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.The crucial moment of interruption thatis sutured at the mid-point of the narrative  the moment, that is, of death (when thedead protagonist s story is picked up as the story of the narrator s survivorhood) is reproduced now, but in the split between the whole narrative as statement and34 Ibid., p.96.35 Ibid., p.87.120 Economies of Representation, 1790 2000its effect as utterance, that is, between its remembering and its reminding.And thusa new becoming-haunted is enforced, not this time on the part of the narrator, but inthe mind of readers subjected to the narrator s reminding, and able to acknowledge,like Kincaid s father-in-law, their foreknowledge (foreknowledge of coloniality,foreknowledge of death), and thus to emerge from their self-absorption into a state akinto Kincaid s hauntedness.Reminding produces the form of hauntedness we call readingout of the form of hauntedness we call remembering, which is itself a response (or acounterpart) to the becoming-ghostly of the protagonist.It does so through a relay thatreproduces the now double narrative of the becoming-ghostly of the protagonist and thebecoming-haunted of the narrator (that is, the story of the statement), but reproduces itas a becoming-ghostly of the narrative text that is simultaneously a becoming-hauntedof the reader (which is the  story enacted in the utterance).The agencing text, herefigured by the person of the agencer as narrator of a dual autobiography, is haunting tothe extent that it is haunted, as Kincaid is haunted by Devon; but it is haunted/hauntingalso, only to the extent that it finds a reader hospitable, like Kincaid s father-in-law andunlike her mother, to being haunted, that is, susceptible to realizing  on the reader sown account  the otherness that shadows the text.Her claims of neutrality notwithstanding, we can see that the narrator-agencer,in this, is both like and unlike the protagonist, since each of them is able to haunt,but only the narrator is subject to being haunted; and like and unlike the reader,each of the two being hauntable, whereas it is only the narrator who haunts.Asagencer, it is she, then, who mediates a shift: from the story in the statement, inwhich she is haunted, to the story as an enunciation that haunts the reader.Now,the name of the hauntability this narrator shares with the reader is guilt, the form ofconsciousness induced by the message  He died  the guilt, that is, of the survivor.It is guilt with respect to the dead that a reader has in common with an agencerwhose reminding, therefore, is no longer quite like Kincaid s causing of her mother seyes to narrow by recalling the incident of the red ants because, now, she does notdisclaim responsibility.I mean that, whether or not she intends to make the readerguilty, she does freely acknowledge her own guilty status in her role as narrator.Kincaid s guilt, in her text, takes many forms.She accuses herself of having wantedher brother to die ( I was so tired of him being in this state, not alive, not dead ); ofhaving quarreled with him on her last visit to see him before his death, so that shedid not  kiss or hug him goodbye ; of having not loved him  because I did not knowhim ; and of having not recognized her feeling for him as being love.36 She knowsthat from Devon s birth she  did not wish him dead; I only wished that he had neverbeen born, because it was his birth that plunged our family into financial despair, hisbirth and his father s illness , with the result that  I was sent away to help a familydisaster that I did not create.37 But the crucial occasion of her guilt is the neglect ofher brother, together with the hostility towards her mother, that was entailed by herhaving been sent away, the event that caused the two stories in the énoncé to diverge,since one continued to live  in death in Antigua while, becoming a writer, Kincaidgained  firm footing , and another family, in the West.36 Ibid., pp.108, 138, 150 51, 159.37 Ibid., pp.141, 150.Text as Trading Place: Jamaica Kincaid s My Brother 121Guilt is thus the sign of a crucial divergence in the two stories, one (Devon s)mere survival but the other (Kincaid s) a successful survivorhood; as such, it makesa mockery of the pretence that they are the same story at the same time as, under theguise of hauntedness, it sutures the break that divides them, through the mechanismof relay.But it is the fact of writing, therefore, that most obviously manifests thisstate of guilty survivorhood [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]