‘Cloth speaks’: Cloaks of Telepathy, Melancholia, and the Uncanny in Nicholas Royle’s Quilt
‘Cloth speaks’: Cloaks of Telepathy, Melancholia, and the Uncanny in Nicholas Royle’s Quilt

Summary/Abstract: The article proposes a close reading of the debut novel, Quilt, written by Nicholas Royle, Professor at the University of Sussex and author of many books on critical and literary theory. Quilt unveils a fantastic experience of encountering death and explores the language of mourning as well as phenomena such as telepathy, melancholia, mourning, monomania and the uncanny. Within a broad psychoanalytic framework, the essay deals with a stranger notion of ‘clothing’ than the reader of an issue on ‘The Discourse of Clothing’ might expect: the mood of mourning, in which somebody dresses in black, is not only physical but, as it were, also psychical. Royle’s writing and the uncanny strategies deployed by his mourning protagonist testify to a cover-up which also results in the estrangement of language. The narrator-protagonist’s increasing obsession with his father’s stingrays shrouds the text in a mantle of linguistic alienation from which there seems to be no escape but the unnamed narrator’s final disappearance from the textual universe.

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