| Description |
From the outset of the effort to produce the first edition of Remembering Dismembrance: A Critical Compendium, the prime motivation has been the continued support of the novel's life in conversation, among academics and artists, fans and aficionados. The Compendium is a collection of work that stands in dialogic relation to the novel Dismembrance and its readers; it serves as an expansion of the text's heteroglossic potential, a furthering of polyphony and imagination. Successful as the first edition may be in this regard, over time the Compendium has come to look a bit buttoned down for our taste, too focused on writing about the novel. With this second edition, our attention has been paid instead to works that embody the notion of writing through the novel, whatever that may mean. Where the contents of the first edition often employ a familiar literary discourse in order to speak about the novel and its possible meaning(s), the second edition eschews such questions of "aboutness," offering fewer answers, opting to evoke the character of the novel instead of its characters, to explore the power of the novel's language rather than its plot, to be the dream the novel is having now. In this second edition, ostensibly innocuous aspects of the novel give rise to new worlds and unfamiliar adventures that resonate with echoes of the concerns of the source text, their sound gleefully warped in the wide open spaces of each new author's imagination. If the pieces included in this second edition move us further from the novel, so be it. Such is the price paid by those who would add to the novel's network of reading but resist the terminal assignment of meaning. If the Compendium's first edition was a carnivalesque imagining in the face of a funhouse mirror, let this second be a stained glass through which to see the novel, blurred but brighter for the freedom its inexactness offers. |
