Stepping Off the Edge

by Anne McConnell

Overview

Stepping Off the Edge addresses the question of literary edges and endings in contemporary works of literature from France, the United States, Canada, and Latin America. The book includes discussion of works by nine different authors, including Anne Carson, Marie NDiaye, Paul Auster, and César Aira. It considers the way that specific texts identify and interrogate textual boundaries, and also draw attention to questions of closure. Each of these texts also reflects on the way we experience and write about edges and endings in our lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628973792
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	03/09/2021
Series:	Dalkey Archive Scholarly
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	15 - 18 Years

About the Author

Anne McConnell is a Professor in the English Department at West Virginia State University. She specializes in contemporary literature and critical theory from France, Latin America, and the United States. She published Approaching Disappearance with Dalkey Archive Press in 2013, focusing on the work of Maurice Blanchot. She currently teaches world literature, critical theory, and writing at West Virginia State University.

Read an Excerpt

The end of a text represents a particular edge off of which we might step, but not the only one. In texts that resist linearity and teleology, ends and edges can occur just about anywhere, and often do when we start considering different modes of framing, footnoting, and “paratexting,” in general. Brian McHale identifies the “postmodernist split text” as “two or more texts arranged in parallel, to be read simultaneously, to the degree that is possible” (191, emphasis in original). He goes on to explain that, “Whenever a text is split into the text proper and gloss, whether marginal or in footnotes, questions arise about the relation between the two parallel texts” (191). Using the examples of Pale Fire and The Third Policemen, McHale describes the way that such novels “flout the convention” of distinguishing text from gloss, inverting assumptions about the hierarchy between the parallel texts and disrupting presumed boundaries between a text proper and its excess (191). In that way, egregious footnoting and endnoting move and blur the supposed edge of the text, encouraging us to consider how we know what belongs to the text (ergon) and what supplements it (parergon). For Chambers, footnoting and glossing relates to his notion of digression, and he explains how these “supplemental” texts exemplify “the etcetera principle”:

For the word etcetera has the function of conferring formal exhaustiveness and closure on any inventory—but it signals simultaneously that the inventory, as it stands, is in need of supplementation precisely because it is not complete. The closing gesture turns out in this way to be a marker of lack and vice versa. (86)

From this perspective, footnoting points to a failure of closure and completion; and, while we might traditionally see such texts as “side-notes,” not totally necessary to the text proper, Chambers explains that their existence undermines the ability of the text proper to come to close, to say it all. Furthermore, he notes, one footnote, or extra-textual digression of any sort, points to the possibility of more—whether that means another footnote, or a footnote to a footnote. Therefore, it’s not just that we can no longer distinguish text proper from whatever exists outside or after it, but that we become aware that there is always more room for another gloss, delaying and making impossible the closure of the text.

Those sorts of ruptures point to the way that texts seep beyond the limits that supposedly contain them, and also force a re-evaluation of what we traditionally refer to as “context.” In Framing the Sign, Jonathan Culler warns against that term, though: “But the notion of context frequently oversimplifies rather than enriches discussion, since the opposition between an act and its context seems to presume that the context is given and determines the meaning of an act” (xiv). Thus, if we perceive a renewed interest in and awareness of issues of context in contemporary literature and criticism, it is important to recognize the way that, as Culler writes, “context is not fundamentally different from what it contextualizes” (xiv). Again, that perspective reinforces the permeability of the border presumably separating text and context and troubles our efforts to find the “edge” of the text, bringing our attention to the play of multiple discourses in every act of reading and writing—evoking what Julia Kristeva demonstrates about textual interaction: “every signifying practice is a field of transpositions of various signifying systems (an inter-textuality)” (60). That critical interest, exhibited by Kristeva, Culler, and many others, also takes shape in contemporary literature that pushes against naïve assumptions about textual containment. As noted earlier, the “writerly” or “open” text solicits the participation of the reader, implicitly or explicitly, and asks us to consider our role, within our own discursive contexts, in producing the text. In the most explicit examples, the process of textual production literally relies on the reader’s (or viewer’s) participation, and the text develops in response to a reader’s feedback or activity. Valeria Luiselli’s novel, The Story of My Teeth, which I will discuss in Chapter 1, demonstrates that kind of interaction between writer and reader, as her conversations with a group of factory workers in Mexico about her developing novel influence the unfolding of the narrative. Aside from that very literal incorporation of the readers’ response, other works simply draw attention to acts of reading and writing, and how they condition the development and understanding of a text. According to Linda Hutcheon, in fiction, that particular interest “has taken the form of overt textual emphasis on the narrating ‘I’ and the reading ‘you’” (76). As figures of writer and reader within the text, the narrator and narratee clearly point to our own activity, and to the contextual factors of our interaction; that emphasis recognizes the diegetic levels of the text, at the same time that it implies a sort of migratory movement back and forth over the border. In Fiction Now, Warren Motte writes, “[…] We are always divided when we read fiction. We are outside, but we are also inside; we are here, but we are also there—and vice versa, as it were” (4).

