I shall instead think of the literary as the uncanny, as the haunting and the haunted; as that which resists pinning down, that which will always squirm away and produce ‘other’, ‘unauthorised’ meanings; as that which conjures phantoms, which banishes phantoms, and which always leaves us uncertain whether or not we are alone; as intimately connected with hallucination and dream; as constantly reflecting upon its own state of loss, that loss of the object which is capable of plunging writer and reader into a state of the most profound melancholy; as constantly in a state of becoming, of never reaching a ‘fixed point’, as infected at the heart with an ineradicable absence; as constantly in exile and in flight, dealing in false signatures, forged passports, unthinkable alibis; as always imbricated with the passions, with rage and hatred, with elation and triumph, with jealousy and love; as a phenomenon of lies and truth, of narratives that wind and twist and go nowhere, of history and trauma endlessly and impossibly rewriting each other; as trace and supplement, without origin, without closure, and thus as the distorted mirroring, the per-version, of the worlds in which it functions. All these things I take to be true of the literary in general;
David Punter
