Secretos, mentiras e intranscendencia. La producción de causalidad y autodeconstrucción en La noche de los niños, de Toni Morrison.

Paula MARTÍN-SALVÁN

doi:10.30827/tnj.v1i1.7599

Authors

Paula MARTÍN-SALVÁN Universidad de Córdoba

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30827/tnj.v1i1.7599

Keywords:

Event, non-event, causality, sequence, revelation, secrecy, confession, trauma, deconstruction

Abstract

This essay offers a reading of God Help the Child (2015), Toni Morrison’s latest novel to date, from the perspective of Jonathan Culler’s seminal contribution to narratology in The Pursuit of Signs and Structuralist Poetics, focusing particularly on three related aspects: the textual production of causality, the role of events and the eventful in narrative, and the self-deconstructive nature of particular texts. Morrison’s novel is articulated as a bold reworking of revelatory narrative structures organized around the reconstruction of a primal event at the story level which is only hinted at through analepsis in the diegetic present, by calling into question naturalized relations of cause-effect between events in a temporal sequence. The relevance of Morrison’s structure in God Help the Child can be better appreciated in the light of debates, in the field of narratology, about the definition of narrativity in terms of sequentiality, eventfulness and causality, and their deconstruction by post-structuralist narrative theory. Ultimately, my essay aims at pointing to a moment of self-deconstruction in the novel, exposed in the problematic realization that the primal event in this story is actually a non-event, one which apparently never happened.

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