Again, the particular vein of contemporary literature that interests me seeks to avoid re-instating what Barthes calls the mythic Author or the mythic Reader; but, in challenging the definitive boundaries of texts and textuality, it also avoids pretending that we can write and read texts in some equally mythic, closed off space. And, for that reason, we see a tendency to play with all of those myths, pointing to an extra-textual reality where individuals experience the world, and read and write books, and also pointing to the complexity of discursive contexts involved in the writing and reading of texts (and in the construction of the individual). Linda Hutcheon relates this to a surge in what she calls “historiographic metafiction,” or “well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflective and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (5). One could also point to the re-emergence of autobiographical writing that incorporates a strong sense of skepticism about its status as “autobiography,” focusing on what it might mean to write one’s own life. That would include the genre of “autofiction,” exemplified by writers like Serge Doubrovsky, Hervé Guibert and Annie Ernaux; hybrid texts, such as the “poem-essays” of writers such as Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, and Maggie Nelson; and the autobiographical meditations of Roland Barthes, Paul Auster, and Gérard Genette. In any case, the blurring of text and context, and the insistence upon the complexities of that relation, further draws attention to the tricky job of locating the ends and edges of any text. In addition, it seems to result in the hybridization of texts and the disintegration of traditional generic boundaries.

Another way to think about the edges of texts concerns issues of de-centering and dispersal, often associated with postmodernism but clearly persisting into more recent literature. Hutcheon argues:

Part of [postmodernism’s] questioning involves an energizing rethinking of margins and edges, of what does not fit in the humanly constructed notion of center. Such interrogations of the impulse to sameness (or single otherness) and homogeneity, unity and certainty, make room for a consideration of the different and the heterogeneous, the hybrid and the provisional. (42)

In “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida exposes and dismantles the role of the center in various structures that frame our understanding of the world. In doing so, he pushes critical and literary discussion to the margins, drawing attention to issues of heterogeneity, difference, and liminality. Clearly, literature can explore marginality and de-centeredness in a variety of ways—whether we’re talking about the literal margins of the text, as discussed above; literature’s relationship to and representation of issues of cultural marginalization; and/or to the undermining of what Lyotard calls “meta-narratives,” or the overarching conceptual systems we use to understand and order the world (generally revolving around some “center”) (xxiii-xxiv). All of those issues arise throughout my study of the edges of literature, though I am particularly interested in what it might mean to write and read at the margins of the text, putting that boundary into question and also affirming it in some ways. Many of the texts I will discuss explore the question of writing outside of the possibility of writing, from a marginal position where the work comes to an end as it simultaneously falls apart, and where we experience closure at the moment of our ousting. Several of the narrators and speakers are often trying to tell a story that, for one reason or another, puts them outside of the telling. Other texts feel pieced-together, collage-like, from the scraps of a story that has ended and remains out of reach. And most of the texts are dealing with various types of ends, like death, the failure of relation and intimacy, and even the end or edge of the world. Those textual concerns interrogate centeredness on many fronts and relate to Hutcheon’s description of an interest in heterogeneity, difference, and provisionality. And, as Hutcheon clarifies later in her analysis, that interest does not simply replace the center with the marginal: “It does not invert the valuing of centers into that of peripheries and borders, as much as use that paradoxical doubled positioning to critique the inside from both the outside and the inside” (69). That “doubled positioning” points to a sort of duality that might allow us to write and read from two positions and also implies the split to which Motte refers—both here and there, inside and outside, never static or stable in either position.

In Stepping off the Edge, I consider the way that specific works of literature explore the various issues of edges and endings discussed above. The texts I have chosen engage literal and material questions of closure, like the delineation of text and hors-texte, or the way that a narrative arrives at a particular end or conclusion; at the same time, they reflect on the ways we experience and write about endings and edges in our lives—the end of a life, or the sense that we are approaching the end of the world in one way or another, for example. The texts in this study remain skeptical about the firmness or stability of textual edges and ends, drawing attention to what escapes closure. And, for that reason, they also tend to shift our perspective to the margins of the text, considering what it might mean to write from a position of otherness, or even exclusion.

Since each of the chapters of Stepping off the Edge attempts to foster a conversation between multiple texts, I have split the chapters into sub-sections, in order to allow readers to navigate the chapters more easily and to jump into different sections of a chapter if desired. In other words, the book contains a relatively small number of long chapters, and I have organized those chapters in a way that they can be approached as a whole, or in parts. In keeping with the themes and concerns addressed in the book, I have attempted to compose a structure where the chapter topics, and the works chosen to demonstrate those topics, feel distinct from one another and also invite the reader to consider other ways we might piece the works and topics together, creating new conversations about the broader issue of edges and ends. In other words, the conversations between texts take place not only within chapters, but also between chapters. I have chosen a set of writers and works I believe encourage such conversations, because they share a set of interests and questions—most importantly, for the purposes of this study, a preoccupation with issues of closure, textual margins, and the limits and boundaries of a work of literature.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1: LOCATING, RELOCATING, DISLOCATING THE EDGE OF THE TEXT
Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red
Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth
CHAPTER 2: TANGIBLE GHOSTS: WRITING AFTER LIFE
Paul Auster’s “Portrait of an Invisible Man”
Anne Carson’s Nox
Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder
CHAPTER 3: SELF-PORTRAIT FROM THE OUTSIDE
Marie NDiaye’s Self-Portrait in Green
César Aira’s How I Became a Nun
Marie Redonnet’s Candy Story
CHAPTER 4: WRITING THE END OF RELATION
Marguerite Duras’s The Malady of Death
Maggie Nelson’s Bluets
Lydia Davis’s The End of the Story
CHAPTER 5: APPROACHING THE END OF THE WORLD
César Aira’s Shantytown
Paul Auster’s The Country of Last Things