The Pitfalls of Dispensing with Teleology: Feeling and Justice, Evil and Nature in Graham Swift’s The Light of Day (and Waterland)
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Daniel Candel
Abstract
The present article tries to find answers for a lack of narrative tension in Graham Swift’s The Light of Day. Taking its cue from recent theological approaches to Swift’s work, the article starts by analysing the way the novel expresses parental figures as representations of the Biblical God. The analysis yields a separation of feeling and truth/justice in both the representations and the novel as a whole. The article argues that this separation entails the naturalisation of guilt and evil, which has a deflating effect on the narrative tension of the novel. Through a comparison with Waterland, the article shows that The Light of Day lacks a problematic but seemingly necessary dimension of nature: its teleological dimension. The article concludes by showing how the absence of any teleological dimension in the novel leads to what I call poietic suicide.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Crossing and Re-crossing Borders: The Ethical Aporia of Anomy in Wordsworth’s The Borderers
- Entropy of Sense Perception and the Issue of Observation in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House: The Strange Case of Spontaneous Human Combustion
- Novel Beginnings: Initial Framings as a Historical Category of American Fiction
- Between Science and Ethics in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Waiting for the Verdict
- The Pitfalls of Dispensing with Teleology: Feeling and Justice, Evil and Nature in Graham Swift’s The Light of Day (and Waterland)
- Imagining Flight in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Crossing and Re-crossing Borders: The Ethical Aporia of Anomy in Wordsworth’s The Borderers
- Entropy of Sense Perception and the Issue of Observation in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House: The Strange Case of Spontaneous Human Combustion
- Novel Beginnings: Initial Framings as a Historical Category of American Fiction
- Between Science and Ethics in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Waiting for the Verdict
- The Pitfalls of Dispensing with Teleology: Feeling and Justice, Evil and Nature in Graham Swift’s The Light of Day (and Waterland)
- Imagining Flight in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
