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At the end of part one, the author goes "So far as to
argue, rephrasing Socrates, that unnarrated life is not worth
living". Socrates said, "unexamined." How does
narrative equal or come near examination?
Richard Kearney is
helpful in making us see the approaches to contemporary
criticism. "Every act of story telling involves someone (a
teller) telling something (a story) to someone (a listener)
about something (a real or imaginary world). Romantic idealists
and existentialists often overstress the intentional role of the
‘teller’; structuralists, the linguistic workings of the ‘story’
itself; postmodernists, the receptive role of the ‘reader’;
materialists and realists the referential role of the ‘world’.
"This
referral of the narrative text back to the life of the author
and forward to the life of the reader belies the structuralist
maxim that the text relates to nothing but itself. Which is not
to deny that life is linguistically mediated; only to say that
such mediation always points beyond itself and is not confined
to a self-regarding play of signifiers, the prisonhouse of
language."
Richard Kearney is
very perceptive about American identity. In 1620, a boatload of
pilgrims arrived at Cape Cod. Half of them were separatist
Puritans (‘Saints’). The other half were non-religious
adventurers called "troublemakers" or
"strangers". The Plymouth Brethren became a united
"us" because they were not "them" — the
primitive savages surrounding them. Within years, the skull of
the beheaded Metacom, the vanquished Indian leader, hung from
the fort of Plymouth, where it remained for two decades, his
wife and children sold into slavery in the West Indies.
Thanksgiving
remains the US national feast day, but few recall that the
Turkeys at the first celebration of the feast were provided by
local Indians who were exterminated or sold into slavery within
years. Over ten million Indian people inhabited America at the
time — scarcely a tenth of the figure (1.4 million) exist
today. The natives possessed over 75 per cent of US land upto
200 years ago and less than 2 per cent today. They spoke more
languages than were spoken in Europe then or now. They signed
over 371 legal treaties with the US government between 1778 and
1871, most of which were ignored or traduced.
Condemned as
misfits and monsters by the Established Church of England, the
Plymouth Brethren found new misfits and monsters in the New
World, whom they could in turn condemn. This phenomenon of
fantasising and demonsising the Indian and Negro can be called
‘Occidentalism’ as a counterpoint to Said’s Orientalism.
How it echoes today going back on ABM Treaty and demonising of
Saddam and Islam!
I am not sure if
only Holocaust is a central motif in Richard Kearney or
postmodernism. While on the one hand we have: "Auschwitz
has changed the basis for the continuity of the conditions of
life within history", on the other hand he can raise the
philosophical question of discerning when it is right to
remember and when it is right to forget, or how much we should
remember or forget. I don’t know if he is more philosophical
or less when he writes next: "Sometimes, some places,
Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Rwanda — it is important to let go
of history, to heed Nietzsche’s counsel to ‘actively forget’
the past ... to remember everything is a form of madness. Other
times, other places — Auschwitz being the time and place par
excellence — it is essential to remember the past in order to
honour our ‘debt to the dead’ and try to insure that it
never happens again" (page 69).
Why the
difference? An editorial cock-up or a matter of feeling?
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RICHARD
Kearney is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College and University
College, Dublin.
