Family Secrets and Narrative Structure in Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng’s novel Everything I Never Told You (2014) has been said to combine some stock ingredients of literary thrillers with other less customary features that complicate its classification in that genre. Although we learn from page one that the protagonist of the novel, sixteen-year-old Lydia Lee, is dead, discovering who is behind the possible murder of this Chinese American girl proves to be one of the lesser mysteries in the story. While the reader remains intrigued by the forces/people that may have driven Lydia to her demise, other enigmas—related to the other members of the Lee family—keep cropping up and turn out to be closely linked to the protagonist’s fate. This article explores the secret-saturated structure of the novel, which moves back and forth between the Lees’ speculations about Lydia’s death, the impact that the event has on their lives and the protagonist’s own version of the story. Ng delves deep into the issues of gender, race and other types of otherness that spawn most of the secrets driving the story. Assisted by theories expounded by Frank Kermode, Derek Attridge and other scholars, the article highlights the centrality of family secrets as a structuring principle in Ng’s novel.

El fragmentarismo en la novela modernista española: el «Diario de un enfermo» (1901) de Azorín

Este artículo analiza el fragmentarismo en la primera de las novelas de Azorín, la titulada Diario de un enfermo (1901). A tal fin procedemos, primero, a destacar la importancia del fragmentarismo en la novela modernista en cuanto técnica para la aplicación de algunas características esenciales de la literatura de esa época, fundamentalmente la interiorización narrativa. Seguidamente, y a partir de la categorización de fragmento avanzada por Frank Kermode, analizamos el uso en el Diario de un enfermo de varios tipos de fragmento, dispuestos al objeto de minimizar la trama e intensificar el perspectivismo interiorizador. Concluiremos que, comoquiera que el propósito de la novela consiste en mostrar el alma del protagonista, los fragmentos que la conforman se demuestran fundamentales para la consecución de tal fin.

Liminalidad de una mirada infantil antibélica: Cartucho, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno y Cerezas

El comienzo y el final de una novela pueden ser umbrales estratégicos para la construcción discursiva dentro de la narración literaria, sobre todo cuando el referente del discurso es un acontecimiento problemático como lo es una guerra civil. Como señala Italo Calvino, los extremos de un texto son lugares claves porque permiten rastrear ─desde la postura autoral─ un importante potencial reflexivo más allá de su nivel eminentemente narrativo y literario. Por otro lado, como identifica Frank Kermode, recae en el final el sentido que determina la temporalidad de la narración y consecuentemente su registro discursivo. A partir de estas premisas, y con el objetivo de poner en evidencia la relevancia de la construcción discursiva en correspondencia de dichos umbrales, el artículo propone un análisis comparado del discurso crítico y humanista presente en tres novelas de la guerra civil: Cartucho (1931) de Nellie Campobello, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947) de Italo Calvino y Cerezas (2008) de Aurora Correa.

Exordium

Departing from Giorgio Agamben’s “The End of the Poem,” the introduction distinguishes “inception” from a series of related but not synonymous terms: origin, birth, and beginning. Recalling what R. Murray Schafer calls “onset distortion” in music, inception marks the text’s (and the life’s) vexed relation to its outside; inception, for this book, marks an asynchronicity within beginnings, textual and existential, where foundation diverges from mere starting out. The literary work, because it can neither comprise its inception nor externalize it in an authorizing exteriority, must in some sense posit itself. This fundamental, non-trivial self-reflexivity the book links to potentiality and to a striving for literary language to communicate itself, beyond any particular content of communication. In brief discussions of texts by Agamben, Arendt, Augustine, Benveniste, Frank Kermode, Roland Barthes, J Hillis Miller, Nabokov, and others, the introduction attempts to spell out its understanding of the relation of potentiality to inception and to trace some of its consequences for understandings of the relation between art and life. In so doing, it also distinguishes the book’s project from other possible approaches (empirical, practical, narratological) to the question of beginning.

Apocalypse Ever After: Lifted Veils and Transcendent Time in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

In this chapter Sheheryah B. Sheikh examines the narrative organization of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2014)’s love story through the lenses of apocalyptic literary theory and eschatology. Drawing from the writing of Frank Kermode, the chapter argues that the film’s primary narrative problem, the disappearance of Clementine from Joel’s memories, constitutes an eschatological occurrence on a personal scale. However, the film is “apocalyptic” in another sense: while Joel is trying to prevent this cataclysmic event, he revisits his memories and uncovers greater meaning in them, simultaneously revealing these details to the audience, and thus the film “lifts veils from” Joel’s memories, which is the etymological meaning of the apocalypse. Sheikh argues that, through the film, Gondry advocates strongly for the need to revisit and re-assess memory, rather than rejecting memories, even if they are painful.

