“We do not know the reason but must try, somehow, to find it out”: Narrative Pregnancy in Sight, or the (In)Curious Body-Building Business of Writing - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

“We do not know the reason but must try, somehow, to find it out”: Narrative Pregnancy in Sight, or the (In)Curious Body-Building Business of Writing

Résumé

Although it has often been used as a metaphor for the act of writing, pregnancy – quite literally body-building – has a long history of being left out of literature itself. While trying to write her novel Sight (2018), which she eventually decided to write from the perspective of a pregnant narrator, Jessie Greengrass was left with the impression that pregnancy in literature was generally ‘something out of shot, a business of hot water and towels despatched elsewhere while in the centre of things a man paces a carpet’ (The Guardian, 2018). This depiction of pregnancy and childbirth – or absence thereof – can be read as the common erasure of female experience in literature, or as a consequence of the philosophical tradition of the separation of body and mind – and so of the body and literature. But it is also a valid, experienced perspective. It is a perspective that avoids looking at the event of pregnancy and childbirth, one that refuses to enter the room where it takes place, one that refuses to be curious. In Sight Greengrass accounts for this (absence of) point of view by showing that going into the birth room and looking would force the same realization on the man as ‘pacing the carpet’ does: some things cannot be seen anyway. As such, Sight retraces the historically male and scientific perspective of pregnancy (the invention of the X-ray, William Hunter’s first autopsies of pregnant women, and Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis) and points out its inadequacies, only to provide instead a female, embodied perspective that is just as flawed. Still, a partial representation of pregnancy turns out to be better than none at all. In the final lines of the novel, immediately after the birth of the narrator’s daughter, as the newborn ‘starts to cry’, the narrator admits she ‘do[es] not know the reason but’, she insists, ‘must try, somehow, to find it out’. Here, the novel embraces both flawed attempts at accounting for pregnant bodies and challenges the man ‘pacing the carpet’ to go into the room and to look anyway, to see somehow, to be curious. As such, the diegetic pregnancy in Sight forces the writer to confront the childlike nature of their work: its otherness, its embodiedness. The novel retraces the blind, pregnant-like, body-building effort of writing and, most importantly, acknowledges the body of work that results as it really is: alien to its creator. Which is why the creator’s curiosity remains essential to the survival and integrity of their work.
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Dates et versions

hal-03950068 , version 1 (21-01-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03950068 , version 1

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Maxence Gouleau. “We do not know the reason but must try, somehow, to find it out”: Narrative Pregnancy in Sight, or the (In)Curious Body-Building Business of Writing. JE "Body Building, Building the Body in Literature", Laboratoire junior OVALE, Jun 2022, Paris, France. ⟨hal-03950068⟩
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