Present-Tense Narration and Representing Trauma in Anne Enright’s The Gathering

KronoScope ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-227
Author(s):  
Karen Anne McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Her Family ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sexually Assaulted ◽  
Present Tense

AbstractIn this article, I engage with the present-tense narration in Anne Enright’s novel, The Gathering. The narrator, Veronica Hegarty, is tasked with assembling her family for a wake after the suicide of her closest brother Liam. What his death unleashes in her is a compulsion to write down an “uncertain event,” which may or “may not have happened,” in which Liam was sexually assaulted as a child. The narrative suggests that Veronica witnessed this “event” and, in line with the aporetic nature of traumatic experience, did not register it as such. The narrative temporal strategy, as this article will demonstrate, is key to the author’s representation of the “event” which, due to its traumatic nature, is always of the present, and never successfully relegated to the past. I also explore the ways in which the novel suggests a healing which can be neither contained nor enacted within the confines of this overtly present-tense narrative.

THE RELIC AND THE RUIN: EQUIVOCAL OBJECTS AND THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST INDANIEL DERONDA

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 855-874 ◽  
Author(s):  
Priyanka Anne Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Vantage Point ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
The Past ◽  
Right Hand

Early in George Eliot'sDaniel Deronda, Daniel's life is set on a decisive new path by his fleeting attraction to an object in a shop window. He is turning into a side street off Holburn Road when:his attention was caught by some fine old clasps in chased silver displayed in the window at his right hand. His first thought was that [his aunt] Lady Mallinger, who had a strictly Protestant taste for such Catholic spoils, might like to have these missal-clasps turned into a bracelet; then his eyes travelled over the other contents of the window, and he saw that the shop was that kind of pawnbroker's where the lead is given to jewellery, lace, and all equivocal objects introduced asbric-a-brac. A placard in one corner announced –Watches and Jewellery exchanged and repaired. (344; bk. 4, ch. 6)Daniel then moves across the street to avoid the shopkeeper, and it is only from this new vantage point that he notices the name “Ezra Cohen” above the window – the name he's been seeking while wandering Jewish neighborhoods in London in the hopes of reuniting his protégée Mirah with her family. He will return to the pawnshop later and become acquainted with the Cohens, eventually finding through them his mentor and Mirah's actual brother, Mordecai. Although some discussion of the silver clasps ensues, they are neither purchased nor used in the space of the novel. Still, this seemingly inconsequential trinket proves to have a long history, one that raises questions about the lingering remains of the past, the equivocality of the object, and the dispossessions that hauntDaniel Deronda.

scholarly journals Identity and Diasporic Trauma in Mira Jacob's “The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing”

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-68
Author(s):  
Jameel Alghaberi ◽  
Sanjay Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
First Generation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Stage Model ◽  
Collective Trauma ◽  
Home Culture ◽  
First Generation Immigrants ◽  
The Past ◽  
Personal Loss

This article explores the assimilation politics in Mira Jacob’s Novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing (2013). The intersection of memory, trauma, and mourning with reference to immigrant experience is discussed. In terms of assimilation, Barkan’s six stage model is critiqued, and diasporic ‘hybridity’ is proposed as an alternative to the notion of total assimilation. In the analysis of traumatic experience, the paper makes reference to Caruth’s formulations of the ‘abreactive model’. The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing (2013) is a transcultural text that represents the gap that truly exists between the first-generation immigrants and their offspring. It is a typical trauma novel featuring timeless and unspeakable experiences. The novel does not present a postcolonial collective trauma but invariably an example of diasporic imagined trauma. By presenting two contrasting generations in her novel, Mira Jacob attempts to highlight the dilemmas that baffle diasporas in the United States particularly of those that resist assimilation. Much of the narrative projects the haunting presence of home, and the anguish of personal loss experienced by first generation immigrants. Moreover, the novel questions the nostalgic and romantic engagements with the past and it promotes a bold affirmation of the culture of the adopted land. In other words, Mira Jacob calls for more genuine engagements with the new culture that the second and the third-generation immigrants are more exposed to than their home culture because their in-between status leaves them with no choice.

scholarly journals History in the Attic: Search for Roots in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-96
Author(s):  
S. Asha
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Diaspora Literature ◽  
Caribbean History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Conflict Situations ◽  
Plural Society ◽  
New Beginnings