Empty Time as Traumatic Duration: Towards a Cinematic Aevum

Frank Kermode uses the term aevum to question the links between origin, order, and time, associating experience with spatial form. Without end or beginning, aevum identifies an intersubjective order of time where we participate in the “relation between the fictions by which we order our world and the increasing complexity of what we take to be the ‘real’ history of that world”; being “in-between” time is a primary quality of the aevum. Regarding cinema, aevum identifies this third duration as emotional experience, occuring as traumatic time. It facilitates thinking beyond lived temporal experience of everyday life to a philosophy of experience that accounts for alternative sensoria of time, similar to the traumatic encounter. The cinematic aevum is equally not of the material, corporeal world; concurrently associating human reality with the myths of the human condition. To say that a cinematic aevum exists following traumatic scenes, is to specify a visual “time-fiction” in film, to recognise a spatial form that belongs neither to the finite time of the film's narrative, or of the “eternal” time outside the film's diegesis, but participates in the order (and linking) of both. Wilfred Bion's psychoanalytic works are used to discuss the traumatic symptom of “empty time”: the inability to recollect, to make links between memory and experience, demonstrating a version of empty time that works as an external violence to spectator perception. Bion's theories offer fresh psychoanalytic perspective on trauma and its relationship to time by challenging classical ways of thinking about inner and outer perception.

Stopped Clocks

Chapter 3 begins by examining a prominent trope in photographs of the home front: the stopped clock. Unpacking the manifold, often competing, meanings of this image—by turns denoting suspension and dislocation, but also temporal resilience and transcendence—it underscores how the photographic medium corroborates or problematizes the temporalities portrayed within its frames. The chapter then turns to the short stories of Elizabeth Bowen and William Sansom, both of whom variously conceived of their own writing as ‘photographic’. Rendering a temporality somewhere between what Frank Kermode, in narratological terms, called ‘tick-tock’ and ‘tock-tick’, Bowen’s and Sansom’s fragmented short stories blended fiction with non-fiction, and were ultimately anthologized as ‘records’ of the war.

The Aesthete in A Misalliance (1986)

This chapter mobilises key nineteenth-century aestheticist motifs to render a Sapphic lesbian homoerotic in A Misalliance. Protagonist Blanche Vernon’s nympholepsy is related to the text’s sensual motifs and the intertextual matrix surrounding the ancient Greek poet Sappho. The novel’s early reception is reviewed, including comments by Frank Kermode and John Bayley whose gendered readings obscure the text’s symbolism. On the contrary—emblematic of contested narratives of lesbian sexuality, women’s writing and political subversion in Sapphic texts by Charles Baudelaire and Renée Vivien—Sappho becomes the intertextual springboard for the production of the aesthete. In addition to the sensual motifs of the novel, key behaviours of aestheticism are indicated across the intertextual arc between Brookner’s text and her aestheticist predecessors including Renaissance revival, the desire to live life as art, the homoerotic gaze, the backwards turn, a trans-generational homoerotic and the subversion of bourgeois utilitarianism and family life. The performance of the aesthete is staged across the rhetorical figure of metaleptic prolepsis as supplied by Thomas Bahti’s reading of Walter Benjamin, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s narrative of metamorphosis with its contours of guilt, punishment, redemption, purification and blessedness. Reasserting women’s contribution to Romantic aestheticism, Brookner is read as both women’s writer and aesthete.

The Bible and American Literature

It is a critical commonplace that the King James Bible served as the moral and cultural foundation for the Reformed Protestant community—a People of the Book—that developed in Puritan and colonial America and then continued in this role in the newly established United States well into the 20th century and even up to the present in attenuated form. Yet the contemporary student of American literature and the Bible is initially confronted with a paradox; for although commentators have long recognized the central role of the King James Bible in the development of the American literary tradition (as in the culture at large), the subject has long occupied a marginal position in the academy. As an interdisciplinary endeavor, the study of American literature and the Bible ideally requires competence in two academic realms, as manifested in the work of such past masters as Northrop Frye, Frank Kermode, Robert Alter, and Harold Bloom. Having developed in tandem with the growth of literary approaches to the Bible, the study of the influence of the Bible on American literature is now an increasingly recognized area of scholarly interest. Initially a field dominated by Christian scholars, it currently includes all those who recognize the Bible as a culturally authoritative source text for Western culture and tradition. The field has markedly expanded in recent years, with the appearance of key reference books, general surveys, and author studies. Major American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Flannery O’Connor now have a substantial body of critical commentary on their work in relation to the Bible, while many others have received varying degrees of attention from this vibrant academic discipline.