3 Gupta: “‘Facts! Facts! Facts! Does Beethoven believe in notes? I make facts sing: glissandos, (.)ģa question which would somehow tend to indicate, as a mere preliminary, 2 that Shelley Jackson’s novel barely functions as this old-fashioned object once called a book used to… Well, it is a book all right, or at least bears every external resemblance to what we usually call a “book”.

Nora, the narrator of Jackson’s novel, is right (.) 2 Or, to be accurate, the doubling of a preliminary.In retaliation for what he feels is an insult, he raises a challenging question that inevitably resounds as a warning in the mind of Shelley Jackson’s reader : “What happened to textual analysis, if I may ask ?” (245) Thus forewarned, one had undoubtedly better eschew any facile answers and rest content with merely formulating questions instead-or trying to-like :ĢHOW TO UNREAD SHELLEY JACKSON’S HALF LIFE ? For, contrary to his opponent’s expectations, Gupta has no personal axe to grind and is himself no conjoined twin but a “singleton”. Theodore Gupta-a renowned albeit controversial literary critic defending a theory according to which Shakespeare themself was one of those “conjoined twins” whose existence history has up until now been ashamed of letting everybody know of-appears surprised, not to say hurt, to find out that the boundaries between his literary research and his personal life can be so easily contested and his integrity as a scholar so blatantly challenged. 1 First published in 2006 by HarperCollins.ġAt some point in Shelley Jackson’s Half Life, 1 the reader comes across a clipping Nora, the narrator, keeps in her “Siamese Twin Reference Manual”.

Half Life by Shelley Jackson