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Writing and Loving: Strategies to Overcome Humbleness in Lynne Reid Banks’s Children at the Gate

p. 179-194

Résumé

By applying narratological tools and theories on race, trauma and melancholia to the analysis of Banks’s Children at the Gate, this article aims at revealing that this novel represents the humble as an annulling and pathological status that can be overcome through two essential mechanisms: therapeutic writing and experiencing unselfish love towards the Other. Moreover, this novel illustrates how the humble emerges both as a motif denouncing stories of marginalisation and as an aesthetic category structuring narratives that endorse the repairing power of writing, allowing the humble to re-write themselves into love and agency.


Texte intégral

‘Children at the Gate. . .’

1‘I’ll go out into the ominously peaceful morning sunlight and get a taxi and go and fetch her. I can’t see a yard ahead in time; [. . .] I have no right at all to be so happy and to feel that everything is beginning’.2 The last words in Lynne Reid Banks’s novel Children at the Gate, originally published in 1968, portray the main female character at the moment when she believes in the possibility of an invigorated future, declaring that she has no right to be happy but actually she is, as a new life is being disclosed in front of her. Why does she think she is not entitled to be happy? And what are the causes of this happiness? These are some of the key questions that will be addressed in this article.

2I will start by referring to Heise’s statement that much of the literature produced in the last few decades has given voice to groups that did not have the opportunity to share their stories of suffering and alienation before.3 Many contemporary writers have recreated minorities’ counter-(hi)stories by depicting marginalised, abused, traumatised, vulnerable and displaced groups who have had recourse to literature to voice their silenced experiences. In this respect, British writer Lynne Reid Banks has been a pioneer, since her writings have given voice to dispossessed and vulnerable characters since the 1950s. Mainly known for her contribution to children’s literature, her novels tend to depict experiences related to hybridity and life in the margins, some of which she might have experienced when she migrated to Canada due to the outbreak of the Second World War, and during the time she lived in an Israeli kibbutz before returning to England in the 1970s. In particular, Children at the Gate uses the diary form to unveil the story of a half-Jewish woman, Gerda, living in a melancholy state of self-destruction, which will be analysed according to the notion of the humble. This article is targeted at analysing the narrative strategies through which this novel displays the overcoming of the main character’s melancholic condition, namely, converting the notion of the humble as a status connected to marginalisation and self-loathing into a condition in which the subject can be liberated from previously assigned stereotypes and exert conscious acts of agency and regeneration.

Representing the Humble: Race and Melancholia

3According to the OED, the two main meanings ascribed to the term ‘humble’ are: ‘1. Having a low estimate of one’s importance, worthiness, or merits; marked by the absence of self-assertion or self-exaltation; lowly: the opposite of proud’ and ‘2. Of lowly condition, rank, or estate; of modest dimensions; modest, unpretentious’.4 Drawing on the first definition, the humble is a category that may be subjectively experienced and there are several examples along Children at the Gate where the main character writes about herself as someone who does not have any merit and who does not deserve to be loved. This aspect can be observed in the following comments: ‘I am sick and mad and I must keep away from people’ (Banks 21) and ‘I guess if I were a nicer woman, or even just a stronger one, I’d have been able to make my happiness some other way’ (192). Remarks like these point out the severe negative state of self-deprecation in which Gerda finds herself as she is unable to recognise any positive qualities in her personality, leading her humble nature to an extreme and even unhealthy position. In keeping with the second definition, the humble status can also be imposed on the subject by external forces, usually social structures that classify individuals and groups into different ranks. The low condition to which the humble belongs is embodied by various characters depicted in the novel. Gerda seems to be a part of this inferior class from the beginning of the narration when she portrays herself living in the northern coastal city of Acre in very unhealthy and poor conditions (16–17). Apart from the protagonist, other characters are also relegated to a secondary position in society because, like her, they are racially mixed. For instance, this happens to the daughter of Gerda’s friend Kofi, Hanna, who regrets being socially rejected due to her mixed Arab and Jewish origins in the following terms: ‘people came out to our flat and said things to Daddy. And when I went shopping with Mummy, nobody would speak to her. And the children I played with, [. . .] they wouldn’t play with me after that’ (76). In this episode, it is made clear that the state of the humble corresponds to the lower rank that the community has assigned to this racially-mixed child.

