The “I” and the Voice: Interpreting the Narrator’s Anonym in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Light of the World”

La nouvelle de Hemingway “La lumière du monde” est un récit à la première personne, et bien que le nom de l’énonciateur n’apparaisse nulle part dans le texte, la plupart des études, dans le sillage de Philip Young qui a classé la nouvelle parmi les Nick Adams Stories, considère qu’il s’agit de Nick. Par conséquent l’anonymat de l’énonciateur et la réticence du texte à lui donner une personnalité, une psychologie, n’ont jamais été interrogés comme tels. Cette étude propose au contraire de considérer le dépouillement caractéristique de la première personne comme un élément structurel majeur de la nouvelle. C’est précisément cette sobriété attachée à l’énonciateur anonyme du texte qui en éclaire la structure, laquelle emprunte à la forme théâtrale, ainsi que la thématique principale centrée sur le témoignage, piste que le titre suggère et que l’histoire enchâssée de Steve Ketchel poursuit sur le mode parodique. Elle se révèle être un élément pertinent pour une interprétation du texte visant la question du désir, au cœur de la poétique hémingwayienne tant dans les nouvelles que dans les romans.While the first person narrator in Hemingway’s “The Light of the World” remains unidentified, most studies following in Philip Young’s wake have assumed him to be Nick Adams. The anonymity of the first person and the text’s reticence to construct the speaker as an ego endowed with psychological characteristics has been largely ignored. This study proposes to focus on the bareness of the “I” narrating the story, leaving aside the character of Nick Adams, as a crucial structural element of the text. The very bareness of the unidentified first person accounts for the text’s structure that reads like a play, as well as for its major theme of testimony suggested by the title and developed in the embedded story of Steve Ketchel. It is a relevant clue to an interpretation of the story drawing on the notion of desire that matches Hemingway’s overall poetics in the short stories as well as in the novels

Black Magic in A.S. Byatt’s Little Black Book of Stories: Painting the Body Sublime

Colours in Byatt’s collection of short stories are either organic or related to the body, which is consistent with the stories as tales of domestic horror depicting the decaying body, the tortured body, the écorché body or the body left without a mind. Byatt is, in particular, a black magician evoking the horror within by making use of the domestic toil of black-leading or the domestic upset of the war’s blackout to build a sophisticated metaphor of the work of art as metamorphosis. Working like a painter incrementing layers upon layers of meaning like so many touches of colour or coats of material, Byatt’s use of colour is a subtle means to work on the limit (limes) of the unspeakable and stand on the threshold (limen) between brilliance and terror so that she may transform Raw Material into Body Art as two aptly named stories suggest. Working with colours, she paints the body sublime.L’usage de la couleur dans le recueil d’A.S. Byatt se concentre sur les façons de dépeindre le corps, les nouvelles mettent en scène une forme d’horreur domestique explorant les facettes du corps mortel : corps écorché, corps malade, corps torturé, corps sans âme. Byatt use de la magie du noir pour évoquer l’horreur : bouleversement domestique provoqué par la deuxième guerre mondiale lors du black-out de Londres, labeur domestique quotidien de frotter les fourneaux à la mine de plomb (en anglais black-leading). Byatt use de magie noire pour construire une métaphore de l’œuvre d’art comme métamorphose. Travaillant à la manière du peintre, Byatt superpose les couches de sens et utilise la couleur pour explorer les limites (limes) du dicible et les zones liminales (limen) entre éclat et terreur afin de transformer Le matériau brut en Art corporel, pour reprendre les titres de deux nouvelles. La couleur aide Byatt à peindre un corps sublime

The “I” and the Voice: Interpreting the Narrator’s Anonym in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Light of the World”

