- 1 See, for instance, the 2014 issue of the Revue de psychanalyse française on “Transmissions”, as wel (...)
- 2 The fact that all profits go to the housing and homelessness charity Shelter points to yet another (...)
1The etymology of transmission, from the Latin trans (beyond) and mittere (to send), evokes ideas of crossing, passage, circulation and communication, which reverberate in a variety of domains, including science, technology, biology, law, psychoanalysis1 as well as social and cultural practices. The prefix trans- implies a relation to the other as a message, object or thought circulates from an originator to a recipient, who, in literature and arts, may be writer and reader, playwright and audience, visual artist and viewer, musician or singer and listener. Transmissions/Volume One (2021), released by the Edinburgh-based arts collective Blackford Hill and curated by Simon Lewin and Tommy Perman, combines several modalities of transmission through its 31 musical tracks in a variety of genres, print work by Peter Green and essays by The Wire’s Julian Cowley.2
2From an intergenerational perspective, processes of transmission raise questions of legacy, heritage and inheritance. Parents may transmit a name, a culture and a history to their descendants, bequeath money, property and objects that act as a continued bond within one’s family, reinforcing a sense of identity and community. Family trees give a concrete form to such a genealogical transmission but may also reveal gaps and ruptures. In addition, heirs are not doomed to passively accept the familial legacy and can select what they will retain and reject from their material, cultural, linguistic and intellectual inheritance (Jongy and Keilhauer 13–14). Sometimes, what is passed on provokes perplexity and confusion as in E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) when Ruth Wilcox decides that Margaret Schlegel should inherit her house, or in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011) where the bequest by an ex-girlfriend’s mother of five hundred pounds and a friend’s cryptic diary baffles the narrator who fails to understand what exactly is being transmitted to him. This last example highlights that transmission requires an active intervention on the part of the recipient and that information or knowledge is not unequivocally and automatically passed along. In Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (2011), Tim Ingold critiques the metaphor of transmission based on the vertical genealogical model as he argues that ‘people do not acquire their knowledge ready-made’ simply because it has been bestowed by ancestors, ‘but rather grow into it’ (162), by ‘going around in an environment’ (160). He compares the process to that of ‘following trails through a landscape: each story will take you so far, until you come across another that will take you further’ (162). He gives the name ‘wayfaring’ (162) to this horizontal trail-following through which knowledge is perpetuated, appropriated and renewed.
3Notions of heritage also apply to literary and artistic domains where the concept of transmission evokes filiations, intertextual practices and continuing forms of dialogue with the past. Walter Benjamin notes that ‘[e]xperience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn’ (84), and this oral transmission can then transform into written or visual forms. However, to quote Ingold again, ‘stories do not, as a rule, come with their meanings already attached’ and listeners or readers will need to discover for themselves what they mean, ‘by placing them in the context of their own life histories’ (162). For Béatrice Jongy and Annette Keilhauer who analyse what is at stake in autobiographical practices, transmission is ‘a primary impulse of the writing gesture’ (14), which can perform pedagogical, didactic and corrective functions. As death approaches, individuals may feel the need to write or tell their story, leave a mark, reveal secrets, make confessions. A few months before his death in 2004, Jacques Derrida talked of this desire to leave traces behind in an interview with Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: ‘there is just below the surface a testamentary desire, a desire that something survive, get left behind or passed on—an inheritance or something that I myself can lay no claim to, that will not return to me, but that will, perhaps, remain’ (in Naas 113).
4Poetry, drama, novels, short stories, films, paintings, sculptures, installations and performances all involve the transmission of meaning, emotions, plots which circulate through place, time and languages—the practice of translation being yet another form of transmission. Ancient stories, past models and traditions transfer into the present, going through processes of appropriation, transformation, reconfiguration or adaptation. Transmission is thus a conduit through which to preserve stories, cultures and memories (passed on from one generation to the next), transfer knowledge and craft (from teacher to pupil, master to apprentice) and hand down valuable objects (within families or communities), but one needs to bear in mind that what is transmitted does not remain fixed and unchanged as it follows ‘paths of movement’ (Ingold 143).
