Title: The palimpsestuous face of the other : homoerotic memory in Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2019, vol. 45, iss. 1, pp. [211]-227
Extent
[211]-227
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2019-1-13
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/141004
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
This paper contends that Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child (2011) revises Sarah Dillon's renegotiation of De Quincey's "palimpsest" and Emmanuel Lévinas's "Face of the Other" to deal with the working of (homoerotic) memory. In joining the palimpsest and the Face of the Other as metaphors of the invocation and resurrection of Cecil Valance − the hero and tutelary spirit of the novel − I argue that the politics of remembrance and representation in The Stranger's Child shift, and change us as readers as well. From being a closeted gay WWI poet to becoming an early-twenty-first-century relic, Valance works as a "palimpsestuous face" that returns our gaze and forces us to renegotiate our relation with the past and the Other.
Note
The author would like to acknowledge the support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) and the European Regional Development Fund (DGI/ERDF) (code FFI2017-84258-P), and the Government of Aragón and the European Social Fund (ESF) (code H03_17R), for the writing of this essay.
References
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[2] Barthes, Roland (1981) Theory of the Text. In: Young, Robert (ed.) McLeod, Ian (trans.) Untying the Text. A Post-structuralist Reader. London: Routledge, 31–47.
[3] Bell, Duncan (ed.) (2006) Memory, Trauma and World politics. Reflections on the Relationship between Past and Present. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
[4] Caeners, Torsten (2015) Memory and Memory Work. In: Wolfreys, Julian (ed.) Introducing Criticism in the 21st Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 282–307.
[5] Cohen, Richard (2001) Ethics Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation of Lévinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[6] Critchley, Simon (ed.) (2002) The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[7] Davies, Helen (2012) Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction. London: Palgrave.
[8] De Groote, Brecht (2014) The Palimpsest as a Double Structure of Memory. Orbis Literarum 69 (2), 108–133. | DOI 10.1111/oli.12055
[9] De Quincey, Thomas (1995) Confessions of an English Opium Eater. New York: Dover Publications.
[10] Derrida, Jacques (1999) Living on: Border Lines. In: Bloom, Harold (ed.) Hulbert J. (trans.) Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Continuum, 75–176.
[11] Dillon, Sara (2005) Reinscribing De Quincey's Palimpsest: The Significance of the Palimpsest in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies. Textual Practice 19 (3), 243–263. | DOI 10.1080/09502360500196227
[12] Dillon, Sara (2007) The Palimpsest. London: Bloomsbury.
[13] Forster, E. M. (1971) Maurice. London: Penguin Classics.
[14] Haraway, Donna (2004) The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge.
[15] Hollinghurst, Alan (2011) The Stranger's Child. London: Picador.
[16] Johannessen, Lene (2012) Palimpsest and hybridity in postcolonial writing. In: Quayson, Ato (ed.) The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Writing, volume II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 869–902.
[17] Johnson, Christopher M. (1988) Intertextuality and the Psychic Model. Paragraph 2, 71–89. | DOI 10.3366/para.1988.0004
[18] Lévinas, Emmanuel (1982) Ethique et Infini. Paris: L'espace Interieur.
[19] Lévinas, Emmanuel (1991) Totality and Infinity. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
[20] Orrells, Daniel (2011) Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[21] Rothberg, Michael (2009) Multidirectional Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
[22] Samuel, Raphael (1994) Theatres of Memory. Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso.
[23] Silverman, Max (2013) Palimpsestic Memory. The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film. New York and Oxford: Berghahn.
[24] Singh, Avtar (1986) The Novels of E. M. Forster. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers.
[25] Tennyson, Alfred (1974) In Memoriam, Maud and other Poems. London: Dent.
[26] The Chicago School of Media Theory (n.d.) Palimpsest. Accessed from https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/palimpsest/ on 12 Nov. 2015.
[27] University of Exeter (14 Jan. 2015) Exhibition reveals the impact of WW1 on art and facial reconstructive surgery. Accessed from http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/research/title_429629_en.html on 17 Nov. 2015.
[28] Villar, Carlos and Robert Murray Davis (2005) Waugh without End. Bern: Peter Lang.
[29] Waugh, Evelyn (1988) Brideshead Revisited. London: Penguin.
[30] Young, Frederick (2015) Lévinas and Criticism. In: Wolfreys, Julian (ed.) Introducing Criticism in the 21st Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 101–121.