Homelessness and Knowledge. On Childhood Wounds in "Swimming Home" by Deborah Levy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31261/Rana.2022.5.02Keywords:
home, knowledge, trauma, working-through, contemporary British novelAbstract
The aim of this article is to analyse childhood wounds of Joe Jacobs, the protagonist of Deborah Levy’s novel Swimming Home, through the prism of psychoanalytically grounded trauma studies. By means of studying Jacobs’s family life and his precarious relationship with Kitty Finch, a woman he has just met, I demonstrate how trauma and an unceasing sense of homelessness construct the protagonist’s identity. I note that Jacobs, a Holocaust survivor, strives for – but is incapable of – coming home, while Kitty functions as a mirror that reflects his repressed self-knowledge. As it turns out at the end of the novel, it is Kitty who guides him home: home which, as a locus of trauma, happens to be accessible only through death.
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