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  • To the New Belsen:Textual Repetition-Compulsion in Stephen Poliakoff’s Caught on a Train
  • Alan Kirby (bio)

Sometime in the Victorian era a shift occurs in the repatriation of the idea of Europe into British literature, hitherto dominated by representations of named continental individuals interacting in foreign places. Increasingly Europe is conjured as a distinctive, beautiful, historically rich and geologically meaningful but essentially unpopulated site, into which the British will journey in order to have significant experiences of their own. In the twentieth century, influenced by Henry James, this literary construction of Europe becomes dominant. Confining the discussion here to male novelists, whose treatment of the subject manifests a marked interlinkage of characteristics and obsessions, beginning with the Edwardians and necessarily simplifying considerably (a book-length study would be required to tease out all the variations and evolutions of this narrative form), two types of twentieth-century British fiction of continental European travel can be isolated. In the first, a young, bourgeois, cultured, repressed, leisured and curious traveller is confronted with the cultural, spiritual, emotional and sexual challenges of the continent. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and A Room with a View (1908) are archetypal versions of a therapy narrative in which this traveller is awoken, even 'cured' of her/his psychological inhibitions by exposure to the sun, freedom and art of the continent, a healing which is costly, even traumatic, but presented as vital. In the second version of this narrative, much the same kind of traveller is, instead, menaced or engulfed by continental authoritarianism and the frighteningly anti-democratic. In fictions such as Childers' The Riddle of the Sands (1903) and Conrad's Under Western Eyes (1911) the British traveller is confronted with the violence and threat of the looming European despotic or the incipient or actual war imposed by the despotic; he or she will seek to resist, fight or flee the shadow of fascism and cruelty, but more often finds him/herself morally compromised by it. [End Page 241]

This schematic over-simplification of the plots of several dozen novels and stories by male British writers across the twentieth century nevertheless indicates a spectrum within which these narratives first position themselves and then, frequently, update. In many, especially interwar texts like Lawrence's Aaron's Rod (1922), and works by Isherwood and Greene which will be discussed later, the two types co-exist and blend into each other. In this paper I will study a late and particularly interesting evolution of this narrative form, in which the Holocaust and other horrors of Nazism are repeated over thirty years later in the shape of a compulsive British nightmare. To focus this analysis, which will eventually encompass texts from popular music and cinema as well as literature, I will explore in some detail Stephen Poliakoff's screenplay for the BBC television drama Caught on a Train (1980),1 which I take as emblematic of its form. Although Chris Allison believes that Peter, Poliakoff's protagonist, undertakes a 'journey, both physical and spiritual' leading to 'personal revelation',2 the text is, in truth, much closer to the fascistic narratives than to the therapy model, and problematically so. I shall argue that, by saturating itself with a reading of its own contemporary context while looking back self-consciously to certain texts from the 1930s and early 1940s, it creates and develops its own anachronistic dual-time scheme, in which its events seem, nightmarishly but systematically, to be occurring both in the present day and at the height of the Nazi past. Depicting the political, social and cultural crises of the 1970s, its references to and echoes of British narratives of continental travel and Central European historical events of the 1930s and 1940s create a dual time frame which I analyse as trauma, the half-controlled swamping of the present by the ghosts of the past, in such a way as to suggest a fusion of the two. However, this trauma appears to function, not within any specific character or even as E. Ann Kaplan's 'vicarious trauma',3 but on the level of the text itself. Poliakoff's text therefore fuses his own narrative dexterity, his...

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