Into the fold: The folded narratives of Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, William S. Burroughs and J. G. Ballard.

Abstract

Frequently, literary critics have overlooked the narrative possibilities of authors who have been profoundly affected by the surrealists. They use various metaphors to describe their narratives such as hallucinatory, delirious, or cut-up. Too often these narratives are viewed as resisting meaning, rather than as narratives that employ their own particular methods and models. Andre Breton, the famous French surrealist, for example, had a very particular narrative method in mind when he wrote "Soluble Fish." The whole idea of his "pure event" was to present a narrative that couldn't be associated with other narratives before or after it. Such narratives offer seemingly insurmountable problems for the traditional critic.

In my paper Into the Fold: The Folded Narratives of Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, William S. Burroughs and J. G. Ballard I examine how such surreal narratives within these authors might work as narrative folds. I contrast these narrative folds with linear narratives and I demonstrate how narrative folds fold and unfold upon themselves, creating narratives that emphasize the metamorphosis over the traditional linear climax and its resolution. I also examine how these folds might work as they continually "roll over, " creating isolated events such as Andre Breton's pure event as well as Djuna Barnes' animal becoming. In chapter one, for example, I present the phenomena of the inside and outside of the fold and show how this affects concepts of narrative space.

Throughout my paper I propose that narrative folds are also a new way of reading character, particularly their bodies and how bodies interact within narrative space apart from narrative sequence. It seems to me that such a reading is needed for these authors. These authors, and other authors like them, seem to present the possibility of revealing new phenomenological spaces inside and outside of the body. I examine these spaces.