Emotionally Weird

Kate Atkinson's Emotionally Weird reads, in some respects, like a dry run for her most recent novel, Case Histories.  Like Case Histories, Emotionally Weird playfully jumbles and juggles a number of popular genres, including detective fiction, academic satire, and gothic; like Case Histories, Emotionally Weird insists on the emotional power of storytelling itself.  At the same time as it dwells in the recognizably postmodern world of metafiction, however, Emotionally Weird also looks back to the nineteenth-century novel--whether in the looming obstacle of a paper on George Eliot or a freewheeling plot structure that melds farce and Lewis Carroll.

Effie (short for Euphemia) is marooned in a decaying manor on an isolated island with the woman she thinks is her mother, Nora (short for Eleanora).  Effie tells Nora stories about her bizarre adventures in the English department at the University of Dundee; Nora tells Effie stories about both of their mysterious pasts.  In turn, Effie intersperses her tales of academic woe with her creative writing paper, a comically cringe-inducing attempt at detective fiction called The Hand of Fate, as well as with occasional indigestible chunks of a critical essay on Middlemarch.  Other writers muscle their way in as well, offering us a would-be exercise in postmodern experimental fiction, an aspiring Mills & Boon romance, and a dreary, multivolume fantasy novel in the very post-Tolkien tradition.  And then there's Effie's sluggish (and slug-like) boyfriend, Bob, who views the world in terms conveniently derived from Star Trek (classic version--this is, after all, the 1970s).  While all this is going on, Nora--who appears to prefer her fiction the old-fashioned way, straight up with lots of linear plotting--occasionally drops in some tart comments about the way that Effie's "novel" seems to be going.

While the novel's content sends up postmodern jargon, then, the novel itself is very much in the postmodern metafictional mode.  Content-wise, the academic satire is the novel's least interesting contribution; despite the blurb ("a stinging critique of modern literary studies," says The Washington Post Book World), a reader acquainted with Small World or Straight Man or Book or, heaven help us, Murder at the MLA will not find much in the way of interest here.  That being said, the satirical sections become much more provocative when taken not as reflections on the academic profession, but as critiques of a certain type of non-creative or -productive language.  Whether the critical rhetoric in question belongs to the age of James or the age of Derrida, it makes nothing happen.  Dr. Archie McCue, for example, always talks like this (italics Atkinson's):

'When words no longer strive for mimesis they become dislocated and disconnected.  They illustrate in themselves the exhaustion of forms.  Writers who eschew mimesis, looking for new ways of approaching the fiction construct, are disruptivist--challenging what Robbe-Grillet refers to as the "intelligibility of the world".'  Archie paused.  'What do you think of this statement? Anyone?'  No-one answered.  No-one ever had any idea what Archie was talking about.  (27)

Archie, whose tutorials appear to consist entirely of theory-speak, is jargon in search of an auditor.  While Effie tells stories to Nora--and, in so doing, ultimately manages to conjure up a satisfactory if amusingly strained ending for herself--Archie settles for talking about language at his bored (and semi-captive) audience.  His plaintive hope for a response from some indefinite "you" suggests the actual aimlessness of this purportedly philosophical rhetoric, as well as its own inability to disrupt much of anything.  Still, it is this critical language that is "dislocated"  and "disconnected"--so disconnected that Effie can "speak" it without actually assigning a meaning to it: '"Well, I suppose these days [...] there's an epistemological shift in fiction writing, whereby second-order verisimilitude won't suffice any more when trying to form a transcendentally coherent view of the world."  I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, but Archie seemed to' (44).  In the critical language game, the author is, for all intents and purposes, dead; Effie's jargon, which might as well have been created by the postmodernism generator, enters into a supposed conversation while leaving her out of it.  (Nevertheless, it's worth remembering that Effie can spin New Critical rhetoric as well; it's all grist for the novel's mill.)

Atkinson's novel celebrates not linear plotting--as Nora keeps grousing, Effie's rambunctious "plot" hardly merits the name--but the pleasures of storytelling for its own end.  Storytelling, even the most inept storytelling, works on the reader and on the world: Effie, despite her otherwise sensible aversion, can't help checking in on the fantasy epic; Archie's bizarre pomo experiment turns out to create accidents in Effie's "real" narrative frame (and, in an act of magic, erase them); and Nora, who is afraid of where Effie's story may lead, still finds herself listening compulsively.  It's worth noting that, at one level, poor senile Prof. Cousins has it right: '"But don't  you think, Archie," Prof. Cousins said mildly, "that really all literature is about the search for identity?"' (39) After all, by the end of the novel, Effie has figured out her identity (its a true Rube Goldberg contraption), and a remarkable number of people manage to live Happily Ever After.  But Prof. Cousins still puts the emphasis in the wrong place.  Emotionally Weird celebrates not the "search for identity," but the search for identity--the narrative process itself, not its (as here) sometimes ludicrous ends.