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How does one of the novels studied reflect on the differences between history and Story-Telling?

In this essay, the question asks how the difference between history and storytelling is presented in one of the texts studied on the course. In this particular essay the novel chosen is Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs.

 McEwan is a well-known author, renowned for his use of macabre imagery, and disturbing adult themes. In his novel Black Dogs, there is a complex number of themes included in the narrative, including social, political and ideological tensions. A common trope in his novels is that the narrator has something to do with literature, whether it is writing, researching or reviewing literature. In his novel Black Dogs, the protagonist attempts to write a book of his mother in law’s story, which takes place just before WW2.

The main threads of this story take place in Vichy, France. Historically, this was a particular town that was ruled by the Nazis until they were liberated in 1945. Until then it had been used as a proxy for the Nazi government.

The frame of the story the protagonist is narrating is set in the 80s, when both the war and the occupation have ended, and just the shadows of these things remain.

However, the way we receive this story is through the two digressional characters narrating their conflicting experiences to their shared son-in-law. This shows that history is not neccesarily one collection of events, but a mix of perceptions of those events. (e.g. June’s experience with the Black Dogs would not be the same as the men and women who they were trained to rip apart).

One piece of imagery McEwan uses to affect the reader is the Churchillian image of the Black Dog. Neither Jeremy nor Bernard ever experience the Black Dogs for themselves. This creates two issues – one of the unreliable narrator, and one of constant hearsay. Jeremy states the problem of an unreliable narrator outright when June starts telling him the story again; “I swear she adds another dog every time she tells that story”. This also shows the obsession humanity has with sensationalism, and is an issue throughout the novel with every story that the reader is shown.

 However, the stories we receive from other characters such as the mayor’s

somehow makes the encounter seem more real

 “She had been raped by the Gestapo, excuse me Madame” and she placed her hand on June’s

“That’s what we all thought” the Maire said.  “That’s not what we discovered later…Pierre and Henri Sauvy…They saw it happen…but they tied Danielle Bertrand over a chair…It wasn’t the Gestapo who raped her. They used…The simple truth is, these animals can be trained.”

 Even though we are shown several instances where they attack humans, we have no evidence that the ones who attacked June were the same who attacked Danielle, or that they existed at all. However, when Madam Auriac goes on to deny that this could have happened, it seems very desperate, and somehow her disgusted reaction gives the story more weight. This makes it seem as though she knows it is true, but simply doesn’t want to believe it.

The reason Madam Auriac gives for the two drunks making up the story is that Danielle was a wealthy woman whom they were jealous of. However, with the testimony of June’s experience it seems a desperate qualifier to the original theory.

 Like many holocaust deniers, she refuses to believe the awful story about her friend, simply because it was too horrific to accept. Many Nazi collaborators had a similar reaction when being shown the atrocities inflicted upon their friends and neighbors. Many deniers claim that they knew what was happening but simply didn’t know to what extent the suffering was perpetrated due to propaganda or even self inflicted ignorance.

 However, with all that is known about the Nazi atrocities, and the horrific stories that are still being constantly unearthed today, it is sufficed to say that the two characters that witness the bestial rape in the Nazi offices were probably telling the truth. In any case, they would have had to have particularly grim imaginations to lie about such a thing.

 In the novel there are differing ideologies playing on the same events:

June and Bernard experience; the rational and spiritual, the Augustinian and Iranaean. Both characters see history differently. Both experience the black dogs differently, and both end up with different world views in the end of their relationship. This can be seen through the way June mocks Bernard’s political alliances as a mouthpiece for the labour party.

 “Do you know what he wanted to talk about when he came last month? Euro-communism!...He said he felt optimistic!...Jeremy, he was actually excited! Just as we were back then. Progression is too kind. Stasis, I’d say. Stagnation.”

 Through her stories which she tells to Jeremy, June portrays a postmodern apathy, resulting in a worldview of cyclical history: the idea that history repeats upon itself with no real change in the way we live our lives, therefore resulting in the “stagnation”. This can be seen through the fact that Hitler and Ghandi’s fame and infamy took place in the same historical period. However, these ‘cycles’ are mainly anecdotal, reliant on aposteriori knowledge of the world, rather than something that can be measured or quantified.

 This then brings into question, what is history and what is storytelling? Traditionally, storytelling is thought to be linked to fiction, and history to fact. However, this would then cause the relaying of personal experience into the wrong category.

  “As I was saying all this, our train pulled in with a great clatter and an awful lot of smoke and steam, and just as it came to a stop June burst into tears and threw her arms around me and broke the news that she was pregnant and that the little insect in her little hands made her feel not only for the life that was growing inside her, but for all life, and that letting me kill that beautiful dragon fly was an awful mistake, and she was sure nature would take its revenge out on the baby

 Most of the stories in which June is mentioned are given an underlying theme of superstition which Bernard rebuffs with cold skepticism. However, whilst it is not factual that June held a dragonfly which would hurt her unborn child, it is part of her own narrative, something personal to her.

 The fact that Jeremy then goes on to defend her when she isn’t present shows how the younger generation of the post war period became heavily involved in it’s history. By asserting that “Jenny’s extra finger” was directly caused by “the moth’s retribution”, Jeremy is imposing a grand narrative onto both Bernard and June’s lives. The fact that we hear the story from Bernard however, misappropriates the ownership of that story. Although we know what June thinks she experienced, we are receiving her experience from her ex husband instead, thereby rationalizing her story beyond the grand narrative she insinuates.

