Rethinking Olmi's 'Beside the Sea', by Gill Rye

Our featured text at our first workshop, in May 2012, was Véronique Olmi’s superb novella Beside the Sea (2010; originally published in French as Bord de mer (2001)), which is about maternal ambivalence and despair, ending with a mother’s murder of her children. My paper on the text focused on the mother’s voice and perspective in the novel, considering its various literary techniques and effects. 

http://www.sas.ac.uk/videos-and-podcasts/culture-language-literature/infanticide-ambivalence-desperation-mother-s-voice-v

As part of my argument, I stated that the narrative was relatively coherent and thus did not fall into the category of ‘trauma fiction’ (as defined by Anne Whitehead (2004)), that is, fiction that mimics traumatic narratives, and includes techniques such as repetitions, ellipses, flashbacks, blank spaces, non-chronological narratives and screen memories, to evoke the effects of trauma. However, since then, I have thought more about this point, because there are silences in the text – as indeed I mentioned in my paper – and I would now tend to argue that haunting the narrative of the events leading up to the mother’s killing of her children are traces of another narrative, suggesting a trauma behind – or at the root of – the tragic outcome. This trauma narrative is, then, not the narrative of child murder, or even of maternal ambivalence.  Rather, it is to be read in the silences and fragmented comments about the narrator’s family background and her physical and mental state (for example, asides about broken teeth and shoulder problems suggest she has been subjected to physical violence), implying that the killing may partly be the outcome of some trauma that cannot be spoken. My paper is still work in progress and I intend to explore this aspect further in due course.

Since the book, which has been translated into a number of European languages (including Italian, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, Hungarian and Polish), generated a great deal of discussion at the workshop, and there is much more to be said about it, perhaps we could kick off the virtual reading group by discussing it further now. So, I’d like to invite participants who were at the first workshop and anyone else who would like to get involved to post their thoughts about this text here. If you have not yet read it, it is available in English translation from the publisher, http://www.peirenepress.com/ and in English and other languages from various on-line booksellers.

On starting the network, by Gill Rye (Principal Investigator)

The Motherhood in post-1968 European Literature Network is something I have been thinking about for some years. As much feminist work has shown, motherhood is best treated in an interdisciplinary environment. Indeed, scholars of literature commonly draw on feminist work from sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, politics, social policy, philosophy, and so on, to inform their readings of representations and narratives of mothering in literary texts. However, although this cross-fertilisation does sometimes happen in the reverse, it is not quite so usual. Like me though, my colleagues here at the cross-cultural Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, believe that motherhood in literature – and in women’s writing in particular – has plenty to offer other disciplines, and so we are delighted to have received support from the Arts & Humanities Research Council to develop this Network. We are also really encouraged to have received so much positive interest already from researchers from many different disciplines. As I explained in my introduction to the first workshop in May 2012, our impetus for this work is the climate of changing family demographics in Europe – as a consequence of changing family patterns, new reproductive technologies, mass migration and globalisation, hybridisation of identities, the economic crisis, and high unemployment figures – which are creating new experiences, challenges and opportunities for women as mothers, and new issues and challenges for feminisms and feminist scholars and researchers of motherhood and the family. We think literature can contribute useful insights in such a climate.

http://www.sas.ac.uk/videos-and-podcasts/culture-language-literature/motherhood-theories-methods-and-narratives-introduct

Effective interdisciplinary work is exciting but difficult. Even with the very best of intentions and will, problems and tensions arise to do with individual disciplinary methodologies, different understandings of the nature of evidence, discipline-specific vocabulary and terminology, and this can also be the case in cross-cultural and comparative discussions. Across the Network workshops, and the conference in October 2013, we aim to make all sessions interdisciplinary, so that papers on literature come into direct dialogue with those from other disciplines, and to try to deal with any attendant problems as we go along.

We are also including featured texts, discussion of passages from literature, author readings, and I plan to start a virtual reading group on this blog.