SOURCE: Kadir, Djelal. “Next Door: Writing Elsewhere.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 12, no. 2 (summer 1992): 60-69.

In the following essay, Kadir deconstructs the theme of the “other place” in The Garden Next Door, drawing parallels to the work of Dante, T. S. Eliot, Henry James, and George Eliot.

Next door is always in another space, another yearned-for place of the other yearning in perpetual unsituatedness. Writing's difficulty must inevitably be brooked in the writing. The predicament finds no necessary and sufficient conditions of absolution or amelioration in its predication. The assuasive slave does not reside in what is written but in what writing does not give up, in what and where writing does not yield, in the indomitable and untenable otherness that writing insinuates only as trace and never as presence or outright representation. The only hope is a partial and borderline suggestion, a promise that reverberates at the...