SOURCE: Saalmann, Dieter. “Joyce Carol Oates: ‘Speak to Me in Berliner,’ or Deconstructing the Logocentric Closure in East-West Relations.” Studies in Short Fiction 27, no. 1 (winter 1990): 21-34.

It was a time of platitudes. …

—Joyce Carol Oates, “Détente”

In Joyce Carol Oates' stories “Ich bin ein Berliner” and “Our Wall,” the Berlin Wall functions as the objective symbol of the tragically divided human psyche. In the latter narrative, the specificity of the East-West barrier is elevated to encompass the philosophical underpinnings of all divides that constrict the mind. In both prose texts, the rigorous assessment of the historical facts underlying Berlin's special status, namely, its allied administrative regimen, is an impressive and convincing concretization of the principle of deconstruction.

In summary fashion, Oates' argument goes as follows: neither East nor West Berlin recognize each other's full legitimacy—the West by scrupulously adhering to the provisions of the Four Power Agreement, with the East blithely ignoring these arrangements. As a result, both sides engage, willy-nilly, in the act of deconstructing their own logocentric reasoning. Thus understood, the Wall has no presence; its foregroundedness is being denied by the unimpeded access of the Allied Forces to the antagonist's ideological sphere of influence. As an extension of the “non-being” of the Wall, East Berlin and West Berlin do not have a presence either. At the same time, the presumed entity of Berlin as an overarching concept does likewise not exist in an unambiguous sense. “Greater Berlin,” the author avers, is “a matter of facts that cannot contend with its presence.”¹ In consequence, the Allies, by virtue of their mutually agreed upon obviation of the urban givens—West Berlin, East Berlin—do, nolens, volens, reaffirm the idea of an all-encompassing construct of sorts, but equally sous rature, or under erasure, as Derrida would have it: Berlin. Such an approach bestows the aura of timelessness on the Wall. It dehistoricizes the edifice. In deconstructive terms, it has been displaced, like its surrounding territory, but not actually obliterated: Berlin Wall. It is, therefore, revealed as a phenomenon without a language of its own to bestow meaning, except for the idiom of postponed existence and deferral of final certitude: “Speak to me in Berliner,” as the author articulates the current reality of the former capital of the German Reich by postulating its nature in terms of an ongoing discourse of differences (106-07). The two polities that share the designation “Berlin” are, fundamentally, semiotic, rather than semantic, notions subject to indefinite suspension. “Berliner,” then, is a linguistic concept that embodies the presumed exclusiveness and putatively determinate significations of the two Berlin entities, including the Wall, and the whole East-West constellation, as a system of incessantly changing signs.

It is the West German novelist and essayist Peter Schneider, who, in his treatise The Wall Jumper, emphasizes the fact that in the post-World War II era, “German” is valid solely in reference to language.² This claim needs to be revised in the light of Oates' findings regarding the idiom of “Berliner.” Schneider tends to discount the metaphysical fallacy that debases German as a verbal medium. He fails to take into account that it incorporates the logocentric constraints imposed on it by capitalism and socialism alike. Hence, there exist only the ideologically preconceived versions of “German.” As an all-inclusive idea, it has been dislodged by antinomical ideational appropriation. It can, therefore, be conceived merely as a ceaseless movement of coetaneous dislocation and reconstitution: German. To paraphrase Oates, each logocentric version of German must be taken separately; it is comprehensible only within the restrictive sphere of its particular pre-determination. Thus, the contrarieties afflicting both Germanys preclude a holistic notion of the German language, as propagated by Schneider. It is Oates' sovereign use of impeccable and incontrovertible logic that denounces the ideological absolutism on either side of the Iron Curtain. In this way, she illuminates the common landscape of illogicality and irrationalism that links the opposing camps.

For Oates, history, too, needs to be deconstructed in order to fight the collective amnesia of Berliners regarding the past. As she writes in “Ich bin ein Berliner,”

Berlin was reduced to rubble and rubble has no memory so you cannot expect a poignant sense of history: and in any case does history exist? Everyone appears to have been born after 30 April 1945. If not, if they are older folk, they certainly served courageously in the Resistance; they may have been wounded, imprisoned, tortured—the usual. … They are patriotic. If they want the two Germanys united it is only in the interest of world peace, a bulwark, as the saying goes, against the Enemy.

