Output details

"Experience", "The Stain" and "An Abduction"

“Experience”, “The Stain” and “An Abduction” are three new stories, published in the New Yorker and not yet collected anywhere. Research questions focussed on: 1 What ‘innocence’ might possibly mean in our twenty-first century sophisticated literary culture. 2 Are there new ways of imagining innocence, uncoupled from its old associations with female sexual chastity? Inside our very disabused cultural moment, could innocence be re-examined and recovered? 3 Is there a reason why all my innocent protagonists are female beyond a leftover from a long cultural tradition? 4 What are the special strategies within writing to address the paradox at the heart of innocence - that it must not admire itself, or even know itself, lest it change on the instant into something smug and preening? In ‘The Stain’ a young woman is innocent about the bloody reality of politics, and of life outside her immediate country neighborhood. In ‘An Abduction’ a woman persists as girlish and unself-knowing into her middle age, because of a moment of deep disappointment in her youth. Laura, in ‘Experience’, wants initiations beyond the quiet life she’s had, and thinks of her innocence as a maimed thing, humiliating. All these stories are equivocal about innocence, recognizing the damage it can do, yet valuing its compensations. Research practice resulted in an outcome of layered effect, where the writer’s language cannot be innocent in itself, but must make space inside its sophistication for innocence to be real.