This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Fools and heroes The changing representation of the novelist-character Darling, Rachel Jane Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 28. Sep. 2021 1 FOOLS AND HEROES: THE CHANGING REPRESENTATION OF THE NOVELIST-CHARACTER by RACHEL DARLING Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy KINGS COLLEGE LONDON SCHOOL OF ENGLISH MAY 2014 2 THESIS ABSTRACT This thesis analyses the representation of the novelist as a fictional character in British and Irish literary fiction from the late 1920s, when the character first began to appear concurrently in the work of numerous authors, until the end of the twentieth-century. In the twenty-first- century the character has retained its prominence, which is why selected supplementary nov- els written post-2000 have been included in the early chapters (although not the case studies) in order to demonstrate ongoing critical issues and suggest opportunities for further study. The most recently written novel to appear centrally – that is as a case study – is William Boyd’s Any Human Heart – which was actually published in 2002. However, as Logan Mountstuart was originally conceived as part of Boyd’s 1998 Nat Tate: An American Artist, 1928-1960, I believe that Logan’s inclusion is justified within the twentieth-century time frame. Although the specific novelist-character (as opposed to the more general artist- character) does feature within the nineteenth-century British novel, notably in Charles Dick- ens’s David Copperfield (1850) and George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), the character only begins to appear with increased regularity at the end of the 1920s with Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928) and W. Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale (1930). The aim of this thesis is to interrogate the variety of metafictional purposes and metaphorical which the novelist-character can serve within the narrative, and to explore a range of critical issues that the presence of this character raises. This thesis also argues that the specific novelist-character is subject to a more cynical portrayal than the idealised artist-character/hero found in eight- eenth and nineteenth-century novels, and examines causes behind this contrasting treatment. In order to qualify as a novelist-character, the character in question must identify or define themself explicitly as a novelist rather than as any other kind of writer or artist. They must also demonstrate evidence of (or a preoccupation with) undertaking the process of writing a novel, and awareness of their position as a novelist. Many of the novelist-characters looked at are also the first person narrators of their novels; however it does not necessarily follow that all first person narrators are also novelist-characters. Although first person narrators may be seen to be telling a story, the novelist-narrators selected for this thesis explicitly identify as novelists, and repeated references are made throughout the novel to their own writing. In sev- eral instances they also appear to author some or all of the narrative in which they feature. Post-WWI, instances of generally artistic protagonists diminish, whilst the novelist-character 3 begins to proliferate and continues to do so throughout the twentieth-century and into the twenty-first. This thesis will look at a range of historical, critical, and cultural reasons to sug- gest why this shift – from artist to novelist-character – occurs and why the novelist-character comes to be represented in such a distinct way. Depictions of the novelist-character are seen to be influenced by various, often contradictory, theoretical and historical thinking on the fig- ure of the novelist, in comparison with the figures of the artist, the author, and the writer. These are explored in Chapters One and Two. Preliminary study indicated that there was no true progressive chronological deterioration of the novelist-character. Although appearances of the character in the 1980s-90s are seen as increasingly ambiguous, the character’s representation does not necessarily become more negative towards the end of the century. Instead it becomes apparent that the character was, from the outset, typically depicted with derision – in fact the earliest novel looked at, Hux- ley’s Point Counter Point, contains one of the most negative portraits. Whilst this does not preclude the impact of certain historical factors upon the portrayal of the novelist-character it dictated a thematic rather than chronological organisation of the case studies, which make up Chapters Three, Four, and Five. The scope of this study, along with the lack of preceding work on the analysis of the novelist-character, has necessitated the wide range of novels ex- plored within this thesis. Each of the case study chapters focuses on a particular purpose which the novelist-character is seen to serve within the novel and examines it along with similar or comparative utilisations of the character. The three different aspects of the novelist- character’s function explored in Chapters Three-Five are (i) autobiographical – in which the writer utilises their own biographical material in the depiction of the novelist-character; (ii) framing device – in which the novelist-character is employed as part of a metafictional frame narrative; (iii) metaphorical – in which the novelist-character is seen to perform a role which acts as a metaphor for the function of the novelist. 4 CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 6 CHAPTER I: FOOLS AND HEROES I. Introduction 7-21 II. What is a Novelist? 22-45 III. Paper Authors 46-69 IV. Conclusion 70-73 CHAPTER II: THE NOVELIST’S FUNCTION(S) I. Introduction 74-86 II. Depictions of the Novelist 87-98 III. Writing the Female Novelist 99-112 IV. The Novelist (The Marketplace) and The Reader 113-125 V. Conclusion 126-128 CHAPTER III: THE USES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY I. Introduction 129-134 II. A Convenient Ventriloquist’s Dummy? 135-150 III. Self Divisions Cause 151-165 IV. Written Out 166-180 V. Conclusion 181-183 CHAPTER IV: THE NOVELIST-CHARACTER AS FRAMING DEVICE I. Introduction 184-187 II. The Truth Doesn’t Matter Any More 188-198 III. Only Partially Perceived 199-208 5 IV. Looking for the Outlines of a Story 209-222 V. A Self-Evident Sham 223-237 VI. Conclusion 238-240 CHAPTER V: THE ROLE PLAYING NOVELIST-CHARACTER I. Introduction 241-244 II. Wise Detectives? 245-252 III. There Were No Obituaries 253-261 IV. I Write This Sitting in the Kitchen Sink 262-269 V. Nailed on Paper 270-278 VI. Have You Been Playing Me All Along? 279-288 VII. We Lie For a Living 289-298 VIII. Conclusion 299-301 CONCLUSION 302-309 BIBLIOGRAPHY 310-328 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Richard Kirkland, without whose patience and guidance this project would not have been possible. I would also like to extend thanks to Professors Clare Pettitt, Max Saunders, and Cora Kaplan for their comments and advice at various stages of the writing process. Also to Hilary Davies of the RLF, and to King’s College London for providing me with the opportunity, and also for conference funding. Thanks to all my friends and colleagues at Foyles Bookshop, but particularly Gary Perry, Varrick Zed, Benjamin Lovegrove, and Patrick Wray, for their sustained interest, help, and suggestions. A special thank you to Janette Cross, for her understanding and invaluable sup- port, and to Jenny Thompson for all the commas! For my parents and my sister, to whom I owe much and more. Finally to Tom, for being my reason to keep going. 7 CHAPTER I: FOOLS AND HEROES I. INTRODUCTION Put a novelist into the novel. He justifies aesthetic generalizations, which may be interesting – at least to me. He also justifies experiment. Specimens of his work may illustrate other possible or impossible ways of telling a sto- ry. And if you have him telling parts of the same story as you are, you can make a variation on the theme.1 This thesis came about through an interest in novels of an explicitly metafictional nature, coupled with the recognition that presenting the novelist as a protagonist or character enabled the author to utilise the character as a metafictional device. Through further reading it became apparent that the novelist-character could be seen as performing a variety of differing roles within the novel; the appearance of this character type in numerous guises across a broad sample of twentieth-century British and Irish fiction conveyed both its versatility and diversi- ty.