Attention to What? The Poetics, Ethics and Attentional Economies in Dave Eggers’s The Parade

Abstract

Dave Eggers’s The Parade (2019a) presses on the ethical and sociopolitical nuances of the attention paid to sacralised individuals by two company operatives as they build a road in an unidentified Third-World country. The novel starts by contrasting their opposite responses to the ethical demands of the precarious indigenous population along the axis of inattention and care that frames the novel. Named as “Four” and “Nine” to protect themselves from unwanted attention, they are instructed to echo the company’s attentional policy by resisting their will to give an ethical response in the face of the radical vulnerability of the locals, which proves to be increasingly difficult. This difficulty is paralleled by Eggers’s choice of an apparently straightforward narrative form that relies on the contrast between attentional styles for the construction of narrative tension. Aesthetic and ethical tension add to the seeming straightforwardness of Eggers’s style to add layers of intertextual references and lyrical nuances that are only available to particularly attentive readers, or readers who care for literary detail. As the story demands that readers swing from attention to form to attention to content, Eggers’s novel also interrogates readers regarding the ethical dimension of their aesthetic response to literary texts.