In Shik Bang

DOI: Vol.68(No.3) 535-557, 2022

In her graphic memoir, Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? (2014), Roz Chast chronicles disturbing issues of aging and death by recalling that of her own parents. Using an ironical narrative technique in the form of comics to look back on the last years of her parents, Chast not only expands the territory of graphic novels, but also redefines the conventional radius of life writings. Unlike the mainstream life writings that primarily focus on public figures’ prime times, Chast, in her narrative of conscious aging, articulates what it means to be frail and old. That is, Chast, by employing texts, images, and photos among others, probes into the end of one’s life through the painful lens of observing her parents’ death. With death looming in front of them, her parents recognize the mortality of their own life and gradually become “Being-towards-death.” They change abstract time into an opportunity to be fully responsible for their own existence. As the only caregiver for her dying parents and an artist representing their last days with an ethnographic gesture, Chast confesses that she could experience death only through the demise of her parents. To explain the different conceptions of time represented in this graphic memoir, critical discourses on life, death, and time by Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas have been used. One’s old age inevitably accompanies illness, disability, and eventually death; Chast in her graphic memoir, however, argues that this period allows us to reconsider life’s circle anew by expanding the frontiers of life narratives.

old age, death, graphic memoir, autobiography studies, Roz Chast

Jung-suk Hwang

DOI: Vol.68(No.3) 559-577, 2022

Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) depicts a tragic history of the 1937 massacre of Haitians by Dominican military troops, particularly migrant workers, under the dictator Rafael Trujillo’s orders, with the participation of Dominican civilians. Critics have examined the novel’s representation of the traumatic event that has been silenced and omitted from the official narratives. Despite different approaches, the current readings have commonly re-circulated the binary between Haiti/Haitian/victim and Dominican Republic/Trujillo/persecutor and reproduced a popular perception of the massacre as a conflict between the two Caribbean nations, while highlighting the long legacy of French and Spanish colonization on Hispaniola as its root cause. These readings tend to overlook one of the most crucial histories of the 1937 massacre referenced in Danticat’s novel―the US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Danticat harshly criticizes the United States in her article, “The Long Legacy of Occupation in Haiti,” published in 2015 on the hundred-year-anniversary of the US invasion of Haiti. Explaining how America affected and propelled the development of sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic, the Haitian eastward movement, and exploitation of Haitian migrant workers as cheap labor force, this article sheds new light on important aspects of the 1937 massacre that have been relatively neglected in discussions of The Farming of Bones. Based on Danticat’s article, I examine how she represents the history of the US occupation of Haiti as an underlying cause of the 1937 massacre and portrays its continuing effects on Hispaniola in the novel.

Danticat, the 1937 massacre, US occupation, Haiti, eastward movement

Sungjin Jang

DOI: Vol.68(No.3) 579-597, 2022

In general, action-adventure video games consist of three elements: game players, main and side quests, which are introduced in game intros, and game bosses. While game players continue their journey, they need to complete game quests as many as they can to level up their power and skills. Along with the quests, they encounter many game bosses and often fail to defeat them. Joyce’s “An Encounter” has these elements: the unnamed narrator and Mahony (game players), the boys’ journey to the Pigeon House (the quest), and game bosses (Father Butler and the old man). Thus, viewing the first part as the game intro and the second part as the main gameplay, this paper argues that the two parts are connected with each other in terms of the boys’ encounter with game bosses: Father Butler in the game intro threatens Leo Dillon, and the old man in the main gameplay intimidates the narrator by continually mentioning whipping children. In addition, the narrator at the end of the story suddenly expresses regret for despising Mahony. Without giving any information about this change, the narrator forces the reader to simply accept that something has happened to the narrator. However, if we view the narrator’s confession through the lens of a video game, the narrator’s abrupt confession can be understood as his realization that Mahony has been the narrator’s helpful companion. Confronting this threatening situation, the boy realizes how desperately he needs Mahony’s assistance and how great Mahony has been a help to him.

James Joyce, “An Encounter, ” video games, game intro, game bosses

Hye Ryoung Kil

DOI: Vol.68(No.3) 599-622, 2022

This essay examines the crisis of national identity incurred by failure of dominant ideologies, as represented by the protagonist’s sexual dysfunction or lack of potential to have a male heir in Joyce’s Ulysses and Mo Yan’s Big Breasts and Wide Hips. In Joyce, Bloom suffers shame and guilt for the suicide of his father who converted to Protestantism, which parallel the psychological burden the Irish carry for what happened during the Great Famine. The famine which led the poor Catholics to starve to death or convert to Protestantism to survive, revealing the unviability of Catholic and nationalist ideologies, burdens the survivors with shame and guilt. Bloom, haunted by the shameful and remorseful death of his father, lacks the virility to produce a male heir to inherit the Irish national identity. Similarly, in Mo Yan Shangguan Jintong who is born after eight daughters toils through the catastrophic events in twentieth-century China which claim the lives of all Shangguan daughters, suggesting the unviability of Confucianism and Communism as governing ideologies. All the sacrifices his sisters make for the sake of the male heir afflict him with shame and guilt, which represent those of the Chinese who live through the troubled times. Particularly, Jintong is obsessed with the woman’s breast as the symbol of his shame and guilt. Never weaned, he is unable to grow up to father an heir, which signifies the crisis of Chinese national identity.

