultures in Canada in
the Canadian Studies Programme and in the Department of English and
Canadian Studies” Programme for nearly a decade at the University of
Toronto and received several prestigious fellowships. Her translation of
Tagore’s play Dak Ghar/Post Office was performed by Pleiades Theatre,
Toronto, in 2010 to critical acclaim and earned her the title of “One of
Sixteen most Influential South Asians in Canada”. Her current research
and publications are on Diasporic Histories, Memory and Trauma and
Food Histories, and her articles are widely published in journals and
books. She is the author of Dance of Life: The Mythology, History and
Politics of Cambodian Culture, about the resurrection of Cambodian
dance by seven women survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocidal regime,
and co-author of Strongman, the best-selling biography of Cambodian
Prime Minister Hun Sen with Harish C. Mehta. She considers herself a
homeless, global nomad living between foodways and cultures. She cur-
rently resides in Calcutta, India.
Harish C. Mehta holds a PhD from McMaster University in Canada in the
history of American foreign relations and Southeast Asia, with speciali-
zations in the twentieth-century history of China and Christian-Muslim
Encounters in the Early Modern World. He did graduate studies at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of four
books on Cambodian politics and media and the Vietnam War (Cambodia
Silenced: The Press Under Six Regimes, 1997; Warrior Prince: Norodom
Ranariddh, Son of King Sihanouk of Cambodia, 2001; Strongman: The
Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen, Marshall Cavendish, 2013; and People’s

xv
 C ontributors

Diplomacy of Vietnam: Soft Power in the Resistance War, 1965–1972,

2019). His articles on Vietnamese diplomacy have appeared in the aca-
demic journals International History Review, Diplomatic History, Peace
and Change, The Historian and History Compass, and his review articles
have appeared in H-Diplo. He has taught history at McMaster, the Uni-
versity of Toronto and Trent University. He has twice won the Samuel
Flagg Bemis research award from the Society for Historians of American
Foreign Relations and has received the Asian Print Media Write Award
from the Asian Media Information and Communication Center, Singa-
pore, and a Freedom Forum Fellowship, Washington, DC, among other
awards. He is the editor-in-chief of Rising Asia Journal. Harish is a for-
mer senior Indochina correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore,
and he was based in Singapore and Thailand for 17 years, covering both
Southeast Asia and ASEAN.
Cécile Oumhani was born in Belgium to a Belgian and Scottish mother and
a French father. She developed strong personal links with Tunisia through
marriage. She currently lives near Paris, where she devotes herself to writ-
ing after teaching at the University of Paris-Est Créteil as a senior lecturer.
Among her recent publications in poetry is Tunisie carnets d’incertitude
and Passeurs de rives. Among her novels, Tunisian Yankee received the
Prix Afrique méditerranéenne-Maghreb ADELF 2016 and was a finalist
of the Prix Joseph Kessel 2017. She also received the Prix Virgile euro-
péen francophone 2014 for her work as a whole. Cécile Oumhani is
on the editorial board of French journals Siècle 21 and Apulée and the
Indian online journal Caesurae: Poetics of Cultural Translation.

xvi
 INTRODUCTION
Narrative, Narrativity and Narrativization
of Time, History and Culturescapes

Could we ever step outside the universe of Narrative? The word “Narra-
tive” originates from the Latin word narre, which means “to make known,
to convey information, to provide individuals with a tool for learning and
teaching others about the world” (Slávka Tomascikova 2009: 281). ­Verbal
and non-verbal speech both are different forms of narrative across disci-
plines, cultures, time and spaces, if there is a story. Sometimes, silence too
can be eloquent, suggesting the story of cultural repression or erasures
of history from collective memory. Speech could find expression through
literature as recit, or oral cultures or through different mediums of “sto-
rytelling”. Speech could be semiotic and symbolic. It could be pictorial
engravings of the caveman in the pre-historic times as “signs” of history to
posterity. Western theories of narrative generally focus on fiction. Theories
of narrative focusing on social semiotics write about narrativizing experi-
ences in a world as constructed by a “text”1. Narrative, according to them,
“is an effective and flexible strategy which particular societies and dyads
can use to reproduce their value systems or experiences” (Hodge and Kress
1988: 230). Narrativity2 depends on the style of the narrator and his chosen
medium for discourses. Historical narratives in literature form a part of the
body of Narrative Fiction, but history could also be vocalized through the
semiotic narratives of memory using music, architecture, murals and vari-
ous other mediums of expression. In fact, all forms of human creativity are
different aspects of storytelling across time, space and history. So narrativ-
ity as a story of lives and selves becomes an integral part of philosophical
discourse across cultures and time. The concept of narrativity becomes a
process of finding a form, which constitutes the Self. Following from the
theories of Ricoeur, Gregory Currie, Noel Caroll, Louis Mink, narrativizing
(proposing a possible narrative)3 is an intrinsic aspect of consciousness. If
the form and content of narratives are culture-specific, the act of narrativ-
izing or the impulse to do the same is human. Yet there are perspectives on
storytelling as self-telling against a coherent narrative unifying the disparate
selves and perceptions of a man’s life. Before moving on to the discussion of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311539-1 1
 I ntroduction

Strawson’s contention against narrativity, let us take a look at the various

theories of narrative in the twentieth century.
As Tomascikova analyses:

In the 1990s because the interest in a variety of aspects of nar-

rative within the humanities rises significantly, resulting publica-
tions reveal a distinctly narrative turn in humanities. Narrative is no
longer the exclusive domain of literary studies. The concept of narra-
tive, in fact, can be found in almost all works produced by research-
ers in the humanities and social sciences, whether it is the primary
focus of their work or just one element they deal with, whether they
intentionally do so or are unaware of it. Consequently, narratology
is more than ever before open to various methodologies of different
fields: philosophy, aesthetics, history, sociology, psychology, reli-
gion, ethnography, linguistics, communication and media studies.
(281)

She contends that there are different approaches to the theory of Narra-
tive, say among many others, Existentialist (Peter Brooks and Paul Ricoeur);
Cognitive (Mark Turner and Jerome Bruner); Aesthetic (Philip Sturgess);
Sociological (Barbara Hernstein Smith and Dan Ben-Amos). Quoting Ryan,
Tomascikova says that sometimes, “narrative is even characterised as a con-
cept, analytical category, discourse type, text type, and macro-genre” (Ryan
2004: 2–8). To agree with Tomascikova, with “such a variety of contexts
and approaches, narratology enlarges into a very complex field” (281). Yet,
for my analysis here, I would limit my study of Narratology to philosophi-
cal discourses across cultures and storytelling only, across time, to explore
how that shapes the consciousness of the world and contains the ideas of
ethicality, ethnicity and explains the Self. Areas of narratology pertaining to
structured texts that aim to educate or inform readers would be categorized
as non-narratives.4

Theories of Narrative in the Twentieth Century:

A Brief Overview
“Narratology”5 as a term was introduced by Tzvetan Todorov originally
in its French version “narratologie” (see Todorov’s essay in Lipking et al.
1972). Narrative theory (narratology) in the twentieth century was devel-
oped by literary critics on the basis of the Russian formalist and French
structuralist traditions. In the Post-World War period in the twentieth cen-
tury, narrative theories split into three main overlapping strands: the for-
malist, the structuralist and the post-structuralist.
Modern Narrative Theory includes Structuralist thinkers like Roman
Jakobson, Tynyanov and Viktor Shklovsky. If Tynyanov combined his skills

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as a historical novelist with formalistic ideas proposed by Jakobson to write

his treatise on literary structure in Theses on Language (1928), Shklovsky
introduced his concept of ostranenie or defamiliarization in art and litera-
ture that challenged novelistic realism by drawing the reader’s attention to
the strangeness of what is most familiar and thus calling into question the
referential function of language. M.M. Bakhtin, around the same time, prof-
fered a similar theory of novelistic form based on what Caryl Emerson refers
to as “aesthetic distance” in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929) (see
Emerson 2005). Shklovsky’s concept of estrangement or defamiliarization6
for Bakhtin is dialogism, or largely a function of a relationship “between one
person and another person, between two distinct living centres of conscious-
ness” (Bakhtin 1929: 656). According to Bakhtin, a novelistic narrative is
generally polyphonic and is characterized by a condition of heteroglossia as
distinct from the monologic voice that one finds in the omniscient narration
of the nineteenth-century Realist thinkers. His notion of “carnivalesque”,
based on ideolects and interpolated dialogues of characters in a text, is a
mode of discourse which turns tables on traditionalist thinking on narrative.
It suggests that the destabilization of social and discursive stratifications has
the power to liberate both the author and the reader from the restrictions of
social and literary orthodoxies.
Vladmir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928) influenced the
French Structuralists. Propp theorizes that a folktale is made up of specific
narrative functions (about 31), where all or some may appear in a given
tale, invariably in the same order. According to him, function is understood
as “an act of character”, defined from the point of view of its significance
for the course of the action (21). These functions, he asserts, are stable and
independent of the particular character who fulfils them. The “dramatis
personae” of the folktale could be of seven different character types: villain,
donor (provider), helper, princess (“a sought-for person”), dispatcher, hero,
false hero (Propp 1968: 79–80). However, these limited numbers of char-
acters and narrative situations permit an almost infinite number of story
possibilities. Later in the 1960s, A.J. Greimas (1983) restructured Propp’s
structuralist model by employing the science of semantics based on “act-
antial” relations that stress binary pairs. Each of these pairs makes sev-
eral “thematic investments” so that the actors can be established within a
tale occurrence, and “the actants, which are classifications of actors, can be
established only from the corpus of all the tales”. An “articulation of actors
constitutes a particular tale; an articulation of actants constitutes a genre”
(200). “Actantial” relationships express a “specialized relationship of
‘desire’ and do not operate on the primary level of action . . .”. This “desire”
transforms itself at the level of the manifested functions into “quest” (207).
Say, for example, the story of a “learned philosopher of the classical age”
who desires knowledge would be a “drama of knowledge” in which the
subject is “philosopher” and the object – “world”, the sender – “God”

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and the receiver – “mankind”, the opponent – “matter” and the helper –
“mind” (209–210). There could be any number of actors, depending on the
genre, to fulfil these “actantial” functions. Greimas’s structural semantics
thus is driven by desire.
Greimas’s remodelling of Propp’s formalistic approach to the study of folk
tales, and the structuralist methods of analysis in anthropology and literary
studies, happen at about the same time. According to the structuralists, the
form of a given narrative does not necessarily follow the sequence of events
in a story; rather, the tensions created between the expected temporal order-
ing of the story and the actual structure of narrative give the story its form.
There are different levels of narration: story/discourse, histoire/récit, fabula/
sjuzet. In each case, the same fundamental distinction is maintained. Both
Propp and Greimas, with their emphasis on the meaning of functions and
character, are interested in what is narrated or the level of the story. These
ideas on narrative are preeminent also in the theories of Tzvetan Todorov,
Mieke Bal, Gerard Genette and Roland Barthes, with the result that char-
acter and events are subordinated to processes and problems of narration.
Roland Barthes takes linguistics as the starting point for a structuralist
theory of narrative as a functional syntax in his Introduction to the Struc-
tural Analysis of Narrative (1966). According to him, narratives function
like sentences, but they operate on different levels of description. He writes
about two primary relations: “distributional (if the relations are situated
on the same level) and integrational (if they are grasped from one level to
the next)” (86). The arrangement of elements in a narrative is possible in a
variety of predictable ways within the acceptable limits of syntax or gram-
mar and operates according to a “hierarchy of instances” such as units,
action and narration. Units perform distributional functions at the “atomic
level”, ordering elements around “hinge-points” of the narrative and at the
integrational level they connect and order the levels of character and narra-
tion. Though these units are often microelements of the story, they can serve
important functions as leitmotifs by linking or “distributing” narrative ele-
ments in a causal chain or by integrating different aspects of the narrative
across temporal and spatial contexts. The character, which is not a “being”
in the psychological sense, but a “participant” enacting a function within a
specific sequence dominates the level of action and the level of narration or
the commonly phrased “point of view”, concerns the specific structure of
linguistic presentation and the site of reading. Thus, there is a shift from sto-
rytelling as an act to the structure of narrative itself. Ideas associated with
conventional realism based on a linear understanding of the external world
become redundant, as Barthes emphasizes, “The function of narrative is not
to ‘represent’; it is to constitute a spectacle still very enigmatic for us but in
any case not of a mimetic order” (124).
Gerard Genette and Mieke Bal, in the 1970s, continue to forge ahead
the possibilities of narrative through their tripartite models of narrative

