1In Ali Smith’s Spring (2019), as a train glides from England into Scotland and the characters neither see a border nor notice any difference in the landscape, a twelve-year-old girl proposes a redefinition of the border: ‘What if, the girl says. Instead of saying, this border divides these places. We said, this border unites these places. This border holds together these two really interesting different places. What if we declared border crossings places where, listen, when you crossed them, you yourself became doubly possible’ (196). Her interlocutor, who works at an Immigration Removal Centre, replies that she is ‘being naïve . . . In so many ways’ (196). The contemporary period has been marked by a surge in transnational mobility and transcultural dialogue in what some economists have called a borderless globalised world, coupled with an insistence on the fortification of national borders in the context of Brexit, the refugee crisis, migration movements, isolationist tendencies and the COVID pandemic. As noted by sociologist Emanuel Deutschmann in Mapping the Transnational World. How We Move and Communicate across Borders, and Why It Matters (2021), the term ‘transnational’ implies that ‘national borders are crossed, not that they dissolve’ (3). The paradoxical nature of the border which can both divide and unite, and the distinction between crossing and dissolving borders can be applied to a wide range of contexts—geographical, cultural, political, environmental, economic, social, mental, generic, aesthetic, linguistic, stylistic or narratological. This issue of Études britanniques contemporaines proposes to explore some of the contrasting modalities of borders and processes of ‘bordering’ through an examination of modernist hybrid works (by Virginia Woolf and Olive Moore) and of contemporary texts by novelists and short story writers (Will Self, Jon McGregor and Jan Carson), as well as playwrights (Selina Thompson and debbie tucker green).
2In a prescriptive sense, borders are strict lines of separation, corresponding to the meaning of limes—a boundary that prevents any crossing. As such, they can mark the division between literary genres, languages, socio-economic classes, genders, races, communities or territories. The borders which separate geographical areas may take physical and concrete forms through prominent markers like barriers, walls, stockades, barricades, barbed-wire fences, customs checkpoints or lines on maps. The Irish border which came into existence in 1921 led James Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, to coin the portmanteau word ‘borderation’ (528), ‘combining border with botheration, to hint that borders bring forth botheration and territorial strife’ (Ellmann 96). In his poem ‘The Boundary Commission’ (1980), a reference to the 1924-1925 commission which was supposed (but failed) to determine the boundary between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, Paul Muldoon exposes the absurdity and arbitrariness of the border:
You remember that village where the border ran
Down the middle of the street,
With the butcher and baker in different states?
(48; original emphasis)
3The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 led to the removal of roadblocks, security barriers, watchtowers and military checkpoints, and provided hope that the relatively unobtrusive and invisible Northern Irish border might not only divide but also connect, the territorial border functioning ‘as both a limit and a crossing’ (Ellmann 107). Maud Ellmann relates this hope to Seamus Heaney’s memory of the use of the verb ‘march’ in the North of Ireland when he was a young man:
The verb meant to meet at the boundary, to be bordered by, to be matched up to and yet marked off from; one farm marched another farm; one field marched another field; and what divided them was the march drain or the march hedge. The word did not mean ‘walk in a military manner,’ but to be close, to lie alongside, to border upon and be bordered upon. It was a word that acknowledged division, but it contained a definite suggestion of solidarity as well. (Heaney 1998, 625)
4In their analysis of Northern Irish border poetry, Adam Hanna and Anna Teekell consider ‘the border road as simultaneous connection point and dividing line’ (16), thereby echoing Katy Hayward’s suggestion in The Irish Border (2022) that ‘although borders are often conceived in terms of division and separation, it is sometimes better to understand them as meeting points’ (Hayward 5). However, in Literature, Partition and the Nation State (2002), Joe Clearly stresses that the partition of Ireland did not stop at the inter-state border as ‘the militarisation of local territorial boundaries and the increased segregation of its two communities have effectively produced a whole series of internal partitions within Northern Ireland’ (99–100) which have endured even after the Good Friday Agreement. The so-called ‘peace walls’ that separate Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods in Belfast persist and Maud Ellmann points to the ‘border’s spectral presence’ (107) in the North of Ireland: it ‘fractures every household, neighbourhood and consciousness’ (99), as shown in Anna Burns’s Belfast novel No Bones (2001) in which the border partitions the city ‘street by street, church by church, and house by house’ (Ellmann 108).