James Joyce, Mo Yan, Ulysses, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, national identity

Myungsung Kim

DOI: Vol.68(No.3) 623-649, 2022

This article explores the racialized historical continuity between the colorblind racist culture of the post-civil rights era and the formation of American democracy in the antebellum nineteenth century in Octavia Butler’s Kindred. The novel represents the 1970s as a culture where colorblind, neoliberal market universalism is prevalent and the 1830s as a germinal era of Herrenvolk republicanism. While the novel’s antebellum scenes correspond to the time when the political meaning of race underwent significant changes in American history, the 1970s alludes to the outset of the new racial system, a new political invention in the post-Civil Rights Movement United States. Such historical references to race and American democracy represented in Kindred illuminate the contradictory nature of American democracy and its political doctrine that have persisted throughout US history. Dana’s time travel is a rhetorical device to disclose the invisible continuity between these historical eras, illuminating the racist nature of American democracy and allegedly post-racial society. Through the alignment of democratic nation-building in the antebellum nineteenth century and its colorblind re-regimentation in modern US culture, the time travel in Kindred racializes the post-racial America where white supremacist polities have invented new meanings of race in order to maintain color lines. This trans-historical space shares with the novel’s literary ancestors, Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a common concern for the adequacy of the novel genre in representing racial experience, locating itself within the formal tradition of modern African American literature.

Civil Rights Movement, colorblind racism, Herrenvolk democracy, Kindred, Octavia Butler

Seogkwang Lee

DOI: Vol.68(No.3) 651-674, 2022

This essay endeavours to read Tony in The Sense of an Ending as an unreliable narrator, and that his incredible recount is due to his neurosis. This pathological neurosis instigates his fantasy, which distorts his understanding of reality. Moreover, his fantasy-embedded mumbling communication blurs his points into unreliability. What results is his deteriorating moral sense, out of which he ends up damaging the people he knows, such as Veronica, Adrian and, to an unnecessary degree, Adrian junior, who lost his young father when he was an infant. This essay’s analytical reading thus focuses on how the novel’s whole sequence unfolds in a scheme that Tony intentionally and unintentionally sets up to mangle the life of others. In the bottom line, his lackadaisical and peace of mind-seeking attitude makes him an inconsiderate character of neurosis that Iris Murdoch abhors as an enemy of love. In the course of analysing Tony’s solipsistic narration, this essay uses Murdoch’s longstanding idea of neurosis and its subsequent solipsistic interpretation of the world, stemming from her notion of fantasy in opposition to the imagination that Murdoch expounds in different writings. This essay argues that Barnes’ novel is an illustration of Murdoch’s idea of neurosis based on the analytical ground that according to the author’s device Tony and his school friends wear a watch on the inside of their wrists, which indicates a predetermination towards understanding events subjectively. This essay takes this tendency as a rationale to employ a Murdochian reading of neurosis, fantasy and solipsism.

Iris Murdoch, neurosis, solipsism, narration, memory

Shinhyun Park

DOI: Vol.68(No.3) 675-707, 2022

This paper aims to explore how Doris Lessing in her novel Mara and Dann (1999) embodies the female body of Mara and nonhuman bodies intra-actively co-constituted in the times of severe droughts, inviting the readers to perceive droughts affectively and cognitively, and suggests that like a refugee girl, Mara, human species should be able to identify themselves as migrants or refugees equipped with the decision to leave and the courage to travel for their survival in the era of climate change. Furthermore, it examines the way Mara and Dann envisions the human civilization beyond the Anthropocene and women combining professional expertise and response-ability qualified for leading new communities after the climate change. The novel proposes new heterarchical posthuman communities supported by companionship and caring, resisting the hierarchical society of Eurocentrism in the past. In this novel both human and nonhuman bodies including inorganic bodies such as stones and cities, manifest themselves as material narratives which tell their stories eloquently. Mara and Dann provides extraordinarily vivid descriptions of sufferings caused by drought and thirst, and draws particular attention to the fact that in underdeveloped countries, women and girls suffer disproportionately in severe water shortages. These water-related injustices and discrimination that women face are tacitly reported in the novel. By tracing the growth of Mara as cartographer and storyteller, Lessing implies that the Anthropocene literature is a sort of cartography which helps the readers to imagine the incalculable scales of the Anthropocene through the shift of spatial-temporal scales even though it requires their deciphering the signs on the map.

Doris Lessing, Mara and Dann, Anthropocene, climate change, new material feminism

Pradeepa. S , Anu Baisel

DOI: Vol.68(No.3) 709-730, 2022

The prevailing stereotypical views of old age articulate the relevance of the need for artistic representation of ageing in fiction. The centrality of the intersection of gerontology and literature brings out the understanding of attitudes toward ageism. The focus is on humanities-based intervention, which draws attention to how ageing is portrayed in the select novel. Specifically looking at literary gerontology, this article aims to represent the layering of prejudices dealing with grandparenthood and infantilization in late adulthood. It shows how Anne Tyler’s novel, Back When We Were Grownups, contests the narrative of ageism and the character’s concern about the role of behavior in their old age. The reflexive stance on the conceptualized notion of grandparent also takes the form of a specific stereotypical view. Tyler’s exploration of aged characters introduces realities such as physical dependency, loneliness, visual impressions, and changing roles concerning ageing. Thus, the act of prejudice acknowledges that it not only stems from society’s perspective but also begins from the older adult’s own family. While enduring old age, there are possibilities to form a tie between childhood and old age due to dependency. Though the openly manifested social norm of dependence in ageing is quite unnatural, the novel throws positive light through its old-age characters. In between the framed identical stereotypes, the novel’s protagonist seeks to transform beyond the gerontological stereotypes in society. It is pressing, especially when older women are imbued with the threat of self-realizing transformation from their younger selves and framing themselves as widows.

fictional ageing, gerontological stereotypes, later life, literary representation, positive ageing