Unquiet spirits: death writing in contemporary fiction
2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09502360902868787
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Gilbert Adair, The Death of the Author, (London: Heinemann, 1992). This sense of the “uncanniest of double genitives – ‘the writing of the dead’” (428) is investigated productively in Ivan Callus, ‘(Auto)Thanatography or (Auto)Thanatology?: Mark C. Taylor, Simon Critchley and the writing of the Dead,’ Forum for Modern Language Studies: Special Issue Autothanatographies 41.4 (October 2005), pp. 427–438. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980), trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 393. Louis Marin, ‘Montaigne's Tomb, or Autobiographical Discourse’, Oxford Literary Review, 4.3 (1981), pp. 43–58, p.55. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, trans. Gregory Rabassa. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 57 Ibid p. 8. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 52. Ibid., p. 221. Most contemporary dead narrators do invoke the murder mystery as at least a potential plot. However, among those that do not we could identify Self's How the Dead Live, and Martin Amis's Time's Arrow (1991), both of which involve narrators (or, in Time's Arrow, the entity of which the narrator is a part) who die in old age. While these novels do not investigate the narrator's own murder, there is certainly a sense of the investigation and the search for a solution to a crime: in Self's novel the crime is failed parenting; in Amis's it is genocide. Ernst Bloch, ‘A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel’ in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenberg (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 245–264, p. 254. For this interpretation of the detective novel as a highly structured narrative puzzle also see Tzvetan Todorov's ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’ The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). It is worth noting that the implication in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is that the murderer-narrator of the novel is actually dead by the time of reading (the final lines gesture towards his imminent suicide) and the text therefore revolves around a posthumous voice in the same way as the murderer's use of the dictaphone recording. Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones (London: Picador, 2002), p. 6. Glen Duncan Death of an Ordinary Man (London: Scribner, 2005), p. 46. Bloch, p. 254. See also Paul de Man ‘Autobiography as De-facement’ (1979) in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984), p. 81. Sfax says that he had ‘divined in advance’ and ‘prepared … for’ the reaction to this particular statement (p. 29). Martin McQuillan argues that these ‘first nine words here are often ripped from their context and used to demonstrate de Man's alleged extremism’ (Paul de Man [London: Routledge, 2001], p. 79). In Adair's novel there's something of the Dantean contrapasso in Sfax's afterlife, as these words alone seem to have been used to structure Sfax's torment in its entirety, seeing him constantly displaced from his own death by his narration of it. De Man, p. 81. Ibid, p. 78. Jeremy Tambling, Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2001), p. 24. See Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Marin, p. 43. Frank Kermode, ‘Novel and Narrative’, in Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe, The Poetics of Murder, (San Diego: HBJ, 1983), pp. 175–196, p. 180. Brooks, p. 104. Derrida, p. 393. Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘Introduction’, The Third Omnibus of Crime (New York: Coward-McCann, 1935), p. 5. Salman Rushdie, quoted in Rachel Falconer Hell in Literature: Western Descent Narratives since 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 4. Falconer, p.138. Amy Tan, ‘Author Q&A: A Conversation with Amy Tan’, Random House Publishing Group Website, http://www.randomhouse.com/rhpg/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780345464019&view=qa Contrary to what Tan says here, Jim Crace's Being Dead does not actually employ a dead narrator. The quotation here is from Gerard Genette's Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1972), trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 252. Falconer, p.46. Neil Jordan, Shade, (London: John Murray, 2004). The other contributory factor is George's discovery of the remains of a foetus (fathered by her half-brother) which Nina aborted as a teenager; a discovery that, for George, retrospectively reshapes their past in its entirety.
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