6533b82cfe1ef96bd128f176

RESEARCH PRODUCT

"For beyond this trading community lies family life" : filiation et écriture dans Crossing the River

subject

description

This paper examines the relationship between filiation, affiliation and writing in Crossing the River. First, it examines the diversity of literary genres incorporated, revisited and juxtaposed in a novel often defined by its polyphonic structure. This analysis leads to a study of the ways in which family ties, and particularly the links between parents and children, are staged in the text through a complex pattern of repetitions and inversions. The echoes which connect, and sometimes oppose, the various parts of the novel suggest that repetition and inversion are the tools through which family identity is constructed throughout the novel. The reason behind these textual strategies may also lie in the novel’s intention to stage a family romance, but not in the traditional Freudian sense of the term; what emerges from Crossing the River may be more aptly described as a genealogical romance which “familialises” the collective myth of slavery, articulating individual and collective issues through the figures of the “guilty father” and his children.