(109)

The residents of this city—and, by implication, of the two German republics—are engaged, it seems, in a “deconstructive” practice of their own by disavowing any responsibility for what transpired in the pre-1945 epoch. These bygone years are buried under rhetorical clichés such as “resistance” and the illegitimacy of its universal claim. The present is reduced to cold-war stereotypes—e.g., the purposed role of West Berlin and the Federal Republic as beacons of democracy confronting the Feindbilder, or adversarial images of the German Democratic Republic: “‘The Wall’ is rarely used,” the narrator of “Our Wall” explains; “The expression over there is fairly frequent, as in (to a naughty child): If you don't behave I'll send you over there. (Over where? I once asked my mother boldly. Over where? Where?—You'll see over where, my mother said, slapping my face. Her breath came quick and hard; her own cheeks were burning.)”³

Such logocentrism accounts for the “claustrophobic atmosphere” that bedevils East-West relations, not only in physical, but more importantly, in notional terms. To wit: the rambling discourse of the State Department official in “Ich bin ein Berliner.” His breathless effusions impregnated with hackneyed terminology are dramatized and impressed upon the reader typographically by the complete absence of punctuation:

we are devoted to Berlin it is a very special city it is a phenomenon unparalleled in diplomatic history a stateless city a “Western” city in “East Europe” under our protection you must recall John F. Kennedy's famous words I am a Berliner in the very geography of totalitarianism the glittering city survives the jewel afloat upon the sea of darkness survives and flourishes under our protection for it will not be attacked by the Enemy an armed attack on Berlin is precisely the same as an armed attack on Chicago or New York or Washington. …

(108-109)

This kind of rhetorical imperviousness perverts the historical process itself. Such vacuous terminology adheres to the same preceptual dogmatism that is anathema to the deconstructive urge to directly confront and dislodge the Procrustean bed of ideological ritual and conformity. History is a continuous movement of variegated directions. Hence, the respite from German history sought by the American diplomat betrays a propensity for self-delusion. The annals of human activities, it must be noted, are not under the spell of supposedly unfathomable forces, as is so often proclaimed, but the product of personal initiative: “History”—Oates reiterates in “Ich bin ein Berliner” what should be self-evident—“cannot imitate itself without human participation” (110). Like the Wall, it is neither “finitude” nor an “absolute end,” but a constantly evolving discourse whose text it behooves us to decipher (110).

Oates suggests that traveling from West Berlin to the Federal Republic is, in a sense, tantamount to moving in an “easterly” direction because of the intervening GDR territory. Such a deconstructive attack on conceptual centrism undergirds the belief that “fact” need not be identical with “truth.” The resultant dislodging of terminological certainty relativizes the established precepts. It recalls Robert Frost's effort to find an answer to the query as to whether a human-made barrier “walls in” or “walls out.”⁴ It is the same inclusionary, as well as exclusionary, predicament that is ascribed to the Berlin Wall and its dual effect on the adjacent populations in “Our Wall”: “There is a paradise beyond The Wall in which men and women live ‘freely.’ (Though of course they must be bound—how could they fail to be?—by The Wall, just as we are. Perhaps it is somehow worse for them because our Wall surrounds them)” (238).

For Oates, the East-West boundary line in Berlin suggests a “Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde” configuration, a political trivialization of this ancient yearning for transubstantiation. In this sense, the Wall represents the Faustian myth of the two souls in the German breast, now reincarnated in two disparate bodies politic. German-German history is the story of the doppelgänger, with one country seeing itself continually mirrored in the other's image, thereby being forced into an endless confrontation with its destiny. Thus, the twain are compelled, because of self-inflicted historical circumstance, as well as intellectual tradition, to meet again and again, in accordance with the law of ineluctability. The ontological message of being a “Berliner,” then, intimates what seems to be an irreparably discontinuous state of existence.

As for Oates' deconstructive mindset, its most poignant manifestation is the raison d'être for the narrator's journey to West Berlin in “Ich bin ein Berliner.” The ostensible reason is to recover the brother's body after the young American has fallen victim to his unbridled infatuation with the East-West conflict in the very heart of the ideological controversy. Nonetheless, what counts, ultimately, is the how of his death, in congruence with the Derridean credo, rather than the why, however logical its primacy may appear. More central to the task at hand are the internal dynamics that constitute the Wall and that explain the brother's perdition. In view of such prioritizing, the visitor's own ideological motivation, or logocentric doctrine, must recede into the background. Any attempt to dwell extensively on the justification for the Wall and the human sacrifice it has demanded would bestow too much credence on the metaphysics behind its existence. As Oates explains in “Our Wall”: “why was The Wall constructed?” “But no one understands [the] question.” “No one, not even our oldest citizen, understands. Each of the … words, taken singly, is comprehensible; but the question in its entirety is incomprehensible. … Why was The Wall constructed?” (233-34). The individual word represents the pre-logocentric phase, whereas the sentence as a whole embodies the result of ideational encrustration. As a consequence, metaphysical obstruction is taken for granted, thanks to the seductive convenience of an all-too-facile submission to canonical rhetoric: “It is far easier—most of us find it easier—to assume that The Wall is eternal, that it ever was and ever shall be. And that the Forbidden Zone (which of course none of us has ever seen) is eternal too” (234). Hence, such a submissive attitude of unquestioning acceptance of the ideological status quo is bound to inhibit human inquisitiveness.

