History and Memory

The Fiftieth Gate

Course criteria

• How are ideas and concepts represented?• How representational methods of meaning

and ideas in essence drive the text?• Choices of content and the style of delivery of

those choices.• Compose speaks to persuade audience.• An informed comment on structure.

Non-fiction text.

Conventions of text types:• Atypical and typical features of the genre.• Typical Features:• Memoir (A historical account or biography written

from personal knowledge.)• Autobiography (An account of a person's life

written by that person).• Documented evidence.• modern holocaust literature.

Atypical features

• Different from the typical ways of representing non-fiction.

• Melding genre techniques and elements. • Hybridized genre brings reader on a journey

(refer to title of book “journey through memory”).

• The combination makes the text well received, appealing to a wider audience.

• A wealth of features to represent ideas.

Atypical feats:• Motif - gate• Symbolism (dark/light)• Imaginative re-creation.• Bildungsroman :Spiritual journey.• Evocative imagery.• Jewish mysticism - cultural experience,

authenticity.

Holism

• The theory that whole entities, as fundamental components of reality, have an existence other than as the mere sum of their parts.

• Holocaust is represented in a holistic way, in the framework of the text.

Differing perspectives/positions

• Narrator • Son• Historian

Impact on responder – how are we positioned and influenced?

Representation

• Mode of representation is massaged throughout the text.

• Focus: History Vs Memory. Strength and fragility of both history and memory.

Recap

• After this unit you should come to understand that history is just as subjective as memory. History and memory need each other to discover truth.

• History is not what we first thought it to be, just as fragile as memory.

Recap

• Baker makes us understand, by marrying the two stories of his parents.

• Baker comes to value their stories as a mutual story.

Recap

• Baker cathartic (the purging of the emotions or relieving of emotional tensions, especially through certain kinds of art, as tragedy or music) pant to go beyond.

• Baker: Protagonist. He learns self-awareness and self-knowledge. (gate motif)

• Catharsis: Discharge of pent-up emotions so as to result in the alleviation of symptoms or the permanent relief of the condition.

• 2. The purging of the emotions or relieving of emotional tensions, especially through certain kinds of art, as tragedy or music.

Recap

• The gate motif refers to the change and transformation occurring within the book for the parents.

Re-cap

• Baker’s journey through memory is a collage, criss-crossing decades and continents and interweaving his findings to make sense of it all.

• Putting together the missing pieces. What he sets out to do; the outcomes are different.

‘No’, I say, ‘not numbers, it’s people’. (293)Genia: ‘It’s all I have’, she says. ‘Memories. Just memories.

Nothing more’.Mark: ‘Give them to me’, I plead. ‘Let me take them’.Genia: ‘The hair you can have. The rest is mine’.

XLIII: 43A child is bornWith infinite memory.

it remembers,the secrets of creationthe fruits in the gardenthe place of the hidden keythe wounded martyrsthe breathless bonesJob’s lamenthis own cryUntil an angel flies into the infant’s mouth, Touches its unformed lips, so that nothing,Not a word, a sound of fragrance, is remembered.

Sometimes the angels forget,or perhaps they are frightened to fly into thesilent cryOf those reborn.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job+3-5&version=NASBthey Have never wondered why we came into being, especially as we see the suffering of innocents whose only apparent

fault was being born into a particular time and place? Job’s song of regret brings up images of human agony.

Gate 42• Empathy takes over from history and memory.• What effect does this recreation have? What has Baker included

it?Jewish mysticism:‘Kaddish’ Hebrew prayer for the dead and most important Jewish

prayer “Shma Yisroel”.Effect of the motif of water, that then converts to the “rivers of

blood”.Imagery:“twisted tongues”, “Serpahs (celestial being) dancing for God”,

“Bulging eyes” and “Limo bodies”.“the point of light, pouring through the fiftieth gate”.

Re-cap• The Fiftieth gate is written in an abstract

(conceptual) manner.

• “”It always begins in blackness, until the first light illuminates a hidden fragment of memory”.

Jews, defend yourselves against the Germans, by never forgetting. Your memories are your weapon.

Nazi stormtroopers bar the Berlin entrance to a Jewish shop. Their signs read: "Germans, defend yourselves against the Jewish atrocity proaganda, buy only at German shops!" and "Germans, defend yourselves, buy only at German shops!"

History and Memory

• Memories are snippets and remnants of the past, which can be treasured but can also trigger both pain and pleasure.

• Past is important to us, but others can’t recognise the same significance.

• Remembering can be tortuous.• Rather than saying history and

memory are wrong, you can say they are compromised.

• Francis Parkman “Truth is questionable as well as memory”.

• “Survive the death of your entire world”. The world as you know it has been destroyed.

• “For the sake of our children, we must remember, so that it does not become their future.”

Elie Wiesel

“Close your eyes and listen. Listen to the silent screams of terrified mothers, the prayers of anguished old men and women. Listen to the tears of children, Jewish children, a beautiful little girl among them, with golden hair, whose vulnerable tenderness has never left me. Look and listen as they quietly walk towards dark flames so gigantic that the planet itself seemed in danger.”

• Postmodern concept – no absolute truth – memory a valid perspective. How one perceives the world is their truth.

• Theme: Survival, could use as a thesis focus.

• Genia spoke about memory through symbolic terms “darkness”.

• History is ambiguous.• Societal demand – “don’t forget”.• Didactic (moralistic) reading – cautionary for

present and future.• Jewish experience is a representational

experience of what is still going on.

Language • ‘Left. Right. Left. Right. No, left.’ (Pg120)

OR‘Right. Right. Right. Left. Right’. (Pg120)

Effect? - Truncated – cold, detached, powerful. - Marching tone. - The power/control over another's fate. - Cruelty of holocaust. - Life Vs Death. -Embedded past. - Guilt of the living.

Juxtaposition:

• Structural elements• Perspectives of people and facts• Characters – son/mother/father.

Stylistic feats

• Bricolage (Construction or creation from a diverse range of available things) of styles

• Jewish mysticism – authenticates it.

Use quotable quotes

• “how can you be so sure? Were you there? You think because you’ve read a few pieces of paper that you suddenly understand everything?”