Pastiche and Reprise

The generic heterogeneity of Seth’s work conceals a hidden unity so far overlooked by critics: it lies in a deliberate and systematic use of reprise. Underlining the importance of Seth’s poems for an understanding of his overall literary strategies, I argue that he situates himself in a tradition of Light Verse in which mimetic practices, notably pastiche, play a foundational role. A cross-generic study of Seth’s work unveils a crucial oscillation between the fear and freedom attendant upon reinvesting a tradition. While his poems tend to reverberate superficial echoes, his novels do not reduce to a mechanical or nostalgic repetition of always already written texts, but dramatize instead the postcolonial author’s ambivalent relation to F.R. Leavis’s “Great Tradition.”