4Thus, two main sources of humbleness—as a category both externally imposed on individuals and subjectively interiorised by them—may be identified in Children at the Gate. At a general level, all the characters that are racially mixed—‘half and half’ (40–41, 57, 278)—are depicted according to a humble status that defines them as inferior subjects within their given community (whether this is the Arab community in Jaffa in part one, the Jewish one in the Kibbutz in section two, or the amalgamated setting of Jaffa before the war in the last part of the novel). And, in the particular case of the main character, Gerda’s humbleness also stems from the trauma of losing her son that she experienced in the past. Thus, her innate humble status acquires a pathological condition from which it will be very difficult to escape, as the guilt and pain caused by her son’s death has reinforced her marginal status and has contributed to foster her continuous self-hurting habits.

5As for the issue of race, Banks clearly reveals her aim of unveiling the painful stories of those many people who have been marginalised for being racially mixed when she dedicates this book ‘to all half-and-halfs.’ The novel portrays various characters that can be categorised under this label: Gerda, whose father was German Canadian and whose mother was a third-generation English-Jewish Canadian; Hanna, who has an Arab father and a Jewish mother; and Ella and Peretz, the two Arab children that Gerda adopts to be educated according to the Jewish rules of the kibbutz. Gerda, being the narrator and main focaliser of the narration, depicts all of them on the grounds of a humble state of inferiority, which they seem to have assumed as something natural. A clear instance of this appear when Kofi explains to Gerda that his daughter will have to get used to being punished because of her mixed blood in the following terms: ‘She’s different in her blood, [. . .] for that they will punish her anyway, and she may as well get used to it’ (40). Generally speaking, those hybrid subjects ‘who do not fall easily into any established categories’ have traditionally caused certain anxiety or ‘proteophobia’ within a given community (144).5 Following Young’s Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, hybridity has usually been associated with the ‘radical heterogeneity, discontinuity, the permanent revolution of forms’ (25), a phenomenon which tends to produce anxiety within rigid and homogeneous societies.6 Young explains that the word ‘hybrid’ evolved from its biological and botanical meanings to acquire linguistic, racial and cultural connotations, as he argues that ‘in the nineteenth century it was used to refer to a physiological phenomenon; [while] in the twentieth century it has been reactivated to describe a cultural one’ (6). In fact, he explains that, although the idea of race has always tended to be considered in dialectical terms, Bhabha provided the concept of hybridity with explicit racial significance in the (post) colonial context (19). Such are the connotations that the concept of hybridity, and the characters embodying it, epitomise in Children at the Gate. In the novel, hybridity is a socio-racial constructed category—as may be seen at the end of the narrative when nobody wants to adopt Hannah because of her mixed race: ‘there would be hopes of having such a bright, attractive child adopted. But you see, there is her mixed blood. It’s very odd’ (Banks 274)—, whereas it is also a notion intrinsically experienced by the characters who are aware of their in-betweenness—as can be noted when Gerda sees herself as a homeless exile owing to her miscellaneous origins in these words: ‘Canada’s not home any more. Nor is Israel, really’ (Banks 89). These hybridised characters produce negative reactions in their settings, as is demonstrated, for instance, by the difficulties that Gerda finds when trying to adapt to the way of life in the kibbutz where she is perceived by the Jewish community as ‘new, ’ ‘strange, ’ ‘husbandless’ (Banks 113), while they have interiorised their hybrid nature in negative terms too—an aspect that is mainly depicted through the character of Hanna, as observed in one of the girl’s conversations with Gerda:

‘You [Hannah] are half and half’
‘That means you aren’t really anything’
After a moment I said, ‘Nonsense’—though it wasn’t. ‘I’m half and half, too’
[. . .] ‘Half and half? You? [. . .] half what? ’
‘Half Jewish and half-not Jewish’
‘Was your Daddy an Arab? ’
‘No, he was Canadian. His family came from Germany a long time ago.’ (Banks 57)

6This fragment illustrates the processes of identity formation widely described by Hall, who saw identity as a construction formed by different socio-political discourses that are unconsciously assimilated by the individual,7 as is demonstrated by the fact that Hanna has assumed that being racially mixed is equivalent to having no identity at all. According to Hall, there are two cultural identity models: the first defines identity as one common culture shared by a group, whereas the second is based on the differentiation between Self and Other. Far from being a new concept, the term Other was reappraised by postcolonial thinkers like Bhabha and Hall, who referred to the process by which Western societies justified the subordination exerted upon those Others which challenged their status quo. Hall provided a useful definition of the Other as the ‘people who are in any way significantly different from the majority—them rather than us—[and who] are frequently exposed to this binary form of representation. They seem to be represented through sharply opposed polarized, binary extremes’ (229). In this novel, set in Israel, this binary opposition corresponds to the traditional clash between the Arab and the Jew; an antagonism that increases for those characters that do not belong to a pure race and who become, then, Others, outsiders and misfits living in the margins of the community—an issue which becomes particularly clear during Gerda’s stay in the kibbutz, the place where she is constantly reminded of her strangeness (Banks 135). This essentialist practice of stereotyping has led Hanna, in the previous passage, to assume that the only possible identity is that of being either a pure Jew or a pure Arab, reinforcing the binarism that continues relegating characters like her to the humble minor position just exposed.

7This binarism is more noticeable when it comes to the case of Jewish identity, a collective identity that has been founded upon their diasporic nature. Immigration and foreignness lie at the core of their sense of communality, as the Jew has come to represent the ‘archetypal Other’ in most societies.8 The common attitude towards Jewishness in the course of history has been ambiguous, combining dismissal and attraction, which has contributed to the fact that the Jews have come to represent the Other, the foreigner. Also, Gilman explains this phenomenon by alluding to the feeling of ‘self-hatred’ that has characterised Jews throughout history, and which has led them to mythologise their own diasporic history.9 Jews have assimilated this Otherness by developing their own ‘myth of origins, ’ defining themselves as the people chosen to be tormented with homelessness until the end of history and launching the archetypal idea of the ‘Wandering Jew’—the ultimate symbol of foreignness and Otherness across centuries.10 Kofi reinforces this stereotypical and archetypal view when he tells Gerda that she has to kill all the Jewish flies in her room, as ‘they never learn when they’re not wanted’ (Banks 12); thus, the fly acts as a metaphor of the Jews’ perpetual role as scapegoats and wanderers. As has been shown, and in parallel to the construction of the notion of the humble in this novel, this is a status that has been given to the Jewish population, and one that they have also assimilated as inherent to them—as demonstrated by Gerda along the narration in comments such as this: ‘strange how Jews like us only run away from our comfortable ticky-tacky boxes when we are driven out’ (Banks 31). All these ideas would confirm Simmel’s view of the Jew as the ‘classical example’ of the social type of ‘the stranger’.11 In fact, drawing on Simmel’s theories, Wexler has pointed out that ‘the stranger, like the hybrid, is simultaneously within and outside of the prevailing collective identity, and embodies the synthesis of nearness and distance which constitutes the formal position of the stranger’.12 Simmel’s connection between the Jew, the stranger and the hybrid supports my claim that Gerda and Hanna, being both half-Jews and hybrids, represent the clearest position of Otherness and consequently, humbleness in the narration; which explains why neither of them can easily integrate in the communities depicted across the narrative. In Children at the Gate, the correlation between Jewishness, hybridity and humbleness is reassembled since these three categories restrict the subjects to an inferior position within the community according to both external binary practises of stereotyping and internalising processes of self-hatred.