La nouvelle de Hemingway “La lumière du monde” est un récit à la première personne, et bien que le nom de l’énonciateur n’apparaisse nulle part dans le texte, la plupart des études, dans le sillage de Philip Young qui a classé la nouvelle parmi les Nick Adams Stories, considère qu’il s’agit de Nick. Par conséquent l’anonymat de l’énonciateur et la réticence du texte à lui donner une personnalité, une psychologie, n’ont jamais été interrogés comme tels. Cette étude propose au contraire de considérer le dépouillement caractéristique de la première personne comme un élément structurel majeur de la nouvelle. C’est précisément cette sobriété attachée à l’énonciateur anonyme du texte qui en éclaire la structure, laquelle emprunte à la forme théâtrale, ainsi que la thématique principale centrée sur le témoignage, piste que le titre suggère et que l’histoire enchâssée de Steve Ketchel poursuit sur le mode parodique. Elle se révèle être un élément pertinent pour une interprétation du texte visant la question du désir, au cœur de la poétique hémingwayienne tant dans les nouvelles que dans les romans.While the first person narrator in Hemingway’s “The Light of the World” remains unidentified, most studies following in Philip Young’s wake have assumed him to be Nick Adams. The anonymity of the first person and the text’s reticence to construct the speaker as an ego endowed with psychological characteristics has been largely ignored. This study proposes to focus on the bareness of the “I” narrating the story, leaving aside the character of Nick Adams, as a crucial structural element of the text. The very bareness of the unidentified first person accounts for the text’s structure that reads like a play, as well as for its major theme of testimony suggested by the title and developed in the embedded story of Steve Ketchel. It is a relevant clue to an interpretation of the story drawing on the notion of desire that matches Hemingway’s overall poetics in the short stories as well as in the novels

The Confluence of Naturalism and Postmodernism in Rose Tremain’s The Swimming Pool Season: a Post-War Feminist Approach to Realism

With such characters as Gervaise or the Maréchal exclaiming over ‘la comédie humaine’, Tremain pays homage in The Swimming Pool Season to the tradition of the great realistic novel. Her portrayal of mid-life crises of middle and lower class characters impacted by their ‘milieu’—the social, economic, national components of their identity—within a causal plot matches the conventions of the realistic novel, more particularly of the naturalistic school. Her character study, however, also incorporates modernist issues of the exile of the self and the disjunction between one’s perception and the world’s judgement with a gallery of migrant and local characters gathered together in the made-up French village of Pomerac. Although postmodernist thinkers were highly critical of realism, The Swimming Pool Season may be an example of the ‘the synthesis or transcension’ of the modes of writing of traditional bourgeois realism and modernism that John Barth foresaw for postmodernist fiction. Tremain’s brand of realism adopts feminist and psychoanalytical concerns with the instability of gender signifiers depicted in this polyphonic novel through marital crisis and a variety of love triangles. Larry and Miriam are a British couple in crisis while Gervaise, her husband Mallélou and her lover Klaus are involved in a ‘ménage à trois’. Hervé, the village’s bachelor misogamist doctor, is wooed by Polish Nadia whose husband resides in an Adjustment Home. Xavier, Gervaise’s son, falls in love with the doctor’s niece who is engaged to well-off Luc. It is also modified by postcolonialism and post war issues with the fabrication of a cosmopolitan village against the historical background of the French collaborationist past. The novel opposes the patriarchal figure of the Maréchal and the obscene figure of Pétainist Mallélou. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the vitality of the realistic genre and attempt to answer the charges against it of conservatism, especially when written by a woman

Fault Lines: Viral Disquiet in Sarah Moss’s Fiction

Sarah Moss’s latest novel, The Fell, is a pandemic novel which explores the social fractures that the COVID 19 lockdown blatantly exposed. Its oppressive atmosphere of rising anxiety in the self-isolating context of the epidemic, however, has pervaded Moss’s fiction from the beginning of her career. Her first novel, Cold Earth (2009), published a few months before the swine flu pandemic, imagined a group of archaeologists cut off from the world in Greenland as a consequence of the global spread of a virus. Her 2020 novel, Summerwater, similarly pictures a group of tourists isolated by the rain in Scotland while her 2018 novel, Ghost Wall, describes an experiential archaeological summer camp going wrong. Moss uses extreme quarantine-like circumstances to question individual responses and group behaviours. Thus, the various confining circumstances of her novels unfold as political fault lines questioning single motherhood, domestic abuse, xenophobia, scapegoating, class and gender divides. The paper will explore such rifts through attention to Moss’s diverse writing procedures from the first-person polyphony of her first novel to the disjointed use of free indirect speech, characteristic of pandemic writing, in her latest novel, using affect theory to account for her viral signature brand of writing

