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Abjection and Compassion: Affective Corporeality in Patrick White's Fiction
Abstract
This article argues that the seemingly disparate affective and corporeal sensations of abjection and compassion significantly inform the fiction of Australian modernist, Patrick White. Focusing in particular on White's early novel The Living and the Dead ([1941]1977), a work often sidelined in critical discussions of his writing, it maintains that the dialectical tension between abjection and compassion that fascinates White informs his representations (and troubling) of subjectivity from the beginning of his oeuvre. Accordingly, the article identifies the importance of corporeality within White's fiction, an aspect of his work that has often been occluded within critical readings committed to his transcendentalism. With particular reference to Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection and various recent theoretical conceptions of affect, it suggests that White's characters’ sublime, recurring and transient forfeitures of identity may be profoundly imbricated with their surrender to – as opposed to their transcendence of – embodiment. Finally, the article argues that White's persistent elaboration of affect as corporeal suggests a physicality of literature that evokes the reader's own embodied sense of compassion. Altogether, the article explores the ways in which White's fiction reclaims a focus on corporeality that he perceived as lost to an inherently narcissistic modern consciousness.
... 27 No hemos abordado aquí, entre otras tantas, las diversas reinterpretaciones de nociones provenientes de la teoría psicoanalítica puestas al servicio de los estudios del afecto como en el trabajo pionero de Teresa Brennan (2004) y su transmisión del afecto, o la sugestión, mimesis, transferencia abordada entre otras por Lisa Blackman (2010), Valerie Walkerdine (2010) o Anna Gibbs (2010). Tampoco hemos considerado otras matrices de producción de conocimiento que no pertenecen a la«ciencia», como las teorías de la estética y el arte, en este tipo de articulaciones destacan los trabajos de Jane Simon (2010) sobre la relación subjetiva con la fotografía o Bridget Grogan (2012) y Sianne Ngai (2005) sobre la transmisión del afecto en el estilo literario, por ejemplo. cimiento; o si podemos continuar promulgando unas «teorías sociales» desinformadas de los avances científicos. ...
The so-called ‘Affective Turn’ has brought articulations between certain contributions from social sciences and humanities —what we call here «social theory(ies)»— and some expressions from hard or natural science, —what we call here «science(s)»—. The argument of this paper is that such re-encounters between «science» and «social theory» happen, in the frame of the contemporary studies, in three different kinds or gear logics that we have named ‘Assemblage Spheres’. Here we argue that each of those spheres promotes different notions about the body, and each particular notion is what distinguishes them and what defines the possibilities of articulation for each sphere. The three logics of articulation that name our spheres are: The cybernetic fold, the Techno-Science and the Neuroscience. We will explain every sphere and we will illustrate each one with a research that displays its logic. Moreover we will make some warnings about possible critiques with regard to the re-encounters of «science» and «social theory», finally we will incorporate some premonitions about such relation within the studies of affect.
This article details the deconstruction of social identity in Mark Gevisser’s memoir Lost and Found in Johannesburg. It does so by emphasising how the city’s design reflects racial and sexual segregation through the construction of borders and boundaries that are nonetheless nebulous and artificial. In Gevisser’s memoir, his recollections are interspersed with the narratives of other marginalised individuals and groups. I employ Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to understand how systems of exclusion function not only to exclude, but paradoxically, how they allow spaces of inclusion. I argue that the apartheid city can be read as a social body that can be analysed in a similar manner to how the individual subject distinguishes itself from others. The social body therefore creates subjective boundaries between racialised and sexualised others to maintain its sense of autonomy.
The monstrous is individuated by the same normative discourses that regulate the definition and the performative constitution of the corps propre, the human and the social. The mechanism of monstrosity and that of humanity are, thus, one and the same. The function of this mechanism is precisely to affirm the existence of a clear split between the human and the inhuman, and to objectivate this split by performing their separation in discursive and social practices. Referring to the different views on the abject in the works of Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek, this paper argues that the human and the inhuman are not just inseparable, in that they are two products of the same dynamics, but also radically indistinguishable. The split which is assumed and created by normative discourses, as much as it is deemed necessary for the formation of human subjects and communities, is in fact impossible to realise completely, and always uncertain. Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama provides an example of this fundamental and irresoluble ambiguity of humanity and inhumanity, as it presents a prototypical rural community in nineteenth century Japan in which the boundaries between the human and the animal, social aggregation and isolation, compassion and cruelty, death and plenty, are hard to draw. By refusing to take an essential and idealised notion of humanity as the universal ground of equality and social institutions, Imamura compels us to acknowledge the contingency and indeterminacy of the human and the inhuman, and the hegemonic struggles that characterize their very distinction.
