engleski

“What will I do while I’m lasting, Marianne?”: Fragmentary Writing in Janice Galloway's The Trick is to Keep Breathing

The main protagonist and narrator in Janice Galloway’s debut novel The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989), a teacher in her late twenties, suffers from severe depression following her lover’s death by drowning and eventually ends up in a psychiatric clinic. What we witness in the course of the novel is Joy Stone’s (oftentimes very witty) stream-of-consciousness which is clearly reflected in the highly unusual typographical construction and the physical fragmentation of the text. As Donald Petrie claims, the author uses “a variety of typographical devices to convey the fragmentation of the protagonist's self” (69). The unconventional layout of the pages in this novel mirrors Joy’s fractured state of mind, or in other words her way of tackling the tragic loss and the trivia of everyday life (on which the text focuses to a great extent). Throughout the novel, Galloway uses techniques and “textual tricks”, as Mary McGlynn calls them (16). It is interspersed with pages left partly blank ; parts of the text are put down in italics, whereas some words/letters are written in boldface and others in lightface ; short disconnected messages seem to bleed off typographically into the margins ; excerpts from magazine articles (e.g. horoscope) are quoted verbatim ; the novel abounds in theatre text dialogues ; unfinished sentence are nowhere resolved. These textual ‘tricks’ that Galloway deploys to “tell her protagonist’s story do not hinder, but serve to accentuate, the emotional dimension of the narrative” (Soon Ng 238). This presentation therefore sets out to explore ways in which the physicality of The Trick is to Keep Breathing (which evokes both T.S. Eliot’s modernism and Alasdair Gray’s postmodernism!) accentuates coping mechanisms which help our disembodied protagonist in the long and painful process of grieving and in the act of regaining a sense of emotional and physical sanity.

Galloway, stream-of-consciousness, textual fragmentation, trauma

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