Facsimile : The Makings of the Similar in Graham Rawle’s Collage Novel Woman’s World

Abstract

This article reads Graham Rawle's collage novel Woman's World (2005) by utilizing the literal and metaphoric meanings of the facsimile as critical tools. Woman's World is an assemblage of circa 40,000 fragments cut and pasted from over a 1000 copies of British women's magazines of the early 1960s. These snippets are reproduced in facsimile and thus feature a jerky variety of font types, cases, and sizes. Woman's World does not only present a facsimile of its found graphic materials but it also studies, in my reading, the "facsimile" (similarizing, imitating, copying) qualities of gender identification, adopted discourses, (cross-)dressing, and the novel's own construction. The "varieties of similarity" within the facsimile that the novel presents relate to its thematic concerns. The visible outlines of the materials mark breaches in the concepts of gender and discourse as unified entities. The forms and degrees of facsimile also seem to pluralize, and relativize, the very idea of making similar and thus the very concept of identity—typographic, gender, or other.