Was is/was a network map, where the network is primarily language, as creole, dream, synaptic short-circuit, echololia, Glossolalia, gibberish, Joycean (James Aloysius) sprach, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E—ish syntactical complication, and Googlespew web search output (Stuart Moulthrop and his grad students have mischievously and wondrously chased down whole strands of the latter), all of it mapped against the actual world, at least on the seven continents of this orb, a world where code-shifting formerly a restricted linguistic phenomenon has instead become a lingua franca. (My very verbal, witty and brilliant, four and a half year old granddaughter, Talulla, suddenly confronted with her father speaking German during a vacation to Switzerland began to talk gibberish at intervals for as long as her parents would tolerate it, and still does so with her grandfather, who delights in talking thusly, most recently as we chatted through an inning or two of a rare NY Mets win to the apparent dismay of neighboring fans.) There is no central character, the story, such as there is, is connection and confusion as happy convergence.
Remedia, despite the misgivings of a few of the publishers who passed on it before Steerage, has a story, albeit a circuitous and circus-like multi-ringed and recursive one, and it also has a central character, albeit seemingly nameless, who acts less as a ringmaster, the neo-traditional role of practitioners of what has come to be called (alarmingly at least to this one witness) “innovative writing” but instead as a wide-eyed, not to say clueless, observer of spectacles and latterday multimedia mystery plays. While scholars of Spanish literature get rightly incensed that Don Quixote is loosely termed a picaresque novel when the knight is not a rogue but an idealist and a seeker, Remedia’s protagonist is in my estimation a picaro in the sense that people consider Quixote (or even Hesse’s seeker Siddartha) to be. His roguishness is a venial yet nonetheless fatal innocence to the extent that he often isn’t aware of what he is seeing or being seen as or within and, unlike Quixote but a little like Chauncey Gardiner of Being There, his medial predecessor, he doesn’t do anything about it, indeed doesn’t do anything much, despite being in the midst of historic doings and persons, and despite being told as much by wise women who love him.
In describing the novel for promotional copy (as opposed to this?) I wrote “where that prequel [i.e., Was] was fleeting, Remedia is grounded, and where each immerses readers in a forest of mirrors, in Remedia the mirrors give way to portals. If Was presented readers a relay of shifting narrators, Remedia’s nameless narrator is a long distance runner looking to find his footing while seeking the bright amidst the bleak.”
The post Interview with Michael Joyce about Remedia: A Picaresque (Steerage Press) (2/10): How does Remedia expand/elaborate on its prequel, Was: a novel of the internet? first appeared on Steerage Press.
