Remembering Ethnicity in Middlesex

Abstract

Jeffrey Eugenides's second novel, Middlesex (2002), deals with processes of coming to terms with trauma by connecting opposites in humorous and imaginative ways. The protagonist and narrator of the novel, Cal Stephanides, recovers the ethnic legacy of his Greek-American family in order to work through his trauma of intersexuality. Trauma is manifested in a number of textual and thematic strategies related to the modal use of tragicomedy. The discursive act of healing this trauma is carried out by combining suffering and laughter, seriousness and playfulness, engagement and detachment in a textual artifact, thus attaining "narrative repair" (Nelson 2001). By going against coherent and closed structures, the hybrid, tragicomic mode enhances affect and closeness, while at the same time distancing the narrator (and the reader) emotionally. The tragicomic vision also contributes to the working-through of trauma by means of an empathic acceptance of human suffering and of traumatic past.