Ben Winsworth
Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Popular Culture at the University of Orleans, France. Research interests include: 20th century novel, relationship between literature and psychoanalysis, D. W. Winnicott, history and analysis of popular music (pop/rock), British youth subcultures.
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Papers by Ben Winsworth
It is, of course, possible to consider Braithwaite’s dodging the past, and unreliability as a narrator, within a postmodern context: Flaubert’s Parrot is another novel which confirms the provisionality of the narratives that we construct to explain and order our lives, and illustrates that ‘truth’, like the parrot within the text, is always somewhere else beyond the futile attempts of language to catch it, confirm its presence, and make it inanimate.
However, one thing that seems not to be given enough credence in this equation is the emotional bargaining that is taking place between allusion and access in Braithwaite’s ‘writing’. Using Freud’s brief paper, ‘Negation’ (1925), where he examines the way in which the narratives that his patients construct often reveal the origin of that which has been repressed, at the same time as they offer protection from the full force of that repressed material, I will attempt to look in more detail at the tensions and paradoxes playing themselves out in Braithwaite’s narrative. It is, I shall argue, a game of hide and seek in which Braithwaite’s negation – the refusal or inability to grant an idea or association its full significance – provides both a defence against being found and a means of being found in allowing the repressed a way into consciousness.
Sometimes we will hear a piece of music that was popular during a very special time of our life and this too seems to elicit within us not so much a memory as an inner psychic constellation laden with images, feelings, and bodily acuities. (3)
Paradoxically, while such encounters allow us to ‘reach through the past and touch the essence of a distant self experience’ (3), and give shape and expression to that self experience, they will remain particular to ourselves and we will be unable to fully explain the significance that they have for us1. Having said this, such moments, while being experientially unique, are as much a part of the human condition as dreaming. We all know what Proust is writing about in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu when he describes his ‘petite madeleine’, even though our own tastes and associations may be different. Similarly in ‘The Dead’, when Gretta is moved by The Lass of Aughrim, we know something of how she is feeling and what it is that James Joyce is trying to explore in his short story, even though it may be difficult for us as readers to say exactly what that is.
It is, of course, possible to consider Braithwaite’s dodging the past, and unreliability as a narrator, within a postmodern context: Flaubert’s Parrot is another novel which confirms the provisionality of the narratives that we construct to explain and order our lives, and illustrates that ‘truth’, like the parrot within the text, is always somewhere else beyond the futile attempts of language to catch it, confirm its presence, and make it inanimate.
However, one thing that seems not to be given enough credence in this equation is the emotional bargaining that is taking place between allusion and access in Braithwaite’s ‘writing’. Using Freud’s brief paper, ‘Negation’ (1925), where he examines the way in which the narratives that his patients construct often reveal the origin of that which has been repressed, at the same time as they offer protection from the full force of that repressed material, I will attempt to look in more detail at the tensions and paradoxes playing themselves out in Braithwaite’s narrative. It is, I shall argue, a game of hide and seek in which Braithwaite’s negation – the refusal or inability to grant an idea or association its full significance – provides both a defence against being found and a means of being found in allowing the repressed a way into consciousness.
Sometimes we will hear a piece of music that was popular during a very special time of our life and this too seems to elicit within us not so much a memory as an inner psychic constellation laden with images, feelings, and bodily acuities. (3)
Paradoxically, while such encounters allow us to ‘reach through the past and touch the essence of a distant self experience’ (3), and give shape and expression to that self experience, they will remain particular to ourselves and we will be unable to fully explain the significance that they have for us1. Having said this, such moments, while being experientially unique, are as much a part of the human condition as dreaming. We all know what Proust is writing about in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu when he describes his ‘petite madeleine’, even though our own tastes and associations may be different. Similarly in ‘The Dead’, when Gretta is moved by The Lass of Aughrim, we know something of how she is feeling and what it is that James Joyce is trying to explore in his short story, even though it may be difficult for us as readers to say exactly what that is.