Search

Sebastian Faulk's novel, Human Traces (2006), embarks on a new trend in contemporary English fiction. Through its representations of two main protagonists, pioneers in the field of psychology between the 1870s and 1918, Faulks traces the formative years of the development of the young discipline of psychiatry. Even though Faulks works in the realist traditions of Charles Dickens and George Eliot, yet he delves into such major questions as the role of unconscious motivations in human individual behaviour, the causes of mental illness, and the very attempt to understand the nature of the human being. The time frame of the novel expands from the portrayal of the struggles and relationships of a handful of individuals, to encompass the entire sweep of human evolution. Thus, Faulks in Human Traces introduces a radically new dimension in the development of the novel. This paper offers an attempt at evaluating the innovative thematic and technical achievement of a major work of modern fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the novel two individuals from dissimilar spatio-cultural backgrounds alternate in first-person narration. The voices are Hannah’s, a 31-year-old American postdoctoral researcher, who comes to Paris to investigate the empirical history of French women during the German Occupation, and Tariq’s, a nineteen-year-old Moroccan runaway. Hannah engages Tariq to assist her with interviews of witnesses still alive and translations of the recorded testimonies that were hardly ever raised to public awareness. The two narrators share the non-committal starting position that is for the American based on her scholarly approach from overseas and for Tariq on his adventurous youth, as on his ignorance of Europe and French (colonial) history. The question how to acknowledge the visibilised is addressed on several narrative and generational levels: in the embedded stories told at different times by the witnesses, and in the explorers’ response to the accounts they are confronted with in their dislocated situation.

In this article I discuss the surprising similarity between the interpretation of the story told in chapter 3 of Genesis put forward in several of his novels by Sebastian Faulks and my own interpretation set out in my book, The Fall and the Ascent of Man: How Genesis Supports Darwin.1 Faulks and I argue that Genesis 3 is about hominization, the achievement of human status by a proto‐human couple by the acquisition of self‐awareness. However, that is where the similarity ends. I consider Faulks's understanding of self‐awareness to be seriously mistaken, reductive and incoherent, and I take issue with what I consider to be the consequences of this mistaken understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]