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“Survivors all”: Affirmative Connections in Novels by Julian Barnes and Caryl Phillips

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The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture

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Abstract

This chapter picks up on a comment by Caryl Phillips that frames his writing in the discourse related to survival. Rather than follow Primo Levi or Theodor Adorno, it explores the affirmative connections between survivors of genocides, conflicts and disasters as depicted in Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989) and in several novels by Caryl Phillips, notably Higher Ground (1989), Crossing the River (1993) and The Nature of Blood (1997). It examines how Barnes and Phillips relate histories and memories of slavery, genocide, colonialism and the Holocaust across different periods and generations and create connections between characters from various times and places, who survived thanks to resilience, solidarity and interdependence in the face of vulnerability and precariousness.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Levi (1988, 62).

  2. 2.

    Levi (1988, 62).

  3. 3.

    Agamben (1999, 89) quotes Bettelheim: “One cannot survive the concentration camp without feeling guilty that one was so incredibly lucky when millions perished”, Wiesel: “I live, therefore I am guilty […]. I am here because a friend, an acquaintance, an unknown person died in my place”, and Lingens: “I live, because others died in my place”.

  4. 4.

    Agamben (1999, 88) finds Levi’s chapter “Shame” “ultimately unsatisfying” partly because of its confusion of shame and guilt, for example, when Levi writes: “many (including me) experienced ‘shame,’ that is, a feeling of guilt” (Levi 1988, 73). The difference between the two concepts is addressed by Ruth Leys in From Guilt to Shame : Auschwitz and After, in which she also refers to Levi’s use of the terms (2007, 20).

  5. 5.

    Agamben (1999, 89).

  6. 6.

    Adorno (1973, 363).

  7. 7.

    Adorno (1973, 362).

  8. 8.

    Adorno (1973, 364).

  9. 9.

    Kral (2017, 12).

  10. 10.

    Kral (2017, 78).

  11. 11.

    Kral (2017, 12).

  12. 12.

    Phillips (1995, 57).

  13. 13.

    Phillips (1995, 24).

  14. 14.

    Phillips (1995, 91).

  15. 15.

    Phillips (1995, 182).

  16. 16.

    Phillips (1998, 5).

  17. 17.

    Phillips (1998, 9).

  18. 18.

    Gramsci (1971, 276).

  19. 19.

    Phillips (1995, 97).

  20. 20.

    Shamsie (2009, 183).

  21. 21.

    Shamsie (2009, 137).

  22. 22.

    Rushdie (2015, 75).

  23. 23.

    Phillips in Davison (2009, 21, my emphasis).

  24. 24.

    Levine (2006, 7).

  25. 25.

    Derrida (2010, 131).

  26. 26.

    Butler (2016, 382). Trauma theorists refer to the survivors’ need to tell their story in order to survive and not only to survive so they can tell their story (Laub 1992, 78; Levine 2006, 1). Laurie Vickroy borrows Suzette Henke’s concept of “scriptotherapy” (Henke 2000, xii) to argue that protagonists of fictional narratives also “attempt to survive by creating enabling stories and self-concepts” (Vickroy 2002, 9).

  27. 27.

    As noted by Dominick LaCapra (1999, 722), the reader should avoid over-identification with the victim but feel what he calls “empathic unsettlement” which “involves a kind of virtual experience through which one puts oneself in the other’s position while recognizing the difference of that position and hence not taking the other’s place”.

  28. 28.

    Low (1998, 132).

  29. 29.

    Phillips (2006, 2).

  30. 30.

    Phillips (2006, 235).

  31. 31.

    Phillips (2006, 235).

  32. 32.

    Phillips (2006, 236).

  33. 33.

    Agamben (1999, 92).

  34. 34.

    Agamben (1999, 92).

  35. 35.

    Des Pres (1976, 245 and 72). As noted by Agamben (1999, 93), “Bettelheim reacted to Des Pres’s book with indignation”, reaffirming instead “the decisive importance of the survivor’s feeling of guilt”.

  36. 36.

    Phillips (2006, 235).

  37. 37.

    Phillips (2006, 236).

  38. 38.

    Phillips (2006, 236).

  39. 39.

    Phillips (2006, 237).