In most of diaspora literature there is an attempt to retrieve the past. This makes one measure time in many ways, different calendars, change of seasons, past encounters narrated through wars, defeats, encounters and disasters. It is remembered through family history, ancestral heritage, nostalgia, memory and even through national disasters. This interaction portrays the immigrants caught in flight of memories, relationships and images. The relocation has its disgust for one thing or the other. The author has to live in the reminiscences, a collective memory representing a symbolic relationship between past and present. The Swinging Bridge  by Ramabai Espinet chronicles the multiple exiles that are part of the Indian experience in the Caribbean and Canada through two figures one from the past- great grandmother Gainder and the other from the present - Mona, the protagonist. The novel commemorates the maternal roots and routes of Indo-Caribbean history by establishing the subjectivity of widows and young girls from India who crossed the Kala Pani (Black waters of the Atlantic) in search of new beginnings in Trinidad and the great-grand-daughter who engages in an existential quest for selfhood in Canada. Grief motivates a flood of personal memories as Mona begins to remember intimate details of family life that had been repressed under the cover of migration. Bits and pieces of the past, fragments scattered in various places, childhood memories, overheard conversations, prayer songs, all come together in the attic. She explores the secret songs, photographs and letters giving her a powerful voice for her culture, her family, her fellow women and for herself. Mona’s drive to document history enables her to reveal the family’s carefully guarded secrets- domestic violence, drunken rampages, sexual abuse, illegitimate children, and even AIDS. This paper seeks to analyse the novel’s diasporic contents and find out whether this attempt at retrieval of the past brings about a change in the perception of today’s generation. The author brings to light the problems of a plural society calling for need for relationships and need for mutual respect- all to avoid conflict situations through this effective tracing of history in the novel.

Postcolonial Trauma in the 21st-Century English Female Fiction

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-104
Author(s):  
Lilia F. Khabibullina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Psychological Problem ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Family Chronicle ◽  
White Teeth

The postcolonial fiction of the 21st century has developed a new version of family chronicle depicting the life of several generations of migrants to demonstrate the complexity of their experience, different for each generation. This article aims at investigating this tradition from the perspective of three urgent problems: trauma, postcolonial experience, and the “female” theme. The author uses the most illustrative modern women’s postcolonial writings (Z. Smith, Ju. Chang) to show the types of trauma featured in postcolonial literature as well as the change in the character of traumatic experience, including the migrant’s automythologization from generation to generation. There are several types of trauma, or stages experienced by migrants: historical, migration and selfidentification, more or less correlated with three generations of migrants. Historical trauma is the most severe and most often insurmountable for the first generation. It generates a myth about the past, terrible or beautiful, depending on the writer’s intention realized at the level of the writer or the characters. A most expanded form of this trauma can be found in the novel Wild Swans by Jung Chang, where the “female” experience underlines the severity of the historical situation in the homeland of migrants. The trauma of migration manifests itself as a situation of deterritorialization, lack of place, when the experience of the past dominates and prevents the migrants from adapting to a new life. This situation is clearly illustrated in the novel White Teeth by Z. Smith, where the first generation of migrants cannot cope with the effects of trauma. The trauma of selfidentification promotes a fictitious identity in the younger generation of migrants. Unable to join real life communities, they create automyths, joining fictional communities based on cultural myths (Muslim organizations, rap culture, environmental organizations). Such examples can be found in Z. Smith’s White Teeth and On Beauty. Thus, the problem of trauma undergoes erosion, because, strictly speaking, with each new generation, the event experienced as traumatic is less worth designating as such. Compared to historical trauma or the trauma of migration, trauma of self-identification is rather a psychological problem that affects the emotional sphere and is quite survivable for most of the characters.

scholarly journals Abscission of Familial Bonding in Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 54-56
Author(s):  
C Joy Hepzibah
Keyword(s):  
Young Child ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Biological Parents ◽  
The Family ◽  
The World ◽  
Birth Family ◽  
Critical Situations

Adoption is a beautiful thing in the world when it comes to giving life to abandon children. But as said often, “The only guarantee if a child is adopted is trauma,” the same adoption is so brutal when the child has been separated from the living family members and given for adoption. There is no worse pain than the pain of the children being separated from their birth family. This research throws light on abscission from the familial cohesion because of the critical situations in the family. Here, in this study, a young child is abscissed from her own family by adoption. The permanent separation from her biological parents creates the feeling of separation and longingness in the novel, And the Mountains Echoed, written by Khaled Hosseini. Pari, is theadopted child, and the protagonist of the novel was in her immature age when she had been separated from her family. The importance of familial relationships is shown very deeply in this novel through the plight of the protagonist, Pari. After the years of separation, the same child who became a mature woman gets reunited with her brother. But the traumatic experience that she had undergone can never be undone.

scholarly journals “Unfathomable Calmness”: Betrayal Trauma, Silence and Dissociation in The Secret Agent

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 61-81
Author(s):  
Imen Chemengui
Keyword(s):  
Trauma Theory ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Betrayal Trauma ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Political Aspect ◽  
Psychological Response ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Secret Agent

With the rise of trauma theory in late 19th century, researchers have focused on foregrounding the significance of some catastrophic events that pertain mainly to the collective, leaving other forms of trauma and their psychological aftermath on the individual underrepresented. In this paper, I focus on social traumas in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which seems to be overlooked by some critics whose insights highlight primarily its political aspect. The events of the novel revolve around the peculiar and traumatic experience of Winnie Verloc whose life is rife with betrayal and violence. Her recurrent exposure to successive shocking events culminates in her dissociation and, consequently, her suicide. To pin down what lies beneath Winnie’s ambiguity, aloofness and silence in the novel, I mainly rely on trauma theory, drawing from studies on PTSD, betrayal and dissociation by several trauma scholars, such as, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Jennifer Freyd, and others. Furthermore, this paper examines the inextricability of the past from the present in trauma through the breadth scrutiny of Winnie’s psychological response to her excruciating experience. Hence the way the appalling past returns unbidden to shake Winnie’s present.

