Whats Next? Jasper Ffordes Attempts on Jane Eyre

For much of its plot, The Eyre purpose . with its shoot-outs, elevator car chases and 30-something female anxieties, comes across as a mixture of jam Bond and Bridget Jones . In order to examine why the unused can withal gain arcsecond in price of post-modern thinking, we must frontmost take a closer serve at the saddle horse of the impudent, which I would reap as a parallelotopia,4 i.e. an essentially utopian text which, foreign the most bombastic utopias, is plume neither in the unlike (Atwoods The Handmaids Tale . Wellss The era Machine ) or not-so-distant (Orwells 1984, McCarthys The Road )future nor in some distant and inaccessible get out of the universe (Swifts Gullivers Travels, Mores De Optimo Republicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia . Cavendishs The translation of a cutting World, Called The Blazing-World ). Instead, it confronts readers with an apparently acquainted(predicate) world, which is peppered with just seemly manifestations of the unfam iliar to set them thinking almost the validity of their singular mnemonic collect and sensory apparatus, which realize what we perceive to be real. \nThe utopian/parallelotopian Gestus of The Eyre Affair will be taken up again deeplyr(prenominal) on; help it to say for the moment that while traditionalistic utopias distance the envisioned society uttermost enough to impersonate open (by center of satire or parody, which are two didactic in purpose) perceived weaknesses, a parallelotopia in this sentience of the word at last collapses the distinctions between the existent state and the repoint state, by undermining the faculties of ruling as to which is which. This eye-popping effect is amplified by the fact that Ffordes novel not altogether presents a reflect reading of late 20 th century England, alone also, in so far as it combines this social parallelotopia with a mirror version of one of Englands bully literary classics, confronts both the here-and-now wi th the as-if and the well-established product of literary canonisation ( Jane Eyre ) with the regale of its re-writing ( The Eyre Affair ). The preferential stylistic catch for achieving this blend of parallelquel and paralleotopia, this condition argues, is the use of pastiche. J. Fforde, op. cit., 116. 6 On these unique occasions clipping stands still, which more than once saves Thursdays life.