‘embarrassing enlightenments’: casual text play in “John Duffy’s Brother”

This paper argues that as a play text, “John Duffy’s Brother” invites two simultaneous readings: that of the primary mimetic narrative, and of a performative metadiscourse through which the protagonist’s metamorphosis into a train may be interpreted as a critique of the absurdity of fictionalisation. The paper develops an idea of reader activation in which the reader participates in the world- and text-making processes of mimesis and performance, before demonstrating how the text creates and undermines mimetic expectations. In doing so, the text ‘casually’ creates ‘embarrassments,’ inviting the reader to adopt a meta-attitude towards what the narrative is doing. Beginning with the frame-breaking strategy of the story’s paradoxical opening, the first part of this paper outlines Wolfgang Iser’s concept of text play, and defines the unconventional nature of the story’s “textual schema”: the non-mimetic elements of the text that create the “tilting game” through which the text may be read two ways simultaneously. Using Sue Asbee’s analysis of the text’s opening paragraph as the point of departure, I draw a parallel with Samuel Beckett’s “Imagination Dead Imagine,” to demonstrate the foregrounding of the untenability of regular mimesis. The tonal difference between these two texts is also highlighted, leading to a discussion of the importance of the narrator’s ‘casual,’ co-conspiratorial voice, and how the “gesture towards anecdote” (to use Asbee’s phrase) contributes to the ludic openness of the text. This section also explores the importance of the playful presupposition that the text exists within the fictive world of the text. I then argue that the reader then encounters a series of narratological flourishes that sustain the text’s self-referentiality. Whereas most critics seeking a Joycean parallel have focused on the overt influence of “A Painful Case,” this paper looks to Margot Norris’s analysis of “The Sisters” to illuminate the function of Duffy’s spyglass, interpreting it as a “hermeneutic signal” which serves to sustain and alter the textual schema, and which draws the eye of the reader and the eye of Duffy parallel in a game of suspicious sign reading. We then see how those elements that frustrate the traditional narrative are sustenance for our ‘embarrassed’ reading, and for potential play. The final section of this paper identifies a potential mise-en-abyme within the text, which equates mimesis with madness and suggests that the metamorphosis may be the consequence of over-interpretive sign-reading; an imagination gone off the rails. Thus the function of the metamorphosis is to remind us that, as the opening paragraph warns, the fictionalising act in which we are engaged is “absurd.” As the narrator alternates between the protagonist’s human and trainlike aspects, the urge to draw a correspondence between the strange episode and our dual reading of the text is shown to be irresistible. The paper concludes by noting the importance of the story’s casual narrative voice in differentiating O’Brien from his contemporaries, resulting in a text which, to quote Neil Murphy and Keith Hopper, is “a garden in which all of us may play."

Introduction

This chapter prepares the comparative media crucible – an intensive synthesis of approaches to understand the media, in relation to capital, infrastructure, film form, narration, sovereign voice and geography. The book takes shape inside this analytical dwelling at the intersection of various grids – the recruitment of the province, capital and narrative voice, and the ideological containment of the masses – preparing the grounds for reading the coalitional tendencies before reassembling the role of media within the social order. It also assesses the provincial imperative acting upon ‘Bollywood’, and the attendant translations and purifications of the processes investigated in the book. The book thus grapples with a constellation which, this chapter argues, addresses an overflow of tendencies tethered to an unknowable ‘mass audience’. This search for an abstract mass, which breaches the embankments of region, class, language and culture, forces us to prepare the crucible with robust comparative analytics.

Getting Steamy in Amnon’s Chamber: Philological and Metaphorical Observations on 2 Samuel 13

2 Samuel 13:1–19 presents us with dueling perspectives on a rape scene. Despite Tamar’s protests, the narrative voice reflects Prince Amnon’s lustful viewpoint, in which he and Tamar are acting out a scene of steamy seduction. Within this framework, the unexpectedly detailed description of Tamar preparing the dumplings deserves more attention. I examine the Hebrew words לְבִבוֹת (“heart-cakes”), יצק (“to pour out”), and מַשְׂרֵת (traditionally, “baking pan”), offering a philological explanation of their associations that diverges from much modern scholarship. This new understanding of the food-preparation scene makes it clear that Tamar’s actions are a narratively realized metaphor: in preparing the food to be consumed, she is preparing herself to be consumed erotically—at least, as viewed by Amnon. In other words, using the language of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Tamar is the cake.