5From a less auspicious perspective, transmission may imperil and have close affinities with contagion and contamination, in particular when it involves infectious diseases or viruses, be they biological or technological. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) paved the way for speculative fiction and countless dystopian narratives featuring epidemics, pandemics and plagues which put humanity at risk and reveal our vulnerability and fragility. The COVID-19 pandemic sent readers back to Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947) and to terrifying books (and films) about contagion which Jon Day labelled ‘epidemi-lit’. In the digital age, computer viruses can likewise destroy entire systems, as shown in Hari Kunzru’s aptly named novel Transmission (2004). Dissemination and propagation also apply to rumours, fake news and conspiracy theories that uncontrollably spread through internet networks in the contemporary world. According to French sociologist Dominique Boullier in his book Propagations (2023), we have entered the age of propagations because of the exponential development of digital technology (11).
6If the transmission of memories and histories down generations guarantees that they are not forgotten, the question of who has the right or the ability to hand them down and therefore whose voice and whose perspective pass through is crucial. Fictional works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have attempted to provide alternative versions of History so that the discordant and dissenting voices of the subaltern, of victims and minorities may also be heard. The past is thereby retrieved and reclaimed in its diversity rather than as a monological and hegemonic Ur-text. Voicing these narratives is particularly essential when dealing with traumatic experiences from the past if one wants to prevent ‘the continued repetition of the original trauma across the generations’ (Fewell 82). Indeed, as noted by Judith Fewell who draws from Gabrielle Schwab’s book Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (2010), ‘that which cannot be acknowledged in a family, spoken of, or mourned, is disavowed and unconsciously transmitted to the next generation’ who is ‘haunted by the unspoken, the unacknowledged, the denied, the unremembered’ (Fewell 82).
7In The Power of Witnessing (2012), Nancy R. Goodman and Marilyn B. Meyers refer to the ‘need to memorialize tragic events and their victims, and the responsibility to transmit knowledge of them to future generations so that they will not be forgotten’ (114). Museums, archives, memoirs and memorials all participate in this process of intergenerational transmission. Marianne Hirsch famously coined the concept of postmemory to identify ‘an intersubjective transgenerational space of remembrance, linked specifically to cultural or collective trauma’ (in Hirsch and Kacandes 14). The questions Hirsch and other theoreticians of trauma studies and memory studies raise are ones that writers and artists struggle with, such as ‘How is trauma transmitted across generations . . .? How is it remembered by those who did not live it or know it in their own bodies?’ (Hirsch 11)—to which one may add: how can an event that has not been directly experienced be transmitted in a work of fiction or in visual art? For Hirsch, post-generations can be witnesses to the past through a persistent practice of inquiry, attention and imaginative engagement.
8However, the distance that separates our present from past history can complicate transmission networks. As Lucy Bond, Stef Craps and Pieter Vermeulen point out in Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (2017), ‘as the Holocaust begins to pass out living memory, the question of how memories of survivors of historical traumas are transmitted to, and inherited by, members of later generations has become another area of intense inquiry’ (2). In their creative works, writers and artists sometimes point to what is lost in transmission when the temporal distance from original events becomes incommensurable and memories fade, when facts are deliberately erased or hidden (by an individual, a family or a country), when communication is made impossible (due to migration and geographical distance, political censorship or technological issues) or when painful experiences prove unspeakable and thus remain unsaid and unshared. In her essay ‘Back to My Own Country’ (2014), Andrea Levy, born in England to Jamaican parents who came to Britain in 1948, reflects on her lack of knowledge of her family’s history—‘Those silences about where we had come from. The shame. The denial.’ (11)—and on how her trip to Jamaica changed her perspective: ‘I realised for the first time that I had a background and an ancestry that was fascinating and worth exploring’ (11). Literature and arts can play an ethical role by drawing attention to those gaps, silences and broken circuits, and by creating new circuits of transmission, for example through what Irene Kacandes calls ‘transhistorical-transcultural co-witnessing’ when readers or audiences from different societies or living at a later time in history are willing to engage with an unknown person’s story (202–203).
