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Abstract: Peter Carey, a typical new-fiction writer, has first made his mark on the Australian literary scene with a series of short stories that merged fantasy and dark humor. The paper approaches The Rose by Peter Carey from the post-modernist point, that’s metafiction and Foucault’s discourse.
Key Words: The Rose, discourse, post-modernism
1. The Rose and Metafiction
The short story begins with the first-person narrator by which he gains greater intimacy with readers. In the beginning, “I” looked for the village on an atlas and cannot find it”. Is the village too small to be ticked on the map or is there actually, no such village in the world? It lets readers wonder why there’s no way to find it on the map. No matter under what condition, it draws us to question the believability of the narrator’s story. What’s more, at the nearly end of the story, the narrator “visited the town”, which, in turn, indicates that he is not a local. Readers just wonder, from whom or by what way, he has procured the story. If it were taken from hearsay, then we would approach the narrator with caution. To some extent, He may be not recording history; he’s fabricating a story. Such kind of “betrayal” would not affect the truthfulness of the story but to stimulate readers to think seriously about the status of fictionality. Peter Carey implicitly exposes the fictionality of the short story. Such writing technique is special of metafiction. “Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.”[2]
2. Subversion of Discourse
town and plants hybrid rose in a glasshouse. Not until two more foreigners came to take the old man away did the townspeople know that the foreigner was the former Commandant of Auschwitz. In the story, there are some points implicitly referring to anti-Semitism under Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany. Moreover, the other two foreigners were members of the Israeli security service. From these points, we can infer the anti-Semitic Holocaust in the World War Two. The old man grew the hybrid roses and the broken clock has been regarded as inferior quality. Seemingly unrelated as the two events are, they draw my attention, especially the two words “hybrid” and “inferior”. The Jews were discriminated against as a distinct and inferior race compared to their host nations in the Second World War. Adolf Hitler propagated his so-called “noble beliefs” that the Nordic Europeans were superior and pure in his speeches.
According to Michel Foucault, ‘in politics, art and science, power is gained through discourse: discourse is ‘a violence that we do to things’’.[2] Never could Hitler have instigated the World War Two and executed the Holocaust, if he weren’t in control of the discourse at that time. He advocated the policy of the survival of the fittest, namely preserving the racial impurity and wiping out those inferior. However, he left out the anti-Semitic ideas from the speeches of his election, from which we could see he feared the power of Jewish money, as he hadn’t been in complete control of discourse. Once he rose to power and became the person in authority, he began his crazy anti-Semitic atrocities and disasters befell Jews. Wielding political power, the Nazi regime employed soft power (such as media) to reshape the minds of the public. They reconstructed what’s the “normal” and “rational” in favor of their interests by distorting facts. At the same time, the Nazi regime deployed hard power (such as military) to kill Jews no matter Jews defied them or not. In the short story, the rose planted by the old man was “almost black in color, with just the faintest hint of red in its velvety petals”. It is profound in its symbolism. In my opinion, black rose is used to signify death as black is the color of death. The black also indicates the precarious or dangerous existence Jews were in at that time, while the red symbolizes the hope.
3. Conclusion
All in all, the Rose is analyzed in terms of post-modernism. By metafiction, the fictionality of the story is exposed and Hitler’s atrocity towards Jews is analyzed through Foucault’s discourse.
Notes:
[1]see [http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/metafiction.htm]
[2] Selden, Raman. Widdowson, Peter. & Brooker, Peter 2004, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literature Theory, Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press Pearson Education, Beijing, p. 187.
Key Words: The Rose, discourse, post-modernism
1. The Rose and Metafiction
The short story begins with the first-person narrator by which he gains greater intimacy with readers. In the beginning, “I” looked for the village on an atlas and cannot find it”. Is the village too small to be ticked on the map or is there actually, no such village in the world? It lets readers wonder why there’s no way to find it on the map. No matter under what condition, it draws us to question the believability of the narrator’s story. What’s more, at the nearly end of the story, the narrator “visited the town”, which, in turn, indicates that he is not a local. Readers just wonder, from whom or by what way, he has procured the story. If it were taken from hearsay, then we would approach the narrator with caution. To some extent, He may be not recording history; he’s fabricating a story. Such kind of “betrayal” would not affect the truthfulness of the story but to stimulate readers to think seriously about the status of fictionality. Peter Carey implicitly exposes the fictionality of the short story. Such writing technique is special of metafiction. “Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.”[2]
2. Subversion of Discourse
town and plants hybrid rose in a glasshouse. Not until two more foreigners came to take the old man away did the townspeople know that the foreigner was the former Commandant of Auschwitz. In the story, there are some points implicitly referring to anti-Semitism under Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany. Moreover, the other two foreigners were members of the Israeli security service. From these points, we can infer the anti-Semitic Holocaust in the World War Two. The old man grew the hybrid roses and the broken clock has been regarded as inferior quality. Seemingly unrelated as the two events are, they draw my attention, especially the two words “hybrid” and “inferior”. The Jews were discriminated against as a distinct and inferior race compared to their host nations in the Second World War. Adolf Hitler propagated his so-called “noble beliefs” that the Nordic Europeans were superior and pure in his speeches.
According to Michel Foucault, ‘in politics, art and science, power is gained through discourse: discourse is ‘a violence that we do to things’’.[2] Never could Hitler have instigated the World War Two and executed the Holocaust, if he weren’t in control of the discourse at that time. He advocated the policy of the survival of the fittest, namely preserving the racial impurity and wiping out those inferior. However, he left out the anti-Semitic ideas from the speeches of his election, from which we could see he feared the power of Jewish money, as he hadn’t been in complete control of discourse. Once he rose to power and became the person in authority, he began his crazy anti-Semitic atrocities and disasters befell Jews. Wielding political power, the Nazi regime employed soft power (such as media) to reshape the minds of the public. They reconstructed what’s the “normal” and “rational” in favor of their interests by distorting facts. At the same time, the Nazi regime deployed hard power (such as military) to kill Jews no matter Jews defied them or not. In the short story, the rose planted by the old man was “almost black in color, with just the faintest hint of red in its velvety petals”. It is profound in its symbolism. In my opinion, black rose is used to signify death as black is the color of death. The black also indicates the precarious or dangerous existence Jews were in at that time, while the red symbolizes the hope.
3. Conclusion
All in all, the Rose is analyzed in terms of post-modernism. By metafiction, the fictionality of the story is exposed and Hitler’s atrocity towards Jews is analyzed through Foucault’s discourse.
Notes:
[1]see [http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/metafiction.htm]
[2] Selden, Raman. Widdowson, Peter. & Brooker, Peter 2004, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literature Theory, Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press Pearson Education, Beijing, p. 187.