THE MARK INSIDE: DECENTRALIZING THE NARRATIVE SUBJECTIVITY

Abstract

Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside.-William S. Burroughs'...every concept necessarily receives two similar marks - a repetition without identity - one mark inside and the other outside the deconstructed system.- Jacques Derrida2I am not a poet, but a poem. poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject.-Jacques Lacan3In Word Cultures, Robin Lydenberg identifies identifies a most puzzling problem faced by critics and readers of William S. Burroughs, that of locating a stable and continuous narrative presence in the novels. She writes:Burroughs' experiments with narrative deny the reader all continuity, even that of a narrative persona, and the temporal dislocations of his style cannot be framed or explained by an omniscient narrator or by the scope of any single character's subjective perception.4The source of this issue rests in his most ambitious experiment, the decentralization and dispersal of subjectivity. The fragmentation of the subject, which eventually results in its decentralization, occurs at all levels in Burroughs' novels, from the internally fractured and externally interchangeable characters to the permutating and often untraceable narrative voices. The unstable subjectivities of characters and narrators become confused and conflated with one another and extend outward from the text to implicate both author and reader in a collective of dispersed and intermingled subjects. Ultimately, Burroughs' novels require the abandonment of all binary distinctions between self and other, be they character-narrator, authorreader, or any other variation of these. In order to effectively engage these works, the reader must enter into a collaborative partnership with the author that considers narrative itself as subject rather than object. Rather than a product of the interaction of the author and reader, the narrative subjectivity must be viewed as a distinct, third entity: a decentralized and nonlocatable factor that negotiates meaning as a unique creation of reader along with author enacted during the singular event of a specific reading.Experimentation with subjectivity in narratives can be found throughout the development of United States literature. Charles Brockden Brown offers a character in Wieland who appears to divide himself by throwing his voice. Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym toys with the distinction between the book's author and its character/narrator. Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, provides a multiplicity of narrative voices that transmute from straight narrative styles to the academic discourse of Cetology, the dramatic structure of Midnight, Forecastle, and the lyrical movement of A Squeeze of the Hand. William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, features a multiple narrative structure in which certain narrative voices, in particular that of Dari, can and do intrude unannounced into the narratives of others.Even more drastic fragmentations and confusions of characters and narrators emerge as commonplaces in postmodern narratives. Examples can be found at least as early as the unnamed narrator/main character of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man 5 up through (and beyond) Chuck Palahniuk's also anonymous narrator/main character of Fight Club. Such characters may challenge conventional notions of subjectivity by projecting split subjects such as Palahniuk's Tyler Durden or Ellison's Rinehart. But these characters, each in his own way, become subsumed under a cohesive and dominant narrative voice. Even the internal instabilities of the fractured character/ narrators of these novels are tempered by a consistent, if not entirely stable, central consciousness. Such a strategy foregrounds the narrative persona as a distinct and constant presence, which in turn provides a means of making sense of the unstable elements within the narrative by providing anchor points from which to discover meanings that have been fragmented and/or obscured. …