A "not-knowing knowledge": Narrative Attentiveness and Care(-giving) - Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 Accéder directement au contenu
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2017

A "not-knowing knowledge": Narrative Attentiveness and Care(-giving)

Résumé

This article argues that contemporary fiction brings in a special knowledge (M.C Nussbaum) that Geoffrey H. Hartman has defined as “not-knowing knowledge,” and that is constitutive of the text’s clinical effectiveness or, at least, care—to take up A. Whitehead’s idea, of the process of “writing with care.” To do so, I will focus on Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and on the novel’s double temporal structure according to which the character’s resilience is shown in reverse order, while the narrator’s follows chronological time. I will argue that the contradictory or at least paradoxical temporality of such a limit-case fictional narrative duplicates that of Wordsworth’s “Immortality” ode, with its final allusion to trauma (“Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”), and thereby the double temporality of afterwardsness as described by Freud and developed by Laplanche. In so doing, I will address the persistence of youthful resilience in the adult—an insight present in Hartman’s analyses—and the healing powers of afterwardsness that helps revisit the locus and nature of the original traumatic breakthrough so as to help narrativise it and open the way towards healing. Throughout, I shall pay attention to the issue of narrative ethics as encapsulated in the way in which fiction imposes a special, arrested rhythm on reading and addresses a vulnerable reader whose sympathy cannot should not develop into over-identification (Hartman). The “not-knowing knowledge” of fiction guarantees not so much a knowledge as a shared experience that elicits a singular response to events caught in their singularity and thereby opens the door to healing.
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hal-04522600 , version 1 (26-03-2024)

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Paternité - Pas d'utilisation commerciale - Pas de modification

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  • HAL Id : hal-04522600 , version 1

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Jean-Michel Ganteau. A "not-knowing knowledge": Narrative Attentiveness and Care(-giving). « Story-telling and Resilience: The Function of Literature in the Overcoming of Trauma”, Academia Europaea, Susana Onega, Sep 2017, Budapest, Hungary. ⟨hal-04522600⟩

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