Stacey D’Erasmo: On the Unsayable (January 2011)

What, Stacey D’Erasmo asks, is the meaning of “the unsayable” for a writer today? She argues that the heart of the question lies not in which topics may be taboo and why, but rather in subject matter which “we fear language will be inadequate” to portray. Looking closely at Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, D’Erasmo explores how these novelists use indirection to narrate stories about the horrors of slavery and nuclear apocalypse.