{"title":"《儿童性丑闻》与现代爱尔兰文学:约瑟夫·瓦伦蒂、玛戈特·盖尔·巴克斯的《无法言说》(书评)","authors":"M. Kervick","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10237808","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"In Claire Keegan’s “long short story” Foster (2008), the unnamed child protagonist-narrator is temporarily displaced to the home of distant relatives to ease the burden of her feckless father and pregnant mother who are overrun with other children to care for.1 In an early scene, the narrator’s new foster mother, Mrs. Kinsella, gives the child a bath. The child thinks, “Her hands are like my mother’s hands, but there is something else in them, too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place and new words are needed” (Keegan 2008: 18). Though Keegan’s text is not mentioned in The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (2020), the child protagonist’s “loss for words” in this intimate scene recalls the experiences of so many of the child characters at the center of the fictions in Joseph Valente’s and Margot Gayle Backus’s study: an inability to put into words something they have witnessed or endured. In the foreword to The Child Sex Scandal, the widely known Irish cultural critic Fintan O’Toole discusses the role of writing in the process of uncovering things that are unspeakable, particularly when those things involve children. O’Toole explains that “in life, much of what children know is communicated between them only in quiet speech—the unspeakable is really the unwritable. In art, it is writing that occupies the place of this speech, that broaches, more or less explicitly, what is not being said, either by the young characters themselves or by the world around them” (xiv). Listening closely to “what is not being said” is the impetus for this study, and Backus and Valente—two key players in the field of Irish literary studies—attempt to unearth the “unspeakable” narratives of child sexual abuse in a selection of twentiethand twenty-first-century short stories and novels by some of Ireland’s most studied writers.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"1 1","pages":"467 - 476"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus (review)\",\"authors\":\"M. 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Though Keegan’s text is not mentioned in The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (2020), the child protagonist’s “loss for words” in this intimate scene recalls the experiences of so many of the child characters at the center of the fictions in Joseph Valente’s and Margot Gayle Backus’s study: an inability to put into words something they have witnessed or endured. In the foreword to The Child Sex Scandal, the widely known Irish cultural critic Fintan O’Toole discusses the role of writing in the process of uncovering things that are unspeakable, particularly when those things involve children. O’Toole explains that “in life, much of what children know is communicated between them only in quiet speech—the unspeakable is really the unwritable. In art, it is writing that occupies the place of this speech, that broaches, more or less explicitly, what is not being said, either by the young characters themselves or by the world around them” (xiv). Listening closely to “what is not being said” is the impetus for this study, and Backus and Valente—two key players in the field of Irish literary studies—attempt to unearth the “unspeakable” narratives of child sexual abuse in a selection of twentiethand twenty-first-century short stories and novels by some of Ireland’s most studied writers.\",\"PeriodicalId\":44252,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE\",\"volume\":\"1 1\",\"pages\":\"467 - 476\"},\"PeriodicalIF\":0.2000,\"publicationDate\":\"2022-12-01\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"\",\"citationCount\":\"1\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"1085\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10237808\",\"RegionNum\":3,\"RegionCategory\":\"文学\",\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"0\",\"JCRName\":\"LITERATURE\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10237808","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
摘要
在克莱尔·基根(Claire Keegan)的“长短篇小说”《福斯特》(2008)中,没有名字的儿童主人公兼叙述者暂时被安置在远亲家中,以减轻她无能的父亲和怀孕的母亲的负担,因为他们要照顾的孩子太多了在开头的一个场景中,叙述者的新养母金塞拉夫人(Mrs. Kinsella)给孩子洗澡。孩子想:“她的手和我妈妈的手很像,但里面还有别的东西,一种我以前从未有过的感觉,也说不出名字的东西。”我感到无言可说,但这是一个新的地方,需要新的词汇”(Keegan 2008: 18)。虽然基冈的文本没有在《儿童性丑闻和现代爱尔兰文学:书写无法言说的》(2020)中被提及,但在这个亲密的场景中,儿童主角的“失语”让人想起约瑟夫·瓦伦蒂和玛戈特·盖尔·巴克斯研究的小说中心的许多儿童角色的经历:无法用语言表达他们所目睹或忍受的事情。在《儿童性丑闻》的前言中,著名的爱尔兰文化评论家芬坦·奥图尔(Fintan O 'Toole)讨论了写作在揭露不可言说的事情的过程中所起的作用,尤其是当这些事情涉及儿童时。奥图尔解释说:“在生活中,孩子们所知道的很多东西只能在安静的语言中交流——无法言说的东西实际上是无法书写的。”在艺术中,写作占据了言语的位置,或多或少地明确地揭示了年轻人物自己或周围世界没有说出来的东西”(xiv)。仔细倾听“没有说出来的东西”是这项研究的动力。巴克斯和瓦伦特——两位爱尔兰文学研究领域的关键人物——试图从一些最受研究的爱尔兰作家的20世纪和21世纪的短篇故事和小说中挖掘出关于儿童性虐待的“难以言说”的叙述。
The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus (review)
In Claire Keegan’s “long short story” Foster (2008), the unnamed child protagonist-narrator is temporarily displaced to the home of distant relatives to ease the burden of her feckless father and pregnant mother who are overrun with other children to care for.1 In an early scene, the narrator’s new foster mother, Mrs. Kinsella, gives the child a bath. The child thinks, “Her hands are like my mother’s hands, but there is something else in them, too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place and new words are needed” (Keegan 2008: 18). Though Keegan’s text is not mentioned in The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (2020), the child protagonist’s “loss for words” in this intimate scene recalls the experiences of so many of the child characters at the center of the fictions in Joseph Valente’s and Margot Gayle Backus’s study: an inability to put into words something they have witnessed or endured. In the foreword to The Child Sex Scandal, the widely known Irish cultural critic Fintan O’Toole discusses the role of writing in the process of uncovering things that are unspeakable, particularly when those things involve children. O’Toole explains that “in life, much of what children know is communicated between them only in quiet speech—the unspeakable is really the unwritable. In art, it is writing that occupies the place of this speech, that broaches, more or less explicitly, what is not being said, either by the young characters themselves or by the world around them” (xiv). Listening closely to “what is not being said” is the impetus for this study, and Backus and Valente—two key players in the field of Irish literary studies—attempt to unearth the “unspeakable” narratives of child sexual abuse in a selection of twentiethand twenty-first-century short stories and novels by some of Ireland’s most studied writers.