| Asymptotic Novel: The Language of Fiction and Its Limits qualifies Maurice Blanchot's seminal work, "The Narrative Voice," through an extended examination of stylistic and formal innovations in twentieth-century fictional language. It elaborates Blanchot's theory of "the neuter" (the exteriority beyond language, beyond the limits of signification and authorial intention) and applies it to a study of novels by writers such as Lautreamont, Alasdair Gray, Nathaniel Mackey and Thomas Bernhard, writers who overtly and self-consciously counter narrative readings based in the symbolic logic of representation. I propose the term "asymptotic" as a means of conceptualizing the two asymmetrical operations embodied in novels which try to approach and surpass the limits of fictional language. In the first operation, the writers focus on the development of evocative, playful, and punning language, within the context of the novel, within the limits of fictional language. These novelists, in other words, write within the system of rules and prohibitions which allow for metaphor, symbols, emblems and metamorphoses to appear in fiction. In the second operation, the limits of the field of language are first defined and then transgressed or penetrated. In effect, the writers focus on the exteriority to language, not on the nature of the system inside it, but on what lies beyond the rules and prohibitions of language, that which allows these rules to come into being. In this way, asymptotic novels explore the finite space between written language and language yet to be written. |
