Leslie Scalapino; Defoe
Series No.: EL-E-PHANT 55
ISBN: 1-931243-44-1, Pages: 227
In Part I, Waking Life, the heroine, in love with James Dean, discovers herself in a desert pocked with fires in which the “henna man”—a drug dealer— is being carried in a white cocoon. And throughout Scalapino's work the reader is taken into a world where the written word creates “an event retrieved from so far back that it is separated from memory.”
The Review of Contemporary Fiction wrote of this book: “As a literary work, Defoe most closely resembles the sort of automatic writing pioneered by Breton and Soupault; as a political and philosophical critique of contemporary discourse, Defoe reveals a deep affinity with the works of Heidegger and Derrida. But ultimately—perhaps most controversially—it is a call to writers to liberate themselves from the limits of narrative and embrace a new kind of writing.”