“THERE WAS A BLACK GAP WHERE THE DE HAD BEEN:” DISPOSSESSING DISCOURSE IN AIDAN HIGGINS’ BALCONY OF EUROPE
“THERE WAS A BLACK GAP WHERE THE DE HAD BEEN:” DISPOSSESSING DISCOURSE IN AIDAN HIGGINS’ BALCONY OF EUROPE

Summary/Abstract: “There Was a Black Gap Where the DE Had Been”: Dispossessing Discourse in Aidan Higgins’ ”Balcony of Europe”. My paper attempts to explore a novel by Irish writer Aidan Higgins from the perspective of the so-called “ethical turn” in the study of narrative by arguing that both its form and its content explicitly thematise the ethical risks of the first-person discourse when it comes to representing the other. Using Dorothy J. Hale’s notion of the voluntary “self-binding” fiction requires from the “responsible readers,” I examine the strategies through which Higgins pits the narrator’s failure to represent otherness against the imminent disintegration of the European landscape, history and identity under the pressures of a discourse of possession and rigid localisation. To these pressures, the text responds by suggesting the language of fiction has the potential to criticise and counteract possession as a model for identity through the effort it imposes on the readers to simultaneously exert and limit their individual freedom.

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