‘The Barest of Lives: Looking at War from the Heart of Things in Harry Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier (2016)’

Études Britanniques Contemporaines

关键词: Harry Parker;    Anatomy of a Soldier;    it-narrative;    biopolitics;    bare life;    zõê;   

DOI  :  10.4000/ebc.3932

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

At a time when the physical reality of bodies at war has become both omnipresent and increasingly mediated, Harry Parker’s debut novel Anatomy of a Soldier (Faber and Faber, 2016) chooses to displace the narrative logic of war and to reveal its organic materiality. Reinventing the ancient tradition of the ‘it-narrative’, in which reality is seen from the points of view of things or animals, Afghanistan and Iraq veteran Harry Parker narrates the Afghan war from the perspective of the objects and animals that cross the path of his veteran protagonist, from his training days to his rehab after he has been seriously injured by an IED. Parker’s indirect and plural autobiography is more than a stylistic tour de force. It enlists the potential of narrative omniscience to an ethics of empathy that exposes the physics of a post-humanism moving beyond the remit of human life. Parker’s own experience of bare life also opens onto a paradoxical commonwealth of embodied cognition. A continuum of dispossession and pain is made tangible in a fragmented narrative that lays the foundations for a new intelligence of what Jane Bennett defines as ‘vibrant matter’.

【 授权许可】

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