Dismembering “Patriotism”: Cosmopolitan Haunting in Theresa Breslin’s Remembrance

Ghosts ask the questions that people cannot ask for themselves—the fundamental questions that lie at the heart of individual and social dilemmas. Once the questions are answered and the dilemmas solved or reconciled, then the ghosts depart.

(Tew and Mengham 163)

Although Nick Hubble’s essay refers to the ghosts that haunt the shell-shocked Siegfried Sassoon in Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, nevertheless it provides an apt introduction to my discussion of Theresa Breslin’s historical novel Remembrance (2002), also set during the First World War. A memorable title, it leaves an impression and the revenant of Remembrance returns to trace the horror of the trenches, its youthful characters serving as spectral indentations of educational enlightenment for contemporary young readers. For Jacques Derrida, ghosts are necessary ethical instruments, teaching us how “to learn to live finally” (xvii). Learning to live is not something “taught by life” but, rather, that which can only be imparted through “the other and by death” (Derrida xvii), which is precisely the hauntological history lesson of Remembrance. Like many historical fictions, Breslin’s memento mori reflects on an earlier epoch’s struggle between self/other in order to draw comparisons with uncanny contemporary social concerns affecting British society within a global context. Its ghostly visitants speak to us through the chronotope of literature and “ask the questions that people cannot ask for themselves,” due to the deafening voice of ideological hegemony.

I disagree with Tew and Mengham, though that “the ghosts depart” upon resolution of questions, because the ghosts of our literary and cultural past must repeatedly haunt the collective imagination, as Derrida has already demonstrated. Such perpetual haunting by departed ghosts involves experiencing the uncanny as “a sense of repetition or ‘coming back,’” where “the return of the repressed” is manifested by “a compulsion to repeat” (Royle 2). By reawakening a narrative of the past, through the uncanny experienced as haunting repetition or remembrance, Breslin’s text teaches history’s lessons to avoid a destructive cycle inhibiting future generations. Poststructurally, the haunting of the sign means that “to tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns” and, as such, “all stories are, more or less, ghost stories” (Wolfreys 3). Remembrance “open[s] a space” through its narrative retelling of the Great War, returning spatiotemporally to “something other.” Its title evokes memories for contemporary readers of the Remembrance Day service (previously Armistice Day until World War Two), an annual reminder of two World Wars (including the Holocaust). It also prompts its reader to reflect upon history’s atrocities in comparison with contemporary conflicts. Breslin’s text utilizes the space of historical fiction within a young-adult (YA) novel to pedagogically show future citizens that war is not distantly associated with old men in Remembrance parades, but instead wears the face of youth: in this 2002 novel, the controversial First World War is comparable with debates surrounding the post-9/11/2001 global War on Terror. The spectral space opened up by this fiction allows an anachronistic engagement between present and past, a hauntological “conversation” that “disjoins” or “unhinges” time, teaching its reader “To live otherwise” and “more justly” (Derrida xviii). Those who “love[s] justice at least, the ‘scholar’ of the future, the ‘intellectual’ of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost” (Derrida 221), which is the conversational exchange that occurs between Remembrance’s ghosts and its intended readership. Nicholas Royle’s reading of the uncanny in Derrida’s work similarly notes that “Ghosts don’t belong to the past, they come from the future” (Royle 67).

The novel focuses upon the lives of characters from Stratharden, a fictional village near Edinburgh: the upper class Charlotte and her brother, Francis Armstrong-Barnes, and middle-class siblings, Maggie, John Malcolm and Alex Dundas, indicate how utterly saturated in conflict the nation’s youth become. The early chapters of the novel depict a communal picnic “by the edge of the water, spreading the rugs under a large tree” (Breslin, Remembrance 39). The perfect summer’s day symbolizes their flourishing youth...