Patrick McGrath

A psychiatrist narrates what at first appears to be a patient’s story, then a friend’s story involving a patient, that increasingly becomes his own story through his narrative choices. Are we then - as reader - an audience, a confidant, a witness, perhaps the narrator’s own therapist? Patrick McGrath’s Asylum (1996) sets up these subject positions within the text, both as characters and as possible reading positions, and then blurs the boundaries. Bryan Fuller’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels, as the television show Hannibal (2013 -2015), develops the same technique. The entire third (final?) season of the series is devoted to psychiatrists and psychological profilers, who may also be murderers and lovers, debating agency, observation, participation, and responsibility. The focus of all this psychiatric narration is the same; sex and death.

This paper explores the disruption of genre and the text/audience dynamic in these fictions about analysis, analysts, adulterers, and murderers.  Asylum reads like literary fiction; described by the New York Times as having ‘elegance and discretion’i it yet treats its audience like knowing connoisseurs of the gothic, and of horror. Fuller has declared, repeatedly, that Hannibal is not ‘television [but] a pretentious 80’s arthouse movie’. However, it opens with the structure and conventions of the serial investigative procedural. Form and function in these gothic works are analysed, exacted, and reconfigured, like the bodies of the victims, the psyches of the characters, and the perspective of the audience. Just who is taking whom to pieces?

The main goal of the article is to expose transculturality as a fundamental feature of the fictional prose by Enrique Vila-Matas. The investigation focuses on his two novels published in 21st century: Never any end to Paris (París no se acaba nunca, 2003) & Dublinesque (Dublinesca, 2010) and reveals the multinational, interdisciplinary narrative perspective that has significantly broaden the cultural and artistic dimensions of the novelistic worlds developed by the writer from Barcelona. The analysis of his texts shows enormous density of intertextual connections contracted by Vila-Matas with the classic works of European and universal literature and, thusly, unveils the complexity of influences that concreate the textual identities elaborated both in Never any end to Paris and Dublinesque.

Gutkowska-Ociepa, K. (2014): Perspectiva transcultural en la narrativa de Enrique Vila-Matas. Sobre “París no se acaba nunca” y “Dublinesca”. En: Encuentros entre lenguas, literaturas y culturas de los territorios luso-hipanos. Perspectivas diferentes. J. Wilk-Racięska, A. Nowakowska-Głuszak, C. Tatoj (eds.). Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, pp. 13-38.

This article explores the manner in which Patrick McGrath’s Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now and Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days have both responded to 9/11 through similar techniques of literary triptych that place different historical periods of New York, including the present, into complex relations of similarity, repetition and difference. The cumulative effect of the temporal juxtaposition and the centrality of absent figures within each story emphasize the difficulty and necessity of the twin tasks of mourning the dead and evoking and conserving hope for the city’s future.