View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository BLACK BLOOD/RED INK: FACT, FICTION, AND AUTHORIAL SELF- REPRESENTATION IN VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS! , MARGUERITE DURAS’ L’AMANT DE LA CHINE DU NORD , AND PHILIP ROTH’S OPERATION SHYLOCK: A CONFESSION David C. Phillips A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of Chapel Hill 2012 Approved by: Dr. John McGowan Dr. Inger Brodey Dr. Erin Carlston Dr. Eric Downing Dr. Diane Leonard ©2012 David C. Phillips ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT DAVID PHILLIPS: Black Blood/Red Ink: Fact, Fiction, and Authorial Self-Representation in Vladimir Nabokov’s Look at the Harlequins! , Marguerite Duras’ L’Amant de la Chine du Nord , and Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock: A Confession (Under the direction of John McGowan) In the past several decades, a new class of hybrid texts seems to have emerged: texts characterized by both 1) autobiographical referentiality, and 2) intertextual relations to earlier fictive works by the author. Such texts pose a variety of problems for their readers as well as for literary critics and theorists—problems revolving around a number of inter-related issues that coalesce around two primary questions: 1) How are such works to be read and interpreted?, and 2) What do the author’s strategies of self-representation in such works reveal about the relations between their fiction and their lives? Answers to the first question may be arrived at through a consideration of various theories of fiction as both a discursive mode and a distinct literary genre—particularly the theory of fiction advanced by Gregory Currie in The Nature of Fiction , which defines fiction as a communicative act according to issues of authorial intentionality. Answers to the second question depend upon particular studies of individual works, informed and contextualized by answers to the first question. The present project is a comparative analysis of three such texts—Vladimir Nabokov’s Look at the Harlequins! (1974), Marguerite Duras’ L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991), and Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993)—which have been specifically selected for both the remarkable similarities in the situations that gave rise to them as well as iii the specific strategies and techniques employed; and the significant differences in their respective authors’ understandings of a) the nature of the self, how it is to be represented and on what authority; and b) the precise inter-relations between the autobiographical and the fictive. Through such a study we might gain greater insight into the range of possibilities inherent in the single common strategy of composing a hybrid text characterized by both autobiographical or autobiographically-derived self-representation, and intertextuality with respect to the author’s own prior works. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank all of the very many people who have made this project, and my continued and continuing academic career, possible…. My dissertation director, Dr. John McGowan, and the members of my committee, Dr. Inger Brodey, Dr. Erin Carlston, Dr. Eric Downing, and Dr. Diane Leonard, whose patience and flexibility have never been taken for granted. Dr. Lowell Frye and Dr. Sarah Hardy of Hampden-Sydney College, whose continued interest and support, as both teachers and friends, particularly over the last year, helped me to persevere. My loving and incredibly supportive family—my mother, Mrs. Eulalie S. Phillips; my sister, Jennifer Phillips Swift, and brother-in-law, Nathan Swift; my brother, Jonathan Phillips, and sister-in-law, Michelle Younts Phillips; and my parents-in-law, Greg and April Crouse—who have always been there to encourage me. All of my many and dear friends, who have always believed in me. And most of all, my beautiful and wonderful wife, Emily Elisabeth Crouse Phillips, without whose steadfast love, unwavering faith, and selfless support I would not and could be who I am or do what I do. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I. THEORETICAL AND CRITICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS! , MARGUERITE DURAS’ L’AMANT DE LA CHINE DU NORD , AND PHILIP ROTH’S OPERATION SHYLOCK: A CONFESSION …………………………………………………………………………..1 I. Look at the Harlequins! and the “Problem(s)” of Autobiographical, Intertextual Metafictions………………………………………………………………3 II. Autofiction, and the Blending of Autobiography and Fiction……………………...5 III. Separating Fact and Fiction: On “Fictive” vs. “Natural” Discourse……………..12 IV. Fiction as Make-Believe: Gregory Currie’s The Nature of Fiction ……………...21 A. Making Believe and the Role of Authorial Intentionality………………...21 B. Reasonable Inference and “Background”………………………………...26 C. The Signaling