• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.21-42
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• 2012

Gloria Naylor's second novel Linden Hills (1985) explores the issues of self-exploration, empowerment, history, and memory by delineating the communal and familial tragedies and the distortion of values prevalent in a prosperous African-American urban community called Linden Hills. Drawing upon the Freud's concept of "primal scene" and "family romance," this paper aims to focus upon the Nedeed family, the founder of Linden Hills, and investigate the compelling traumatogenic force within the family, which is inseparably intertwined with the inversion of values and moral corruption permeating the entire community. The "primal crime" committed by the Nedeed ancestors serves to preserve and perpetuate a tyrannical rule by ruthless patriarchs who reign by underhanded strategies of purposefully neglecting and abusing others, including their own wives. The imprisonment, by Luther Nedeed, of his wife Willa in the family morgue epitomizes the long legacy running in the family-the oppression and burial of the pre-Oedipal, maternal history. Willa's accidental encounter, at the nadir of the family estate and her personal despair, with the faded records of the forgotten and abused Nedeed women exposes the violence-ridden ground of the family's primal scene and the absurdity of family romance the Nedeeds pursued. As the several lines of poem composed by Willie, Willa's male double, show, the hidden, forgotten history of the Nedeed women, in a sense, is the real, which cannot be assimilated to the social symbolic governed by the inhumane patriarchy of the Nedeed family and the success-oriented Linden Hills society. By portraying a catastrophic downfall of the Nedeed family and the futile outcome of its family romance, the ending of Linden Hills conveys implicitly that the contingent symbolic order and its oppressive control, however solid and invincible they may seem, can be toppled down by the real, its nameless forgotten Other.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.5
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• pp.871-887
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• 2011

In Lacanian terms, the real, which is a non-representative Ding an sich, is indirectly approachable only in and through language. This 'speaking of the real' is made possible through a restoration of the missing link between one signifier, S1 and another signifier, S₂, as is manifested in the Lacanian formula of metaphor. In Freudian terms of textual metaphor, the missing link is restored by substituting a new edition for an old edition of one's historical text of life. This is what this essay means by the metaphorical/dualistic structure of the analytic/literary text. And this is a way of talking about an intertextuality between literature and psychoanalysis in the sense of the 'text as psyche' and the 'psyche as text.' Applying the 'signifying substitution' to the Oedipus complex, the Oedipal child can find a meaning(s), "my erotic indulgement with my Mom is wrong" by metaphorically substituting S₂: the Name of the Father for S1: the Desire of the Mother. This meaning leads to the constitution of the human subject and the formation of the incest taboo, one of the most significant distinctive features of the human being as distinguished from the animals. We can see a similar metaphorical structure of S1-S2 taking place in the literary texts such as Macbeth and "Dover Beach": in the course of the stage of life being substituted for the primal scene in the former, and the plain of Tucydides for a bed scene in the latter, respectively.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.2
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• pp.347-378
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• 2012

Holocaust fiction has always raised the moral and aesthetic questions about the nature of mimesis and the literary representation of atrocity. The Holocaust, defying any representation of it, has been considered as unspeakable, unknowable, and incomprehensible. This essay aims to explore Martin Amis's narrative strategies in Time's Arrow to conduct the difficult tasks of re-creating the primal scene and of discovering a moral reality behind the Holocaust. One of the major narrative experiments in Time's Arrow is the time reversal: the story moves from the present of phony innocence to the past of unrelieved horror. Reversing the temporal order of events reverses causality and generates the revision of the morality, ultimately creating the epistemological and ontological uncertainties. Amis's novel is also narrated from the perspective of a double persona of the protagonist who, as a Nazi doctor, participated in the massacre in Auschwitz and then fled to the United States following the war. As almost a self-conscious storyteller, the narrator shares a sense of retrospective guilt with the reader who finally realizes that the Holocaust was a world turned upside down morally. Amis's postmodern narrative strategies are unusual enough to warrant a new way of representing the Holocaust.