Realism Disavowed? Discourses of Memory and High Incarnations in Jackson's Dilemma

Text and Genre in Reconstruction: Effects of Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviours, Products and Institutions

“…There is an opposing line of argument that the distinctive quality of Jackson's Dilemma is the result, not of prediagnostic Alzheimer's disease, but of a deliberate and ground-breaking experimentation with novelistic form: that the apparent lapses in maintaining a consistent authorial point of view that we see in Jackson's Dilemma are deliberate and subtle artistic touches; the strangely inverse relationship between Jackson's prominence in the narrative and his importance to the advancement of the plot, the lack of anything in his fictional life that can genuinely be termed a dilemma, and his relative anonymity as a character, all reflect a deliberate decision on the part of the author to 'privilege the peripheral over the central' (Todd 2001). But in the best traditions of getting one's retaliation in first, I would point out that, in respect of the work on which I now report, the book was analysed at the linguistic rather than stylistic level, on the basis of a priori hypotheses derived from two decades of study of language breakdown in Alzheimer's disease.…”