Crossing the Boundaries of Flesh and Narrative

Abstract

This article deals with the boundary between language and the pre-reflective, taking as point(s) of departure Hélène Cixous' concept (and project) of writing the body – a project that also crosses the boundaries of theoretical and poetic discourse. It argues that a more rigorous theoretical formulation of the relation between flesh and narrative can be found in the hermeneutic and phenomenological writings of Paul Ricoeur and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Ricoeur has created an over-arching theory covering metaphor, narrative and judgement, all of which he asserts to exist in a dialectical relationship with the pre-reflective. Starting with his account of metaphor and the pre-reflective, I show how it can be extended to cover narrative and judgement. However, I also take this theory a step further with the aid of some concepts taken from Merleau-Ponty – chiasm and dialectic without synthesis – in order to show that the boundary between the pre-reflective and language is a frontier that can be crossed, but where something is always lost in the crossing. In order to continue the project of interweaving the literary and poetic with the theoretical, the theories in question are interlaced with extracts from John Keats and D. H. Lawrence that act as their illustrations and concretisations.