Bodying forth linguistic excess in The Book of Dave by Will Self

Abstract

As it introduces the body into the text through reciprocal semiotisation and somatisation of text and body, Self’s novel entitled The Book of Dave makes the reader experience language as excess: indeed, the very physical experience of reading Self’s visually and orally modified language enables the reader to perceive the importance of the work of the remainder as that of the excess in and of language. The remainder, which is to be identified with the capacity of language to play with its own rules, is indeed foregrounded in Self’s experimentations with language, which flesh out the texture and the physicality of language itself, turning the reader’s experience of the text into an encounter with an opaque, elusive, unstable Other.