Att berätta en relation. En etisk läsning av Emilia Fogelklous "Arnold"

Abstract

The subject of this dissertation is the autobiographical novel Arnold by the Swedish writer Emilia Fogelklou (1878-1972). By combining Gérard Genette’s narratology and Andrew Gibson’s narrative ethics this study seeks to examine through what means the relationship is being told and with what ethical consequences different strategies are used to tell one’s experiences from life. The narrative analysis focuses on how the narrator is engaged in the narrative, how the bond between narrator and characters can be described, what is known to whom and how, and what is beyond the narrative’s limits. The analysis finds that Arnold is a changeable narrative, consisting of a short biography of the husband included in the story about Mi’s and Arnold’s relationship, and thus there are two different modes of telling in which different strategies are possible. Their union in marriage leaves narrative traces, why it is sometimes difficult to define the border between the two characters. Despite a description of narrative techniques, new conclusions are reached by applying an ethical perspective, inspired by Andrew Gibson. Defined as a heterodiegetic autobiography, the form of the novel appears as an ethical strategy not to reduce Arnold to how Mi perceives him, although the narrator still cannot treat them symmetrically. In contrast to Mi, Arnold cannot be completely included in the narrator’s discourse and he is therefore partly outside the narrative’s horizon. Through quotations from his letters and diary, he becomes an intradiegetic narrator. The weave of his and the extradiegetic narrator’s discourses creates an ethical movement, an excendance, where the border between telling subject and described object is questioned and negotiated. The strategies through which the relationship is told counteract its stagnation into a completed, stable entity. In this way, the narrative of Arnold is not only a retelling but a continuation of the relationship.