Hyperion - Nietzsche Circle

‘Impossibly
Narrow Rooms’
by Kevin Arnold
“‘Don’t you believe in
death?’ I yelled at him.
‘No,’ he answers, ‘and
I don’t believe in time
neither . . .’”
James Purdy’s graphic and often violent depictions of
sex indicate the presence of something that is lacking
in both the discursive space he creates in his novels
as well as in the signification of sex and sexuality
itself. Through writing, Purdy calls attention to this
lack that is at the heart of desire as such, embodied
in a form of violence, which also poses a challenge to
received strategies for conceptualizing the body and
sexual identity. For Purdy, the excesses of the body in
violence and in sex become a means by which he can
interrogate a profound absence within both sexual
language and even sex itself. Ultimately, it is this
form of desire, what underwrites language but which
also remains irreducible to it, which is at stake in his
Hyperion—Volume VI, issue 1, March 2011 144