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Witnessing Trauma in Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2020-12-13 , DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2020.1858750
Jonas Kellermann 1
Affiliation  

ABSTRACT

This article explores the controversial reception of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) through the framework of trauma theory. The polarizing novel earned both acclaim and contempt for its extreme portrayal of sexual abuse in the protagonist Jude’s childhood and the haunting effect thereof on him as a self-harming adult. For many readers, the excessive amount of violence and the highly emotional tone of the novel simply became ‘too much to bear’. Contextualizing Yanagihara’s novel within current discourses on literary trauma, I argue that the book deliberately textualizes the affective incommensurability of Jude’s trauma into its melodramatically exuberant form and content. Negotiating between emphatic proximity and distance, Yanagihara enforces unto the reader a form of compassionate witnessing that may be too close for comfort and dares its witnesses to respond in an equally extreme manner. A Little Life thus opens up a thought-provoking perspective onto the status of narrative perspective and focalization in contemporary trauma fiction.



中文翻译:

柳屋花矢(Hanya Yanagihara)的《小小的人生》中的创伤见证

摘要

本文探讨了Hanaya Yanagihara的《小小的人生》A Little Life)的争议性接受(2015年)通过创伤理论的框架。这部对立的小说因其在主人公裘德的童年中对性虐待的极端描写及其对他自残成年的困扰而倍受赞誉和蔑视。对于许多读者来说,小说中过多的暴力和强烈的情感基调变得“太多了”。我认为,在当前关于文学创伤的论述中柳屋原的小说将其语境化,我认为这本书故意将裘德创伤的情感不可通约性化为戏剧化的形式和内容。Yanagihara在强调距离和距离之间进行协商,向读者强制执行一种富有同情心的见证,这种形式可能过于贴近而难以安慰,并敢于让其证人以同样极端的方式做出回应。因此,《小小的生活》为当代创伤小说中的叙事视角和聚焦状况开辟了发人深省的视角。

更新日期:2020-12-13
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