8Apart from the identity and racial issues, the main character’s traumatic experience deserves special attention when it comes to understanding the humble state to which she has been relegated. From the first pages of her therapeutic diary, Gerda appears to be undergoing a dissociation process, which was primarily defined by Janet as the response of some subjects to very stressful situations in which they automatically repress the traumatic experiences in their subconscious.13 A good example may be observed in the following passage:

My NAME is Gerda Shaffer.
My name is Mrs. Alec Shaffer, née Osborn.
Giddy Osborn. Giddy Gerda, sister of Judy the Prudy. (I am not sure any longer what I am called. Those names belong to someone who existed before I was born) [. . .]. I am divorced. My husband has gone back to Canada. I shall never see him again. I don’t want to and I don’t care, except for the business of having no one to comfort me when I am wake from a nightmare [. . .]. I’d like to finish myself off now, before another night comes. (Banks 11)

9Gerda suffers from an identity crisis, she is unable to attach herself to a place of origin and she appears to be acting out some repressed trauma, which even makes her think about committing suicide. Drawing on the Freudian psychoanalytical approach to trauma, LaCapra has explained that the process of acting out trauma is characterised by the compulsive repetition of the traumatic event and is manifested in nightmares, the repetition of past events, anxiety, unknown fears, and even auto-mutilation14—many of the symptoms embodied by Gerda’s present state of self-neglect. Considering the unspeakable nature of any traumatic process, to discover the trauma lying at the heart of her diary and, as a result, of the whole novel will be a complex undertaking.

10The first part of the book illustrates the main acting-out symptoms suffered by Gerda, which can be explained following the terms coined by Herman as ‘hyperarousal, ’ ‘intrusion’ and ‘constriction’.15 Hyperarousal happens when the subject is easily startled, reacts irritably to small provocations, and sleeps poorly. These are the main signs that Gerda shows when she lives in Acre: she tends to hurt herself by drinking too much, and she becomes defensive when Kofi tries to help her. Intrusion consists in the belated reliving of a traumatic event, for instance, when the protagonist sees children who remind her of her son (Banks 45). Constriction refers to the person’s paralysis in the face of trauma: Gerda’s purposeless life is an instance of this. Gerda finally discloses the event that destroyed her life: the death of her son Jake when he drowned in a lake in front of her: ‘They tried to make the word “accident” sound like an act of God, instead of something brought about by human carelessness (Carelessness! [. . .] What a petty, trivial, untragic word to load to sinking point with guilt)’ (72). As the words between brackets suggest, Gerda gives way to her inner thoughts; her state of fragmentation has to do with the guilt caused by this loss, which is acted out every time she is close to a child.

11In his essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia, ’ Freud defines mourning as ‘the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on’.16 Gerda exemplifies this definition perfectly since she has first suffered the loss of her son, then the loss of the feeling of belonging to a nation or a country—the abstract idea to which she clung when migrating to Israel after the traumatic event: ‘I thought a sense of identification with a nation would give me a sense of personal identity [. . .]. And so I have no country now, any more than I have a husband or a child’ (Banks 33). However, she has not carried out a proper process of mourning since she appears to be in a melancholic state. The main trait of melancholia is, according to Freud, ‘the disturbance of self-regard’ (244), and this is embodied by Gerda’ own specific sense of the humble. The other distinctive symptoms of melancholia are, still according to Freud, ‘a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-relivings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment’ (244). Gerda, who embraces ‘a perverse form of self-punishment’ (Banks 47) by living in a ‘self-imposed dark’ (275), clearly appears as a melancholy character. As such, she needs a long time to acknowledge the cause of her acting out, melancholia being related, as Freud shows, to ‘an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness’ (245). Gerda also wonders about her guilt, her possible incapacity to love him: ‘perhaps the guilt was so acute because, deep down, I didn’t really want him’ (Banks 282), thus turning the loss of her son into the ‘ego-loss’ (Freud 249) typical of melancholia.17

12The representation of the humble in this novel—both as a tendency to self-deprecation and as an externally assigned low rank or condition—is inextricably linked to the vulnerable situation that the humble subjects depicted endure throughout the story. The traumatic loss of a loved object comes out as a direct cause of Gerda’s harmful endorsement of humbleness in the narrative, and racial hybridity leads the characters not only to a humble state-since they both consider themselves and are considered to be socially inferior—but to an extreme state of vulnerability, synonymous with exclusion and marginality.

