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Memory into Forgetting and Vice Versa: The Creative Uses of the Mundane in Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13

Jean-Michel Ganteau
p. 115-124

Abstract

Cet article propose une lecture du quatrième roman de Jon McGregor, Reservoir 13, qui emmène le lecteur dans un univers bucolique où le processus d'oubli est saisi dans son instantanéité, au moment-même où les perceptions disparaissent. La démonstration se fonde largement sur les travaux de Freud, de Ricœur et des frères Tadié afin de cerner la puissance créative de l'oubli. Dans un premier temps, ce sont les modalités de l'émoussement de la perception qui sont mises en avant. Le second moment de la démonstration se fonde sur la mise en visibilité paradoxale ou indirecte de l'oubli, à travers la métalepse ou la dissemblance. L'article se clôt sur la catégorie de l'oubli de réserve, empruntée à Ricœur, qui garantit la fonction narrative.

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1Reservoir 13 is Jon McGregor's fourth novel. Coming after Even the Dogs (2011), which allowed for an immersion into the life of a community of dossers and drug addicts recounted by a choral, spectral narrator, the new novel dives into another type of community altogether. Its focus is the life of the inhabitants of a valley, both human and non-human (animal, vegetal), over a span of thirteen years, each of the thirteen chapters chronicling the existence of the community over a year. The novel starts with the mysterious disappearance of a girl, using some of the basic conventions of the detective narrative the better to abuse them and, instead, provide a highly poetical, repetitive evocation of the minutiae of everyday life. In so doing, it toys with boredom as it rehearses the minute events fleshing out the existence of the community, the recurring stages of the natural cycles and the religious and social rituals that have been holding the village together from time immemorial. Such a context naturally makes room for the spectral, that typical dramatisation of repetitiveness, as the missing girl will never leave the minds of the community of villagers and will keep haunting the bucolic landscape. Each chapter, on top of starting with the same words, in refrain-like fashion, metes out sightings of the girl, each one equally realistic and dreamlike:

[t]here were dreams about her appearing on television again, gazing at the camera as she was hurried from a car to a house in a London street, unable to talk about where she'd been. There were dreams about her crawling through the caves her clothes smeared with mud and tar in the dark. There were dreams about her held captive, in basements and isolated barns, always with something across her mouth or her eyes. There never seemed a way to stop it. (McGregor 2017, 107)

2In such passages, the relentless anaphora laps up the shores of the reader's attentiveness in the same way as the wavelets on the surface of the eponymous reservoir. It evokes the permanence of memories while spelling out the impossibility of oblivion. It also hints at the hypothesis of collective trauma, a situation in which the past cannot be remembered and hence keeps repeating itself in the present, as notoriously demonstrated by Freud (Freud 2001, 17). The spectral traces of an individual and collective trauma may be seen to send shivers through the narrative, and it would be tempting to provide a reading of the manifestations of forgetting—or the impossibility thereof—through the prism of trauma theory. Still, I consider this would be scientifically unsatisfying as trauma does not technically fall within the remit of memory or forgetting. We may remember that what characterises traumatic states is non-inscription, i.e. the fact that an event is so violent that it does not register as a mnesic trace would, which implies that the event leaves a hole in the psyche, hence cannot be remembered—or forgotten, for that matter. Technically speaking, trauma and memory or forgetting belong to strictly separated spheres. This is what Jacques Press pithily expresses, as he evokes the issue of non-inscription: "[l]e traumatisme négatif ne peut par définition s'inscrire au sens de la trace mnésique. La non-inscription, de par la brûlure que provoque le défaut de représentation qui lui est lié, exerce un effet d'aspiration sur le reste du psychisme de l'individu" (Press 74). Such a "hoovering effect" is what brings about the repetition compulsion that, in narrative terms, finds its expression through anaphoric, rhyming structures. Symptom-like, they saturate the text the better to signal that not only time is disjointed but also that there is something wrong or rotten with memory or forgetting. This poetics, obviously evinced by the narrative as a whole, is intrinsically compatible with the evocation of trauma, and admittedly McGregor's novel may be envisaged from this angle, as I have explained elsewhere (Ganteau 2018). Admittedly, the poetics of trauma and that of forgetting share a lot of formal, rhythmic characteristics. Still, in the following pages, I shall set aside the traumatic dimension to address the issue of forgetting as creative labour through the categories of blurring, negative or indirect visibility and reserve/ressource.

