Flaws in the Living Machine. Architecture, Botany and Affect in Las horas claras by Jacqueline Goldberg

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to read Las horas claras (2013) by Jacqueline Goldberg as a means to reveal the ways that this novel, through its “trans-gender” condition, intervenes in official history and proposes a poetics of non-belonging based on the gesture of cracking the topos of the house as a common space of human dwelling. This is also perceived as a form of intervening in literary dwelling by decentering its limits towards other experiences and knowledges such as architecture, botany and culinary. For Goldberg, narrating the life of a French woman in the first half of the 20th century, entails thinking of existence as an inedible fungus, as a green grapefruit that intoxicates and provokes death. In this way, her writing breaks down the hierarchy between human and non-human life to show how the living also expresses negative affects that operate to destroy