2 - Taking Responsibility for One's Own Past
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
In a 1988 interview in The Times, he looked back on some of his early music and offered a simple assessment. “No, I am not like Samuel Beckett, who says, ‘Oh my God, I was such an idiot in that period, and I wrote such nonsense at the other time.’ I always hear what I have written as a part of myself given sincerely, and it remains a part of me because it is a place where I have lived.”
– Obituary for Olivier Messiaen, New York Times, April 29, 1992A CASE EXAMPLE
Felicia, the heroine of William Trevor's novel Felicia's Journey, is an inexperienced young girl who lives a sheltered life with her family in a small Irish town. There she falls in love with young Johnny Lysaght and becomes pregnant by him. Naively convinced of Johnny's good intentions despite his sudden departure for England, Felicia steals away from home and drifts, penniless, through the industrial English Midlands in search of the boyfriend she hopes to marry. She persists in her search, despite repeated indications of Johnny's faithlessness, indications that she did not but should have taken to heart. Along the way she meets up with the fat, fiftyish, unfailingly reasonable Mr. Hilditch who offers to assist her in her quest for Johnny. He assumes the role of a father figure and even manages to convince Felicia that it would be best for her if she had an abortion. But Hilditch's intentions are far from benevolent.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Moral Demands of Memory , pp. 57 - 109Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008