“Spells Out The Word of Itself, and Then Dispelling Itself”: The Chaotics of Memory and The Ghost of the Novel in Jeff Noon’s Falling out of Cars
Forthcoming: Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
This article is a study of British author Jeff Noon’s most recent novel Falling out of Cars (2002) as a literary... more This article is a study of British author Jeff Noon’s most recent novel Falling out of Cars (2002) as a literary experiment engaged in raising the ghost of the modern novel, long hailed as dead. Here, Noon samples canonic literature then transforms, manipulates, and reconfigures it in much the same way a message is transformed when being passed through a communication circuit. The result is a kind of poetic prose Noon terms “metamorphiction”: an elegant experimental mode of fantasy in which signs mutate within certain systemic parameters. In metamorphiction, the textual past literally haunts the textual present. This formal experiment is mirrored in the content: the novel concerns a middle aged woman mourning the death of her daughter. Ultimately, Falling out of Cars is both a virtuosic piece of fantastic fiction and a serious meditation on the contemporary state of the novel.
Fractal Narrative, Paraspace, and Strange Loops: The Paradox of Escape in Jeff Noon's Vurt.
Science Fiction Studies #113 = Volume 38
This article examines how Jeff Noon grafts concepts from chaos theory to literature in order to develop a playful... more This article examines how Jeff Noon grafts concepts from chaos theory to literature in order to develop a playful narrative form appropriate to representing multiple ontological levels. I argue this by looking closely at the roles of form, metaphor, and content in Noon’s stylish debut novel, Vurt (1993). The novel’s movement from order to disorder and finally towards a new order suggests that the structure of Vurt may operate mimetically according to the vision of reality proposed by chaos theorists. In this way, Noon experiments with literary form by reinterpreting the narrative spaces of virtual reality through the metaphors of fractal geometry, a spatial phenomenon that so delighted the popular imagination at the time of the novel’s publication. I explore the relationship between metaphor and content through the trope of conflict between order/chaos and meaning/hopelessness, and by applying Douglas Hofstadter’s theory of consciousness and his concept of the paradoxical “strange loop.” These tropes may cast light on the complexities of the characters’ intense desires for transcendence and how the form of the novel itself makes this ambivalent quest difficult, if not impossible. Accordingly, chaos functions not only as a reminder of the turbulence inherent in human experience but also of the exciting aesthetic possibilities this theory extends to literature.
"You are cordially invited to a / CHEMICAL WEDDING": Metamorphiction and Experimentation in Jeff Noon's Cobralingus
Electronic Book Review
January 2012
This paper is a study of British author Jeff Noon’s writing game, the Cobralingus Engine, from his experimental novel,... more This paper is a study of British author Jeff Noon’s writing game, the Cobralingus Engine, from his experimental novel, Cobralingus (2001). The aesthetic process of this game whimsically engages with information theory and the remix techniques of electronic music. In the game, a sample of canonic literature is imaginatively sent through a communication circuit, transformed, manipulated, and finally reconfigured. The result is a kind poetic prose Noon terms metamorphiction: an amusing and elegant experimental mode in which signs metamorphose and mutate within certain systemic parameters; in short, it is a narrative, not of deconstruction, but of reconstruction.