3Some critics, Paul Ricœur among them, remind us that there may be such a thing as an ars oblivionis in the same way as there is an ars memoriae. He evokes the creative powers of forgetting, showing its collaboration with remembering and insisting that forgetting cannot be counted as dysfunctional (Ricœur 553). He even goes so far as saying that forgetting is the condition of memory (Ricœur 553). Interestingly, Reservoir 13 seems to contribute to such an ars oblivionis by privileging a singular poetics that mimics the workings of effacement inherent in the process. In their influential, interdisciplinary study Le Sens de la mémoire, Jean-Yves and Marc Tadié hold that all memory is necessarily defective: "[t]out souvenir est entaché d'imprécision, d'effacement, de lacune, c'est-à-dire de formes d'oubli" (Tadié 201). Such effacing relies on various parameters like a lesser acuity, a blurring of intensity, a blunting of feelings (Tadié 201–3). When it comes to apprehending a poetics of forgetting, the challenge is to render the way in which an absence or a deletion—a nothing—may be evoked in a narrative, which by definition relies on words and the medium of the printed page. McGregor sets about meeting the challenge, working stroke by mundane stroke, multiplying details and minute notations. The novel privileges the juxtaposition of vignettes mixing up the vegetal, the animal and the human, the cultural and the purely natural. In a myriad fragments of the everyday, they painstakingly record insignificant details:

[t]he clocks went forward and the evenings opened up and the days stood a little straighter on their feet. The catkins came out on the willows by the river and swung wildly in the wind. The allotment sycamores dropped a branch on the old Tucker place and took off a dozen slates. The rain got in and soon afterwards a For Sale sign went up. In her back garden Su Cooper drank a coffee while the boys kicked a ball. (McGregor 138)

4The fictional paradox based on the principle of multiplying textual matter the better to evoke the effacing and blunting processes of forgetting is obviously at work in these lines. By saturating the narrative with similar descriptions (and a high proportion of it is made up of descriptive passages), the novel imitates the way in which one memory chases after another and contributes to the extenuation of sensation. In other words, there are limits to attentiveness and retention, and the multiplication of glimpses of the mundane is a particularly efficient means of not only mimicking the way in which ordinary oblivion—that Siamese twin of ordinary memory—works, but also of making the reader experience it.

5By multiplying very acute perceptions the better to indirectly figure out the blunting of memories, McGregor lends immaterial substance to an imperceptible, permanent process, whose discretion escapes consciousness and ordinary recording. This implies a great deal of aesthetic and pragmatic risk-taking as few readers might see much interest in such a chronicle of the ordinary. Of course, McGregor might be said to tread in Virginia Woolf's footsteps when, in "Modern Fiction", she invited the reader to "look at an ordinary mind on an ordinary day" (Woolf). Still, even if McGregor's atomist technique may be considered to owe much to that of his modernist predecessor, what makes Reservoir 13 such a singular piece of work is the fact that its perceptual centre is rarely to be encountered anywhere. What I mean here is that most of the time observations (turning into memories while immediately blurring into forgetting) cannot be located within one single centre of consciousness or attributed to any single human, animal or, possibly, vegetal perspective. In other terms, the forgetting process is objectivised and made independent of its traditional seat in the literary tradition, i.e. the human mind—a practice of impersonality that was not privileged by modernist predecessors. It is not the least of the novel's feats that tiny, intimate perceptions should extend on a collective, communal scale, as if forgetting assumed a ubiquitous dimension and were inescapable in its panoramic function. The perceptual landscape that the novel drafts out becomes a pretext for the evocation of ordinary forgetting, making it vast enough for the reader to distinguish its scope and effects, training the reader's perception of the hardly perceptible.

