Abstract
Nathaniel Mackey's novel, Djbot Baghostus's Run, advances the possibility of poetic language as a site of political resistance. As Jared Bottle (Mackey's protagonist) sits in jail, he considers a plan for escape--an escape he bases on a form of language play that enables him to "chant down the shifting terms of incarceration" (162), chant down the logic behind the discourse (criminal law) that keeps him imprisoned. Bottle mounts his resistance by inventing new words, altering syntax, by breaking prohibitions in the laws of language and grammar, and ultimately by unveiling the dialectical logic behind criminal law, forcing it to interpret acts which have not yet been codified as proper or improper. In effect, once Bottle exposes the faulty rationale behind his arrest (for standing still at a green light), he manufactures a kind of escape--not from prison, but from the logic of the law.
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