The permeable reader: queer metalepsis and the novels of Barbara Trapido

This article considers how contemporary women's writing manipulates the novel form in order to represent reading and its effects. I propose that specific novels represent a potential permeability of readers – a latent capacity for an ambiguous yet hyperbolic overwhelming or undoing through reading. Focusing on work by Barbara Trapido, a UK-based South African novelist, I argue that such keen effects of reading are represented through transgressions of narrative boundaries, which are in turn tied to acts of reading linked to sexuality and gender. In order to make these arguments, I draw on and develop Michael Lucey's concept of 'queer metalepsis', which involves a blurring of narrative levels that results from modes of queer reading in and of literary texts. In my development of the concept, queer metalepsis not only raises questions of how writing can represent the impacts of reading, but also questions of how – as readers and as literary critics – we approach our own responses to texts. I consider the variously theorised 'inappropriate', 'attached', 'bad', or 'too close' acts of reading celebrated in queer literary criticism and query my own attachments to Trapido's novels throughout my analysis. The article seeks, finally, to emphasise reading as connective, and argue for the value of generous, invested acts of interpretation.