6Another way to draw attention to the labours of forgetting is to measure up the effect of time in relation to the founding event in the narrative, i.e. the girl's disappearance. As suggested in the introduction, the incident never completely fades from the villagers' memories, and neither is it completely effaced from what appears as the collective memory of the valley (animal and vegetable worlds included). The spectral returns of the lost girl haunt the story and recur in each single chapter, under the guise of oneiric apparitions and more naturalised yet spectral sightings. The repetition compulsion that seizes hold of the narrative as a whole dramatises the acting out of the past in the present, a symptom that falls outside the province of forgetting and memory, as we have already seen, but which in poetic terms solicits the reader's recollection through the means of structural rhymes. Still, this reactivation, which seems to nudge towards the impossibility of forgetting, is pitted against contrasting episodes. In Chapter Eleven, more than ten years after the girl's disappearance, a parody of the missing one is put up when, on Mischief Night, a girl dresses up in the same way as Rebecca Shaw on the day when she went missing: "[o]n Mischief Night a girl from another village dressed up in a white hooded top with a navy-blue body-warmer, and black jeans, and canvas shoes, and zombie make-up. She was driven back to her parents and words were had" (McGregor 2017, 280). Of course, the adults' reaction is a reminder that the episode is very much present in the older generation's minds, but what it correlatively reveals is the loss of acuity and intensity of the feelings associated with the memory for the younger people—one of the first effects of forgetting, as indicated by the Tadié brothers. In such passages, what can be measured up in a very concrete way is the passing of time, the blunting power of habit, and the ensuing work of oblivion that cannot be considered independently of memory, the latter being the product of the former, as indicated by Augé: "[l]'oubli, en somme, est la force vive de la mémoire et le souvenir en est le produit" (Augé 30). Remembering is here compounded of forgetting, and vice versa, and I would claim that the narrative's interest lies in its contribution to an ars oblivionis that imitates the effects of forgetting in its more ordinary, imperceptible way, making tangible what generally escapes consciousness, let alone attention, revealing a silence or an absence. In other words, the novel engages with training the reader's perception and showing that perception is not a given but a capacity to be developed so as to renew norms of perception and visibility (le Blanc 13).

7One of the most practical ways of evoking absence is through the means of metalepsis in its original meaning, a figure that evokes an object indirectly, either through its causes or consequences. In the case of the ars oblivionis, what is particularly at stake is the way in which the narrative metaleptically calls up an inaccessible event (forgetting) through the means of its effects. In Georges Didi-Huberman's terms, this is done through the means of a mimesis of effect as opposed to the more traditional mimesis of aspect (Didi-Huberman 140; see also Ganteau 2012). Said differently, and I would suggest that this is one of the characteristics that the poetics of trauma shares with that of the ars oblivionis, the lacuna or hole can only be apprehended negatively, or at least indirectly, through its periphery. Clearly, the poiesis of forgetting can only be envisaged as mimesis of nothing. This may be attained in various ways certainly, but more specifically perhaps through the staging or narrative reproduction of symptoms. Such a borrowing from the vocabulary of pathology points in the direction of medicine or neurology, and more particularly hails from psychoanalysis. Freud notoriously commented on the function of the symptom (a presence that manifests itself) to evoke a forgetting (an absence), not really in terms of acute pathology but more pointedly in the context of ordinary life. All the mistakes, lapses, resistances, repetitions, screen memories that he tracked down in his researches point in the same direction, i.e. that the symptom is the sign of a forgetting. This is what he asserts in one of his essays on hysteria and reminiscences: "[l]à où il y a un symptôme, il y a aussi une amnésie, un vide, une lacune dans le souvenir, et, si l'on réussit à combler cette lacune, on supprime par là-même le symptôme" (Freud 1967, chapter I).