Overcoming the Humble: Writing and Loving

13From the theories of Freud to those of Cyrulnik and Henke,18 the power of writing to heal melancholic and/or traumatic states has been highlighted. Since traumatic memories are unassimilated experiences stored in our unconscious mind, it is essential to integrate them within our conscious memory through language in order to come to terms with them. As Almog wisely explains, the restorative power of language is indebted to the fact that stories ‘shape the consciousness, our imagination, and the way we see and comprehend reality. [. . .] We use stories to heal ourselves and others’ (301).19 Endorsing this line of thought, Henke coined the term ‘scriptotherapy’ to name ‘the process of writing out and writing through traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic re-enactment’ (xii–xiii). In the particular case of mourning, Gana stated that there is a performative dynamic between mourning and writing since ‘narrative is the signifying field of mourning and simultaneously the effect or product of the very work of mourning it signifies’.20

14Analysing this performative symbiosis between writing a therapeutic diary and the process of mourning, the initial pages of Children at the Gate reveal the great difficulties experienced by the narrator when trying to write the unspeakable, the unwritable. Gerda admits: ‘I want to write it so I can read it, I want to read it so—maybe—I will be able to look at it’ (Banks 13). Writing her life story then becomes an activity that provides her empty life with some meaningful purpose (18). As Cyrulnik explains, the act of writing helps the disturbed subjects to break free from the past and regain control over their damaged emotions (259). Although the diary at first displays a disrupted and fragmented discourse that echoes Gerda’s traumatic state (Banks 11), the narrator’s discourse gradually becomes more coherent, showing the healing process is under way and Gerda’s condition is improving; she is able to say that ‘the habit of writing is ingrained now’ (Banks 56). In the second part of the novel, the diary proves to be a useful tool to contrast her previous depressive state with the relative happiness she enjoys after adopting Ella and Peretz in the kibbutz. By manipulating the words on the pages of her writing, Gerda has become a key agent in her own recovery process. Finally, in the third part of the novel, the melancholia Gerda initially suffered seems to have decreased, as she does not have recourse to self-hurting habits like drinking anymore but relies on the act of writing instead (Banks 248). In the end, the concluding phase in this process is reached when Gerda stops writing about her own self and starts paying attention to her neighbours in Jaffa: ‘What a relief is to write of other people! [. . .] I notice my lack of outward-looking’ (241). These comments disclose her opening to other people’s suffering, an opening which culminates when the personal diary is replaced with the letters she sends to Hanna in the last chapter. The fact that she is now capable of addressing an Other in her life narrative confirms that the process of scriptotherapy has been carried out successfully.

15Addressing the Other is connected to the other crucial way of overcoming humbleness in the novel, that is, the act of loving. Gerda’s need to find a life purpose (Banks 41) finally materialises in her adoption of the first mixed-Arab child. The desire for a child is presented as Gerda’s ‘solution’ and ‘cure’ (78); nevertheless, in order to acquire its healing potential, this cure should not be based on egotistic love. As Lechte, drawing on Kristeva’s work, maintains: ‘based on love, the cure in analysis gives the psyche over to the other, to difference and variation, making the other an “event” in the life of the subject’ (33).21 Relying on this, the classical philosophy of love has been revisited by contemporary Western theories such as Levinas’ ethics of alterity, Gibson’s development of an ethics of sensibility and Falzon’s notion of social dialogue. In spite of their particularities, these current ethical views have proved to be ‘oriented towards some wider opening, some greater sensibility and a surrender of the same in favour of the other / the infinite, that which is otherwise than being, that which is not here, with correlative notions like vulnerability and disinterestedness’ (3).22 Following this line of ethics and focusing mainly on Levinas’ ethics of alterity—which demands of the subject an attitude of responsibility towards the other and emphasises the individual’s capacity to feel with the other, especially the other’s suffering, while recognising his or her otherness (115)23—in order for love to acquire its beneficial qualities, Gerda has to transcend her own self and embrace the Other not as an object aimed at satisfying her personal loss, but as a pure event in her life.

