Glimpses of a Failed Marriage

At a time when literary scholars have begun to investigate the connection between shame and the act of narration, Jamaica Kincaid’s 2013 novel See Now Then provides fascinating insights into the complex processes involved in writing about shameful matters. See Now Then offers an account of the rupture in Kincaid’s life caused by her divorce, and it describes her attempt as a memoirist and novelist to deal with her shame as she tells the story of the breakup of the marriage of an interracial couple, the white composer Mr Sweet and his black Caribbean immigrant wife, Mrs Sweet. For readers familiar with Kincaid’s other novels, there is a backward-looking quality to See Now Then as Mrs Sweet’s betrayal by her once beloved husband echoes and repeats the central shame drama that haunts Kincaid’s autobiographical fiction – the daughter’s betrayal by the once beloved but then hated mother. Through the verbally profuse yet hesitant and repetitive style of See Now Then, Kincaid’s narrative conveys the way that shame can both hinder and propel speech. Readers can also sense the deep anger and contempt that drive Kincaid’s narrative performance, which reads, in part, as a personal vendetta against her former husband. Thus, while readers may admire the literary qualities of Kincaid’s narrative as she transforms the shameful experiences surrounding her failed marriage into a verbally complex and, at times, extravagant and disorienting form of literary expression, they may also question the ethical propriety of Kincaid’s adversarial autobiographical performance, as she sets out, in a calculated way, to publicly shame her former husband in See Now Then

Art · Betrayal · Contempt · Literature · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Shame · White (mutation · Wife · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology · Philosophy · Social Psychology

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