the way of our club is surely the best. We actually do live in isolation from the world—which is to
say that we live in exactly the same way as all other clubs except that we do so more comfortably
and don’t have to pretend that we have open minds. Our beloved theory, the only true one in the
world, is the only one we want to hear about. Identity is the answer to everything.This visionary novel anticipated the present preoccupation with identity,
satirizing it but also taking it seriously and exploring its nature as a social
phenomenon.
The above enumeration is not an attempt to do justice to the works cited. It just
singles out some aspects that are relevant to the topic at hand to offer a glimpse,
however superficial, at how polyphonic and rich an echo of the identity
problematique resonates in fictional literature past and present.
In addition to informing the contents of works of fiction, identity is important in
two other ways in literature that deserve to be mentioned.
Style and identity
Writing fiction involves creating identifiable characters. Many authors
elaborately equip their protagonists with distinctive features that make them
come alive with their own voice. In drama, this is part of the script that tells the
actors how to speak their lines. In prose, authors employ stylistic techniques like
the ones forensic linguistics analyses, as discussed in Chapter 9.
Some characters use certain words and expressions, some always speak in
carefully crafted roundabout sentences, and some use interjections, never
finishing a sentence. Since real-life speech cannot be reproduced in writing—for
example, we hear but do not see the difference between a female and a male
voice—writers use symbolic techniques that evoke features of speech. Non-
standard spelling, such as, ‘it woz noffink’ for ‘it was nothing’, ‘wanna’ for
‘want to’, or ‘enry iggins’ for ‘Henry Higgins’ insinuate certain characteristics,
including ethnic, social, regional, and gender identity markers. What is known as
‘eye dialect’ is a stylistic device to portray a character’s local or educational
background. Skilful writers also know how to denote jargon and childlike
speech. Combining both in his novel Zazie in the Metro, Raymond Queneau
presents his foul-mouthed ten-year-old heroine by letting her say precociously,
‘gzactement’ for ‘exactement’ (exactly), ‘chsuis’ for ‘je suis’ (I am), ‘a rvois’ for