With respect to the Berlin Wall, Peter Schneider accentuates its invisible presence, as well as the difficulty of restoring its conspicuousness.⁵ It is the same observation that Oates makes in “Our Wall”: “The largest percentage of the population … does not ‘see’ the wall at all—that is, literally” (236). Thus understood, the structure has surrendered its distinctiveness, except for its myth-generating capacity, which diminishes its physical impact. For Schneider, this vanishing act is highlighted by the fact that the artificial Berlin Wall of a movie set commands a greater corporeal awareness than its real-life counterpart. In fact, the original “composition” has evolved into “a work of art” (236) in its own right; it has become the very incarnation of “Berlinart,” an exploration of the world of graffiti creations. It is thus in the Berlin Wall that the common denominator of “artistic” and “artificial” has found an objective correlative. It advocates a revisionary perception of history, not as the inescapable result of unalterable laws of a transpersonal origin, but as an uninterrupted sequence of unique events. Such a view mobilizes the creative attributes of the artistic endeavor for historical purposes in order to countervail the putatively inexorable course of history and the fatalistic attitude it entails. In aesthetic terms, the author, as artist of the word, reshapes the reality of the Berlin Wall through the transformational power of the imagination.

Creativity is synonymous with the visionary faculty. Thus, it is quite valid to assert that “dream precedes history in Oates' vision.”⁶ The author herself concurs: “In dreams, the most shameful and turbulent of dreams,” writes Oates in “Our Wall,” “where one is clambering up The Wall … in dreams we scale The Wall nightly, and keep our secrets to ourselves” (240-41). The Berlin Wall, in Oates' view, is made up of a multitude of metamorphic layers of ideations. Inured to logocentric intimidation, she senses the boundary's historicity, an amalgam of old and new ideological tissues. Highly attuned to the relationship of the Great Divide to art, she couches her description in aesthetic language of a distinctly nightmarish quality. Seen from a strictly deconstructive vantage point, constitution and notional dissolution of the structure, its past and present conjoin in a moment of heightened awareness and attendant ontological precariousness. In sum, the Berlin Wall, for Oates, incarnates the entelechy of individualization and its resistance to the societal forces that impinge on its prerogatives.

It is thus in the realm of the imagination that the author sees the most promising potential for surmounting the seemingly irreconcilable cleavage between East and West: “A very strange tale, too wild to be credible, about a family in a balloon who drifted across The Wall. Seven people including a baby. Romantic but implausible. … Wouldn't a large balloon make an irresistible target?” (241). Since the event in question is based on an actual incident, it emerges that the alleged irrationalism of such an action transcends the supposed rationality supporting the Wall. In this sense, the success of a balloon flight signals the triumph of the putatively romantic, i.e., irreal, over a concrete phenomenon. Thus, the fictitious exploration of the imaginative potential of the human mind exposes so-called sober facticity as a thoroughly fantastic reality. Factuality and dream coalesce in the romantic sphere of illimited imagining.

In her story “Crossing the Border,” Oates describes the American-Canadian boundary as follows: “The border between two nations is always indicated by broken but definite lines, to indicate that it is not quite real in any physical sense but very real in a metaphysical sense: so nature surrenders to politics, as mythology surrenders to physiology.”⁷ Regarding the Berlin Wall, the situation is considerably more complex. On western maps, as observed by Oates, it usually appears as a deliberately incomplete demarcation to signal ideological opposition to the concreteness of this “wall of shame.” The East resorts to the same rhetoric of logocentric occlusion by marking what it prefers to call its “antifascist protective wall” in the shape of a solid line. Deconstructively, the edifice defies depiction in either fashion. “Definite” and “indefinite” extensions are, ultimately, irrelevant criteria. The true character of the Wall, as Oates recognizes in “Ich bin ein Berliner,” is the fluidity of its meaning: “What is the Wall but a dotted line on my tourist map?” she opines in this context; “It's even difficult to locate that dotted line, tiny pale blue dots, aswim in a typographical picnic of livelier colors” (101). Such thinking negates dualistic reasoning through the deferring process of differing-differentiating with respect to the antinomical ideological tenets. The “metaphysical sense” that Oates discerns in the Canadian border is, therefore, identical with the notion of “metaphysics” invoked by Derrida in denouncing the nefarious consequences of linguistic totalization.

