‘Strangers to Ourselves’

Abstract

Literature brings us to the brink of existence. Its imaginary landscapes invite the reader to be a voyager filled with wonder, but the prospect of the marvellous that dazzles the eye may also open on to a dark world of terror and despair. Literature, like dreams, cannot be controlled, and disrupts the hold we have on habitual experience. When we read or write, we inevitably follow the traveller’s impulse and steer a course across unknown countries with the help of a map, yet language, and literary language most especially, creates its own ephemeral universe resistant to all that is familiar. Something in this shifting landscape escapes and alienates our travelling eye. The most intense forms of estrangement experienced by the subject, according to Julia Kristeva, are those produced by poetic language. For while its origins are implicated in the origins of subjectivity, poetic language is a fire of tongues. It has an infinite, ecstatic quality that eludes the mastery of human consciousness. The landscape of literature then, is inhabited by a foreignness that deflects the traveller and divides us from ourselves. We become, in other words, exiles.