9Aware of the existence of obstacles to communication and circulation, writers and artists may choose modes of transmission which are not verbal or testimonial but involve performance, images, objects, music or other media. For instance, photographer Ian Beesley has documented the social and industrial history of the North of England and especially the demolition of textile mills, the closure of heavy industries and slum clearances through his black and white photographs of working people. He notes in an interview that his images ‘are regarded as historical records and often viewed with nostalgia by ex-workers’ while they give ‘some of the younger generations . . . an understanding of what their grandparents had done in their working lives’ (Caignet 220, 223). Other examples are Paul Gilroy’s book Black Britain, a Photographic History (2007) or the Staying Power project conducted by the Black Cultural Archives and the Victoria and Albert Museum to acquire photographs and oral recordings of the ‘Black British experience’ in Britain between 1950 and 1990 (Chambefort-Kay). Both realisations give visibility to the contribution of Black Britons to British culture and society, and are endowed with a historiographic and pedagogical dimension.
10Literature also bears witness to the role of photographs as vehicles of memory and transmitters of past experiences. In Jonathan Coe’s The Rain Before it Falls (2007), an elderly woman on the verge of dying takes a tape recorder and describes to a blind girl she has not seen for two decades twenty photographs that relate to her family’s history, hoping thereby to pass on a legacy to the estranged girl. It is also by browsing through family albums in Jamaica that Faith Jackson, the protagonist of Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon (1999), comes to know the stories of her relatives which her parents had never told her about. Photographs, material objects and memorabilia may thus act as what Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer call ‘points of memory’ while foregrounding ‘the fragmentariness of the vestiges of the past that come down to us’ (141).
11The contributors to this issue address a variety of questions relating to the notion of transmission of which only a few have been introduced above. Bearing in mind what Linda Hutcheon famously called historiographic metafiction, some of them study contemporary novels which raise doubts about the reliability of memory and historical documents, and their ability to pass on accurate knowledge about the past to future generations. In Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987), Henri, a young boy who enlisted in Napoleon’s army, remarks: ‘I knew how old men blurred and lied making the past always the best because it was gone’ (28), while in Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983), the narrator admits that he must ‘reconcile [him]self to the inevitability of the missing bits’ (69) and that ‘[m]utant versions of the past struggle for dominance’ (124). The first section of this issue includes papers that explore various modes of access to the past, acknowledging potential distortions and elisions, but also offering alternative strategies of remembrance.
12Isabelle Roblin examines how History or family stories relating to the two world wars and the Iraq war are deliberately or unwittingly falsified in Graham Swift’s Shuttlecock (1981) and Wish You Were Here (2011). In the latter, the story of the heroism of George Luxton in World War I, which is annually commemorated, may have been a fabrication while Major Richards lied about the circumstances of Tom’s death in the Iraq war. However, the omniscient narrator helps rectify the faulty version of past events whereas in Shuttlecock the reader is kept in the dark as to what really happened. A liaison officer’s memoirs about his exploits during World War II are marked by gaps, inconsistencies and contradictions but when his son is offered the possibility to know the truth, he chooses to destroy the evidence by burning a crucial secret file, while the reliability of his own narrative is put into question.
13Solène Camus’s analysis of Martin Amis’s 2014 novel The Zone of Interest extends the reflections of specialists of Holocaust and trauma studies on the means of transmission of knowledge about the Shoah and the ethical questions they raise. While memoirs, testimonies and historical documents are expected to relate authentic events and experiences, fiction can experiment with imaginative strategies to try and capture the horror of the camps. Camus argues that the aesthetic and narrative choices made by Amis in his novel—offering the perspective of the perpetrators, relying on shock, disgust, obscenity and humour—allow something of the traumatic past to pass through as the reader engages with the text, their attention captured.
14Héloïse Lecomte explores the transformative functions of transmission in Salena Godden’s debut novel Mrs Death Misses Death (2021) as the author rewrites and renews the allegory of Death, changed from featureless male Grim Reaper to embodied black woman. Mrs Death shares with a young ghost-writer who is encouraged to write her memoirs a great number of horrifying death tales, both past and present, thereby granting anonymous victims, particularly women, visibility, audibility and ‘a space of remembrance’. The unbroken chain of transmission from storyteller to listener to reader ensures that the dead, human and non-human, are grieved and not forgotten, and that a community of mourning can emerge.
