John Banville's "monstrous child": freedom and inheritance in Shroud.

John Banville has described his novel Shroud (2002) - a fictionalised re-imagining of the 1988 scandal of Paul de Man, whose war-time publications for a collaborationist journal were discovered after his death - as his "monstrous child" that only he could love. This essay turns to Derrida's thoughts on monstrosity, and in particular his framing of the future-to-come as an unforeseeable reckoning between Nietzsche and Rousseau, whose approaches to human freedom and authenticity remain philosophically irreconcilable. Shroud engages with these two inheritances on a thematic level, bringing them into conversation through the characters of Vander and Cass. The interruption of intergenerational love and the prospect of a child between them, however, makes Derridean monstrosity - that more properly deconstructive trope that opens to the future by unearthing traumatic inheritances from the past - into a structuring principle, and the means by which we might best understand the novel itself as a "monstrous child". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]