The limits of language and the fragmentation of the western mind in John Burnside's the Dumb House

Abstract

This essay reads John Burnside's first novel "The Dumb House" philosophically as an exploration of the limits of Western rationality and the Enlightenment ideal of the transparent objectivity of language. By exploring the larger thematic and symbolic significances of Burnside's use of macabre violence and treatment of pathological obsession in the novel, this essay demonstrates how Burnside advocates for an alternative mode of co-existence with nonhuman others which can only arise when conceptual frameworks encapsulated in an anthropocentric understanding of language are challenged, exceeded and deconstructed. In this way, the novel argues for the benefits of encountering the strangeness of the other via a decentering of the importance of the constructs of humanism as presented in the foundational tents of the Western philosophical and literary tradition.