In view of these insights, it can be asserted that “Our Wall” fulfills substantially more than solely a “contrapuntal” role vis-à-vis “Ich bin ein Berliner.”⁸ In addition to its obvious function as a narrative counterpoint, “Our Wall” is, first and foremost, a sustained allegorical elaboration and deepening of its companion piece. Oates' use of allegory, adumbrated in “Ich bin ein Berliner,” turns the Wall into a more comprehensive metaphor. The allegory, by definition a figure of rhetoric that conveys a meaning other than, and in addition to, the literal significance, reaches beyond the realism of the Wall to elucidate the universal implications of all obstacles bifurcating human consciousness, “the wall in our heads,” to quote Schneider's succinct assessment of the contemporary world. In this context, Oates, too, avers in a similar vein in “Ich bin ein Berliner”: “The Wall is, by the sleight-of-hand of logic, all walls” (110; see also 109). In reality, however, it is more than a simple case of prestidigitation involving the rational faculties. It is decidedly not the magic, i.e., the implausibility of reasoning, but its natural, in other words, its consequential and compelling, rather than supernatural, attributes that extend the import of the Wall to the human domain as a whole. This given—namely, “the Wall = the wall”—thus emerges as a constitutive, definitely not as a fortuitous, comparison. It reaffirms the prejudicial disposition as being endemic to humanity's nature. Allegorical representation transcends the merely analogous, inasmuch as it appeals to the power of deconstructive imagination. Political allegory in particular, it should be noted, uncovers and conceals at the same time. It thereby disarticulates the hegemonic equation “West = good”-“East = bad” that precipitated the erection of the Berlin Wall in the first place.

Oates actively engages the reader in the constitution of the text. By necessitating a perennial reevaluation of the asseverations implicit in the verbal material, she forces the recipient of her linguistic signals to duplicate the process of concurrently taking apart and rebuilding what is unfolding in her discourse. In this way, she shifts the focus of her narrative, as outlined earlier, from content-based categories—the why—toward the dynamic pattern of relationships—the how. The socio-political polarities that have begotten the Wall, but whose impact reaches far beyond the parameters of Greater Berlin, are not aufgehoben, or sublated, in the Hegelian sense of the word. Instead, the entire East-West conflict is merely “erased,” as understood by Derrida, in order to do justice to the multiplicity of history's enduring movement of (re)affirmation and denial, a “ceaselessly” operating “mechanism …” (107).

“The explanation is—the Wall” (109). Oates' narrative approach in “Ich bin ein Berliner” extends the concept of the textual field to the Berlin Wall itself because it is viewed as the inevitable consequence of a rhetorical operation. The very existence of the structure, as we have had occasion to observe, is engendered by German-German interaction and required by both systems as a matter of political convenience to ensure the survival of these independent logocentric entities. In a genuinely deconstructive manner, however, this assumption is instantly called into question by Oates, to the extent that it only “appears” to be a matter of ideological expediency (110). She thus advocates the discourse of oppositions as against the idée fixe of identity. In order to escape the prison house of doctrinaire fictions, she adheres to the politics of referentiality. The goal is to liberate the spirit of the children allegedly buried in the Wall. Their voices attest to the truth that the edifice is more than just “The Wall,” i.e., the entombed presence of the victims of the dichotomous East-West metaphysics it incarnates. These “faint” and “incredulous” voices of childhood have a paradigmatic function. They evince ideational innocuousness, the proverbial blank page that is the human mind in its infancy unencumbered by pre-established harmonies. Hence, the Berlin Wall is a “living memorial” of German-German relations in the potentially regenerative meaning of the term. As such, it does indeed embody the peril of death, but it also contains the promise of survival: “for the Wall is Death”; “the Wall is Life” (110).

