Crisis of the ‘Event’, Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City (2018)
This article argues that the notion of event, through its different facets and acceptations (Badiou, Deleuze and Derrida), is seminal to account for Gunaratne’s take on the city in In Our Mad and Furious City (2018). Whereas in fiction-writing the event is, as a rule, a necessary structuring device,...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2022-12-01
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| Series: | Études Britanniques Contemporaines |
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| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/12945 |
| Summary: | This article argues that the notion of event, through its different facets and acceptations (Badiou, Deleuze and Derrida), is seminal to account for Gunaratne’s take on the city in In Our Mad and Furious City (2018). Whereas in fiction-writing the event is, as a rule, a necessary structuring device, serving different plotlines and thematic contents, it becomes here the text’s linchpin. Indeed, city life is predicated on the traumatic scene of Lee Rigby’s murder in 2013 which ripples through the novel. The best way to sustain this paroxysm is to delegate the narration to a range of characters who are caught up in their own tormented presents. Their successive, alternating oral deliveries are testament to a crisis of the event as the character narrators are involved in ‘limit situations’. The study is threefold, first it introduces perspectives on the notions of ‘event’ and ‘crisis of the event’, to argue that they constitute the fiction’s matrix, then it is shown that the novel’s structure is not driven by causality but reflects the randomness and unpredictability intrinsic to the event. This is demonstrated by investigating the maverick division of the book into sections headed by intertitles (Genette 271–292) defying immediate understanding. In the last part, the performative aspect of grime music is considered to highlight narrativity as event. |
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| ISSN: | 1168-4917 2271-5444 |