The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Daughter! I Forbid Your Recurring Dream by James ChapmanTrevor Dodge
James Chapman. Daughter! I Forbid Your Recurring Dream! Fugue State Press, 2000. 217 pp. Paper: $8.00.
Readers of James Chapman’s four previous novels—particularly his 1995 Glass (Pray the Electrons Back to Sand), an astonishing critique and simultaneous indulgence of the tele-voyeurism of the Persian Gulf War—will again find themselves in the presence of a truly remarkable literary alchemist. If the adage holds true that an author’s books are in many ways her/his children, Chapman’s Daughter! is perhaps the brightest and most beautiful test-tube baby in his family of experimental novels. In detailing the otherwise ordinary life of our narrator Frieda from her preconception to her postmortem, Chapman blends elements of creation mythology, semiotics, religion, the artifice of music, and the banality of family life into a grand poetic prose that is as hauntingly disembodied as the best texts of Kathy Acker and as strikingly visual as any Paul Thomas Anderson film. In opening Daughter!, Frieda reminds us that “Believing what you cannot see, that is believing.” And while faith hangs in the balance as we trip through Frieda’s life and her forays into art, love, politics, self-actualization, and self-destruction, thematic justice seems to be among the least of Chapman’s concerns. It is Chapman’s ongoing experiment in his fiction—his exploration of the serious limitations on our ability to communicate in a largely inarticulate culture that has become dangerously obsessed with violence, veneer, and volume—that weighs most heavily. For as Frieda believes that she can “rescue us all out of the performance” of our parents’ lives by setting her own agendas and interpreting the “instructions my own way,” Chapman may too believe that his Daughter! can deliver Barnes & Noble-ized fiction from its current infantile regression by creating entirely new rules and setting different expectations. I believe with his newest enfant terrible that he may just be right. [Trevor Dodge]