Diegetic Pregnancy in Jesse Greengrass’s Sight (2018), or the Ethics of Building Bodies in(to) Literature
Although they have often been used as metaphors for the act of writing, pregnancy and childbirth have a long history of being left out of literature itself, especially as diegetic events in the novel. Jessie Greengrass’s novel Sight (2018) provides us with a rare pregnant narrator and as such includ...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Centre de Recherche "Texte et Critique de Texte"
2023-06-01
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| Series: | Sillages Critiques |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/14653 |
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| Summary: | Although they have often been used as metaphors for the act of writing, pregnancy and childbirth have a long history of being left out of literature itself, especially as diegetic events in the novel. Jessie Greengrass’s novel Sight (2018) provides us with a rare pregnant narrator and as such includes pregnancy as a diegetic event and as a theme. Starting with the assessment that pregnancy in literature can be summed up by the image of “a man pac[ing] a carpet” while a woman gives birth outside the frame of the narration, Greengrass’s novel tackles the compulsion to look and to look away, to show and to hide that is at the heart of this image. The novel shows that pregnant bodies have been overlooked by literature not for lack of curiosity, but rather because of an obsessive curiosity for what lies inside them and what comes out of them. By investigating scientist/object relationships alongside mother/daughter relationships, Sight formulates the beginning of an ethics of looking at and of writing about bodies, which lies in a practice of parenthood that acknowledges both curiosity for and discomfort with bodies. The novel thus deconstructs the metaphor of writing as pregnancy and childbirth and points to an ethical way of incorporating bodies, especially female ones, into literature. |
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| ISSN: | 1272-3819 1969-6302 |