UDTR Global Rights of Nature Radar

“Averting the Catastrophe of Being: Jenny Diski’s ‘Metaphysical Grotesque’ in 'Rainforest' and 'Monkey’s Uncle'”

Identification

Public canonical key

radar:r-2dc842d393c3e7bbdcb3bf7944d938ad

Authors

NICOLOSI, MARIA GRAZIA

Reported year

—

Reported language

English

Source type

conference paper

First detected

2026-11-13T15:32:30.801054+00:00

Last metadata observation

2026-11-13T15:32:30.801054+00:00

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Documentary abstract — original language

Commenting on the paradoxes of representation when confronted by the extremity of inconceivable horror, Blanchot’s resonant phrase, “the disaster de-scribes” (Blanchot 1995: 14), might offer an insightful entry point to approach Jenny Diski’s ‘difficult’ fictional world. Under various guises – harrowing or humorous, or both at the same time – all her novels attempt to carve out an impossible narrative space for her characters to retreat into from all ordinary connections to others and to conscious human awareness. However, although in the grip of traumatic loss and unacknowledged grief, the characters’ inherently indescribable struggle to sever all recognizable human ties by way of monomaniacal order, ‘madness’, or oblivion of the present is always paradoxically undone by the intrusion of more or less symptomatic others, and by the terror of desire and need. Thus the ambivalence about twining grief and melancholia with the possibility of ‘truth’ belies an ethical approach in Diski’s writing that, out of the shadows of a yearning for the inanimate and a longing for an oblivious implosion in nature, or in “a dissolution of the mind”, brings forth a monstrous tenderness engaged in a search for reparation and regeneration. I would argue that the privileged vehicle for this re-articulation of unexplored resources is Diski’s interestingly idiosyncratic use of the grotesque. As Harpham points out, the grotesque “stand[s] at a margin of consciousness between the known and the unknown, the perceived and the unperceived, calling into question the adequacy of our ways of organizing the world” (Harpham 1982: 3). As such, the grotesque would seem especially apt to engage the irreducible otherness of the other, its absolute alterity in the most humble and open way: “... its true home is the space between [...]. This mid-region is dynamic and unpredictable, a scene of transformation or metamorphosis” (ibid.: 8). In this constellation, then, ‘madness’ is not merely a narrated symptom within the diegesis, but an eminently ‘ethical’ writing strategy meant to de-structure the narrative and linguistic fabric, de-stabilize the characters’ and readers’ epistemological certainties and, in so doing, explore the “ontological boundaries of humanity” (Nordius 1991: 442). For Diski, the polarity between Kayser’s and Bakhtin’s respective understanding of the grotesque necessarily serves a doubly grotesque purpose: whereas it precipitates a “catastrophe of Being” in Rainforest, it functions as a catalyst for radical (ontological) change in Monkey’s Uncle. Thus, the opposition between inside and outside, such a resonantly Kristevan theme in her analysis of “abjection”, takes on both a metanarratological meaning via Diski’s structural experiments with multilayered and polyvocal narrative and the ethical dimension spelt out by the interiority and exteriority dialectics of Levinas’s view of “transcendence”. The aim of the paper is to explore stylistically and narratologically Diski’s treatment of gendered melancholia in Rainforest and the possibility of regeneration in Monkey’s Uncle through her use of elements of the grotesque as alternately fantastic ways of overcoming a traumatic rehearsal of defensive solipsism.

Identifiers

HANDLE

20.500.11769/90886

Documentary context

Documentary family

conference_paper

Source-reported types

conference paper

Publishers

Liguori Editore

Entity mentions are not evidence of legal recognition. Jurisdiction studied is separate from author affiliation country.

Sources

OpenAIRE

Direct documentary source pending consolidation

Documentary status

Relevance pending

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