Oral Textuality, Gender and the Gothic in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (2020)

Sonja Lawrenson

doi:10.24162/EI2023-12043

Autores/as

Sonja Lawrenson https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2821-6386

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24162/EI2023-12043

Palabras clave:

Oralidad, Irlanda, género, hauntología, lamento, Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Resumen

En A Ghost in the Throat de Doireann Ní Ghríofa, la narradora detalla su labor académica al traducir al inglés Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, el lamento de Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, una mujer de Kerry del siglo XVIII, por la muerte de su esposo, Art Ó Laoghaire. En su relato, la narradora también explica su experiencia personal mientras investiga y traduce esta obra. Su búsqueda de los orígenes del cantar de lamento o Caoineadh es apasionada, pero la narradora se muestra cada vez más desconfiada en cuanto a la viabilidad e implicaciones de dicha recuperación histórica. Atrapada entre el deseo de recuperar la voz y la presencia de Ní Chonaill y su asunción de lo ilusorio de sus anhelos, la voz narrativa de Ní Ghríofa se sumerge en los intersticios entre el Caoineadh y sus innumerables reverberaciones en la interpretación, la transcripción y la traducción. De este modo, Ní Ghríofa se enfrenta a antiguas preocupaciones europeas sobre la relación entre escritura y oralidad.

Considerando la crítica de Jacques Derrida sobre la crisis de la escritura en el siglo XVIII, este artículo interpreta el caoineadh como un detonante no reconocido, aunque vigente, en los debates de la Ilustración sobre oralidad y textualidad. El artículo se centra en las reflexiones de Derrida sobre hauntología para examinar la forma en que Ní Ghríofa responde a la marginación y el silenciamiento de la tradición matrilineal del lamento, de la que participa. Partiendo de la genealogía de la herencia política de Derrida, la narrativa de Ní Ghríofa proyecta una textualidad gótica alternativa en la que lo oral y lo escrito se entrelazan intrincadamente con el pasado, el presente y el futuro de Irlanda. De esta forma, se evitan jerarquías androcéntricas, etnocéntricas y antropocéntricas que, como se pone de manifiesto en la conclusión del texto, siguen afectando tanto al legado de Caoineadh como al canon literario irlandés del siglo XXI.

Biografía del autor/a

Sonja Lawrenson

Dr Sonja Lawrenson is Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Her research centres on women’s writing in eighteenth-century and Romantic Ireland. She has published on authors such as Frances Sheridan, Elizabeth Hamilton, Sydney Owenson, and Maria Edgeworth, and more broadly on Irish transnationalism, Enlightenment Orientalisms, Romantic print culture, and the eighteenth-century Irish stage. She is currently preparing a short monograph entitled Maria Edgeworth and the Gothic for Cambridge University Press and co-editing a special issue of the journal Gothic Studies entitled Melmoth’s Global Afterlives, with Dr Matt Foley. She is co-director of the “Long Nineteenth-Century Network” at Manchester Met and co-host of the “North-West Long Nineteenth-Century Seminar”.

Citas

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Textualidad oral, género y gótico en A Ghost in the Throat (2020) de Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s

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