Framing Terror: Illness and Art in Anita Brookner's Look at Me

• Published in: Etudes anglaises Vol. 74; no. 2; pp. 203 - 252
• Main Author: Petit, Laurence
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Paris Éditions Klincksieck 01.01.2021; Klincksieck
• Subjects: Allusion; Art and art history; Autobiographical literature; Bildungsroman; Biographies; British & Irish literature; Brookner, Anita; Contemporary literature; Death & dying; Derrida, Jacques; Disorders; English literature; Erotica; Exegesis & hermeneutics; Fate; Heroism & heroes; History; Humanities and Social Sciences; Illnesses; Literary characters; Literary criticism; Literary devices; Literature; Mental institutions; Metaphor; Narrative structure; Narrative techniques; Narratives; Novels; Ontology; Plot (Narrative); Short stories; Writers; Anita Brookner; Look at Me; Illness; Art; Death; Terror; Melancholy; History; Trauma; Holocaust; Postmemory; Ergon; Parergon; Jacques Derrida; Marianne Hirsch; Julia Kristeva; Mary Ann Caws
• DOI: 10.3917/etan.742.0203
• ISSN: 0014-195X

Anita Brookner's 1983 novel, Look at Me, recounts the story of Frances Hinton, the reference librarian of a medical institute. Frances's task consists in archiving reproductions of works of art depicting maladies through the ages-a veritable "encyclopaedia of illness and death," as she puts it. As the plot unfolds, centering upon Frances's interaction with the other characters in the library, the novel itself develops into a veritable narrative of illness and death in which the pictorial material acts as a metaphor for Frances's gradual mental and physical disintegration. Following a near-death experience, Frances manages to create the conditions for a therapeutic writing retreat in which she can embark on her lifetime project-writing an autobiographical novel centered on the medical institute, in other words writing the very novel that we have been reading throughout. Drawing from philosophers and literary critics such as Kristeva, Derrida, Hirsch, Woolf, Caws, and Restuccia, as well as from Brookner scholars such as Bowen, Williams-Wanquet, and Stetz, this essay explores the way in which the pictorial and writing frames that Frances sets up in order to try to control her life and that of others can be seen as metaphorical frames against terror, from an ontological as well as a historicized perspective.