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structure where the narrative text denotes the level of narration and the nar-
rator; the story – a sequencing of events and fabula – “a series of logically
and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors”
(Bal 1985: 5) There is, however, a tension between fabula and the story,
where fabula is both the signifying level of narrative and the deep structure
of the narrative text, which “causes the narrative to be recognizable as nar-
rative” (175). Bal, in the tradition of Roland Barthes, argues for a deep
structural aspect of narrative, and Genette’s tripartite theory of narrative
distinguishes between story (the level of the signified or narrative content,
which he also called diegesis), narrative (the level of the signifier, discourse
or narrative text) and narrating (the level of the “narrative situation or its
instance”, including narration and narrators). Genette lays emphasis on the
temporality of narrating and the point of view or mood or the concept of
focalization: “it is almost impossible for me not to locate the story in time
with respect to my narrating act, since I must necessarily tell the story in
a present, past, or future tense” (Genette 1980: 215). According to him,
“mood” is determined by “the character whose point of view orients the
narrative perspective”, whereas the voice leads us to the question, “who
is the narrator?” (186). According to Genette, there are three narratorial
functions: narrative function, which emphasizes on telling a story; direct-
ing function or the metanarrative function, where the emphasis is on the
narrative text; and the function of communication or the relation between
the narrator and the reader, which underscores the differences between a
fictive narratee within the text and the reader or implied reader outside of
it. For Tzvetan Todorov, the object of structural analysis “is the literary dis-
course rather than works of literature, literature that is virtual rather than
real”. It is “to present a spectrum of literary possibilities, in such a manner
that the existing works of literature appear as particular instances that have
been realized” (Lawrence I. Lipking 436–437). He offers another perspec-
tive to the structural analysis of narrative, emphasizing on the structure of
a discourse.
French Structuralist Narratology, thus as espoused by Barthes and
Todorov in the main, analyses how a story’s meaning develops from its
overall structure or the langue. Going back to Aristotle’s contention that
all narratives develop longitudinally from beginning to middle and the end
through the casual selection and temporal combination of events, it fol-
lows that narratives can be analysed horizontally, at what Barthes calls the
syntagmatic level. But narratives as complex “representations” of events
ask for an interpretation. The complexity of meanings calls for a vertical,
paradigmatic, hermeneutic analysis, and it is this vertical axis of narrative
which the Russian Formalists had in mind when they differentiated between
a “fabula” and “sjuzet” (Todorov’s “story” and “discourse”) as the two
main analytical levels. The French structuralists, thus drawing on Saussu-
rean linguistics, defined literature as a kind of langue of which each specific

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work is an instance of parole. Roland Barthes, Claude Bremond, Greimas,

Tzvetan Todorov chose to develop an underlying structural approach to
literature to identify the general codes that structure literary language as a
whole. Such Structural narratological discourse remains an important field
of scholastic research till date and is further explored by Ricoeur and the
post-structuralist thinkers like Bourdieu, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault and
Castoriadis.

The Modern Theories of the Novel

The modern theories of the novel, beginning with George Lukacs in his
­Theory of the Novel (1920), however, have gained more attention in narra-
tive discourse than structural narratological discourse and include thinkers
like Wayne Booth in the 1960s, Frederic Jameson and Jean-François Lyotard
in the 1980s, Robert Scholes and Linda Hutcheon in the more recent times.
Lukacs, in his Theory of the Novel, argues that the novel is “the epic of a
world that has been abandoned by God”, a world “in which the extensive
totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of mean-
ing in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality”
(88, 56). The problem of the world and its representation in literature was
closely bound up with the complexity of a novelistic discourse, where the
old notions of religious and social totality no longer provided solace. Lukács
believed that the representation of social totalities was best achieved not
in the experimental Modernist novel, which tended to emphasize fragmen-
tation and alienation, but in the realist novel, which had the potential of
capturing the complexity of class relations and class consciousness. For the
early theorists, like Percy Lubbock and F.R. Leavis in the Anglo-American
tradition, who favoured the realist novel for very different reasons, novelis-
tic realism was the most effective way to explore human consciousness and
the motivations that led to moral action. Wayne Booth’s rhetorical approach
in the sixties, however, successfully displaced these earlier models of think-
ing. Booth and his followers, like James Phelan, were actually the succes-
sors of a theoretical tradition that originated with Henry James and Joseph
Conrad. Booth focused on problems of point of view, mood, and narrative
voice, like Genette. But he was more interested in the rhetorical function of
narration than in the structure of narrative. What interested Booth more
was narrative irony and narrative distance, as devices which represented the
gap between the narrator and the narrated and between the author and the
narrator. Dorrit Cohen posited a theory of free indirect discourse or a mode
of third-person narration in which speech and thought are represented in
terms very close to a character’s own syntactical and idiomatic usages.
From 1980s onwards, the theory of the novel adopted historicist and
materialist approaches. Jameson, in The Political Unconscious (1981),
argues that the Modernist novel harbours a deeply sublimated narrative

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structure shaped by ideological forces. His analysis reveals his indebted-

ness not only to Freud and Lacan but also to Althusser as well, who pro-
vided a “post-Marxist” theory of ideology. A related development can be
discerned in Postmodern theory and in Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition
(1979), where he analyses the status of master narratives and speculates on
the viability of alternative models of narrative based on “paralogy”, a mode
of narrative legitimation that is not concerned with promulgating “law as a
norm”, but rather with making moves within “pragmatics of knowledge” (8,
60–61). Lyotard’s Postmodernist perspective, along with Linda Hutcheon,
­Robert Scholes and other theorists’ writings on the concepts of metafiction,
are responses to a crisis in narrative representation and narrative legitima-
tion. The translation of Bakhtin’s work in the early 1980s led to the prolifer-
ation of new modes of interpreting the novel that focused on the polyphonic
structure of narrative and dialogism. Insights of Reader-Response theories
of Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish combined with Bakhtinian dialogism and
works of ethical philosophers like Levinas, Booth and J. Hillis Miller pro-
vided an ethics of narrative, which had for its primary concerns to seek an
understanding, why and to what ends and under whose auspices we read.

A Narrative Against Narrativity and Counter-Narratives

Galen Strawson, in his “Against Narrativity” (2004), argues against the
normative idea of narrativity as he advocates for non-narrativity. He con-
tends against these ideas, which he enumerates in the abstract to his article:

“each of us constructs and lives a ‘narrative’ . . . this narrative is

us, our identities” (Oliver Sacks); “self is a perpetually rewritten
story . . . in the end, we become the autobiographical narratives
by which we ‘tell about’ our lives” (Jerry Bruner); “we are all vir-
tuoso novelists . . . We try to make all of our material cohere into
a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief
fictional character . . . of that autobiography is one’s self” (Dan
Dennett). The second is a normative, ethical claim: we ought to
live our lives narratively, or as a story; a “basic condition of mak-
ing sense of ourselves is that we grasp our lives in a narrative”
and have an understanding of our lives “as an unfolding story”
(Charles Taylor). A person “creates his identity [only] by forming
an autobiograph- ical narrative – a story of his life”, and must be
in possession of a full and “explicit narrative [of his life] to develop
fully as a person”.
(Marya Schechtman)

Galen Strawson presents a nuanced argument glossing over Derek Parfit’s

normative claim that we should not be attached to our past and future lives

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(1984). Strawson claims that people are of two kinds, namely, Diachronics
and Episodics, who experience life differently. A Diachronic person, “natu-
rally figures oneself . . . as something that was there in the further (past) and
will be there in (further) future” (430). An Episodic person has a memory of
his or her past and different kinds of experiential reality in various phases
of life. Yet he or she does not feel connected to these experiences in the past.
Strawson also makes a distinction between narrative and non-narrative peo-
ple. Episodics could be non-narrative in certain cases, he affirms, but it is
rather difficult for the Diachronic person to be so. People with diachronic
self-experience have a misconception that everybody is like them, but that
is not so. They have a false idea of Self. ‘Episodics’, Strawson affirms, have
a better grasp of the self “as a matter of metaphysical fact”, as something
momentary and in a state of flux always. Episodics do not experience their
life as a story (because in order to experience your life as a story, you need
to experience your Self as being extended over time). Only Diachronics
(though not necessarily all of them) feel that way. Strawson identifies him-
self as an Episodic personality and bears witness to what it is like to be one.
He confides:

I have absolutely no sense of my life as a narrative with form, or

indeed as a narrative without form. Absolutely none . . . I have no
significant sense that I – the I now considering this question – was
there in the further past.
(433)

In other words, Strawson with his experiential reality in the past is not
the same Strawson in his contemporary reality. As experience remoulds us
every minute, it would be wrong to suggest that there is a continuous one-
dimensional narrative in a person’s life. So, searching for narrative unity
could be difficult and can lead to false identification of the Self. According
to the normative narrativity thesis, “experiencing or conceiving one’s life as
a narrative is a good thing: a richly Narrative outlook is essential to a well-
lived life, to true or full personhood” (Strawson: 63). However, ­Strawson
points out that this is a purely descriptive account and need not be the
only reality that all people should experience and agree with. He differenti-
ates four possible combinations of ethical and psychological theses. The
first combination could be in cases where one may “think the descriptive
thesis true and the normative one false. One may think that we are indeed
deeply Narrative in our thinking and that it’s not a good thing” (Ibid.: 429).
He cites the example of the Stoics and the protagonist of Sartre’s novel La
nausée, who holds something like this view. In the second combination, one
may, on the contrary, find the descriptive thesis false and the normative one
true and that we are not all naturally Narrative in our thinking. Yet there
is an insistence that we should accept the descriptive in order to live a good

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life. Strawson cites the example of Plutarch’s writings for this case. In the
third combination, there may be people who consider both the theses to be
true. “[O]ne may think that all normal non-pathological human beings are
naturally Narrative and also that Narrativity is crucial to a good life” (433).
Strawson continues to argue that the dominant view in the academy sup-
ports the third combination, followed by the second view. He continues to
foreground his thesis:

It does not entail that everything is as it should be; it leaves plenty

of room for the idea that many of us would profit from being
more Narrative than we are, and the idea that we can get our self-
­narratives wrong in one way or another.
(437)

In the fourth and final combination, there may be people who consider the
acceptance of the third combination regrettable, and he understands himself
to belong to this category. He explains:

