Insignificant Inheritance: Repairing Domestic Interiors

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing on James Clammer’s novel Insignificance, this paper explores the intersection of inheritance and repair. Marking its difference from 20th century concerns with the historiographical conditions of inheritance captured in such critiques as Stuart Hall’s account of “The Heritage,” Insignificance is set against the reality of modern Britain, where the possibility of inheritance has been undermined by decades of austerity and a mounting crisis of homelessness and housing stress. A material turn of inheritance studies is required. In Clammer’s novel, the question of inheritability becomes one of repairability and the novel recounts the repair work of plumber, Joseph Forbes. As Joseph labors however, disrepair overcomes him: the skin on his hands tears, becomes “old-womanly” and undermines the potential of his work. Looking to Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida who consider hands, if they are to be human, as necessarily mechanistic and caring tools, I understand hands as devices of repair, capable of realizing the project of inheritance by maintaining the conferral of the past through to the future. Whether the gift of repair that hands offer is received serves as the novel’s central problematic, one posed as much within the context of the novel as without.