Reading: New Formations

"Britain's most significant interdisciplinary journal of culture, politics and theory."

I read Roger Lockhurst's contribution to the special issue of new formations devoted to "life writing." I was hoping for some close reading's of Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, but instead I got a brief meditation on the significance of trauma memoir. I was interested, and found Lockhurst really hits the right note on this touchy genre: it's kind of bad to read about people getting hurt and dying, to witness the grief and pain of the author in the writing. But it's good in a way, because it prepares us for necessity of "magical thinking" in our own lives. And at its best, it can remind us of the need for "magical thinking" in life more generally -- Lockhurst does a great job implying a lot here, without going into excruciating detail.

There was one significant reading, however, on the subject of Didion's application of "repetitive syntactical structures," when she describes her experiences after her husband's. This repetitions (wish I could quote some to you but Lockhurst doesn't give an example) convey "both a sense of magical incantation to keep him alive, but also a kind of post-traumatic automatism - and these repetitions are accumulated throughout
the book to brilliant effect. These tropes are at the foundation of literature’s
elegiac function, at least according to William Watkin, who suggests that in
elegy ‘language’s assumed magical powers of naming, and thus of giving or extending life, is called upon in the service of intense grief.’" That last part certainly sounds nice, but I'm not sure I've digested it yet.