Abstract

Robertson Davies is not usually perceived as a radical writer, either politically or stylistically, but he is subversive in the way he privileged fiction over non-fiction. At a time when the factual and the fictive tend to be conflated into amorphous ‘narrative,’ Davies insists on a distinction between the two, favouring the imaginative over the archival. In the Deptford Trilogy he has Dunstan Ramsay ghostwrite the Phantasmata: The Life and Adventures of Magnus Eisengrim, violating the central tenet of life-writing, that author and narrator must be identical in autobiography. Through Ramsay, Davies makes the case that, despite its obvious deviations from the historical record, this ‘poetic’ autobiography of Eisengrim captures the magician’s essence in a way that is truer than a more ‘factual’ life.

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