Justin Pfefferle<\/p>\n
Accusation<\/i>
\nby Catherine Bush
\nFredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2013
\n355 pp., $32.95<\/p>\n
In his seminal book Representing Reality<\/i> (1991), documentary film theorist Bill Nichols outlines what he calls \u201cdiscourses of sobriety,\u201d structures of language and understanding that \u201cregard their relation to the real as direct, immediate, transparent\u201d (4).\u00a0 Wielding institutional \u2013 even legal \u2013 authority, sober discourses like those of journalism, jurisprudence, and documentary activate procedures that isolate truth and separate fact from fiction.\u00a0 Their special access to reality entails responsibilities and privileges: \u201cthrough them,\u201d Nichols writes, \u201cpower exerts itself. Through them, things are made to happen. They are the vehicles of domination and conscience, power and knowledge, desire and will\u201d (4).<\/p>\n
Discourses of sobriety rely upon and reiterate assumptions that Nichols, writing at the tail end of postmodernism, regards with suspicion.\u00a0 Objectivity, the Enlightenment ideal of dispassionate examination as a means for apprehending reality, has been deconstructed if not dismissed as a fallacy.\u00a0 Notions of singular, universal truths have been rejected in favour of polyglot truths, incoherent, mongrel, multiple realities.\u00a0 Human beings are story-telling animals: we narrate our worlds and our relationships to them from our own particular, limited points of view.\u00a0 Our narratives, whether fictional or non-fictional, reveal and conceal, illuminate and distort.\u00a0 All stories yield only partial truths.<\/p>\n
Catherine Bush puts several discourses of sobriety into collision in Accusation, a novel about the elusiveness of truth in a climate that is equally legible and illegible.\u00a0 These discourses, and the people who employ them, make their own claims upon reality.\u00a0 Together, they generate fragmentary pictures of a contorted, contortionist world.\u00a0 Sara, a journalist for a Toronto newspaper who writes about migration issues and migrant communities around the globe, arrives in Copenhagen, Denmark, at the beginning of the novel.\u00a0 There to attend a conference, she happens, one evening, upon a performance of Cirkus Mirak\u2014 a group of young performers based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, who tour and work under the direction of Raymond Renaud, a Canadian from Montreal.\u00a0 Juliet Levin, a former colleague of Sara\u2019s in Montreal who is currently making a documentary about the Circus, introduces her to Renaud.\u00a0 Out of nowhere, he asks her to drive him some five hours from Toronto to Montreal in the middle of the night.\u00a0 Inexplicably, Sara agrees.\u00a0 Before long, she tells this stranger the story of her \u201ctangled history in Montreal\u201d (59): that she was in a relationship that ended after she was accused of stealing a woman\u2019s wallet and using her credit cards; that she was charged and put on trial, let off \u2013 but not acquitted \u2013 due to lack of evidence.<\/p>\n
Sara\u2019s affinity toward Renaud intensifies several months later when she reads about an accusation that has been made against him.\u00a0 While performing at the Sydney Alternative Arts Festival, nine members of Cirkus Mirak \u2013 six boys and three girls \u2013 defected and applied for asylum in Australia, on the grounds that Renaud \u201cconsistently abused them\u201d (88) when they lived and worked under his care.\u00a0 The allegations destabilize Sara\u2019s position as a journalist: she wants to get to the bottom of the story, but she\u2019s inclined to give Renaud the benefit of the doubt, whether because of the intimacy that they shared in her car, or because his condition as un accus\u00e9 calls to mind her own ordeal.\u00a0 As someone who has been interpellated by the law (to use an Althusserian term), Sara knows something of what it is to be accused.\u00a0 Her past experience gives her insights into Renaud\u2019s present situation, even as it compromises her ability to seek the truth about his case as a neutral, impartial investigator.<\/p>\n
Although the two accusations differ in quality and kind, Sara can\u2019t help but conceive of Renaud within the prism of her own history and subjectivity.\u00a0 She resists the impulse \u201cto judge him, either him or his accusers, but him in particular because he was the accused and as yet only accused and in some small way she knew what this felt like\u201d (95).\u00a0 Empathy complicates discourses of sobriety by challenging boundaries of interior and exterior, self and other. \u00a0To empathize is to understand another as oneself, to identify with the experiences and emotions of other people as coextensive with one\u2019s own existential condition.\u00a0 Journalism makes clear the divide between reporter and reported; a conduit of information, the journalist removes herself from the story as a precondition for attaining truth without bias.\u00a0 Law, too, posits an uncomplicated binary between accuser and accused: it identifies guilt as something exterior to itself, beyond the limits of acceptance by the State.\u00a0 Sara, who internalizes the accusation made against Renaud as though it had been made against her, finds such binaries impossible to maintain.\u00a0 She\u2019s necessarily implicated, and thus unable to separate herself from the story of Cirkus Mirak.<\/p>\n
Documentary, the most fraught of sober discourses, underscores epistemological questions of knowability and unknowability that Bush challenges her reader to consider.\u00a0 Comprised of images, documentaries mediate reality: they fashion as much as they record.\u00a0 Upon learning of the accusation against Renaud, Juliet abandons her documentary project and gives her unedited material to Sara, to whom \u201cthe footage felt real because it was raw\u201d (101).\u00a0 In many ways, of course, the footage is real: as imprints of bodies and things in time and space, the images have direct relationships to the real.\u00a0 As Susan Sontag puts it: they \u201cdo not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality\u201d (On Photography<\/i> 4).\u00a0 Nevertheless, they invite interpretation, signifying differently to different viewers at different times.\u00a0 Sara finds one image \u2013 a photograph of a young boy sitting on Renaud\u2019s lap \u2013 especially ambiguous.\u00a0 If \u201cphotographs furnish evidence\u201d (Sontag 5), then evidence of what?\u00a0 Does the image refer to the appropriate intimacy between a child and a man whom he has adopted as a father? \u00a0Or to the disturbing bond between a victim and his abuser, a person entrusted to protect him?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In Accusation<\/i>, Bush explores the ethical and philosophical quandaries that arise in questions of innocence and guilt.\u00a0 A novel in which \u201cnothing is certain\u201d (87), it resists passing judgement and avoids supplying the reader with a final, authoritative account of what really happened between Raymond Renaud and his group of circus performers.\u00a0 It\u2019s worth asking whether or not Accusation makes a fetish of its own commitment to uncertainty.\u00a0 As Nichols writes: \u201cour access to historical reality may only be by means of representations,\u201d but this does not preclude \u201cthe persistence of history as a reality with which we must contend\u201d (7).\u00a0 That our knowledge about the world is limited, mediated, or otherwise fragmentary isn\u2019t to say that there\u2019s no knowledge to be had, nor is it to say that all truths evade equally.\u00a0 The challenge of postmodernism (is it now post-postmodernism?) is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater: to acknowledge the constructedness of our apprehensions of reality while agreeing that the real remains a category worth troubling over.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fiction Review Justin Pfefferle Accusation by Catherine Bush Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2013 355 pp., $32.95 In his seminal book Representing Reality (1991), documentary film theorist Bill Nichols outlines what he calls \u201cdiscourses of sobriety,\u201d structures of language and understanding that \u201cregard their relation to the real as direct, immediate, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1857,"parent":93,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1491","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1491"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1981,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1491\/revisions\/1981"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}