Search

This chapter re-orients consideration of realist elements in Bowen’s short stories by framing readings according to a series of ‘recesses.’ The first is as a building feature designed to conceal and display, which frames a discussion of the status of ‘things’ in Bowen’s writing, that is, the objects that deck out her narratives and become a focus for critical interest in her realism. The second is as a cue for the notion of receding, which I use against claims about consistency in narrative voice in Bowen’s work to argue instead that Bowen’s ‘voice’ can be shown increasingly to recede, leaving the subject-position in such doubt as to compel the willing reader to complete the point of view. Finally, ‘recess’ is used in the sense of suspension or adjournment, against claims that the ‘psychological realism’ created by Bowen presents a ‘transtemporal subjectivity,’ to argue that agency in Bowen’s narratives becomes, by virtue of the points raised above, suspended, such that ‘subjectivity’ is itself untenable. The term I will use to describe the coming together of people and things in Bowen’s fictional universe—and indeed in her writings about the world of the Blitz—will be ‘inter-objectivity.’

Does a Postal Principle, a principle of destinerrance, hold true for computer mediated communication (CMC)? Perhaps. However, the question is not one concerning technology. Is it rather the case that we must ask, after Derrida, after all, whether destinerrance ever held true, as a principle? This paper considers the prospect that the Postal Principle was, in principle, or as a principle, an expression of a truth value from something that can not in fact, be held at all: the ghost in the machine. Drawing on a phenomenology of computer practice, the paper argues that there is greater explanatory value to be found in Derrida's more recent comments on the relative exteriority of the technological apparatus (in Archive Fever and elsewhere), framing an understanding of the human body as partes extra partes. Yet it is demonstrated here that this same framing was already in place from the moment that the principle of destinerrance was first articulated, and that a subsequent technical turn in Derrida's work merely extends a framework already set in place in the earlier work (in The Post Card, for example). It is argued, then, that in articulating a Postal Principle for the purpose of guaranteeing its failure, Derrida had calculated the future trajectory – and had built the logic of the calculation and of the ‘jet’ words, as he calls them, into this trajectory – of what I call the ‘fantasy of the disembodied virtualm’ through which users of CMC project themselves into the archive of archives that the internet was bound to become.