Spatial And Psychological Alienation In Garth Greenwell’s “Cleanness”

Abstract

The topic of alienation as a state of extreme lack of connection to the surrounding environment, society, and oneself has long been the concern of literary scholarship. This theme reveals certain urgency in the present-day queer fiction, and it is frequently associated with the feelings of shame, desire, and cultural displacement. The 2020 novel “Cleanness” by Garth Greenwell is an important contribution to this school, being characterized by its lyrical treatment of the life of a queer American protagonist, in post-communist Sofia.

Although the existing criticism has been able to analyze the atmospheric setting of the novel and its depth in terms of psychology in an isolated manner, there is a significant loophole. The spatial, psychological, and narratological aspects of alienation have been approached as distinct issues in the current scholarship with little consideration of the depth in their interdependence. This paper holds that alienation in Cleanness is a three-partite phenomenon that is totalizing. It shows that the crumbling urban terrain of Sofia is actually instrumental in disintegrating the inner world of the protagonist, that his psychological condition of shame and desire determines how he sees the city, and that the strange prose style with its long sentences and non-linear arrangement actually brings this alienation to the reader. Using an interdisciplinary theoretical perspective that combines spatial theory, queer and psychoanalytic theory, and narratology, this paper demonstrates the reciprocal nature of self, the city and the sentence in the articulation of a sense of profound estranged belonging.