From Borderline to Borderland Stories: Will Self’s The Quantity Theory of Insanity

Will Self’s (in)famously “transgressive fictions” (Finney) offer various manifestations of his consistent engagement with the in-between. His debut collection already features liminality as a central material, motif and method. The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991) explores a vast range of borderline states and spaces, relentlessly complicating conventional mappings of knowledge and experience. Both Self’s focus on “threshold states” (Drewery) in each individual story, and his border-crossing praxis in the cycle as a whole, seem to epitomise recent critical assessments of the short story as inherently liminal. Self’s liminal poetics/politics unfold at the seminal intersection between gender and genre, shedding more light on relatively uncharted fictional crossings between masculinity and madness. This article explores Self’s subversive strategies of b/ordering (Krasteva) as enacted by the passage from an exploration of liminal spaces in the short story to the examination of the short story itself—and the short story cycle—as a liminal space open to reconfigurations of genre and gender.