I've chosen to dig on the concept of Burrowing (not, as I'm sure I will confuse myself on any number of occasions in this writing, to burrow on Digging). While the concepts of Supplementarity and Burrowing are similar, the latter certainly owing to if not derived from the former, I have chosen Burrowing because, though I hesitate to use the word ‘simpler,' it is more in the language of the writer than the theorist (i.e. more practical), and in the end it is the concept I found most personally revelatory. This said, Burrowing is a term used primarily by Haake, and therefore proved difficult to research outside of her own text (though the Burrowing exercises in Chapter 9 vindicated, articulated even, writing practices I associated with ‘writing good'), so I had to turn back to Supplementarity to dig deeper, and hopefully this will all come around again to the terms of Burrowing.
Christine van Boheemen-Saff describes Supplementarity (as used by Lacan and Joyce) as an “attempt to extend the range of language in articulating within it an echo or uncanny redoubling which suggests that the circumscription of language, the limit to discourse, is eluded” (170). What is limiting to writing is the concept. “Supplementarity cannot be conceptually defined, and its function is to question the status of any central or dominant concept by revealing what it leaves out or “represses” (Lacapra 152). Writing is not a destination, but a journey. Supplementarity allows the writer to access the full spectrum of available language, unencumbered by the limits of ‘why' and ‘where.' If Burrowing can be described as the more practical (user-friendly) articulation of this theory, it is the means by which we escape the constraints of what we think we want to do and instead we just do (insert Nike Swoosh here). By looking backwards the process leads us forward without stopping for outside considerations, and as Haake puts it, “It is the stopping that is bad for writing” (249).
Works Cited (in as close to MLA format as I could manage)
Boheemen-Saff, Christine van. Joyce, Derrida, Lacan and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: University Press, 1999.
Haake, Katharine. What Our Speech Disrupts. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000.
Lacapra, Dominick. Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts Contexts Language. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.
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