Hybrid Topologies of the Self

Abstract

The following study focuses on Matthew Baker’s Hybrid Creatures (2018) and Irvine Welsh’s The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins (2014) in order to explore the problematisation of mediation, remediation, and transmediation that fiction potentially occasions beyond mere ekphrasis, highlighting their elusive and seemingly self-erasing presence in the signification practices that inform representations of identity and reality. Their outlines are mediated by the plurality of discourses weaving the fabric of the cultural matrix, blurring ontological and categorial boundaries into zones, spaces that fold back onto the sites they delimit and identify. The self-reflexive and self-referential interplay of abstraction and materiality articulates topologies of hybridity, a nowhere space onto which the human is displaced and deferred.