Postmortem Postmodernists: The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narrative (review)

In Postmortem Postmodernists Laura Savu examines the portraits of such wellknown writers as D.H. Lawrence, Novalis, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Chatterton, Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, as they emerge respectively from the fictions penned by Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage; Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower; Peter Ackroyd, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde and Chatterton; Peter Carey, Jack Maggs; Colm Tóibín, The Master; and Michael Cunningham, The Hours.

Savu’s volume should be seen in the context of contemporary fiction’s preoccupation with past fiction and literary precursors, a topic that has been thoroughly examined by David Cowart in Literary Symbiosis (1993), or Christian Moraru in Rewriting (2001) and Memorious Discourse (2005). Postmortem Postmodernists also seeks to theorize on the nature of author fictions as a genre, following the lead of Paul Franssen and Ton Hoenselaars’s The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature (1999) or Naomi Jacobs’s The Character of Truth: Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction (1990).

The richness of the volume lies in Savu’s insightful observation of the multiple ramifications of having a postmodern writer like Ackroyd or Carey cast a given predecessor as a fictional character. These representations are enriched beyond the mimetic reconstruction of the author, whose biographical or literary portrait is never fully developed. The author fictions examined, Savu insists, highlight the ways in which eighteenth and nineteenth-century texts and authors foreshadow postmodernist and poststructuralist perspectives on language, identity and history, “celebrating fragmentation, contradiction, imitation, indeterminacy and contingency as aesthetic standards” (246). More specifically, while Jack Maggs, The Master and The Hours bring to the forefront issues of otherness and difference, The Blue Flower, Chatterton and The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde reinforce the indeterminacy of meaning by means of fragmentation and lack of closure. Thus, author fictions reexamine from a postmodernist angle the issues at stake in the literary traditions in which their author characters are inscribed—Romanticism, Realism, Modernism. At another level, it is not uncommon for this complex genre to re-inscribe not only real authors but their works. By way of example, Jack Maggs features Dickens as a character as well as rewrites Great Expectations from a postcolonial angle, and the same process applies to The Hours with Virginia Woolf and Mrs Dalloway.

Throughout her volume Savu emphasizes the contemporary novel’s ability to replenish itself through rewrites and fictionalized biographies, the critical potential offered by these practices, their investment in the past, and the way the classics benefit from their continuing relevance in the present, thus countering the traditional charges levelled against postmodernism.

Of particular interest in Postmortem Postmodernists, besides its theoretical implications, is Savu’s perceptive analyses and close readings of the novels under discussion. The author does not overlook Dyer’s touching and intimate portrait of D.H. Lawrence, Ackroyd’s poignant imagining of Wilde’s self-exile in Paris after his release from prison, or Tóibín’s powerful engagement with Henry James’s personal and psychosexual struggles. Interestingly, in the last chapter, devoted to The Hours, Savu encourages scholars to delve into the stimulating arena of female-centred author fictions, a topic that has received little critical attention.

Postmortem Postmodernists will be of interest to readers concerned with postmodernism, life writing, authorship debates, and comparative literature.

Lourdes López Ropero
University of Alicante, Spain