Whose Story Is That? Experimental Narrative Strategies in Rethinking Normality and Age

Daria Baryshnikova

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Chapter 4 Whose Story Is That? Experimental Narrative Strategies in Rethinking Normality and Age

In: Poetics of Disturbances

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Daria Baryshnikova

Daria Baryshnikova
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 79–94

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004519886_006

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Abstract

This essay discusses the representation of non-normative bodies and minds in Tim Crouch’s video installation – dramatised version of B.S. Jonson’s novel House Mother Normal (1971) produced for the Brighton Festival 2021. The original novel shows a social evening in a nursery house from nine different points of view, and it is aimed at representing nine characters’ mind processes. Each successive character has a higher degree of mental and/or physical disability than the previous one, so their monologues get more fragmented and incoherent. The present essay combines the formal analysis of the modes of storytelling with the exploration of the dialectics of discourse and cultural conventions. To extend the discussion of Johnson’s novel focused on the narrative and cognitive modes in the text (Bernaerts 2014), the emphasis will be directed to the emergence of a collective mind and the question of how it is represented through the medium-specific multi-perspectivity. Drawing upon enactivist approaches in cognitive narratology and cultural analysis, I argue that Crouch’s artwork not so much presents to the viewers the interpretation of Johnson’s story but rather enacts the experimental discourse of the novel. My analysis focuses on the ways in which Crouch’s installation evokes minds using visual aspects of simultaneous characters’ representation on screen alongside the audible deployment of voices, pauses and sounds, words, and music. This juxtaposition may shed light on how the expressive modes (verbal and non-verbal) contribute to the recontextualisation of earlier texts within the actual cultural situation. The latter can be described as including such relevant for the present study characteristics as globalisation with its overwhelming fluxes of information, diversity and inclusiveness, and the impact of the pandemic on art practices.

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Poetics of Disturbances

Narratives of Non-normative Bodies and Minds

Series: Narratives and Mental Health, Volume: 2

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004519886

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 24 Oct 2024

Subjects
- Biology
  - Psychology
  - Interdisciplinary Sciences
- Literature and Cultural Studies
  - Literature, Arts & Science
  - English & Anglophone

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Chapter 4 Whose Story Is That? Experimental Narrative Strategies in Rethinking Normality and Age

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Poetics of Disturbances

Narratives of Non-normative Bodies and Minds

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