Picturizing narrative innovation: a bird’s eye view of hypervisualized intertextuality in Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English

Abstract

Via the use of ‘seeing’ strategies (pictographization) rather than just ‘telling’ strategies (textualization), Booker-prize shortlister, Stephen Kelman, in Pigeon English, successfully synergizes multimodality to inscribe and create a dual trope of active and passive visuality – of both ‘seeing’, and of being ‘watched’. Kelman’s intertextual strategies of narrative construction, while obviously simple and overt in their taxonomic variety, including, for example, Adaptation, Retro, Appropriation, Parody, Pastiche and Simulation (according to D’Angelo’s ‘rhetoric of intertextuality’, 2010), also function in subtly complex ways, inevitably entailing a covert, discoursed, hybridized, triumvirate of re-coded, textographic strategies including, but not limited to, multimodal-genre mixing, multisensory visual Englishization, and picturized meaning. The author argues that Pigeon English encapsulates an innovative polychromatic, 21st-century literary vision which is ultimately multisensory: visualized, auralized, and textualized.