Quartet in blue: a collection of fiction

Quartet in Blue embraces the uncanny. The gesture is not naive but deliberate, made after contemplating current theory regarding borders that nominally define the living from the dead, the foreigner from the native, meaning from nonsense, and history from folklore—as a few examples. In Aporias, Derrida gestures toward the uncanny while he contemplates the border between life and death. He admits, for example, he is haunted by the word arrivant, about which he says: "I was recently taken by this word, arrivant, as if its uncanniness had just arrived to me in a language in which it has nonetheless sounded very familiar to me for a long time" (33). "Carro" most directly addresses the sublime rapture that Derrida experiences, but all four fictions push at borders so binaries erupt to allow other arrangements to emerge. The purpose for these ruptures becomes especially significant when one considers that the United States political process denied Indians American citizenship until 1924. In the slipperiest fashion, native people were designated foreigners in their native domains.