Introducing new SELMA postdoctoral scholar Sara Villamarin-Freire

Sara Villamarín-Freire is a ‘Xunta de Galicia’ postdoctoral fellow at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). She earned her PhD in Advanced English Studies from the University of A Coruña (Spain) with a dissertation entitled Against the Dominant Fiction: Seeking Alternatives to Hegemonic Fatherhood in Contemporary US Literature (2022). Her research interests lie in contemporary US literature, postmillennial trends in Anglophone literatures, comparative literature and narratology. She will be conducting a 12-month research stay at SELMA (2024-2025) to work on her project “Narrating the Father’s Body: Storytelling, Paternal Asomia and the Father-Child Bond”.

You can contact Sara via email: sara.villamarin[at]usc.es

“I stumbled across my research topic, as I suppose we all do, purely by chance. In 2015 a lecturer in my master’s degree mentioned a book in class that caught my attention—some Lacanian psychoanalyst dissecting the ethical potential of father figures in our current day and age. It was probably the parallel mention of Albert Camus’s Le Premier Homme which really captured my interest, so I wrote my paper for that course on both: Camus and this Massimo Recalcati fellow. Then I went on to write my masters’ dissertation on Camus, and Juan Rulfo, and Philip Roth, and their respective grappling with paternal figures in their works. I was hooked. Then it occurred to me I could write a whole PhD dissertation on the matter. I was no longer hooked: I was doomed.

In my doctoral years, I reoriented my research to focus on contemporary US literature. All of a sudden, I found myself facing a ginormous puzzle I could not make sense of. There were father figures, and father-child relationships, memoirs and novels, American masculinity in a state of perpetual crisis, obscure references to Lacanian psychoanalysis, the patriarchy, and a question that kept bugging me: Recalcati had affirmed in his book that individual father figures held the key to a new model of ethics, one based on mutual responsibility and care, whose foundational moment consisted in the Levinasian cry Me voici ! (“here I am!”). But something was amiss. Could a brand-new ethics spring from a fundamentally flawed institution that held sons in more esteem than daughters? Could a father be not just the object, but the subject of love, considering men had forfeited their bodies to be assimilated into the Name-of-the-Father under a patriarchal discursive framework? What role was literature to play in this mess?

Then narrative hermeneutics came to the rescue. By changing the angle—maybe fatherhood, in all its complexity, could also be understood as a narrative—I was able to make sense of how discursive practices challenged or perpetuated our collective understanding of father figures. There were individual fathers, and there was the dominant fiction, according to Kaja Silverman: a tale as old as patriarchy, in which fathers feel more like abstract entities, perpetually out of their children’s reach. The dominant fiction says we all ought to be whole; that fathers, in particular, are monolithic entities conflated with the phallus rather than regular subjects. This fiction left no room for selves in the making, fallible individuals passing on their stories, or ethical approaches. So I began untangling the conflation formed by individual fathers, the abstract Father, and the stories that buttress this alignment. Some storytelling practices contributed to reifying this association—but others could subvert it. As it turns out, there are stories out there in which children tell their fathers, and fathers tell their children, through acts of what Adriana Cavarero calls reciprocal storytelling. Observing selfhood from a narrative perspective, à la Paul Ricoeur, also contributes to countering the myth of monolithic identities found at the core of the dominant fiction. In fact, revealing the constructed nature of the dominant fiction and its subsumptive power is seminal to advance in the separation of paternity and patriarchy.

Literature, through individual acts of storytelling, can help us pave the way towards changing these patterns that have become reified in our narrative unconscious. After studying the ways in which reciprocal narration and paternity operate in works of fiction and non-fiction (some by Cormac McCarthy, Alison Bechdel, Sharon Olds, Paul Auster, or Philip Roth, to name a few authors), I have begun to examine more thoroughly the role of the paternal body in its affective dimension. The postdoctoral stage has found me researching the ways in which these issues intersect with ethics and narrative identity formation in the novels Sing, Unburied, Sing (Jesmyn Ward, 2017) and Lincoln in the Bardo (George Saunders, 2017). Oh, and I also like to write on whatever it is that comes after postmodernism—but that’s a story for another day.”