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SAVU, LAURA E., Ph.D. Postmortem Postmodernists: Authorship and Cultural Revisionism in Late Twentieth-Century Narrative. (2006) Directed by Dr. Keith Cushman. 331 pp The past three decades have witnessed an explosion of narratives in which the literary greats are brought back to life, reanimated and bodied forth in new textual bodies. In the works herein examined—Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde and Chatterton, Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Colm Toíbín’s The Master, and Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence—the obsession with biography spills over into fiction, the past blends with the present, history with imagination. Thus they articulate, reflect on, and can be read through postmodern concerns about language and representation, authorship and creativity, narrative and history, rewriting and the posthumous. As I argue, late twentieth-century fiction “postmodernizes” romantic and modern authors not only to understand them better, but also to understand itself in relation to a past (literary tradition, aesthetic paradigms, cultural formations, etc.) that has not really passed. More specifically, these works project a postmodern understanding of the author as a historically and culturally contingent subjectivity constructed along the lines of gender, sexual orientation, class, and nationality. The immediate implications of my argument are twofold, and they emerge as the common threads linking the chapters that make up this study. First, to make a case for the return of the author into the contemporary literary space is to acknowledge that the postmodern, its antihumanist bias notwithstanding, does not discount the human. Author fictions bring life and work into creative realignment, affirming and celebrating human creativity as the best means of illuminating and exploring the human, “all-too-human” experience shared by authors and readers. Second, to emphasize the kinship between rewriting and the posthumous is to reveal the classic’s capacity to renew itself and take on new meanings in different contexts. If, as J.M. Coetzee maintains, “criticism is duty-bound to interrogate the classic” (16), then author fictions assume some of the prerogatives of criticism: through the appropriation and implicit interrogation of the classic, they ensure its survival. Thus by fictionalizing celebrated biographies, within or alongside related bibliographies, late twentieth-century writers create an intriguing genealogy for themselves and their own cultural moment. POSTMORTEM POSTMODERNISTS: AUTHORSHIP AND CULTURAL REVISIONISM IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY NARRATIVE by Laura E. Savu A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2006 Approved by Committee Chair © 2006 by Laura E. Savu For my parents and brother, with love. ii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair Committee Members Date of Acceptance by Committee Date of Final Examination iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Over these years, a number of teachers and mentors have guided and encouraged me to pursue my interest in the intellectual and cultural exchanges carried out by contemporary writers with their famous predecessors. I particularly wish to thank Professor Keith Cushman for his unfailing support and valuable advice offered throughout the writing and rewriting process of my dissertation. I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Christian Moraru for being an attentive and perspicuous critic of my efforts to theorize the genre of author-fictions as well as to place these works in an ongoing intellectual tradition. I also benefited enormously from the spirited discussions both in and out of Mary Ellis Gibson’s feminist theory seminar, Robert Langenfeld’s course on James Joyce, and Hephzibah Roskelly’s course on romanticist- pragmatist rhetoric. Last but not least, I would like to gratefully acknowledge the Kates Dissertation Fellowship, which I was honored to receive in the spring of 2004. iv PREFACE WHEN THE DEAD AWAKEN: THE MIRAGE OF THE GREATS IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION “It is only after death that we will enter our life and come alive, oh, very much alive, we posthumous people.” (Nietzsche, Gay Science 365) “The mighty dead return, but they return in our colors, and speaking in our voices.” (Bloom, Anxiety 141) This study originated in my fascination with the literary “afterlives” of canonical authors in recent, primarily British, but also American fiction, and my need to grasp not only what would be involved in narrating such lives but also why contemporary writers might be drawn to their predecessors, to “the mighty dead.” Propelled by these forces, I began a journey of discovery that many other readers and writers were making in the last decades of the twentieth century. In the course of this journey, I encountered one of the most dynamic and productive literary forms, life writing, and found