"You can be your own prophet.” Remembering the Scriptural in Will Self’s The Book of Dave

and problematises the constraining and constructive dimensions of what Wesley Kort
labelled “scriptures”, i.e., of special-status, but non-transcendent texts. In Self’s novel,
scriptures display both their coercive/destructive and supportive/preserving potential,
released, as I want to argue, when scripture’s partiality is (respectively) forgotten or
remembered. Making the role of memory pivotal for the functioning of scripture (and
drawing on Charles E. Scott’s conceptualisation of memory’s complexities), the article
claims that scriptures can be positively transformational when they are kept afloat, i.e.,
when they are guarded against oblivion but also maintained in a mercurial state.