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AnalysisSource: Modern children's literature. An introduction, edited by Kimberley Reynolds, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. .../... Memories in the present  It is to the aftermath of World War II and its implications for contemporary children that Belgian writer, Anne Provoost, turns in her challenging novel Falling (1995). Since I am discussing the English translation (by John Nieuwenhuizen, 1997), I will not attempt to consider the intricate details of narrative structure and language that might have altered in the process of translation. Rather, Provoost's broader treatment of the past and memory forms the basis of discussion. Falling is set in contemporary France, in the imaginary town of Montourin, and focuses on the experiences of Lucas Beigne during the summer after his grandfather's death. During the course of the novel, Lucas gradually becomes aware that a secret from his grandfather's past has long been kept from him and it is his uncovering of this secret that initiates his 'fall' from childhood innocence. Early in the novel, as he attempts to come to terms with the summer's tragic sequence of events, Lucas reflects: "Going back over it all, I can see that this was the moment everything started to go wrong--but of course that's easy to say with hindsight. At times, I lie on the bed with my face in the pillow. I scratch my head and want to reverse time, but it's impossible. I can no longer wake up innocent, as I was that morning. Only in my dreams can I believe that it was all a bad dream. (28)" As this extract indicates, Falling is in many ways an exercise in 'going back', of filtering the present, or at least recent events, through memory in the hope that a new perspective might change the outcome; change the present. As Lucas realises, this is impossible--what is possible is a new understanding of those events as they are absorbed and altered 'with hindsight'. A brief summary is necessary before discussing the text. Lucas and his mother spend the summer in his deceased grandfather's house in the hills of Mountourin. Lucas soon befriends Caitlin, an enigmatic young dancer, who is staying with her mother as the guest of Soeur Béate at the old convent next door. A series of burglaries blamed on immigrant Arabs working in the town, leads Lucas to Benoît, a charismatic extremist who involves Lucas in his racist schemes by repeated inferences about Lucas's grandfather's mysterious reputation. Meanwhile, obscure references are made to the fate of Jewish children once kept at the convent and it eventually transpires that Felix Stockx (Lucas' grandfather) betrayed them to the Nazis after the death of his own daughter through possible malnutrition. Caitlin's mother, it is also revealed, was one of the children who survived, while several of her friends died at Auschwitz. As his relationships with Caitlin and Benoît progress, Lucas becomes embroiled in a circle of divided loyalties and a cycle of guilt and blame. When Caitlin becomes trapped in a burning car he is forced to make a terrible choice which implicates him as the inheritor of his grandfather's actions. In order to free her, he decides to cut off her foot and Falling charts his attempts to come to terms with this decision through reference to the past, both recent and distant. As Lucas's retrospective narrative suggests, the chronology of Falling is not straightforward. It opens at the chronological end of the story, as Lucas waits for Caitlin to return home from hospital, where it seems that she has had her foot amputated. The reader can have no understanding of the implications of Caitlin's injury at this point in the novel and thus is immediately engaged in a process of anticipation and retrospective revisioning, mirroring Lucas's position in the text. In order to understand Lucas's connection to Caitlin, the reader must, like Lucas, return to 'the very beginning of it all…back in time…to last winter' (p.22). What soon becomes clear, however, is that Lucas's attempts to locate 'the beginning' of his story are futile, since events in the present are shaped by events from his grandfather's past and beyond. It is obvious, however, that Felix Stockx's death is the catalyst for an opening up of the past, giving Lucas a way in to the unknown events which influence people's perception of him. As Lucas tells Caitlin, "I'm discovering all sorts of things…now that my grandfather is dead, everybody is beginning to talk." (136) It is as if his Grandfather's death has catapulted Lucas into William Blake's world of experience (Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) depict a cruel adult world distanced from God's love as opposed to the world of innocence enabled by the child's proximity to God), whereas he previously enjoyed the innocence made possible by his mother's, indeed the whole town's silence. However, it was an uneasy and unnatural innocence, embalmed, as Lucas suggests, in a desire to suppress and thus not deal with the past: "My feet are tangled up in something, but I don't know what. This town feels as if it's preserved in formaldehyde." (96) It is almost as if Lucas himself becomes a lieu de mémoire (site of memory) as he becomes the focus for the blame or sympathy of the townsfolk. Krips adopts the notion of lieux de mémoire from Pierre Nora, explaining that, 'the sites of memory of which Nora writes, come into being because memory fails. They are the sites at which what remains of collective memory is constellated, where, in other words there is an intention to remember' (2000: 17). This concept usually refers to objects or memorials; artefacts that focus attention on a past moment. In Provoost's hands, however, Lucas becomes the object of admiration or disdain as people respond to a specific, and terrible, moment in their history. Their own culpability is thus distanced from them, and Lucas is left to struggle with this unasked for inheritance. This is not to say that Lucas is any longer innocent himself; his actions in the present may have a bearing on the past, but Provoost makes it clear that finally he must take responsibility and choose. As he struggles to free Caitlin from the car, Lucas recognises that: 'There was nobody to ask for advice…I felt infinitely alone and knew that, no matter what I did, that feeling would be with me for ever' (235). As Provoost herself has observed of Falling, however, 'more important than the question of who is guilty is the problem of inherited versus personal guilt, and the awareness that different kinds of guilt are there, also in other lives and in other situations' (Provoost, 2003). In Falling, the nature of guilt, both public and private, is intimately tied to the act of remembering and thus to the nature of human relationships formed in the present. The only way to deal with such terrible and complex memories is to translate them into the present and move forward; the nostalgia figured in so many representations of the British war experience is simply not an option when confronted with an almost unmanageable burden of public and private guilt (see also Chapter 5). Caitlin, it seems, is wrong when she states that the events at the convent are unrelated to Lucas and herself in the present: "it doesn't really upset me, all that. I mean it's a long time ago. It has nothing to do with us and our time." (137) Caitlin initially refuses to take part in the process of blame and justification engaged in by Soeur and Felix Stockx, welcoming Lucas as a friend. By the end of the book, however, she is unable to separate the Lucas before her from the boy who destroyed her future career as a dancer: "When I think of my foot I think of you…I want to do everything I can to remember you as my rescuer, not the person who mutilated me, That's not easy." (284). Caitlin comes to realise that the past does impact on the present and that children must come to terms with the past as handed down by adult authorities. Provoost suggests that children can certainly take possession of that past and move forward, but that the past defines them just as much as the present. In order to move into the future this truth must be accepted. Perhaps less comforting for Provoost's readers is that, finally, moving forward is not always possible, a message implied by Caitlin's loss of her leg and career. .../... |
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