16After adopting Ella, Gerda reflects on the nature of her love and wonders if she really loves the child; she admits: ‘I want her [Ella] to love me!’ (Banks 119), thus illustrating the selfish nature of her affection. The adoption of Ella’s brother then provides Gerda with new hopes to embrace a more disinterested form of caring for the Other. Yet this progression stops when Kofi unveils the terrible secret that, as he had stolen these children, they were being claimed by the Arab government. Following these events, the third section opens up with Gerda’s strategy to save the children: seducing Dan (a married man in the kibbutz) so that he can help her escape from the police. No trace of love is present in her recounting of their sexual encounter; however, this affair turns out to be a fundamental episode in Gerda’s recuperation. ‘ “You’re good”, I said [to Dan], and for once in my life I felt really humble, [. . .]. I feel that was a more important moment in my—what’s the word, rehabilitation? [. . .] This renewed feeling of being once again capable of love’ (218–9, my emphasis). In this moment of awakening, Gerda’s humbleness acquires some positive meaning. Until then humbleness had appeared to be linked to self-hatred, trauma, marginalisation and exclusion, but now Gerda feels humble because she has realised that, despite the mistakes she may have made in her life, she deserves to be loved, which contrasts with her prior embodiment of humbleness. Being loved by Dan allows her to discover that she can still hope to feel pure love again. Therefore, this passage would support the idea that the ethical unselfish love for the Other can only be achieved when the self is endowed with emotional forces that escape his or her rational control, which Gerda perceives in this episode.24

17Gerda and the children also find refuge in Jaffa thanks to the help offered by their neighbours. The family formed by Zev and Suzy and their adopted daughter Ziva turns out to possess healing qualities for Gerda. Firstly, she develops a real friendship (Banks 221) with Suzy, based on mutual affection. Secondly, Gerda’s job consists in being Ziva’s physiotherapist, providing her with the fulfilling task of alleviating this Other’s pain. Finally, the modest house in Jaffa becomes her physical and emotional ‘haven’ (240) because, Suzy and Zev being Holocaust survivors, their pain leads Gerda to put herself in their place, look at their faces, and be amazed at their capacity to continue loving in spite of all the suffering they have gone through.

18However, close to the end of the narration, readers find a shattered Gerda again, who has been robbed of the children. In the letters she sends to Hanna, Gerda reflects on the way she has experienced love during her life: ‘I don’t love you enough [. . .]. Something stops me loving wholly’ (Banks 280). Refusing to assume the responsibility for the Other, for Hanna, Gerda escapes at this point the Levinasian model.

19Yet the previous moments of pure encounter with the Other finally make her embrace the unconditional love for this vulnerable girl. Writing letters to Hanna allows Gerda to see the child’s pain and accept that she is bound uniquely to this Other (Levinas 104). Imagining the illusions that Hanna may be harbouring about leaving the orphanage where she has been sheltered encourages the narrator to phrase the idea that ‘one’s resilience is proportional to the capacity to mobilize one’s love powers’ (62).25 The narrator finally ‘respond [s] to and for the other person’ since, as Levinas’ philosophy predicates, ‘the other person [Hanna] disturbs one [Gerda] to the point that one is no longer “origin” of oneself’ (23).26 Gerda indeed, explains that ‘Peretz never really believed in me, but Hanna did, and still does. Her hope will renew itself every morning’ (Banks 286). In other words, if the love for Ella and Peretz was aimed at filling the gap left by her son, this new relationship will be based on a mutual and generous form of love for the Other.

