Imperfection as a Chance: Matrixial Borderspaces in Anne Enright

Enright’s novels invariably focus on a damaged protagonist-narrator, but while this “damage” ranges from a strong awareness of bodily imperfections (as in The Wig My Father Wore (1995) to a deep sense of incompleteness (What Are You Like? (2000)) and to outright trauma in The Gathering (2007), the woman protagonist’s trouble always has a positive aspect in that the imperfection allows the subject to perfect her perception in surprising ways. In each novel and in most short stories, it is a form of damage which allows the subject to move from action to interaction, from subject as entity to subject as in-betweenness – a subject which is “beside itself”. In this article I show how Enright’s imperfect bodies are a condition sine qua non to develop what she calls a feminist aesthetics. What this entails is best articulated in Bracha Ettinger’s concept of the matrixial borderspace, and it is striking to trace how Enright hones her art to reach this type of perception. From Enright’s very first novel onward, the interactional mode becomes the basic metaphor of the story, but this basic metaphor is further elaborated in The Forgotten Waltz (2011), as this explores the in-between space in much more detail than previously. As the protagonist is driven by passion for the father of a damaged child, she is cast out from society and retreats to her mother’s house. This allows her to remap the world, revising definitions of being, redistributing attributes, never to (id)entities, but to a new kind of provisory aggregates. Using Freud’s concepts of the uncanny and Lacan’s idea of the “object a” we show how Enright’s interactional space is a splendid elaboration of Bracha-Ettinger’s subjectivity-in-severality.

ISBN:9781 137476296

Jaar van publicatie:2017