Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Eye am an other: (or Eye and Mee talk about their phobias)

by
April 1990, no. 119

The Mighty World of Eye: Stories/Anti-Stories by David Parker

Simon & Schuster/New Endeavour Press, $16.95 pb, 194 pp

Eye am an other: (or Eye and Mee talk about their phobias)

by
April 1990, no. 119

Fictions about academic life have always been about sex, but these days the sexiest thing to write about is theory. Fortunately for the writer who wants to write about both sex and theory, the equation between sexual and textual intercourses has excellent credentials in the poststructuralist canon. Followers of Barthes and Derrida have taken to the pleasures of the theoretical text with an eagerness aptly defined by the sexual metaphors they overindulge in. Others, less enamoured by theoretical discourses, have found that these provide an excellent target for parody and satire, and thus manage at once to partake in the playful intercourse and retain a critical, mocking distance. What tends to be forgotten, amidst all this textual cavorting, is that literary theory is a reasonably rigid intellectual discipline: playful though it may be, it is easy to get it all wrong!

At the centre of David Parker’s complex work (there, my theoretical innocence has been exposed - centre, work and author indeed!) are thirteen apparently autobiographical short fictions, held together by the name of  the main character, Roland Eye. But Roland, or Roly, is not the same person in each story. He is generally a writer or academic, more often than not he has a wife named Magda and two or three young children. The different Eyes are moreover connected by a common weakness – they suffer from some kind of delusion about themselves, about the world, or about their relationships to other characters.

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.