‘. . . Who will not go Away’

20Gerda’s healing process may be better understood by returning to Herman’s model, where the final stage of healing consists in the ‘reconnection with ordinary life’ (155). Before reaching that stage, the subject must have recognised the traumatic experience lying at the heart of the acting out phase, as the writing process that dwells in this narration has proved. Then, when the survivor has managed to come to terms with the past, she has to ‘create a future’ (196) by finding ‘a survivor mission’ (207). The mission that saves Gerda from destruction is based on embracing unselfish love as well as endorsing a more positive view of the notion of the humble—a conception which is not tied to segregation and melancholia anymore. Along these lines, Banks fosters the possibility of overcoming trauma and developing a resilient attitude in the face of death and alienation. Although the novel has established a parallelism between humbleness, exclusion and trauma, understanding the notion of resilience as the ability to recover from or adjust to misfortune and change,27 it may be concluded that at the end of the novel Gerda embraces humbleness as the source of a resilient attitude that will allow her to face the future when she commits herself to the ‘new project’ of writing to and loving Hanna (Cyrulnik 259).

21On the whole, Children at the Gate gives a positive representation of the notion of the humble by depicting the evolution of the main character from egotistic to generous love. It also uses the motif of the humble to denounce stories of marginalisation and launch broader reflections on the repairing power of writing for some vulnerable and humble sectors of society. By recounting a story of openness to the Other and forcing the reader to follow a similar dialectical movement, the novel thus displays the healing and ethical value of literature. It compels the contemporary reader to leave his or her comfort zone and see experiences of suffering and displacement through the Other’s eyes, in this case through Gerda’s eyes, and enacts ‘the singularity of literature’. According to Attridge, literature is singular because it responds more vividly to our ethical drives than philosophy, politics or history; indeed, we can experience literary works not as objects but as events which exceed our rational accounting (3), just as we encounter the Other face to face, according to Levinas. As such, Children at the Gate promotes ‘a transformative difference [. . .] that involves the irruption of otherness or alterity into the cultural field’.28 It brings out alterity as the site from which a negative appraisal of humbleness may be reshaped and given a regenerative potential.29 Drawing on Ganteau’s theories of vulnerability, we may say that the novel has the potential to redirect the reader’s attention towards the Other’s vulnerable and humble position. Even though Children at the Gate does not offer the characters an easy integration back into the system, it creates a world that promotes ‘a vision of individuals as interdependent and of humanity as radically relational.’30

Notes de bas de page

1 The research carried out for the writing of this article is part of a project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) (code FFI2012-32719). The author is grateful for the support of the Government of Aragón and the European Social Fund (ESF) (code H05). Acknowledgements should be given to the Project for Young Researchers at the University of Zaragoza ‘Fricciones de la memoria’ (245216—JIUZ -2014-HUM-02).

2 Lynne Reid Banks, Children at the Gate (1968; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996) 287.

3 Ursula K. Heise, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) 16.

4 Findwords, ‘Oxford English Dictionary: Humble, ’ Web, 11 February 2015.

5 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge and New York: Polity Press, 1989).

6 Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).

7 Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage and Open University, 1997) 50.

8 Kenneth Surin, ‘Afterthoughts on Diaspora, ’ The South Atlantic Quarterly, Diaspora and Immigration Special Issue 98.1/2 (Winter/Spring 1999): 275–326; 284.

9 Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1986).

10 Efraim Sicher, The Holocaust Novel (New York: Routledge, 2004) 34.

11 George Simmel, The Sociology of George Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950) 404.

12 Philip Wexler, ‘The Jewish Question Again: From Collective Identity to Social Vitality, ’ Dynamic Belonging: Contemporary Jewish Identities, eds. E. Goldberg, Steven M. Cohen and Ezra Kopelowitz (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011) 74–83; 74; my emphasis.

13 Pierre Janet, The Mental State of Hystericals: A Study of Mental Stigmata and Mental Accidents, trans. Caroline Rollin Corson (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901) 278–365.

