Engineering the Female Subject: Erna Brodber's Myal

At a recent staff-postgraduate seminar hosted by the English Department at U.W.I., Cave Hill, Glyne Griffith presented an analysis of Roger Mais's fiction in which he interrogated certain traditional notions of authorial omniscience and called attention to the power inherent in representation. The omnipotent omniscient narrator, unknowable and beyond challenge, solicits the reader's absolute trust in authorial placing or definition of characters, from whom the narrator maintains a godlike distance. Within this type of literary discourse, inherited from mainstream English fiction of the nineteenth century, characters are 'written': that is, settled, solidified or, as Harris1 would have it, 'consolidated' and fixed for ever.