Mapping the Borders of Language in Jon McGregor’s Lean Fall Stand

This article argues that Jon McGregor’s novel, Lean Fall Stand (2021), offers an exploration of relationality and language through the figure of the metonymy. From a storm in Antarctica to a hospital bed where Robert tries to recover from a stroke, the characters’ inability to communicate is expressed through a failure of metonymic modes of representation and understanding. This results in a tightening of the borders of the characters’ subjectivities, enclosing them within solipsistic modes of perception. However, as the narrative progresses, it proposes an exploration of the very borders it had put in place, eventually shattering and reconfiguring them. As metonymy becomes a means to recast language as a multimodal form of expression, whose success is grounded in an ethical attention to the other, McGregor makes it part of a narrative strategy that reconfigures the readers’ understanding of relationality.