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

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ For a definition and review of post-postmodernism see Fjellestad & Engberg 2013.

² These definitions, listed on a paratextually placed page immediately after the title, range from self-evident (an exclamation or expression of surprise) to obscure (“derived from the Mi’kmaq word ‘Hescuewaka’ meaning ‘an unexpected place’” to irrelevant (“New York Stock Exchange symbol for Hawaiian Airlines, Inc.”). Even at this micro-level Sheppard mocks the reader’s expectations.

³ These terms, it needs to be observed, are not synonymous. For instance, iconotexts tend to be seen as integrating the verbal and the visual into one artifact, while the concept of the mixed text is often used to refer to texts in which there is a hierarchical rather than integrative relationship between images and words. However, the usage of these terms is far from rigorous; all of the terms overlap, at least partly.

⁴ Compared to Moby Dick, Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, and the film Citizen Kane, HA! was immediately pronounced a literary masterpiece and a work of genius, reviewers competing with each other in their use of adjectives such as amazing, extraordinary, monumental, magnificent, magisterial, brilliant, staggering, mesmerizing, riveting, and profound. The McGill-Queen’s University Press webpage offers a representative sample of the reviews of HA!; see http://mqup.mcgill.ca/book.php?bookid=1674. Many of the unsolicited comments can be found on Gordon Sheppard’s home page, http://www.gordonsheppard.com/bottom/bHA.html. Considering the enthusiasm with which the publication of HA! was greeted, the critical neglect of Sheppard’s novel is quite surprising.

⁵ Sheppard died of prostate cancer in 2006, that is, three years after the publication of HA!.

⁶ The fact that the letter and the postcard are present in the narrative as concrete and corporeal entities raises questions about singularity that is in tension with the mass/mechanical reproduction. (It is tempting to draw parallels with Benjamin’s discussion of the aura of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.)

⁷ Of course all reading engages the senses and thus the reader’s body. However, we have been habituated to disregard the routine of, for instance, turning pages as having no other than a purely pragmatic function. The two inserts – as well as a range of other experiments in contemporary literature – make it simply impossible not to pay attention to the physicality of accessing narratives.

⁸ She uses this phrase in passing when discussing the impact of images on readers (37).

⁹ It is worth mentioning that issue 16 of McSweeney’s Quarterly contains two inserts. The first one, a comb, seems to me to be gratuitous, while the second, a deck of fifteen oversized cards backed and cornered like playing cards that can be shuffled and read in any order, are highly functional, since they are the conduits of Robert Coover’s short story, “Heart Suit” (2005), and the order in which the chunks of text are read radically impacts the plot.

¹⁰ Gibbons (2012: 164) reads the flipbook as creating “doubly deitic subjective alignment for the reader with Oskar.” Reading Foer’s novel for its representation of trauma, Gibbons (2012: 165) sees the flipbook working to “direct the readers to perform curative procedures for post-traumatic stress.”–Nørgaard (2010: 123) also sees this segment of Foer’s novel as inviting the reader “to play an active role in the creation of meaning”; flipping through the pages makes the figure “float from Real to Ideal.” At this moment, I would say, the reader participates in Oskar’s fantasy to reverse time.

¹¹ Gonzales (2008), I hasten to explain, does not deal with any of the techniques that I present here; her strictures are directed at narratives such as Jeanette Winterson’s The powerbook (2001) and Martin Amis’s Yellow dog (2003). However, since she sees such narratives as embodying the aesthetics of post-realism, her comments can be extended to the type of narrative I am interested in.