scholarly journals Framing of Identity and Personal History through Multiperspective Narratives in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-30
Author(s):  
Dev Mayurakshi
Keyword(s):  
Public History ◽  
Personal History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Her Family ◽  
The Past ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
History Of ◽  
Shifting Identities

: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000) is an engagement in layers of shifting identities and their eventual unravelling. The novel is dominated by the character and voice of Iris Chase, an octogenarian who slowly and fumblingly presents to the reader the fragmented and complex personal history of her family. The novel becomes an exercise in historiography through Iris’s visitations to her and her sister Laura’s youth in order to explain their tenuous relationship which is achieved through three parallel sources: Iris’s own attempts at a memoir, journalistic documents and letters from the past, and excerpts from an infamous novel published forty years previously. My paper will explore the three narrative structures present in the novel, and attempt to understand the questions of authorship and writing, and their importance in building a historiographic narrative. It will try to examine the ways in which retrospective interventions into public history helps to counter and create identities which were hitherto repressed under social decorum. This paper will borrow from Linda Hutcheon’s writings of the postmodern metanarratives in order to compose a lucid understanding of what alternative historiography in literature can achieve, keeping at the centre Atwood’s novel.

scholarly journals The Fire Horse Girl by K. Honeyman

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Graas
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
Culture Shock ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Life Changes ◽  
Her Family ◽  
The Past

Honeyman, Kay. The Fire Horse Girl. New York: Arthur A. Levine Books - Scholastic Inc, 2013. Ebook.What would you do if you had a chance to be free?  In the novel, The Fire Horse Girl, the protagonist Jade Moon dreams of escaping her traditional Chinese household where it seems she can do nothing right.  Born in the Year of the Fire Horse, a particularly bad year for girls to be born, Jade Moon is destined to bring tragedy to her family, or so she has been raised to believe.  When a visitor comes to the small village of Jinjiu on the last day of the Year of the Water Dog, February 15, 1923, Jade Moon’s life changes forever.Sterling Moon has come with a proposal for Jade Moon’s father: come to America, and save your family from poverty and subsistence.  As with all decisions in the household, Jade Moon is never consulted, but finds herself traveling first to Hong Kong, and then America.  The promises of a new land and the supposed freedoms it offer are intoxicating, and author Kay Honeyman does an excellent job of helping the reader feel the anticipation and excitement that Jade Moon experiences.  When not everything goes as planned, the reader is completely enthralled in Jade Moon’s attempts to get out of trouble alive.  This is a story of immigration, racism, culture shock, traditions held onto and traditions torn away; a story of China and America in the past, with so much to teach the reader about the ramifications for the present and future.  The author has created a world that is easy to fall into, and hard to forget.Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Erin Graas

scholarly journals Reanimating the English Historical Novel in the Twenty-First Century – The Case of David Mitchell’s the Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-222
Author(s):  
Bożena Kucała
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
The Past ◽  
Strong Interest ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract This article argues that David Mitchell’s novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) represents a new variation of the genre of historical fiction. The historical novel in Britain has risen to prominence since the 1980s and in the twenty-first century this strong interest in the past continues. Placing David Mitchell’s book in the context of recent historical fiction, the article takes account of Joseph Brooker’s hypothesis that, together with Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet may be indicative of an emergent trend in the contemporary English historical novel. The purpose of the article is to identify and explore Mitchell’s key strategies of writing about history. It is argued that, departing from the prevalent mode of historiographic metafiction, Mitchell’s book adheres to some of the traditional tenets of the genre while achieving the Scottian aim of animating the past in innovative ways. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the use of the present tense, the subjective perspectives, and the exclusion of foreknowledge lend the novel dramatic qualities.

Hydraulic Laboratory at University of Liège

2018 ◽  
pp. 80-89
Author(s):  
Willi H. Hager
Keyword(s):  
Basic Research ◽  
The Novel ◽  
University Campus ◽  
Current Position ◽  
Professional Background ◽  
The Past ◽  
Comprehensive Picture

The Hydraulic Laboratory of Liège University, Belgium, is historically considered from its foundation in 1937 to the mid-1960s. The technical facilities of the various Buildings are highlighted, along with canals and instrumentation available. It is noted that in its initial era, comparatively few basic research has been conducted, mainly due to the professional background of the professors leading the establishment. This state was improved in the past 50 years, however, particularly since the Laboratory was dislocated to its current position in the novel University Campus. Biographies of the leading persons associated with the Liège Hydraulic Laboratory are also presented, so that a comprehensive picture is given of one of the currently leading hydraulic Laboratories of Europe.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document