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In the Shadow of the Trenches or History Unmade: Doris Lessing’s Alfred and Emily (2008)
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Resumo(s)
War scars humanity in ways we refuse to recognize. In 2008 Doris Lessing publishes her farewell to writin, Alfred and Emily, a tribute to her parents, to the aftermath of the 1st World War and to the suffering, both seen and unseen, that is the inevitable outcome of any war. The text, an experimental hybrid of fiction, memoir and (auto) biography, is a reckoning with the past, imaginatively trying to atone for some of the irreparable losses the conflict brought about. Questioning the boundaries between the real and the fictional, Lessing creates an alternative history, inventing a world in which the war never occurred. She unmakes history, deconstructs the past, reveals what her parents' lives might have been, had they been able to live up to their potential. After the fictive biographies, she tells their story differently. Showing them trapped by circumstances, she remembers their lifelong ordeals in the shadow of the trenches. Permanently haunted by nightmarish memories, the father, a right leg amputee with a prosthetic limb, obsessiverly told the same war stories again and again. The mother, nursing the wounded, mourning the military doctor she had fallen in love with and whose ship was sunk, devotedly tended to her soon-to-be husband. The war brought them together; however ill-matched a couple they turned out to be, they stuck it out. '(...) at times two streams of war horrors went on together, my mother's 'Oh, the poor boys' like a descant to the Trenches.' At 88, her time running out, their daughter offers them the ultimate gift - a second chance at living. 'If I could meet Alfred Tayler and Emily McVeagh now, as I have written them, as they might have been had the Great War not happened, I hope they would approve the lives I have given them.'
Descrição
Palavras-chave
Lessing, Doris, 1919-2013. Alfred and Emily Fiction Memoir Autobiography Alternative history First World War
Contexto Educativo
Citação
Flora, Luísa. "In the Shadow of the Trenches or History Unmade: Doris Lessing’s Alfred and Emily (2008)". Blunt Traumas: Negotiating Suffering and Death. Nate Hinerman and Holly Lynn Baumgartner (eds.). Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press. 2016. 161-171.
Editora
Inter-Disciplinary Press