6 Absented Women’s Voices: Problematising Masculinity in Jim Crace’s Fiction

Abstract

Kristeva’s formulation of Semiotic—the silent rhythmic undercurrents and disruptions to the dominant Symbolic order which dislocate narrative and (gendered) subjects—acts as an intertext to Crace’s narratives. Narrative dislocation is central to Crace’s work. Kristeva’s poetics offer a way of seeing how Crace’s narrative gaps and silences function as self-conscious rhetorical and narratorial strategies to offer up spaces for ‘other’ identities. Through narrative sleigh-of-hand, partial focalisations, lacunae, slippery semantics, and shifting grammatical tenses, Crace disturbs the microcosmic worlds his (male) narrators create. The absence of female voices (dead wives, desired woman, and the young girl violated) is key to Crace’s cumulatively semiotic rhetorical technique: a blank space—an ‘other’—a rich silence on which the reader writes alternative histories and stories.