Bahareh Nilforoshan; Bakhtiar Sadjadi; Fariba Parvizi; Farid Parvaneh
Abstract
Introduction: Reading contemporary fiction through diverse disciplines appears to be a substantial part of narrative studies in particular and literature in general providing a tenable framework of interdisciplinary discourses of knowledge to study and explore fiction. Caryl Phillips’s The Nature ...
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Introduction: Reading contemporary fiction through diverse disciplines appears to be a substantial part of narrative studies in particular and literature in general providing a tenable framework of interdisciplinary discourses of knowledge to study and explore fiction. Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood embraces a labyrinth of narratives, the Holocaust as its ultimate point of recollection. Phillips, by narrating the horrific memories of a camp survivor, delves into the dark memories of racism and brings it to its old days, as far as Othello’s in Venice. The present study explores this dark legacy through a relatively new approach to literature using socio-cultural anthropological concepts. In doing so, the present paper scrutinized The Nature of Blood through the concepts of territorial stigma, ghetto, and punitive containment in order to delineate the true and indisputable role of fiction in other social sciences, emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of literature and novel, in particular. Focusing on the conception of ghetto as a stigmatized territory narrated by Eva and Othello, the two major narrators in the novel, the article finds it as an available and costless strategy of punitive containment practiced through the course of history and represented in The Nature of Blood.Background of Study: Wacquant elucidates his ideas on the nexus of marginality, ethnicity, and penalty. However, tenets of territorial stigmatization and ghettoization would cover more nationalities and disciplinary boundaries. He builds his notions of ghetto on a comparison of some canonical cases and concludes that ghetto is an institutional form that would lead to territorial and social stigmatization: “the ghetto is an institutional form, a social-organizational device that employs space to fulfill two conflictive functions: economic extraction and social ostracization” (Urban Outcasts, 3). He develops the concept of territorial stigmatization according to this comparative approach to social theory and applies his findings about neighborhood taint on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, he has contributed to urban studies by his notion of advanced marginality. Methodology: This article is a library-based research and uses various sources both in interdisciplinary discourses and contemporary fiction. Ghetto is pictured as punitive containment strategy to push the members of periphery to territories of stigma and deprive them of their collective identity and sense of belonging. Conclusion: The present paper explores The Nature of Blood as an instance of the author’s multi-layered narration in a versatile scope of time, place and history that makes it an appropriate microcosm to apply Wacquant’s conception of territorial stigma, ghetto, and punitive containment. It is concluded that territorial stigma, along with other labels relegating the repressed to the margins of a society, is a recurrent and dynamic threat to the integrity of the underclass and the precariat making it difficult to grasp to any kind of collective action and thus, reflecting the future lives and struggles of the migrants with diverse ethno-racial and religious backgrounds, especially from the Middle East, who were trying to find refuge in Europe after the wake of ISIS. Moreover, ghetto, scrutinized by Wacquant in its modern sense, finds its roots in Renaissance Europe in Phillips’ fiction, proving the bitter fact that the ghetto is the other side of the prison aiming at the exclusionary closure of the outcasts of the society and continued almost unchanged to the modern urban metropolis. The punitive containment during the course of history proved to be a practical and priceless strategy to keep the underclass precariat and the social outcasts at bay behind the bars of the prison, sometimes embodied in the form of the ghetto and has always been reflected in literature due to its potential socio-cultural and anthropological overtones.
Mehdi Khoshkalam Pour; Bakhtiar Sadjadi; Fariba Parvizi
Abstract
Introduction: The present paper proposes that Lisa Unger’s Fragile (2010) is involved in a late capitalist social phenomenon that announces both the extinction of the authoritative Oedipal Father and the liberation of mOther and son from his reign. The Hollowers in the novel are incapable of experiencing ...
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Introduction: The present paper proposes that Lisa Unger’s Fragile (2010) is involved in a late capitalist social phenomenon that announces both the extinction of the authoritative Oedipal Father and the liberation of mOther and son from his reign. The Hollowers in the novel are incapable of experiencing any real sexual relationship the lack of which heavily influences their personal and social life. The present paper reveals that even the Hollowers’ commitment of rape, incest, and even murder cannot compensate for the enjoyment of the proper sexual relationship they are innately deprived of. In Fragile, both man and woman infer an ancient rivalry over jouissance from their sexual relationship. Accordingly, Unger’s characters orchestrate various psychological schemes for optimum pleasure from their sexual relationship, while they become involved with some irreparable psychological disorders that neither supply them with their desired pleasure from sex, nor release them from the sexual traumas that permanently remain with them. Background of Study: Between Žižek and Badiou, there is no contention that the contemporary man cannot live up to the name and authority associated with the Oedipal Father, and epitomize the Big Phallus of the Symbolic Order. However, while Žižek reduces woman to an object of exchange between father and son (Žižek, Enjoy Symptoms! 75), Badiou does not consider her as a passive object-cause-of-desire; quite contrary, to Badiou, woman can freely serve and express her social and sexual identity and challenge man’s long-held symbolic superiority (Badiou, True Life 82). The sexuation theory extensively covers the sexual relationship between man and woman and discusses that proper and meaningful sexual relationship is impossible due to the fact both man and woman view it as a place to demand their jouissance. Methodology: Sexual relationship in proper sense, as the sexuation theory implies, is impossible, for man uses it to dominate woman whereas he is basically under delusions of authority (Žižek, Enjoy Symptoms! 156). The sexuation theory publicizes the decline of the Oedipal Father and the late-capitalist phenomenon of orphan bodies that the anal father of jouissance adopts in order to promote frenzied consumerism and monopolized jouissance (Felicia Cosey 6). However, the Oedipal Father’s collapse is followed by the subject’s metamorphosis into the ‘sacrificed body’ that is perplexed with inexplicable che vuoi questions regarding his symbolic value. The Oedipal Father now morbidly envies his son’s firm ties with his wife through what Badiou coins as ‘infantilization’ (Tutt 10). Žižek’s underrating insight to woman as merely “one of the Names of the Father” (Žižek, Enjoy Symptoms 169) is weighed against Badiou’s view of woman as a free agent of herself. This paper finds pertinent the sexuation theory with the psychological disorders of ‘neurosis’, ‘psychosis’, and ‘perversion’, and illustrates the subject’s crushing oscillation between the pleasure of sexual intimacy and the preservation of consciousness and symbolic integrity. Conclusion: The sexual relationship in Lisa Unger’s Fragile is a devastating experience rather than a pleasurable one; indeed, the more they try to enjoy their sexual relationship, the more dismayed they become. Fragile, in line with Žižek’s psychoanalytic hypotheses, demonstrated that authentic sexual relationship is profoundly influenced by the subject’s process of phallic castration that permanently takes him away from the Imaginary Order and the Real encompassed in; therefore, both man and woman presume the sexual relationship as a way to retrieve the lost Real. This article illustrated that in the post-capitalism era, the restrictive Freudian Oedipal Father cannot survive and exert his influence on his household; instead, as the novel of Fragile indicates, the contemporary father is eclipsed by his wife and son’s strong emotional ties that have shaped after he lost his symbolic authority.