5Although, as noted by Fiona McCann, Northern Irish writers such as Patrick McCabe, Brian McGilloway, Colm Tóibín or Garett Carr have engaged with ‘the border as a creative space’ (6) through crime fiction, macabre comedy or non-fiction, the topic has often featured only obliquely in Northern Irish literature (Cleary 107), as if its painful reality and sensitive dimension had rendered writers ‘fork-tongued on the border bit’ to quote Heaney in his poem ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ (1975, 58). This started to change after the 2016 Brexit referendum which brought fears of the reinstatement of a ‘hard border’, the Irish border being the only land border between the United Kingdom and the European Union. In ‘Intimate Borders. Brexit and Ireland’, Eugene McNulty provides examples of novels by Glenn Patterson, Brian McGilloway, Ruth Gilligan and Michael Hughes and plays by Stacey Gregg and Abbie Spallen which address the spectre of ‘re-bordering’ raised by Brexit in Ireland (25). In 2017, Northern Irish artist Rita Duffy created an artwork across the Blacklion-Belcoo Bridge, which straddles the border, entitled Soften the Border, an installation consisting of brightly-coloured dolls and cushions knitted by members of women’s groups from both sides of the border.
6In Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Gloria Anzaldúa described the U.S.-Mexican border as ‘una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds’ (25, italics in the original). The image of the open wound is paradigmatic in border studies and border imagery is recurrent in BrexLit (Shaw). The partitions which Brexit reinforced are emblematised by the title of John Lanchester’s dystopic novel The Wall (2019), Zadie Smith’s essay ‘Fences: A Brexit Diary’ (2019) or a passage in Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016) which records the changes caused by the Brexit referendum ‘all across the country’:
All across the country, the country was divided, a fence here, a wall there, a line drawn here, a line crossed here,
a line you don’t cross here,
a line you better not cross there,
a line of beauty here,
a line dance there,
a line you don’t even know exists here,
a line you can’t afford there,
a whole new line of fire,
line of battle,
end of the line,
here/there. (61)
7The multiple divisions in the country are conveyed through the enumerative style and the recurrent use of commas (that both separate and connect), as well as graphically evoked through the disposition of the lines on the page, turning prose into poetry, ‘here’ and ‘there’ forming alternative rhymes until they are separated, but also united, by a slash in the last line. As shown in an earlier issue of Études britanniques contemporaines (64, 2023), Brexit revealed the fractures and fault lines which already existed in British society and testified to processes of ‘bordering, ordering and othering’ to quote Henk Van Houtum and Ton Van Naerssen. The border policy specialists argue that classifying and categorising strategies of (b)ordering rely on ‘practices of inclusion and exclusion’, even within state boundaries, ‘in order to shape a unique and cohesive order’ (126). Beyond the analysis of visible and concrete markers of difference and separation, border theorists encourage considering ‘inconspicuous boundaries that divide, exclude and demarcate people, patterns and processes through invisible borders of political, socioeconomic, and technological control’ (Diener and Hagen 267). They also recommend transitioning ‘from the concept of border to that of bordering, reconceiving borders as dynamic social processes and practices of spatial differentiation’ (Brambilla 1002). This conceptualisation of borders as processes goes hand in hand with the development of such concepts as ‘borderlands’, ‘borderscapes’ and ‘bordertextures’ that ‘foster an alternative multisited organization of border knowledge, able to overcome binary oppositions through specific attention paid to the multiplicity of symbolic and material interactions at/in/across borders’ (Brambilla 1004). Border theories thus envisage the border not only as a specific and actual site but also as a metaphor, a function, a conceptual tool (Castillo 184).
