Vanity Fea

Sometimes (as happens in Beckett's trilogy) a later work throws new light on, or reframes, the narrative technique as well as the story of previous related works. There is much talk these days in the narrative list of the "T.S. Eliot-influence-over-Shakespeare" kind of issue, actually the modernist influence on our readings of Richardson. (The issue began as an offshoot of the debate over first person versus third person narratives).

Does a later work rewrite its predecessors? Well, such rewritings are part of the postmodernist narrative consciousness, they have been happening all the time, but now they take place in elaborate and self-conscious ways, and are fed back on the process of composition and reading. These issues are fascinating for me—they lie at the fuzzy edge where retrospection meets retroaction, and the significance of previous discourse or previous works is modified après la lettre through a reframing which both transforms the previous work and leaves it untouched—most masterfully by bringing to a clearer light certain aspects which were already there, or perhaps had the potential  to be there. Such reframing, then, is a process of emergence.

Here is my contribution in answer to Annjeanette Wiese's note on one such reframing: