"Seraglio" (Graham Swift) : un silence violent

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the dynamic relationship of secrecy and narrative in a short story by Graham Swift. It maintains that secrecy cannot merely be ascribed to an idiosyncratic reluctance on the narrator’s part to come up with the full story of his traumas, his past and present wrongdoings, or his innermost fantasies. Secrecy in short stories, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, is not defined by contents, but has to do with a forever elusive structure, that appears to be, as "Seraglio" will show, the most powerful impetus of a given narrative. In this labyrinth of a story, an enmeshment of various secrets pertaining to various levels of awareness, one is at a loss for an answer to its one haunting question in different, interwoven guises: "What happened?" Whether it addresses the story of the narrator’s wife’s miscarriage, the unspecified, but possibly sexual, incident between  the latter and a Turkish porter in Istanbul, or the ritual murder of his younger brothers by Sultan Mehmet, the question is surreptitiously folded back onto the issue of story-telling and the uneasy alliance of bodily violence and language or art.In fine, the answer to the story’s question can only be that nothing happened, but that the nothing-that-happened, because it is to be found in the hiatus between the corporeal and the symbolic, accounts both for the origin of narrative and its failure, together with its necessity.Not unlike Cordelia’s "nothing", it is to be understood as a tumultuous silence that worries the text to be heard