The key motif in “Our Wall” is the notion of a “Day of Grace” when the obstruction may be scaled with impunity. The choice of a terminology imbued with religious, i.e., metaphysical, connotations makes this an especially effective means of deconstructive technique to displace the supposedly “holy writ” that is the Wall. The “Day of Absolution,” to be sure, functions as a symbol of atonement for logocentric sins. At the same time, the unpredictability of this event accords with the undecidability inherent in the principle of what Derrida calls différance, to put it another way, a pattern of speech that differs while postponing a secure grasp of its meaning. Alas, this exorcism of what Schneider in The Wall Jumper calls the “Church Latin of East and West” (127) is susceptible to unwarranted logocentric manipulation: “It may be claimed,” Oates writes in “Our Wall,” “that a Day of Grace has been announced for a certain area—a privileged area—and not for another” (234). Suchlike rumors and speculation are indicative of the kind of ideational appropriation that leads to a veritable fascination with the ideal of dispensation from the monopolyzing pressures of ideology. The ensuing paralyzing effect can be characterized as logocentric closure in reverse: “certain obsessed and rather pathetic individuals who can speak of nothing else (though—of course—these are the very individuals who would never dream of trying to scale The Wall)” (235).

The aporetic language used throughout the stories—“it is said,” “it is rumored,” “I surmise,” “it is believed,” “it appears,” “evidently,” “suspicion,” “perhaps”—confirms the principle of deconstructive indeterminacy as the guiding axiom of this prose. Concomitantly, the author of “Our Wall” conjures up the utopian vision of a better future: “For we are, as our historians have noted, a hopeful people” (235). However, her optimistic appraisal is immediately countermanded in concordance with the stringent ethos of disbelief germane to post-structuralist thinking: “To the east, to the west?—difficult to judge. … What is there to say?” (236). Once again, the deconstructive effort to destabilize the ontology of the projected world points to the fact that matter—e.g., the Berlin Wall—is the means, not the object, of significance. Oates' artistic creed is based on the assumption that ultimate truth must elude human percipience. Only the intrinsic operations of language are accessible to the inquiring mind. This, needless to say, is tantamount to conceding the primacy of skepticism over predestined knowledge. Such textual agnosticism counteracts the menace of totalitarian hermeneutics. It does not condone withdrawal from political responsibility and subversion of commitment at all, though. On the contrary, the author's stance represents peremptorily a linguistic aporia. Its intent is to purge language—and, in consequence, the mental landscape—of all notional contamination in order to create a tabula rasa of idiom and mind. This, then, sets the stage for broaching the realm of politics from an unbiased perspective of genuine openness. It permits an authentic restructuring of ensconsed canons.

As for the death of his younger brother at the hands of East German border guards, the narrator of “Ich bin ein Berliner” proffers the following observation: “Identification?—gone. He had thrown away his passport. … He had thrown away being American, it seems, preparatory to throwing away being human, preparatory to throwing away being alive. I hate him for that logic” (107). This is also the logic of deconstructive rationalization carried to its ultimate conclusion. The inexorable movement from the specific to the general, i.e., allegorical, from presumed identity to nonentity, highlights the extreme consequence of allegory as an emblem of physical extinction. The strictly rhetorical process of dispossessing established verities has thus taken a profoundly “morbid,” indeed destructive turn. Like the concepts “East” and “West,” life itself, for the deceased brother, is primarily a state of mind, a quintessentially logocentric phenomenon. As such, it, too, is subject to the same process of not only displacing, but actually invalidating existential meaningfulness, a deferral of signification clearly gone awry: “Who can know,” the narrative voice initiates its ontological inquiry, “who can be sure of these things?—premonitions—anticipating suicide—death?” (98). In the end, even the act of dying, be it of the personal or general variety—“that particular death … some death … someone's death”—needs to be divested of its metaphysical import (98). In a related vein, the propensity of West Germans for submerging their Germanness in a universal milieu—“They are Americans at heart”—is, in essence, a comparable attempt to eschew the burdensome idealist legacy of history (109).

