Ann Quin’s Berg and Stewart Home’s 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess

David Vichnar

doi:10.4000/angles.3759

Abstract

In Berg (1964), Ann Quin develops an idiomatic style blending non-linear narration, multiple viewpoints, and stream of consciousness, marked by a poetic lyricism and hallucinogenic registration, in order to explore such topical themes as the search for identity, the influence of the past on the present, and intergenerational pressures. Stewart Home’s novel 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (2002) revisits some of the idiosyncratic features of Quin’s poetics sub specie Home’s parody of literary post-postmodernism. Philosophically, Home’s detouring towards Quin takes place through the prism of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, and also enables a reading of Quin’s schizophrenic writing in terms of its critical function. The essay argues that Home’s revisitation of Quin’s novel within a broader framework of experimental activism and that both the authors’ novels perform ventriloquist acts designed to deconstruct a certain type of literary subjectivity and the novel form itself.

Highlights

1 Among the few critics who cared about Ann Quin in the otherwise uncaring 1980s was Philip Stevick whose seminal article “Voices in the Head: Style and Consciousness in the Fiction of Ann Quin” (1989) records an anecdote in which Quin’s psychiatrist, treating her after a breakdown in 1970, ordered copies of her novels to be used as therapeutic material
Quin develops an idiomatic style blending non-linear narration, multiple viewpoints, and stream of consciousness, marked by poetic lyricism, fantasy-embedded, hallucinogenic registration, to explore such topical themes as the search for identity, the influence of the past on the present, and intergenerational pressures
Suggesting that “our attention could be more usefully directed towards Ann Quin” (169)

Summary

David Vichnar

16 Berg’s talk, as Stevick and others have pointed out, “scarcely seems ‘inner’ at all, seems rather actual speech, acted out in the theatre of the mind, and one imagines Berg talking aloud to himself, at least shaping his words with his lips.” (Stevick 1989: 232) When on the bottom of the page, a “meeting on the stairs” with the father takes place, featuring a furtive first confrontation, this is not a conversation recounted or remembered No such conversation, the rest of the book shows, has taken place or will — it is mind as a theatre both of remembered wound and desire, possibility, projection, rationalisation, aggression, in which the subject is the leading character with the best, and often the only lines. 32 Let us take just one example of each, the first one from a more or less random paragraph from the first chapter which, O’Neill goes to some length explaining, illustrates the dominant linguistic mechanism of the majority of the text, i.e. the repetition of the clause structure S-V-X (subject-verb-complement), as shown here: SUBJECT We Alan He They He Alan He Fromm Alan

VERB trudged was talking

Every stroke This position

The three other uprights these leaning stones