The Significance of Cumbria in Sarah Hall’s First Novel, Haweswater

In an interview from 2013, Sarah Hall declared: ‘Every writer has a tic, a first port of call and for me it’s the landscape’. Born and raised in the Lake District, she has set her novels partly or wholly in Cumbria. This paper focuses on Sarah Hall’s first novel, Haweswater, and how it sowed the seeds of her literary appropriation of her native region as a cultural landscape whose historical, geological, political and cultural strata she knowingly brings into play to depict the identity conflicts at work in it. Haweswater focuses on a rural community inhabiting a dale in remote Westmorland in 1936 whose place will be flooded by the building of a reservoir. Her work makes extensive use of spatialisation issues as the land disputes mirror the individual battle within larger collective political conflicts. She sets her story against the backdrop of Cumbria as a place-myth contextualized through the dissemination of multiple discrete references to its founding conflicting images. In her first novel, Sarah Hall develops her characteristic signature as a landscape artist

Satire Revised in Light of Thatcherism in Rose Tremain’s Restoration

In the 2009 preface to her 1989 novel Restoration, Rose Tremain makes clear that the choice of the period was meant as a commentary on the Thatcher years. The Restoration allows her to use the literary traditions of comedy and satire for the portrayal of her truculent narrator, royalist Merivel. A student of anatomy turned courtier and cuckold husband of the King’s mistress, Merrivel is both the fop of Restoration comedy and the traditional satirical alazon. While fool Merivel is a man of his time as the representative of a British literary tradition, his career and shortcomings reflect Thatcherist ideals and pitfalls. His gullible utterance demonstrating his blind devotion to the King also serves to underline, for a contemporary readership, the leadership crisis of our times emblematised by Thatcher. The novel thus combines an endorsement of the genre’s conservatism as well as a typically postmodern suspicion of authority, which raises the question of the intent behind the comic impulse of the book

Special issue: Ernest Hemingway

We are pleased to present this special issue on the stories of Ernest Hemingway which was put together by our Guest Editor Rédouane Abouddahab. One of France’s leading specialists in Psychoanalysis and literature and a Hemingway scholar, Rédouane Abouddahab is a Maître de Conférences in American literature at the University of Lyon II. We are grateful to him for his excellent introduction to this issue and for so meticulously undertaking the editorial work involved. We hope you will appreciate the quality of this volume

La couleur

« La couleur, c’est le sensible dans ou plutôt de la peinture, cette composante irréductible de la représentation qui échappe à l’hégémonie du langage, cette expressivité pure d’un visible silencieux qui constitue l’image comme telle » (Jacqueline Lichtenstein, La Couleur éloquente). Poursuivant la réflexion engagée sur les relations entre texte et image, ce nouveau numéro de Polysèmes s’interroge sur le rôle de la couleur à travers les textes littéraires en posant la question du sens et de la représentation, jusque dans ses limites, là où l’écriture se heurte à l’ineffable. Pourquoi la couleur dans les textes ? Pourquoi se reposer la question ? Que nous disent de la couleur les textes étudiés ici, en parallèle, en écho ou à rebours des théories sur l’art et que nous disent les mots de couleur du texte littéraire ? de la littérature ? Trace irréductible au langage, tache, pan ou éclat qui résiste à la saisie du regard comme à la verbalisation, la couleur fait osciller l’œuvre entre forme et informe, figuratif et figural, visible et invisible, lisible et illisible, éloquence et silence. “Color is the material in, or rather of, painting, the irreducible component of representation that escapes the hegemony of language, the pure expressivity of a silent visibility that constitutes the image as such” (Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color). Following up on the analysis of text-and-image relationships, this new issue of Polysemes focuses on the role of color in literary texts, by taking the question of meaning and representation down to its very limits, the ineffable. Why study color in texts? Why ask the question all over again? What do the texts under study in this issue tell us about color, in parallel or in contrast with writings about art and what do the words expressing color tell us about literary texts? About literature? As a trace irreducible to language, a mark, a spot, or a flash of light which resists both verbalization and the capture of the gaze, color makes the textual work of art oscillate between form and lack of form, between the figurative and the figural, the visible and the invisible, the readable and the unreadable, between eloquence and silence