SARAH WATERS by Kaye Mitchell

Author:Kaye Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2019-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

Note

1Sarah Waters, ‘Romance Among the Ruins’, The Guardian, 28 January 2006.

CHAPTER SIX

‘What does it feel like to be an anachronism?’: Time in The Night Watch

KAYE MITCHELL

Chapter Summary: This chapter offers a reading of The Night Watch in relation to various conceptions of anachronistic, subjective and queer temporality, by examining both the treatment of time as a topic within the novel and the nature and effects of the backward narration of the novel. In this way it seeks to move on from discussions of lesbianism’s ‘invisibility’, and to develop Annamarie Jagose’s analysis of lesbianism as a ‘problem’ of sequence and derivation. The chapter considers the importance of the historical setting – the atemporal ennui of wartime – and examines the drag of the past upon the various characters and the foregrounding of their subjective experiences of wartime, industrial time, family time and time served in prison. In concluding, the chapter assesses the affective and political force of these experiences of asynchrony, the extent to which they might, paradoxically, complicate or challenge a view of homosexuality as backwardness.

Keywords: The Night Watch, queer time, anachrony, backwards narration, wartime, history.

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