The historical precedent for the brother's sacrifice on the ideological boundary line was set by Peter Fechter, killed on August 17, 1962. (See “Ich bin ein Berliner,” 102; see also “Our Wall,” 240.) His death, like the demise of the fictitious persona, must be desacrilized. The martyred youth, an image akin to the victimization that attaches to the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group in the Federal Republic, has become a propaganda tool for the West. The original purity of his idealism has degenerated into logocentric petrification. Oates writes in “Ich bin ein Berliner”: “He was … allowed to bleed to death for a long, a very long, a famously long time.” “He is bleeding to death still: you can see the snaky black blood on the pavement. Propaganda hero. … Granted you die only once: but how long does it take?” (102; see also 105). Thus, the idea of freedom has deteriorated into an unwholesome obsession, not only on the part of the principal actors, but also with regard to posterity. Such a charge can likewise be leveled against the reporting “I” which is deeply entangled in this web of metaphysical obfuscation. In this sense, German history, from the incipient days of Berlin in the thirteenth century to the present, has become a single totalizing gesture of putatively unimpeachable certainties. The task confronting the narrator now is to de-center such institutionalized privilegings. In accordance with the deconstructive mode, the proclaimed mimetic pretense—“I am reporting what I see and failing to alter a syllable”—is instantaneously canceled by the aporetical modalities of the narration: “It is America. But no it is Berlin. West Berlin. Germany. But no it is America. No? Yes?” (100); “ruddy thug-faces cruising in their Mercedes, pigs' snouts, small blinking beady eyes, but I am being unfair, am I being unfair?” (102). “Morbidity,” a key term in Oates' argument against the proselytizing penchant of odeological obscurantism, is, therefore, synonymous with Derrida's seminal notion of logocentrism. Thus, the pained sounds of the dying Peter Fechter in “Our Wall”—“A high faint voice. An incredulous voice. Not a voice I recognize”—have been completely deconstructed (240). The narrator's refusal to acknowledge any familiarity with them implies the categorical denial of the ideational prerogatives claimed by the youth's fate. In the same manner, even the “I's” next of kin, after sacrificing himself for whatever ideological cause he may have championed, falls victim to this procedure of rigorous de-mythologizing: “who am I,” the narrator of “Ich bin ein Berliner” declares, “pretending to be a younger brother of the deceased … ?” (98). “I don't have any brother, I shouted,” says the narrator of “Our Wall” (240). The true “enemy,” then, is neither East nor West, but instead the “Forbidden Zone” of logocentric closure in which all the warring parties are condemned to reside (233).

“To caress—just once—the blank face of The Wall. To get that close. To lay your hands upon it. Just once! … and being riddled by the guards' bullets at the same time (for death too, at such a time, in such a manner, would be exquisite)” (240-41). The experience of dying is described in terms that suggest death to be a thoroughly aestheticized, in effect, sensuous experience, with almost voluptuous overtones bordering on the sadistic. It proffers a sensation that skirts the macabre: “The Wall, where small yellow butterflies impale themselves upon the barbed wire. … A delirium that must be love …” (241). It is precisely the Wall's almost pleasurable allurement that provides an explanation for the brother's sacrificial offering of himself, for his having been captivated by, and truly enamored with, the enigma of life and death, as enunciated in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It, therefore, comes as no surprise that this work has held a well-nigh morbid interest for the young American. “The aim of all life is death”—this is the very Freudian tenet of unrelieved exclusionism and contrariety that the narrator's deconstructive stance seeks to undo. Her unswervingly skeptical outlook posits the absence of any teleological finality attending textual representation. To wit: references to focal points of terminological authority such as Checkpoint Charlie de-face the same mythical veneer, or mask of meaning, that encumbers the two states' mutual perceptions as unverifiable hypotheses. In Oates' view, even the fact of death, the highest expression of antithesis and finitude, represents, in actuality, nothing but the fallacy of premature closure. In this sense, the Berlin Wall, it has been observed, is indeed a sort of reality check. The German-German product functions as “a kind of hologram, an endlessly defracting set of images. …”⁹ The Wall's displacing characteristics accentuate its deconstructive effect, in contradistinction to the refracting, or mimetic, impact of positively embodied verity. The déplacement of this fissure alleviates the historically conditioned sense of claustrophobia that continues to haunt what is nowadays a two-track German mind. Demythologizing the engrossing structure, in turn, defuses the inclination of the German language to luxuriate in the perceived isolation afflicting the two German republics.

