Dany Laferrière's Aesthetic of Recycling

This article examines Dany Laferrière's practice of rewritingthemes, characters, and scenes from hisearlyworks. It argues that hisrepurposing of novelistic material, which may suggestthe exhaustion of authorial creativity, is in facta strategy to create a coherent oeuvre in which worksecho and promote each other. Using Journal d'un écrivainenpyjama (2013) as a text that both exemplifies and theorizes Laferrière's aesthetic, the essayshows how and why the author recycles. Analysis of recurrent scenes establishes that Laferrière's works advance byaccretion. Further examination of figures of the author (as a dandy, rock star, in pyjamas, etc.) stresses his parody of the literary taxonomies critics have used to characterize his work (a Haitian, Québécois, migrant author, etc.). Parody aside, Laferrière's repetitive textual patterns and his publishers' marketing techniques have turned him into a brand image that leaves him little choice but to satisfy readers'expectationsof familiar tropes. The author'srecycling technique is at once a critical tool to interrogate the cultural logic of the presentand a means of accruing economic capital.