The Enemy Within the Walls: Examining the Ontological Dimension of Borders in John Lanchester’s The Wall and Prayaag Akbar’s Leila

Abstract

This paper takes up a comparative reading of two works of speculative fiction, Leila by Prayaag Akbar and The Wall by John Lanchester, to embark upon a broader question regarding the ontological dimension of the borderization process. While a euphoria surrounding the rhetoric of globalization still pervades dominant cultures across the globe, we perceive a simultaneous retreat from the globalized order to address a collective reservation toward those deemed aliens and outsiders. The neurotic urge to identify an out-group, or an enemy, ultimately culminates in the materialization of the cartographic imagination in the construction of border walls. These walls, beyond their material and spatial situatedness, also symbolize the crises of communities, where the identification of an enemy becomes an ontological necessity. However, what if the enemy has already pervaded the walls? What if the monstrous enemy and the human self cannot be kept separate? Modernity has been unable to maintain its core binaries, failing to construct the individual as a unified self. Then, the borders are ultimately attempts of a Deleuzian control society to assert a racial and anthropocentric superiority following the dismantling of institutions of enclosure. The anxiety over the loss of familial and institutional bounds takes material form in borders, but the crisis entails that the process is never complete. Drawing on Mbembe’s theory of borderization and Claeys’s political dystopia, among others, the paper seeks to read the two novels to examine the symbolic and ontological implications of the borderization process.