The story “Ich bin ein Berliner” concludes with an “old legend” set in the Bavarian Alps during the epoch of the Holy Roman Empire. By historicizing the question of liberty versus bondage—“Once upon a time …”—Oates imbues her argument with a mythical quality of an atemporal nature. It provides the proclaimed anteriority of the Wall—“Long before many of us were born,” reads the first sentence of “Our Wall,” “The Wall was”—not only with the patina of yore, but also with the legitimizing force of the past (233; see also 241). The parable-like narrative gives credence to the concept of a relational universe that re-evaluates the traditionally antinomical view of life and death. In this sphere of relative values, the idea of freedom is equated with the possibility of destruction, whereas imprisonment guarantees a life of sorts, however restrictive it may be. Thus, incarceration is tantamount to existence, while independence is identified with non-being. The putatively unreal ambience of “Ich bin ein Berliner” with its reversal of conventional criteria makes the irreality of contemporary German-German affairs even more convincing. The aperture in the wall of the castle tower, an apparent means of escape, causes an obsessive concern with this supposed window on a world that presumably transcends closure, but beyond which the prisoner cannot see. To be sure, such fascination with the thought of escaping from the dungeon must be viewed as a form of logocentric closure. Yet the lesson to be learned at the same time is to persevere in an indefatigable and intrepid effort to improve the human condition, irrespective of the unpredictable, if ineluctable nature of such a quest. The legend, needless to say, is a less-than-veiled analogy to German-German relations. The tower, in this context, functions as the paradigmatic representation of a city and nation rent asunder by the Great Divide. The indeterminacy factor in this historical field of textuality, as in the case of its present-day equivalent, is of such magnitude that the narrative process un-projects its own allegorical purpose. The final comments in “Ich bin ein Berliner,” returning to the present, reinforce the iterative and skeptical nature of the creative modalities underlying Oates' deconstructive method: “Unless Rudi, or one of the others, is telling me lies. Unless they are confusing me with someone else” (112; my emphasis). This “tireless research” espoused by the author is the hermeneutic imperative; it is itself subject to the epistemological uncertainty principle, as espoused by Heisenberg in 1927. “Absolute truth,” Oates concludes in “Our Wall,” “is impossible to come by …” (238). In this sense, then, the Berlin Wall indeed is, and is not, the Berlin Wall. To put it differently, it concomitantly eliminates and rewrites itself against a richly endowed background of historical antecedents.

The axiom of undecidability symptomatic of the deconstructive posture is unmistakably enunciated in the reference by the narrator of “Our Wall” to “the interminable month of August” (237). The Berlin Wall—built on August 13, 1961—has evolved into a factor of indefinite duration in intra-German contacts. Its captivating impact testifies to the power of logocentric petrification and spellbinding metaphysics:

The Wall: which stretches out forever. Mesmerizing and boring and beautiful, so beautiful! … our Wall! … Gray concrete. Miles. Years. A lifetime. An eternity. … At peace. So beautiful. … The Wall is absolutely motionless … one cannot imagine a time when it was not. … I want to sit for long … mesmerizing hours. … I am at peace, gazing at The Wall. Its wonderful sameness, its mysterious strength. … I am at peace here. … I am content to live my life on this side.

(237-38)

Nonetheless, the critical observer does not fail to perceive the rain that has erased the contours of the Wall. Such trenchant perception establishes, even in a physiological sense, the non-presence of the edifice, however ephemeral its obliteration may be. It complements the boundary's ideational non-existence, as noted by Schneider. As a result, Oates reiterates in “Our Wall” her quintessentially de-centering stance: “My own theory? I have none. I think only of The Wall. The fact of The Wall, which settles so massively in the mind. The Wall exists to be scaled, like all walls: it is the most exquisite of temptations. The Wall poses the question—How long can you resist?”—i.e., defy the irrepressible lure of narrative subversion (239). This interrogative disposition invites a dispassionate reappraisal of the Wall's raison d'être. “I have never seen The Wall desecrated” (239). Surrounded by an aura of sanctity, the border has become a religious faith, in fact, an ideological icon to be deprived of its stifling metaphysical halo. The same can be said of the Mercedes-Benz star atop a building in West Berlin in “Ich bin ein Berliner”: “A sacred vision beamed over the Wall into the shadowy East” (100). The gospel of capitalism incarnate must also be disenfranchised in order to uncover the treacherous nature of its pseudo religious message.

