Undoing Trust through Eroding Form: Narrating Porosity by the British Shores

The article analyses how trust is constituted and disrupted – ›(un)done‹ – through literary and geological form. Practices of trust, I contend, are expressed in the ritualised use of established modes of narration that may negotiate states of crises and (slow) disasters. I consider dystopia and the Gothic as crisis modes that are relied upon on an extraliterary level, while, paradoxically, their narrative composition undermines reliability. In the British context, the historicity of the two modes connects them to a sense of the nation; a nation that is troubled by the xenophobia present in the Brexit debates and decision and by an increasingly eroding environment as the climate crisis catalyses the loss of the identity-relevant shorelines. The two novels chosen for scrutiny are both set on this porous and precarious site and may be read in the wider context of the Brexit discourse. In Helen Oyeyemi’s Gothic novel White is for Witching (2009), form is eroding when the famous white cliffs of Dover are indeed ›being eaten‹. In John Lanchester’s dystopic novel The Wall (2019), form literally becomes concrete as the eponymous wall structures lives and livelihoods in a vision of Britain post erosion. The aim of the article is to contribute to a discussion of form as practices and containers of trust in a world in which geological and environmental forms are radically altered.