ABSTRACT
Like Georges Perec, Tarek opens up the collective memory of passing through Ellis Island, the port of entry that is inscribed into his memory of the possible. And the rituals of cutting were performed right away as the passengers of the oceanliners disembarked on Ellis Island, one of the great gates to the United States, the site that established the coordinates of the nation. Significantly, in The Visitor Thomas McCarthy goes back to Ellis Island and its ambiguous neighbor, the Statue of Liberty, to create a narrative of belonging. If this excess was mechanically dumped into a limbo of memories at Ellis Island, Nathaniel Hawthorne talks about a different kind of cumulative memory in “The Custom-House.” McCarthy forges awe-ness that redefines the tensions implicit in the word “hospitality” and its uneasy relation to personal and national identity.
