Fractal narratives and musical transmission: the case of Nancy Huston

Abstract

This article focuses on the narrative complexity in Nancy Huston’s novels. This is because Huston’s writing seems to showcase overlapping, interconnected, and perhaps never-ending relationships between and within her literary texts. This reflects the self-similarity of fractal shapes in the natural world. Crucially, if one were to zoom on to a small piece of fractal, the result would very much like the original (larger) entity. In a literary context, narratives as fractals are a “self-symmetry”; in the case of Huston’s texts, they are the (re)transmission of themselves, (re)fracted in different languages, both verbal and musical. In the first instance, this study focuses on Huston’s mise-en-abyme of the writing process, taking examples from the author’s novels since the 1990s. I will then analyse how Huston makes use of intermedial forms, such as musico-literary texts, in order to reinforce the self-reflexive dimension of the texts – attention will be paid to her first novel Les Variations Goldberg (1981) and her self-translation The Goldberg Variations (1996).