Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (2021) as an Existentialist Fable

Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred is a hybrid text: part historical novel, part science fiction/fantasy and part slave narrative. The story transports a contemporary black heroine into 19th–century Maryland in order to explore, recreate and connect with African American narratives of identity. Providing two narrative strands, one in 19th–century Maryland and the other in 20th–century California, the text is able to juxtapose the realities of slavery with its legacy. Conflating these time–periods, Kindred aims to interrogate the marginalization of African American history, but specifically the role black women played in that history, in America's bicentennial year. While Butler adapts what has been regarded as the quintessential African American literary mode of the slave narrative, her fiction consciously draws upon a literary heritage that foregrounds narratives written by black women. Consequently, Kindred highlights the issues and concerns that directly affect the construction of black femininity and its role in the community of slaves as well as examining the historical pressure brought to bear on the configuration of contemporary African American womanhood. In doing so, Butler's fiction articulates the right of black women to intervene in their own construction and to inscribe the existence of black women in stories of originary identity. What this article seeks to explore is how Butler's fiction develops and extends the traditional slave narrative, how this is utilized in order to interrogate the ‘realities’ of both slavery and contemporary US society, and how effective the text is in challenging stereotypical representation of white and black femininity.

For a language with a wealth of great literature such as English, globaliza-tion has been a mixed blessing. The International English of Mc World is a poor descendant of the language of Shakespeare and Dickens. On the other hand, English literature has been tremendously enriched by writings from the former colonies of the British Empire, creating their own ‘norms’ of English – ‘a new English’, as Chinua Achebe famously put it, “still in full communion with its ancestral home, but altered to suit its new surroundings ”. In the postcolonial literary scene, such ‘hybrid’ texts – or ‘métissés ’– are now a familiar feature, but a complicated one for translators working into other European languages. This essay concentrates on India, and looking at writings by Sethu (Pandavapuram in English translation) and Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things in English and in German translation), it investigates the striking features of hybrid source texts and the cultural and linguistic problems involved in re-creating them for a European target culture.

Helen Gansevoort Mackay, a little-known writer from New York, spent much of her life in France, where she became Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. During the Great War she published a book of poetry and two books of sketches based on her work as a nurse. Like Ellen N. La Motte and Mary Borden, two other Americans now canonized for sketches composed while they worked together at a hospital in Belgium, Mackay was a modernist whose voice is self-mocking and ironic; her depictions of medical staff and soldiers are often satiric or starkly disillusioned. All three women had until 1917 somewhat greater freedom of expression than writers from nations at war. Intensely Francophile, Mackay focused on the destruction of bodies, homes, and the fabric of social life. She was highly praised by Richard Burton and several anonymous reviewers for her ‘emotional intensity’ and ‘tragic effect’. Unlike La Motte and Borden, however, Mackay has been forgotten, in part because of her diffidence as an untrained nurse, and in part because her vignettes were read for the lyricism of their descriptions rather than the crisp critical assessments of behaviour. This essay addresses the relationship between London, One November (1916), Mackay’s volume of poetry, and the prose sketches in Journal of Small Things (1917). The free verse of London, One November enabled a narrative mode in short lyrics, while it also exploited rhetorical structures beyond traditional metrical form. Her patterns of contrast and inversion capture social and psychological conflicts in wartime. In London, apostrophe and invocation use the metonymic power of lyric to bring to life places and objects as figures for those who in wartime are absent or dead. Description accumulates around roads or homes, conveying sensory perceptions to shape traces of a war narrative. Time may be frozen as lives are brought to a halt by a paralysing war wound, while individual moments point towards a history in process. Mackay’s experiments in prose correspond to those in her poetry, yet often invert her rhetorical strategies. In Journal of Small Things her prose poems and the progressive structure of a diary trace the curve of the war experience, plotted across fragmentary observations. At the same time, a lyric side of narrative emerges in the condensation to a momentary encounter or snapshot. The brevity of a sketch rhymes with curt observations about the age at which a soldier will die. Everyday observations are invested with contradictory structures that reverse the movement of a sentence in order to capture the emotions of a couple torn apart. The paradoxes of human behaviour expose the importance of pretence to sustaining war and drowning out doubts. Whereas the war was understood to unite a nation, Mackay addresses the separation between her privileged position and the rough poverty of those lower-class staff with whom she works at the Hôpital St Louis.