Simon’s Song is a self-reflexive creative-critical text composed of journal entries, research notes, and various other records written by fictional undergraduate student Simon Goodsworth, and compiled by an anonymous archivist. Through the organized presentation of Simon’s writings, there appears a fragmented narrative which follows Simon as he joins his university’s musical theatre club and becomes absorbed in planning and research for a Master’s thesis applying poststructuralist theory to the study of musical theatre. Simon’s research and original insights into the work of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari destabilize the hidden structures implicit in his perception of his self and his world. Through his writing Simon stages explorations of the ubiquity of performativity, the relationship between life and writing, and the inescapability of what Derrida calls “différance,” the precondition of language and meaning in general. Implicit in Simon’s Song is a recognition that each act of engagement with this text is an uniterable performance. Were it not for this recognition of provisionality, it would be safe to assert that Simon’s Song is, above anything else, a thesis about itself.
