Bodies that Speak

Traumatic Corporeal Spatiality in Doris Lessing's Novella "The Eye of God in Paradise"

Authors

  • Maria Eugenia Berio Universidad de Malaga

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17561/grove.v29.7237

Keywords:

space, literature, body, war, trauma

Abstract

The present article examines the treatment of spatial corporeality in Doris Lessing’s novella “The Eye of God in Paradise” (1957) set in Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War. Even though Lessing’s works have been studied from different perspectives—as the abundant critical studies show—, spatial corporeality has not been analysed before. This paper argues that the characters’ bodies, insofar as physical spaces of flesh and blood that are lived and where power is exerted, represent the trauma encountered by countless anonymous people who suffered due to the horrors of the war and who have only been made visible by the author’s skilled pen. By highlighting the corporeal spatiality in its physical, psychological, and sociohistorical division, Lessing has brought to the fore the intense suffering of unknown people, to give them identity as well as visibility and transform them into a locus of contesting power relations.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Maria Eugenia Berio, Universidad de Malaga

I am an English Philologist with a Master’s in English Literature from the University of Cuyo,
Mendoza Argentina. My field of research is Space, Postcolonial Literature, and Literature
written by women. I am currently doing my Ph.D. about Doris Lessing’s use of space in her
short fiction set in Europe.

References

Andermahr, Sonya and Silvia Pellicer-Ortin, eds. Trauma Narratives and Herstory. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Argyle, Michael. Bodily Communication.1975. 2nd. ed. Routledge, 1988.

Becket, Fiona. “Environmental Fables? The Eco-politics of Doris Lessing’s ‘Ifrik’ Novels.” Doris Lessing. Border Crossings. Eds. Alice Ridout and Susan Watkins. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009. 129-42.

Bessel, Richard, and Dirk Schumann, eds. Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s. Cambridge University Press. ProQuest EBook Central, 2003.

Bigot, Corinne. “Locking the Door: Self-Deception, Silence and Survival in Alice Munro’s ‘Vandals.” Trauma Narratives and Herstory. Eds. Sonya Andermahr and Silvia Pellicer-Ortin, 2013, pp. 113-28.

Brazil, Kevin, David Sergeant, and Tom Sperlinger, eds. Doris Lessing and the Forming of History.Edinburgh University Press, 2018.

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Anomie.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 27 May 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/anomie. Accessed 23 Oct. 2022.

Caruth, Cathy. “Violence and Time: Traumatic Survivals.” Assemblage vol. 20, 1993, pp. 24-25.

Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Di Prete, Laura. “Foreign Bodies”: Trauma, Corporeality, and Textuality in Contemporary American Culture, University of South Carolina, Ann Arbor, 2003. Proquest. https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/foreign-bodies-trauma-corporeality-textuality/docview/305314255/se-2. Accessed 8 Nov. 2022.

Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub, M. D. Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Routledge, 1992.

Foucault, Michel. Power / Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Vintage Books, 1980.

Hall, Edward T. The Silent Language. 1959. Doubleday, 1981.

Hall, Edward T. The Hidden Dimension. 1966. Doubleday, 1982.

Hartman, Geoffrey. “Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies.” New Literary History, vol. 26, no.3, 1995, pp. 537-63. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.1995.0043

Herzog, Dagmar. Sexuality and German Fascism. Berghahn Books, 2005.

History. https://www.history.com/news/nazi-twin-experiments-mengele-eugenics. Accessed 6 Feb. 2021.

Knapp, Mona. Doris Lessing. Frederik Ungar Publishing, 1984.

Laub, Dori and Daniel Podell. “Art and Trauma.” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 76, no. 5, 1995, pp. 991-1005. https://doi.org/10.2307/1939363

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. 1974. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Blackwell Publishers, 1991.

Lennon, Kathleen. “Feminist Perspectives on the Body.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/feminist-body/ 2019. Accessed 6 Feb. 2021.

Lessing, Doris. 1978. Stories. Everyman’s Library, 2008.

Leys, Ruth. Trauma. A Genealogy. University of Chicago Press, 2000. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226477541.001.0001

Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. Routledge, 2008.

Madanipour, Ali. Public and Private Spaces of the City. Routledge, 2003. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203402856

Maslen, Elizabeth. “Lessing’s Witness Literature.” Doris Lessing and the Forming of History. Eds. Kevin Brazil et al., 2018, pp. 152-63. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474414449-014

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge, 2005.

Proctor, Robert N. “Nazi Doctors, Racial Medicine and the Human Experimentation.” The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation. Eds. George J. Annas and Michael A. Grodin. Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 17-31.

Ridout, Alice and Susan Watkins, eds. Doris Lessing. Border Crossings. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009.

Robben, Antonius C. G. M. and Marcelo Suarez-Orozco. Cultures under Siege. Collective Violence and Trauma. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Rubenstein, Roberta. The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness. University of Illinois Press, 1979.

Seltzer, Mark. “Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere.” October, vol. 80, 1997, pp. 3-26. https://doi.org/10.2307/778805

Soja, Edward. Third Space. Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Blackwell, 1996.

Sprague, Claire. Rereading Doris Lessing: Narrative Patterns of Doubling and Repetition. University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place. The Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Vallejo, Irene. El infinito en un junco. Siruela, 2020.

Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. The University of Virginia Press, 2002.

Virilio, Paul and Sylvére Lotringer. 1983. Pure War. Semiotext(e), 2008.

Wolff, Janet. “The Invisible Flâneuse. Women and the literature of modernity.” Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin. Ed. A. Benjamin. Warwick University Press, 1989, pp.141-56.

Published

2022-12-23

How to Cite

Berio, M. E. (2022). Bodies that Speak: Traumatic Corporeal Spatiality in Doris Lessing’s Novella "The Eye of God in Paradise". The Grove - Working Papers on English Studies, 29, 11–30. https://doi.org/10.17561/grove.v29.7237