8This provides a wealth of possibilities for the poetic evocation of forgetting, as Reservoir 13 borrows from the stock in trade of symptomatic forgetting. Admittedly, the main figure is that of repetition in the shape of structural rhyming. I have already evoked this point in relation with the haunting presence of the missing girl, the references to her apparitions pointing at the impossibility to forget her, even while showcasing and performing the blunting of memories. Still, the text is rife with repetitions referring to no event in particular. For instance, each chapter begins with a variation on the same sentence: "[a]t midnight when the year turned there were fireworks going up all across the village but from the hill they looked faint and the sound failed to carry" (McGregor 2017, 135). In each chapter, the same landmarks in the Christian calendar are gone through, in the same way as the same stages in the cycle of seasons are envisaged. Such rehearsals seem to have a specific purpose in that they measure up the passing of time, one of the basic conditions of oblivion. Still, the text teems with references of another type: visions of the same flowers in the same state of budding, glimpses at such or such an element of animal life, with specific focus on the badgers and foxes, and a special attentiveness to the buzzards: "[i]n the band of conifers above Reservoir no. 5 a pair of buzzards rebuilt their nest from the previous year, weaving in new sticks and lining the shallow bowl of it with fresh bracken and grass" (McGregor 2017, 89). Such vignettes, focusing on the same subjects, recur in almost all chapters. Clearly, their function is to buttress the realism on which the narrative is built by contributing to the illusion of exhaustiveness, hence the solidity of specification dear to structuralist critics. Still, one should consider that they occur in a novel that toys with experimentation or, better said, that provides a type of subdued, discreet yet implacable experimentation striking at the roots of traditional narrative, dynamiting the pillars of character and plot and subtly refashioning another type of text. One of the means to re-fashion the novel is by resorting to the massive repetition of seemingly useless, mundane details, creating a densely poetical prose that makes rehearsal its main ambition.

9I would not claim that all repetitive narratives are designed to imitate the symptoms of oblivion and, through the experience of repetition, to share them with the reader. That would be too far-fetched a point. Yet, in the context of a novel that sets great store by a poetics of forgetting, as I tried to show in the first part of this article, I would argue that such an apparently gratuitous, systematic repetitiveness is meant to indicate that something in the world of the novel is amiss, that the excess of textual matter is negatively used to refer to a lacuna, and ultimately that the repetitions are symptoms pointing in the direction of forgetting. My hypothesis is that the narrative is wrought by the labour/work of forgetting in relation with the repetition compulsion, as indicated by Ricœur, following in Freud's wake: "l'oubli est lui-même appelé un travail dans la mesure où il est l'œuvre de la compulsion de répétition" (Ricœur 576), an image—"travail de l'oubli"—equally used by Augé (Augé 20). Like mourning, forgetting can be considered as labour and, possibly, the whole of the novel, with its bucolic context, could be seen as a new type of elegy, both anti-elegy, in its melancholic rehearsal and spectral return of the missing girl, and real elegy, as throughout the years (and outside any single consciousness) forgetting sets in its soothing, healing collaboration with mourning. This intuition is confirmed by Ricœur when he indicates that the work of memory, entrammelled as it is with that of forgetting, goes along with the labour of mourning that it is the condition of (Ricœur 577).

10Forgetting is ubiquitous, as suggested in the poetics of the ars obliovionis, and such a textual apparatus is paradoxically justified in expressing a fundamental truth voiced by psychoanalysis, i.e. that forgetting is impossible. Indeed, we learn from Freud's analyses that even when an element/item seems to be lost, when a blank comes instead of a word, or when a term is substituted by another one, this does not mean that the memory is lost but that, for sundry reasons, it is merely inaccessible. I have alluded to this process above, when insisting on the saturation of details, making for a textual opaqueness that is part and parcel of the narrative's experimental agenda. In the wake of such considerations, I would like to suggest now that the novel provides and performs a testimony to what becomes blurred and less accessible without ever being completely inaccessible or effaced. Such a hypothesis has been aired by specialists of the subject in the fields of medicine or literature. Among them prominently comes Freud, who spoke of an "unconscious memory" (Freud 1967, chapter VI). But we should not forget the Tadié brothers, who insist that nothing ever gets lost, that memories are "indelible", and that they only need to be "activated" (Tadié 212). This they put in a very pithy phrase when, in Augustine's wake, they aver that there is such a thing as a memory of forgetting or "souvenir de l'oubli" (Tadié 210), meaning that memories, as faint and inactivated as they may look, can always be retrieved. This is precisely what I feel to be at stake in Reservoir 13, with its poetics of saturation and the wealth of textual matter making the reader share in/experience the process of memory blurring, superposition and storage, thereby bearing witness to the manufacture of oblivion through the multiplication of innumerable, minute recollections.

