The Hole: Notes toward an insurrectionary poetics of the wounded text

I consider broken narratives through an investigation of the concepts of (narrative) holes, specifically wounds (trauma) and the mouth (voice/language) in relation to minor literatures. Holes, I argue, act as openings and portals for minor voices, with the potential to undermine and subvert entrenched patriarchal and neoliberal power structures. I claim them as sites of resistance beyond teleologically progressing temporalities. I establish the textual hole as feminist (writing) practice with insurrectionary potential, bringing forward the concept of the ‘wounded text’ and its implications for a polyvocal and pluralistic textual practice through the hole acting as metaphor and analogy, investigating the space in between parts of fragmented, incoherent, disjunct or multi-linear narratives.

I argue that the wounded text should not be healed; rather I present ‘Un-healing’ (Un-heil-ung) as political and writerly strategy. The wound must stay open in order to speak. Healing would thus mean silencing, therefore acting complicitly with dominant structures.

Through case studies and writerly analysis I consider poetry in relation to the wounded text, bringing it forward as a polyvocal language with holes; a language of resistance with revolutionary possibilities.

Starting from a narratological, structuralist and poststructuralist analysis of text in combination with sources from feminisms, women studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and psychoanalysis, I re-introduce the materiality of the body into the text.

Departing from methods such as critical fabulation and narrative restraint – which Saidiya Hartman calls “the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure” – and by anecdotal storytelling and questioning of the authorial position, I approach the hole, tending to the wounded text by developing and proposing diverse literary and academic writing registers to free the hole from its preconception as a lack, to write with, through, and around it, and to contribute to a more nuanced reading of the hole/wound.