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3. The Shaggå

A debate both playful and erudite has always surrounded the question of the origins of the Shaggå. Several authors’ names occur in concurrence from which it must be determined who invented the form and who, subsequently, immediately afterward, materialized its beauty. This competition has no concrete base; its motive can be found neither in susceptibilities, nor acts of disloyalty. It is, quite simply, one of the poetic artifices by which the genre expresses its very, very great particularity.

The very first collection of Shaggås is signed Infernus Iohannes, the pseudonym behind which dozens of creators or post-exoticist collectives could have concealed themselves. Its title is Mirrors of the Cadaver; it came to light in 1979. Not much later, Myriam’s Silence by Jean Wolguelam (1979) and The Cold Princes by Maria Echenguyen (1980) appeared.

These three works established the rules of the genre, without which it would have spent much time groping about for a sense of itself. From its birth, the Shaggå has reached an unsurpassable level of perfection, a maturity that does not suffer from childish illness. Mirrors of the Cadaver is not an experimental prototype, but a work that belongs to the domain of post-exoticist academism. The authors who, as a result, have chosen the Shaggå as a mode of expression have not felt the need to alter any of its characteristics. To the contrary, they have imitated the canonical models, introducing no variants besides the inoffensive, under no pretext do they diverge from the path, ever vigilant to avoid betraying Infernus Iohannes.

A Shaggå always breaks down into two distinct textual masses: one part, a series of seven sequences rigorously identical in length and tone; the other, a commentary, in which the style and dimensions are free.