Confession and subjectivity in Black swan green

Confession can be defined as an act of articulating the truth while encountering obstacles to the formulation and expression of truth and having to surmount these difficulties. It is, however, up for debate what kind of truth is produced through such an action and whether it accurately reflects reality. In Foucauldian terms the truth of a confession is not prepositional, the type that is most often associated with the general notion of truth – a speech that refers to the reality in such a way that can be proven right, truthfully reflecting the world. What is expressed in an act of confession is rather an experiential truth revealing the intimate emotional reality of inner life.

Confession permeates our culture, as we can witness it taking various forms starting from poetry that deals with personal feelings and experiences and continuing on to such explicitly modern phenomena as reality and talk shows. The position held by confessional discourse in our culture has often been described as compulsory, an urge to confess induced by the relations of power. What is notable in this mechanism is how pleasurable such discourse can be to one participating in it. There is a certain exhibitionist allure in making a confession, a thrill of exposure as well as the benefit of speaking that which is repressed, a feeling of being transgressive and progressive, of achieving something important by overcoming repression.

Confessional writing, especially in terms of an autobiography, is something taking root in the romantic shift from the religious

emphasis on a confession as a discourse of sin and repentance to an understanding of it as an outlet for emotional experiences, deeply interconnected with intimacy and a notion of individual subjectivity. A characteristically romantic preoccupation with asserting one’s individualism is another significant aspect of autobiographical genre and of modern confessional discourse. Such a text is intent on telling an inner truth of a subjectivity aching to be recognized, presenting itself to be read and ascertained.

The stream-of-consciousness novels of an autobiographical nature have not only been deemed inferior in a literary sense, but have also been accused of a shameless self-revelation (see, for example, the reception of Rousseau’s The Confessions ). It is not impossible to notice how confessional discourse is deeply rooted in the feeling of shame, which needs, yearns to be spoken in order to be freed. And it is this shame and fear of punishment that act as a literary device in Black Swan Green , the thematic core of the novel consisting precisely of that which is tabooed or shameful to the protagonist, and by extension (solely due to the semi-autobiographical nature of the work) shameful to the author: speech disorder, bullying, sexual and at times voyeuristic experiences, death and suicidal thoughts, familial crisis, guilt caused by theft and causing an injury. Most major episodes of the novel have to do with events that one generally cannot speak of, thus giving a reason for such speech, which stems precisely in the fact that it is repressed. These same events constitute the fabula of Black Swan Green , putting in motion the mechanisms of causation which move the story forward: in the first chapter two major conflicts are established: the breaking of the watch and the mysterious calls to the office of the protagonist’s father. It is nothing but one trespassing, one transgression after another, both shameful and both fear-inducing. In the last chapter, which bears the same name as the first one foreboding the story’s coming full circle, we see both questions answered, both conflicts resolved in a simultaneous, reciprocal confession of father to son and of son to father.

Feeling that one’s voice is being suppressed is what usually induces the need to confess, pressuring a person to find a way to articulate that which is forbidden to speak. Jason also has a speech disorder, and thus he feels silenced more frequently and fervently than anyone else does. Poetry serves to him as an outlet for the repressed speech, and on the bigger level we see a whole semi-autobiographical novel still dealing with the same problems. Social circumstances of the protagonist also ensure that his individual voice – his subjectivity – is subsumed by the continuous rumble of the speech of others around him, a speech that feels oppressive and repressive to him. What we see in the novel is the restating of individuality (in a romantic sense, a subjectivity rebellious and confined by others, yet genius and profoundly feeling) by giving a voice to a ‘former self’ previously unable to express itself and its truths, suppressed by the social restrictions, stigmatization and deprivation of voice.

What deserves special attention in the self-reporting speech is how there is a distinct difference, a temporal separation between the person speaking and the person being spoken about, a process in which the speaker tries to impersonate their own self from the past, a self revived from memory by means of narration. The self in Black Swan Green is defined by its history, articulated through the narration of events that took place randomly and without purpose, reshuffling them and embroidering them with words in order to find structure and meaning in history intrinsically chaotic and meaningless. Narrative and interpretation are essentially what we consider to be selfunderstanding and reflexive thought. And the text shows us how the fuzzy, uneven and formless subjectivity presented in the first chapter gradually becomes well-defined, gains features and transforms into a tangible, distinctive personality.

The first chapter is the one that most successfully captures the essence of childhood memories, which primarily consist of images and emotional experiences rather than of continuous narratives accurately referring to the historical reality. The manufactured authenticity of memories is something that also benefits from the formal composition of the novel, the abrupt nature of its chapters leaving certain points of the story untold, its episodic nature skillfully imitating that of human memory, creating an impression of reliving actual experiences of a human being.

Confession and the literary form of a semi-autobiographical novel that it chooses to take, as we have come to conclude, are incredibly complex phenomena closely connected with the notions of self, with the complicated workings of memory and with the intrinsic human need to be heard, to be recognized as a unique voice worth listening to.

Arina Makarova, 4th year student©

Tomsk State University

The Notion of Justice in the Novel Morality Play

Morality Play is a semi-historical novel by Barry Unsworth, published in 1995. The action takes place in the 14^th century, immediately after the outbreak of the plague. Being a medieval style detective novel, it raises several topics important or peculiar for the epoch depicted: faith and religion, feudalism, women’s world, poverty etc. In relation to these topics appear immortal concepts, such as Sin, Love, Truth, Honour, Justice. The last one seems to me particularly significant in the novel, and not only because it is closely connected to the detective genre. Here it plays a rather substantial role in exposing the author’s apprehension of the cultural and historical process that lurks behind a typical detective plot.

The justice here exists in three hypostases, and to make my point clear, I will consider each in order.

The players in the novel stage traditional medieval genres, such as mystery play and morality play. In these plays the characters are abstract concepts, such as Contemplation, Freewill and Justice — and abstract Justice is the first incarnation. It is almost not shown in the novel, but is easily supposed, based on Nicholas’ past and early present. This Justice is more like a rule, an axiom that exists among others, such as Good and Evil. It is considered invincible — that is why the players initially take the existing version of the murder, and the townsfolk are not interested in doubting it without the players’ initiative.

Here, with the doubt, comes the second, concrete Justice . It has two forms: it is a concept, but also there is an embodiment — the