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

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 postmemor...

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Autor principal:	Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN
Publicado:	Institute of English Studies 2021
Materias:	australia richard flanagan pows trauma postmemory haiku affective remembering English language PE1-3729 English literature PR1-9680
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/d0cc3423a128416284d2c235ebf21898
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:d0cc3423a128416284d2c235ebf218982021-11-09T11:51:08ZThe He(A)rt of the Witness: Remembering Australian Prisoners of War in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North10.7311/0860-5734.30.3.080860-5734https://doaj.org/article/d0cc3423a128416284d2c235ebf218982021-09-01T00:00:00Zhttps://doaj.org/toc/0860-5734This 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.Rūta ŠlapkauskaitėInstitute of English Studiesarticleaustraliarichard flanaganpowstraumapostmemoryhaikuaffective rememberingEnglish languagePE1-3729English literaturePR1-9680ENAnglica. An International Journal of English Studies, Vol 30, Iss 3, Pp 141-161 (2021)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN
topic	australia richard flanagan pows trauma postmemory haiku affective remembering English language PE1-3729 English literature PR1-9680
spellingShingle	australia richard flanagan pows trauma postmemory haiku affective remembering English language PE1-3729 English literature PR1-9680 Rūta Šlapkauskaitė The He(A)rt of the Witness: Remembering Australian Prisoners of War in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North
description	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.
format	article
author	Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
author_facet	Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
author_sort	Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
title	The He(A)rt of the Witness: Remembering Australian Prisoners of War in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North
title_short	The He(A)rt of the Witness: Remembering Australian Prisoners of War in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North
title_full	The He(A)rt of the Witness: Remembering Australian Prisoners of War in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North
title_fullStr	The He(A)rt of the Witness: Remembering Australian Prisoners of War in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North
title_full_unstemmed	The He(A)rt of the Witness: Remembering Australian Prisoners of War in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North
title_sort	he(a)rt of the witness: remembering australian prisoners of war in richard flanagan’s the narrow road to the deep north
publisher	Institute of English Studies
publishDate	2021
url	https://doaj.org/article/d0cc3423a128416284d2c235ebf21898
work_keys_str_mv	AT rutaslapkauskaite theheartofthewitnessrememberingaustralianprisonersofwarinrichardflanagansthenarrowroadtothedeepnorth AT rutaslapkauskaite heartofthewitnessrememberingaustralianprisonersofwarinrichardflanagansthenarrowroadtothedeepnorth
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The He(A)rt of the Witness: Remembering Australian Prisoners of War in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North

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