'You can be your own prophet.' Remembering the Scriptural in Will Self's The Book of Dave.

Abstract

Tis article focuses on the ways Will Self’s novel e Book of Dave (2006) evokes and problematises the constraining and constructive dimensions of what Wesley Kort labelled “scriptures”, i.e., of special-status, but non-transcendent texts. In Self’s novel, scriptures display both their coercive/destructive and supportive/preserving potential, released, as I want to argue, when scripture’s partiality is (respectively) forgotten or remembered. Making the role of memory pivotal for the functioning of scripture (and drawing on Charles E. Scott’s conceptualisation of memory’s complexities), the article claims that scriptures can be positively transformational when they are kept afloat, i.e., when they are guarded against oblivion but also maintained in a mercurial state.