It’s just not true that there is only one good way for human beings
to experience their being in time. There are deeply non-Narrative
­people and there are good ways to live that are deeply non-­Narrative.
I think the second and third views hinder human self-understanding,
close down important avenues of thought, impoverish our grasp of
ethical possibilities, needlessly and wrongly distress those who do
not fit their model, and are potentially destructive in psychothera-
peutic contexts.
(429)

Briefly, in Strawson’s view, both the psychological and the ethical narra-
tivity theses are false because “there are deeply non-Narrative people and
there are good ways to live that are deeply non-Narrative”. He does not
contend against Narrative people but the hegemonic “Narrativity camp”
of the thinkers who consider narrativity as the only way of constructing
the meaning of life through coherent storytelling in their fictions. Galen
Strawson’s “Against Narrativity” is possibly the most thought-provoking
critique of narrative theorizing of self and identity in Cultural Studies in the
contemporary times. Yet, if his essay is read carefully, to agree with Matti
Hyvärinen (2012), Strawson actually displays “a closed conceptual lan-
guage game whose premises largely imply the results of the presumed analy-
sis. After all, Strawson neither reveals anything like a distinct ‘Episodic’
style or personality, nor does he indicate any plausible limits of narrativity”
(Göran, Johansson Christer 2012: 327–346). Though Strawson’s argument
against narrativity is captivating, it raises many questions. His definition of
narrativity is an oversimplification if the paradigm of a narrative is merely

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a conventional story told in words. Such a definition is rather normative

or functional “thus allowing for very flexible interpretations about what is
and what is not narrative” (Ibid.). As Matti Hyvärinen analyses, Strawson’s
attack is precisely on the simplified image of nineteenth-century realism,
which foregrounds a universal norm of narrative and narrativity. Strawson
actually formulates his argument against Maria Schechtman’s rigid concep-
tualization that there is a social pressure to constitute a self-identity through
the form and logic of a story (of a person’s life) through a linear narrative.
Hyvärinen points out sharply that,

Schechtman is correct in recognizing this obviously increasing

social pressure for chronological representations of the life course.
She is, however, as obviously wrong in concluding that this social
pressure could simply be translated into a theory of narrative self
and identity. Narrative identity does not need a version of curricu-
lum vitae as its representation. More to the point, it is an obvious
misunderstanding even to equate “narrative identity” with “having
a narrative” (Schechtman 2007). Does any other major theorist
of narrative identity require or presume such conventionality of
narrative?
(Ibid.)

Ricoeur, in his article on “Narrative Identity” (1991), discusses at length

the need to take a detour through modernist fiction to theorize his ideas on
narrativity and narrative identity:

The modern novel abounds in situations in which the lack of iden-

tity of a person is readily spoken of, exactly the opposite of the sort
of fixity of the heroes found in folklore, fairy tales, etc. . . . With
Robert Musil, “the man without qualities” – or rather without
properties – becomes at the limit unidentifiable. The anchorage of
the proper name becomes so derisory it becomes superfluous. The
unidentifiable becomes unnamable.
(Ricoeur 1991: 195)

According to Ricoeur, literary and artistic representations of non-­

homogenous identities are important for formulating ideas about how
modern individuals negotiate with their disparate selves. Narrative identity,
say for example, in a novel like Ulysses, does not depend on only a single
interpretation or representation but involves a far more complex process
of the construction of the Self. Ricoeur has critiqued the structuralist nar-
rative theories through his systematic argument against the formulaic and
conventional narratives (Ricoeur 1981, 1984). Strawson’s inclusion of both
Schechtman and Ricoeur into the “narrative camp” does not justify his case

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against the camp at all, for the “camp, in other words, has never existed in
the unitary form their arguments suggest” (Hyvärinen 2012: 327–346).
The question of narrative identity occurs to Ricoeur after he completed
his three-volume study of narrative in Time and Narrative, 1984–1988.
Narrative identity is not defined merely by characterization in a novel. It has
a larger claim where what the character thinks about himself or what story
he has to offer of himself is not all. What the other characters think about
him is important too. Ricoeur explores the idea of the Self extensively. If
the Cartesian cogito is too strong, one is certain of his Self, and if too weak,
the Self is weak or did not exist or what could be referred to as suffered
from a “shattered cogito” or “wounded cogito”. Kristofer Camilo Arca,
in his essay “Opaque Selves: A Ricœurian Response to Galen Strawson’s
Anti- Narrative Arguments” (2018), deconstructs Strawson’s arguments
against narrativity through his reading of Ricoeuer’s Time and Narrative.
He observes,

The task of a hermeneutic philosophical anthropology required

moving beyond unlocking the meaning-potential of sentence-level
discourse, and towards that of longer chains of sentences – i.e.
narratives, minimally construed. Ricœur’s “wager” was singular:
not only do the tropes offered by narrative understanding disclose
something about human living that goes beyond the confines of
descriptive language, narrativity itself reconfigures time, such that
human existence within time becomes possible in the first place. . . .
Though Ricœur is known as a philosopher who makes small,
­careful moves, the conclusion of Time and Narrative left several
avenues open for future philosophical reflection. One such avenue
is the role that narratives have in shaping one’s identity, if not fully
constituting it. As Ricœur states: “The self of self-knowledge is the
fruit of an examined life, to recall Socrates’ phrase in the Apology.
And an examined life is, in large part, one purged, one clarified by
the cathartic effects of the narratives, be they historical or fictional,
conveyed by our culture”.
(Ricoeur 1984–1988: 74)

In his Ricœurian response to Galen Strawson’s anti-narrative arguments,

Arca takes up the five arguments posited by Strawson against narrative
theories of identity. He then develops a Ricœur’s response to the Strawso-
nian position “by indicating the points of discontinuity between Strawson’s
account of narrativity and Ricœur’s” (ibid.). Arca expands on Ricœur’s
notion of narrative identity by connecting it to the dialectic of idem- and
ipse-identity that Ricoeur later establishes in Oneself as Another (1992).
Arca concludes by demonstrating how Ricœur’s own narrative theory has
the potential to address each of Strawson’s arguments. In his discussion of

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narrative identity and selfhood, Arca analyses that there is a sequence of

stages in Ricoeur’s argumentation about selfhood. He points out that the
question of an identifying reference to persons as selves, not simply things,
and the philosophy of language is the starting point of Ricoeur’s thesis in
Time and Narrative. Area contends that the speaking subject is an agent,
passing through the semantics of action and thus having a narrative identity.
What he narrates constructs his selfhood, and this cannot be separated from
the question of the ethicality of the narrative construction of such a self. As
Arca points out,

This hermeneutics of selfhood culminates in the conclusion that one

is a self as one self among other selves, something that can only
be attested to through personal testimony or the testimony of oth-
ers. Selfhood is thus closely tied to a kind of discourse that says
“I believe-in”. Its certainty is a lived conviction rather than a logical
or scientific certainty.
(77)

Ricoeur distinguishes between two kinds of identity in relation to self-

hood. Idem identity is something that is always the same, whereas ipse
­identity is sameness across and through change. Self-identity involves both
of these. The dialectic between idem and ipse constructs the narrative
identity.

The proposed goal of Ricœur’s hermeneutic gambit is to poetically

resolve the problem of permanence in time. By virtue of appropri-
ating key aspects of narrative’s threefold mimetic structure, one is
able to weave unity and stability out of the diversity, variability,
and discontinuity of lived experience.
(Ricoeur 1984–1988: 78)

Narrativizing Time, History and Cultural Spaces

My intention in this volume has been to first explore the theories of Nar-
rative and to see how narrativity connects with the concepts of Time, His-
tory and Cultural Spaces. The theories of Narrative discussed earlier are
meant to provide the reader with the existing ideas in western thought on
Narrative, to enable him or her to contextualize the new contributions in
this field of study by the contributors in this volume on the themes chosen
for close study. Though the essays included here are majorly from a west-
ern perspective, there are some interventions from a different cultural per-
spective to extend the discourse on narrativity across cultures and different
philosophical thinking. There has been an attempt on my part to offer the

12
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reader more room for thought in order to understand how certain concepts
related to narrativizing Time can have resonances with non-western cul-
tures. From the understanding that there are only points of departure, there
could also be points of commonality across cultures and disciplines, as the
essays included here in this volume would suggest.
The first section (Part One) of the volume explores discourses in phil-
osophical thought across cultures on Time. The concept of Time is what
theorists and philosophical thinkers have been grappling within different
cultures and traditions, and this is also a probing field of research in theo-
retical Physics. As discussed earlier, Time and construction of the Self, Time
related to the understanding of life and death – have interlinked concerns
in literature and culture. Time determines thought processes in a given cul-
ture, construction of historical narratives and also construction of identities
in diasporic societies in the contemporary world. There are five essays in
this section. Two of the essays here draw insights from western philosophi-
cal ideas on Time and History, along with another essay on the Deleuzian
concept of Time as a flow. There are yet two more essays on Time and
Existence offering a different consciousness about Time in non-Christian
cultures, namely the ancient Hindu Culture and the S­ hamanistic Cultures
across the globe. To re-emphasize what I stated earlier, there could be major
points of difference in the understanding of Time in western philosophi-
cal discourse and the Hindu and Shamanistic cultures; yet there are certain
points of commonality, too, for the human consciousness moves beyond the
borders of cultural traditions to grapple with the concept of this world, life
and death and the relevance of our existence in the larger scheme of things.
There is a narrative structure to this volume, too, consciously construed to
narrow down or shift to a gradual microscopic vision from the abstractions
in philosophical discourse to discourses narrativizing history and memory
in literature, art and music in the second section (Part Two) and finally to
the diasporic identities in the final (Part Three) of the volume. For the final
section, I have included an essay on migration and diasporic identity along
with a fictional narrative (short story), followed by an interview with the
writer, narrativizing history, memory and identity formations in the recent
times. My thrust area of discussion through the essays in these two sections
has been twentieth century to the present. However, the essays in the first
section on philosophical rethinking on narratives of life, Time and history
could not be bound within this time frame for philosophical discourses, as
abstractions of life go through a process of renewal through new interpre-
tations and newer understandings in western philosophy. In the other two
non-­Gregorian cultures, philosophical understanding of life and time do not
have such contradictions, and newer understandings for their ideas have
already arrived long back in time and have a logical explanation which
is atemporal and which possibly theoretical physics is trying to arrive at
through mathematical calculations and proofs.7

13
 I ntroduction

The first essay in this volume by Saitya Brata Das discusses the bur-
den of history and memory on human consciousness from his readings of
Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin to explore the “idea of singularity under the
fold of the universal, the radical heterogeneity of life under the gaze of the
world” (Das). This consciousness of non-time, non-historical immemorial
life comes close to the idea of pure consciousness (“sat-chit-anand”) and
that of Time as Kala in Hindu philosophy. Saitya Brata Das points out that a
Hegelian concept of the power of consciousness, considered as the power of
the negative, can stare at the work of dissolution and is not afraid of physi-
cal death. Having argued thus, Das affirms that the understanding of life is
not the dialectical power of phenomenological history after all. He explores
Hegelian theodicy of history to counter the same with the Nietzschean con-
cept of “singularisation to come” (which resonates with the concept of the
Advaita in Hindu philosophy) and Rosenzweig’s messianic conception of
redemption.
Mousumi Guha Banerjee, in her essay, attempts to separate the humanly
lived notions of time or the historic-naturalistic idea of time from the met-
aphysical concept of time. Guha Banerjee attempts to explore and fore-
ground the Kantian idea of space and time as “not things perceived, but
modes of perception”. She points out that time perceived as the metaphysics
of being presupposes that history is the ontology of that being. Such onto-
theology of time can be validated by a certain form of Derridean difference,
and following from such an understanding, a formulation of history then
somewhat neutralized as past, present and future merge into a singular pres-
ence. Guha Banerjee also refers to Hayden White’s concept of the “deep
structures of historical imagination” connected with classical aesthetics of
narration to contend with White that history and historical discourse are “a
form of fiction making operation”. History then is not a mere narrativiza-
tion of the past but a factual hermeneutic or Carlo Ginzburg’s paradigm of
the “indiciary”. Historiography, in that case, to abide by Certeau’s observa-
tion, is a paradox between the real and the discourse. The essay moves on to
discuss the challenges of global history and its ideological confrontations in
the era of “electronic textuality”. The last two sections of Guha Banerjee’s
essay take up the issues of history connected with tradition and modernity
and the issues of subjectivity and identity in literature.
These two essays drawing their insights from western philosophy discuss
the issues of time and history from different perspectives. If Saitya Brata
Das’s essay explores the meaning of Life and pure consciousness, which is
undying, moving beyond the phenomenological constructs of history, Guha
Banerjee’s essay beginning with the Kantian idea of history moves on to
discuss narrativization of history and the issues of subjectivity and iden-
tity. The third essay in this section by Deb Kamal Ganguly discusses the
ontology of difference rather than identity from a Deleuzian perspective to
explore the modalities of cognition and experience in the domain of cinema.

