Bożena Kucała

Sarah Moss’s novel The Fell (2021) is a fictional reflection upon the second UK lockdown in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to its topicality, the novel is likely to be read as a “time capsule,” preserving the unprecedented experience of social isolation, anxiety and domestic incarceration. Starting with the assumption that living in a time of pestilence may be characterised as a borderline experience, this article argues that The Fell revolves around the paradigm of liminality. For the characters portrayed in the book the threshold is social, psychological and existential. Nevertheless, for the main protagonist the metaphorical and the literal merge when, driven to the limit of endurance, she falls off the edge of a cliff while taking a walk on the fells of the Peak District, in defiance of the quarantine restrictions. The article analyses various meanings of liminality in Moss’s novel.

Abstrakt: Powieść Sarah Moss The Fell (2021) jest literackim odzwierciedleniem drugiego lockdownu w Wielkiej Brytanii w roku 2020 podczas pandemii COVID-19. Ze względu na swoją aktualność powieść może być odczytywana jako „kapsuła czasu” przechowująca bezprecedensowe doświadczenie społecznej izolacji, niepokoju i domowego uwięzienia. Wychodząc z założenia, że życie w czasach zarazy można scharakteryzować jako doświadczenie graniczne, niniejszy artykuł dowodzi, iż powieść The Fell jest zbudowana wokół paradygmatu liminalności. Dla bohaterów ukazanych w książce próg ma aspekt społeczny, psychologiczny i egzystencjalny. Dla głównej bohaterki natomiast znaczenia metaforyczne i dosłowne łączą się wtedy, kiedy będąc na skraju wytrzymałości, z naruszeniem przepisów kwarantanny wyrusza na spacer w Peak District i spada z krawędzi klifu. Artykuł analizuje różne znaczenia liminalności w powieści Moss.

* This research was funded by the program "Excellence Initiative – Research University" at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. 

Several of Graham Swift’s novels are permeated with the sense of an ending and eschatological reflections. The characters’ vision of their lives tends to be underpinned by a notion of decline. While the experience of loss and the confrontation with mortality depicted in Swift’s fiction have been extensively analysed, less attention has been paid to the fact that in perceiving their lives as a process of deterioration, the characters implicitly acknowledge the existence of an initial stage of happiness against which this process may be measured. This paper will identify and examine the infrequent yet meaningful intimations of primal harmony and happiness, which sometimes take on quasi-religious overtones, reminiscent of the concept of paradise.
 

The Natural and the Supernatural in Muriel Spark’s Fiction

A striking feature of Muriel Spark’s fiction is its insistence on the reality of the supernatural, which occasionally breaks into the naturalistic level, defying and challenging habitual modes of perception. The fact of Spark being a religious convert is well known, but her faith is manifested in ways different from what is normally assumed to be religious writing. Spark’s novels are never overtly didactic or moralistic; the impact of her faith is manifest in the notion of reality as conveyed by her fiction. Spark’s vision of reality, underlain by her Catholicism, is based on her conviction that empirical reality coexists with the supernatural world; therefore, interactions with the supernatural, however strange they may seem, are presented in her fiction as compellingly plausible. It is argued in the article that Spark’s ontology of fiction is rooted in a tradition going back to Chesterton, who insisted on the paradoxical conjunction of nonsense and faith, both capable of invoking a sense of spiritual wonder at the world we normally take for granted. Memento Mori, Reality and Dreams as well as selected short stories are referenced to illustrate the peculiar combination of the empirical and the supernatural in Spark’s fiction. The article asserts the paradox, central to Spark’s vision of reality, that the supernatural should be accepted as a natural part of profane experience.

This article examines the correlations between aspects of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and André Brink’s The Rights of Desire. Apart from sharing the historical context, i.e. post-apartheid South Africa, the novels display certain thematic parallels. The plot in each novel is initiated by the intrusion of passion into the secluded and uneventful life of the protagonist. Both David Lurie and Ruben Olivier succumb to it, with far-reaching and unexpected consequences. Taking as his title the words of Coetzee’s protagonist who invokes “the rights of desire” to defend his conduct, Brink also portrays an elderly man facing the process of ageing and having to re-evaluate his actions.