Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature by Susana Onega Constanza del Río & Maite Escudero-Alías

Author:Susana Onega, Constanza del Río & Maite Escudero-Alías
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Moon argues for the appropriation of Whitman’s erotic imagery of wounds and care-giving to serve as fetishes that can survive the loss of a lover to AIDS. Moon rejects Freud’s presentations of fetish and melancholia as negative and instead celebrates them through Whitman as positive and political forms of affection, in which the acts of loving and grieving are combined: “not a displacement or a dismemberment—not a castration,” writes Moon, “but a re-memberment that has repositioned itself among the remnants, the remainders, and reminders that do not go away; loss is not denied, but neither is it ‘worked through’. Loss is not lost.”18

Fictional characters created before the time of novels regarded weakly as postmodern, one might say, are able to remember, in ways that postmodern characters cannot, that there are those who love them. I want to offer a restorative pattern of reading on behalf of novels that have been unfairly classified as bleak and nihilistic expressions of the postmodern, a term that I find far too assimilating and, ultimately, misunderstood in its relationship with the direct expression of affect. Most significant, the ability to represent love is often tied directly to the hope of the novel’s survival as a literary genre, and the image of a grotesque , wounded body is central to the motivation of love’s existence. My exploration centres on a construction of point of view that seeks a wilful expression of innocence and naïveté , through which the development of narration becomes an attempt to restore more authentic ways of representing character and identity.

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