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He points out that cinema becomes a close approximation of life and real-
ity and not mimesis in the Platonic sense but simulacrum from the Deleuz-
ian perspective. He elaborates on the concept of “eternal return”, which
is the internal identity of the world of chaos. Cinematic narrative plays on
our consciousness through a series of identifications as singularities actual-
izing and returning constantly in a flux. Ganguly writes about the Deleuzean
concept of the “event”, stating that through the interaction of the textual
flow and the segments of consciousness of the writer and the reader, some
“sense” illuminates, and the “event” is perceived. The “sense” changes the
completeness of the series and becomes a non-linear shadow play of con-
sciousness. Deb Kamal Ganguly discusses how Deleuze gives a primal value
to the concept of time and how he is an important successor to the “process
of philosophy” of Alfred North Whitehead and radicalizes his ideas. Deleuze
categorically distinguishes “event” from “occurrence”, for “occurrence” has
a singular causal progression. But “event” has no such causal progression
and is a multiple overlapping, converging and diverging series. The “event”
can be sensed and this “sense” affects cognition and perception through
appropriation and anticipation of the series. Ganguly draws our attention to
Deleuze’s contemplation of his concept of the “series”, based on difference
as the initiator and the prime mover. It is this difference that “returns” and
“repeats” along the infinite series. The simulacra of experiences create an
illusion of identity though ontologically, it prioritizes differences. Ganguly
analyses how Deleuze criticizes the disjunction between the “difference”
and “concept”. He insightfully contends how “through this possibility of
small conceptual crack the whole of classical metaphysics can surrogately
enter into the otherwise radically different process philosophy”. From here
Ganguly moves on to discuss the Deleuzean categorization of “Chronos’
and “Aion”. If Chronos is the “time of the gods”, or the time of the tran-
scendental all-encompassing subjectivity or the whole of universe of time
which approximates the concept of Kala in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy,
Aion is the “infinitesimally subdivisible” dimension of time which following
from Ganguly’s argument in my understanding would connect with “Calabi-­
Yau-Manifold” in the Hyperspace theory of Physics.8 Aion is close to the
concept of the temporal and durational time in literary theory and “samay”
in Hindu philosophy, dubiously moving into past and the future continually.
Ganguly incisively analyses that Deleuzean concept of time prompts us to
probe into quantum metaphysics, which would make it clear that Chronos
and Aion are different yet related dimensions which can be sensed only at
the expense of the other. Moving from such a thought-provoking analysis,
Ganguly contends that this separation between Chronos and Ainos signifi-
cantly indicates the nature of our dispositions to memories or mnemonic
experiences, which evoke a longing and yearning within us. Thus, impulses
of emotionally charged rhetorized feelings are processes which work within
the other as Aion tends to re-process the condensations of Chronos.

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 I ntroduction

After such theorization of time from Deleuzean perspective, Ganguly

explains that such conceptualization would help for further understand-
ing of the content of the “experience object”, associated with cinema or
diachronic forms of art, whether it is reading novels, listening to music,
watching a theatre or film or appreciating a sculpture or painting. ­Ganguly
suggests that this temporal experience becomes “the lived time” of the
reader/audience and gets “inscribed by the artefacts disclosed in motion”.
The experience of the art form registered by our perceptual and cognitive
faculties are internalized as “flows” within the “manas”. The remaining
part of this explorative essay elaborates on the three kinds of “flows”, and
how they offer a narrative-thematic experience in cinema or other arts.
Divya Joshi’s essay begins with the role of memory in Indian “sanskriti”,
where Vedic knowledge was preserved through shruti (hearing), smriti
(memorizing) and Puranas (written texts). She points out that every activity
or experience, whether physical or psychological or convivial or environ-
mental, according to Vedic philosophy, is linked with the passage of time.
“Existence is a cyclic progression in space and time, where dissolution fol-
lows engenderment in an illimitable cycle” (Joshi). The essay analyses the
concepts of time and space in Vedic thought, quoting and explaining from
the ancient texts connecting the ancient Vedic Physics with the Relativity of
Time. Though the western concepts of Time might seem to be different and
variant to Vedic thought, there are some points where there are resonances.
The physical macrocosm or the gross manifestation of time which is “tem-
poral” resonates with the Deleuzian concept of Aion. Time, as the Power
of the Divine, is subtle, latent and imperceptible and would resonate with
Deleuzian Chronos. The Divine manifests as Finite Time in “human con-
sciousness as a timeline beginning at birth and ending at death, during
which time the Indwelling Spirit is present in them”. Joshi moves on to
describe the concept of “space” or subtle energy as a dynamic energy from
which all objects of nature come into existence and ultimately find dissolu-
tion. She explains that the philosophical frame of Vaastu is based on this
continuum of existence, space and time, where space is the substance of
all substances or the Ultimate substance. It is filled with minutest parti-
cles called paramanu and that every paramanu is a minute space possessing
Energy. This concept on the minute particle vibrating with subtle energy
relates to ideas on space-time in theoretical physics. According to Joshi,
the concepts of the Vaastu relate to the idea of the materialized space and
its connection with outer space. She foregrounds that “this Archaic Indian
Science of Time and Space, Sound and Light, Word and Form deals with
the perpetual process of the subtle energy manifesting into material space
or material form”. Such a manifestation of Time and Space implies that
“our conception of physical space is in conflict with the consciousness as
we explore and understand the relationship between chit, achit and i­ shvar”,
as without chit or consciousness, the physical world does not subsist. The

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whole journey of consciousness, thus from subtle microscopic changes

through cosmic changes within the universe according to Vedic philosophy,
is a movement of Time. The cosmic time in the macrocosm is called yugas,
and in the microcosm, prana is the movement of cellular intelligence.
The concept of the cyclic pattern of existence, as Joshi’s essay contends,
continues in Sanchita Choudhury’s essay on Shamanistic philosophy of
existence. While Choudhury’s essay writes about the different kinds of
Shamanistic practices in the world, it also draws on the idea of continuity
of existence after physical death of a being quoting from Bhagavad Gita
(2000):

Shamanism believes, as stated above, that death is a gateway to the

other worlds; that the soul is undying in a never-ending process of
regeneration. . . . The concept of immortality of soul is much simi-
lar to the verses of The Bhagawat Gita (2:20). Shree Krishna expli-
cates the triviality of the mortal body and highlights the significance
of the immortal soul to Arjuna.

All the five essays thus in this section, in various ways, are commentar-
ies on narrative explorations of the concept of Time, Space and Existence.
Instead of attempting to understand the ideas as different in different cul-
tures, it is interesting to note the commonalities of thoughts and resonances
and how they connect with certain concepts in theoretical Physics.
The second section of the volume (Part Two) contains five essays on the
narrativization of history in different cultures across time from the late nine-
teenth century onwards. Each of these essays foregrounds either certain cru-
cial moments in a nation’s history or narratives of history as postmemory
demanding reconstruction(s). The first essay in this section, on murals as
documenting the memory of martyrdom in Northern Ireland, by Kusumita
Datta in different phases of history from the late nineteenth century, dis-
cusses the presence and erasure of the murals, the liminal space between the
two and also the fact about replacement with other murals through evolving
space and time. The essay also discusses at length how murals acquire new
spaces in other artefacts like photographs, cards and sites of grief tourism.
Datta points out how a framed mural becomes a memento for the “post-
memory” of martyr families and that there is a contestation between popu-
lar demand and sectarian perpetuation where a postmemory contests with
prememory.
The essay by Harish C. Mehta on modern Chinese fiction writes about
the literary revolution in China in 1917, after the fall of the decaying Qing
dynasty. Mehta focuses on the reform movements in China in the early
twentieth century, which have been wonderfully fictionalized in the nation’s
premier fiction writer, Lu Xun’s literary writings. Mehta points out that
the Chinese expression, “Ah Quism”, meaning an attempt to find a moral

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victory even in defeat, owes its origin to Lu Xun’s novella, The True Story of
Ah Q. Mehta’s essay interrogates “modernity” in the Chinese cultural con-
text in the twentieth century. It writes how the concept of “modernity” finds
expression in narrativization of the times. Mehta foregrounds that the liter-
ary revolution beginning from the inspirational historical moment of the
May Fourth Movement carried with it “the idea that literature should per-
form the role of disseminating messages of social redemption and national
salvation, by realistically portraying the reality of life in China”.
The two essays by Corinne Alexandre-Garner and Sagnik Chakraborty,
in different ways, write about the narrativization of the effects of the ­Second
World War, and how the Holocaust found expression through fiction, music
and films. Garner’s essay argues how a careful selection of historical facts
is mingled with the imaginary settings in Lawrence Durrell’s last fiction to
construct a complex textual fabric so that there are crossings of bounda-
ries between different levels of the narrative in the text. A series of textual
fragments from different narrators, belonging to different narrative levels
according to Garner, paves the way to an agnostic artistic position which
confirms Adorno’s observation that the “author’s motivations have nothing
to do with the writer’s work, the literary product”. Garner, through her
incisive analysis of Avignon Quintet, points out that the narrative tells a
kind of a truth and affirms that no single truth is possible since everything is
always in the process of changing and that nothing or no one can be taken
for granted.
Sagnik Chakraborty explores through his essay how music featured
against the larger canvas of the Holocaust. The essay explains “fugue” as a
musical term which denotes a composition in which “three or more voices
(very rarely two) enter imitatively one after the other, each ‘giving chase’
to the preceding voice”. He connects Paul Celan’s poem, “The Fugue of
Death”, with Szpilman’s memoir, The Pianist and the text’s adaptation as
a film by Roman Polansky. Chakraborty explores how each of these per-
sonalities attempted to seek an escape from the horror of the Holocaust as
a brutal memory knitted by death and how this can be evidenced through
their connected creative narratives of history.
Nishat Haider, in her essay on Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire, opines
that literary scholars in the West have ignored the imaginative and cogni-
tive experience and narrative handling of Time and have underscored the
anachronism which characterizes historical consciousness. She, in the first
section of her essay, writes how narrative, as a discursive site of contesta-
tion between competing voices, reconstructs memories and challenges the
hegemonic grand narrative of the past. The second section of her essay con-
centrates on how, through focalization and voice, Hyder blends her retrospec-
tive knowledge and her ostensibly synoptic view with the partial, immanent
perspective of historical agents or characters. Haider’s essay explicitly dis-
cusses the narrative techniques such as imaginative reconstruction, layered

