Studii si Cercetari Filologice: Seria Limbi Straine Aplicate (Dec 2018)
Resurrecting the Word. The Phenomenology of the Gift in Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son and in Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary
Abstract
This paper investigates the phenomenology of the gift in Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son and in Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary. Both texts are contemporary reinterpretations of the Gospels and they are resurrecting the Word through the process of defamiliarization. In Mailer’s text this takes the shape of a full-fledged narrative of the Gospels in which we are very sparingly given the author’s insight on the events. In Toibin’s novel we are assisting at a fist-person narrative of Mary, the mother of Christ, who is telling her version of the events around Christ’s death. Both texts present themselves as a necessary correction to the mistakes made by the apostles in writing the Gospels. These novels will be interpreted through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s and Jean-Luc Marion’s theories on the gift. In The Gift of Death Derrida viewed God’s gift to the world through the sacrifice of Christ as fraught with shortcomings. Norman Mailer’s novel rediscusses some of these limitations and puts into a new light Christ’s relationship with the Father. In his own analysis of the phenomenology of the gift, Jean-Luc Marion put forward the notion of “saturated reader” which entails the reader (understood in the large sense of the word) faced with the exceeding revelation of God. Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary constructs such a reader and foregrounds in an original way the phenomenology of the gift
