Dipping into chaos: Incest and innovations in twentieth-century narrative (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tove Ditlevsen, Denmark, Vladimir Nabokov, Alice Walker, Henry Roth).

摘要

By breaking the taboo that forbids two related characters to mate, certain recent writers have deliberately created a rupture in narrative plot and form in which the language of discussion and representation can be reborn. The incest taboo is the interdiction that distinguishes order from chaos, civilization from savagery. For writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tove Ditlevsen, Vladimir Nabokov, Alice Walker, and Henry Roth, it represents a shocking though perhaps thrilling possibility, because out of chaos a new order may emerge.; The deployment of Freudian masterplots in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and Tove Ditlevsen's Ansigterne (The Faces) means that incestuous desire, whether acted upon or repressed, produces aphasia and confusion, changing a character's basic ability to know and understand, and actualizing the sense- and language-deforming possibilities inherent in the Freudian incest theory.; Midway through the series of autobiographical novels by Henry Roth, the narrator suddenly reveals that not only does he have a sister but he and she have been conducting an affair for some years. The series' structure splinters into several subplots, none of them really resolved with a traditional climax; moreover, around incest and the problems of representation, some lyrical language from Roth's weighty classic, Call It Sleep, resurfaces.; The principal intrigue of Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor is a language plot that overrides the novel's deliberately banal proairetic structure. Writing specifically against Freud, the soi-disant onanistic narrator, Van, presents a version of the primordial state in which language is predicated not on difference (as post-structuralists would have it) but on similarity.; The final chapter concentrates on the link between incest and traditional black speech in Alice Walker's epistolary novel The Color Purple. Walker identifies the dialect spoken and written by a much-incested daughter as a mutilated form of English that is nonetheless more expressive than the standard version wielded by a more educated sister. Within the language family, we are to look at the molested and maligned sibling, the “plain” version of English, for true transcendence.