Storey's "Snare of Doubling"

Storey's "Snare of Doubling" MARIA MARGARONI Over the last ten years, any reviews of David Storey's novels and plays read more like obituaries for a deceased talented author than critical discussions of specific works. The reviews of Storey's latest play, Stages (performed at the RNT's Cottesloe, November 1992 - February 1993), were, interestingly enough, no exceptions to the rule. Quoting Malcolm Pittock in his review of Present Times (Storey's latest novel to date, 1985), the majority of reviewers contented themselves to reproduce (cynically or lamentingly) the writer's "tale of decline: repetition with insufficient variation," as Pittock puts it.' Inevitably, such criticism has given the impression that Storey has lost touch either with the immediate "urgent present"2 (remaining stuck on a Grarnmar-school~boy view of the world) or with his creative powers (hence the need to plagiarize himself). What it has failed to take into consideration, however, is that the tendency to quote himself is by no means "new" in Storey . Even at his most creative phase (which most Storey critics locate in the period between 1960 and 1978) the writer openly - and obsessively - reworks characters, themes, or situations from " novel to nov~l (e.g., from Flight into Camden to Pasmore), novel to play (e.g., from This Sporting Life to The Changing Room), and vice versa (e.g., from In Celebration to Saville). Apparently , then, Storey's recent "transmigration" - so Umberto Eco might put it of themes and characters from past to the present and "from one fictional universe to the other"3 is too conspicuous and systematic a practice to be treated as an instance of plagiarism. Storey consciously quotes himself. sometimes not even bothering (as Pittock complains)' to change the wording. He repeatedly refers readers/spectators back to his earlier works, thus encouraging and establishing a dialogue between his earlier works and his later ones. In Present Times, for example, he has his protagonist, Attercliffe, watch a performance of what is unmistakably The Farm and write a play strikingly similar to The Changing Room. When in 1989 he stages The March on Russia he Modern Drama, 39 (1996) 507 508 MARIA MARGARONI chooses to use the same actors that he had used twenty years before in In Celebration . And it is again from In Celebration that the protagonist of Stages (Alan Bates) comes. Rather than temperamental, casual, or unfortunate, then, what I would call Storey's revisiting of his past is consistent as well as conscious, and it seems to betray a certain ambiguity in the writer's attitude towards his early writings. Thus, while on the one hand it seems to constitute an acknowledgement on the part of the author of the importance of his past stories (i.e., his history), on the other it challenges and cancels their authority (an authority which could be mistaken as absolute in the very early novels) by playing them off against other stories or the subtle - even provocative - rewritings of themselves. At this point it might be useful to remember Linda Hutcheon's definition of postmodem parody, a cultural and artistic tendency of the past twenty years which Hutcheon associates with the power to signal "difference at the very heart of similarity.'" As she emphasizes in A Poetics ofPostmodernism: History , Theory, Fiction, postmodem parody is not a mere imitation/reproduction of the past (as she explains, the prefix "para" in Greek means both "beside" and "counter", "against") but a revisiting of it "with critical distance." If seen in the light of this definition, Storey's own revisiting of his past seems indeed to be "parodic," not so much in the sense of its being a mockery of his early themes and characters (postmodem parody is not "ridiculing imitation," Hutcheon insists)6 but in that it constitutes a challenge to them, an attempt to open them up to different interpretations. The "parodic" nature of the writer's recycling and rewriting of his past is perhaps most evident at those moments when he becomes playful - indeed daring - with it. These are the moments when Storey comically exaggerates his types and archetypes, inverts (and subverts) his themes, and teases and caricatures the pompous seriousness of...