“Incongruities, mysteries”: Freaks and Incongruous Wor(l)ds in Contemporary American Fiction
Abstract
From the freaks under the tent that displays “Incongruities, mysteries” in Rikki Ducornet’s The Jade Cabinet, to the weird and shocking Exorcist in her novel The Stain, by way of Patricia Eakins’s monstrous hungry girls who devour their way out of their mothers’ bellies, or of Pierre-Baptiste, the protagonist of her novel, a man who gives birth to fish-men from his mouth, the reader stops and stares in wonder, amazement, and, more often than not, in horror.
The narration places highly uncanny and incongruous creatures in fictive worlds that the reader can recognize as his or her own through an amazing and complex web of historical, geographical and literary references; Ducornet and Eakins’s fictions disturb the balance of the reader’s familiar world, and reveal the existence of multiple realities.
The breach that reveals the real’s Unheimlichkeit disturbs the reader’s understanding of the world, but also meaning itself. In Ducornet and Eakins’s fictions, new incongruous worlds go along with new incongruous words: they play with linguistic and lexical norms, with language, words and meaning.
This article aims at studying Rikki Ducornet and Patricia Eakins’s incongruous fictional representations, and what they reveal about the nature of the extra-fictional world, fiction and language. This study will focus on Patricia Eakins’s novel and collection of short stories (The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre-Baptiste and The Hungry Girls and Other Stories) and on Rikki Ducornet’s first five novels (The Stain, Entering Fire, The Jade Cabinet, The Fountains of Neptune and Phosphor in Dreamland).
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