Intimacy and the Aesthetic of “Litter” Writing:

Epistolary Renarrativisation in Georgina Kleege’s Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller

Abstract

First-person genres of life writing such as autobiography and diary at the point of their completion evoke anxiety about the ‘death of the author.’ The letter does not do so: it forms part of a correspondence and facilitates continued writing. Its relational nature indicates that the epistolary closure might nevertheless spell authorial death upon readerly non-response. This paper inquires into the problem of non-response as confronted by the subject who addresses her letters to a dead person with reference to Georgina Kleege’s Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (2006). The readerly silence in a fictional correspondence thwarts the subject’s desire for interpersonal intimacy. In Blind Rage, however, the very act of writing the letter rather than its intersubjective reciprocation becomes a way of forging intimacy with one’s dead addressee; the fulfilment of intimacy in fictional letter writing is processual and not closural.