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Humanities
- ISSN: 2155-7993
- Journal of Modern Education Review
The Plethora of Choice as a Double Shift Retrieval in
Julian Barnes’s The Lemon Table
Elena Bollinger
(University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Abstract: Reading experience of The Lemon Table (2004) challenges our memory either to retrieve the “dead” text or to withdraw it from any further links. A creative intertextual way which drives a contemporary impetus for the multiplicity of choice, its exclusive all-inclusiveness, becomes a metaphor for a nightmare vortex. A detailed literary analysis of the text shows how memory exercise, active and human, located between experience and imagination, is constantly counter-balanced by a possessive/passive consumption, leading towards modern obsessive knowledge. Thus, the double anxiety between past and present is revealed in the concept of the “translinguistic transfer” (Kristeva), performed by the text’s construction. The artificial intelligence of a modern character is challenged by a secular philosophy of mind through an emphasis on memory as a complex process of permutation and insider-outsider grasp into the “buried” text and the “dead” author (Barthes).
Key words: the short story, memory, canon, Julian Barnes, Ivan Turgenev
