ABSTRACT

This article provides a poststructural reading of the character of Wesley in Nicola Barker’s 2002 novel Behindlings, which is broadly informed by Jean-Luc Nancy’s thoughts on being and community and Jacques Derrida’s thinking on khōra, as well as other established poststructural paradigms. It contends that the novel simultaneously engages with these ideas and exceeds them. Wesley is the void-at-the-heart of his own “philosophy”: ‘He was hollow. He was empty […] He was a vacuum. He was struck-out. Deleted. He was nothing’. And he is everything as well at one and the same time. It is the classic poststructural paradox – receiving everything while possessing nothing – that makes meaning possible. And that is the argument: the signifier, the empty sign for some, the palimpsest for others, here is simply Wesley. However, my argument is that the characterization of Wesley challenges and complicates such readings, deliberately. This article will demonstrate how the novel repeatedly sullies the theories it implicates by introducing a persistent taint to the main vehicle used to articulate the theory, the protagonist himself, that “puerile […] shithead”, Wesley.

摘要

本文提供了对尼古拉·巴克 2002 年小说《背后》中卫斯理角色的后结构解读，该小说广泛借鉴了让-吕克·南希关于存在和社区的思想以及雅克·德里达关于khōra的思想，以及其他已建立的后结构范式。它争辩说，这部小说同时涉及并超越了这些想法。卫斯理是他自己“哲学”的核心空虚：“他是空心的。他是空的 [...] 他是真空的。他被淘汰了。删除。他什么都不是。他同时也是一切。正是经典的后结构悖论——得到一切却一无所有——使意义成为可能。这就是论点：能指，对某些人来说是空符号，对其他人来说是重写本，这里就是卫斯理。然而，我的论点是，卫斯理的特征刻意挑战并使这种解读复杂化。