Overview

This work is not literature or criticism, but a Hebridean satellite of both, likely to transform the conventional understanding of neither. The author himself declares his intention to "produce a discourse which the reader finds it hard to classify. Is it fiction? Is it literary criticism? If neither, what is it?" In an envoi which heaps confusion upon confusion while ostensibly revealing his multiple sources, he claims kinship with Bernard Sharratt, Umberto Eco and Stanislaw Lem, but refuses to conceal his inferiority to all three: Crackpot Texts is very like Sharratt's The Literary Labyrinth, a mixture of humour and politics, with the politics removed; it is also like that combination of humour and literary theory, Eco's Misreadings, without the literary theory; and it is consciously indebted to Lem's compound of humour and idiocy, Imaginary Magnitude, in all but its failure to amuse.