Letters From A to X: An Ethics and Politics of Space

Abstract

Set in a fictional world in many ways evocative of our own, John Berger’s From A to X (2008) imagines the ghostly correspondence between A’ida and her lover Xavier, a political activist indefinitely detained for defying an authoritarian government. The novel combines the epistolary genre and an intermedial dialogue between A’ida’s words and drawings: the letter, as graphic unit drawn on paper or as combination of words reaching across space to an addressee, therefore plays a crucial role in considering the possibility of political resistance and resilience. This is because the letter tends to put forward a different idea of space as a modality of perception and cognition. Historically, critical debates on the relation between words and image have relied on an agonistic understanding of time and space as competing aesthetic forms. In From A to X however, spatiality is seen in an entirely different light, within an effort to resist an authoritarian separation between time and space. Through the letter, fiction creates an anti-dualistic place of resistance for citizen-readers who are also creatures in space-time.

Keywords

• John Berger
• contemporary British fiction
• intermediality
• word and image studies
• time and space in literature
• spatial form