myself reading intensively about the fictional uses of historical authors, the trope of the posthumous, theories of authorship, the practice of rewriting, as well as the vexed relationship between postmodernism and other aesthetic and cultural paradigms. The contemporary discourse of “author fictions” (a term I borrow from Aleid Fokkema) comprises a tight knot of all these issues and relationships that make it a rich field of critical intervention. And since “[t]he lives of the great come to us overlaid by interpretation” (Batchelor 5), the challenge for me has been to trace recurrent concerns and v patterns in these variegated forms of life writing. Author fictions, as understood here, constitute a recent supplement to a long history of life writing, broadening the space in which the writing subject is inscribed and opening this space out into the reader’s (or the pseudo- biographer’s) context. A sub-genre of what Naomi Jacobs has labeled “fiction biography”—“a focused, fully fictional treatment of a limited period in the life of a single historical figure” (xix)—the literary form herein examined can be variously labeled “fictions of the author,” “novels about authors,” or “author fictions,” which include ventriloquist biographies, or pseudo-memoirs such as The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, and those narratives in which the biographical subject is a character at a remove (as in Geoff Dyer’s memoir about D.H. Lawrence). Taking my cue from Virginia Woolf’s introduction to her topic “women and fiction” in A Room of One’s Own, I define this category of texts in the following terms: authors and what they are, as well as were like; authors and the works they create; authors and the fiction written about them. Because “somehow all these are inextricably mixed together” (Room 3), I too will consider them in that light, exploring the fictional ground where historical reality is transformed by the workings of the imagination, and where “granite and rainbow,” the solid truth of fact and the elusive truth of personality, meet in a happy “marriage” (Woolf, “The New Biography” 150). My topic fits in with a heightened interest in the so-called genre of “the author as character”—a complex production of fiction or fictions lodged at the “crossroads between the historical novel, biography, and the Künstlerroman” (Franssen and Hoenselaars 18). After mapping these “tentative borders,” Paul Franssen and Ton Hoenselaars, the editors of The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature (1999) recognized that “a huge, differentiated field remains as a subject for investigation” and that vi “few have undertaken this kind of research in any systematic way” (20). This study strives to do just that: tease out the literary, cultural, and theoretical implications of “author fictions” with respect to three broad issues—authorship, the posthumous, and rewriting—that arise from considering such works through contemporary critical lenses. As I argue, late twentieth- century fiction “postmodernizes” romantic and modern authors, from Novalis and Chatterton, to Dickens and Wilde, Woolf and Lawrence, so as to understand them better, but also to understand itself in relation to a past (literary tradition, aesthetic paradigms, cultural formations) that has not really passed. Because each of these author-characters is a prominent figure of the romanticist, realist, or modernist canon, my investigation will focus on the ways in which culturally influential authorship paradigms have been transformed in the context of postmodernism. More specifically, the cultural revisionism contemporary writers effect by fictional means projects a postmodern understanding of the author as a situated subjectivity constructed along the lines of gender, sexual orientation, class, and nationality. But how do we account for the enduring interest in the lives of the literary greats? In Joseph Heller’s posthumously published novella, Portrait of the Artist, as an Old Man (2000), an aging novelist, whose last name, Pota, is an acronym for the “portrait of the artist,” is desperately seeking a subject for a final masterpiece. One of his attempts involves recasting Tom Sawyer as an aspiring novelist in search of guidance and mentorship. In another sense, of course, Tom is also the character in search of his creator, Mark Twain. Both the account of Tom’s journey through the “literary hall of fame of America” and the lecture that Pota delivers on what he refers to “The Literature of Despair” present us with biographical facts about American as well as British writers who enjoyed early successes and who then fell out of favor. Pota insists that his lecture’s title does not refer to “the tormented and despairing people in familiar novels,” characters like Madame Bovary, Bartleby the Scrivener, Jay Gatsby, etc., vii but to “literary works about the authors who wrote such novels and what an examination of the lives of these authors reveals” (162-63).

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