Donato Mancini

The high concept here is "paracanonicity"--works that sit uneasily in relation to the canon, subvert it and define its limits, the canonical (hurrrrrrr) example being Finnegans Wake--and obviously that's a fun idea but I had questions about precisely what it meant in practice, because of course if "paracanonical" just means "rated but not THAT rated," that sucks--and Donato doesn't disappoint, bringing together a bevy of literary freaks (the Satyricon, Aimé Césaire, Titus Andronicus, Kathy Acker, Artaud, Melmoth the Wanderer, Lovecraft, the LAPD report on the Rodney King beating) to watch them getting freaky at the borders of popularity/nonpopularity, art/commerce, solemnity/insanity, genre/literature, the ludic/the sadistic, the weird/the banal. I'd hesitate to define a paracanon nevertheless, for what I hope are obvious reasons, but Mancini is so well read, can turn a humorous line, and deploys very careful close readings in conjunction with pragmatics-based explorations of dialogue, reported speech, "the things the words do," and most of all, laughter (that chapter, which brings in like five different works and makes laughing feel like the most subversive, defensive, blindingly obvious thing you can do to flag that SOMETHING IS GOING ON HERE THAT'S NOT QUITE NOOOORMAL, and is a joy to read) all in the service of saying "Hey, really look at this you guys, and see how weird it is," and in that sense this is almost like Kenneth Clark's guide to civilization or a David Arora book on mushrooms or something--we've all been around someone or some book that thought they were freaky but they weren't, and this is the closest thing I've seen to a guide to what is.… (más)