In a description of nationalist poems about “a golden age of black heroes; of myths and legends and sprites” (Marechera 74), the narrator of The House of Hunger (1978) observes that these themes are the “exposed veins dripping through the body of the poems.” In this article we extend this observation to argue that, metaphorically on display in Marechera’s novella itself, are the “exposed veins dripping through the body of the [text]” (74). The novella’s themes include colonialism, social destitution, violence, state-sanctioned oppression, identity struggles, poverty, dislocation, disillusionment and anger, all of which are appropriately imaged in Marechera’s visceral metaphor of the pain and violence implicit in the literary text. More specifically, corporeal imagery emphasises the unnamed narrator’s troubled existence, suffusing The House of Hunger in a manner that elicits disgust and horror, thus encouraging the reader’s affective response to the representation of the colonial condition. This article illuminates Marechera’s seeming obsession with corporeality by providing a postcolonial and psychoanalytic reading, focussing in particular on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection. Although critics have objected to reading African texts through the lens of psychoanalysis, the article sets out to address this concern, noting the importance of theorists like Frantz Fanon and Joshua D. Esty in justifying psychoanalytic readings of African literature, and drawing resonant parallels between Kristevan theory and Marechera’s perspective on the colonial condition of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) in the 1970s.
Sign and symbols, pictures and images are the basic organs of any writing. A writer speaks in his voice through letters and literatures with the help of images and pictures so called Signs and Symbols. This article argues to analyze the thematic and stylistic concerns associated with Symbolism as used by the Australian Fiction writer Patrick White in his novel 'The Eye of the Storm'. While focusing on 'The Eye of the Storm', the article shall examine the characters and their practicality in terms of symbolism as to how and what White wants to suggest through his characters and the theme of the novel.
Emotions shape the landscape of our mental and social lives. Like geological upheavals in a landscape, they mark our lives as uneven, uncertain and prone to reversal. Are they simply, as some have claimed, animal energies or impulses with no connection to our thoughts? Or are they rather suffused with intelligence and discernment, and thus a source of deep awareness and understanding? In this compelling book, Martha C. Nussbaum presents a powerful argument for treating emotions not as alien forces but as highly discriminating responses to what is of value and importance. She explores and illuminates the structure of a wide range of emotions, in particular compassion and love, showing that there can be no adequate ethical theory without an adequate theory of the emotions. This involves understanding their cultural sources, their history in infancy and childhood, and their sometimes unpredictable and disorderly operations in our daily lives.
This book presents an account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Though readers' and authors' empathy certainly contribute to the emotional resonance of fiction and its success in the marketplace, this book finds the case for altruistic consequences of novel reading inconclusive. It offers instead a detailed theory of narrative empathy, with proposals about its deployment by novelists and its results in readers. The book engages with neuroscience and contemporary psychological research on empathy, bringing affect to the center of cognitive literary studies' scrutiny of narrative fiction. Drawing on narrative theory, literary history, philosophy, and contemporary scholarship in discourse processing, the book brings together resources and challenges for the literary study of empathy and the psychological study of fiction reading. Empathy robustly enters into affective responses to fiction, but its proper role in shaping the behavior of emotional readers has been debated for three centuries. The book surveys these debates and offers a series of hypotheses about literary empathy, including narrative techniques inviting empathetic response. It argues that above all readers' perception of a text's fictiveness increases the likelihood of readers' empathy, by releasing readers from their guarded responses to the demands of real others. The book confirms the centrality of narrative empathy as a strategy, as well as a subject, of contemporary novelists. Despite the disrepute of putative human universals, novelists from around the world endorse the notion of shared human emotions when they overtly call upon their readers' empathy. Consequently, the book suggests, if narrative empathy is to be better understood, women's reading and popular fiction must be accorded the respect of experimental inquiry.
What happens when we engage with fictional characters? What sort of cognitive activity and affective response does reading about imaginary figures involve? How do our imaginative engagements bear on our actions in the wider world? Moving between literary and philosophical analysis, this book considers the ways in which readers feel when they read, and how they understand ideas of feeling. By using poetic rewritings of The Tempest as its focus, this book broaches questions about fictional belief, morality, and the dynamics between readers, writers, and fictional characters. The book challenges conventionally accepted ideas of literary identification. It questions whether this activity is necessarily central to our reading practices, and scrutinises why identification has been seen as so important to some liberal humanist theories of literary engagement. Individual chapters on Robert Browning, W. H. Auden, and Samuel Beckett, who all drew on Shakespeare's late play, offer new readings of some major works, while the book's epilogue tackles questions of contemporary sympathy.
This paper takes as point of departure current attempts at understanding what the notion of an embodied subjectivity might mean for life writing. It begins by providing a psychoanalytic perspective on how subjectivity is related to the body, describing the processes by which subjectivity emerges out of bodily drives and showing how the emergence of the subject is coterminous with the emergence of language. Having identified the processes by which subjectivity, language and body are related, the paper examines the writing of the body in the poetry of Arthur Nortje, drawing attention to the stylistic means by which bodily drives are configured. It concludes by suggesting that because the body is present in writing not as substance but as a system of articulation, the only way in which the biographer is able to convey the embodied life of the subject is through what Nietzsche calls the ‘felt text’.