Writing history

  Content:  

1.  Introduction  3

2.  Time and place  3

3.  Communicative and cultural memory  4

4.  Communicative memory in The Piano Lesson  6

4.1  Wining Boy and Cloetha  6

4.2  Wining Boy and the ghosts of the yellow dog  7

4.3  Crawley s death  8

4.4  The History of the Charles family  9

5.  Site of memory  10

6.  Conclusion  12

  Sources:  13

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1. Introduction

History is an issue of great meaning within the works of August Wilson. In this paper shall be analysed through which channels and with which methods the author transports not only the history of a family, but also the history of slavery interwoven with the experiences of the characters and their ancestors in the award winning novel The Piano Lesson. In this process of analysis we will find, that Wilson proposes a concept of memory that can be summed up with the term “kommunikatives Gedächtnis” which was coined by Jan and Aleida Assmann and further developed by Harald Welzer. For better understanding the term “communicative memory” will be used instead. In his play Wilson uses the method of storytelling. Through this we can see how the characters within the play communicate with each other and on one level transport communicative memory. But on the other level the reader becomes a silent listener participating in these conversations and in this role is able to read historical elements from the subtext of the stories told. In the last chapter August Wilson’s way of communicating memory will be compared to Toni Morrison’s approach in Site of Memory.

2. Time and place

What the reader finds in the first lines of the play is a short description of the setting. This short text tells about the Charles’ house and the people who live in it. Most of the description however is concerned with the piano. “What time or period is the setting for The Piano Lesson? That was the first question asked by the late great Chinese actor and director Ying Roucheng after he read the play in 1991.” 1 His confusion concerning the time in which the action of the play is set can be understood easily, because nothing in the secondary text informs the reader about the temporal conditions of the play. It is necessary to take a closer look at the primary text to find the hints Wilson gives to define the temporal situation. The most prominent of those hints can be found in Doaker’s story about the piano when he says, that his older brother Boy Charles “would have been fifty-seven if he had lived.

1 Felicia Hardison Londré, “A Piano and Its history: family and transcending family,” The Cambridge

Companion to August Wilson, ed. Christopher Bigsby (New York: CUP, 2007) p. 113.

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He died in 1911 when he was thirty-one years old.” 2 Subsequently the reader has to do the math. Knowing this, the play must take place in the year 1936 or 1937. That Wilson does not inform the reader initially can be seen as a way of creating a different way of looking at history than the traditional one. The reader has to “listen” to Doaker’s story to get information about the present time. This communicative way of transporting historical events will be dealt with in detail later on.

3. Communicative and cultural memory

What Welzer means with communicative memory must be seen in contrast to the technical term “kulturelles Gedächtnis/cultural memory”, also coined by Jan Assmann, and the modern view on human memory. The way in which humans remember and forget is not a singular one. Modern psychology and social science have determined several methods through which information is saved within the human mind. The first distinction that must be made is between sensory-, short term- and long-term memory. Sensory memory has only a capacity of few milliseconds and is responsible to retain certain stimuli within the sensing organ. The retina for example saves the information entering through the eye for about two milliseconds, so that this information can be transported to the brain even if the stimulus itself only lasted shorter. Short term memory can be seen as a limited buffer for memory items or chunks. It can hold about from six to eight entities but has a rapid decay. Only when these chunks are mentally repeated they can be kept over time. On this way and by linking the information to other existing memories, they can enter into long term memory, which is intended for saving information over a longer period and in a wider variety. These distinctions can be found in almost any introductory book about general psychology. But not only information like facts and data is saved in the long term memory but also emotions, feelings, procedures and episodes from an individual’s life. Jan Assmann defined his concept of cultural memory as:

Sammelbegriff für alles Wissen, das im spezifischen

Interaktionsrahmen einer Gesellschaft Handeln und Erleben steuert und

von Generation zu Generation zu wiederholten Einübung und

Einweisung ansteht. 3

2 August Wilson, The Piano Lesson (New York: Penguin Books, 1990) p. 45.

3 Jan Assmann, „Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität,“ Kultur und Gedächtnis, ed. J. Assmann, T.

Hölscher (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1988) p. 9.

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