Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas

Abstract:

Travel changes character in this neo-Victorian novel, as it marks women with the signs of newly achieved difference. Their explorations array on a palimpsest that reconfigures conventional cultural expectations: it is a narrative technique and trope which renders the past with the immediacy and urgency of the present time of speaking. The novel focuses on a computer program called Genizah that records everything and can be played back to enable the viewer to make the past into an eternal present – a modern version of the Pharaonic project of pyramidal Egypt, a central location for this novel. The Genizah computer program enables time travel, and now can turn into then, dream-experience and/or traumatized life. Horn elaborates the separate strands of this triple-plotted narrative that takes us into the historic Genizah of the ancient Cairo Fustat Synagogue, discovered by two intrepid Victorian women ethnographers. Their discoveries invite links with the historical novel of Sir Walter Scott, the nostalgic fiction of Charles Dickens, and the philosophical thought of Moses Maimonides. The plot turns on a modern re-gendered version of the Biblical account of Joseph and his brothers in Egyptian servitude. History, familial rivalries, and global ambitions thread through the story, and that which has been hidden is forced into acknowledgment and public engagement through a contemporary technology with ancient roots.