‘Novel’ Reality Calling and Telepathy in Nicholas Royle’s Quilt
‘Novel’ Reality Calling and Telepathy in Nicholas Royle’s Quilt

Summary/Abstract: In The Uncanny Nicholas Royle defined Freud’s Unheimlichkeit and the experience of an “unreal reality” as “another thinking of beginning”. But if we are to take him at his word, “the beginning is already haunted” and we may wish to interpret his debut novel Quilt as spectrally haunted by the critic’s earlier theory. The essay, which is structured telephonically, since it refers both to Royle’s view of literature as telepathy (i.e. another form of ‘tele-’) and the beginning of the novel, reads Quilt from its “Afterward”, to unveil two main ghosts haunting Royle’s novel: that of Jacques Derrida and that of James Joyce. Quilt revisits his critical works in order to construct an alternative literary reality, in an experiment in which “spectrality cohabits with writing” (“Clipping”) and which Royle’s “Afterward” to the novel called for in the name of “reality literature”. As part of the author’s uncanny strategies of defamiliarization, which ultimately inform the question “what is the responsibility of ‘novel’ literature in today’s world and its sense of the urgency of the ‘real’?”, is an attempt to “strive for English to appear […] as a foreign language”. I will therefore also endeavour to show how Royle “makes trouble in and with language” as a disorienting move to plunge the reader into a spectral, virtual, telepathic world ̶ instanced by the narrator-protagonist’s increasing obsession with building an aquarium for the stingrays, whose bony spines are as serrated as Royle’s razor-sharp novelistic techniques.

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