8The new configurations of a globalised world viewed as a zone of transnational migrations, exiles and displacements, a place of cultural and political diasporas, require new perpectives on what Homi Bhabha has called ‘border and frontier conditions’ (17). Lines are shifting, walls are brought down, polarities are challenged and the distinction between the centre and the periphery is no longer valid. Anna Krasteva rightly points to the paradox of asserting the fixity of borders at the time of globalisation which ‘describes the debordisation of the world’ (17). Borders should therefore not only be considered as static and impassable barriers as they can be porous and permeable, encouraging crossings and bringing to mind the meaning of limen as threshold.
9In Bad Modernisms (2006), Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz stress that early-twentieth-century writers were ‘preoccupied with border crossings’ in the form of ‘cosmopolitanism, synesthesia, racial masquerade, collage, and translation’ (2), to which one may add generic blurring. This, to their mind, justifies the shift of new modernist studies toward ‘a pluralism or fusion of theoretical commitments’, ‘a heightened attention to continuities and intersections across the boundaries of artistic media, to collaborations and influences across national and linguistic borders, and (especially) to the relationship between individual works of art and the larger cultures in which they emerged’ (2). Notions of circulation, mobility, dialogue, expansion and contact prevail over the sense of closure and exclusion which is more commonly associated with the border. The development of modernist techniques such as stream of consciousness participates in the blurring of boundaries between the character’s inner world and outer reality while avant-garde literature and art view the border as a transgressive and productive space.
10In terms of aesthetics, the notion of the border, which some critics like Linda Hutcheon have vaunted as ‘the governing trope of the postmodern’ (Welchman 175), and its inevitable crossing can be useful to explore the shift from modernism (which itself constituted a rupture) to postmodernism and beyond. More than thirty years ago in The Location of Culture (1994), Homi Bhabha wrote that we live ‘on the borderlines of the “present”, for which there seems to be no proper name other than the current and controversial shiftiness of the prefix “post”: postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism’ (1). The prefix ‘post’ seems to encompass the ambivalence of the border and its relation to what is situated beyond which, for Bhabha, is ‘neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past’ (1–2). The ‘post’ or ‘beyond’ may map out a poetics of displacement or ‘overrun’ as ‘dé-bordement’ to quote Jacques Derrida (68), a process which entails a constant shift of limits and borders, be they aesthetic, generic, gender-related, geographical, mental or social. The prefix ‘trans’ likewise points to the crossing of borders between texts (transtextuality), languages (translation), nationalities, communities, cultures, arts, literary genres or genders, thereby challenging notions of binarity as well as rigid categorisations. In his 1969 essay significantly entitled ‘Cross the Border—Close the Gap’, Leslie Fiedler defined as one of the features of postmodernism the erosion of the distinction between elite and popular culture, an aspect Fredric Jameson also identified as part of a series of effacements of ‘key boundaries and separations’ (128), which postmodernist writers and artists have put into practice. In 1956, the exhibition This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, showed some of the earliest examples of British Pop Art, including by Richard Hamilton and Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi who infused into their artworks elements of popular culture.
11While prescriptive and normative theories of literary and artistic genres have tended to erect hermetic borders between categories, practitioners have consistently highlighted the porosity of generic frontiers in works of art that resist framing and let various literary forms (poetry, fiction, essay, biography, historiography . . .) and semiotic systems (text and image) interact, leading to the creation of such hybrid genres as biofiction, the graphic novel, prose poems, documentary theatre or hybrid art (when artists work with frontier areas of science and emerging technologies). To give just one example of an author examined in this issue, Virginia Woolf famously conceived her novel The Waves as a ‘playpoem’ (203) and consistently blurred the boundary between short fiction and essays, as well as between genres perceived as minor or major. Generic transgression is just as common in visual art: in the 1993 Bristol art exhibition Disrupted Borders and his edited book Disrupted Borders: an Intervention in Definitions of Boundaries, photographer Sunil Gupta endorsed the plurality of art-making practices.