Re-writing Myth: An Analysis of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

: Myths provide a fertile ground for adaptation and appropriation. The preoccupation of writers with the stories and characters from the margins leads to interesting variations of age-old stories. As a consequence, the familiar stories are re-worked and transformed as an act of subversion. The embedded mythical framework in the revised text enriches its meaning infinitely. This paper is an attempt to understand Atwood’s text as trying to fill in some gaps in Homer’s Odyssey. As a feminist writer, Atwood re-visits the canonical text from a new perspective. She attempts “not to pass on a tradition but break its hold over us” (Rich). The re-writing of grand narratives becomes a strategy whereby a shift in power becomes possible. Atwood’s text is subtitled ‘The Story of Penelope and Odysseus’ making the shift quite clear. The narrative voice alternates between Penelope’s disembodied spirit from the underworld and the chorus of her twelve, faithful maids. The Penelopiad, in this way, becomes a polyphonic text where the different voices blend and clash and no final, authoritative meaning is possible. The re-working, thus, becomes an act of liberation.

Translation of Narrative Voice and Reproduction of a Simulated Storytelling Mode

Chinese vernacular fiction is characterized by a simulated storytelling mode through which the narrator manipulates narration and facilitates interaction with the reader. There is little research on the representation of this distinctive Chinese narrative mode across languages and cultures. Recently scholars in translation studies have begun to focus on how different types and levels of voice are represented in translated texts. The present article investigates how the overt voice of the simulated storyteller characterizing the Chinese vernacular narrative style is represented in three complete English translations of a Chinese classic entitled Shuihu Zhuan. The article includes a comparative study of how the storyteller-narrator manifests his narrative voice through storytelling formulae and rhetorical narratorial questions and more importantly, on how the storyteller-narrator’s voice has been rendered by different translators. Besides, by relating the reproduction of narrative voice to translatorship, it shows that the professional role and status of each translator influence their strategy-making as to whether, and to what extent, the narrative voice of the source text should be reconstructed.

Radical Communication Types in William H. Gass’s "The Tunnel"

Radical communication largely characterizes W. H. Gass’s The Tunnel. The novel incorporates many forms of radical speech and thought, it unfolds a number of radically charged issues of public and private life. It features a multitude of innovative experimental techniques and, in many instances, it demonstrates predominance of language and form over the content. In this paper, we have ascertained that the authenticity and multitude of radical communication forms in the said novel can essentially be grasped in terms of disjointing the Ich-Erzähler’s narrative voice and the authorial one. It has been ascertained that the sincerity in narrative largely governs its radical content while the book’s radical composition and radical language and style form the second set of the radical communication styles in the novel, reflecting Gass’s bent on experimental fiction. In the paper, the following radical communication style varieties have been singled out: “breaking the narrative monotony,” “hate intensifying,” “filial unwillingness to forgive,” “revulsion invoking,” “provoking indecipherability/unreadability,” “accentuated total criticism,” or “downgrading metanarratives,” “ambivalent portrayal of the war and Holocaust,” “pictorial communication style,” “communication style of radically structured composition,” “communication style of verbal adornment,” “embellishment,” “conceit” (as a figure of speech).

