The comma and the conditional: Lucy Ellmann’s ducks, newburyport and the performance of the quasi-transcendental

This paper examines how Lucy Ellmann’s novel Ducks, Newburyport formally enacts the quasi-transcendental - conditions of possibility that are simultaneously conditions of impossibility. Following Derrida’s turn to James Joyce, whose equivocal writing disclosed what Husserl’s pursuit of univocity suppressed, I read Ellmann’s novel as a literary figuration whose formal articulation makes a critical phenomenological analysis possible. The analysis centres on the two most conspicuous devices of the novel’s poetics - the comma’s perpetual deferral of closure and the nominalizing refrain “the fact that” - while attending to the wider complex of techniques (listing, accumulation, and the counterpointed, period-bound sections following a lioness) through which the text configures meaning. I argue that this syntax exhibits the impossibility of the classical epoché for a consciousness constituted by the structures of late capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, while holding open the possibility of critical phenomenology in Lisa Guenther’s sense: a mode of attending to how power and history shape lived experience, and of unbuilding those structures from within.