Reception and the Real in 20th and 21st Century American Short Fiction: Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter” (1969), Ben Marcus’s “Cold Little Bird” (2018) and Brian Evenson’s “Born Stillborn” (2019)

Abstract

The reader of contemporary post-(post-)modern American fiction is in the process of giving up on her impossible quest for a simple dialectic of information, meaning and representation. Today, the literary form, especially when experimental, calls on its reader not just to make the experience of the real as it is mediatized by fiction, but to take part in its extension beyond the written word. Indeed, I would like to argue that in the process of reception, the reader is invited to grasp the text in a way that makes her, more than an interpreter or an analyst, a manufacturer of sorts. Thus, she draws from her reading experience—both intellectual and somesthesic, as proposed by Pierre-Louis Patoine in Corps/texte. Pour une théorie de la lecture empathique (Cooper, Danielewski, Frey, Palahniuk), Lyon, ENS Éditions, 2015—a new “text” that translates a novel perception and understanding of the real.Already mediated on the page by the vanishing author, the real in contemporary fiction thus calls for a re‑mediation from the reader, which might originate in some type of “reliaison”, to quote André Green’s concept (« La déliaison », Littératures, no. 3, October 1971, 33–52). This redoubled operation, during which the reader’s relationship to literary history and philosophy intervenes, makes her an architect of the product of her reading experience, namely her renewed connection to the real, both mediated by fiction and unmediated in her own experience of the world.A potentially limitless mirror effect is thus created, the real being (un)faithfully reflected in a play on representation and reaction. I would like to argue that the origin of these processes is—potentially among others—what I chose to call “the margins of affect”, a negative place that serves as an echo chamber for the reader’s (ap)prehension of the text.