ABSTRACT
Positing a final, and uniquely hermeneutical insight into the character of Cecy Elliott, Chapter 7 investigates the relationship between selfhood and Otherness in Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Traveller”. First published in Weird Tales in 1946, “The Traveller” (heavily revised and included in Bradbury’s Elliott Family novel From the Dust Returned) introduces us to Cecy, a young woman with the ability to enter and inhabit any being. In “The Traveller”, Cecy’s ability interrogates and complicates the idea of the self as self-constituted: Cecy, we learn at the conclusion, is present in Uncle John all along, the root of Uncle John’s guilty conscience, manifesting in macabre images of dead family members he betrayed. Stated simply, “The Traveller” places the Other at the center of questions of selfhood.
In Strangers, Gods, and Monsters (2003), philosopher Richard Kearney outlines his project of diacritical hermeneutics, a philosophical approach that, according to Kearney, provides a means to interpret the Other that prevents the Other from becoming “too foreign or the familiar too familiar”, avoiding “certain kinds of apophatic mysticism and deconstruction [that] run the former risk, [and] certain forms of psychoanalytic and New Age immanentism [that] run the latter” (11). Kearney’s diacritical hermeneutics provides entrance into the text through two points: first, through his reliance on the model of selfhood proposed by Paul Ricoeur in Oneself as Another, which supplies a model for thinking the self as “otherness less in opposition to selfhood” and instead as “a partner engaged in the constitution of its intrinsic meaning” (80); second, for the ethical implications of the diacritical hermeneutical approach, which, measured against the response of both Uncle John and Cecy to the stranger in their midst, helps us consider the ethical call of the Other, who “breaks the closed circle of the ego-cogito and reminds us of our debt to others” (81).