Identity, Fidelity, and Cross-Cultural Relationships in Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly

Almayer’s Folly (1896) by Joseph Conrad challenged the conventions of the fictional romance while confronting the need of native-born Malayans and other Asian individuals to find voice and identity in an imperial context. Along with the narrative voice in this text are the many other voices of those who have been colonized. Fidelity to one’s identity and openness to relationships across cultures lies at the crux of this study. Conrad’s critics of the 1950s and 1960s dismissed his first novel as a romance with a weak subplot. However, that subplot, about Almayer’s daughter Nina and her love affair, sets forth moral claims of loyalty and fidelity that must be taken into account. For her relation- ship with a Malay prince expresses a love that is binding and enduring, one that crosses boundaries and divisions and is an apt model for our culturally convergent world. Conrad creates a dialectic of intercultural subjectivities to make a point about identity, loyalty, and self-fashioning. Whereas Almayer is portrayed as foolish and inflexible, his daughter, Nina, faces significant issues of identity, as she has to choose between the traditional, indigenous heritage of her mother and her father’s modern European aspirations. With Almayer’s Folly, Joseph Conrad showed himself to be an international novelist who could develop a story with an inter-racial and intercultural cast of characters.

Los de abajo. Mitificación y metalepsis

The study of narrative resources such as free indirect discourse and narrated monologue, in Los de abajo, although it has been clearly pointed out by critics such as Mansour, Escalante and St. Ours, is scarce in comparison with the works on the Mexican Revolution and the controversy over the ideological position of its author, Mariano Azuela. In the present work, an approach to these resources is made, following the precepts of narratology, starting from the relationship between the narrative voice and the figural discourse, and between the discourses of the characters; that is, from the citation processes. Specifically, an approach is made to the way in which Demetrio Macías recounts his exploits by repeating the speech of Alberto Solís, shaped, in turn, by other anonymous speeches. The relevance of self-narrating in this way is such that it implies a radical change in the personality and destiny of Demetrio Macías.

Los [dos] cartuchos de Nellie Campobello

In 1931, Nellie Campobello published Cartucho. Nine years later, in 1940, a second edition appeared, about which not much has been said. With the exception that it is usually mentioned to assert that Campobello modified it under the influence of the author of El águila y la serpiente, the 1940 edition was left somewhat erased by the third edition (1960), in the same way that each edition’s corresponding characteristics were also erased. This piece reviews some of the features that characterize both editions, with the intention of showing what was already present in the first edition, and what the author added or enhanced afterward. It also presents the context in which the second edition emerged (Campobello’s interest in history, her relationship with Austreberta Rentería, the publication of her book Las manos de mamá), and it questions the author’s motives to propose Cartucho (1940) as a set of “true tales” in opposition to the revolutionary “legend” stated in official history. In the conducted analysis, we can appreciate the expansion of some of the literary strategies present in the first edition (the multiplicity of testimonial voices and the contribution of women as witnesses to the facts) and the permanence of others that appeared in 1931 (the infantile narrative voice, the poetic images associated to the war and to the infantilization of the men that fought in the Mexican Revolution). The premise in this article is that both editions defy the concepts of truth, history, and fiction, in the way we usually conceive them, but that in 1940, Campobello expanded some of the literary strategies that she used in 1931 as a function of the emphasis that she put in the testimonials of a multitude of women and men that lived the civil war in the North and to whom, in the process of officialization and institutionalization of the Mexican Revolution, the truth of their own history had been denied, according to the author.

Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature

This chapter reads Martial’s Epigrams in chronological order. It pays particular attention to the poems about the emperor. It is sensitive to their quantity, quality, and position relative to the remaining poems. Themes from the imperial poems are put in contact with other non-imperial poems, especially poems that are proximate to poems about the emperor. The narrative arc is fairly clear. One begins with a narrative voice that conjures a rising star who is on the make and playing a pseudo-dangerous game with power. Over time the poetry draws closer to an emperor who is himself waxing in size and strength. The poetic voice becomes ever more exuberant even as the relationship to power feels increasingly split. The poet admires the prince. The poet is also afraid of him. The last is never stated, though. The symptomatic figure of this split is Earinus, the emperor’s beautiful and disgusting eunuch boyfriend. Domitian’s death precipitates a disastrous liberation. The chapter ends with an examination of the fraught project of constructing a post-Domitianic Martial in the wake of what had come before. The poet is reluctant to even say what, exactly, had come before. Instead, one finds books of poems that are marked by erasures, rewrites, and chronological irregularities. They celebrate a “newfound freedom” and a “return to art,” but things are falling apart. The poet praises a new Rome that he ends up leaving.