Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory

AFTERWORD. How This Book Reads You: Looking beyond Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory

[Ramon Barreto] understood the restlessness of people made of paper. . . . And on those days, when it was lonely to remember her, he stuffed his mouth with tissue paper and crumpled the Sunday news, and at night he pressed the paper between his knees. SALVADOR PLASCENCIA, THE PEOPLE OF PAPER After glimpsing the “new horizons” through the words of Frederick Aldama and his intrepid crew of fiercely intelligent critics, what is left to be seen or said about what we have seen? The worlds of literature are changing , or (to adapt Salvador Plascencia’s visionary fictional nightmare) the people of paper are evolving, and the tools we use to parse these facsimile /ersatz oddities need to change and are changing as well—a vivid transmogrification is afoot, to say the least. Working my way through a manuscript of Frederick Aldama’s curated volume, the book you’ve just finished, I rediscovered how deliciously impossible it will be to claim mastery in comparative literature or even in American studies. The diasporic cacophony of narrative threads may well dance just beyond or far beyond our ability to map. (My present fave? The chain of affection, translation, and obsession that ties Joyce to Faulkner, Faulkner to Borges, Borges to García Márquez, García Márquez to Toni Morrison, Morrison to Zadie Smith, and Zadie Smith to [antagonistically, por supuesto] David Shields [he of Reality Hunger : A Manifesto], who would have it that the end of fiction is upon us. Shields needs to spend more time with Oscar Wao, if you ask me—or just let Junot Díaz hit him upside the head.) Aldama’s apt editorial self-issued mandate, to eschew “editorial dogAFTERWORD How This Book Reads You: Looking beyond Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory william anthony nericcio 270 William Anthony Nericcio matism,” has placed him in the unenviable position of issuing a collection that might appear at first glance to offer all things to all readers, but the narratological plotline is there for all to see and assimilate: both Analyzing World Fiction and the tools for analyzing it are in flux—aesthetics and hermeneutics look into a mirror and see metamorphosis. Where the drab, turgid days of New Criticism lent us some way to ponder and enjoy a staid stability, the first part of the twenty-first century finds us in chaos and mutation. Forgive this recovering Catholic’s impulse for regression , forgive your would-be priest’s penchant for papist metaphors, but what Aldama and crew capture in this collection is an ever-evolving matrix of transubstantiation, which, the Catholic Encyclopedia admonishes (picture Mother Superior with a stick), “is not a conversion simply so called, but a substantial conversion (conversio substantialis), inasmuch as one thing is substantially or essentially converted into another (Herbermann et al. 580 [emphasis added]). The MLA, it seems, has a healthy future. Into and out of the Book You Are Reading Aldama begins the book playfully, the trope of the primer guiding his hands with “How to Use This Book.” But ultimately, as I suggest in my own title, it is the book itself that is using us, pushing us here and there in our understandings, making us aware simultaneously both of the range of world fiction out there and of the myriad methodologies necessary for ferreting out those texts’ complexities. Brian Richardson’s “U.S. Ethnic and Postcolonial Fiction” ultimately posits a means for fusing postcolonial theory (the spawn of Spivak, Guha, Said, and their ilk) with the best cutting-edge findings making their way out of the American Studies Association—in a way, Richardson surfs the waves (we are all now caught by them) following on the tsunami of Edward Said’s Orientalism and the similar flux and flow brought on by This Bridge Called My Back (Gloria Anzaldúa’s and Cherrie Moraga’s landmark anthology )—the waves merge as multicultural America’s literary armies combine with postcolonial second-wavers such as Zadie Smith and Hanif Kureishi. Out of the corroborative oscillations of this fusion, much has and will come. One thing is for sure—one shoe does not and will not fit all! Dan Shen’s musings on challenges to any universal narrative poetics Afterword 271 is a welcome and bracing study that cleverly foregrounds the need for a neo–comparative literature renaissance; for those of us who find the possibility of a univalent narrative...