14 Dominick Lacapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2001) 21.

15 Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (London: Pandora, 2001 [1992]) 35.

16 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia, ’ The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953) 243.

17 In Abraham and Torok’s terms, the pain that melancholic people inflict upon their ego tries to replace the pain they would inflict upon the loved object because of his having been lost. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis (Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1994) 137.

18 Boris Cyrulnik, Talking of Love: How to Overcome Trauma and Remake your Life Story, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin, 2007); Suzette A. Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing (London: Macmillan, 1998).

19 Shulamit Almog, ‘Healing Stories in Law and Literature, ’ Trauma and Memory: Reading, Healing, and Making Law, eds. Austin Sarat, Nadav Davidoitch, and Michael Alberstein (Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 2007).

20 Nouri Gana, Signifying Loss: Towards a Poetic of Narrative Mourning (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2011) 12.

21 John Lechte, ‘Art, Love, and Melancholy in the Work of Julia Kristeva, ’ Abjection, Melancholia and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva, eds. John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin (London and New York: Routledge, 1990).

22 Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau, eds., The Ethical Component in Experimental Fiction since the 1960s (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).

23 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Linguis (Pittsburg: Duquesne, 1998).

24 A second true encounter with the Other occurs when, the police having discovered Ella and Peretz, Zev and Suzy suggest claiming that the children are theirs. This act of fair-minded love produces a similar reaction to the one Gerda experienced after Dan’s help: ‘feeling began to return to me as if this incredible portion of love [. . .] had been injected into me like warm blood into a corpse’ (251).

25 Henry Krystal, ‘Resilience: Accommodation and Recovery, ’ The Unbroken Soul: Tragedy, Trauma, and Resilience, eds. Henri Parens, Harold P. Blum, and Salman Akhtar (Lanham: Jason Arsonson, 2008) 47–64.

26 Benjamin Hutchens, Levinas: A Guide for the Perplexed (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2004).

27 Salman Akhtar, and Glenda Wrenn, ‘The Biopsychosocial Miracle of Human Resilience: An Overview, ’ The Unbroken Soul: Tragedy, Trauma, and Resilience, eds. Henri Parens, Harold P. Blum, and Salman Akhtar (Lanham: Jason Arsonson. 2008) 1–20; 4.

28 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London and New York: Routledge. 2004) 136.

29 The preface to the novel—‘. . . children at the gate / Who will not go away. . .’—is an allusion to T. S. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday, which is about the poet’s conversion to Anglicanism. The poem draws on Dante’s Purgatorio and depicts the human evolution from darkness to spiritual renewal brought about by religion. The intertextual reference in the novel can be read as a metaphorical allusion to the conversion experienced by the main character from lovelessness and trauma to love and recovery, from a conception of the humble that relegates her to an inferior position to one in which she is empowered and becomes the main agent of her life choices. In keeping with the Eliotean imagery, the innocent children in Ash Wednesday are depicted ‘at the gate’ because they are caught between two different worlds (innocence/experience; atheism/faith), and they thus appear as paralysed subjects who can neither go away (escape from the status quo) nor pray (be included in society). This is exactly what happens to Banks’ hybrid characters that seem to be waiting at the gate to be socially accepted. This reference highlights the in-betweenness represented by Hanna and Gerda who, in the end, do not rely on the social acceptance of their humble status; but, through the acts of writing and loving, they gather enough strength to cross the gate towards a new life together. Nevertheless, these hybrid two main characters are not allowed to be integrated into the Israeli society they should belong to, and have to cross the gate towards an uncertain destination. This creates an open-ended narration that could point at the fact that the integration of these hybrid subjects in society in general and in the Israeli world in particular will continue to be an issue of concern for further public discussion and literary recreation.

30 Jean-Michel Ganteau, ‘Vulnerable Form and Traumatic Vulnerability: Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs, ’ Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and Ethics of Form, eds. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau (New York and London: Routledge. 2014) 89–103; 100–101.

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