5th Global Conference
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 9a: Literature
Chair: Jan Holmberg
Familiarising Death in Fiction: Utopia, Time and Transcendence in
Jim Crace’s Being Dead and Graham Swift’s Last
Orders
Caroline
Edwards
Department of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies,
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom
How does Utopia encounter
the ‘final negativity’ of death?
Is death the end or the beginning of storytelling? This paper will look
at Utopian treatments of death in fiction as transcendable both materially
and symbolically in Jim Crace’s Being Dead (1999) and
Graham Swift’s Last Orders (1996). By exploring the role
of storytelling in these two novels this paper will look at the ways
in which the threatening otherworldliness of death can be positively
reconstructed through ‘narratives of comfort.’
The relationship
between storytelling and death explores culturally naturalised attitudes
towards death as hidden, sanitised and silenced. Sociological theories
of death reveal how political and cultural constructions of death, dying
and bereavement in late modernity have contributed to a ‘denial of
death.’ This paper will argue that storytelling
offers a rapprochement of death within cultural practice, countering
the sequestration of death from contemporary discourse by reconfiguring
death as both positive and familiar.
In Being Dead, Jim Crace’s extraordinary revivification
of his main characters’ corpses employs multiple narrative temporalities
to overcome death by actuating the dead characters’ abiding subjective
existence in community with the material world. In Last Orders,
Graham Swift transcends the irrevocability of death through remembrance,
narrating diverse, temporalised recollections of the dead character to
confront the finality of death through collective memory and the importance
of ritual.
Both writers, therefore, offer positive accounts of dying that
overcome the tabooed marginalisation of death in contemporary discourse.
In this way, these fictions neutralise death’s threatening potential
to overturn social and symbolic order, refiguring the dead body as the
site of mediations between nature and culture that can outlive the absoluteness
of death through narrative. This paper will argue that these two novels
familiarise dying in fiction, enacting a Utopian construction of subjective
agency that transcends the temporality of death through storytelling.
“Life Without A Trace”: Transforming Pain Into A Poem
Julieta
C. Mallari
University of the Philippines, Pampanga, Philippines
This paper aims
to analyze the poem “Life without a Trace” written
by a Kapampangan poet, Jose Gallardo. The poem is an existential evocation
of selfhood by a poet being confronted with death. Gallardo, who was
known for authenticating the folk cultural tradition of his province,
Pampanga, and for actively promoting the homogenizing effect of communal
literature, suddenly deviated and made a radical departure from his romantic
view of life.
Gallardo’s foundational frame for his literary production
was his social identification. He was favorably disposed toward the celebration
of his province’s
cultural past and wedded his art to the claims of his predecessors, i.e., the “performing” facet
of Kapampangan literature conforming to the verbal art of the community.
At
death’s door, however, the poet had only himself to present—an
empty solitude that could not be mediated by normal social relations. By and
large, the usual communal world of the poet ceased to be felt since his attention
was totally focused on the privacy of his death bed. Pessimistic utterances about
the futility of life reverberate in the poem; horrid visual images are projected.
This shift in worldview is suggestive of the writer’s marginalized status
relative to his art. His individuality is vicariously translated into his poem
from which comes the lasting tension of his personal predicament—his psychic
and emotional trauma.
Significantly, the traditional alignment of Self and Society
is disrupted by the existential anguish of the poet: the experience of dying
ultimately undermines social cohesion. The poet’s brooding cynicism in
his poem no longer blends in harmony with his previous creative reflections.
On the other hand, this crisis, in a way, sparked off an existential experience,
making out a “modernist” space for Gallardo and investing with substance
the poet’s literary innovation.
Mourning, Monument, and Memorial in Robert Kroetsch and Eli Mandel:
Poetry of Loss
Christian
Riegel
Department of English, Campion College at the University
of Regina, Regina, Canada
This paper examines the relationship of the work of mourning–as literary textual construct and as grief process–to the role of text as a public memorial. Taking Canadian poet Eli Mandel’s long poem, Out of Place, as its textual focus, the paper outlines how the work of mourning, as conceived by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, as well as later thinkers, is integral to the poem’s purpose. This purpose is then linked to the formal and generic characteristics that identify the text as drawing from the Jewish tradition of yizkor, or memorial, books. Mandel’s private grief process is then tied to a more public and communal process. Though the communities that Mandel writes about are not destroyed by the Holocaust, as is typical of the communities that are the focus of most if not all yizkor books, Mandel nevertheless writes of places that no longer exist as they once did, and he signals his memorial purpose by borrowing and adapting the conventions of the yizkor form.
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