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heteroglossia and artistic license and irony, which the writer uses to drama-
tize the potentially fruitful (and problematic) process of writing histories
“from below”.
The last section of this volume on diasporic cultural history includes a
powerful and extensive essay by Julie Banerjee Mehta on Canada’s rich and
contested history of immigrants, where the carving of identity is through
the assertion of the immigrants’ traditional cuisines that they carried from
their place of birth to the adopted homeland. Banerjee Mehta explores the
narratives of Asian-Canadian writers like Joy Kogawa, Judy Fong-Bates
and Anita Rau Badami, along with other contemporary Asian-Canadian
novelists and poets who write about minorities’ resistance to the hegem-
onic cultural oppression by the mainstream Canadian nation in the asser-
tion of their identity through their culinary uniqueness. The essay critically
analyses how Asian-Canadian and Asian-American diasporic writers “have
been infusing a new oeuvre into the North American literary canon”. Baner-
jee Mehta strongly contends that these writers “embrace the hyphen with
different approaches”. According to her, they embed their narratives with
resonant contextualities of imperialism and domination they had once
encountered as colonial subjects and which they must still endure. Agreeing
with Bhabha, Banerjee Mehta contends that “the third space may open the
way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism
of multiculturalism, or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and
articulation of culture’s hybridity”. She concludes on the note that it is the
“inter”, the in-between space or the cutting edge of translation and negotia-
tion, carrying the burden of the meaning of culture, which inevitably comes
to “reside in the tongue”. This section also includes a moving short story by
Cécile Oumhani, the French writer, which is followed by an interview on her
writings by Geetha Ganapathy Dore. Oumhani’s short story, “The Zebra
Finch”, is about cultural adaptation and relationships across geographical
spaces. The metaphor of the “zebra”, in the title, “zebra finch”, rings out
with diasporic connotations.
Beginning with a discussion on the theories of Narrative and narrativi-
zation, thus, it has been my endeavour to explore various kinds of narra-
tives on Time, History and Memory in different cultures. The narratives on
Western and Indian philosophical discourse are supposed to offer diverse
perspectives on Time, connecting the reader to the next section dealing
with narrativization of history through literature, music, film making and
murals. The final section is on the narratives of cultural exchange as a
conscious effort for understanding the contemporary global environment,
where singularity of cultural discourse is often torn apart by diverse his-
tories of migration and settlement. What this volume has to offer, briefly,
is a discursive terrain of ideas related to Narrative, as literary artefacts, or
verbal fictions or semiotic underpinnings of history and philosophy. To take
Mink’s (see Akker 2013) understanding of Narrative and history, discourses

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as narrative explorations move beyond mere artefacts to serve as a cognitive

instrument with which we make “the flux of experience comprehensible”.
So my attempt has been to connect the various themes explored as narra-
tives here to the experience of life and understanding of Self and identity
itself in the order of human existence.

Notes
1 See “Social Semiotics”, in Handbook of Pragmatics: 2009 Installment. Jan-Ola
Ostman, Verschueren and Eline Versluys (eds). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
2 Narrativity has a special significance in Film Theory. It refers to the processes by
which a story is both presented by the filmmaker and interpreted by the viewer.
The term must be distinguished from narrative, which refers to the story itself.
Narrativity is a common subject of debate in film theory. Many believe that
the interpretation of a film’s narrative is subjective. In other words, the same
story may appear differently to a viewer, depending on their background. Other
important aspects explored by film theorists are the factors which distinguish
narrativity in film from that of other art forms. When exploring narrativity in
film, several factors must be taken into account. For example, the order in which
the events of the story are presented. Films often employ non-linear storytelling,
which refers to a story not presented chronologically. Another important facet of
narrativity is montage, or the juxtaposition of images. Perhaps most importantly
of all are the images themselves. A filmmaker’s choice of what to show, and what
not to show, is key to understanding him or her as an artist and a storyteller.
3 Narrativize would mean to communicate (events or experiences) in narrative
form in order to better understand them.
4 Non-narrative writing is a structured text that is organized by ideas. It generally
has a more formal purposive and a structured introduction, body and conclu-
sion that aim to educate or inform readers. Business documents, research papers,
legal papers, and dictionaries are few examples of non-narrative texts.
5 Narratology is considered by some theorists to be a part of semiotics. For the
first serious attempt to analyse narrative, one has to go back to the philosopher
Aristotle. Aristotle (1997) is still considered to be one of the most influential theo-
rists of narrativity. In his Poetics, written about 330 bc, he defines works of art
as imitations of reality (in later introduced terminology known as “mimesis”)
and specifies three areas related to imitation, those of medium (language, sound,
music, etc.), object (people in action, later also calling it plot) and mode (narration
or action – acting). For Aristotle, art is a mirror reflecting reality (Aristotle 1997).
6 See, “Art as Technique” by Viktor Shklovsky (1917).
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/­
fulllist/first/en122/lecturelist-2015-16-2/shklovsky.pdf (Last accessed on Aug 1,
2021).
7 Reference is to the 11 dimensions in theoretical physics and the idea of gravi-
tational singularity which is a location in spacetime, where density and grav-
itational field of a celestial body are predicted to become infinite by general
relativity. At this point of singularity, the laws of normal spacetime break down.
In Indian philosophical thought, this point of singularity is also the “bindu”, or
the dot between the two eyebrows through which one can travel to astral spaces
in yogic meditation.
8 Calabi – Yau space is a particular type of manifold which has properties,
such as Ricci flatness, yielding applications in theoretical Physics, especially in

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superstring theory, where the extra dimensions of spacetime are sometimes con-
jectured to take the form of a six-dimensional Calabi – Yau manifold, which led
to the idea of mirror symmetry.

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D. Hutto (Royal Institute of Philosophy supplement 60). Cambridge: C ­ ambridge
University Press, pp. 85–115.
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currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/first/en122/lecturelist-2015-16-2/
shklovsky.pdf. Last accessed on Aug 1, 2021.
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0034–60.
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­Bulletin of the Transilvania. Vol. 2. University of Brasov, p. 51.

22
 Part One

NARRATIVES OF LIFE, TIME

AND HISTORY
Some Reflections on Theory and
Cultural Traditions
 1
LIFE
A Critique of Historical Reason

Saitya Brata Das

Introduction
In one of his untimely meditations, Friedrich Nietzsche meditates on the
abuses of a historical reason that has gone wild (Nietzsche 1997). It is pos-
sible to imagine living without memory: one can at least be a cow (The
cow is an important animal figure for Nietzsche, as he was one of the most
important writers of animals ever, along with Aesop and Fontane, Rousseau
and Deleuze.); however, it is impossible to imagine a living without forget-
ting. Too much consciousness, too much history, too much memory: this is
sickness! Like the other diagnostician and symptomologist from nineteenth
century, that is Sigmund Freud, Nietzsche the physician of culture diagnoses
the hidden malady that oppresses our contemporary world of modernity:
life itself suffocates under the oppressive burdens of memory, of history and
of consciousness. As if, as it were, life as life – pure life – does not appear in
the blazing light of consciousness; as if life as life is suffocated in the logic of
intelligibility that is the law of history; as if, there is truly in life something
that is truly immemorial.
That history constitutes the law of intelligibility – the very intrigue of
being – that is the originary violence against life. The documents of his-
tory, then – as Walter Benjamin would show in his famous Theses on the
­Philosophy of History – contains, in their hither side, the traces of barba-
rism which do not appear in the light of intelligibility of the world: “There
is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of
barbarism” (Benjamin 1985: 256). Irreducible to the light of intelligibility
that constitutes “the world”, life flows by, as undertow, as absolute singu-
larity and in its individuation that refuses to be subsumed under the catego-
ries or concepts of universality. Absolved from the law of universality, life
flows on as pure individuation and absolute singularity.
It is then the utmost intellectual-philosophical task and an existential
vocation to restitute – in integrum – life as life from its subjugation under

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311539-3 25
 S aitya B rata D as

the fold of the law. For what constitutes the law as law is this power of
subsumption: singularity under the fold of the universal, the radical het-
erogeneity of life under the gaze of the world. Thus, this life, which is not
a life but pure life, and which, as such, is distinguished from “being mere
alive”, is not to be found in the world; it does not appear in the time of the
world that constitutes our history, and in the consciousness of that time that
constitutes our memory. In its radical heterogeneity, in its pure individua-
tion and absolute singularity, life is the non-world (not the “other” world
as against “this” world), non-time, non-historical and immemorial. As if
something about life, not as an accidental property or attribute but as its
intrinsic non-conditional condition, is eternal. This eternity of life is not the
endless lengthening of time; it is not the spilling over this world into another
world of salvation; it is not the historical progression that spans over into
the indefinite infinity; and it is not the memory whose provisional forget-
ting will be recovered once again, thanks to the power of the consciousness,
which as such is power per say, which is the very power as power, as Hegel
used to say. This is the power of the negative that stares at the work of dis-
solution and is not afraid of death:

Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all

things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the
greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding
for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the
life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devasta-
tion, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It
wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. . . .
Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face and tar-
rying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power
that converts it into being.
(Hegel 1998: 19)

What is this life that is not assimilated to this dialectical power of a phe-
nomenological history? This power of memory for which there is nothing
radical outside is the very image of totality. This totalization is that sickness
of history against which the diagnostician and symptomologist Nietzsche
poses the question of life, life as life, not the biological life which the racist
ideology has made its emblem – the blood and soil – but pure life, opening
to the immemorial affirmation, the eternal yes to life!

