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Reviewed by:
  • Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative by Amelia DeFalco
  • Sally Chivers (bio)
Amelia DeFalco. Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative. Ohio State University Press. 2010. xx, 156. $34.95

As its title suggests, in Uncanny Subjects, Amelia DeFalco draws on Freud to think through the place of the aging subject in contemporary narrative. Perturbed by the invisibility of older adults, she wants to restore ‘the presence of an older subject’ and ‘to investigate the repercussions of occupying the tenuous cultural position of “old.”’ While other scholars seek to evaluate the intersection of age with other forms of difference, such as race, class, and disability, DeFalco avers that she is more interested in examining both women and men as aging subjects. She offers insightful [End Page 482] gender analysis throughout, but her focus is on age as a category of identity.

Densely and deftly written, the book is a very strong theoretical contribution to a burgeoning field that will engage scholars of narrative interested in challenging the central works of Paul Ricouer, Richard Kearney, and Freud, who are prominent in the theoretical sections of each chapter. In her critical framework, DeFalco offers a good précis of key points about the cultural effect of the baby boom demographic, the role of the aging body, a broad sense of cultural panic about the greying of the population, and the pernicious effects of the anti-aging industry. For scholars in the fields of cultural and critical gerontology there is little new in this overview, but it is particularly well constructed and will offer a useful introduction for those not already working in the area. Surprisingly, the foundational insights of cultural age scholars Simon Biggs, Mike Featherstone, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, and Kathleen Woodward rarely appear in the main text, showing up mostly in explanatory notes instead. DeFalco says of Freud’s confrontation of the double that he ‘relegates’ it to a footnote, ‘[banishing] it to the margins of the essay.’ Unfortunately, while she engages theorists of narrative centrally, DeFalco similarly tends to marginalize the scholars of cultural aging upon whose work the viability of her book relies and to whom her ideas owe a debt.

After her clever theoretical framing, DeFalco focuses on the relationship between the narrativity and the uncanniness of aging, valuing the explanatory power of narrative and its links to identity. To do so, she offers readings of contemporary fiction and film with chapters on late life review narratives (The Stone Angel, The Shroud, The Stone Diaries, The Company of Strangers), narratives of dementia and caregiving (Barneys Version, ‘The Bear Came over the Mountain’ and other Alice Munro stories, The Corrections, Iris), and the doubling of the aging image (in stories by Alice Munro and P.K. Page, Requiem for a Dream, Opening Night). Throughout, she argues strongly that identity need not be ‘mononarratological’ and that aging should be thought of in relation to a valuable flexibility of identity through narrative.

This refreshingly open perspective makes the chapter on dementia seem surprisingly narrow in its argument that dementia necessarily imposes limits on narrative possibilities. Certainly, conditions such as Alzheimer’s do ‘[put] incredible strain on a stable selfhood maintained by narrative.’ But it is not unavoidably the case that, as DeFalco argues, ‘narratives of dementia inevitably involve the transfer of narrative authority to another.’ DeFalco does an excellent job of gathering and analyzing instances of such transference. However, in her later chapter on doubles, she explains that ‘embracing the strange or absurd may be the only “solution” to the vexing instability of temporal identity.’ This begs the question: why can that embrace not be extended to dementia? The work of Anne Davis Basting [End Page 483] (both Forget Memory and her TimeSlips improvisational storytelling method) would enrich DeFalco’s perspective without deterring her from her goal of simultaneously acknowledging and offering alternatives to ‘bleak associations’ between old age and loss/decline.

DeFalco’s superlative concluding chapter confirms that she is exceptionally well read, able to mix film and print analysis smoothly without losing sight of the differences, and firm in her admirable position on the potential and limits of age as a category of analysis. These combined qualities...

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