Visions of Excess: Closure, Irony, and the Thought of Comunity in Ivan VladislavicŽs The Restless Supermarket

Abstract

In The Restless Supermarket (2001), Ivan Vladislavic invests Aubrey Tearle, his first-person narrator, with a hermeneutic sensibility. This is, of course, evident in the fact that Tearle is a proofreader, albeit a retired one, who is dedicated matter in its proper order (42), and whose principal aim in life is determine species of error, and to assist in eliminating them (64). In this endeavour, he assumes that his linguistic standards are absolute and indisputable, rather than arbitrary and conventional and therefore provisional and contingent. Tearle's obsession with standards is not purely linguistic, though. Throughout the novel, Vladislavic collapses the distinction between his protagonist's linguistic and his social proofreading, that is, the obsessive manner in which Tearle detects 'errors' in the world around him as he goes about his daily business. In doing the latter, Tearle exemplifies the hermeneutic syndrome outlined in the epigraph to Part One of the novel, drawn from William Hazlitt: He reads the world . . . like an edition of some old work which he is preparing for the press, only to make emendations in it, and correct the errors that have inadvertently slipt in. In the narrative itself, this form of social reading is evident not only in Tearle's interactions with his companions at the Cafe Europa, whom he routinely proofreads (41), but also (and more obviously), in what he calls the big 'clean-up' (83) or his public-service proofreading (107), which involves detecting language