Opacity, Narration, and “The Fathomless Word”

Abstract

Opacity, Narration, and ''The Fathomless Word''If I find that, despite my best efforts, a certain opacity persists and I cannot make myself fully accountable to you, is this ethical failure?-Judith Butler, Giving an Account of OneselfWe remember that Plato, who understood the power of Myth, had hoped to banish the poets, those who force obscurity, far from the Republic.He distrusted the fathomless word. -E ´douard Glissant, Poetics of RelationMy body is opaque to the soul.-Jean Toomer, Cane I.Any narrative critic will perk up at the point in Giving an Account of Oneself where Judith Butler suggests an affinity between the ''speculative philosopher'' and the ''fiction writer.'' 1 This affinity occurs, Butler claims, when both become engaged in the paradoxical act of speaking the preconditions of a speaking subject into existence.The writer does so through an act of world-building, a world in which their invented characters can then act and speak.The speculative philosopher (in whose company we may include Butler themself) does so through a procedure that is, in the technical language of their discipline, antifoundationalist.To be without foundations: to therefore be always in the act of worlding (verb) worlds.The narrative critic, especially in their guise as an affect theorist, will be drawn to such a self-reflexive and open-ended account of worlding.2 Butler abets this project when they propose a shared ethics between the speculative reconstruction of the accountable subject and the creative invention of the semiautobiographical narrator.While the aims of the novelist and Representations 158.

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