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Tanis MacDonald 317 “Something’s missing”: Exploding Girlhood and Narrative in The Tracey Fragments Tanis MacDonald The public sphere is constituted in part by what cannot be said and what cannot be shown. The limits of the sayable, the limits of what can appear, circumscribe the domain in which … speech operates and certain kinds of subjects appear as viable actors. —Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence The other day, something happened. —Maureen Medved, The Tracey Fragments In Maureen Medved’s The Tracey Fragments, a fifteen-year-old girl, naked beneath a shower curtain, sits on a city bus and talks: about school, parents, her boyfriend, sex, her future career as a rock star. Bravado and hyperbole rule. But when she begins to talk about her search for her missing ten-yearold brother who vanished when “something happened” in the park two days ago, the public context of this private speech shifts; Tracey’s capacity for outrageous speech is large, but she cannot say “what happened” that day in the park. When Medved’s voluble “scream-of-consciousness” novel was published in 1998, it was praised for its power as a coming-of-age novel with a difference , and that “difference” was variously construed as (a) gendered and affective: a novel about an angry fifteen-year-old girl; (b) cognitive: a novel about a disturbed young person; and (c) structural: a reference to the imagistic , ragged first-person narrative Medved chooses for Tracey’s monologue. The back cover of the 2007 reprint of The Tracey Fragments cites the Globe and Mail’s review of the novel as “a high-octane jaunt through the remnants of a mind shattered by trauma,” while Vancouver Magazine emphasizes the way the novel captures the “rage and frustration of a self-conscious young girl,” and the Exploding Girlhood in The Tracey Fragments 318 Toronto Star calls “Tracey’s voice … acerbic, funny and totally convincing.” Medved adapted her novel for the screen, and the resulting film of the same name was directed by Bruce McDonald and saw theatrical release in 2007. McDonald resists the temptation to hone Tracey’s ragged edges and instead presents a visual reproduction of the novel’s monologic “fragments”: Tracey’s riffs on life, love, tragedy, sex, psychiatry and fame. The dramatic monologue style remains firmly in place in McDonald’s film, and is given extra street credit (as well as star power) by the performance of Ellen Page in the role of Tracey Berkowitz.1 Using a split screen, multiple camera angles and dozens of tiny moving images contained within their own geometric “fragments ,” McDonald’s filmic representation of Tracey’s memories, assertions, lies, fantasies and fears stream onto the screen in a visual storm that parallels Medved’s mercurial monologue of a fast-talking adolescent girl justifying her existence and her errors through bravado and compulsive repetition. The “fragmented” images reflecting Tracey’s affect and thought processes shape the way McDonald’s film focalizes Medved’s narrative of explosive girlhood as a character study, as a road movie about going nowhere and as a portrait of anxious monstrosity that has both psychological and physical consequences. However, the tension between what Judith Butler calls the “limits of the sayable” in both novel and film and the “limits of what can appear” in the film is palpable, and the metaphor of the fragment, with its connotation of former wholeness and its simultaneous resistance to integration back into the “whole,” functions best when considered as Medved’s method rather than Tracey’s madness. Following Butler’s formulation of the narrative of public tragedy, the print and filmic versions of Tracey’s story create a “public sphere” out of the inexpressible and the unwatchable. The film shows Tracey’s passage through public space as an integral component of her unending public vulnerability , marking out the ways that the edge of private pain is made uncomfortably public. Medved’s novel offers not only a retelling of a child’s tragedy that is unrelieved by an adult’s perspective, but also suggests a trace of a historical tragedy that has been effaced by one generation only to be inherited by the next. Butler’s discussion of the “unbearable vulnerability” set against the need for “patient political reflection” about terrorism and violence (Butler x) may seem at odds with Medved’s novel, which sutures postmodern adolescence onto compulsive illocution, but The Tracey Fragments—despite its apparent emphasis on articulating layers of individual subjectivity—is...

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