Aislinn Hunter, A Peepshow with Views of the Interior: Paratexts

Although not every reader will appreciate Aislinn Hunter's A Peepshow with Views of the Interior: Paratexts, those who get it will find it enormously rewarding and engaging.

For me, it joins Thomas Wharton's novel-ish but uncategorizable The Logogryph on a very short list of endlessly rereadable books, and I mean that as very high praise. I've had The Logogryph in my vehicle for almost a decade now, and I clamber back inside its pages whenever I have a spare ten minutes. I don't know that I'll remain quite so obsessed for as long with Hunter's book, but that's the kind of way I'm feeling about Peepshow.

Now, one of the bonkers things about Canadian literature is that it's not at all unusual to stumble across all kinds of amazing books that sometimes seem to have been written (or at least published) with the expectation that they won't find readers.

An awful lot can be said about how publishers are influenced by government funding streams, and about how much impact a grant can have on an author's freedom, but I don't want to get into all that. My point is, simply, that you have no idea what you can find when you grab something unheard-of from a shelf of small-press Canadian books.

That's not the case for everything written by Aislinn Hunter, I should say. Some of her books have been very successful, with awards and "Best Books" stickers from NPR, the Globe & Mail, and so on, and her novel Stay was made into quite a well-regarded movie. Mostly that's her fiction, as one might expect, but she has continued to publish volumes of poetry as well, and the publication trajectory of her fiction and poetry has gone both fairly well and reasonably conventionally. (Successful within this market, is what I mean, and I mean that to sound more complimentary than it might sound!)

And then there's Hunter's 2009 A Peepshow with Views of the Interior: Paratexts.

(The word "paratext" looks like a secret handshake, but it just refers to all those various sections of a book that aren't the book proper: forewords, lists of illustrations, acknowledgements, and so on.)

(Also, it's not that kind of peepshow; it's this kind of peepshow.) 

Early on, Hunter explains that to some extent, this book wouldn't exist without a chance remark by John Banville at a conference, after which she and a bottle of wine were able to ask him to elaborate: "Things are moral objects" (pp.15-16). Hunter modestly proposes this book as only the barest preliminary steps toward unpacking Banville's first two words, "There are—." In other words, Hunter is trying in these variously experimental interlocking essays to explore the meaning of things in their represented forms: the meaning of things, the thingness of meaning, the meaning of meaning, the thingness of things.

This isn't meant abstractly, or merely academically: "I fear that we are a generation who cannot noun the world. Look at the parts that make up a chair—splats, rails, struts; look at the architecture of the room you're seitting in, describe it specifically. We are losing language everyday—objects are being made generic" (p.17). The chair hit me particularly hard, maybe because I enjoy Antiques Roadshow and The Repair Shop; I recognize those words, but they're beyond my ken. (What's "ken," exactly? And why is it "ken"?)

Mostly we bump into and around the objects in our lives, finding only a few of them meaningful, and I think we all recognize this in ourselves. Partly this is a very reasonable survival strategy, being surrounded as we are by so many things, and as long as we make good choices, we can get along without being too harmed by this constant annihilation of potential meaning. (Congenitally, of course, we make bad choices. No point pretending otherwise.)

But one of Hunter's worries is that to some extent, we do the same with words, with books, with people: "We are what we read because in entering the mind of another we absorb their ideas. In this way, the book is not just a thing, it is an embodiment of human thought. A material form that contains a vital presence. Accordingly, books are enigmatic objects" (p.48). That's an older worry for me, and one that has long kept me edging toward panic about the future.

Peepshow looks more enigmatic than most books, perhaps, but actually I think that's only the clothes it's wearing. Clothing rarely marks the person wearing it as beyond hugging, if you'll pardon the metaphor, and for all its formal flash and play, Peepshow is an intimate, thoughtful, feeling-filled book.

Turning to the book's subtitle, Paratexts: this book consists entirely of paratexts. Every book has bits that aren't part of the book's main section, such as acknowledgements or an "About the Font"-style colophon, but the formal trick here is that Peepshow doesn't have a main section. There's no book proper, only an unwieldy number of often unnecessarily long paratextual bits.

The section labelled "Contents," for example, appears to list seven component sections by their titles, with a paragraph commenting or elaborating on each one, but none of the seven appear in the book. Each of the "Contents" paragraphs seems to have been sparked by the apparent title, but it's more like prose poetry than anything else.

There's even a fake letter (presumably it's fake) from someone willing to write a foreword, except that they've been so taken aback by being presented with a manuscript lacking a main section that they think the publisher has made a mistake.

These paratexts are all kind of fun, is what I'm saying, even though they're doggedly tackling richly complicated ideas. Although Peepshow does have the formal experimentation of postmodern nonfiction, it also has the intimacy that you can only get from personal essays, and it's this blend that left me loving it.

Sadly, I can't find any reviews online of this book, so I worry that it fell on publication into something like a void. The only academic discussion I can find is Christine Wiesenthal's lengthy, generous paywalled discussion in Word & Image, too, and Wiesenthal's piece came out in 2020, fully 11 years after the book's original appearance. While it's a thoughtful, intense analysis, with the volume of its 74 footnotes almost echoing Hunter's paratextual approach by filling two of the article's ten pages, reviews ought to be timely. Mind you, it's six years later that I'm here complaining non-academically that Wiesenthal was too late, so who among us etc.

Anyway: A Peepshow with Views of the Interior is a stunning book, and it deserves readers, more even than the readership generated by Wiesenthal's commitment across "[a] half dozen years of reading Hunter’s text with cohorts of graduate and advanced undergraduate students" (p.98). Because my copy says that the first edition was published in a print run of only 600 copies, it makes sense that few readers would find it, but I would say that the Palimpsest Press page for the book has a different cover design, so presumably more than 600 copies were eventually printed.

I hope that's true, because I hope you can find yourself a copy of this strange, brainy, emotional book. It's not for everyone, but if it's for you, it's a treasure.