Resurrecting the Word. The Phenomenology of the Gift in Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son and in Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary
Resurrecting the Word. The Phenomenology of the Gift in Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son and in Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary

Summary/Abstract: This paper investigates the phenomenology of the gift in Norman Mailer’s TheGospel According to the Son and in Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary. Both texts arecontemporary reinterpretations of the Gospels and they are resurrecting the Word through theprocess of defamiliarization. In Mailer’s text this takes the shape of a full-fledged narrative of theGospels in which we are very sparingly given the author’s insight on the events. In Toibin’s novel weare assisting at a fist-person narrative of Mary, the mother of Christ, who is telling her version of theevents around Christ’s death. Both texts present themselves as a necessary correction to the mistakesmade by the apostles in writing the Gospels.These novels will be interpreted through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s and Jean-LucMarion’s theories on the gift. In The Gift of Death Derrida viewed God’s gift to the world through thesacrifice of Christ as fraught with shortcomings. Norman Mailer’s novel rediscusses some of theselimitations and puts into a new light Christ’s relationship with the Father. In his own analysis of thephenomenology of the gift, Jean-Luc Marion put forward the notion of “saturated reader” whichentails the reader (understood in the large sense of the word) faced with the exceeding revelation ofGod. Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary constructs such a reader and foregrounds in an originalway the phenomenology of the gift.

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