The house is empty Grammars of Madness in J.Frame’s Scented Gardens for the Blind and B.Head’s A Question of Power. n. 3

Descrizione

Taught by the reading experience that fictional madness shows itself in style and, particularly, in its grammatical phenomenology, rather than in themes, the author of this study investigates the stategies and the performative charge of the rhetoric informing the grammatical orchestrations of Janet Frame’s Scented Gradens for the Blind and Bessie Head’s A Qeustion of Power. After analyzing the ways in which the two grammars enact their semiosis of alienation and unbelonging, its multiple inflections are addressed in the conclusive stage of the work, when the two “lunatic” discourses are inscribed in their respective contexts (New Zealand, Southern Africa) so that the moral and political import of their rhetorical gestures may be better appreciated. This comparative moment reveals fascinating imbrications of differences and homologies ensuing from a common condition of “homelessness”, however much antipodeanly inflected. Among the latter, very strong turn out to be the two “unordinary” protagonists’ urge to care for the ordinary, their deconstruction and shattering of the dangerous mystique of “pure” essences/origins and monologic identities, and their obsessive concern fot the all-too-possible collusions between language, power, and death.