Writing (with) the body: the case of Kim de l’Horizon’s Blutbuch

Abstract

In recent years, narratology has yielded innovative views on how certain narratives create and convey meaning through embodied processes. Such ‘embodied narratives’ have increasingly been considered to reflect the way human perception itself functions: by drawing upon corporeal impressions before mental cognition, and physical sensation before language. This article suggests that Kim de l'Horizon's Blutbuch offers further productive insight regarding the nature and function of the embodied narrative. The novel–an auto-fictional tale that deals with non-binary identity–shot to fame in the winter of 2022 after winning prestigious literary awards in the German-speaking world; and it has been lauded, in particular, for the pride of place it offers to the author-narrator’s embodied perspectives on gender identity. As this article will argue, however, Blutbuch also foregrounds a biopolitical worldview in which all boundaries–and not just those of gender–are seen as superfluous. In doing so, not only does the novel allows its author-narrator to create a narrative body that reappropriates for itself the agency that cisnormative discourse would traditionally deny it, but it also proposes an expanded understanding of the embodied narrative: one that conceives of such forms of writing as metaphors for the body itself.