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Secret Rooms, Locked Doors and Hidden Stories: Retelling “Bluebeard” as a Holocaust Narrative in Michèle Roberts’s "Ignorance"

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Goszczyńska M.

Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre

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2020

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vol. 6

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issue 2

52-62

EN

One of the most grisly European fairy tales, “Bluebeard” is also a story that has proved immensely productive, spawning numerous variants, adaptations and rewritings. This essay offers a reading of Michèle Roberts’s Ignorance (2012) as one such retelling. Roberts employs “Bluebeard” to construct a story that utilises the format of a dual coming-of-age novel but is gradually revealed as a Holocaust narrative. Set in a provincial town in Vichy France, Ignorance makes repeated use of “Bluebeard” motifs to explore the complicity of individuals in Nazi crimes against their Jewish neighbours. Featuring secret rooms, forbidden chambers, locked doors and embedded narratives, the novel tells the story of Jeanne Nérin as she comes to terms with her Jewish identity and accepts her responsibilities as a Holocaust survivor. This account is complemented by several other stories, the most important of which is that of Jeanne’s childhood companion, Marie-Angèle, whose Bildung ends in emotional and ethical failure. Fascinated with the life of bourgeois comfort and respectability, Marie-Angèle embraces what Nancy Tuana describes as “wilful ignorance,” and becomes increasingly complicit in the acts of injustice, exploitation and crime she witnesses.

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Monet at a Glance: A Dynamic, Ekphrastic Encounter in Michèle Roberts’s “On the Beach at Trouville”

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Goszczyńska M.

Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture

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2022

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issue 12

470-486

EN

The essay analyzes Michèle Roberts’s 2012 story “On the Beach at Trouville” as an ekphrasis of Claude Monet’s early Impressionist painting, The Beach at Trouville. It first approaches the narrative though W. J. T. Mitchell’s model in which ekphrasis is understood as staging “a war of signs,” only to conclude that the dynamics between the painting and the story is too complex to be satisfactorily explained in these terms. As a result, the essay moves on to read the story as an “ekphrastic encounter” and uses Norman Bryson’s concept of the glance to account for what happens between Roberts’s text and Monet’s image. Bryson discusses the glance in opposition to the totalizing, immobile and disembodied gaze and understands it both as a way of looking and painting. The essay reveals how the glance can be used to explain important dimensions of Roberts’s ekphrastic project: its depiction of Monet’s picture as a semiotic system of arbitrary signs, its emphasis on the durational, performative aspect of painting, its insistence on the contingent nature of interpretation, and, finally, its attempts to mimic Monet’s Impressionist style. All these features, the essay argues, allow Roberts to transform her story into a dynamic scene of intermedial dialogue where word and image enter a relation of what Stephen Scobie describes as “reciprocal supplementarity.”

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Practices of Planetary Relationality in Colum McCann’s Apeirogon

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Goszczyńska M.

Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture

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2023

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issue 13

257-274

EN

For a number of critics, what we are witnessing in postmillennial Anglophone fiction is an attempt to do away with postmodern posturings of ironic distance and ethical non-commitment, and a renewed interest in questions of authenticity, empathy, responsibility and solidarity. According to Christian Moraru, one of the keenest chroniclers of contemporary culture, the shift is rooted in an understanding of the world as an interconnected system of relationality, which the critic discusses under the headings of cosmodernism and planetarity. Moraru locates the premise of this evolving cultural project in its ethical call for “a new togetherness, for a solidarity across political, ethnic, racial, religious, and other boundaries” (Cosmodernism 5), but recognizes it as leaving its imprint on the aesthetic and thematic choices made by contemporary authors. The aim of the paper is to analyze Colum McCann’s 2020 novel, Apeirogon, as indebted to this planetary vision of relationality. In particular, my intention is to trace the impact of this mindset on the narrative structure and the imaginary of the novel.

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Michèle Roberts’s Mud and the Practice of Feminist “Re-Vision”

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Goszczyńska M.

Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis

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2018

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vol. 13

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issue 2

89-96

EN

In Michèle Roberts’s Mud (2010), writing emerges as an act of creative recycling, allowing pre-existing texts to be moulded into new forms and infused with new meanings. In the opening, title story, the idea is expressed through the image of mud, whose curly brown flakes falling off shoe-soles are seen as “bits of writing” − fragments of letters, commas and full stops − to be pieced together into “something new”. This process of literary replenishment is repeatedly witnessed by the readers of Mud as they come across characters, scenes and motifs borrowed from such well-known literary texts as Beowulf, Tristan and Isolde, Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary and Nana or encounter a host of actual historical figures, including George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Claude Monet, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and Colette, in stories that set out to retell incidents from their biographies. Offering new versions of these literary and historical texts, Roberts engages in an act of feminist revision as outlined in Adrienne Rich’s seminal 1979 essay, When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision. Rich describes the practice of feminist rewriting as “an act of survival”, whose essence is “not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us”. Indeed, in story after story in the collection, this is precisely what Roberts seems determined to do.

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2 Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture

1 Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre

1 Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis

4 Goszczyńska M.

1 2023

2 2022

1 2018

Secret Rooms, Locked Doors and Hidden Stories: Retelling “Bluebeard” as a Holocaust Narrative in Michèle Roberts’s "Ignorance"

Monet at a Glance: A Dynamic, Ekphrastic Encounter in Michèle Roberts’s “On the Beach at Trouville”

Practices of Planetary Relationality in Colum McCann’s Apeirogon

Michèle Roberts’s Mud and the Practice of Feminist “Re-Vision”