Known to Us in this Great Absence: The Absent Self’s Identities in Edwin Muir’s Poetry

Abstract

This paper aims at exploring issues pertaining to the
theme of an apparently absent self in Edwin Muir’s poetry, in the light of
Derrida’s theory of metaphysics of presence. It offers a thorough
deconstructionalist reading of some poems to highlight the suspension or
negation of the privileging of presence over absence in the evaluation of
being, the consequent redefinition of the self’s relationship with the
other, and the ontological impossibility of envisaging unmediated
nothingness. In other words, it demonstrates how Muir centralizes a
liminal space between existence and nothingness in his treatment of the
poetics of reality involved in the representation(s) of an absent self. As
this process leads to the discovery of the loss of the transcendental
signified, language fully reveals its reliance on provisional meanings.