VI. Temporary Conclusion
My understanding of my own book, Memories of My Ghost Brother, as an interstitial work, has significantly changed not only my own retroactive perception and understanding of it, but the future direction of my literary work as well. The marketing of Memories of My Ghost Brother reminded me, somewhat, of the fact that my own citizenship had never been under my control (the document that shows I was naturalized at age three has my father's rendition of my signature on it). For much of my life, this detail regarding my citizenship meant nothing to me, but its meaning became a significant issue once I was old enough to understand identity politics, colonialism, and issues of liminality. My understanding of my writing, a product of my conscious, subconscious, and unconscious intentions, has changed, quite radically, since those writing workshop days when I was creating things in a sort of aesthetic fog. I am far more aware, now, of the act of perception and its consequences.
I will end this version of my essay here for now. In a future edition, or perhaps a continuation of this essay, I will pull together some of the ideas I have introduced above and discuss how the simple, yet elegant, slit experiment — which illustrates the particle/wave duality of light, one of the profound mysteries of reality — also illustrates the power of interstices in the act of perception. I will also introduce a new approach to Structuralism, a literary extrapolation of the Holographic Paradigm, to illustrate how well-crafted literary works, and particularly interstitial works, create their own internal logic. Stay tuned for "Towards a Theory of the Interstitial (Version 2.0): The Literary Fractal."
Some suggested readings online:
Perloff, Marjorie, "Cultural Liminality/Aesthetic Closure?: The 'Interstitial Perspective' of Homi Bhabha"
For more on Victor Turner: click here
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