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7. Rejoinders in a Planetary Dialogue: J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Lloyd Jones, et al. in Dialogue with Absent Texts
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111 This paper investigates in a global context a new form of hypertextual circulation that moves beyond intertext and transmogrifies into a new development of metafiction in mutation. It engages with the dynamics of planetary dialogism, focusing on configurations of motifs that have travelled across time and space, but that are arguably no longer part of a cultural continuum identifiable to a wide readership. It raises certain troubling questions with respect to the eventual death of the hypotexts often referred to as master narratives. With a publishing industry regulated by the market forces of consumer society and catering to an audience more comfortable with visual and audial forms of fiction, are these canonical works still readable? Or are they hitherto accessible only through mediated, simplified reconfigurations , and reduced to surviving solely through the spinoff products of their hypertexts? It is useful to begin by addressing that imaginary creature we term the narrator, examining how its forms or manifestations, analogous to a mask that can be doffed on and off,1 unsettle the relations between producers and receivers of discourse, linked or separated by either overlapping or discrete extratextual reality(ies).From the rhetoricians of antiquity to the formalists, structuralists, and narratologists of the past century, we have been categorizing and quarrelling over the manifold shapes of that writerly mouthpiece. By playing with the codes of voice and point of view, implying corresponding patterns of involvement or detachment, of disclosure or concealment, even 7 Rejoinders in a Planetary Dialogue: J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Lloyd Jones, et al. in Dialogue with Absent Texts Marta Dvořák 112 DIALOGISM, POLYPHONY, VOICE erasure, and the collision of (or conflation of) restricted view and omniscience , contemporary writers call attention to the instability of the sign-referent relation, the inherent slippage that is part of language and its usage. Yet like the early moderns before them, so fond of false perspectives and trompe l’oeil, they do much more than that. They engage more generally with the dynamics of representation itself and the construction of meaning, as well as their phenomenological and axiological matrices. In this volume, Frank Davey addresses the controversial interchangeability (almost anamorphosis) of the visual, aural, and textual in experimental poetry. In their discussion of interdiscursivity and perspectival overcoding which leads to considering the multi-vocality of Michael Ondaatje and the rhetorical counterpoint which is so analogous to musical practices, Ajay Heble and Winfried Siemerling identify writerly strategies ranging from free-floating to localized narrators.2 While hybrid forms participate in the transgressive dynamics of today’s writers, they are in no way a postmodern invention, but were already gleefully practised by writers often classified for convenience’s sake under the label of literary realism, such as Laurence Sterne, Charles Dickens, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The scope of this paper will not allow an in-depth study of these hybrid forms which often subject the local community to the cross gaze, language, and mindset of strangers, but I propose to address them briefly in the spirit of this volume which sets out to situate Canadian cultural production within global tendencies . I see them notably as manifestations of the polyphonic confrontation of cultures within which, ever since the eighteenth century, Canadian writers have been among the first to engage in questions of identity construction and cultural differentiation, nourished by the complex perspective stemming from the multiple allegiances of migration.3 I call attention to hybrid forms such as shifts to external or multiple vantage points because they reveal themselves to be subversive components of a perlocutionary network of relations set up the world over between the producers of discourse and the receivers. Such métissage on the part of often diasporic writers destabilizes the relations of distance and normativity initially set up in the reading pact,4 effectively defamiliarizing and critiquing social structures through a peripheral, often unsettling outsider’s point of view. Centrifugal combinations promoting the plurality of multiple subjectivities and consequently the provisional nature of truths and certainties abound in postmodern writing around the globe. They argue for an exponentially growing internationalization of literatures that Salman Rushdie identified decades ago5 and that Vinay Dharwadker has more recently ex- [54.221.159.188] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:22 GMT) Rejoinders in a Planetary Dialogue MARTA DVOŘÁK 113 plored.6 Double or multiple narrators abound involving the almost echoic repetition of a story through another voice and point of view, from Pulitzer Prize–winners Carol Shields and Jhumpa Lahiri to Anita...