This can be accomplished through an intense visual examination of the Wall's intrinsic properties: “So few of my fellow citizens ‘see’ The Wall at all,” Oates remarks deploringly in “Our Wall” (240). Such a deconstituting vision, then, requires the ability to see through the sham of ideological presuppositions that form the very essence of the dividing line. Trenchant observation, however, is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, a searching analysis reveals the enticing nature of logocentric pretense: “The Wall, in the midday sun, appears to show a certain benevolent aspect. If you stare for a very long time, your eyes held open wide, this benevolence becomes obvious” (240). By the same token, undue curiosity may also invite retaliatory action on the part of those responsible for the metaphysical obstructionism: “Of course there are lurid tales: men and even women shot down and dragged away and never heard of again, and never spoken of again. Because they stared too hard at The Wall. Might have seemed to be studying it, memorizing it. Adoring it” (241). Yet, critical “adoration” of the structure can also expose almost invisible chinks in its conceptual armor, thus setting the stage for desanctifying the object of “theological” veneration: “For the first time I can see fine cracks in The Wall …” (241). By cleansing the impediment of its preordained truths, the author initiates the process of turning it, once again, into a pristine presence, i.e., untainted by predetermined certitudes, a pure sign, as it were. In this primordial sense, objects, like the Berlin Wall, “are mere facts. They point toward nothing beyond themselves,” to put it differently, their being resides solely in their innate value system (239). Any attempt to foist prior notions on them would mean a violation of their essential “thingness,” as Rilke would have it. It stands to reason, though, that the entrenched position of metaphysical totalization, as attested to, for example, by the admittedly remote threat of secret pan-German dreams to reconquer the world as “Germany's” supposed “destiny,” must be accepted as a given (241). Thus, even the appearance of the first signs of erosion in the East-West schism does not obviate the continuous need for countermeasures to weaken the repressive ambience of notional hegemony: “long before you were born The Wall was, and forever will The Wall endure” (241). Such is the nature of logocentric encirclement. It furnishes the impetus, in the age of ambivalence, to revoke putatively untouchable assumptions. Ultimately, however, it is the same deconstructive practice that questions its own premise in the very process of carrying out its mandate of dislodging embedded veraciousness. This explains the all-pervasive presence of a self-negating tenor in Oates' prose.

The intent of “Ich bin ein Berliner” and “Our Wall” is to dull the “edge of impossibility,” the injurious abrasiveness of the Berlin Wall.¹⁰ While such a strategy is bound to come to naught in its attempt to completely eradicate the tragic implications of internecine strife among nations, it does contribute to alleviating the immediate impact of these polemics on human conduct. Like the balancing act of the boundary walker straddling the ideational tightrope in Schneider's “wall jumping” adventures, the narrators in Oates' stories reside in the ideological no man's land atop the Great Divide, i.e., in the existential locus of logocentric disengagement from the hierarchic signified that is the Wall. Thus, the utter precariousness inherent in teetering on the ontological abyss evolves into the cutting edge of deconstructive reasoning. Its purpose is to eliminate the verbal “humiliation” that the narrator of “Our Wall” sees as being inflicted by the powers-that-be on the casualties of the political antagonism: being branded “‘Traitors’—‘criminals’—‘subversives’—‘degenerates’—‘enemies of the People’—‘victims of abberation.’” This kind of stereotypical labeling is the “sacred experience” of rhetorical dogmatism to be divested of its cherished sanctity (239).

To synthesize the Derridean qualities of Oates' “Wall” stories: the “I” in both narratives begs to “differ” in order to “mean,” while “deferring,” in the deconstructive manner of différance, which is what does not exist, any conclusive resolution as to the ultimate nature of such signification. Deploying ordained truths sous rature, the discourse contained in the textuality of the Berlin Wall formulates and, simultaneously, disarticulates itself. Representation and significance remain incompatible. Thus understood, “Ich bin ein Berliner” and “Our Wall” are, in effect, as the author herself suggests, the allegories of their own reading, in compliance with Paul de Man's epistemological maxim.¹¹ Hence, the resultant image of the Berlin landmark proffers, in a sense, only the simulacrum of a presence.

Notes

1. “Ich bin ein Berliner,” in Last Days: Stories (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984), p. 106; subsequent citations are in the text.

2. The Wall Jumper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983).

3. “Our Wall,” in Last Days: Stories, p. 236; subsequent citations are in the text.

4. See the poem “Mending Wall,” in The Poetry of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), p. 34.

5. See Deutsche Ängste (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1988), especially Schneider's remarks concerning the making of the film “The Man on the Wall,” which is based on his treatise The Wall Jumper (pp. 8-10).

6. Samuel Chase Coale, “Joyce Carol Oates: Contemporary Spirits,” in Modern Critical Views: Joyce Carol Oates, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), p. 126.

7. “Crossing the Border,” in Crossing the Border: Fifteen Tales (New York: Vanguard Press, 1976), p. 13.

8. See Greg Johnson, Understanding Joyce Carol Oates (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1987), p. 190.

9. Cited in Jane Kramer, “Letter from Europe,” The New Yorker, November 28, 1988, pp. 69 and 92; my emphasis.

10. See Joyce Carol Oates, The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature (New York: Vanguard Press, 1972).

11. See Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Rilke, Nietzsche, and Proust (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979).