Playing with the subject : writing in The Pillow Book and in In the Penal Colony

Abstract

This study explores the nature of writing and the sorts of presence that writing gives us access to. This understanding of writing includes not only all speaking and all writing in the narrow sense of marks on a page, but goes beyond this to include the sense in which Derrida uses the term ‘writing’ in Of Grammatology, to mean a broad and complex process of the construction of textual traces or presences necessarily brought about through the structural mechanism of difference inherent in the writing process (Derrida, 1997). This study argues that writing is a system that creates Subjects or selves as the writing happens. It suggests that writing is a remarkable site from which to explore the construction of selves, because it gives us access to (partially) identifiable presences, in the apparent absence of the writer. It goes on to demonstrate that this identity can be distinguished through written traces of difference left for the reader to decipher, by analysing different aspects of the plot and writing devices in Peter Greenaway’s film The Pillow Book and in Kafka’s short story In the Penal Colony. These two texts are considered particularly relevant to this study, in that they both explicitly deal with the contradictory nature of writing and how it relates to the Being (there or the contextualised Being of Dasein) and being (in general), the life and death, the empowerment and destruction of the Subjects that writing sets up. Both texts explore salient aspects of writing on the human body. The study uses these texts as a platform for speculation about the kind of presence that can be traced through writing, and proposes that the written Subject is multiple, contradictory and reflexive, connected and related, and that it is impermanent and has a deferred presence. Finally, this written Subject is also explored in the context of Foucault’s expositions of the self in texts such as Technologies of the self (Foucault, 1994) and ‘What is an Author?’ (Foucault, 1977) in answer to his question Who are we in the present, what is this fragile moment from which we can’t detach our identity and which will carry our identity away with itself? (Foucault, 1994:xviii) Copyright