A RECENT MENTAL GEOGRAPHY OF FICTION:
A RECENT MENTAL GEOGRAPHY OF FICTION:

Summary/Abstract: Laura Hird does not need to struggle free from convention because she is Born Free. The Desperadoes, born into the defiance of the previous nineteen-century fairy-tale tradition, took the death of chronological causality and love interests for granted; they put into practice what Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot had preached one literary movement before them. Laura Hird is an After-Desperado, belonging to what might aptly be called the literary movement of the Born Free Novelists. How did Desperadoes manage to be different from Modernists? By focussing on suspense/ the ‘telling’ instead of the ‘told’. Their suspense was a rediscovery of the fairy-tale in a way. The author felt he had to feed his reader a story, but, technique-addicted as he was, and born from stream-of-consciousness (meaning highly intellectual) parents, he could not help himself: he told his story in a tricky/surprising/complicated way. The Desperado suspense focused more on ‘how’/’the telling’ than on ‘what’/ ‘the told’. Laura Hird’s after-Desperado thought-suspense feeds the reader a closing incident (the parents are together again, Joni will get a job and leave, but Jake, still a child, only wants to feel ‘safe’), while she plants a question mark in his mind. The question is a general one. It is aimed at the fate of mankind. Laura Hird is far beyond dystopia. Her heroes are and her readers should be beyond fear. Desperadoes ended on a threatening note. After-Desperadoes like Laura Hird are beyond the point where the novel debated whether the tale should have an ending (hope) or not. What Born Free tells us is that the fairy-tale is dead and, such as we are, we have survived it, we are free from hope, and the only thing left for us to do now is make the best of telling ogre-tales in cold blood.

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