Overcoming Grief and Salvaging Memory:: Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers

• Autores: Giulio Milone
• Localización: The Poetics and Ethics of (Un-)Grievality in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction / coord. por Susana Onega Jaén, Jean-Michel Ganteau, 2023, ISBN 978-1-03-238976-9, págs. 169-183
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Juggling between the mid-1980s and the present, Rebecca Makkai’s 2018 novel, The Great Believers, explores the interconnections between public and private trauma and inquires into the complex dynamics of overcoming loss and grief over loved ones while keeping their memory alive. Informed by theoretical observations of such thinkers as Judith Butler, Susan Sontag and Leo Bersani, the chapter takes a close look at how the first narrative line of the novel, set in Chicago at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and focusing on a circle of gay friends, is closely interwoven with a second one about the sister of one of those friends who is now looking for her estranged daughter in Paris against the backdrop of the November 2015 terrorist attacks. The novel’s focus on the burden borne by those who have survived or witnessed the AIDS epidemic engenders a broader meditation on the ripples and repercussions of traumatic events and senseless violence over decades. Furthermore, the multigenerational feature of the novel also provides a framework in which the politics of mourning over marginalised groups can be investigated, both in terms of their development over time and of their initially contested and eventually hard-earned legitimacy.