Final Acts

Tom Ratekin

Description

Writers facing death offer a rare glimpse into human mortality—they have the unusual opportunity to craft the closing chapter of their life stories. Final Acts explores memoirs of terminal illness, and shows a paradoxical pattern where the diagnosis of terminal illness evokes not despair, but a new freedom and richness in life. The memoirs analyzed—by Allon White, Harold Brodkey, Gillian Rose, and Derek Jarman—provide insight into the experience of radical contingency that an awareness of mortality brings. Tom Ratekin engages the concept of "traversing the fantasy," elaborated by Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, to argue that the new richness in life each of these memoirists' experiences arises from the abandonment of a particular fantasy that guided his or her earlier work—a fantasy that both protected and inhibited the memoirist. Freed from convention, these writers, while close to death, can reinterpret the stories presented in their earlier work, and gain new perspectives on their worlds and existence.
Acknowledgments

1. Finite and Infi nite Games: Terminal Illness and the Genre of the Literary Memoir

2. The Critical Process of Symptom to Sinthome: Allon White’s “Too Close to the Bone”

3. Working through the Four Discourses: Gillian Rose and the Products of Love’s Work

4. Harold Brodkey’s Traversal of Fiction: This Wild Darkness as La Passe

5. Modern Frame for the Postmodern Image: Reclaiming the Gaze in Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature and Blue

Conclusion: The Genre of the Unconscious

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Literary theory

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 02 juillet 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438427409
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

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Final Acts

SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture

Henry Sussman, editor

Final Acts

Traversing the Fantasy in the Modern Memoir

Tom Ratekin

Published by State University of New York Press,Albany

© 2009 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu

Production by Eileen Meehan Marketing by Fran Keneston

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Ratekin, Tom.  Final acts : traversing the fantasy in the modern memoir / Tom Ratekin.  p. cm. — (SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 9781438427294 (alk. paper)  1. Literature, Modern—Psychological aspects. 2. Autobiographical memory in literature. 3. Terminally ill—Psychology. 4. Semiotics and literature. 5. Authorship. I. State University of New York. II. Title.

PN56.P93R376 2009 809'.93353—dc22

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

2008047769

For my parents

It was a relief to have the illness unmasked, to have Death be openly present. It was a relief to get away from the tease and rank of imputed greatness and from the denial and attacks and from my own sense of things, of worldly reality and of literary reality—all of it.

—Harold Brodkey,This Wild Darkness

The only thing you know for sure is the present tense, and that nowness becomes so vivid to me that, almost in a perverse sort of way, I’m almost serene. You know, I can celebrate life.

—Dennis Potter,Seeing the Blossom

The virus produced a quiet space in all the hubbub, achieved a subtle alienation. Dame Perspective, the obsessive mistress. What dark shadows remain to be explored?

—Derek Jarman,Modern Nature

It was a disease that gave death time to live and its victims time to die, time to discover time, and in the end to discover life, so in a way those green monkeys of Africa had provided us with a brilliant modern invention.

—Hervé Guibert,To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life

But there is a terrible clarity that comes from living with cancer that can be empowering if we do not turn aside from it. What more can they do to me? My time is limited, and this is so for each one of us. So how will the opposition reward me for my silences?

—Audre Lorde,A Burst of Light

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Contents

Finite and Infinite Games: Terminal Illness and the Genre of the Literary Memoir

The Critical Process of Symptom toSinthome: Allon White’s “Too Close to the Bone”

Working through the Four Discourses: Gillian Rose and the Products ofLove’s Work

Harold Brodkey’s Traversal of Fiction: This Wild DarknessasLa Passe

Modern Frame for the Postmodern Image: Reclaiming the Gaze in Derek Jarman’s Modern Natureand Blue

Conclusion The Genre of the Unconscious

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ix

2

1

7

4

5

73

107

139

145

155

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