The Promise and the Apology: Speech-Acts, Ethics, and Reading in Mavis Gallant's "The Pegnitz Junction"

novella The Pegnitz Junction, a favorite among Mavis Gallant's critics, is also considered her most complex and challenging piece of writing (Schaub 27; Wilkshire 891). Set in post-Second World War Germany, text is produced from Gallant's position as an interested witness. A Canadian reporter during war, Gallant went on to live for rest of her life in Europe, where she wrote a number of works that attempted to come to terms with this traumatic event. Gallant can thus be considered to function as what Ann Kaplan has described as an embodied translator (104), where her writing participates in an of witnessing (122). This important practice of witnessing, Kaplan argues, implies a larger ethical framework that has to do with public recognition of atrocities (122). Gallant's narrative investigates issues of memory, storytelling, writing, reading, speech, and action, and her brilliance lies in her ability to examine issues of language in extremely nuanced ways as well as to engage in analyses in many registers simultaneously, where her technical abilities serve to develop themes of her story. Motivated by a desire not to look at large objective historical or political structures for answers about why Nazi Germany happened but instead to look close up in terms of fascism's small possibilities in (qtd. in Brandt 31), Gallant felt that it was in every living where the origin of worm--the worm that destroyed would be found (qtd. in Schaub 22). Karen Smythe argues that Gallant's stories approach ... an anagnoristic understanding of human potential for inhumane behavior, and of necessity of remembering ethically, so that extremes of sentimentality and irresponsible forgetting--both of which allow evasion of responsibility for past--are condemned (90). At its most basic level, story follows journey of protagonist, a young German woman named Christine, who accompanies her lover, Herbert, and his son little Bert to Paris and then back to Germany. Christine is engaged to marry another man, a theology student, and throughout narrative tries to decide between her two suitors. three travelers depart from a hotel in Paris and embark on a number of train journeys in order to return home; story ends with them still in transit and with characters all in a state of limbo. It is significant that in a narrative that examines such moral themes, Gallant chooses structure of four-fold allegory to allow her to address larger and world historical issues while focusing on every day aspects in characters' lives. Rather than particular being subsumed into some larger symbolism, allegory allows her to engage these other levels where significance of each level remains intact. voyage thus operates at a literal level as a journey through France and Germany; at typological level looking back at past and linking train journeys to those that took Jewish people to death camps in Nazi Germany; at moral level, as questioning of how one should act in present; and, finally, at teleological level, which presents future journey of German people and humanity in general as a question mark, particularly in terms of generations born after war. Yet Gallant's use of allegory is anything but morally programmatic or judgmental. She refuses both binary thinking and moral finger-pointing and instead emphasizes an ethics of listening, reading, rereading, reviewing, and understanding past, even as we realize that any tellings and understandings are going to be selective and limited. In 1940s, Gallant was asked in her capacity as a reporter to write captions to accompany first pictures that were issued of concentration camps. At time, she argued that pictures should speak for themselves, effectively counseling silence and disagreeing with her editors, who wanted something sensationalist (Hancock 39). …

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