  40. 40.

    Rothberg (2016, 366).

  41. 41.

    Caruth (1996, 24).

  42. 42.

    Phillips (1998, 170).

  43. 43.

    Craps (2012, 156).

  44. 44.

    Barnes (1990, 242).

  45. 45.

    Barnes (1990, 84; emphasis in the original). Kath repeats this expression as well as the noun “connections” five times in this chapter.

  46. 46.

    Said (1994, 407 and 408).

  47. 47.

    Finney (2003, 62).

  48. 48.

    Barnes (1990, 174).

  49. 49.

    Barnes (1990, 97).

  50. 50.

    Barnes (1990, 97).

  51. 51.

    Barnes (1990, 94).

  52. 52.

    Rothberg (2010, 7).

  53. 53.

    Rothberg (2010, 8). In a different context, one could relate this dialogue to Wilson Harris’s (1983) view of cross-culturality and Édouard Glissant’s (1990) poetics of relation.

  54. 54.

    Rothberg (2016, 359).

  55. 55.

    Gilroy (2000, 78).

  56. 56.

    Ledent (2002, 70).

  57. 57.

    Craps (2012, 160).

  58. 58.

    Phillips (1995, 127).

  59. 59.

    Phillips (1995, 69, 84, 145).

  60. 60.

    Phillips (1995, 72).

  61. 61.

    Phillips (1995, 89, 90).

  62. 62.

    Phillips (1995, 67, 90).

  63. 63.

    Phillips (1995, 147).

  64. 64.

    Barnes (1990, 10).

  65. 65.

    Barnes (1990, 44).

  66. 66.

    Barnes (1990, 121).

  67. 67.

    Barnes (1990, 184).

  68. 68.

    Kral (2017, 21).

  69. 69.

    Rothberg (2010, 11).

  70. 70.

    Ganteau (2015, 3)

  71. 71.

    Ganteau (2015, 11).

  72. 72.

    Barnes (1990, 21).

  73. 73.

    Barnes (1990, 4).

  74. 74.

    Barnes (1990, 28).

  75. 75.

    Barnes (1990, 173).

  76. 76.

    Barnes (1990, 57–58).

  77. 77.

    Barnes (1990, 121).

  78. 78.

    Levi (1988, 79).

  79. 79.

    Levi (1988, 59).

  80. 80.

    Butler (2016, 383).

  81. 81.

    Blanchot (1993, 132). I would like to thank Maria Anna Mariani for drawing my attention to the reasons why the “I” vanishes in the camps.

  82. 82.

    Butler (2016, 383).

  83. 83.

    Butler (2016, 386).

  84. 84.

    Phillips (1998, 48).

  85. 85.

    Phillips (1998, 47).

  86. 86.

    Phillips (1998, 45).

  87. 87.

    Phillips (2006, 23).

  88. 88.

    Phillips (2006, 31).

  89. 89.

    Phillips (2006, 61).

  90. 90.

    The American Colonization Society supported the “repatriation” of former slaves to Africa (even if most of them were born in the United States) as a way to remove free blacks and avoid slave rebellions.

  91. 91.

    Phillips (2006, 116).

  92. 92.

    Phillips (2006, 124).

  93. 93.

    Phillips (1995, 59).

  94. 94.

    Phillips (1995, 60).

  95. 95.

    Phillips (1995, 60).

  96. 96.

    Butler (2016, 386).

  97. 97.

    Butler (2016, 388).

  98. 98.

    Barnes (1990, 111).

  99. 99.

    Phillips (1995, 169).

  100. 100.

    Phillips (1995, 215).

  101. 101.

    Phillips (1995, 216).

  102. 102.

    Levinas (1969, 198).

  103. 103.

    Phillips (1998, 11).

  104. 104.

    Craps (2012, 158).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Lyon, France

    Vanessa Guignery

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  1. Vanessa Guignery
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Correspondence to Vanessa Guignery .

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  1. University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany

    Rudolf Freiburg

  2. University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany

    Gerd Bayer

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Guignery, V. (2021). “Survivors all”: Affirmative Connections in Novels by Julian Barnes and Caryl Phillips. In: Freiburg, R., Bayer, G. (eds) The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7_3

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