Hence, the primary aim of this article is to examine the interrelation between the dominating chronotope in the novel and the investigation led by the protagonist, Blue.I intend to prove how the surroundings contribute to the replacement of rational and objective judgment of the case with personal engagement. Whereas, traditionally, in detective fiction the dominant space, be it a locked room or a city, to mention a few, offers the sleuth clues necessary for solving the case, in the postmodern story of detection these clues are disorienting or meaningless.
The dominant setting of the novel, the urban space of New York and the observatory apartment located in it, is endowed with postmodern qualities, which leads to the transformation of the specificity of the investigation and its departure from one that is traditional. Ghosts, the second part of Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, is generically classified as anti-detective fiction. Bernard harnesses the power of poetry to queer or unsettle other kinds of discourse (including orthodox historical narrative) by imaginatively re-embodying hitherto disembodied voices, enabling them to speak in the interstices between private memory and public history in some unique (and strikingly affecting) ways.
The varied formal and aesthetic experimentation of many of the poems allow Bernard to ask some challenging questions of British society and its relation to its history, as well as the complex tension between public histories and personal accounts. Drawing on theoretical insights such as Derrida’s concepts of ‘hauntology’ and ‘archive fever’, this article argues that the notion of the archive is central to both the aesthetic and political project of Surge.
This article considers both the politics and aesthetics of Surge as a collection which addresses the social and material in/exclusions experienced by black Britons within some specific historical and socio-cultural contexts, including the 1981 New Cross and 2017 Grenfell fires in London. Perhaps." (Derrida, Archive Fever, p.36) Many of the poems in Jay Bernard’s Surge (2019) were inspired by Bernard’s 2017 residency at the George Padmore Institute, London, an experience that allowed them to access the Institute’s unique archives on black British history.
The name of the one that disappeared must have gotten inscribed some place else." (Derrida, Specters of Marx, 4) "What does it mean to follow a ghost? And what if this came down to being followed by it, always persecuted perhaps by the chase we are leading?" (Derrida, Specters of Marx, 10) "The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come.
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