History as Theodicy
The dominant conception of history – the one that is born as a response
to the Enlightenment’s idea of history – understands history as an imma-
nent plane of continuum that progressively and in an accumulative manner

26
 L ife

moves towards its telos which lies at the end of its process. Behind all the
periodic breaks, it perceives a continuum of self-presence (Hegel’s idea of the
­Subject) of which the breaks are only perceived to be attenuated variation of
the fundamental continuity underlying all the interruptions and discontinui-
ties of history. The metaphysician of history – the owl of ­Minerva – who
takes flight only at the dusk, commemorates and celebrates the victory of
memory over forgetting. The song that the metaphysician sings on this fes-
tive occasion is the song that celebrates the triumphs of the world-historical
politics: it celebrates the progressive rationalization of reality as it embodies
itself in the world-historical figures of sovereignty. The Hegelian dialectical
phenomenology of history is the most systematic exposition of theodicy:
here the Absolute embodies itself, objectively, in the sovereign figures of
world-historical politics, as if God himself sojourns on the worldly plane
of becoming. This embodiment of the divine must pass through dialectical
stages of diremption and return whose speculative meaning Hegel draws
from Christology (Christ dying on the cross and resurrecting himself): it
is the drama of history itself, the very power of history, whose objective
manifestation Hegel finds, at the end of this history, in the very figure of the
modern State, the Prussian State which embodies the conquered truth that
reason has become real and the real has become, finally, rational. Hegel’s
theodicy has become thus the apologist of the victorious. It effectively
refuses to confront the radical evil that is operative in history in the name
of the Good that lies at the end of a progressive world-historical movement
on a homogenous scale. It is against this Nietzsche writes his “Uses and
­Disadvantages of History for Life”:

The belief that one is a latecomer of the ages is, in any case, para-
lyzing and depressing but it must appear dreadful and devastating
when such a belief one day by a bold inversion raises this late-
comer to a Godhead as the true meaning and goal of all previous
events, when his miserable condition is equated with a completion
of world-history. Such a point of view has accustomed the Germans
to talk of a “world process” and to justify their own age as the
necessary result of this world-process; such a point of view has set
history, insofar as history is “the concept that realizes itself”, “the
dialectics of the spirit of the peoples”, and the “world-tribunal”, in
place of the other spiritual powers, art and religion, as the sole sov-
ereign power. History understood in this Hegelian fashion has been
mockingly called God’s sojourn on earth, though the god referred
to has been created only by history. This god, however, became
transparent and comprehensible to himself within the Hegelian cra-
niums and has already ascended all the dialectically possible steps
of his evolution up to this self-revelation: so that for Hegel the
climax and terminus of the world-process coincided with his own

27
 S aitya B rata D as

existence in Berlin. Indeed, he ought to have said that everything

that came after him was properly to be considered merely as a musi-
cal coda to the world-historical rondo or, even more properly, as
superfluous. He did not say it: instead he implanted into the genera-
tion thoroughly leavened by him that admiration for the “power of
history” which in practice transforms every moment into a naked
admiration for success and leads to an idolatry of the factual: which
idolatry is now generally described by the very mythological yet
quite idiomatic expression “to accommodate oneself to the facts”.
But he who has learned to bend his back and bow his head before
the “power of history” at last nods “Yes” like Chinese mechanical
doll to every power, whether it be a government or public opinion
or a numerical majority and moves his limbs to the precise rhythm
at which any “power” whatever pulls the strings. If every success is
a rational necessity, if every event is a victory of the logical or the
“idea” – then down on your knees quickly and do reverence to the
whole stepladder of “success”!
(Nietzsche 1997: 104–105)

Hegel’s theodicy – his justification of God’s ways in history – is secularization

of the Jewish-Christian eschatological conception of Heilsgeschichte. The
nineteenth-century metaphysics of history takes up from the eschatological
Heilsgeschichte its conception of history that is oriented towards its end but
secularizes that eschatology by taking away its apocalyptic sting (Löwith
1957). The criticism of the world, which is the original impulse of the early
Christian eschatology, now turns out to be a justification of the evil in his-
tory and a celebration of the triumph of “power in history”. The unbear-
able experience of evil and the suffering – the very experience of the cross of
Christ – that puts into question the evil in history has now been transformed
into the triumphal song of the world-political sovereign powers. It is against
this violence of history, against the anonymous order of totality which is the
very metaphysical image of modernity (grounded in Hegel’s theodicy), that
Nietzsche poses the question of life anew in an untimely manner, that is, out
of sync with the metaphysical image of modernity.

Life – Being Singular

Hegel’s grounds his theodicy of history onto-theo-logically on his concept
of the Concept: that the concept is not a transcendental inert significa-
tion lying transcendentally apart from sensuous “thing” but the dialecti-
cal becoming of itself which subsumes, by the power of its positing and
negating (negating by positing; or, positing by negating: this is why it is
“dialectical”), the sensuous things. The multiple, differential, non-identical,
individuated being-in-existence is subsumed, by the force and violence of

