The He(A)rt of the Witness: Remembering Australian Prisoners of War in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North

• Authors: Rūta Šlapkauskaitė

Abstracts

EN

This paper engages Cathy Caruth’s thinking about trauma, Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, and Giorgio Agamben’s theorising of bearing witness to examine the affective performance of remembering in Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Reading the narrative as a postmemorial account of Japan’s internment of Australian POWs in Burma during the Second World War, I focus on the body as a site of both wounding and witnessing to show how the affective relays between pleasure and pain reanimate the epistemological drama of lived experience and highlight the ambivalence of passion as a trope for both suffering and love. Framed by its intertextual homage to Matsuo Bashō’s poetic masterpiece of the same name, the Australian narrative of survival is shown to emerge from the collapse of the referential certainties underlying the binaries of victim/ victimiser, witness/perpetrator, human/inhuman, and remembering/forgetting. In Flanagan’s ethical imagination, bearing witness calls for a visceral rethinking of historical subjectivity that binds the world to consciousness as a source of both brutality and beauty.

Keywords

EN

Australia; Richard Flanagan; POWs; trauma; postmemory; haiku; affective remembering

• Publisher: Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw
• Journal: Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies
• Year: 2021
• Issue: 30(3)
• Pages: 141-161

Dates

published

2021

Contributors

author

Rūta Šlapkauskaitė

Identifiers

DOI

10.7311/0860-5734.30.3.08

Biblioteka Nauki

2049127