NARRATIVE HOSPITALITY. Sigrid Nunez’s Poetics of Fragmentation
NARRATIVE HOSPITALITY. Sigrid Nunez’s Poetics of Fragmentation

Summary/Abstract: This paper proposes the notion of “narrative hospitality” for interpreting a particular kind of discontinuous or fragmentary writing, and discusses this technique with reference to the work of contemporary American author Sigrid Nunez. Arguably, hospitality as a mode of storytelling and as a problem can be found throughout Nunez’s oeuvre. The paper opens with a section on the aesthetics of fragmentation, based on recent theoretical approaches by Vanessa Guignery, Wojciech Drąg, Meritt Moseley, and others. It then goes on to interpret Nunez’s prose as hospitable on the formal level and links her use of fragmentation with the theme of hospitality in “Chang,” “It Will Come Back to You” (2001), Sempre Susan (2011), and The Vulnerables (2023). Although there is nothing inherent in the fragmentary narrative that makes it egalitarian or democratic, it has been embraced as a transgressive form by feminists and queers, among others. Nunez’s use of this narrative technique is egalitarian in that it allows for the juxtaposition of various manifestations of in/hospitality. In fact, Nunez’s prose does the kind of work Lance Olsen described as “effacing, or at least deeply and richly complicating, the accepted difference between privileged and subordinate discourses” (Olsen, qtd. in Drąg, Collage 20). Nunez is particularly sensitive to the precarious position of animals, children, the elderly, the displaced, and all those who depend on the interest and hospitality of others, but her writing repeatedly shows that “guest” and “host” are positions rather than fixed identities. On the formal level, the theme of hospitality is underscored by the narrator’s openness to interrupting herself and being interrupted. In sum, Nunez’s technique of fragmentation lends itself to laying bare the contradictions associated with the practices of hospitality and their affective underpinnings.

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