Confronting the Joint Legacies of the Holocaust and Colonialism in Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to apply the concept of synergy to the workings of memory in Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell (2007) by focusing on the relationship between its two main characters, Max Otto, a German professor of history, and Dougald Gnapun, an Aboriginal elder. It does so with a view to analysing the way in which fiction can weave connections between different histories of violence—in this case the Holocaust and the colonisation of Australia—while simultaneously pointing to the risks of downplaying the specificities of each case. Both men are burdened by traumatic memories of past atrocities: for Max it is his father’s complicity in the crimes of Nazism, while for Dougald it is the 1861 Cullin-la-Ringo massacre of white settlers, allegedly led by his great-grandfather. Max and Dougald meet through Vita McLelland, a young Aboriginal academic visiting Hamburg, who invites Max to a conference at the University of Sydney and then to visit her uncle Dougald in Queensland so that the professor can learn about the history of Australia’s indigenous people. Though far from one another in terms of geographical and cultural background, a close friendship develops between these two men whose only initial link is their being descendants of perpetrators. I argue that by confronting the joint legacies of the Holocaust and colonialism through Max and Dougald’s synergistic and transformative friendship, and by placing their stories/memories in a broader transnational and transhistorical context, Miller’s fictional recreation of these historical events engages with the complex relationship between victimisers and victims, perpetrators and descendants, history and fiction, remembrance and appropriation, which, as in the case of Max and Dougald, suggests the possibility of reconciliation with, and a letting go, of traumatic pasts.

KEYWORDS:

• Alex Miller
• Landscape of Farewell
• Holocaust
• colonialism
• perpetration
• memory

Notes

1. Corning, “The Synergism Hypothesis.”

2. McMahon, “Continental Heartlands,” 131.

3. Miller, “Chasing My Tale,” 6.

4. McMahon, Islands, 20.

5. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, passim.

6. Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory, passim.

7. Caruth, “Trauma and Experience,” 11.

8. Bennet, Empathic Vision, 10 (italics in original).

9. LaCapra, Writing History, 41, 135.

10. Hirsch, “Projected Memory,” 7.

11. Eaglestone, “Conclusion,” 278–79 (italics in original).

12. Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing, 17.

13. Moses, “Conceptual Blockages,” 7, 31 (italics in original).

14. Miller, “The Mask of Fiction,” 37.

15. Miller, Landscape of Farewell, 14. Hereafter page numbers are cited in the text.

16. This is part of the information on the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre that Miller himself provides at the end of the novel. He also gives some bibliographical sources, including Les Perrin’s book Cullin-la-ringo: The Triumph and Tragedy of Tommy Wills (1998), and articles by Gordon Reid, Henry Reynolds, and David Carment. For information on the subject, see also Carment, “The Wills Massacre of 1961,” and Richards, The Secret War.

17. Walker, “Frontier Wars,” 159.

18. Kühne, “Colonialism and the Holocaust,” 339.

19. Agger, “Dialectic of Desire,” 75.

20. McMahon, “Continental Heartlands,” 132.

21. Molloy, “‘To Sing, After This,”’ 231.

22. Rosenthal, “National Socialism,” 247.

23. Bar-On, Legacy of Silence, 328.

24. Cummins, “Sound and Silence,” 9.

25. Sharp, “Vision of Friendship,” 97.

26. Hyde, The Gift, 4.

27. Sharp, “Vision of Friendship,” 101.

28. Miller, “The Mask of Fiction,” 37.

29. See Crotty, “Beyond Genocide”; and Curthoys and Docker, “Introduction – Genocide.”

30. Richards, The Secret War, 24.

31. Miller, “Written in Our Hearts,” 8.

32. Nolan, “Narrating Historical Massacre,” 9.

33. McEwan, “Only Love and Then Oblivion.”

34. Webby, “Representing ‘the Other,’” 114.

35. Miller himself explained the genesis of his first published story, which recalls the intercultural exchange between Dougald and Max and also illustrates the writer’s rejection of “no entry signs” when it comes to literary creation. In the course of a long conversation, his friend and mentor Max Blatt—a central European Jew, survivor of the Holocaust—told Miller the story of how he escaped an anti-Semitic attack in Poland at the beginning of World War II. Miller then reworked this brief oral story into a longer narrative entitled “Comrade Pawel,” which he gave Max to read. Full of emotion, Max concluded: “You could have been there.” Miller, “Waxing Wiser than Oneself,” 25. These are the very same words Dougald tells the fictional Max in Landscape of Farewell after reading the story of the warrior Gnapun.

36. Bennet, Empathic Vision, 105.

37. Adams, “Introduction,” 1–2.

38. Hyde, The Gift, 4 (italics in original).

39. Gnapun seems to ventriloquize here Adorno’s famous dictum about the barbarism of writing poetry after Auschwitz. As is well-known, he later modified his view, arguing that “[p]erennial suffering has as much a right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.” Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 362.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness in collaboration with the European Regional Development Fund (code FFI2017-84258-P). The author is also grateful for the support of the Government of Aragón (code H03_20R) and the University Research Institute for Employment, Digital Society and Sustainability (IEDIS, University of Zaragoza).

Notes on contributors

María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro

María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro, PhD, is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. She is a member of a research team working on contemporary literature(s) in English with a particular focus on ethics, trauma, memory, and transmodernity. Her recent publications include the articles,“The Estrangement Effect in Three Holocaust Narratives: Defamiliarising Victims, Perpetrators and the Fairy-Tale Genre” (Atlantis 42.1, 2020), and “Art, Nature and the Negotiation of Memory in J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country” (Anglia 136.3, 2018); the book chapter “The Broken Voice of History: Fairy Tales, Anti-Tales, and Holocaust Representation” (in Contemporary Fairy-Tale Magic: Subverting Gender and Genre, ed. Lydia Brugué and Auba Llompart, Brill Rodopi, 2020); and the co-edited volume Memory Frictions in Contemporary Literature (Palgrave, 2017).