ABSTRACT

It has become a critical commonplace that postmodernism no longer serves as an adequate designation for contemporary literature. But what comes after postmodernism? What are the tendencies and directions within contemporary American literature that promise to shape its future?

The contributions to this book are written in the shadows of ‘new media’, a turn towards the nonhuman in critical thinking, and a surge in environmental and apocalyptic thought. Engaging with such contemporary debates, the authors map the rapidly changing ecosystem of contemporary literary genres and forms and attend to transformations in the production, reception, and circulation of books. This book takes for granted that American literature does have a future, although whatever this future holds, it is unlikely to be what we expect. At this historical juncture, the American novel seems to carve its future though an engagement with issues at the forefront of our present, thereby ensuring its own ongoing contemporaneity. This book was originally published as a special issue of Studia Neophilologica.

chapter 3|1 pages

The Paradoxes of “Unnatural” Mimesis in Gordon Sheppard’s HA!

DANUTA FJELLESTAD What is an “unnatural” narrative? In a fascinating book on narrative theory – or, more correctly, a book that explains four distinct strands in narrative theory – written by five leading figures in the field (David Herman, James Phelan, Peter J.

chapter |1 pages

As must be clear from the above, Sheppard’s text fashions its “unnaturalness” through all kinds of language­ and genre­games as well as the unconventional graphic layout and inclusion of images. But side by side with such obviously antimimetic strategies HA! amplifies mimesis so that through its excess it is, as it were, undermined from within and denaturalized. This process of turning mimesis against itself reaches a kind of climax in two physical inserts that the reader finds in the narrative. These inserts, I want to propose, serve as but one exemplar of a different type of “unnaturalness” than unnatural narratology has dealt with thus far. After close to seven hundred pages crowded with images the reader may not be surprised to find an image of an envelope with the caption “Facsimile of Hubert Aquin’s farewell letter to Andrée dated March 16 1977.” A single handwritten word, “Amour,” is placed in the middle of the envelope. The surprise comes as the reader turns the page and discovers a three­dimensional envelope glued to the bottom of the page. Once the envelope is opened, two sheets of yellow legal paper filled with Aquin’s handwriting can be pulled out (Sheppard 2003: 697). This physical letter turns out to be the French “original” of the one printed two pages earlier, its content rendered in English (and in italics). Above the letter in English there is a note that it was “written in blue ink on lined yellow notepad paper” (Sheppard 2003: 696); this ekphrastic description is given a material reality in the insert. The second physical insert comes toward the very end of the narrative. On the top of the page we find the following text: “Addressed to Emmanuel and post­ marked Geneve [sic], February 25 1977, this postcard arrived in the mail at 3776 rue Vendôme, Montréal, one week after Aquin’s death” (849). Below the caption we see a reproduction of the obverse (face) and reverse (back) of a postcard in black and white. Underneath this reproduction there is a physical envelope (without its top flap) glued to the page. Inside the envelope the reader finds the “original” postcard, a physical object to be pulled out, viewed, and read. The handwritten text in French (Aquin’s message to his son Emmanuel) is rendered in English beneath the glued envelope. We read: “A small reminder of Aigle and of our picnics. One difference today: you can’t see the mountains and it’s snowing up there. I’ll wait for you to go back up Leysin. Papa Hube” (Sheppard 2003: 849). What’s going on in these two textual instances? How can we interpret them? To begin with, like many images in HA! (for instance maps or newspaper clip­ pings or photographs), the letter and the postcard have a documentary function, very much in line with the biographical thrust of the novel. The letter and the postcard participate in a set of thematic concerns that are built up by the verbal narrative as well as by all kinds of images embedded in HA!. For instance, both the letter and the postcard relate to the thematic of remembrance and memory, enhancing it through the question about the function of physical objects in assisting memory. Both instances can be read in the context of the themes of spec­ trality and ghostliness that saturate the narrative, not least because both messages arrive after Aquin’s death; they are messages, as it were, from the grave. The letter resonates with the theme of Aquin’s obsessive braiding together of love and death (in particular suicide) throughout his life. Both are traces, mementos, of Aquin who is no more; not unlike Barthes’s “ça a été” (“that­has­been”), they arrest a specific temporal moment and lodge it in the present. Both the letter and the post­ card participate in the reflections on the role of writing in eternalizing what is mortal and perishable, the human flesh, the traces of which are preserved in the handwritten. They also trigger off reflections on the original and copy: while the

chapter 7|7 pages

A Sociological Imagination

chapter |7 pages

Index