15Maxime Petit examines the short stories collected in E.M. Forster’s The Life to Come and Other Stories (1972) and investigates how the themes of transmission and homosexuality intersect in these texts. He studies in particular the fear of contamination which pervades these stories (linked to corrupting influences or sexual deviance) as well as the renunciation of the system of inheritance law as self-definition and a reliance on spiritual heirs and alternative genealogies replace conventional transmission via progeny and wills. Petit argues that although they were published posthumously, Forster’s gay-themed short stories testify to his desire to pass on the memory of the criminalisation of homosexuality.
16The second section of this issue addresses literary transmissions in order to explore modes of filiations that allow for transformations and adaptations. Lise Lefebvre and Constance Pompié thus examine how ancient forms are being re-invested in contemporary British literature, more specifically that of the romance by Peter Ackroyd and the pastoral mode in Sarah Hall’s Haweswater (2002). Lise Lefebvre analyses the circularity and circulation of texts in Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987), English Music (1992) and The House of Doctor Dee (1993), which resonate with works from the British literary canon and literary ghosts from the past that return to haunt the present, and explore the inheritance and circularity of trauma when an event in the present reactivates past wounds. Constance Pompié points to the longevity of the pastoral which finds its origins in the Idylls of the Greek poet Theocritus (third century BC) and went through a series of necessary transformations to still persist in the twenty-first century where it bears witness to the environmental crisis. In Haweswater, both an anti-pastoral and a post-pastoral, Sarah Hall adapts pastoral conventions to the contemporary context and subverts the idealised vision of the countryside as a space of retreat to expose environmental concerns and question our responsibilities as human beings.
17Armelle Parey considers Laura Wade’s 2018 stage adaptation of The Watsons, an uncompleted novella written by Jane Austen in 1805, to explore the aesthetic and ethical questions raised by the adaptation of unfinished and less well-known texts. While the canonical peripherality of The Watsons gives the playwright more freedom in her adaptation, Wade opts for postmodern self-reflexivity, breaking the theatrical illusion to write her own persona into the text, who reflects on the very process of adapting and continuing unfinished texts, insists on the authenticity of her version of Austen’s text but sees the characters of her play reject her authority.
18The last section examines different ways of reaching out to the other, either by passing on knowledge in a spirit of reciprocity with readers or by attempting to grasp an experience one is unfamiliar with. In the only paper not concerned with fiction in this issue, Clémence Laburthe-Tolra scrutinises Vita Sackville-West’s sharing of her botanical knowledge, craft and gardening philosophy in her weekly horticultural columns published in the Observer between 1946 and 1961, and marked by a conversational tone. Sackville-West favoured practicality, accessibility, humility, generosity and creativity, and aimed to establish a reciprocal relation with her readers (garden lovers and amateurs like her rather than experts), regardless of their social class and gender. Transmission is far from being one-sided since knowledge, as well as seeds and plants, circulate among a community of garden lovers.
19Following British writer Jessie Greengrass’s question ‘Why does literature ignore pregnancy?’, Maxence Gouleau acknowledges the obstacles to the literary transmission of pregnancy and maternity, topics which are often envisaged from a male point of view and depicted as a source of anxiety for men. She notes that in Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and Andrew Cowan’s Common Ground (1996), the male characters—teachers and storytellers who pass on historical knowledge and personal stories—metaphorically imitate and thus appropriate their partners’ experiences of pregnancy and maternity. However, she also argues that the two novels provide alternatives to the paradigm of male anxiety through the use of sarcasm and irony, and by attempting to signify what cannot be signified.
20This issue of Études britanniques contemporaines thus bears witness to the many different paths and trails that can be taken for various forms of transmission to occur but also to potential obstructions to the circulation of knowledge, experience, skills, property or language, and to the modalities developed to try and circumvent them. The papers highlight the epistemological but also ethical dimensions of the act of transmission, which requires processes of sharing and caring.