Narrative Returns: The Production of Domino

Abstract: Ross King’s 1995 novel Domino follows Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine (1830) and Roland Barthes’s S/Z (1970) in using the castrato as an analogue for contemporary textuality and sexuality. The body and voice of the castrato traduce classification and elicit responses that can be only multiple and fragmentary. All three texts address epistemological and ontological crises of identity whereby gender becomes unhinged from certainty, and performance replaces being as a form of identity. These familiar postmodern explorations of the contingent, however, raise questions about the production of gender and narrative ambiguity and about an alternative system of meaning: specifically, the ethical, which, according to Emmanuel Levinas, “is not a moment of being, it is otherwise and better than being; the very possibility of the beyond” (69).