Becoming-Signiconic: Emergence and Territory in The Familiar

Abstract

The Familiar is densely structured by divisions and hierarchies in terms of plot, focalization, vocabularies and layout, but it is primarily a book of interconnectedness. This is a principle that propels its narrative and poses the biggest challenge in its execution: is it possible to describe a genuinely new and disruptive entity, a “monster” unreadable in terms of existing codes and concepts, arriving as a series of glitches, a system breach, a breakdown of defenses, an enforced encounter with the Other?The Familiar itself could be conceived as an arena where a new genus comes into being through the corporeality of text, not represented as a character or recounted as an event, but assuming flesh on the page within the suspended temporality of print. A specific signiconic lexicon was devised to blur the borders between the textual and the pictorial, to give a voice to the voiceless (“the waves, the animals, the plants”), and to “surpass or bypass the mind” (Danielewski). Placing this enlarged semiotic spectrum of the sensible and the intelligible within the traditional frame of a multi-volume novel makes its ambition even more radical. Pushing the book-as-archive beyond its historical confines of mimesis and expression, The Familiar envisions literature as a process, a distribution of forces across an ontologically heterogeneous field, suggesting a nonlinear continuum motivated by a “non-subject-centered mode of agency” (Bennett).Starting with notions of the book to come as a locus of futurity and unexplored possibility (Blanchot, Derrida) and assemblage as a multiplicity, a corpus of becoming or a zone of emergence (Deleuze and Guattari), this article attempts to examine the tension between storytelling demands and the very materiality of The Familiar (including its asemic borders or cores) in view of its own signiconic and inherently post-anthropocentric goals.