Focus on the Inexplicable: an Analysis of John Burnside’s A Summer of Drowning and Graham Swift’s Here We Are

In spite of appearances, John Burnside’s A Summer of Drowning (2011) and Graham Swift’s Here We Are (2020) share a consistent number of common elements. Both narrations prove to be a tough test for the two female narrators who clash against their own inability to appropriately convey their experiences into words. In this paper, I intend to analyse the two narratives in terms of a mourning after the loss of a dear one: on the one hand, Liv the narrator in A Summer of Drowning, grieves after the loss of Kyrre Opdahl, her old neighbour and possibly her only friend, after he sacrifices his life to prevent his Norwegian village from remaining under the sinister influence of a girl who allures young men before they vanish. On the other hand, Evie White’s memories bring her back to reconstruct the episodes turning around the mysterious disappearance of the magician Ronnie Dean, her former boyfriend, who goes missing after a spectacular number on stage. Moving from Freud’s study on “Mourning and Melancholia”, I will attempt at evaluating the reactions of melancholic subjects, who typically reject the idea of the irrevocability of loss and instead play with fantasies of a rejoining with the dear one. The theories of Butler, Žižek, Gilson and Berlant will be used to further contextualise the melancholic’s predicament and position the case in frame with the studies on vulnerability.