 However, according to Adorno, there is indeed a grand narrative to our lives. All humans strive to organize nature and violence is our way of rationalizing nature. Therefore, all humans are innately violent, and the holocaust whilst horrific was not anything new. History seeks to remember what time annihilates – time seeks ends to everything. The change in production depends upon the individual remembering history, something which doesn’t exist without people remembering it.

This brings in the idea however, of a grand narrative; that humanity is heading towards something. In the novel Black Dogs, there is nothing left to get better or worse. As stated by Jeremy, when entering the concentration camp museum, “there was no one to feed or free”. This is ironically reminiscent of Fukiyama, who claimed in his own works that “History was finished” as it had reached an equilibrium, and that justice was now restored.

 However, These ideas are born of grand narratives. These ideas date back to the biblical ideas displayed in Agustinian an Iranaeian theodicies, both based on the different accounts of The Fall. Augustinian theodicy supposes that because of Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden creating an an equidistance with God, the world has depreciated, and evil has increased. The Irenaean theodicy, however, argues that God neither created nor necessitated evil, and that evil helps fully form humans. The alternative according to him, would be for us to live in a “toy world”.

 Both are too Eurocentric however. As the decades have progressed since WW2 and the holocaust, there has been more global coverage of other countries suffering from mass genocide. Therefore these theories on world progression are outdated, and the evil in the world is not growing we are simply becoming more aware of it.

 Whereas Hegel states that the soul is a determinate object, meant for a higher purpose as this quote states:

 Spirit does not toss itself about in the external play of chance occurrences; on the contrary, it is that which determines history absolutely, and it stands firm against the chance occurrences which it dominates.

  This brings into play the idea of cold rationalized violence, a sobering legacy left by the Nazis. Whilst Jeremy experiences the cold mechanized processing which Nazi camp inmates experienced during Auchwitch, he still can’t imagine the true horror of what the camp experience was like. In this passage he even slightly admires it the efficiency with which death and burial was carried out.

 “On our way out, Jenny spoke for the first time in an hour to tell me that in one day in November 1943 German authorities had machine gunned thirty six thousand Jews from Lublin. They made them lie in gigantic graves and slaughtered them to the sound of amplified dance music”

 Because there is nothing in this quote condemning the efficiency and irony of the Nazi’s methods in the extermination process, it leaves the reader with a sinister air of praise. It helps show the detachment of the younger generations of post war Britain and how they don’t immediately relate to the history unfolding around them, almost showing a sense of being overwhelmed by such a volume of history.

 The removal of the narrator from the novel’s main period of digressional action helps illustrate this point. Jeremy is not a part of this story, yet he makes it his simply through visiting the camp. “There was no one to feed or free” Perhaps this is McEwan accepting that he himself as a post war writer, has no part in telling the stories of the WW2 generation.  

In conclusion, storytelling is a powerful tool from any perspective. Past or present, the way that the generation who endured and fought through the holocaust are represented should always be represented in a  powerful way, as should the later generations learning about them.

 2. Philosophical problems in the novel

 This question asks for the evaluation of the philosophical problems in a novel studied on the course. This part of the essay will concern with the novel Black Dogs, by Ian McEwan.

The novel itself is set in the 80s, with the advent of the Berlin Wall being destroyed. Here McEwan is using retrospective to look back on something out of his, and anyone else’s control.

 A question which seems to arise a few times is the morality of nature. When June is attacked by the Black Dogs trained by the Nazis, the reader would most likely blame the men who trained them. However, surely if this principle can be applied to the dogs themselves, then it can go further. However, many choose not to, as if one goes far enough, we end up blaming the Allies, those who supposedly ‘won the war’ for us in the first place.

 During the post war period, many tried to create conditions to help explain the psychological conditions of the Holocaust. One of these experiments was implemented by Jewish psychologist Milgram. The actual participant would be placed in a room with a number of electric shock controls. They would then meet an actor who would pretend to go into the next room for a memory test. The actor would then pretend to receive electric shocks going up to 250 volts, acting as though he had heart trouble and remaining silent after a certain number of pretend shocks. The aim of the experiment was to show that Germans were more compliant than Americans, due to defined cultural differences, thereby creating a test for fascism. However, when testing the environment on 41 white working class American males, he found that most reacted by complying. This actually shows that most people do comply with authority when under stress.

 As this mainly shows how people can be convinced into commiting crimes they’d be uncomfortable with, a better example of conditions allowing the id to perpetrate harm is Zimbardo. ZImbardo’s study consisted of a group of college students who were going to take turns being the guards and prisoners of a made up prison, with hostile conditions. However, the prisoners became so disturbed and agitated that the study only lasted 5 days before ending. The result showed that the guards often enjoyed inflicting pain or discomfort, even asking for extra shifts.

However, rather than show why the holocaust happened, these studies simply show us that normal individuals can react in these ways should the conditions fit their purpose. In a way it is easier to focus on the evil itself, rather than the cause.

 In conclusion, there is no overall grand narrative in the post modern era which can explain atrocities such as this. Since global news has taken over, the significance of a European war ending whilst millions die overseas creates a feeling of apathy amongst the civilian population.