of Authorial Intentions: “Background” and/as Paratext………………………………………………………………………29 D. Fiction and the Real: “Dual Referentiality” and “Multi- Intentionality”………………………………………………………………..35 V. Basis for a Comparative Analysis: Situational and Textual Similarities…………………………………………………………………………...43 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………….48 II. THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS AND WHAT VOLODYA FOUND THERE: LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS! —VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S ANTI-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL INTERTEXTUAL METAFICTION …………………………………………………………………….50 I. “A Deliberate Travesty”: The Synthetic Nature of Look at the Harlequins! ...........53 vi A. Antithesis: Look at the Harlequins! and Field’s Biographical Project………………………………………………………….54 B. Thesis: Nabokov’s Autobiographical Self-Representations: Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1966) and Strong Opinions (1973)………………………………………………………56 C. Synthesis: The Dual Referentiality of Look at the Harlequins! ..................65 II: V(l)adim(ir) V(l)adim(or)ovich N(abokov)………………………………………66 A. The Original of Vadim: A (Brief) Comparative Biography, From Russian Childhood to European Exile………………………………...68 B. Looking-Glass Library: A Comparative Bibliography…………………...71 Tamara ……………………………………………………………….73 Pawn Takes Queen …………………………………………………...74 Plenilune ……………………………………………………………..75 Camera Lucida (Slaughter in the Sun) ………………………………76 The Red Top Hat ……………………………………………………..76 The Dare ……………………………………………………………..77 See Under Real ………………………………………………………81 Esmeralda and Her Parandrus ………………………………………82 Dr. Olga Repnin ……………………………………………………...84 Exile from Mayda ………………………………………………….....84 A Kingdom by the Sea : Echoes of Lolita and Vadim Vadimovich’s Autobiographical Fictions……………………………85 Ardis : “The Myth of Cardinal Points” and “The Texture of Time”……………………………………………………………...93 III: “That Other Writer”: The Real Life of Vladimir Vladimorovich, Écrivain ………………………………………………………………………………97 vii A. Intimations of the Author…………………………………………………97 B. Inclined Beams of Pale Light: Authorial Cameos and Metaleptic Insertions………………………………………………………101 IV. Nabokov’s Strategy of Oblique Self-Representation: Nabokov’s Postmodern Novel of the Transcendent Self……………………………………….108 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………...113 III. ÉCRIT EN ABÎME: L’AMANT DE LA CHINE DU NORD— MARGUERITE DURAS’ INTERTEXTUAL FICTIONALIZED AUTOBIOGRAPHY …………………………………………..…………………..115 I. “ L’Amant Recommencé ”: Autobiographical Aspects of L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991)……………………………………………………………116 A. Jean-Jacques Annaud’s L’Amant (1992)………………………………...117 B. “Duras’s Own Story”: L’Amant (1984)………………………………….120 II. Palimpsest: The Hybrid-Nature and Intra-Corpus Intertexuality of L’Amant de la Chine du Nord ………………………………………………………123 A. Cinematic Aspects: A Project for a Film Adaptation of L’Amant ……………………………………………………………………..124 B. Novelistic Aspects: L’Amant de la Chine du Nord and L’Amant ……………………………………………………………………..128 C. Les Amants: An Archaeological Excavation of the Lover-Figure in the Works of Marguerite Duras…………………………...131 D. “Qu’il y aura des livres, on sait”: Other Intra-Corpus Inter-Textual Relations……………………………………………………..137 1) “A Family Chronicle”: Les Impudents (1943) and Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950)……………………………..137 2) “Une Valse Morte”: The India Cycle (1964-1976)……………...140 III. An “Autobiography” Revisited: Re-Contextualizing L’Amant de la Chine du Nord —Issues of Wish-Fulfillment and Authorial Control………….……141 viii A. “A l’ombre d’une jeune fille en fleur”: The Facts in the Case of M. Donnadieu (1914-1929)………………………………………..141 1) The Fiction in the “Facts”………………………………………..142 2) Les petits cadeaux d’amour: Repetition, Revision, and Resolution—Writing as Wish-Fulfillment, and Imagination Inflation…………………………………………….…146 B. The Issue of Authorial Control: L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991) and L’Amant (1992): A (Brief) Comparative Analysis……………………………………………………………………152 1) Traditional Linear-Chronological Narrative: Scene-by-Scene Similarities………………………………………..153 2) Characterizations………………………………………………...157 3) Re-Writing the Self: Authorial Control: Self- Inscription, Self-Narrativization, and the Autonomous Artistic Act of Self-Determined Self-Re-Creation……………..…..159 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………...163 IV. BEING PHILIP ROTH: OPERATION SHYLOCK —PHILIP ROTH’S INTERTEXTUAL PERFORMATIVE “CONFESSION”……………….165 I. The Autobiographical Writer That I Am”: Self-Representation in Roth’s Oeuvre ………………………………………………………………………166 A. “A Kind of Intricate Explanation to Myself of My World”: The Fictive Mode of Self-Representation…………………………………..169 B.