Making Sense of the Lunacy: Synesthesia, Paratextual Documents, and Thoughtless Memory in John Dufresne’s Deep in the Shade of Paradise

LAURA NICOSIA Montclair State University Making Sense of the Lunacy: Synesthesia, Paratextual Documents, and Thoughtless Memory in John Dufresne’s Deep in the Shade of Paradise JOHN DUFRESNE’S MOST EXPERIMENTAL NOVEL, DEEP IN THE SHADE OF Paradise, presents the stories of a star-crossed Southern family—the Fontanas—their ontological quest for love and their epistemological search for meaning. Through the construction of an intricate, genre-blurring and self-referential narrative, this reinvention of A Midsummer Night’s Dream plumbs the intersections of communal and personal memories and explores the powers of the senses. It revels in the visual and, more importantly perhaps, ruminates upon both the methodologies of memory and the shortcomings of living lives devoted to logic or causality. Linear narratives are artistic constructs neither entirely natural nor wholly representative of the ways we experience the world. Despite attempts to create causal narrative threads for the events of our daily lives, tidy patterns are elusive. Existence often defies direct sequence and provides, instead, nonlinear and seemingly random encounters. For example, as I write this paper in my living room, my lunch is heating in the microwave. I hear the familiar beep and trudge toward the kitchen to retrieve my meal. Suddenly, I hear the all-too-familiar crunch of one car colliding with another and know instinctively that the second of those cars is mine. In this real life, my meal and the collision are not directly related, yet. Back in my living room, I grab the phone, dial 911, and march outside to wait for the police to arrive. My lunch grows cold—unrelated to the actions curbside. Any immediate attempt to make such connections would seem absurd. Over time, however, I may recall the accident when I choose to microwave another frozen lunch. Who knows? These 696 Laura Nicosia connections and memories happen after a period of reflection—but it is in hindsight and over distance that these linkages are established. However, if these events were to be recorded in a story by a fiction writer, my lunch and the car wreck would be forever linked in a narrative sequence. Students reading such a story would ponder long and deep about the profound connections and the unifying significance of Kung Pao chicken and a smashed red Ford Focus. This is what we do in our discipline. If John Dufresne were to record this event, he would write about the microwaved lunch and the car wreck and would fully annotate the narrative with an End Note about a lawsuit undertaken against the Stouffer’s Corporation by a distant relative of mine who burned herself trying to cook her Lean Cuisine using a blowtorch and lighter fluid. Perhaps in another note, Dufresne’s reader would learn how individual characters would forevermore conflate a red Ford with a craving for Chinese food or would recall a similar auto wreck every time amicrowavewould“ding.”Melodramatic?Certainly.Butitisnarratively believable within a literary context. Dufresne’s readers reflect on events and become aware of the passage of time by their active engagement in the reading process—turning pages and traversing back and forth throughout the novel—and gaining a literary hindsight via the process. Ultimately, the overarching paradox of this book is that by trying to make the narrative more life-like—that is by making big and little connections between events and people—it grows more seemingly absurd. Moreover, the more absurd the novel grows, the more life-like it becomes. Dufresne brings his readers into the novel by assuming an intimacy with them. He incorporates the reader into the family as his narrator clearly is, and, if I dare to say, he likes his readers. As such, he comfortably allows his narrative structure to become synonymous with the way family storytellers digress, circumnavigate topics, retell communal memories, double back on stories, and fill in gaps that they feel we, as more distant relatives, may have. He even trusts us enough to talk about the nature of stories in the first place. One might say that this novel’s form is somewhat foreign to those reading for narrative continuity, but extremely familiar to those who have large families and have...