Joyce engineered his almost total self-effacement and reader spatialization in one 1904 day in the life of Dublin, sitting back and pairing his fingernails outside the process of the novel - yes, Stephen Dedalus is a young self-portrait but also quite removed from Joyce the author at the time of writing. By contrast Alba’s technique is to cite and parody a way inside the story towards a self-portrait by never really attempting one. Uncorrected Proof is as truthful and revelatory, confessionally, as it is not. Alba sets the main character(s) and reader in multiple factual and fictional places and contexts, allowing fluid relationships between fact and fiction to redefine the mock heroics (and heroics) of writing of the twentieth and twenty first centuries.
Alba lands story and style in places readers will be familiar and unfamiliar with – London, New York, Barcelona, Aigues-Mortes and Hackney. There is no attempt to separate the myth of ‘authorial selfhood’ from the novel’s character detail as Joyce set out to do. Instead, Alba joins the tradition of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol to forge a new meaning for the mythical self in an elusive wandering inside the irony and paradoxes of re-contexualism, a style deriving from the styles of others yet also quite unique. Alba sites readers in the floating consciousness of the postmodern artist.
Uncorrected Proof also contradicts the often quoted postmodern idea of story as redundant and irrelevant. In Alba’s deconstruction of style he affirms story as the only truth a reader can believe in. Unlike Joyce he doesn’t seek to negate it. While Joyce followed the travels and trials of his latter-day Ulysses to the laborious realtime and mythical letter, Uncorrected Proof puts down roots into a recreation of the part of the Iliad that seems never to have been “written” – Homer’s prequel to the Iliad, the conditions for Helen’s flight: her first kidnap by the northern Greek king Leonidas; the breakdown of her marriage to Menelaus; the early interaction of Achilles with Helen; her first meeting with Paris; the early hidden hand and role of Agamemnon.
Implicitly Louisiana Alba asks if the novel, if not all literary forms, are only part of a seamless continuity of technique and content, constantly ‘mining’ influences we can never fully grasp.
Alba creates an authorial face openly challenging styles, celebrating and excoriating writing from the past. Uncorrected Proof does not end with closing of the cover after reading but traces out into the vast complex universe of literary history in search of itself.
April 16, 2008 by elephantearspress
Parodying over 100 writers Louisiana Alba celebrates and critiques, adding value, re-igniting fiction of twentieth and twenty-first century fiction. Alba asks implicitly: what is a novelist? What does a creative memory and craft truly and uniquely comprise of? Is there such a thing as originality? Are not writers unconsciously and consciously guided and influenced by writers before them so much so that literature forms a continuity of technique and content?
A writer who isn’t influenced by earlier writing, if there is such a writer, probably hasn’t read anything.
