Island as a Figure of the Unconscious: Toward a Metaphorical Relation between Human and Place in Michael Crummey’s Sweetland

Abstract

"In Configuration: Essays in the Canadian Literatures, E.D. Blodgett suggests an effective way of looking at space in fiction through the poststructuralist and psychoanalytical lens of Gérard Genette and Jacques Lacan via Roman Jakobson.... This essay is intended to test this analytical tool of the metonymy-metaphor dialectic as Genette’s figure through a discussion of Michael Crummey’s novel Sweetland (2014), which features a relation of a place (Sweetland as island) with a human (Moses Sweetland). Blodgett notes that “Lacan’s ‘subject’ is a kind of house through which character is projected” (77); thus, in Crummey’s novel, by analogy, the house is functionally replaced by the island, ... whose role in the character development is hard to overestimate."