12This de-bordering process has also been adopted by scholars of new materialism and posthumanism who undermine humanist hierarchies, and reject a simple binary system premised upon human supremacy and non-human disposability. They challenge the strict borders opposing nature and culture, and argue instead for a ‘natureculture’ continuum, stressing ‘the mutual interdependence of human and non-human others’ (Braidotti 11). They point to more-than-human entanglements and ‘curious kinships’ to quote Amelia DeFalco (104), or ‘oddkin’ in the words of Donna Haraway (4), between human and non-human entities. Several contemporary writers and artists explore these interconnections which decentre the human and challenge oppositional pairs, encouraging readers and spectators to recognize their participation in a shared, vital materiality, one that equally belongs to humans and non-humans.
13The papers included in this issue of Études britanniques contemporaines are attentive to the blurring of boundaries between human and non-human as well as those that distinguish literary genres. Xavier Le Brun thus points to the generic hybridity of two essays by Virginia Woolf, ‘The Death of the Moth’ and ‘Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car’, which he proposes to examine as ‘meeting-texts’ because of the ways in which they create a framework of intimacy for the reader and generate a joint reader-narrator experience beyond the limits of the text. Le Brun argues that the two essays, which sometimes veer on the fictional, are particularly relevant to this exchange because they convey a sense of the circulation of life between the geological, animal and human worlds. In addition, the pronoun ‘one’ allows for a vital circulation of affects between narrative voice and reader, thereby eliciting a sense of intimacy, shared perception and communion.
14Florence Marie examines the experimental book of a less well-known modernist writer, Olive Moore, who crosses multiple boundaries in The Apple is Bitten Again (Self Portrait), a disparate collection of aphorisms selected from her notebooks and published in 1934. According to Moore, the creative artist is the one who transcends boundaries and this is what Moore, who is acutely aware of the constraints and limitations in British society, proceeds to do in her ‘self-portrait’. She blurs the borders between poetry and prose, blends lowbrow and highbrow culture, mixes several languages and performs extensive transtextuality. The aphoristic form, which makes the book feel like a collage or an assemblage, partakes in the undermining of boundaries and categories while allowing for movement and fluidity, refusing closure.
15More than half a century later, Will Self took a different route to explore geographical, mental and cultural borders in Walking to Hollywood (2010), a fictionalised memoir which is also an account of three walks, a surreal narrative, an exploration of mental pathologies and an iconoclastic satire. In her paper, Myrto Petsota examines the ways in which Self crosses geographical and psychological boundaries to construct a new mental geography in which the border is understood as a living and dynamic space, a liminal site of conflict and transformation. Self’s satire destabilises fixed identities, reconfigures cultural and intellectual borders, and critiques the foundations of Western civilisation and of Modernity. Drawing from Kenneth White’s concept of intellectual nomadism, Petsota argues that Self explores new pathways for the novel and constructs a new topology of being.
16In her examination of Jon McGregor’s Lean Fall Stand (2021), Katia Marcellin first exposes the rigid borders that prevent solipsistic characters from communicating, either because they are separated during a storm in Antarctica or because aphasia will not let them escape the prison of the self. The metonymic function of language fails to connect the experiences of the separate characters, and therefore to convey a coherent message. However, in the last part of McGregor’s novel, when people suffering from aphasia look for new ways of expressing themselves, the boundaries between individuals start to dissolve and a different type of communication emerges. It relies on metonymy, the reconstruction of missing links and the expansion of the borders of language, allowing for a collective form of expression based on a reconfigured relationality.