11The welter of tiny remembrances being processed from the first line to the last may be considered a textual presentation and performance of what Ricœur has called reserve forgetting ("oubli de réserve") that corresponds to some state of latency of memories (Ricœur 539, 542). This he opposes to another more radical type of oblivion that he considers to be based on the effacing of traces (Ricœur 539, 542). What the novel dramatises in its own subtle way is this paradoxical process of showing what becomes latent at the very instant of its processing. In other words, the narrative keeps capturing the moment when perception is treated and stored as puny memory teetering on the brink of extinction or, rather, imperceptibility. Instead of considering forgetting negatively, Ricœur goes on to suggest that it has a creative function, which he describes as "survivance", i.e. a permanence "that we do not perceive, that we do not presuppose and that we believe in" (Ricœur 564). Once again, Reservoir 13 plays on paradox: the paradox of an extremum of matter solicited the better to catch an evanescent survivance that is the gist of forgetting. One step further, the French philosopher argues that forgetting is a "life force", "the creative force of stories" (Ricœur 571), their origin or "Ursprung" (Ricœur 571). Seen in this light, oblivion becomes the condition of life and thought. For the Tadié brothers, it has a liberating function: "il affranchit de l'ordre chronologique strict et permet l'émergence de la pensée" (Tadié 217). In other terms, not only is forgetting the condition for the existence of memory, as seen above (Ricœur 553), but also of the capacity to create and to tell stories. From this point of view, I would claim that the novel, without ever allowing the reader to get a generalising, abstract perspective, and by both representing the welter and performing the density of processed perception and sensation, provides an experiential approach to forgetting in its intimate relation with memory. Without really telling one story, on which a core plot would rely, and by choosing the horizontal, democratic multiplication of equal or equivalent vignettes, it refuses to let the reader take any height, maintains him/her most of the time in a humble position, close to the ground and to the singularity of phenomena and situations, in close contact with the making of both memory and forgetting. And such is the flux of impressions to which the reader is submitted that s/he is never allowed to discriminate clearly between what comes first, memory or forgetting, or to distinguish which is the condition of the other. Or, more precisely, s/he is led to observe that each one is a condition of the other that makes forgetting and memory strictly interdependent, each one needing the impetus of the other, each one providing an image of vulnerability.

12Ultimately, Reservoir 13 unveils, almost literally, another apprehension of subjectivity. This it does through its insisting reliance on the perceptual and the experiential by performing a phenomenology of the processing of memory into forgetting and—more importantly—vice versa. Seen in this light, oblivion becomes a component of the subject and of subjectivity as much as memories (Tadié 216), and such an idea proves relevant when considering the contemporary subject as certainly not sovereign and independent but humble and inherently vulnerable; not in charge of much, but accountable for a lot. This is predicated on an experimental poetics that foregrounds the density of perception to paradoxically and tentatively capture an evanescence. In so doing, the narrative trades in precariousness by paying sustained, faithful attention to the processing of forgetting. And by creating poetic density through the multiplication of tiny, insubstantial strokes, Reservoir 13 calls for a practice of attention and, more particularly, consideration, in so far as consideration implies an attentiveness to singularities, without which the subject (and reader here) is condemned to sideration (Pelluchon 32). With such an unclassifiable novel, McGregor takes the reader away from him-/herself and gets him/her to open up to alterity, to become dispossessed and engage with the other. This is done by relying on perception and starting from the body as the seat of sensation, that most democratic of relational objects. The narrative favours incarnation as the condition for community and relationality, and as dependent on the humble perspective of that which is close to the ground and does not assume superiority (Pelluchon 33). Once again, by metaleptically performing incarnation, the novel promotes the de-pathologisation of vulnerability and, here, of forgetting. A far cry from the condemnation of amnesia, it favours forgetting as creative force through the practice of an ars oblivionis made up of attention, hence ethical democratic exposure to the humble.

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Bibliography

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References

Bibliographical reference

Jean-Michel Ganteau, Memory into Forgetting and Vice Versa: The Creative Uses of the Mundane in Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13Caliban, 60 | 2018, 115-124.

Electronic reference

Jean-Michel Ganteau, Memory into Forgetting and Vice Versa: The Creative Uses of the Mundane in Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13Caliban [Online], 60 | 2018, Online since 01 December 2018, connection on 16 April 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/4390; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.4390

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About the author

Jean-Michel Ganteau

University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, EMMA EA 741

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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