Tracing Partial Enunciations in Robert Alan Jamieson’s Da Happie Laand

Contemporary literature pursues within the anxieties of the present, a paradigm for being in this world. Robert Alan Jamieson negotiates a similar initiative amidst the collage of narratives comprising Da Happie Laand. Matters political, social and cultural mingle indiscriminately in this novel, proposing a complex multiplicity that relies on the reader for its articulation of plot arcs, themes, and resolutions. The co-creative approach adopted by Jamieson bears affinity with Félix Guattari’s writings on ‘partial enunciations’. Deferred and subsequently entrusted to readers, the arrangement of meaning becomes a creative endeavor. Tracing familiar uncertainties through partial enunciations, therefore, invokes not just another inspired reading of the status quo, but a creative confrontation with the lack inherent in social and personal expressions. The plights of the present, then, find mediation in the midst of yet another narrative; the stories told this time, however, are laced with the potency of multiplicity and the promise of emancipation.