Ann Quin’s Berg and Stewart Home’s 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess: Schizophrenic Text-Types

In Berg (1964), Ann Quin develops an idiomatic style blending non-linear narration, multiple viewpoints, and stream of consciousness, marked by a poetic lyricism and hallucinogenic registration, in order to explore such topical themes as the search for identity, the influence of the past on the present, and intergenerational pressures. Stewart Home’s novel 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (2002) revisits some of the idiosyncratic features of Quin’s poetics sub specie Home’s parody of literary post-postmodernism. Philosophically, Home’s detouring towards Quin takes place through the prism of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, and also enables a reading of Quin’s schizophrenic writing in terms of its critical function. The essay argues that Home’s revisitation of Quin’s novel within a broader framework of experimental activism and that both the authors’ novels perform ventriloquist acts designed to deconstruct a certain type of literary subjectivity and the novel form itself.