28
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occasions, the silence of the ladies, and the half compassionate
courtesy of Colonel Houston, wounded her heart more deeply than
the most bitter reproaches could have done.
A week passed in this dreary manner, and still Major Helmstedt and
Captain Houston had not returned, though they were as yet daily
expected.
Margaret, lonely, desolate, craving companionship and sympathy,
one day ordered her carriage and drove up to the parsonage to see
Grace Wellworth. She was shown into the little sitting-room where
the parson’s daughter sat sewing.
Grace arose to meet her friend with a constrained civility that cut
Margaret to the heart. She could not associate her coldness with the
calumnious reports afloat concerning herself, and therefore could not
comprehend it.
But Margaret’s heart yearned toward her friend; she could not bear
to be at variance with her.
“My dearest Grace, what is the matter? have I unconsciously
offended you in any way?” she inquired, gently, as she sat down
beside the girl and laid her hand on her arm.
“Unconsciously! no, I think not! You are doubly a traitor, Margaret
Helmstedt! Traitor to your betrothed and to your friend!” replied Miss
Wellworth, bitterly.
“Grace! this from you!”
“Yes, this from me! of all others from me! The deeply injured have a
right to complain and reproach.”
“Oh, Grace! Grace! my friend!” exclaimed Margaret, wringing her
hands.
But before another word was said, old Mr. Wellworth entered the
room.
“Good-afternoon, Miss Helmstedt. Grace, my dear, go down to
Dinah’s quarter and give her her medicine, Miss Helmstedt will
excuse you. One of our women has malaria fever, Miss Helmstedt.”
“Indeed! I am sorry; but I have some skill in nursing: shall I not go
with Grace?” inquired Margaret, as her friend arose to leave the
room.
“No, young lady; I wish to have some conversation with you.”
Grace sulkily departed, and Margaret meekly resumed her seat.
“Miss Helmstedt, my poor child, it is a very painful duty that I have
now to perform. Since the decease of my wife, I have to watch with
double vigilance over the welfare of my motherless daughter, and I
should feel indebted to you, Margaret, if you would abstain from
visiting Grace until some questions in regard to your course are
satisfactorily answered.”
Margaret’s face grew gray with anguish as she arose to her feet, and
clasping her hands, murmured:
“My God! my God! You do not think I could do anything that should
separate me from the good of my own sex?”
“Margaret, unhappy child, that question is not for me to answer. I
dare not judge you, but leave the matter to God above and to your
father on earth.”
“Farewell, Mr. Wellworth. I know the time will come when your kind
nature will feel sorrow for having stricken a heart already so bruised
and bleeding as this,” she said, laying her hand upon her surcharged
bosom; “but you are not to blame, so God bless you and farewell,”
she repeated, offering her hand.
The clergyman took and pressed it, and the tears sprang to his eyes
as he answered:
“Margaret, the time has come, when I deeply regret the necessity of
giving you pain. Alas! my child, ‘the way of the transgressor is hard.’
May God deliver your soul,” and rising, he attended her to her
carriage, placed her in it, and saying:
“God bless you!” closed the door and retired.
“Oh, mother! mother! Oh, mother! mother! behold the second gift—
my only friendship! They are yours, mother! they are yours! only love
me from heaven! for I love you beyond all on earth,” cried Margaret,
covering her sobbing face, and sinking back in the carriage.
Margaret returned home to her deserted and lonely rooms. No one
came thither now; no one invited her thence. Darker lowered the
clouds of fate over her devoted young head. Another weary week
passed, and still the returning soldiers had not arrived. The Sabbath
came—the first Sabbath in October.
Margaret had always found the sweetest consolation in the
ordinances of religion. This, being the first Sabbath of the month,
was sacrament Sunday. And never since her entrance into the
church had Margaret missed the communion. And now, even in her
deep distress, when she so bitterly needed the consolations of
religion, it was with a subdued joy that she prepared to receive them.
It was delightful autumn weather, and the whole family who were
going would fill the family coach—so much had been intimated to
Margaret through her attendants. Therefore she was obliged to order
her own carriage. The lonely ride, under present circumstances, was
far more endurable than the presence of the family would have been;
and solitude and silence afforded her the opportunity for meditation
that the occasion required.
She reached the church and left her carriage before the hour of
service. The fine day had drawn an unusually large congregation
together, and had kept them sauntering and gossiping out in the
open air; but Margaret, as she smiled or nodded to one or another,
met only scornful glances or averted heads. More than shocked,
appalled and dismayed by this sort of reception, she hurried into the
church and on to her pew.
Margaret had always, in preference to the Houstons’ pew, occupied
her own mother’s, “to keep it warm,” she had said, in affectionate
explanation, to Mrs. Houston. Generally, Grace or Clare, or both,
came and sat with her to keep her company. But to-day, as yet,
neither of her friends had arrived, and she occupied her pew alone.
As hers was one of those side pews in a line with the pulpit, her
position commanded not only the preacher’s, but the congregation’s
view. The preacher had not come. The congregation in the church
was sparse, the large majority remaining in the yard. Yet, as
Margaret’s eyes casually roved over this thin assembly, she grew
paler to notice how heads were put together, and whispers and
sidelong glances were directed to herself. To escape this, and to find
strength and comfort, she opened her pocket Bible and commenced
reading.
Presently, the bell tolled; and the people came pouring in, filling their
pews. About the time that all was quiet, the minister came in,
followed at a little distance by his son and daughter, who passed into
the parsonage pew, while he ascended into the pulpit, offered his
preliminary private prayer, and then opening the book commenced
the sublime ritual of worship.
“The Lord is in His holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence before
Him.”
These words, repeated Sunday after Sunday, never lost their
sublime significance for Margaret. They ever impressed her
solemnly, at once awing and elevating her soul. Now as they fell
upon her ear, her sorrows and humiliations were, for the time, set
aside. A hundred eyes might watch her, a hundred tongues malign
her; but she neither heeded, nor even knew it. She knew she was
alone—she could not help knowing this; Grace had passed her by;
Clare had doubtless come, but not to her. She felt herself abandoned
of human kind, but yet not alone, for “God was in His holy temple.”
The opening exhortation, the hymn, the prayers, and the lessons for
the day were all over, and the congregation knelt for the litany.
“From envy, hatred and malice, and all uncharitableness, good Lord
deliver us.”
These words had always slid easily over the tongue of Margaret, so
foreign had these passions been to her life and experience; but now
with what earnestness of heart they were repeated:
“That it may please Thee to forgive our enemies, persecutors and
slanderers, and to turn their hearts.”
Formal words once, repeated as by rote, now how full of significance
to Margaret. “Oh, Father in Heaven,” she added, “help me to ask this
in all sincerity.”
The litany was over, and the little bustle that ensued, of people rising
from their knees, Margaret’s pew door was opened, a warm hand
clasped hers, and a cordial voice whispered in her ear:
“I am very late to-day, but ‘better late than never,’ even at church.”
And Margaret, looking up, saw the bright face of Clare Hartley before
her.
Poor Margaret, at this unexpected blessing, nearly burst into tears.
“Oh, Clare, have you heard? have you heard?” she eagerly
whispered.
There was no time to say more; the services were recommenced,
and the congregation attentive.
When the usual morning exercises were over, a portion of the
congregation retired, while the other remained for the communion.
Clare was not a communicant, but she stayed in the pew to wait for
Margaret. Not with the first circle, nor yet with the second, but
meekly with the third, Margaret approached the Lord’s table. Mr.
Wellworth administered the wine, and one of the deacons the bread.
Margaret knelt near the center of the circle, so that about half the set
were served before the minister came to her. And when he did,
instead of putting the blessed chalice into her hand, he stooped and
whispered:
“Miss Helmstedt, I would prefer to talk with you again before
administering the sacrament to you.”
This in face of the whole assembly. This at the altar. Had a
thunderbolt fallen upon her head, she could scarcely have been
more heavily stricken, more overwhelmed and stunned.
This, then, was the third offering; the comfort of the Christian
sacraments was sacrificed. No earthly stay was left her now, but the
regard of her stern father and the love of Ralph. Would they remain
to her? For her father she could not decide. One who knew him best,
and loved him most, had died because she dared not trust him with
the secret of her life. But for Ralph! Ever at the thought of him,
through her deeper distress, the great joy of faith arose, irradiating
her soul and beaming from her countenance.
But now, alas! no thought, no feeling, but a sense of crushing shame
possessed her. How she left that spot she never could have told!
The first fact she knew was that Clare had left her pew to meet and
join her; Clare’s supporting arm was around her waist; Clare’s
encouraging voice was in her ears; Clare took her from the church
and placed her in her carriage; and would have entered and sat
beside her, but that Margaret, recovering her presence of mind,
repulsed her, saying:
“No, Clare! no, beloved friend! it is almost well to have suffered so
much to find a friend so loyal and true; but your girlish arm cannot
singly sustain me. And you shall not compromise yourself for me.
Leave me, brave girl; leave me to my fate!”
“Now may the Lord leave me when I do! No, please Heaven, Clare
Hartley stands or falls with her friend!” exclaimed the noble girl, as
she entered and seated herself beside Margaret. “Drive on, Forrest,”
she added, seeing Miss Helmstedt too much preoccupied to
remember to give the order.
“My father was not at church to-day. So if you will send a messenger
with a note from me to Dr. Hartley, I will remain with you, Margaret,
until your father arrives.”
“Oh, Clare! Clare! if you hurt yourself for me, I shall never forgive
myself for allowing you to come.”
“As if you could keep me away.”
“Clare, do you know what they say of me?”
Clare shook her head, frowned, beat an impatient tattoo with her feet
upon the mat, and answered:
“Know it! No; I do not! Do you suppose that I sit still and listen to any
one slandering you? Do you imagine that any one would dare to
slander you in my presence? I tell you, Margaret, that I should take
the responsibility of expelling man or woman from my father’s house
who should dare to breathe a word against you.”
“Oh, Clare! the circumstantial evidence against me is overwhelming!”
“What is circumstantial evidence, however strong, against your
whole good and beautiful life?”
“You would never believe ill of me.”
“Margaret—barring original sin, which I am required to believe in—I
think I have a pure heart, a clear head, and strong eyes. I do not find
so much evil in my own soul, as to be obliged to impute a part of it to
another. I never confuse probabilities; and, lastly, I can tell an Agnes
from a Calista at sight.”
By this time the rapid drive had brought them home. Clare scribbled
a hasty note, which Forrest conveyed to her father.
The Comptons and the Houstons were all communicants, and did
not leave the church until all the services were over. They had been
bitterly galled and humiliated by the repulse that Margaret Helmstedt,
a member of their family, had received. On their way home, they
discussed the propriety of immediately sending her off, with her
servants, to Helmstedt’s Island.
“Her father does not come; her conduct grows worse and worse; she
has certainly forfeited all claims to our protection, and she
compromises us every day,” urged Nellie.
“I am not sure but that the isle would be the best and most secure
retreat for her until the coming of her father; the servants there are
faithful and reliable, and the place is not so very accessible to
interlopers, now that the British have retired,” said old Mrs. Compton.
Such being the opinion of the ladies of the family, upon a case
immediately within their own province, Colonel Houston could say
but little.
“Dear mother and fair wife, the matter rests with you at last; but for
myself, I prefer that the girl should remain under our protection until
the arrival of her father. I would place her nowhere, except in Major
Helmstedt’s own hands.”
The ladies, however, decided that Margaret Helmstedt should, the
next morning, be sent off to the isle. And the colonel reluctantly
acquiesced. As for old Colonel Compton, from first to last he had not
interfered, or even commented, except by a groan or a sigh.
Upon arriving at home, they were astonished to find Clare Hartley
with Margaret. And when they were told that Forrest had been
dispatched to Plover’s Point, with a note from Clare to inform her
father of her whereabouts, Nellie prophesied that the messenger
would bring back orders for Clare to return immediately. And she
decided to say nothing to Margaret about the approaching exodus
until after Clare’s departure.
Mrs. Houston’s prediction was verified. Forrest returned about
sunset with a note from Dr. Hartley to his daughter, expressing
surprise that she should have made this visit without consulting him,
and commanding her, as it was too late for her to cross the bay that
evening, to return, without fail, early the next morning.
Margaret gazed anxiously at Clare while the latter read her note.
“Well, Clare! well?” she asked, eagerly, as her friend folded the
paper.
“Well, dear, as I left home without settling up some matters, I must
run back for a few hours to-morrow morning; but I will be sure to
come back and redeem my pledge of remaining near you until your
father’s arrival, dear Margaret; for every minute I see more clearly
that you need some faithful friend at your side,” replied Clare, who
felt confident of being able to persuade her father to permit her
return.
Clare slept with Margaret in her arms that night. And early the next
morning—very early, to deprecate her father’s displeasure, she
entered Margaret’s little Pearl Shell, and was taken by Forrest
across the bay and up the river to Plover’s Point.
She had scarcely disappeared from the house, before Mrs. Houston
entered Miss Helmstedt’s room.
Margaret was seated in her low sewing-chair with her elbow leaning
on the little workstand beside her, her pale forehead bowed upon her
open palm, and a small piece of needlework held laxly in the other
hand lying idly upon her lap. Her eyes were hollow, her eyelashes
drooping until they overshadowed cheeks that wore the extreme
pallor of illness. Her whole aspect was one of mute despair.
The bustling entrance of Mrs. Houston was not perceived until the
lady addressed her sharply:
“Miss Helmstedt, I have something to say to you.”
Margaret started ever so slightly, and then quietly arose, handed her
visitor a chair, and resumed her own seat, and after a little while her
former attitude, her elbow resting on the stand, her head bowed
upon her hand.
“Miss Helmstedt,” said the lady, taking the offered seat with an air of
importance, “we have decided that under present circumstances, it is
better that you should leave the house at once with your servants,
and retire to the isle. Your effects can be sent after you.”
A little lower sank the bowed head—a little farther down slid the
relaxed hand, that was the only external evidence of the new blow
she had received. To have had her good name smirched with foul
calumny; to have suffered the desertion of all her friends save one;
to have been publicly turned from the communion table; all this had
been bitter as the water of Marah! Still she had said to herself:
“Though all in this house wound me with their frowns and none
vouchsafe me a kind word or look, yet will I be patient and endure it
until they come. My father and Ralph shall find me where they left
me.”
But now to be sent with dishonor from this home of shelter, where
she awaited the coming of her father and her betrothed husband;
and under such an overwhelming mass of circumstantial evidence
against her as to justify in all men’s eyes those who discarded her—
this, indeed, was the bitterness of death!
Yet one word from her would have changed all. And now she was
under no vow to withhold that word, for she recollected that her dying
mother had said to her: “If ever, my little Margaret, your honor or
happiness should be at stake through this charge with which I have
burdened you, cast it off, give my secret to the wind!” And now a
word that she was free to speak would lift her from the pit of
ignominy and set her upon a mount of honor. It would bring the
Comptons, the Houstons, the Wellworths and the whole company of
her well-meaning, but mistaken friends to her feet. Old Mr. Wellworth
would beg her pardon, Grace would weep upon her neck. The family
here would lavish affection upon her. Nellie would busy herself in
preparations for the approaching nuptials. The returning soldiers,
instead of meeting disappointment and humiliation, would greet—the
one his adored bride—the other his beloved daughter. And
confidence, love and joy would follow.
But then a shadow of doubt would be cast upon that grave under the
oaks by the river. And quickly as the temptation came, it was
repulsed. The secret that Marguerite De Lancie had died to keep,
her daughter would not divulge to be clear of blame. “No, mother, no,
beautiful and gifted martyr, I can die with you, but I will never betray
you! Come what will I will be silent.” And compressing her sorrowful
and bloodless lips and clasping her hands, Margaret “took up her
burden of life again.”
“Well, Miss Helmstedt, I am waiting here for any observation you
may have to offer, I hope you will make no difficulty about the plan
proposed.”
“No, Mrs. Houston, I am ready to go.”
“Then, Miss Helmstedt, you had better order your servants to pack
up and prepare the boat. We wish you to leave this morning; for
Colonel Houston, who intends to see you safe to the island, and
charge the people there concerning you, has only this day at his
disposal. To-morrow he goes to Washington, to meet Ralph and
Frank, who, we learn by a letter received this morning, are on their
way home.”
This latter clause was an additional piece of cruelty, whether
intentional or only thoughtless on the part of the speaker. Ralph so
near home, and she dismissed in dishonor! Margaret felt it keenly;
but she only inquired in a low and tremulous voice:
“And my father?”
“Your father, it appears, is still detained by business in New York.
And now I will leave you to prepare for your removal.”
Margaret rang for her servants, directed Hildreth to pack up her
clothing, and Forrest to make ready the boat, for they were going
back to the island.
Her faithful attendants heard in sorrowful dismay. They had acutely
felt and deeply resented the indignities inflicted upon their young
mistress.
An hour served for all necessary preparations, and then Margaret
sent and reported herself ready to depart.
The family assembled in the hall to bid her good-by. When she took
leave of them they all looked grave and troubled. Old Mrs. Compton
kissed her on the cheek and prayed God to bless her. And the tears
rushed to Colonel Houston’s eyes when he offered his arm to the
suffering girl, whose pale face looked so much paler in contrast with
the mourning dress she still wore.
They left the house, entered the boat, and in due time reached
Helmstedt’s Island. Colonel Houston took her to the mansion, called
the servants together, informed them that their master would be at
home in a few days; and that their young mistress had come to
prepare for his arrival, and to welcome him back to his house. That
of course they would obey her in all things. This explanation of
Margaret’s presence was so probable and satisfactory, that her
people had nothing to do but to express the great pleasure they felt
in again receiving their young lady. In taking leave of Margaret,
Colonel Houston was very deeply shaken. He could not say to her,
“This act, Margaret, was the act of the women of my family, who, you
know, hold of right the disposal of all such nice questions as these. I
think they are wrong, but I cannot with propriety interfere.” No, he
could not denounce the doings of his own wife and mother, but he
took the hand of the maiden and said:
“My dearest Margaret—my daughter, as I hoped once proudly to call
you—if ever you should need a friend, in any strait, for any purpose,
call on me. Will you, my dear girl?”
Miss Helmstedt remained silent, with her eyes cast down in bitter
humiliation.
“Say, Margaret Helmstedt, my dear, will you do this?” earnestly
pleaded Colonel Houston.
Margaret looked up. The faltering voice, and the tears on the old
soldier’s cheeks touched her heart.
“The bravest are ever the gentlest. God bless you, Colonel Houston.
Yes, if ever poor Margaret Helmstedt needs a friend, she will call
upon you,” she said, holding out her hand.
The old man pressed it and hurried away.
The next morning Colonel Houston set out for Washington city to
meet his son.
The reunion took place at the City Hotel.
Captain Houston was eager to proceed directly homeward; but a
night’s rest was necessary to the invalid soldier, and their departure
was fixed for the next day. Ralph Houston’s eagerness seemed not
altogether one of joy; through the evening his manner was often
abstracted and anxious.
When the party had at last separated for the night, Ralph left his own
chamber and proceeded to that of his father. He found the veteran in
bed, and much surprised at the unseasonable visit. Ralph threw
himself into the easy-chair by his side, and opened the conversation
by saying:
“I did not wish to speak before a third person, even when that person
was my brother; but what then is this about Margaret? Mrs.
Houston’s letters drop strange, incomprehensible hints, and
Margaret’s little notes are constrained and sorrowful. Now, sir, what
is the meaning of it all?”
“Ralph, it was to break the news to you that I came up hither to meet
you,” replied the colonel, solemnly.
“The news! Great Heaven, sir, what news can there be that needs
such serious breaking? You told me that she was well!” exclaimed
the captain, changing color, and rising in his anxiety.
“Ralph! Margaret Helmstedt is lost to you forever.”
The soldier of a dozen battles dropped down into his chair as if
felled, and covered his face with his hands.
“Ralph! be a man!”
A deep groan from the laboring bosom was the only response.
“Ralph! man! soldier! no faithless woman is worth such agony!”
He neither moved nor spoke; but remained with his face buried in his
hands.
“Ralph! my son! my brave son! Ralph!” exclaimed the old man, rising
in bed.
The captain put out his hand and gently pressed him back upon his
pillow, saying in a calm, constrained voice:
“Lie still; do not disturb yourself; it is over. You said that she was lost
to me, forever. She is married to another, then?”
“I wish to Heaven that I knew she was; but I only know that she
ought to be.”
“Tell me all!”
The voice was so hollow, so forced, so unnatural, that Colonel
Houston could not under other circumstances have recognized it as
his son’s.
The old man commenced and related the circumstances as they
were known to himself.
Captain Houston listened—his dreadful calmness as the story
progressed, startled first into eager attention, then into a breathless
straining for the end, and finally into astonishment and joy! And just
as the story came to the point of Margaret’s return from her
mysterious trip, with the denial that she was married, he broke forth
with:
“But you told me that she was lost to me forever! I see nothing to
justify such an announcement!”
“Good Heaven, Ralph, you must be infatuated, man! But wait a
moment.” And taking up the thread of his narrative, he related how
all Miss Helmstedt’s friends, convinced of her guilt or folly, had
deserted her.
At this part of the recital Ralph Houston’s fine countenance darkened
with sorrow, indignation and scorn.
“Poor dove!—but we can spare them. Go on, sir! go on!”
“Ralph, you make me anxious; but listen further.” And the old man
related how Margaret, presenting herself at the communion table,
had, in the face of the whole congregation, been turned away.
Ralph Houston leaped upon his feet with a rebounding spring that
shook the house, and stood, convulsed, livid, speechless, breathless
with rage.
“Ralph! My God, you alarm me! Pray, pray govern yourself.”
His breast labored, his face worked, his words came as if each
syllable was uttered with agony: “Who—did—this?”
“Mr. Wellworth, once her friend!”
“An old man and a clergyman! God knoweth that shall not save him
when I meet him.”
“Ralph! Ralph! you are mad.”
“And Margaret! How did she bear this? Oh! that I had been at her
side. Oh, God, that I had been at her side!” exclaimed the captain,
striding in rapid steps up and down the floor.
“She felt it, of course, very acutely.”
“My dove! my poor, wounded dove! But you all comforted and
sustained her, sir!”
“Ralph, we thought it best to send her home to the island.”
“What!” exclaimed Captain Houston, pausing suddenly in his rapid
walk.
“Yes, Ralph, we have sent her away home. We thought it best to do
so,” replied the colonel, generously suppressing the fact that it was
altogether the women’s work, against his own approval.
Ralph Houston had gone through all the stages of displeasure,
indignation and fury. But he was past all that now! There are some
wrongs so deep as to still the stormiest natures into a stern calm
more to be feared than fury.
“What, do you tell me that in this hour of her bitterest need you have
sent my promised bride from the protection of your roof?” he
inquired, walking to the bedside, and speaking in a deep, calm, stern
tone, from which all emotion seemed banished.
“Ralph, we deemed it proper to do so.”
“Then hear me! Margaret Helmstedt shall be my wife within twenty-
four hours; and, so help me God, at my utmost need, I will never
cross the threshold of Buzzard’s Bluff again!” exclaimed Captain
Houston, striding from the room and banging the door behind him.
“Ralph! Ralph! my son, Ralph!” cried the colonel, starting up from the
bed, throwing on his dressing-gown and following him through the
passage. But Captain Houston had reached and locked himself in
his own chamber, where he remained in obdurate silence.
The colonel went back to bed.
Ralph Houston, in his room, consulted the timepiece. It was eleven
o’clock. He sat down to the table, drew writing materials before him,
and wrote the following hasty note to his betrothed:
City Hotel, Washington, October 6, 1815.
Margaret, My Beloved One:—Only this hour have I
heard of your sorrows. Had I known them sooner, I would
have come from the uttermost parts of the earth to your
side. But be of good cheer, my own best love. Within
twenty-four hours I shall be with you to claim your hand,
and assume the precious privilege and sacred right of
 protecting you against the world for life and death and
eternity.
Yours,
Ralph Houston.
“‘It is written that for this cause shall a man leave father and mother
and cleave to his wife.’ I am glad of it. Let them go. For my poor,
storm-beaten dove, she shall be safe in my bosom,” said Ralph
Houston, his heart burning with deep resentment against his family,
and yearning with unutterable affection toward Margaret, as he
sealed and directed the letter, and hastened with it to the office to
save the midnight mail.
 CHAPTER XIV.
MARTYRDOM.
“Mother, mother, up in heaven!
Stand upon the jasper sea
And be witness I have given
All the gifts required of me;
Hope that blessed me, bliss that crowned,
Love that left me with a wound,
Life itself that turned around.”
—Mrs. Browning.

An evil fatality seemed to attend all events connected with Margaret

Helmstedt. The letter mailed at midnight night, by being one minute
too late for the post, was delayed a whole week, and until it could do
no manner of good.
The little packet schooner, Canvas Back, Captain Miles Tawney,
from Washington to Norfolk, on board which Ralph Houston, the next
morning, embarked, when but thirty-six hours out got aground below
Blackstone’s Island, where she remained fast for a week.
And thus it unhappily chanced that Major Helmstedt, who reached
Washington, on his way home, a few days after the departure of the
Houstons from the city, and took passage in the first packet for
Buzzard’s Bluff, arrived thither the first of the returning soldiers.
Having no knowledge or suspicion of the important events that had
occurred, he caused himself and his baggage to be landed upon the
beach, below the mansion, in which he naturally expected to find his
daughter dwelling in honor and security.
Leaving his trunks in charge of a loitering negro—whom he had
found upon the sands, and who, to his hasty inquiries, had answered
that all the family were well—he hurried up to the house.
He was met at the door by a servant, who, with ominous formality,
ushered him into the parlor, and retreated to call his mistress.
Mrs. Houston soon entered, with a pale face, trembling frame, and a
half-frightened, half-threatening aspect, that greatly surprised and
perplexed Major Helmstedt, who however, arose with stately
courtesy to receive and hand the lady to a chair.
After respectfully saluting and seating his hostess, he said:
“My daughter Margaret, madam—I hope she is well?”
“Well, I am sure I hope so, too; but Margaret is not with us!” replied
the little lady, looking more frightened and more threatening than
before.
“How, madam, Margaret not with you?” exclaimed Major Helmstedt,
in astonishment, that was not free from alarm.
“No, sir. You must listen to me, major—it could not be helped,”
replied Nellie, who straightway began, and with a manner half-
deprecating and half-defiant, related the story of Margaret’s
indiscretions, humiliations, and final expulsion.
Major Helmstedt listened with a mighty self-control. No muscle of his
iron countenance moved. When she had concluded, he arose, with a
cold and haughty manner.
“Slanders, madam—slanders all! I can say no more to a lady,
however unworthy of the courtesy due to her sex. But I shall know
how to call the men of her family to a strict account for this insult.”
And, throwing his hat upon his head, he strode from the room.
“Major Helmstedt—Major Helmstedt! Come back, sir. Don’t go; you
must please to listen to me,” cried Nellie, running after him, the
principle of fear now quite predominating over that of defiance.
But the outraged father, without deigning a word or look of reply,
hurried onward toward the beach.
Nellie, in great alarm, dispatched a servant in haste after him, to
beseech him, in her name, to return and stay to dinner—or, if he
would not honor her so far, at least to accept the use of a carriage, or
a boat, to convey him whithersoever he wished to go.
But Major Helmstedt, with arrogant scorn, repulsed all these offers.
Throwing a half guinea to the negro to take temporary charge of his
trunks, he strode on his way, following the windings of the waterside
road for many miles, until late in the afternoon he reached Belleview,
whence he intended to take a boat to the island.
His cause of indignation was reasonable, and his rage increased
with time and reflection. That Margaret had been foully wronged by
the Houstons he from his deepest convictions believed. That the
charges brought against her had the slightest foundation in fact, he
could not for a moment credit. All his own intimate knowledge of his
pure-hearted child, from her earliest infancy to the day when he left
her in Mrs. Houston’s care, conclusively contradicted these
calumnies. But that, for some reason or other, unconfessed, the
Houstons wished to break off the contemplated alliance with his
family he felt assured. And that his daughter’s betrothed was in
correspondence with Mrs. Houston, and in connivance with her
plans, he had been left to believe, by the incoherence, if not by the
intentional misrepresentations, of Nellie’s statement. That they
should wish, without just cause, to break the engagement with his
daughter, was both dishonorable and dishonoring—that they should
attempt this through such means, was scandalous and insulting to
the last degree. That Ralph Houston should be either an active or a
passive party to this plan, was an offense only to be satisfied by the
blood of the offender. His pride in an old, untainted name, not less
than his affection for his only daughter, was wounded to the very
quick.
There seemed but one remedy—it was to be found only in “the
bloody code,” miscalled “of honor”—the code which required a man
to wash out any real or fancied offense in the life-stream of the
offender; the code which often made an honorable man responsible,
with his life, for careless words uttered by the women of his family;
that code which now enjoined Philip Helmstedt to seek the life of his
daughter’s betrothed, his intended son-in-law, his brother-in-arms.
Nor was this all. The feeling that prompted Major Helmstedt was not
only that of an affronted gentleman, who deems it necessary to
defend in the duel his assailed manhood—it was much more—it was
the blood-thirsty rage of a scornful and arrogant man, whose honor
had been wounded in the most vulnerable place, through the only
woman of his name, his one fair daughter, who had been by her
betrothed and his family rejected, insulted, and expelled from their
house, branded with indelible shame.
“Ralph Houston must die!”
He said it with remorseless resolution, with grim satisfaction, and in
his heart devoted the souls of his purposed victim and all his family
to the infernal deities.
In this evil mood, and in an evil hour, Major Helmstedt unhappily
arrived at Belleview, and, still more unhappily, there met Ralph, who,
in pursuance of his vow never to set foot upon Buzzard’s Bluff again,
had that morning landed at the village, with the intention there to
engage a boat to take him to Helmstedt’s Island, whither he was
going to seek Margaret.
It was in the principal street of the village, and before the only hotel
that they chanced to meet.
Ralph advanced with eager joy to greet his father-in-law.
But Major Helmstedt’s mad and blind rage forestalled and rendered
impossible all friendly words or explanations.
How he assailed and insulted Ralph Houston; how he hurled bitter
scorn, taunt, and defiance in his teeth how in the presence of the
gathering crowd, he charged falsehood, treachery, and cowardice
upon him; how, to cap the climax of insult, the infuriate pulled off his
glove and cast it sharply into the face of the young man; how, in
short, he irremediably forced upon Ralph a quarrel, which the latter
was, upon all accounts, most unwilling to take up, would be as
painful, as needless, to detail at large.
Suffice it to say, that the circumstances of the case, and the public
sentiment of the day considered, he left the young soldier, as a man
of honor, no possible alternative but to accept his challenge.
“‘Needs must when the devil drives;’ and, as there is no honorable
means of avoiding, I must meet this madman and receive his shot. I