Shame as Narrative Strategy - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

the reader. With respect to the outstanding presence of liars in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
work, she assumes that
by positioning readers as witnesses of exposed shame, Dostoevsky makes us
experience our post-lapsarian heritage, thereby dramatizing his social, political, and
metaphysical message of human interconnection. By creating and exposing his liars,
whose narcissistic stories manifest their shame, Dostoevsky reveals fiction’s
function not only to expose but possibly also to save readers as he affords us ethical
awareness and thus the impetus to change. (Martinsen 2003, p. XIV)
Although Martinsen uses the term of “shame as narrative strategy,” she neither elaborates
on its exact forms nor on its concrete ways of function. ‘Strategy’ is merely used in
the means of a ‘strategic use’ of shame in order to re-establish and support moral and
social order. Such a moral(ising) function of shame narrative plays only a minor role in
the literature of contemporary Scottish women authors, which will be discussed in this
study. The exposure of a shamed subject to the judging eye of the audience is not their
main aim; only in connection to shameless characters this strategic use of shame might
be at stake. Therefore, Martinsen’s position will be referred to again in Ch. II. 2. 5 on
Shamelessness.
Reader reaction is also a subject matter in J. Brooks Bouson’s study of Toni
Morrison’s novels. This study of the interrelation between racism and shame is based
on recent psychoanalytical and psychological shame and trauma theories. Bouson’s
concept of shame concentrates on the connection between racism and traumatic
shame, and she only discusses shame affects related to this particular type of shame.
The emotional demands on the reader for being forced “into uncomfortable
confrontations with the dirty business of racism” (Bouson 2000, p. x) are repeatedly
stressed. Like Martinsen, though, Bouson does not analyse the exact narrative forms of
the novels and their supposed functioning. The study assumes reader attachment to
the point of vicarious shame feelings, but the mechanism behind this reaction is not
investigated. 2
In the introduction to Melville and the Evil Eye, Joseph Adamson provides by
far the most elaborate introduction to contemporary psychoanalytical shame theories.
He focuses on the interrelations between shame-proneness and shame-rage, and
between idealisation and grandiosity. His analysis of Herman Melville’s novels works
mainly text-immanent without reference to an assumed reader response to the shame
narratives, or their textual construction. By contrast, Adamson refers extensively to
‘the private Melville’ (Adamson 1997, p. 21). The autobiographical relation between
literary shame and the actual or presumed strong shame disposition of the author
2
Given a North-American white audience, feelings of guilt as a reaction to
Morrison’s minute descriptions of violent racism and shame-rage among Afro-Americans
appear in fact more likely.
10