17Héloïse Lecomte shows how the spectre of the Troubles in the North of Ireland and of sedimented border mentality haunts Jan Carson’s The Fire Starters (2019), a novel in which some passages are marked by poetic cadences, and The Last Resort (2021), a book branded as a collection of short stories but which can also be viewed as a novel as each chapter tells the same story from a different perspective. The two hybrid books address the legacy of the Troubles and highlight the porosity of borders between past and present, life and death, inside and outside, dream and reality, socio-political realism and magic realism. The ghost figure in particular, ‘a border-crosser’, blurs the boundaries between past, present and future, suggesting that the violence of the past still invades the present, bringing fears about the future of the North of Ireland, but also hopes that the partition mentality may be overcome.
18In On Drama, Boundaries of Genres, Borders of Self (2000), Michael Goldman argues that genre is not only about ‘the sensing of boundaries’, ‘the policing of boundaries’, but also about ‘the permeation of boundaries’, and drama itself recurrently involves ‘the violation or testing of genre boundaries’ (27). This is the case in two contemporary plays examined by Lisa Bertucco which both exhibit and abolish borders pertaining to literary genre and identity. In salt. (2017), Selina Thompson blurs the boundaries between play and performance, between stage and audience, and between the identities of actress, playwright and character, as she relates The Woman’s experience in the present as a black woman of immigrant background to the collective story of the diaspora caused by slavery and colonialism. In debbie tucker green’s stoning mary (2005), the actors are all white but speak in Jamaican English or African American Vernacular English and suffer the traumas usually experienced by sub-Saharan African people, thereby destabilising identity boundaries and challenging the white liberal audience.
19This issue of Études britanniques contemporaines also includes a section of varia with three articles. James Dalrymple examines the contradictory impulses in Dennis Potter’s television play Blue Remembered Hills (1979) and addresses its representation of regional identity and local dialect, which is infused with a sense of nostalgia and loss. The play, which takes place in the Forest of Dean in 1943 and displays the cruelty of children, is one of Potter’s less experimental productions and may be associated with the kind of realism typical of kitchen sink drama through its reliance on verisimilitude and its correction of stereotypes about the English West Country being characterised by rustic charm. However, Blue Remembered Hills also includes illusion-breaking self-reflexivity through the choice of a cast of children all played by adults and the deployment of physical exaggeration and what Bakhtin called ‘grotesque realism’.
20Christophe Brochier reflects on Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and collections of short stories The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959) and The Ragman’s Daughter (1963), and critiques the concepts of rebellion and rage that critics have usually associated with these early writings. Sillitoe himself denied being part of the ‘Angry Young Men’ movement, acting as a spokesman for the working class or aiming to convey a political or ideological message against the society of his time. Brochier argues instead that Sillitoe’s early writings demonstrate his characters’ accommodation to the social system and their acceptance of the cycles of life, from youth to adulthood and marriage. He goes on to analyse the changes brought by the film adaptations of ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’, in which Colin Smith is humanised and sentimentalised rather than depicted as a delinquent, of ‘The Ragman’s Daughter’ which is more melodramatic than the original short story, and of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning which is faithful to the novel in its depiction of a young man’s acceptance of the constraints of adult life.
21The last paper, by Trajanka Kortova Jovanovska, addresses the question of authorial subjectivity in Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2001) and Quichotte (2019). Fury is viewed as a reflection on the author’s status as a literary celebrity and on the consequences and aftermath of literary creation. The main protagonist Malik Solanka fashions a creature who subsequently rebels against her creator who thereby loses his authoritative status and is left ‘unselfed’. Quichotte likewise explores the nature of authorship, featuring a protagonist named the Author and conceived as a generic, Everyman figure with a split self but who can also be seen as a surrogate for Rushdie himself. The Author creates the character of Quichotte, who is marked by a decentred and unstable subjectivity, and the borders between incompatible ontological realms shatter when Quichotte leaves the Author’s fiction to enter the ‘real world’ and the Author steps into Quichotte’s world. The novel thus playfully dissolves the boundaries between authorial selves and gestures at the constructed image of the author.