ABSTRACT
Chapters 3 observed protagonists foundering on hierarchical and binary social arrangements, and Chapter 4 the damage that structural and epistemic injustice does to bodies. This chapter revisits divisive forms and literary bodies with a focus on how fictional characters overcome the harms of split-separating systems of control to rediscover their connectedness. The first part of the chapter explores counter-pleasure and blues irony (the latter term Anthony Reed’s) in Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and Serhiy Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad. Humour becomes counter-pleasure when it subverts unjust power, and blues irony exemplifies counter-pleasure that is subversive without being exclusionary or negatory. Like all forms of counter-pleasure, its tendency is to deconstruct hierarchies and binaries, bringing bodies back into relation. The second part of the chapter engages María Lugones’ notion of curdling to illuminate the dynamics in George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Ada’s Realm. It foregrounds chiasmus as a reciprocal, non-hierarchical, and non-dialectical form, and as a counterweight to political strategies of fragmentation or separation.
